The Community Building Process
/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.