My first actual experience of Reflect was when we were in meetings to get the Saturday School for Black children started. We used action grids and I hadn’t seen anything like this before – it was interesting, it was different. It was the first bit of collective work I had done.

I find it interesting because it IS collective. It has an impact. I like the flexibility too – you have to think on your feet when you are facilitating. I think that encourages the group to feel part of it. It isn’t rigid. But there are pitfalls too.

Quite a few of the men we know don’t seem to like it as they like being verbal and getting on with action and this method is about stopping and thinking, for part of the time anyway. I have also noticed people’s barriers come up because what they are writing down can be seen by everyone and some people are not very confident about their writing.Some people can’t get their heads around it to be able to participate at all.

Doing collective work, I was involved with a project called Street Dreams. This was a group of us – mostly Black young people in their twenties, men and women. We wanted to have a base for young people – somewhere which they felt they owned, somewhere they could influence. We wanted to create more opportunities for young people. We did some good things as a group – we organised a Family Day in a park last summer and we made a wooden tree ten feet high with the leaves made out of pictures taken of members of the community saying what their “Street Dreams” were – personal goals and visions for their community. This tree is now going to find a home base and be converted into a structure that can be moved more easily and then it will be lent out to schools and youth groups. It has already been lent out to a school and they really loved it. Anyway, we used participatory methods for the meetings to make this happen.

In terms of power, I think the method deals with power in the group but the facilitator has to be quite experienced to manage that effectively. In terms of changing power in the community, I don’t think we have really started to do that yet. We haven’t targeted a certain group about a certain issue – we haven’t gone down that road yet. I would be interested to. We have concentrated on creating the skills in the members of the community and its good we’ve done that.