Culture

Too often approaches to community cohesion start by focusing efforts on communities as primary organising units and strive to foster cohesion at an inter-community level. Such an approach assumes communities are unified. Our experience in working with some of the most vulnerable people in society is that power is rarely shared evenly across communities, and communities (often unwittingly) impose significant barriers to active civic participation.

This could result in many communities having both low aspirations and low levels of sustainable cohesion. These communities are consequently poorly equipped to manage change or perceived threat, all too often bearing out negatively in intercommunity relations.

Hedayat centre identified two of the most important areas to address were family and youth concerns, and different activities such as organising sports clubs, family workshops, and social outings were arranged in order to bring the community closer together and also have social interactions.