An overview of our community building approach: 

 

Introduction

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We all share a deep-seated desire to live in healthy and vibrant communities. Whether our community is a town with good jobs, stellar schools, and fun locales; an organization with passionate employees, a caring management, and good revenue, or; a school district with engaged students, inspiring teachers, and attentive administrators – we all want basically the same thing for our communities: good health and good fun. Unfortunately most communities are not doing so well on this score. We think we can do better.

One way is by developing a replicable, practical model describing a new social role whose sole task is to bring out these qualities in our communities: the community builder. The Field Guide for Community Builders is this model consisting of the foundational knowledge, assumptions, skills, and processes community builders need to get started. The Field Guide is a basic toolbox for community builders wanting to nurture their chosen community toward greater health and vibrancy.

For this work a community is best defined as a group of people who, celebrating the diversity of their perspectives, accept and transcend their differences, enabling them to communicate effectively and openly to work together toward goals identified as being for their common good. Of course there are many kinds of communities fitting this definition, but the scope of the Field Guide is limited to geographic community systems. More specifically, the work presented here has been developed for and tested in communities (1) that are locally or regionally based and (2) that fulfill some particular social function, such as an education community, a regional economic development community, the public safety community, and so on. As such, it does not attempt to address either purely geographic communities such as neighborhoods, cities, and regions or distributed communities such as religious, online, or professional communities.

The Field Guide for Community Builders assumes many local social systems – made up of people, places, institutions, resources, and much more – have enormous underutilized assets. Skills are going unused because we don't know others well enough, projects are going unfunded because passionate community members don't know where to look, countless examples of creative collaboration are being missed because people rarely meet and talk with one another, enthusiasm is being wasted because there's no good way to tap into the community system, and on and on. At its most basic we are describing the role of a community builder – someone who seeks to understand their community, know the people in it, map the numerous assets it has, nurture the emergence of shared goals, and generally facilitate the members of a community in being the health and vibrancy we all want.

The Community Builder's Field Guide

This Field Guide is designed to be as simple as possible and as detailed as necessary. That means that if what you're looking for is just a set of tools you can put to work today, then you'll first encounter a number of sections devoted to context, values, understanding your community, processes, and much more. This is all here because we're convinced that reflection and practice are complementary processes. Reflection is necessary to understand what is around us and plan with clear intention; practice is necessary to affect the world and gather new information to refine our understanding. The only real mistake one can make is to stop cycling between the two.  That's why even in this practically oriented Field Guide we've decided to delve into several foundational issues before getting to the tools.

In what follows we briefly present each element of this model, its tools, and the background knowledge that we think necessary to successfully execute it. This includes:

  1. Context & vision
  2. Assumptions & values
  3. Set of common vocabulary
  4. Team-network-community system
  5. Processes of community building
  6. Tools
  7. Community & capital assessments
  8. Team member roles, skills, characteristics, & qualifications
  9. Indicators of success in community building

Together we hope that this comprises a foundation of knowledge and tools to achieve our shared goal: to build healthy and vibrant communities.

Starting Context & Assumptions

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There's no point in building a wonderful house on a poor foundation, and we strongly feel that the same is true for community building. We think it is essential to understand the social and historical context in which community building makes sense and we feel that it is only honest to lay out as many of our starting assumptions as possible. (We also secretly think this is a great way to have our assumptions challenged!) That's why the Field Guide begins with these two aspects: context and assumptions. The full section will lay these out in more detail, but here's a snapshot of our thinking.

  • The functioning of our regions' social systems (e.g. education, economic development, corporate production) immediately and directly affect the current well-being and future prosperity of the people who live here.
  • Many of our communities' social systems were designed for a society with different values, tools, and ways of life. As a result, these systems are falling out of date and are hampering our communities' current well-being and future prosperity. We need to update (and in some cases, completely transform) our social systems to align with our current and future way of life.
  • Furthermore: An increasing number of social systems are experiencing a shift from hierarchical to distributed power. While we know how to work in the old paradigm, we're not so good at the new one.
  • Good news: There are already people and organizations in our communities and around the world developing innovative ways to improve and transform the systems in need of change.
  • More good news: Our regions already have an abundance of the capital assets needed to transform our dated social systems.
  • The rub: The capital stores in most social systems are hidden or untapped due to decaying politics, lack of trust, fear of changes to current systems, and a culture of individualism, to name just a few primary obstacles.
  • Moreover: The innovators and caring community members are poorly connected with each other and the available resources. This makes it difficult to makes connections of talent and resources that would be mutually beneficial.
  • And to pile on: True transformation of social systems today will require buy-in and bold forward-thinking action from institutional leaders, caring community members and a region’s general populous. Innovators will show the way, but the system’s leaders must be willing to transform their operations and the citizens of the region must be willing to support the creation of the new.
  • Technology can help. Modern information technologies and ecosystems can help communities maximize their own potential for communicating constructively and for leveraging disparate assets. Our current Internet-based tools for creating healthy and vibrant community ecosystems are only in their infancy.
  • We can help our regions transform their social systems by helping the caring community around and the innovators in each system connect with each other, understand and explain the needs of a new system, find capital assets, develop needed resources and as a result, build buy-in and support needed for bold forward-thinking action among the institutional leadership and the broader regional populous for true system-wide transformation.

Our Vision

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On the basis of the context and assumption we laid out in the last section we think it is now possible to put forward our vision for our communities. In short, we think that a healthy and vibrant region is one where citizens are active and efficacious in their social systems, where all actors are welcome to the table, where our social systems are aligned with our identities, histories, and ways of life, where solutions are found within, using the wealth of capital and assets all our communities naturally possess, and where all these activities support and foster our current well-being and future prosperity.

We think this vision is both possible and necessary. Possible because all the ingredients – people, talent, connections, knowledge, diversity, natural resources – lay at our feet. Necessary because our position in history demands that we become both more connected and more self-reliant at the same time. But we're also convinced that this vision can be brought to fruition more painlessly with the help of devoted community builders: people whose sole responsibility and passion it is to help a community make the transition to this emerging paradigm of social relatedness. Like a midwife, a marriage counselor, or a loving gardener, the community builder's role is to do everything in her power to ensure the well-being of everyone involved. This dispassionate passion requires a unique mindset, a unique set of both technologies of the self and social skills, and a unique range of tools that we think needs to be recognized and encouraged. This is ultimately what the Field Guide for Community Builders hopes to achieve.

Common Vocabulary

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In order to work together we need to be able to talk with one another. Every role has its own tools, skills, and a shared, common vocabulary. The sawyer knows about tenon saws, crosscut saws, and veneer saws, he knows how to set a saw's teeth, how to start a cut, and how straighten a bent blade, and he shares with other sawyers this same vocabulary. For the same reason we think it is essential that community builders begin to build a common vocabulary that will allow them to identify the tools they use, codify their skills, and simply talk with one another effectively. 

CAPITAL: The ability to get something done. Capital can come in many forms – skills, connections, know-how, money, tools, votes, etc. In different systems different kinds of capital are important and the rules for exchange between forms of capital varies. It is essential for community builders to understand where capital is located, how it can be exchanged, and where connections can lead to greater use of existing reserves. (synonym: assets)

  • Social capital: Social capital is the value of social relations between persons, colloquially referred to as “connections”. Like economic capital, social capital is a store of power that can be called upon to achieve certain ends and which operates according to certain local rules of exchange.
  • Economic capital: Liquid and illiquid stores of economic power. Money, stocks, bonds, real estate, machinery, etc.
  • Symbolic capital: Symbolic capital is the ability to affect discourse. It is the power of a symbol to get something done and the power of certain people and organizations to create such symbols. The largest concentrated holdings of symbolic capital have traditionally been in the hands of governments, media organizations, “taste makers”, religious leaders and other people and institutions with extensive access to mass discourse and high levels of trust.
  • Human capital: Human capital encompasses the knowledge and skills a person possesses relevant to accomplishing tasks. Skills can be very general and have wide applicability, such as the ability to read or organize a team, or they can be very specific, such the ability to make crème brûlée. Knowledge can likewise range from the very general to the very specific. 
  • Cultural capital: Cultural capital refers to the set of ingrained skills and dispositions that a person possesses which allow them to navigate certain cultural fields. In a sense these are a combination of human capital – skills regarding how to behave in certain situations, how to dress, how to speak, bodily comportment, dining skills, rules of grammar and pronunciation, etc. – and knowledge about the practices, customs, and reference works within a given cultural field.
  • Spiritual capital: Spiritual capital is the ability of a person or place to put people in deeper touch with the spiritual level of reality; the ability to enable people to come in closer contact with their own integrity, meaning, and voice.

COMMUNITY: A group of people who, celebrating the diversity of their perspectives, accept and transcend their differences, enabling them to communicate effectively and openly to work together toward goals identified as being for their common good.

COMMUNITY BUILDING: The process of nurturing a community toward the self-realization of its own shared goals. This includes a number of essential processes including building authentic and trusting relationships, knowing and mapping the players in a community and their forms of capital, finding ways to engage community members in making their shared goals clear and explicit, and looking for ways to leverage latent assets better.

INNOVATION: The reintroduction or creation of processes, structures, and tools which allow a community to better realize their accepted, shared goals. As such innovation has two primary coordinates: difference and context. Innovation is always about applying tools which are different than those currently dominant, whether they be novel or not. Additionally, in innovation that has community building as its goal, true innovation is only that which works towards to a community's shared goals.

Innovation only counts as such if its goal is the realization of possibilities – as opposed to simple novelty. Such success depends highly on knowledge of and sensitivity to the current context/state of a system.

SHARED GOALS: The communities that this Field Guide focuses on are ones with a particular social function. Education systems aim to educate young people; regional economic development agencies seek to create a welcoming business environment; media companies seek to inform, connect, and entertain their users; and so on. We think that all communities have these shared goals, but that they often remain only implicit in the work of their members. Furthermore, we think that all communities can better achieve their own well-being by making these shared goals explicit and finding ways to leverage underutilized assets.

SOCIAL SYSTEM: A social system is roughly synonymous with a community, but looks at it from the outside and in its relationship to other social systems. Thus a local K-12 education system can be seen as a community – the group of people, institutions, and resources that make it up as well as the shared goals it pursue – or it could be viewed as a social system – a network of institutional relations that is itself embedded in other economic, political, cultural, and historical relations. The difference is one of perspective.

Values of Our Community Building Teams

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We build understanding and encourage independent action, empowerment and and ownership among community members. We are careful to not create dependency on our team.

We’re for what works for both now and the future. We don’t pick sides.

Institutions and communities need each other. Institutions can provide important services, but they will always have their limits. Communities can provide care, possibility and innovation beyond any institutional limits. Institutions and communities are not competing entities, just interdependent and co-existing.

All who care are welcome. We don’t pick winners and we can’t predict who will be successful innovators. We provide an open network and welcoming front door to anyone who is interested in constructively participating in our community. Membership in the caring community is voluntary. No application or admission fee required.

Encourage Transparency. Our work is to create an open network for all caring community members. Transparency of relationships, resources and opportunities are key to engaging and welcoming all people into the fold.

Work in Partnerships. To create an infrastructure of relationships and resources to get more things done, produce all events, programs, and special features with a set of partners who actively care about the issue at hand.

Build Capacity and Capabilities. Our intention is to create more vibrancy in the community – not to own it. To that end, we work to support, promote and encourage community members to learn and take on productions of events, projects and programs of ours or their own.

We embrace a density of resources and encourage collaboration over competition. Replicated efforts in different areas of the community can add up to a stronger network and more knowledge in the community of what works and what doesn’t.

We bring a fresh perspective and ways of doing business. We look for models, formats, ideas and ways of operating that inspire sense of new possibilities. Highly valuing and prioritizing design, hospitality and regular travel to other vibrant communities is key to keeping our methods fresh.

We’re people first: personal, genuine, human, authentic and fallible.

There is a clear distinction between community building, community organizing and networking. Teams will have the burden of explaining that distinction, especially in politically sensitive systems.

Market and non-market forces can work together to their mutual benefit.

Community building is non-partisan. Teams focus solely on allowing the system to attain optimum performance. Just like a good teacher, the teams don’t push their system toward any one future, but support them in making whatever future they choose the best it can be.

It’s possible to build consensus while maintaining differences. Teams will strive to move their systems toward these points of consensus.

The Community Building Process

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Moving the community toward a state of health and vibrancy requires a wide variety of processes, tools, and resources. This is an overview of the major activities to nurture that goal.

Build Personal Relationships and Facilitate Connections. Build, strengthen, and expand relationships with and among active community members. The aim here is to better understand each active player’s focus, ambitions and needs. Build personal relationships with the players and connect them to other people and resources that can help them accomplish their goals.

Model the Behavior. Whenever possible, invite, introduce, collaborate and mentor, and encourage everyone else to do the same. 

Facilitate Community Conversations to Define the Problems and Make the Case for Change. Through partnerships and co-creation with the community, build contextual information pieces to define the problem/issues, make the case for innovation, and start developing and modeling the community’s values.

Map the Network and its Capital Holdings. Build a working picture of the system, identifying the players, their functions and aspirations, their capital holdings and assets, the relations to one another, etc. In other words, map the system to understand what’s there and how it functions.

Develop a Strategy for Change. Looking at the established capital holdings, power alliances and sources innovation, develop a strategy for making deep-rooted change in the system.

Highlight What’s Working. Find and connect with people who are actively working on improvements and tell their stories through various mediums. Timely narratives from the network and community will help more clearly define the range of voices present and inspire more forward movement.

Create Gathering Places. Set-up or support creation of permanent and temporary places, physical and virtual, where community members can meet and connect for varying needs and amounts of time.

Host Events and Programming. Live opportunities to meet other active community members, hear and exchange ideas, discuss differences, and build consensus around an issue/system/innovation.

Mediate and dissolve conflicts. When conflicts arise (or are inherited) among network members, work to help the various sides find common ground and space to sort out their differences.

Facilitate Resource Creation. Additional community resources – again real or virtual – that are needed to move forward on a particular issue.

Capital Assessments & Creating a Strategy for Change

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If community builders have as their primary task helping a system achieve its greatest potential, then they’re are going to need to continuously develop the deepest and broadest possible understanding of that system possible. This is what we mean by a capital and community assessment: a map, a lay of the land, an understanding of the market. What this assessment involves in primarily mapping stakeholders and theirs forms and levels of capital holdings.

Stakeholders are, quite apparently, any people or institutions that have some stake in the relevant systems. Again, these may range from single individuals to large institutions, but together they make up the “agents” within the system.

Capital, at its most basic, is a store of some kind of power that can be converted to get something done. Understanding the different forms of capital, being able to identify and discuss them, is an essential tool in understanding communities and the dynamics of the groups within them. The most relevant forms of capital are: economic, cultural, social, and symbolic. In different systems these capital holdings may take on different forms and will certainly be subject to unique rules of exchange. But since these forms of capital are the stuff by which things do get done, it is absolutely essential that community leaders are constantly striving to understand and map where they are located and how they can be best utilized for the health of the entire community.

Finally, the goal of capital and community assessment goes beyond merely helping the teams in their work. Others can also greatly benefit from this analysis. Thus, in some form or other these assessments should be open to the community at large, thus allowing network and community members to better understand their own community and affect the changes they seek.

Here is an example developed by Andy Stoll for Seed Here. This document outlines Seed Here’s understanding of the capital stores, resources needed and actions to take to support entrepreneurs:

Tools, Products & Making Money

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The main objective of the team is to build community and help foster better conversation and understanding about vital community issues. If we do that well, we will organically discover and be in a prime position to generate revenue and create products and services that are inline with the values and needs of the communities. Revenue streams will likely come from sponsorships, events, community-specific media channels and packages, and products and service lines. Finding revenue streams is a secondary yet important and inevitable part of the work.

Indicators/Measurement of Success

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  • More people reading, attending and participating community activities
  • More people taking ownership and initiative by producing their own events, projects, programs and gathering spaces
  • New niche community building teams popping up on their own
  • Reports of innovation being easier to accomplish
  • Regional pride in the vibrancy of the community
  • External recognition of the vibrancy of the community