A fundamental principle of community organizing is to start where the people are. The closer you engage people to where they live, the more likely they are to get involved. You should be able to get successively larger turnouts for gatherings at the neighborhood, city, state and national levels, but the percentage of the population engaged will most likely be the highest at the street, block, building or floor level.
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Earlier this Fall, academic researchers and professionals in government, business, and environmental organizations came together to explore the potential for creating FutureTalks – a large-scale community engagement program on urban sustainability and climate change issues.
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Champions of a cause often are eager to convene a collaboration to catalyze change. However, convening stakeholders without first assessing whether the conditions are right and the essential elements are in place is a recipe for coblaboration. The evil twin of collaboration, coblaboration only results in redundant meetings, assignment of blame and little change.
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In the 100 years of leadership practice, one subject we haven’t yet solved is change management. There must be something missing in our leadership of change. The missing element is that we have ignored, or at least misread, what really happens when humans face change.
Conventional thinking has us believe that “people resist change.” But that can’t be true otherwise we’d be still living in caves. And it’s not true in our personal lives – many changes we welcome. Conventional thinking about change denies human nature.
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The Orton Family Foundation’s Community Heart and Soul Initiative is rooted in the belief that, “the strength of a community lies in the hands of its residents."
Its Community Heart & Soul Field Guide 2nd Edition summarizes the essence of wisdom gleaned from more than a decade of listening, learning, refining and partnering with more than a dozen small towns (under 50,000 residents). The field guide is both practical and comprehensive. It outlines an array of resources and tools that they have used and refined to promote proven, resident-driven approaches to community engagement and change that reflect genuine involvement that engage all sectors in planning so that small towns can build their own successful futures.
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One of the key conditions of collective impact is continuous communications. In Collective Impact 3.0, Mark Cabaj and I reframed this condition to include authentic community engagement. We all know about the importance of continous communications but how well and how often do we practice this condition?
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