Vertigo and The Intentional Inhabitant: Leadership In A Connected Environment

in Organizing

Bill Traynor is a leading theoretician and practitioner in the field of community development. He is currently the Executive Director of Lawrence Community Works, an initiative that’s rebuilding the struggling city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, his hometown. He was the Director of Community Development for the Boston Community Training and Assistance Center, and the Executive Director of the Coalition for a Better Acre in Lowell, where he raised over a million dollars to support organizational growth and to implement several housing and economic development projects. The author of numerous articles on community development and community organizing, Traynor received a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University in 1998. During his tenure with LCW, Traynor grew the organization from a staff of two and a deficit, to a staff of 45 and an operating budget of over $2 million, while leveraging over $25 million in public and private project investments for affordable housing, infrastructure investments, a city-wide youth network, and a range of family asset building and community organizing initiatives.

The Nonprofit Quarterly features this article in its current edition. Read the full article: Vertigo and The Intentional Inhabitant; Leadership In A Connected Environment: « The Value Of Place. Excerpts:

I have had to grapple with trying to find a way to lead when many of the traditional levers of power and decision making are neither handy nor useful. Moving from a traditional environment to a network or connected environment can cause a kind of vertigo because the environment is so radically different. It operates by different rules and responds to different stimuli. To try to lead in a network environment armed only with the perspectives and skills honed in traditional settings, is unsettling and disorienting.

It’s About the Space

A network environment is dominated by space, and so it is the space that should dominate your attention. The leader in a connected environment has to understand that the power of these environments comes from the space, not the forms that populate the space. Therefore the critical function of the leader in the network is the recognition of, and the creation, preservation and protection of space.

What is meant by space in this context? Well, it’s time and opportunity mostly, as well as accessibility, flexibility and options. It is the time for unfolding, time for adaptation, time and opportunity for intentional and random bumping and connecting, for creation, for response, for listening and reacting, for deconstruction. It is the space in between, around, behind, on top of and underneath the all of the action, the commitments, the transactions – these things are all forms. Networks die when the space closes because in the clutter of commitments, expectations, structures, programs, partnerships etc, there is no more space for adaptation or response.

At LCW we try to build language, tools and systems to help us recognize, create, preserve and defend space. We try to resource the demand environment in lots of different ways so that we can get better at resourcing real life opportunities rather than concepts and ideas that we or funders come up with. We try to keep all of our teams and committees loose and flexible and leadership moving from person to person so that we can stay focused on ‘what we do’ rather than ‘who we are’. This creates space for experimentation and allows things to grow and also allows for things to go away when they aren’t useful anymore. We try to do the routine things as efficiently as possible so that we can save time for the complicated stuff.

Over the past several years I have found that there are three ways to create and preserve space in a network environment.

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Reflections on Community Organizing and Resident Engagement in the Rebuilding Communities Initiative

in Organizing

Reflections on Community Organizing

Reflections on Community Organizing and Resident Engagement in the Rebuilding Communities Initiative.

Bill Traynor. Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Reflections of a community’s struggle with resident engagement and community organizing. The report’s focus in on understanding the role and practice of community organizing and resident engagement in the context of a comprehensive community change initiative.

Highlights:

We tried many things; some worked, some did not. Throughout the process, we all participated in a collective struggle to understand and master the challenge of effective resident engagement in a complex, multi-faceted comprehensive community initiative … This monograph is a reflection on their struggle. Its focus is on understanding the role and practice of community organizing and resident engagement in the context of a comprehensive community change initiative. It is based on my own reflections on their work as well as the thoughts and experiences of dozens of residents, activists, and professionals who have been involved in RCI.

  • It is difficult to establish strong and reliable measures of success. To complicate matters further, the rhetoric of resident engagement and community building is now so banal as to render much of it meaningless.
  • The truth is this work is difficult to do well, especially over a long period of time. Moreover, even successful community-based organizations (CBOs), such as those selected to participate in RCI, face significant challenges as they try to build capacity to do this work.
  • At its core is the challenge of engaging residents and other stakeholders to shape new thinking, new policies, new actions, and new visions. Of course, this requires a new approach to how CBOs identify, educate, activate, and mobilize their constituencies.

Lessons learned:

  • Community building efforts can only be successful if they are concerned both with building social capital and implementing an agenda for change.
  • For many groups, the shift to a community-building approach represents a wholesale shift in organizational culture and operations.
  • An investment in developing professional community organizing capacity is necessary to get results from community-building work.
  • Community-building efforts suffer from a dangerous combination of high expectations and meager resources.

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Network Organizing: A Strategy for Building Community Engagement

in Organizing

William J. Traynor, Jessica Andors . Shelterforce 2005.

Across the country there is a fundamental condition that consistently undercuts even the most successful community development efforts: chronic disengagement. In most cities, public or civic life is a hostile environment for the average person, ruled by cynicism and division, and dominated by entrenched habits of isolation and detachment. Unfortunately, while our community development field is engineered to build the physical things communities need — new homes, community centers and small businesses — and to some extent, to influence the policy that supports those products, we are not designed to attack this condition.

The author describes how his organization — Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW), a CDC based in Lawrence, Massachusetts — is using a “network organizing” strategy to overcome this situation. This strategy connects people to each other and to opportunities for people to step into public life — from the neighborhood group to the City Council — in a way that feels safe, fun and productive. LCW’s approach is a hybrid of many of the established practices of community organizing. The principal twist is the application of network theory, a set of ideas that come from the technology and economics fields but that are proving useful for understanding and shaping our community environments. Applying this thinking helps challenge some of the common obstacles to genuine engagement and helps shape a strong demand environment for change.

via KnowledgePlex: Network Organizing: A Strategy for Building Community Engagement, March/April 2005.