Karl Blick

Karl Blick
Warley Rugby Club

I grew up in Great Arthur Street, Smethwick. It’s the road that runs adjacent to the canal in this photograph. There is a park at the end of the road but the environment is dominated by factories, there is a motorway that runs across the other end, so it’s very much an industrial space. 

The rugby kit I am wearing is the team that I played for called Warley Rugby club. The club was formed in Smethwick 50 years ago, we just had our 50th anniversary. I have done lots of things through rugby - I have played and coached and I take my children now. It’s been a big part of my life, it’s had a big impact on me from when I started when I was sixteen. It was simply a place where I went and played sport, but also a place where I could go and try out and do something else. 

It's not just the game itself, it’s more the club itself and what it brings to the area, what it brings to the community. It brings people in from the community and develops their skills, whether is about their playing skills, or about being coaches for us, or that they have become bar managers. It’s been a good springboard for people to prove themselves. We have been supportive to give people roles, either paid roles or volunteer roles. And people can be empowered and supported. 

Being part of the club gave me a different way of looking at community work. Community work is seen by a lot of people as a top-down approach. Within the club, there is a lot more space for people to create their own activities and events. Working in the community is really about finding people’s interests and connecting to their needs rather than going with an agenda with charts telling us this is what this community needs.

I am always propelled by doing things that people like to do. I do things that are initially rewarding and then we find that the bigger rewards that are more important come later. But the initial rewards that really trigger their interest have to be things like being safe and having fun. People want to feel they are happy in a place, to feel that have people they know, they trust and who understand them.

You can’t shine a light on a spot five miles away and say, “that’s where we are going” because people will say, “there’s a lot of dark space between here and there and it looks like a lot of hard work.” Well, people don’t want to start with the hard work, they want to start with something nice. So let’s start with something nice, and that will take us to the bigger stuff at the end road. We have to start with something that makes people happy, makes people feel involved, secure and safe and befriended. It’s about doing things that make us humans tick on a simple level, but also takes us to the long-term goals. 

Community for me is people sharing a common need or ambition. On a community level we want to be able to step outside of the door and find people with a similar outlook on their space. So doing stuff like community litter picks shows not just a tidy space afterwards. The important thing is that it shows to people within the community there are people taking care of the place. For me, community means an understanding that we can all have an input into this place where we live, where we are. 

It’s very easy to see the worst in other people. Someone told me once that all behaviour is situational, and if you change the situation you can change the behaviour. So changing the situation and behaviours is a learning opportunity. It’s learning that what you are doing is not the only thing you can do - you can explore yourself, you can expand yourself, you can use what you have in different ways. So by giving those people opportunities to do things differently is to say you can choose a different way and have more control of your life through your choices. You don’t have to stick to one mode of behaviour, one mode of interaction. I work with people who have made changes and done things that have amazing themselves, what they did has made a big impact. 

Where I come from gets a bad press. With people, it’s easy to see the worst, that’s apparent. Where we took this photograph is a former industrial highway. This is where I played as a child, it’s where I had the chance to do things. We got into all sorts of scrapes down there as kids, but it’s about when things go wrong, how do you deal with it, and who do you use to help you navigate problems. And now I get paid to do similar things with children. We get to give children the experience of risk, to plan for failure and to deal with problems. These are life skills that some children don’t get the chance to build up. I am always grateful that where I live, no matter how bad it might appear, has given me opportunities to learn things that have been useful to me and I can now share these things with others. 

I want to live in a world that is respectful to everyone’s past and their heritage, but that’s also positive about creating our future. We don’t have to be hidebound by the past. We take the good things and run forward with them and find new things to do. It’s great to have a past behind you, but it’s more important to think about how we are going to carry things forward. We have lost a lot of our industrial heritage. That building in the photo has been refurbished and you can learn a lot from it. But it’s not our future. It’s part of who we are but we have got to build ourselves a new future.