The Art of Community

in Asset-Based Community Development, Organizing, Resident Associations

Excerpts from Chapter 1 of The Art of Community, by Jono Bacon. Note from the author: When I started work on The Art of Community I was really keen that it should be a body of work that all communities have access to. My passion behind the book was to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. I wanted to write a book that covered the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, and illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales.

But to give this book real value, I was keen to ensure the book could be freely accessed and shared. I wanted to not only break down the financial barrier to the information, but also enable communities to share it to have the content be as useful as possible in the scenarios, opportunities and problems that face them. To make this happen O’Reilly needed to be on board to allow the book to be freely copied and shared, in an era in which these very freedoms threaten the publishing world.

But they came through. Thanks to the incredible support of Andy Oram, my founding editor for the book, O’Reilly were hugely supportive of the project and our desire to break down these barriers.

Today I am pleased to announce the general availability of The Art Of Community under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

Main points

A sense of belonging is what keeps people in communities. This belonging is the goal of community building. The hallmark of a strong community is when its members feel that they belong.

Belonging is our goal. It is that nine-letter word that you should write out in large letters and stick on your office wall. It is that word that should be at the forefront of your inspiration behind building strong community. If there is no belonging, there is no community.

Belonging is the measure of a strong social economy. This economy’s currency is not the money that you find in your wallet or down the back of your couch, but is social capital.

The first known use of the term “social capital” (referred to in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community [Simon & Schuster]) was by L. J. Hanifan, a school supervisor in rural Virginia. Hanifan described social capital as “those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit….”

For an economy and community to be successful, the participants need to believe in it. If no one believes in the community that brings them together, it fails.

For an economy to work, every participant needs to believe in the economy. Belief is a critical component in how any group of people or animals functions. This can be belief in God, belief in values, or belief in a new future. Whatever the core belief is, the economy and the community can be successful only if everyone has faith in it.

Like any other economy, a social economy is a collection of processes that describe how something works and is shared between those who participate.

An economy is a set of shared concepts and processes that grow and change in an effort to generate a form of capital. In a financial economy, participants put goods and services on the market to generate financial capital. The processes and techniques they use include measuring sales, strategic marketing, enabling ease of access, and so forth. A social economy is the same thing—but we are the product, and the capital is respect and trust. The processes and techniques here are different—open communications mediums, easy access to tools, etc.—but the basic principles are the same.

These processes, and the generation of social capital, which in turn generates belonging, needs to be effectively communicated.

An economy is like a flowing river: it never stops, and the flow is critical to its success. Economies never stand still. Every day they change, adjusting to stimuli in the world that affects them. At the heart of how this movement works is communication.

The Basis of Communication

Peter Block, a consultant on learning, makes an important foundational observation about communication in a social economy: “community is fundamentally an interdependent human system given form by the conversation it holds with itself.” When I first heard that quote, I realized that the mechanism behind communication in a community is stories.

Stories are a medium in which we keep the river flowing. They are the vessels in which we not only express ideas (“I was taking the subway to work one day, and I saw this lady on there reading the paper, and it made me think xyz”), but also how we learn from past experiences (“There was one time when I saw David do xyz and I knew I had to adjust how I myself handle those situations in the future”). Furthermore, when the characters in the stories are people in a community, the stories are self-referencing and give the community a sense of reporting. Communities really feel like communities when there is a news wire, be it formalized or through the grapevine.

Not all stories are cut from the same cloth, though. Communities tend to exchange two very different kinds of story: tales and fables.

Tales are told for entertainment value and to share experiences. They are individual units of experience that are shared between people, and their primary value is in communicating a given person’s experience and adding to the listener’s repertoire of stories and experiences.

Fables are different. Fables are stories designed to illustrate an underlying message. The vast majority of us are exposed to fables as children, and these stories are passed down from generation to generation, each one extolling a moral message to the youth of the day.

To be continued.

Join the Art of Community Comedy Photo Competiton

Join the Art of Community Comedy Photo Competiton

This book is free, but you should buy it if you could. From the author: While the book is ready to download right now, the book is available to buy in print, on Kindle, and other electronic book formats and I would like to encourage you to buy a printed copy of the book for a few reasons: Firstly, buying a copy sends a tremendous message to O’Reilly that they should continue to publish books (a) about community and (b) under a Creative Commons license. Secondly, it will encourage O’Reilly to invest in a second edition of the book down the line, which will in turn mean that communities around the world will have a refreshed and updated edition that is available to them. Thirdly, aside from the voting-with-your-feet side of things, it is just a really nice book to own in print. It is really well made, looks stunning and feels great to curl up with in a coffee shop or on the couch.

More from The Art of Community

Loving Thy Neighbor

in Asset-Based Community Development, Organizing, Resident Associations

via Loving Thy Neighbor. By Sam Fulwood III, Center for American Progress. As a fresh immigration reform debate gears up in Washington, D.C., a wide range of faith groups are showing a new, unexpected, and grassroots-led social activism that’s rooted in theological and moral ground. While loud and shrill anti-immigrant voices dominate much of the media attention regarding immigrants and especially the undocumented, faith community activists are caring and praying in the shadows of public attention.

These groups have worked for many years and across the country on immigration issues and as strong advocates for undocumented workers and their families. Their efforts include creating citizenship projects, offering educational and support services, fighting discrimination and exploitation, bridging gaps between immigrant and nonimmigrant communities, providing sanctuary for immigrant families, supporting comprehensive legislative reform, and more.

Hundreds of diverse faith communities have been active independently and within larger organizations. Mainline Protestant denominations, Catholic parishes, Jewish congregations, and others, along with groups such as PICO, the Interfaith Immigration Coalition, Sojourners, Catholic Social Services, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Families United, and Gamaliel have stood up and spoken out on behalf of immigrants and their families.

But lately, these efforts are gaining new energy and spreading around the country as people of faith are championing the cause of immigration reform. This is an important development because it heralds a sweeping grassroots movement that will support political leaders in Washington who join their cause.

The ancient scriptures describe the stories of immigrants—people cast out of their native land who wander in the world’s wilderness and seek refuge in foreign places. It’s an epic saga, filled with struggle and conflict, despair and deliverance. Little wonder that present-day people of faith find parallels in the lives of immigrants in this country.

Of course, the travails of people fleeing poverty-stricken Latin America or the war-ravaged Middle East to come to the United States are very different from the patriarchs’ journey to Egypt in search of food or the exile of Israelites after their homeland fell to Assyria and Judea fell to Babylon. Or are they?

The specific details may vary, but the plight of an immigrant is as old as humanity. From biblical antiquity to the 21st century, the response of people of faith remains constant, following the admonition to ease the burdens of strangers in their midst.

This report is a collection of present-day immigrant stories. Unlike the more familiar narrative of oppression in a foreign land, these are stories of faith in the flesh, of people filled with the conviction of their religious beliefs and pushed to act in defense of needy neighbors in their community.

The report also intends to be an antidote to the mistaken belief that ordinary people of faith are not involved in political advocacy or shy from pressing their influence in national debates and policies affecting immigrants. As these stories demonstrate, many efforts sprang up at the grassroots, independent of each other and often without awareness that anyone or any other group was concerned about this issue. People of faith pitched in to help fellow humans whose lives seemed very different from their own, and they were spurred on by a sense of moral outrage at the detentions of undocumented immigrants in their communities.

Several of these stories haven’t been widely told and therefore aren’t a part of the media chatter in the debate over immigration reform. This must change if comprehensive immigration reform is to earn broad and popular support. Faith-based activism must become part of the public debate.

Voices from the Field II – Reflections on Comprehensive Community Change

in Asset-Based Community Development, Organizing, Resident Associations

Excerpts from Voices From the Field II: Reflections on Comprehensive Community Change, by Anne C. Kubisch, Patricia Auspos, Prudence Brown, Robert Chaskin, Karen Fulbright-Anderson, and Ralph Hamilton. Washington, D.C.: Aspen Institute.

In 1997, the Aspen Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives distilled early lessons and emerging conclusions from the practices of CCIs during their first years. Drawing on information gleaned from focus groups with 94 different stakeholders—residents, program directors, funders, technical assistance providers, and evaluators— Voices from the Field: Learning from the Early Work of Comprehensive Community Initiatives described the overall functioning of CCIs and highlighted the fundamental challenges in their design and implementation. That volume (hereafter referred to as Voices from the Field I) was intended to synthesize then-current thinking and provoke useful discussion about the goals, approaches, and dynamics of community change.

Now, five years later, we can begin to weave the ongoing experience of CCIs into the fabric of knowledge about community change that comes from a broad array of initiatives, approaches, and activities—efforts that are all in some way about “community building” and “comprehensive community improvement.” Together, these constitute a loosely defined, informal field of work, with some shared goals for community change and some common principles that guide action. The threads represented by CCIs offer lessons that reinforce, modify, and add to the experiences of other approaches. Collectively, they can increase our knowledge base about what it takes to substantially improve struggling neighborhoods and the quality of life within them. With this volume, we review the current state of these community-change efforts, synthesize what we know about their potential and their limitations, extract lessons about effective strategies, and propose a framework to guide future action.

voices

THE MESSAGE OF THIS BOOK

The means for solving poor neighborhoods’ problems lie only partially within communities’ boundaries, and expectations for the outcomes of community-based change must reflect that reality.

Opportunities for significant improvement in disadvantaged neighborhoods rely on two essential factors.

  1. that communities must maximize their ability to produce whatever kinds of change are within their control. Effective local anti-poverty work thus requires enormous community “capacity”—a resource whose scarcity in impoverished neighborhoods debilitates and undermines much good work. To advance this agenda, we must improve our definition and understanding of community capacity and develop, test, evaluate, and reproduce strategies for building such internal strength.
  2. that communities must be able to use interactions with structures, resources, and other influences beyond their boundaries to the maximum advantage of the community. This means that community-change efforts must develop more sophisticated analyses of political, economic, and social dynamics and find better ways to tap into them, benefit from them, make demands on them, and improve their operations in distressed communities.

The challenge of committing to “community” while also recognizing its limitations has been a major struggle for CCIs and other community-change efforts. In the recent experience of CCIs, the challenge of tackling internal and external problems simultaneously has been so overwhelming that many confined themselves to what was possible: they focused almost exclusively on localized needs and did not address the major structural and institutional barriers that constrained their communities’ ability to change. Now, some are re-examining and questioning the underlying premises of their work.

How should we act on this message? Unfortunately, the answer is not an easy one. The solution is not to abandon our current work but to do it better, with more sophistication and from a more strategic vantage point. It involves working more deeply within communities and more aggressively beyond their bounds. To do so, we need better theories of what the process of community change should really look like and better knowledge about how to do the work. Then, we will need to apply the theories and knowledge to a better infrastructure for action and sustained community improvement. We envision an ecology of change that has four principal levels:

  1. Change among community residents;
  2. Change within and among community-level institutions;
  3. Change among those who provide technical, financial, practical, and other supports;
  4. Changes in broad policies and structures that have enormous influence on community residents and institutions.

Finally, we need to be sure to invest in a continuous cycle of tracking our work, distilling lessons, applying new information, and learning as we go. This book offers a first step in that direction.

See also: Core Principles of Community Building

Click here for more from Voices from the Field

“A Very Intense and Complex Balancing Act”

in Asset-Based Community Development, Organizing, Resident Associations

Excerpts from “A Very Intense and Complex Balancing Act” – a Reflection by Oakland Making Connections Coordinator Fred Blackwell via Site Stories.

The local people who took on the role of coordinating the Making Connections work in the 10 sites faced a great challenge: how to pull together and be an advocate for local people and organizations while also being the connecting point between the local work and the national foundation that was supporting the work, the Annie E. Casey Foundation. One of the first coordinators was Fred Blackwell in Oakland. He says he learned a lot from the experience.

Fred Blackwell

Lessons learned:

  • Be clear about the limitations of your role, and the fact you are balancing and answering to multiple bosses in some ways. Being clear about your limits is really key, so that people at all levels have appropriate expectations around your actions, and an understanding around where your loyalties are.
  • One factor that made engaging community challenging was the emphasis on producing quantifiable results relatively quickly in its target neighborhoods. Where the tension arises is around the timing of the foundation’s expectations for change. If you really want authentic resident engagement in this work, it just necessarily takes longer to see proof of the work.
  • We always felt we were short on the resident engagement side, but at the same time, we always felt like there was a lot of pressure to continue to show movement to the foundation. We thought we could show movement and at the same time invite people to come on board. But while we were doing that, we were leaving residents farther and farther behind. If I had it to do all over again, I would have stopped and addressed our shortcoming around engaging resident before we started marching forward.
  • If you look at the Making Connections sites that have been the most successful in engaging residents, they have one thing in common. They really took advantage of that honeymoon period in when there weren’t expectations around producing results to engage their residents.
  • Wherever you go, if you are working in a low income community, people will say the same things about what they want to see happen, and they generally line up with what the foundation says it wants to see happen. Everybody’s interested in jobs. Everybody’s interested in economic opportunity. Everybody’s interested in brighter futures for their kids. Everybody’s interested in having strong neighborhood institutions that have the capacity to produce the changes the people want. Where we come into conflict is in the timing of the change. We also come into conflict around the strategies and tactics.
    • One example of this conflict over strategy concerned education. Blackwell says that everyone agrees about the need to improve education; the question is how to accomplish this objective. The foundation took a very strong stand that this was not going to be a K-to-12 reform initiative. Instead, in relation to education, the foundation focused Making Connections on preparing children for school. This created a little tension because many site people felt you really needed to get into the education reform agenda.
    • Another example of conflict over strategy, Blackwell says, concerned the issue of safety, which many community people thought should be a priority but which wasn’t one of the foundation’s core outcomes.
  • The notion that, rather than having an open slate, you need to have a focus on a set of common ground outcomes is great and important. In this kind of work, without that kind of focus, you rarely accomplish anything. My criticism on that is that it should have been on the table from day one. Why? We engaged these communities in a process of determining whether they wanted to be partners with us without giving them complete information about what partnership was. Ideally we would have gone out in the beginning and said, ‘These are the six outcomes we want to achieve.’ To say take it or leave it is kind of crass, but this is what we want to work on. ‘Do you want to work on this with us?’ Rather than saying, ‘We want to work with you, we’re willing to work on the stuff you think is important, there are some things we think are important,’ but not being clear about what these things were.
  • Blackwell understands the need to emphasize outcomes: When you’re investing this kind of money, you need to know whether or not your investment is making a difference. But he says the foundation should be careful about getting stuck on the outcomes. It isn’t the only way to judge the impact of this work. Another way to judge the work is to look at the impact it has had on people’s thinking. In the case of Making Connections, he thinks the impact has been profound.
    • One example concerns its focus on Family Economic Success. This FES framework has been adopted very broadly. When I started working with Making Connections, I didn’t hear anybody talking about family economic success and the need to combine workforce development strategies with service strategies with asset accumulation strategies. People were talking about all of those issues in isolation. Now, wherever you go in this country, people are talking about putting families on firmer financial ground.

Lessons about engaging residents

  • We have to be open to the various ways we can engage people and really understand the continuum of engagement. Some people will come to meetings. Other people will want you or need you to come to them or talk to them in their living rooms, on their turf, in one of their meetings. It is unrealistic to think you can set one table that everyone is going to come to and assume a leadership role.
  • The most important thing is that the activities of the initiative are guided by and accountable to residents. To achieve this, he thinks you must build a broad understanding in the neighborhood of what you’re doing and that what you’re doing must reflect the priorities of most of the residents.
  • The people who are collectively doing the work must be held accountable in some way to a broader constituency of people who care about the work.
  • Blackwell also learned how hard this is to do in a diverse neighborhood like the Lower San Antonio. It’s a challenge not only in terms of strategies and communications, but also in terms of expenses and staffing. You’ve got to be prepared to spend the money to translate materials, to have translators at meetings, to have staff people who adequately reflect the diversity of the community so they can communicate well with the folks they’ve been working with.
  • You also have to be keenly aware not only of the linguistic challenges, but the differences in culture and how these differences affect how you actually approach the work and design your interventions and go about implementation. It’s a huge challenge to me.
    • One example involves employment. It’s not one size fits all. Program design that works well for immigrant and refugee families may not work at all for families who have been in this country for multiple generations. Employment strategies for somebody who is in poverty but who is in transition is different than a set of strategies for a person who has spent many years in the safety net and has a family that has interacted with the safety net and public support system, sometimes for generations. He explains that they may have a different set of needs and expectations than an immigrant family.

At the time of this posting, Fred Blackwell was the Executive Director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

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

in Asset-Based Community Development, Organizing, Resident Associations

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.

(more…)