Community Building

You and I believe in the Green Economics message. Don’t we? But we are still a small group of people. How do we spread the Green Economics message? How do we encourage co-operation? How do we make it come alive for people? We are a community here, now, in Somerset, and it isn’t so difficult, but what about when we get back home? How might we keep it alive for ourselves and for others? How do we find support when we feel alone?

This session is around how we build up a community of practice – like-minded people working towards a goal or goals that are important to us all. Learning to build community is useful to you not just in helping you when you are back in your normal environment with support and ideas, but also in giving you the opportunity to continue to share what you learn and perhaps to invite and inspire others to join.

The main tool I use is called Appreciative Inquiry, based around enquiry – finding the right questions to ask. My learning around community building came from my experiences working with villagers in Nepal to build rural communities and help them to develop. We can do the same with communities here. Not necessarily rural communities, but “communities of practice”. The way that communities work is the same whether they are rural or otherwise.

Community: “Group of people living in one place or having same religion, ethnic origin, profession, etc.” Oxford Dictionary. What our community has “the same”, therefore, is Green Economics. What we share is an approach where we think before we do things, considering the longer term impacts as well as the short term. And we share our thinking.

The first thing we might do is to apply Appreciative Inquiry to look at how we can support each other as a community, how we can share what we have learned. To do this we might think about a time when we have felt really well supported by a community or by individuals and look at what we were doing and feeling at the time. What did others do to support us? How did it feel? What else was going on? We recall a powerful sense of belonging, of receiving warmth and love, of seeing life in a positive rather than negative light. We call this stage Discovery.

From there we move to ask ourselves what else we could do with those wonderful, positive resources. What could we build in the future for our children and grandchildren? How could we think big, basing this ‘blue-sky’ thinking on what we know works well? We call this Dreaming.

We share our dream(s) in a group of like-minded people and build upon them and our next possibility is looking at this ‘big’ dream and deciding which of the things in the dream are things that we can make happen now, and what later. And later again. And how do we make them happen? What resources or organisation do we need? Who do we think we need to talk to? What kind of help do we need? We call this Design.

And finally individuals or groups commit to action – what they will do to make the dreams reality. We call this Delivery.

This works when you have a group of like-minded people who have something they agree on. Or, if they don’t know they have something they agree on - and if we ask the right questions - we can begin to develop a community. But what if we are on our own and we would like to help people to think a bit differently, to actually consider some of the impacts of the things that they do. How might we do that?

This is when enquiry really comes into its own. We ask questions. Simple questions asked from the heart, in a desire to really understand someone else and what is important to them. We don’t try to convince them with our rhetoric – that usually doesn’t work. We seek to understand and then perhaps – if we’ve done that well enough – we will have the opportunity that they reciprocate and are willing to hear us.

Questions like, ‘What do you think is working in our current economic system?’ What works well? What doesn’t work so well? Do you have any ideas about what we can do to help things work better? (It is likely that they won’t, but - they might have great ideas). What do you think would happen if we all did….? Are there things that we could do to help each other?”

From simple, heartfelt questions and with a mind open to listen to others’ points of view, we can, each of us, engage with others, we can invite and inspire them to embrace change, small step by small step. And so, each of us can grow a community of people who care about and take care of our whole environment, enlarging the Green Economics community as we do so.