THE COMMUNITY CENTRE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 429, 12 September 1947, Page 18

THE COMMUNITY CENTRE

"THIS was the first of a series of four radio talks by

H. C. D.

SOMERSET

on "The Community Centre," but it is com-

plete in itself.

These talks (the last of which will be heard

next Monday evening) were prepared as part of 2Y A’s Winter Course programme

these talks I am going to try to tell you what a community centre is, what it can do and what it. should certainly not attempt to do. Much of this is based upon what my wife and I have learned in working with the people of Feilding in the development of their centre. But I don’t want to bore you with an account of what is done in,Feilding. Much has already been written about it and much more has been said about it. When we went up to Feilding more than nine years ago with some ideas we asked for nothing better than time to try out a few of them; we wanted to learn by experiment the kind of: organisation that would suit a New Zealand community. And so we went to work. Before long, I was asked to give a series of

talks on the result of our efforts. I was in some doubt whether I should or shouldn’t when my wife settled it by saying, "Remember the gentleman dining at Crewe?" I did: the one who discovered a mouse in his stew. "Said the waiter, don’t shout, or wave it about, Or the rest will be wanting one too." So we decided not to wave it about. But the experiment has become well known and lots of places are now wanting one too. I don’t blame them; a community centré is a good thing to have. I think, therefore, that I can serve you best if I tell you some of the principles upon which centres should be founded. Something New Here is the first point I want to get clear; the centre is really something new in the life of the community; we may have to attach it to something already /

existing for purposes of organisation, but its work, its spirit, is unlike anything we have had in the past. It’s true that we call our venture in Feilding the Community Centre for Further Education and Recreation and it is, in fact, an educational centre with many recreational activities as well; but it is in no real sense an extension of education or recreation as we have come to understand these terms. Let’s say for the moment that further education means a special activity that schools and university colleges as such cannot pessibly provide for. Remember that schools and colleges cater for people who are still immature, for young people who are able to spend the greater part of their time in learning. The centre is designed for the use of adults and nearadults who have started their life’s work and for whom the settling into a job and the establishment of a home and family must be the first concern. We can understand the needs of these people best if we forget about education and think about. the word community. In your town or village you and your néighbours have seen to it that your needs are provided for. Shops have come into existence because you

need such things as food and clothes and petrol and books. So shops are part of the life of the place and no one could imagine a modern community without them. Yesterday I was talking fo one of the oldest residents of Feilding about the early settlement of a near-by town-, ship. "I was there before the first settlers arrived," he said. "I took up a wagonload of flour, tea, axes, spades, shirts, and trousers and opened the first shop in a tent." His tent was really the first community centre~in the bush settlement because it supplied its first need. I imagine that it supplied much more then food and clothes and tools; it supplied, as early shops always did, a place for talk and discussion. The Essence of Community But as communities grow in size and complexity, more and more crganisation becomes necessary. Soon there are churches for religion, schools for elementary education, banks for the collection and distribution of money, town councils for roads and drainage, the police station for law and order, the railway, the post, and ‘the telephone for better communication with the outside world, the libraty for communication with better (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) minds than our own. Every bit of organisation in the community arises in answer to a human need. Organisation is the essence of community, and organisation is concerned in one way or another with communication. My friend who opened the shop under canvas in the bush settlement was establishing -a line of communication between the makers of axes and spades and those who wanted to use them; even the most highly developed modern shop doés no more. It’s interesting to look at our own community in this new way-to see it as the end of many lines of communica"tion and as the starting point of other linking us up as a nation and a people. If we get into the habit of thinking of communities existing because there are so many things to be carried through to us, we get a clearer view of ourselves and our needs. In the past, communities of men tended to form at the stopping places orf trade routes. A city would grow round an oasis on a camel route or at the entrance to a mountain pass, at the mouth of a river or in a harbour where ships came to rest. And along the lines of communication moved many things, which came to be called goods because of the satisfactions they gave. We can give a rough definition of a community, then, as a place where people live together for the better transmission of goods. But man’s needs are not simple and he must have for his well-being a great variety of goods. Goods for Mind and Spirit He needs goods for the mind and the ‘spirit as well as for the body; he needs food for his dreams and his hopes, he needs poety, music, and religion. These are also goods. You will notice that I don’t divide goods into materia] goods, mental goods, and spiritual goods. I think the division is a false one and has hindered our thinking on human affairs as well as on spiritual affairs. But we may judge of the maturity of a community by the variety and quality of the goods that enter into it and by the use that the members of the community make of the goods that are available. To follow this a little farther, it will be seen that as time goes on, human ingenuity produces more and more goods and more and more ways of transferring them. And every new invention alters in some degree the life of the community. The motor car arrives and the makers of cars see to it that we know all about them. The community begins the job of organising so that we may have the new "good." If we could see the changes on a film in the same way as we can now look at a seed growing in’ a few minutes into flower and fruit, the result would be astounding. We'd see livery stables turning into garages, drinking troughs fading out and petrol pumps coming up in loud tones of red and yellow; we should see the rough roads furrowed with cart tracks giving place to smooth miles of concrete and bitumen. We should see bank balances leap, from their safe deposits and acquire a new velocity in a race to

keep up with the motor car. Pumpkins | turning into coaches and mice into horses would be tame by comparison. Using — or Dodging Everything new that comes along the lines of transmission to your community alters its design and the way people live within that design. Think of the effect on community life of the coming of the radio, and the aeroplane, of the machinegun and the high explosive bomb, But goods don’t all move at the same rate down those lines of communication, Some of thém, like the radio and the cinema in peace time and the machinegun and the bomb in wartim., are scarcely spawned from the inventors’ minds before we are all using them-or dodging them. We may not like them, but we cannot ignore them. Other goods, those that have no immediate commercial value, that is, goods which the community does not understand and for which it is not ready, move. very slowly. Electricity was discovered 2000 years before the community was ready to use it. The now common D.D.T. was known for 70 years as a chemical curiosity before we camé to know it as an insecticide. If there’s a time-lag in such useful, everyday things there is a far greater lag in the realm of ideas. To illustrate this I want to tell you.a story about my old friend, whom I will call Jim; he has long since gone to his rest, but if he were listening he would enjoy what I am going to tell you. Jim was a farmera man who.had worked hard and had a fine place down in the South fsland. His equipment was his pride; his tractor was the very latest; so was his milking-machine. His cow-shed was the best that, dairy science could design. There were concrete walks for the cows reaching out into the paddocks so that there was no mud near the milking. But 100 yards away there was a fenced-in mass of mud and stagnant water where the pigs wallowed in cold misery.. Jim would shake his head over them sadly

and ‘say, "The pigs are dying on me; | I’m sure I don’t know why." The point of this. story is, of course, that it had been someone’s job to communicate to Jim the wonders of tractors, milkingmachines and dairy hygiene; but so far nothing had reached him about the care of pigs. At that point the community had failed him. . This brings me to the first elementary function of a community centre: it is an organisation for the communication. of goods in the form of ideas for which the community has not already provided. If there had been a community centre near where my farmer friend Jim had lived, it would-among many other functions-certainly have provided a short course of talks by an expert on pig culture, In conclusion; I want to make it clear that my outline of the nature of the community is. very much _ simplified, Quite obviously it exists in much more than the communication of goods and ideas. In his play, The Rock, T. S. Eliot says: 5 When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city? ~ Do you huddle close together because you love each other?" What will you answer? "We all dwell" together To make money from each other?" or "This is a community?" It’s abundantfy clear that mere living together is no more a community than a heap of bricks is a house.