Meet the menders
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Category B: Mediating

These disciplines are all about maintaining or repairing relationships, often in a place. While peer connectors build new relationships, mediators help to repair relationships that have gone wrong – between neighbours, community groups, or between a community and an institution. In places where it’s needed, this work is often primary: you have to rebuild trust before other work (e.g. connections, or imagination) can happen. There are two disciplines in this category, the first of which can apply in any community and the second of which tends to focus on places where there are divisions and trust has broken down.

04 Community stewards · 05 Peace-builders and bridge-builders

  2. Category B, Mediating
Mediating

Discipline 4. Community stewards

A South Asian man in his fifties straightening a chair beside a bench, a broom leaning nearby.

Maturity of support

  • 1Codification
  • 1Institutions
  • 1Training
  • 1Communities
  • 2Academia
  • 1.2Overall, mean of the five

Community stewards smooth the countless small frictions that arise when a community shares space together. Think of the managers of the Old Kent Road Family Zone in Southwark, for example, or of park keepers who ‘know the regulars’, or library workers who function as part-time social workers, keeping the peace in a space. This is ambient work; it is there in the background, and this makes it different from a more explicit process of facilitation or mediation.

Community stewardship is one of the most important and undervalued of the disciplines we encountered, but some might question whether it is really a discipline at all. Certainly this work can be done by people with a wide range of job titles, and it shows up in the day jobs of many public servants – a teacher watching over a playground at lunchtime, for example. While this might make community stewardship look like a practice, rather than a discipline, we believe it is worth treating as a discipline because community stewards are working towards something specific – a shared space that is safe and welcoming – and this entails a key set of core skills. We also met people whose working lives are organised around these skills, even if their job title does not say so. In the end, we concluded that naming community stewardship as a discipline might help this work get the recognition and support it deserves.

Assessing the supporting architecture

Community stewards have very little support; this discipline gets the lowest maturity rating in the report. Practitioners sit mostly in sectoral frameworks – librarianship, housing support officer, park ranger (for example, CILIP’s Professional Knowledge and Skills Base for librarians) – which codify the primary function of the role and often miss the aspects of stewardship. There is no body supporting the discipline, no direct training, and no peer community for people who steward civic or public space. The closest thing to codification we found in our research is the Warm Welcome Campaign’s guide to setting up a Warm Welcome Space. Relevant skills such as trauma-informed practice and de-escalation are taught to public servants in some sectors as an adjunct to other professional development.

There is a small academic literature, but this focuses mostly on social infrastructure, left-behind neighbourhoods, and the costs of a depleted civic realm. We did not find any significant literature on the practice of community stewardship itself – what a good steward does, hour by hour, in a library or a park or community centre.