Community Spirit, Community Power: The Power of Empathy
In November 2023 we held an event at The Glasshouse, Gateshead, called ‘Community Spirit, Community Power’. Members of the GCB team gave speeches about their experiences, their work and their ideas. These blog posts are drawn from those speeches…
Discussions at our ‘Community Spirit: Community Power’ event.
From speech by Zahra Bazarganianpour:
My name is Zahra and I am a Gateshead Community Bridgebuilder hosted by GemArts, and also a Peer Enabler based in St Chad’s Community Project, focusing on asylum seekers and refugees.
In 2020, in the peak of the pandemic, I joined a storytelling inquiry (the precursor to the peer enabler work) in which we collected about 120 stories of people who were living in Gateshead. The results of it have made me aware of the pain and difficulties going on beneath the surface of my community and neighbourhood.
In 2021 I was honoured to be employed as a Bridgebuilder. I thought to myself it’s time I focused on some of these issues. When I started, I was so boxed up in the old system that I was waiting for someone to tell me what to do and how to do it. But having a few meetings with our team of bridgebuilders – which is very diverse and non-hierarchical, and equality is practiced fully – made me realise that through this role not only have I got my own voice back, but also I can be the voice of the community who has not been given any chance to be heard and listened to.
I reflected that the issues I have seen over the last 20-odd years, with my friends and in my neighbourhood, were all about language barriers. Now I could do something for them focusing on this – why not. I made a proposal to the Gateshead Community Bridgebuilder (GCB) team for a Language Inquiry, providing English language classes for the asylum seekers who have just arrived in the UK. I wanted to focus on this group after I learned that they couldn’t join any colleges for learning English for the first six months (and even more sometimes) after they come to the UK.
In the first pilot sessions, as part of my learning process I’ve learned that the secret to any successful project, is good teamwork. I started going to the hotels where the asylum seekers are housed, connecting with Mears staff, Jonah (from City Church, based in the asylum seekers’ hotel), hotel staff, the guards, and most importantly hotel residents. The support I’ve got from my teammates, my host organisation, the GCB, and most importantly the residents’ trust in me, made my inquiry very successful.
In my groups, we don’t just learn always about grammatical concepts such as the Present Simple tense or Past Participles. We use children’s books, which have been kindly provided by the National Literacy Trust as part of my becoming an NLT champion, such as “Don’t Feed The Coos!“ in which, through reading, we explore the book’s idea that we should embrace our problems but shouldn’t let the negative thoughts get into us. We discuss how we should come out of our rooms and make friends and discuss our problems with them to ease things off.
They know that I’m there for them and I’m on their side of the table. They know by being hopeful and focused at the same time they can be in my place and help others too.
When they left the hotel, they sent me a present, an award titled “Special Friend“. It made me realise that I’ve made fiends for life with them, and this prize is even sweeter to me than a Nobel Prize!
In a poem by well-known Persian poet, Saadi Shirazi, a human being is compared to parts of the body. If a finger gets hurt, you feel the pain in all your body, and your body comes together to heal it. So if you are a human being and you don’t feel other people’s pain and do something about it, you shall not call yourself a human. To experience empathy and act on it is what being human is all about.