Category Archive for ‘Community Engagement’ at Creating the Future!

Archive for the 'Community Engagement' Category

Clyde, King of Community Engagement

Published

on December 13, 2009

. 2 Comments

This week, Clyde announced it is officially the holiday season!

Given the focus on Transparency & Engagement that has captured me the past few weeks, it seems only fitting that I re-post last year’s post introducing Clyde. Somehow that post is even more appropriate this year than it was last year. Enjoy!

*****

If Community Engagement is like gardening in the front yard, I can think of no one more engaging than Clyde.

Clyde is the work of my neighbor, Larry. I don’t know how long Clyde has been around, but we were introduced when we moved into the house directly across from Larry’s in 1996. For 12 years now, the holiday season is not official until Clyde is up.

I am happy to state the obvious: Clyde is goofier than goofy. He is misshapen, and he looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man meets the Marlboro Man meets Andre the Giant. That is part of Clyde’s charm – he is so “out there!”

But here’s the bigger part of Clyde’s charm – his sign. Every year, parents bring their kids by to hug Clyde. Couples walking by on their nightly walk – they stop and hug Clyde, too. Folks stop to talk to Larry when he is out in the yard, because face it – how can you ignore a guy with a 20 foot goofy snow-cowboy in his front yard?

Simply put, Clyde is engaging. He engages by not being afraid to be different. He engages by having a goofy smile, by being friendly to his air-filled core. And he engages by asking for nothing but a hug.

As we all seem to be figuring out how to adjust in this spiraling economic climate, and as fear grips us so easily in these times, we could all take a lesson from Clyde. There is a lot we can all learn about asking for a hug.

I don’t mean asking for money – we all seem to be doing that with an air of desperation this holiday season. I mean more than that. I mean asking for friendship. Real give and take, real respect, real love and devotion – you know – friendship!

When we ask for people’s ideas, their wisdom, their experience – the money will follow, as will a bevy of other good stuff that comes from true engagement. And I don’t mean wisdom and ideas about where to find money. I mean asking for their wisdom and ideas about your mission, your programs.

“Who have you noticed needs the most help right now? Given our mission, how can we link arms with others to provide that help? What does our community need that we can help to provide – maybe by working with others to do so? Do you have any ideas how we can be of more service?”

From there, see if there are other organizations who need a hug – and give it to them. Ask those other organizations who are in the same boat as you what THEY need the most. See how you can help them.

When times are tough, the reaction we share with the rest of the animal world is to retreat, to think first and foremost of our own survival. Through our humanity, though, we can see past the animal instinct to aim for the strength that comes when we are all working together. That is where power lies. It is where sustainability rests. It is also where you will find joy in the sea of despair that is threatening to eat community organizations alive this year.

So open your arms like Clyde. Embrace those other organizations who you previously considered your “competition.” Ask how you can help them. “We have so little now, but we know you also have little. Is there anything we can do to make the burden less for you?” You will be surprised how that will help you at the same time.

Clyde with family

Between my sunflowers and Larry’s snowman, we have quite an interesting street. But one thing we have in abundance is that folks go out of their way to walk by our houses, to engage us in conversation. And when life has been hard, our neighbors have been there in amazing ways, asking how they can help.

We could all use a bit of that right now. So take a lesson from Clyde and embrace your community without expecting anything in return. You may just find, as Larry and Clyde find every day, that your community will step up and hug you right back.

For help in crafting the kinds of engaging questions that build solid friendships, this may help.

Transparency & Community Engagement: Part 3

Published

Hildy

on December 6, 2009

in Community Engagement

. 7 Comments

Sunflower - backlit

From Parts 1 & 2 of this series, we begin to see how much can be accomplished by authentic, transparent community engagement – the power of gardening in the front yard.

The following are some of my observations as we’ve worked to put transparent engagement into practice in the various organizations we have founded over the years. These are in no particular order, nor are they intended to prove any particular point except that there is much to think about as we consider doing our work in the most engaged and authentic way possible.

Transparent community engagement starts by sharing the end goal, and only then engages the means brought to the mix by others. What makes the brew rich, then, is not just the shared means, but the larger goal that creates the context for the conversation. “Why is this important? What is important about it? What does it make possible?”
Transparent community engagement leaves little room for organizational ego – it is not about seeking acknowledgment for how smart we are. Instead, it is about eliciting and trusting the wisdom of others, and trusting that wisdom will improve our chances of achieving our shared goals.
Transparent community engagement lets us see how many people want our cause to succeed. It shows who is paying attention – often way more people than we realize. (That became so clear to us in our Facebook discussion!)
Transparent community engagement leads to more transparent engagement. When we’ve done it once and experienced its power, we want to do it again. We become more aware of opportunities to open up. We begin to see people who care everywhere we look.
Transparency is 2-way. We tend to think in terms of others’ ability to see in, but it’s also about our seeing out. When we live closed-up, we never realize the reason we find it so hard to connect is that we only think we are reaching out. In truth, the only time many organizations “reach out” is when they need something (volunteers, donations). They are cracking the door open just enough to let in that thing they need, and then closing it back up again before anyone can come in and make themselves at home.
Which leads to my last observation – that being closed-up is about fear. “What if they steal my idea? What if they think I’m wrong / dumb / etc.? What if they take my funding?” Transparent community engagement – trusting others – is the path of quiet bravery.

That’s my top-of-the-head list. What thoughts occur to you about transparent community engagement? What has your experience been? Please share!

Learn how your organization can deeply engage your own community, with the Community Engagement Action Kit.

Photo: One of Earl’s sunflowers’ progeny

Transparency & Community Engagement: Part 2

Published

Hildy

on December 2, 2009

in Community Engagement and Consulting

. 3 Comments

Sunflowers Yesterday’s post originally ran 2 years ago. The comments following both the original post and its re-run yesterday talked about a hesitancy to be transparent, the desire to keep organizational issues in the “back yard” where no one would see them.

I can understand that. Building the Community-Driven Institute, Dimitri and I often wonder how much to share. After all, we are supposed to be the smart ones, the teachers. We are the ones who developed the approaches we teach. I’m the one who wrote the book about making visionary change practical. If we are honest and transparent in sharing our concerns, won’t people wonder, “Gee – I thought they were the experts!”

When these issues arise in our Consultants Immersion Course, we teach folks to set aside their own brilliance and instead engage the wisdom in their clients. Throughout the week, consultants who are used to being the smartest one in the room experience for themselves the powerful effects of trusting and nurturing the wisdom of others.

That core philosophy – that the result is more powerful when it is built by the collective wisdom of everyone involved – is at the heart of every step we are taking to build the Community-Driven Institute. New aspects of the curriculum are being developed by graduates of our existing courses. Critical infrastructure issues are also being addressed by tapping on the wisdom in the room.

Even so, we were not at all prepared for the delightful surprise we experienced last month. Under the tree

Building the Institute
In building the Institute, we are wrestling with the same questions faced by any other new organization – building a board, creating policies and bylaws, and a million other issues lined up behind those. As we shared those issues with our advisors last month, several of them suggested fiscal sponsorship – an interim step that would allow us to postpone many of the decisions we faced.

Normally I’m a huge fan of the model – heck, we built two diaper banks using fiscal sponsorship. We love the model enough to have devoted several pages of The Pollyanna Principles to the concept. Still, when it came to the Institute, my gut said, “I don’t think this project is right for fiscal sponsorship.”

Talking it through, we realized we didn’t have to make that decision on our own. If trusting the wisdom in the room is good enough for our work with clients, it is certainly good enough for building the Institute itself!

And so that is what we did. We “experts” in organizational effectiveness shared our question at Facebook, both in my stream and at the CDI’s Facebook Group. I tweeted about it. I posted the question to the online community for our course graduates.

And the answers? Lists of pros and cons. Links to rich sites with tons of information about fiscal sponsorship. Questions we had not considered, and suggested answers to those questions.

So what were the results? Here are the major ones:

We got more information than a Google search could have found, because people were being encouraged to share more than just raw information – they were asked for their experience, their stories, their ideas, concerns, thoughts.
We received offers to help us with whichever approach we chose.
We generated conversation, stretching people’s brains to consider the issue from different angles. From there, people learned and grew. Aren’t these the benefits of engagement in the first place?
Most importantly, though, we showed that an organization can be transparent in making tough decisions that would normally be kept private – and that it’s ok. Beyond ok, it’s way better!

zinnia Now when we meet again with our advisory group, we will have objective criteria against which to weigh our decision. Which approach will provide the strategic positioning the Institute needs? Which approach will be more acceptable to funders of large international projects? Which will provide the fastest start-up / the least amount of start-up work? From the process of weighing “fiscal sponsorship” and “separate organization” against critical objective criteria, we are confident the best decision will simply arise on its own.