Best practice malpractice

in community engagement

I’d been asked to prepare a presentation for the “Someone’s Done That Already: the Best Practice of Using Best Practices” session of the June 2 Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp on Empowering Communities. So I reached out to a few friends who know far more about best practices in community empowerment than I do.

I told them my plan was to create a slide for each one who filled in an online questionnaire, and talk about the Top 3 to 5 resources that they’d recommend. Preferably, I said, the resources are available free online, but they could list resources in any medium.

I knew this little exercise was going to be fun when the first submission I got came from Kevin Harris, principal of Local Level, author of the Neighborhoods blog, with 20+ years working with residents and community development professionals, including years as an advisor to the UK government.

Here are the questions Kevin chose to answer:

1a: Name/Title/Author of Resource: Local people

1b: Link to resource (please include http://): Really quite close to where you are now

1c: Brief description of this resource. If you want to say why you recommend it, please do so.

Local people are quite capable of doing stuff if only those who have power that they shouldn’t have would get out of the way. This doesn’t mean that people don’t need services, run in a professional way, for which they rightly pay taxes. It means that those in positions of power need to address their own behaviour that disempowers ordinary people. This tends to be effected through bureaucratic procedures, references to regulations and health and safety conditions, excessive formalities in grant applications, inappropriate use of formal language, attention to their own work targets not community benefit, conveying a (completely false) sense of superiority, and a painful inability to see things from others’ point of view.

This box is for anything else you want to say.

Conceivably, perpetuating discussion about best practices might simply perpetuate the over-bureaucratisation (and unnecessary professionalisation) of community action. It could help to reflect on worst practices. The best community development role is sometimes to remove barriers, remain silent and/or just get out of the way.

Gee thanks, Kevin. And off we go! Next up: Richard Layman

The Craigslist Foundation San Francisco Gathering, Part 2

in community engagement

Toward the end of 2009, the Craigslist Foundation began a series of discussions around their plans to focus the foundation’s efforts on strengthening communities, with some emphasis on neighborhood-based communities. This began with a meeting at The Case Foundation in Washington DC, which included Michael Smith, Kari Dunn, Cindy Gallop, Jessica Kirkwood, Marsha Semmel, Michael Karpman, Rhonda Taylor, Ron Carlee, and Siobhan Canty. They “chatted about the need of organizations with libraries of unpublished case studies and ideas, connecting local changemakers with the big picture of systemic change, bringing essential info to people at exactly the time they need it most, and using storytellers to communicate long (or boring) case studies in more entertaining and inspiring ways.” (see How Can We Build On One Another’s Successes?)

In the second meeting, at end of January 2010, they gathered twelve more friends in San Francisco “for a different take on the conversation: Beth Kanter, Chris Gates, Craig Newmark, Frank Schulenburg, Gwyneth Borden, John Lyman, Kate Stahnke, Matt Garcia, Pamela Wheelock, Peggy Duvette, Rob Miller, and making it all amazingly fun was our facilitator Allen Gunn. Here, we talked a lot about the importance of people over information, how to reach those who aren’t online, what motivates people to tell their success stories, which organizations have already been doing work in this area, and what audiences might be most in need of improved information flow.”

A week later, they posted their “theory of change”: that “that place-based communities and neighborhoods must be strengthened if our society is to flourish and our democracy advance — and that Craigslist Foundation can play a catalytic role in assembling the talents of key partners and collaborators capable of offering people in communities the tools and resources they need to take greater responsibility for where they live, work, and play.” (see Catalyst for Community Vitality)

In this article, they also said “this translates into a role for us in convening successful organizations and people across all sectors — nonprofit, government, business, philanthropy — to work intentionally and together toward building stronger local communities and economies.” A month later, on  March 9, Craigslist Foundation announced that it was going on the road to learn more about “how people build stronger neighborhoods and what prevents others from joining in the fun.” They hosted small group discussions in Washington DC, New York, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Austin, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon in March and April.

I was part of the seventh and last of these meetings, posted photos of participants and their ideas, and transcribed their post-it notes below. Also in this meeting: Aaron Goodman, Ali Williams, Amelia Kolokihakaufisi , Anne Marie Engel, Bruce Richard, Clint Mitchell, Ka Yun Cheng, Karen Kwok, Kathie Lowry, Kristarae Flynn, Terri Forman, Maura Mccarthy, Nick McClintock,  Patrick Flanagan, Peggy Simmons, Toby Leavitt, and Winston Dong.

To keep track of the discussions and to create “a place to listen to the community, share some of our ideas, highlight cool projects we encounter, and generally keep the community up to date as our programs are developed”, CLF created the lab at craigslist foundation, and a uservoice forum that asks people to submit and vote on answers to the questions: What stops you from impacting your community? What has worked well for you?

Things I know that I wish I could share with leaders in other communities

Can't read the one on the top left

  • I didn’t get a good snap of this, sorry (see pic), so the way it reads to me is this: How do you break down barriers to regorible thaking? (i.e. minimize appepridics of competrif nit & cissided resources)
  • Illegible/illegible mentoring
  • I don’t wish, I share
  • The adventure of education abroad
  • How many options there are for raising money
  • How to create concepts that are large scale, inventive, and sizzling in getting people in cohesion faster
  • I know good ways of getting people of very different backgrounds together, as equals, so everyone walks away changed
  • How to facilitate community action/impact of people averse to talking to institutions and developers (more…)