Why relationships matter in community responses to COVID-19

What is relational working – and why has it played such a fundamental role in how communities have responded to the pandemic? As we publish the latest briefing in our research with the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) exploring community responses to COVID-19, Angus McCabe (TSRC), Angela Ellis Paine (TSRC), Asif Afridi (brap), and Eleanor Langdale (Renaisi) explore changes in community relationships during the pandemic.

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The pandemic has made us think more about all our relationships: with our family, our work colleagues and our fellow community members. During this time of upheaval and challenge, we’ve all experienced changes in our social relationships differently.

While some people have felt more connected, others have experienced extreme isolation. Many of us have had to stay closer to our immediate family, while being physically distanced from relatives, friends and colleagues.

We’ve often orientated ourselves more towards those who live closer to us. Indeed, research shows the quality of our relationships with our neighbours saw the greatest net gains during the pandemic – perhaps reflecting the ways neighbours pulled together to respond to the crisis in their communities.

Many community groups have relied on relationships to enable them to respond to the crisis.

Nurturing social connections

The latest briefing in our research, which has been following 26 areas throughout the pandemic, shows just how much relationships have mattered in community responses to COVID-19.

In fact, many community groups have relied on relationships to enable them to respond to the crisis. This includes relationships amongst individual local residents, who have come together to provide support; community groups and organisations who have needed to work together to ensure people’s needs are met; and relationships between community groups, local authorities and other organisations, such as NHS Trusts and national voluntary organisations.

Food delivery, for example, quickly became as much about the doorstep conversations as about the food itself.

Where these relationships did not already exist, community workers have generally sought to build them. Community groups have also paid attention to the importance of relationships to those they have supported, working in ways which seek to nurture people’s social connections even while meeting more immediate needs.

Food delivery, for example, quickly became as much about the doorstep conversations as about the food itself.

This is evidence of relational working: working in ways which rely on relationships and developing those relationships to provide support, welfare or development, but also pay attention to the importance of relationships to the people we engage with and support.

This has been fundamental to the strength of community responses to COVID-19.

Positive outcomes – and ongoing challenges

Relational approaches can lead to positive outcomes which go beyond meeting basic needs. In some areas, they’ve led to a breaking down of traditional identities, roles and relationships that have previously kept people apart, between donors and recipients, and between workers, volunteers and service users.

For some people it has proved too much, and the intensity of these relationship-based approaches has been emotionally exhausting.

In some areas, they have contributed to enhanced levels of individual and community wellbeing.

Relational working is not, however, without its challenges. It’s clear that this is work: it requires a lot of time, effort and emotional energy. Boundaries can also become blurred: it can be hard to separate out home and work/community life, to know when or how to stop and step back.

For some people it has proved too much, and the intensity of these relationship-based approaches has been emotionally exhausting.

And while relationships can be inclusive, they can also exclude. They may favour those with pre-existing access to resources, to the detriment of more vulnerable or marginalised groups – with a tendency to rely on existing patterns of relationships, which risks amplifying rather than reducing existing divisions within communities.

Reflections on relational working

When reflecting on what they had learnt about relationships and relational working over the last 18 months, community activists highlighted three key lessons:

• Relationship building takes time and effort, and the outcomes may not be realised for several years.
• It is critical to go beyond pre-existing relationships to effectively respond to community needs.
• How to ‘flip’ the methods of relational working from face-to-face to online, via Zoom and other communications technologies.

For some, a final lesson was that there were limits to what community groups could – or should – achieve alone.

While community-based, relational approaches can lead to positive outcomes, they will need to sit alongside a range of other forms of investment, support and change, which are needed to address the longstanding structural inequalities which have been highlighted and further entrenched by the pandemic.

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