The Importance of Community Pride

While driving around one thing that has really stood out is the importance of community pride. A town like Balingup has it and I guess that meant that I grew up expecting it to be the norm.
To me community pride is exhibited in several ways, including:

• being genuinely positive when talking about the place you live in
• doing the little things required to help keep the place you live in attractive (picking up litter etc.)
• getting involved in community organisations and activities
• taking friends, colleagues etc. to visit your favourite places within your community

A blog by Chris Brogan springs to mind regarding some of these elements -
This topic came to mind when we were walking around Moree and Max and Harry asked me “why there was so much rubbish on the streets and graffiti on the buildings”. It set in train a discussion (pitched obviously towards a 7 and 9 year old) about why people look after some places and not others. To my mind this largely revolves around community pride.

Places we had previously visited, such as Yacka and Bellingen obviously exhibited it, although in vastly different ways. Yacka was a small town somewhat in decline – yet with a genuine local spirit and desire to  preserve and maintain the town. This has resulted in a ‘town walk’ being created to showcase the town’s history to visitors as well as a local archives.

Bellingen on the other hand is a vibrant hub, with funky little shops and what would appear to be a growing population. Both towns however appear full of residents who genuinely care for their towns and are proud of where they live and how it presents to outsiders.

Moree on the other hand had the opposite feel (even discounting things we had heard about the place prior to arriving). The scene was set when, just after I had finished setting up camp a ‘local’ wandered past on his evening constitutional and stopped to say ‘you better lock everything up tight in this town’. Whether this was right or not, the message was delivered in a manner that definitely suggested he wasn’t particularly proud of ‘his town’.

This was then followed up with the discussion with the kids – which really hit home as I figure that if the kids notice something of this nature then it is pretty obvious. It also suggested to me that pride is partly learned, as it is through our teaching that the kids generally pick up litter when they see it (and have a profound dislike of graffiti – especially tagging).

This isn’t to suggest that Moree has nobody with a sense of pride in their community, just that is is heavily outweighed by people who obviously don’t care enough to put their litter in the bin, while Bellingen undoubtedly has people who do litter etc. however being in the minority this is quickly cleaned up by others.

The difficulty is how to turn around a situation where there is a low level of community pride. There is obviously no magic pill that can be out in the water and often early steps to improve places can be quickly destroyed by the elements that have no pride. I would suggest that it is simply something that has to be persevered with and promoted within the community. The key thing to keep in mind is why should others be impressed/attracted to my town if I am not?

To go back to Chris Brogan’s post linked above – what are the places in your community that you have pride in taking your visitors to? If there aren’t any, what can/are you going to do tho change that? Are there places that you would like to be able to take people to and why can’t you? How do you have an impact to change this?

I am a firm believer in bottom up development being the most successful and long-term. This therefore suggests that one person can make a difference if they have genuine desire and stick at it.