What do we mean by ‘bridge building’?

We describe our work in terms of ‘bridge building’ – but what does that actually mean?

As the work progresses, the term gathers new layers of meaning. That’s in no small part because the team is made up of people given a lot of freedom to interpret a broad brief in whatever way feels appropriate for the communities they support. That brief is ‘working with a community you’re already part of, surfacing and understanding the everyday issues that are impacting ordinary people, and trying to collectively find creative ways to combat these issues.’

These are some of the ways in which we interpret the term ‘bridge building’:

Working in community is bridge building

Bridge builder work is all about connecting things up. A lot of the time it’s about building and nurturing relationships. The team is funding specific pieces of work, such as the language classes Zahra is running, the Saturday school Hakan is expanding, the d/Deaf arts festival Paul is organising, but that is only part of the work. The relational work done in order to develop and start those projects is the other half of it.

Funding great people just to do what they see needs doing in community – even if it’s not a distinct ‘project’ – is in itself invaluable for Gateshead. Funding bridge builders is putting resources into the community, because the bridge builders build up other individuals, and build their community. They work alongside individuals to help them fix issues that are personal to them and the people around them. They identify other people facing similar issues and connect it all together.

More than that, the ‘projects’ or ‘big ideas’ are levers to other benefits realised in community. Zahra’s language classes were set up to teach English to people who weren’t eligible for existing language-learning provision. But the benefits of the project are much broader than that. In order to get people to the classes, Zahra and Afroz go to the hotels where asylum seekers are being temporarily housed. They get to know the staff and asylum seekers. They are visible, they are consistent, they build trust, they build connections, they build relationships. They become known to a group of people who are unseen by the majority of Gateshead residents. Zahra said herself, ‘I didn't know about that hotel at all and my son was just going to school on top of that hill.’

Whether or not people come to the language classes, a bridge is built between them and the wider Gateshead community. And, in so doing, we develop a greater understanding of the problems they face, which shows us other ways we could use the team’s resources. Some of those might be problems that Zahra and Afroz are tackling in real time just by using their own human capacity, some might need a different kind of resource.

There is something deeply human about working in this relational, not transactional, way; we can’t underestimate how valuable that is. Several of the bridge builders said that even if they weren’t doing their bridgebuilder role they’d still be doing this kind of work – so the benefit is felt by bridgebuilder as well as community.

Bridge building is about convening and continuously learning

It’s about listening to people and understanding what the community needs, not assuming that we have all the answers based on our own experience. It’s about convening, about bringing people together to make sense of a problem, understand it in more depth and look for ways to solve it. As Bridgebuilder Eric says, bringing people together gives us ’the idea how we work tomorrow’.

‘I'm picking out the themes of things that that people have been saying or observations that I have about things that people have said that have commonalities or differences. Things that we might be able to reflect on as a group and learn from’

- Paul

This learning pathway isn’t one that comes from a standing start. The fact that the Bridgebuilders have been doing this work in community for years before the GCB formed is important. The relationships that we have built with other in the past are invaluable for helping us to build our understanding of the problems that people are facing in Gateshead.

‘When we are working as a family support worker [people] build the trust on you and they explain their issues and problems. Since 20 years I'm doing with them. I'm like a family member’

- Afroz

Bridge building is about bridging our past experiences with current problems

The diversity of the Bridgebuilder group is invaluable, we have a wealth of experiences to draw on, and around which to build hypotheses about what kind of activity would help to solve different kinds of problems.

‘Different views are really the right view, because we [are] coming from different backgrounds, different area…not working with the same community.’

- Eric

Different bridge builders are building different types of bridges

• Hakan is bridging children and their cultural identity, and bridging gaps in education caused by people being forced to flee their homes to seek asylum elsewhere through the Saturday School. He’s also bridging communities of different cultural backgrounds through a programme of cross-cultural events, building understanding and a sense of unity that celebrates and is enriched by difference.

• Eric is bridging people and their adopted community and bridging between individuals with the same cultural background, in order to bridge the gap between themselves and their rights as asylum seekers. Through the sport and wellbeing project he’s tackling isolation by building bridges between people via the medium of sport.

• Afroz is bridging people and other people’s cultures, bridging isolated individuals via the friendship group, and bridging people and the language that will help them to navigate their adopted country.

• Zahra is bridging individuals with herself, bridging organizations and people who want to help the community with marginalised people, and bridging professionals (e.g. NHS mental health peer supporters) with communities. Through the language inquiry she’s bridging the gap between new arrival refugees and their new home by equipping them with practical language skills to help them navigate Gateshead life.

• Paul is bridging gaps in services, for e.g. young d/Deaf people and institutions that enrich lives but are inaccessible to them (gyms, cinemas, the broad world of d/Deaf-led art), bridging d/Deaf people who aren’t getting the healthcare provision they need due to lack of interpreters, people from ethnic minorities and dementia services.

• Fozia is bridging gaps in women’s health provision, and bridging gaps in services that are open to but not used by certain demographics – for example getting Asian elders recognised as a distinct category with distinct and different support needs.

Bridges can be person to person, community to community, person or community to organisation. They can be thematic (cultural or educational), they can be ‘out there’, i.e. connecting two entities out in community, or they can be a mix of ‘out there’ and ‘in here’, bringing other people into our work.