We are all part of a community and we need to be actively involved in communities to meet the needs of families. Creating a sense of community is an important part of what we do and is integral to the Aistear principles of parents, families and communities; while the Siolta principles of parents and relationships also guide us in meeting these needs.
Some reflective questions to share and discuss with your team:
- Who benefits from partnerships between the early years’ service and the wider community?
- How do you build relationships successfully?
- What is the importance of being visible in your community?
A community is more than just a location, or a collection of individuals who happen to live or work in the same place. When we talk about a ‘sense of community’ we usually mean the quality of the relationships and connections that bind people together, rather than just the fact that they see each other regularly. As early childhood practitioners, creating a ‘sense of community’ is an important part of what we do. While the saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ may have become a cliché, the idea behind it—that children grow up as a part of a community—remains an important one. Children do grow up in the context of a community. How we acknowledge this and engage with our own local communities will have a significant impact on children and families, as well as on our own ways of working. For children, a sense of community plays an important role in the development of their feelings of identity and belonging. Children thrive in an environment of mutually supportive and caring relationships. For this reason developing a sense of community within a service is crucial. It is also valuable for children to feel part of a wider community that extends beyond the learning environment. As children grow and develop, connections to the outside world help them to find their place in the world, to develop understandings of how society works and to recognise and understand the shared values that underpin our society. For many families early childhood settings often provide their first contact with a wider community beyond the home. Because of this, early childhood services can act as an important point of connection for families. They can foster supportive relationships between families as well as connecting families to other organisations and services in the local community. Strong links with the local community also provides practitioners with invaluable information and resources. By drawing on community knowledge and expertise, practitioners are better able to understand the children and families with whom they work, and better able to provide children with learning experiences that are meaningful and relevant to their lives. Finding ways to effectively engage with the community and the time in which to do it can be challenging. Our tendency to imagine that whatever we do in relation to the community has to be ‘big’ is not helpful either—small is fine!
Some ideas to begin with:
- Engaging more effectively with fathers. Often we offer services targeting families, but in reality this predominantly means mothers. Often our opening hours preclude many dads from participating. Perhaps begin with engaging dads who we may often see at the service. Dads can often offer a different perspective and great ideas around setting up an obstacle course for a fun day – maybe grandads could help meet and greet on that day.
- Reflect on how we can better protect and care for the environment – maybe collect rain water in a water butt to water the plants.
- Take pictures of the children’s wider community eg. playgrounds, shopping centres, hospitals etc. and place it in book format in the book corner. Some additional of their community in your service eg. of the road you’re on, the outside of your building with your name logo and then the various classrooms in your service. The children love paging through it and discussing or merely looking.
While early childhood services are, in many ways, perfectly placed to play an important role in the local community, they can easily become cut off and isolated from that community. The busyness of the day and the feeling that it may be safer and easier to stay inside the boundaries of the service rather than to venture out, can all limit how we connect with the outside world. If however, we recognise that we are already part of the community, then our task becomes comparatively easy.
