An overview of our community building approach: 

 

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 As a result, these systems are falling out of date and are hampering our communities' current well-being and future prosperity.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.