We can’t change the whole world – but we can change many worlds

In this blog for CHEX, Brendan Rooney, newly-retired Executive Director of Healthy N Happy Community Development Trust, reflects on his decades of work in community development and his hopeful aspirations for the future. 

When I was sixteen, I undertook my first volunteer role and it shook my world. I visited a local man who lived less than a mile from where I grew up. Until that moment, I had no idea that such profound poverty existed so close to home. That experience was my epiphany. I knew, even then, that this was wrong. I also knew I wanted to do something about it. Like many young people, I set out to change the world. 

I have volunteered and worked alongside people ever since, spending 44 years in mental health and community-led health improvement settings. As I retire from the work that I have loved doing, I find myself reflecting on the world we now live in, compared to the early 1980s, when I began my journey. 

The younger me did not fully understand that the rise of selfish neoliberal capitalism, with its emphasis on individualism and free market solutions, was already reshaping societies in ways that would prove deeply damaging for families and communities. Nonetheless, undeterred, my like-minded colleagues and I set out to improve lives, to improve the places where we live, and in some cases, to save lives. Looking back, I realise that the sixteen-year-old me was rightly idealistic. The sixty-year-old me is still idealistic too - just a little more realistic.

Across decades of collective work in community development and mental health, our impact has been vast. Amid the busyness and effort of everyday practice, I don’t think I fully grasped the scale of what we collectively were achieving. Only now, with hindsight, do I truly see how many lives — and how many individual worlds — were changed through our collective community-led action. 

I am deeply grateful to have worked alongside so many passionate, skilled, and committed people. Our experience confirms what community development practitioners know instinctively: that our collective effort is far greater than the sum of its individual parts. Community-led work does change lives. It changes individuals’ worlds and it offers a powerful, bottom-up pathway towards a wider community led social transformation.

As I move into quieter waters, I do so with a sense of satisfaction that I’ve done my best. There is, of course, still much work to be done — and I have not given up on changing the world. But I can be hopeful, because there are so many of us in our field, who can and who are continuing to change and improve worlds.

Keep the faith and renew your determination. Communities are where you find those quietly-powerful “small groups of thoughtful, committed, citizens” and communities can change the world, for everyone.

Brendan will be chairing our 2026 conference - book your place now!