An overview of our community building approach: 

 

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.