Feeling Like YOU Belong There
The breakdown of social cohesion – of truly belonging – is a real problem for many residents in the community.
They want their communities to be better and safer places to live. To strengthen communities and assist in the development of more social cohesion all residents need to be included in the everyday social, economic and civic relationships of the community in which they live. Belonging is an individual experience that means different things to different people and groups, however, we can all work towards creating an environment where people may feel like they belong.
'Belonging There' means feeling welcomed comfortable and safe, feeling like people are interested in you and what you want and feeling that you canCommunice and connect with others.
Things to think about:
Feeling Welcomed
Feeling like people are interested in what you want
Courtesy goes a long wayLesley Glover
At the bank they say hello ‘Mrs Glover’ whenever I walk in the door and
it is nice you know! It is that getting to know you that is important.
The little things add up. The older you get the more it matters because
you can isolate yourself. Some of our older people are disengaged even
from their families so having people say hello and being interested in
what they have been up to creates a sense of belonging. It is simple
really, if someone treats you nicely you are going to go back there, if
they don’t treat you nicely you will go somewhere else. If there are
two shops that have the same things we will go to the one that has the
personal service. We have two local supermarkets where the prices are
similar, the products are the same but the service is more personal in
one. The manager is always saying hello and making sure that everything
is ok, and that does make a difference, we always use the one where the
service is friendlier.
Common courtesy doesn’t mean as much if it is not genuine though. A lot
of staff are trained to be friendly and it is not really them. There
mightn’t be eye contact, sometimes there is just a blank look on their
faces but then you get some staff that are just nice anyway so you will
go back to those employees all the time. We look for those ones and
they are usually the ones with the biggest lines.
It has to come from management, if you are an employer you have to set
the standard. You have to let your employees know it is ok to be
friendly with customers. It gets very machine like in the big
supermarkets and places like that where they have the instructions to
tell them what to say, it is very mechanical and there is no personal
touch.
The management has to say ‘look these people are our market and if they don’t come and shop you don’t get paid’.
