—
It is often said it takes a village to raise a child. But what does it take to transform a neighborhood of individuals into a village, a connected community so to speak? When a neighborhood becomes a community, it has incredible power. Every place we live in is packed with human currency, just waiting to be tapped — from skills and knowledge to time and enthusiasm.
We may barely know our neighbors, but they’re a wellspring of abilities, knowledge, passions, and experiences. We may be unaware of the informal clubs and groups doing good work, or the important contributions that local institutions are making. We may overlook the physical, built, and cultural treasures around us, and not see the potential wealth in a local vegetable garden. But it’s all there, waiting to be connected. All of these aspects of the community form an incredible resource — social capital that can be invested to renew our health, security, care, local economy, ecology, and food sovereignty — and build a better life together
Each time we go out of our way to encourage, support, share, and enjoy a neighbor, we are putting the world to rights on our own street and building connection. But to truly create a Connected Community takes more intention. It’s not just the moments, but the beliefs behind them that put caring and connection first.
These six neighborly principles can act as our true north as we transform the invisible neighborhood into a visible, vivid, and vibrant one. Consider them the vital steps on our journey toward a Connected Community:
1. Discover one another and what surrounds you. Discover other local resident connectors — who naturally weave together their community through neighbor-to-neighbor and associational relationship building. Convene tables of connectors whose membership overlaps and represents the diversity of an entire neighborhood.
2. Welcome one another and the stranger. Actively welcome neighbors — and those who are pushed to the margins—by giving your neighbors a good listening-to, through one-on-one learning conversations and listening campaigns. Learning conversations and listening campaigns bring what people care about to the surface. Start with what is strong; not what’s wrong in your neighborhood.
3. Portray one another and your neighborhood in terms of your gifts. As you discover what you all care about enough to take collective action, creating dynamic portraits of the local assets you can use is a helpful way of making community building blocks visible to everyone. No one person can hold a full picture of all the ingredients that a neighborhood encompasses. Creating a shared portrait of your neighborhood assets — such as individual talents, an association, a park or a thriving garden, a local institution, the local heritage, and culture — is a powerful way of enabling your neighbors to discover what communitybuilding ingredients they all already have. Then you can all figure out how best to connect these unconnected resources in ways that create new possibilities and resolve old problems.
4. Share what you have to secure what your neighborhood wants. Intentionally doing things together, from breaking bread to tending a neighborhood garden, brings us into a radical presence with our neighbors. Sometimes it is necessary to create “shareable moments.” These moments occur when we intentionally create the conditions for neighbors to have exchanges. These can include skills exchanges, seed swaps, exchanges of books and toys, and repair cafes. They create a community onramp for people who may be unsure about how to get into community life. The more these moments enable gift exchange (the giving and receiving of gifts), hospitality, and association, the more likely they will become part of a community’s customs and traditions.
5. Celebrate one another’s comings and goings, the plantings, and harvests. Celebrating neighborliness and community life through local rituals, annual events, parties, sports events, yard sales, and front porch concerts are important ways to give ourselves a collective slap on the back. Adding food, fun, songs, and dance into the mix is a great way to honor our past achievements and dream up new community possibilities.
6. Envision with one another a preferred future. Creating a collective vision that establishes the priorities and reveals the possibilities for the shared future of a neighborhood is a powerful way to bind the community together. It ensures that residents in the neighborhood shape and own the shared vision.
These simple acts support and build a neighborhood into a community — and there are countless examples of what happens when people come together. During the first year of COVID-19, for instance, citizens in one Menasha, Wisconsin neighborhood mobilized (all over Zoom, no less) and took actions to bring people together, from creating a food drive, to recognizing essential workers, to creating a phone tree and a network to help neighbors in need.
Their creativity and caring transformed eight hundred households into a community — by improvising around obstacles and innovating solutions. They celebrated individual perspectives and gifts, came together around the communal need to tend to each other during a pandemic, and brought their skills and energy together. It’s from that “nest” of caring that a community’s health, wealth, and power grow — and this process is repeating itself all over the world.
—
This content is brought to you by Cormac Russell
Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash