Building communities

According to Webster the word for 2024 is polarization. We have drifted into different camps - conservative/liberal, authoritarian/libertarian, red/blue, religious/humanist, democratic/republican, etc.

The work of Engaged Communities, is community building. We offer three services to help build communities; (1) providing a space for people to discover one another and converse (Community Spaces), (2) both a promotional and a planning calendar (Community Events) to help people plan and discover activities and (3) what you are reading now (Community Journal) to publish news, opinions and stories of interesting people.

We believe that building more (lots more) communities is a key to re-connecting people.

In this article, we will use the book “Get Together: How to Build a Community with Your People” to introduce a method of building your community.

Get Together defines a community as “A group of people that keep getting together to do what they care about” and are built with people rather than for people and is written around three major topics.

Sparking the flame

The first step in creating a community is to define the type of community you want to create. The two primary categories are bridging and bonding. A bridging community tends to focus on bringing together a diverse group of people and is outwardly focused while a bonding community focuses on forging tighter bonds among a more homogeneous group and is inwardly focused. Deciding on the type of community then leads to clearly writing down the purpose of your community followed by inviting a few people to get together who share the purpose.

With these initial people you should design your first activity and make it purposeful, participatory and repeatable.

Stoking the fire

Once a few group meetings have been done you need to focus on cultivating the identity of the group by creating some type of welcome package for new members and offering some kind of badge such as a customized logo on shirts, or other useful items.

To attract new folks you should craft an origin story comprising the story of self (that’s your story), the story of us (how the group came into existence), and the story of now (why it is important to join right now).

Now that you (hopefully) have some members beyond the founding group, it is necessary to encourage sticking together. This can be done by developing a shared language, adopting rituals and determining a demonym (a noun used to identify members of the group).

The final activity in stoking the fire is to pay attention to who shows up by gathering information on regular participants, using surveys and interviews to provide insight on what the participants want out of the group and keep track of the hand raisers (those people that frequently volunteer).

Passing the torch

Passing the torch involves growing together and balancing the need to structure the group and supporting the freedom of the group to adapt and change. At this point it is important to identify future leaders by laying out the leaders journey, determining where your upcoming leaders need support the most and then providing that support.

Read the book!

This is only a brief overview of the book which goes into greater depth and provides numerous real world examples.