Community Voice: Marcus Tayebwa and the Foodscapes of Southwark Project

What role does the built environment play in people’s health? This is a question Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity has raised in relation to the high rates of childhood obesity in Southwark. In response, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity (GSTC) and Gehl started a project in two Southwark wards in the summer of 2019 to understand how people use their city, what their everyday behaviour is, and how the environment around them is unconsciously pushing them toward unhealthy eating choices. In order to conduct this project in the local context and gain trust from the community, Gehl and GSTC partnered with The Social Innovation Partnership to recruit and train 16 local Community Surveyors from Peckham and Camberwell. The Community Surveyors were hired to observe and interview local passers-by within the wards about their eating routines for the Foodscapes of Southwark project. Our Community Surveyors spent one full day in the neighbourhoods interviewing 380 members of the community, and later spent an evening with Gehl and local young people serving as cultural translators and workshop facilitators.

We sat down with one of our surveyors (soon to become a trained Community Researcher), Marcus Tayebwa, to hear a little bit about his experience working on the project, why he thinks it’s important for community members to be involved in local interventions from design to implementation, and how he thinks institutions can avoid falling into the ‘saviour dynamic’ with the people they support.

*The below is an edited transcript of an interview that took place between Shaun Danquah, Tyler Fox and Marcus Tayebwa on 17 October 2019. TSIP’s mission in developing this blog is to ensure that his voice and experience as a peer in this research is heard and valued.

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Tell us a little about yourself and why you got involved in this work.

I’m currently studying at Goldsmiths University: I do Economics, Politics and Public Policy. In terms of the community research aspect, it’s always been a passion of mine to holistically nurture people, because I’m someone that came from a background as an orphan, so I have an adopted family as such. I learned early that the lost seeds in society that fall in the cracks, it’s more so because there was no one there to guide them. So, I did youth work, funnily enough, as a 16-17-year-old, and I guess I found it important to try and nurture – especially young men – in a way that I had felt like I had had a lack of nurturing.

 

Can you tell us a bit about the work you did for Gehl and TSIP?

Gehl was trying to tackle childhood obesity. So, trying to factor in how the community relates to their environment, and the idea was to glean ideas from the actual community and what changes would be needed. My specific role was to liaise between – I understand Gehl’s vision, but the actual community themselves. I share the same background, same language, the same talk, the same mindset. So, I agreed to be part of an induction before the first workshop. Once I got there and I met the team, I was quite surprised at the layout of the people around me because I felt like it would probably be a bit more stuffy and contrived. But the people around me were literally just like, your average Joes from a community that looked a touch out of place in Zone 1.

 

So why did you get involved with the work initially?

 I felt like it was a charitable affair in the sense that it was good for society, but I also felt like it was building towards a better future, rather than just pitying and throwing resources at people in an offhand manner. So, I felt like this opportunity had a bit more of a forward-thinking consciousness to it because it was targeting issues that, if they are not tackled, will become endemic issues. And it was a project that actually had the best interests of the future of today’s youth at heart.

 

Did you feel welcomed?

Very much. I felt that there was a culture gap between Gehl – the representatives of Gehl – and the, well, we can call them the constituents, the people that were there. But that isn’t necessarily nobody’s fault, because there are clear differences in upbringing. So, I noticed like – not necessarily a hostility, but a sense of distrust and guardedness that’s typically found in any lower social stratum in any big city, because they’ve been maligned many, many times.

 

So then where do you come in to fill the gap there, and fix that problem?

I think somebody like myself, or anyone with such a skill set would, as long as they were able to straddle the line between understanding the bigger vision of what Gehl has to do and the limitations that they’re working with, and has the ability to liaise with the people they’re actually trying to reach – preferably having some shared cultural literacy or language – I think that that would allow more efficiency and less miscommunication; because I think a lot of great initiatives and idealistic projects if they become miscommunicated to the intended target audience, you’ve wasted your time.

 

So, what surprised you the most when speaking with people on the street?

What surprised me the most is how open they were to me, because I know the London mentality: you get blown off; people don’t have time. Time is money, people also don’t have money; I can understand the stress. And the kids that are raised in this society are – I wouldn’t say cold, but they’re very guarded because I think it’s the wealth and higher quality of living that London affords isn’t necessarily built for everybody in mind, and the kids that we were talking to were the people who fall outside of that.

 

Do you think there’s an institutional issue in terms of a lack of understanding of certain nuances within communities when putting these kinds of initiatives together?

I think that [many] institutions start their idea with a utopia in mind, but they draw up their plan as if it is taking place in a utopia, which it is not. So, to not understand the social subtexts of where you’re trying to implement your community outreach initiative, you have to really understand that community in order to affect that community.

 

And do you think there’s a fear among institutions that you shouldn’t get too many people in because they’ll overtake the work?

I could see that as being so because I believe in institutions there tends to be tight ownership of the victory of such projects; but the issue is, you can’t necessarily help a person or a community well if they’re not involved in the process of being helped.

 

So then did this work feel genuine, or did it feel patronising?

It felt genuine because I was able to speak with members of Gehl, and I could see the passion for their cause; I could see the validity of their cause and I could see the effectiveness. So, it did feel genuine, it just felt miscommunicated. But that I saw coming.

 

And is there a way of doing that better?

Yes. Any community you’re looking to change, you need to involve reputable people from that community in your drive to change things, because that will lead you to solve the issues that need to be changed, rather than just what you would like to change. You need to communicate to the community that the work being done is a collaborative process towards a better future, instead of a favour being done by the privileged to the underprivileged. That needs to be communicated, and you do that by having more bodies from the community involved, and also establishing a common language, a medium in which the communication won’t be misinterpreted because, by the time you put up the presentation, I’ve already made a lot of social judgments at that point as to whether or not I’m going to take you seriously. So, entering the dynamic and actually addressing those preconceived notions from the beginning, I think would open up the community’s minds to the work.

 

Why do you think this research is relevant to people in Peckham?

These initiatives tackle the future, essentially. And there tends to be quite a lack of planning for the future of underdeveloped or disenfranchised communities, so it fills a very massive gap.

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To find out more about our work on the Foodscapes of Southwark project, get in touch with Tyler Fox on tyler.fox@tsip.co.uk.