Our Map of Belonging: community spaces we have known and enjoyed

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At our recent Stories of Our Lives session, we talked about belonging, community and the places that help us feel part of something.

We used some resources I have been working on, which I would like to share with other community groups in the future. This Connection Kit included photographs, symbols and question cards to get us started. However, we didn’t need much stimulus before the conversation went in all sorts of rich directions.

Someone described the topic as “intricate”, which felt very true. Belonging is not one simple thing. For some people, it is strongly connected with family. For others, it is found in day-to-day chats with neighbours, familiar faces, shared routines and local places. It can also come from having a role, being useful, joining in, or knowing that we are contributing in some way.

Some of the key words that came up were:

Family • belonging • groups • community • connection • identity • location • contribution

The group also came up with these questions, which you might like to ponder in your own time:

What places help you feel part of a community?
What gives you a sense of belonging?
What attitudes or behaviours contribute to a sense of community?
Have you ever experienced leaving a community or entering into a new community?
What helped you enter a community that was new to you?
How do you relate to the need to belong?
How does belonging contribute to your wellbeing, if at all?

At the end, people also gave some honest feedback about the resources we used. Some enjoyed having the photos, symbols and prompts to work with. Others found there was quite a lot to take in, especially as I had covered the table with all sorts of materials as well as the kit.

That was useful learning for me. Sometimes one image, one object or one question is enough to open up a conversation. I love that our group is somewhere people feel able to say what they need, rather than somewhere that requires people to silence their needs in order to fit in. To me, that is part of what brings a true sense of belonging.

The pieces below were shared after the session, and each one carries the conversation on in its own way.

Jane Graham

Community

The interplay between the people of a community and the culture that has evolved there has so many facets. While respect for individual choice and privacy is always an overwhelming bottom line for our community in Chorlton, the community as a body wants to ensure they are a resource that can be accessed at any time and for any reason to create a contented and harmonious living space for us all.

Coming together is an important part of community and buildings of all sorts make their facilities available to meet the variety of needs; from private houses, churches, cafes, library, sport facilities, pubs, all, along with their outside grounds, are in constant use communicating daily the skills of the many people who are committed to making all lives a positive experience. This amazing number of people generally don’t give credit to themselves; they just do what they have always done and their families before them. They are the fundamental life of the community.

From the cradle to the grave our community is a living place where change to improve is constantly happening and always ‘doing’ to make sure that skills are shared, friendships established. In this harmonious environment brave, tentative steps are made by some into new places and ideas. A wonderful feeling being accepted regardless of whatever it was we thought might hold us back e.g. age, disability, lack of digital skills, having no particular skills or abilities.  (These are just my holdbacks).

My personal favourite community activity is talking to people when I shop or out walking. Everyone I pass is a potential for just “Hello”, or “Thanks” as they make space for me. What I really want is more to be added. Someone smelling a flower can develop into insight into their life. A person in a wheelchair can make laughable comments of daily experiences. I have learned about people’s relationships, how their stocks and shares are doing. People want to talk. The warm sun is a great help and their dog. Someone sitting alone in a cafe is easy to talk to. I particularly like it if a conversation happens with school kids. They are polite and interested in me! One conversation encounter still looks out for me after we first met three years ago. I now know a lot about her early life in Poland.

Change happens and Chorlton will change. As a thriving, rich, sharing community what will we make sure continues? The above indicates the beating heart of the place and this, I think, will always stay.

Jean Byrne

Finding my tribe

Many years ago, I had a dream about my ideal job. It was about being part of a community of women sitting around a big table working together to make a patchwork quilt. I have always enjoyed sewing but hadn’t done much while working and looking after family. One day, after taking voluntary redundancy and early retirement, I was wandering around the shops in Stretford Mall trying to work out who I was now I no longer worked in a library. This led me to find a community project called the “The Hive” which was using one of the vacant shops. This project was offering many free activities included a craft group.

 Anyone was allowed to join the craft group which met on Wednesday mornings. On my first day they were working on a small knitting project. I have never been much of a knitter but was given some needles and wool. One of the group showed me how to cast on and I remembered how to knit rows after not knitting for 30 years. Another member showed me how to cast off. The project was a knitted bag with a sewn fabric lining.

This was a lovely group to be part of, and it gave me a renewed sense of purpose. After a few months I learned they only had funding for a year, and it would soon end. Many of the women attending had serious health issues and it was a lifeline for them. It was more than a craft group. It was a supportive nurturing environment for some women facing difficult lives.

Some of us had links to Stretford Library and went to ask if they had any space for us to continue meeting. Fortunately, there was some space. The group still meets on Wednesday mornings in the library. In this group my dream about the quilt also came true. During the Covid lockdowns we were unable to meet in the library for over a year. We were allowed to take some of our resources from the library and made craft kits then delivered them to members to help them stay in touch during the crisis. The hands and heart kits made in lockdown have now been sewn together and made into a patchwork hanging.

Working on many different projects with this group has given me a better sense of belonging in Stretford and might be the nearest I will ever come to finding my tribe.

Sue Ash

So here’s the thing – so often in the days after a Stories Group meeting, I will experience something relevant to what was discussed by the group.  I think that’s because the group discussions raise my awareness of different aspects of life.  On this occasion two days after this meeting, I attended an event with neighbours from the flats where I live, not expecting to know anyone else there.  But while there I saw, and said hello, to a member from the Stories Group and someone else I had met recently.

Looking back at the different places I have lived over the years, it is these chance meetings when out and about that give me a feeling belonging and community.  When moving to a new area I have always looked for groups to join, from Mum & Tots groups when the children were small, to activity or hobby groups for myself when they were older.  Most recently I started attending the Stories group when I moved to Chorlton four years ago, and very soon started seeing people I knew when browsing the shops in the Precinct, which has now sadly been closed for development.

I have also found myself thinking about my early childhood.  Outside of school my mother took me to dance lessons and Brownies and Sunday School, each with very few, if any, other children I knew, but usually soon made new friends.  Because she was with me in those early years, I had no reason to feel nervous and as I grew up, I joined other groups on my own, such as Youth club, Tech College, etc.  And as an adult my working life ultimately focused on supporting community led projects.

So, except for that moment of walking through the door for the first time, I am lucky to rarely feel worried about joining new activities and meeting new people.  At ‘ground level’ most people are welcoming and friendly, with everyone having their own unique and interesting stories.

Margaret Kendall

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated by the way in which rooms can transport you to different places depending on what is happening within them.   My primary school only had four classrooms and doubled up as a space for community events for the church parish.  The classrooms were divided by partitions which were moved back to make a bigger space for the Christmas fair, for example, and although the familiar pictures were on the walls, the Christmas decorations transformed it into somewhere else.  Somewhere magical for the fancy-dress competition, the hoopla, the lucky dip, the craft stalls where we bought presents for our parents, and the sounds of laughter and chatter from the grown-ups drinking tea and eating biscuits.

Ever since I’ve lived in the Chorlton and Whalley Range area, over forty-five years now, I’ve felt similar transformations happen in the different community spaces we are lucky to have here.  I’ve line-danced to loud music in the same church hall where I’ve been to argumentative meetings, I’ve celebrated significant birthdays with friends in the same rooms above a sports club in which I’ve shed tears after funerals, I’ve enjoyed watching local theatre groups and drinking wine in the same church hall to which I went week after week to a slimming group.  I love how the library has provided community spaces over the years, from bookshelves on wheels which could roll back for children’s storytelling or poetry readings, to the recently refurbished meeting rooms where we share our memories and experiences in our lovely Stories of our Lives group.

It was a pleasure recently to read a history of the varied uses made of the community hall above the Co-op on Hardy Lane, Chorlton, and to attend the unveiling of the plaque which celebrates its existence since 1929.  Community rooms were once a common feature above the Co-operative stores, especially in the North-West.  I remember going to one of my cousin’s weddings, probably the first wedding I’d been to, in the licensed hall above the Co-op in St Helens.  Nowadays, our room above the Hardy Lane Co-op is one of very few left, if not the only one, in the Greater Manchester area.  It felt special to celebrate with around sixty other people sharing their own memories of the wide variety of social and political events which have taken place there.  People also talked about how much attending the current programme of activities means to them, for example, the weekly French conversation classes which I enjoy.  Yes, we are lucky to have many community spaces where we can meet in our part of the city, but this one above the Co-op, built around the same time as the Barlow Moor housing estate, continues to be important in bringing people together in different ways.  Long may it survive, way beyond its 100^th birthday!

Tony Goulding

This month the group explored different aspects of “community”. It is quite difficult to define precisely the meaning of the word. For me it is those people we know who fill the place between friends and family and strangers. Some may be in large groups with only light links while others could be members of a smaller set with stronger connections.

The feeling of “belonging” to one or more communities is, I believe, essential to a sense of well-being.  With the decline of the extended family and an increasingly aging population, the role of community is assuming a more significant importance.

A community may be quite transitory, as in that formed by passengers on a cruise ship, otherwise it could be lifelong as in the adherents of a religion.

There is a fundamental difference between people we know as members of a community and mere acquaintances; communities share a common bond and are commonly co-operative rather than competitive in nature.

I feel that “communities” fulfil a basic human need and can appear in myriad ways. They can be either quite structured or totally informal.

To close on a personal note, I am very thankful for the help of Chorlton Good Neighbours in fostering my greater involvement in the local area following my retirement.