There is a big tension in community change efforts. There is the tyranny of the immediate - hunting for quick wins, trying to move the agenda forward and being aware of the multiple demands on participant time. With such a focus on the immediate, we sacrifice the building of relationships and reflection to meet the demands of the short term and time factors.
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My colleague and mentor Jay Connor often pushes me with this question. On the surface, it seems like an easy question to answer. We are doing this to improve the lives of people in our communities who are being impacted in negative ways. That answer pulls at heart strings. It gets lots of heads nodding in agreement. But it is also a vague response and one that does not hold us to account.
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Before launching a new initiative, I often advise groups to have “100 Cups of Coffee.” Not to be confused with the popular Futurama Frye video clip, 100 Cups of Coffee is a way to understand the complexity of an issue, build relationships with key people and organizations, and discover opportunities for synergy.
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Over the past several weeks I have attended workshops, meetings and conferences about a wide variety of topics including refugee settlement, advancing STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), homelessness and health. In each case, I was not the content expert, in fact, I knew very little about the subject matter being discussed. Rather, I was invited for my knowledge of community engagement and collective impact.
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Poverty is a complex issue. It’s an issue that cannot be approached in isolation or solved by a select few – it effects everyone, is experienced by people in different ways, and involves a significant number of interrelated elements and stakeholders. We know this. We know that when working on complex problems, such as poverty, finding comprehensive solutions requires communities to come together to leverage and better understand their assets – knowledge, experience, skills and resources – to truly see and act on the issue from all angles.
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Community change is personal. It is, at its very core, about changing citizens and communities for the better. However, we often depersonalize this process. We talk about services, programs, statistics and organizations in a way that removes the face of citizens. Perhaps this makes the process easier. It also removes the urgency of the issue. If we don’t reflect on the daily impact that citizens are facing in our communities, we can spend endless time in conversation about the problem.
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