In my attempt to define extreme community, I need to learn from people who have formed their lives around fostering collaboration in groups and organizations. That seems like the largest source of inertia – moving people from lip-service to actually working together to change things.
It’s not like this is a new idea. Local communities have had government for a long, long time. There have been local social institutions, too – schools, chambers of commerce, Kiwanis and Lions clubs, church parishes…
But many and probably most localities have lost much of their collaborative community spirit due to many factors in modern American culture, communications and commerce. The neighborhood that works together on projects year after year is rare indeed. So how do you revive and instill a spirit that has died? Or one that never existed?
Tom Wolff now headlines his Tom Wolff Associates website with “Coalition Building for Healthy Communities.” They’re literally about that: they help communities become more healthy. That’s a big factor in building resilience, of course, and this may be a good focus for beginning to build the collaborative skills of extreme community. Everybody can agree on better local health, right? (Maybe not so on a national level.)
Tom Wolfe
There’s a quarterly newsletter, and a book I’m going to get and review: The Power of Collaborative Solutions: Six Principles and Effective Tools for Building Healthy Communities.
These are Tom’s basic truths, as posted on his Philosophy page:
Collaborative processes are the key to addressing the critical challenges that confront our communities, our states and our nation in the new millennium. Through collaboration, individuals, organizations and communities become empowered to impact the world around them. Our work exemplifies the power of these processes.
And also this:
We are proud to offer the specialized tools and services that can help individual organizations and systems of coalitions work though the challenges of building and maintaining multi-sector collaborations. We aspire to bring greater joy and a deeper sense of spirit and purpose to those seeking to create healthy communities – places where we all want to live and raise our children.
David Hodgson 3:54 pm on December 21, 2009 Permalink
that sounds about right to me. Perhaps another couple could perhaps be watershed focused, as that is the way nature subdivides things, and then interconnected with other such communities. Jeff Vail’s rhizome model is one I like in that respect.
I really wanted to come to your event at the hub last week, but in the end couldn’t make it. I would be interested in getting together with you to have a chat sometime.