Keys to Civility
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Dialogue
Through healthy dialogue, members of the community can share their individual hopes and dreams allowing the commonality of these hopes and dreams to create a common sense of purpose.
Ideas to Help You on Your Journey
1. STAY OPEN
Staying open to new ideas, relationships, personal growth opportunities, and strategies enables you to keep weaving stronger and more complex fibers into your community fabric. Without that openness, your process of community change is inhibited.
In part, being open-minded means listening to common sense—our inner voice of reason and fairness. Common sense gives us most of the skills and understanding we need to be effective in our communities, as long as we open our minds and hearts to the knowledge that exists deep inside of us all. When we participate in or observe something in our community and we sense that it is wrong, we are probably right. When we hear a presentation and say to ourselves that it doesn’t make sense, it probably doesn’t. When people say, “If I did that in my work I would be out of business,” the strategy probably won’t work in the community either.
Success can keep us from staying open to new ideas, however. As a community improves, it is important to remember how people were able to accomplish their shared goals. The ideas must continue to flow; individuals must keep stretching their comfort levels and growing into new roles and relationships. Understanding the freedom that comes from remaining open will help you manage and sustain your efforts.
2. THERE ISN’T A MANUAL
Cheryl Honey, Founder of Family Support Network Int'l
working with other participants at the national gathering
You may find manuals to help you through specific elements of the community change process, but we believe that any manual designed to lead you through the entire process will be useless. There are too many variables and unique community features to consider, and the degree of readiness for change varies so widely that it is impossible to dictate the best place to start for all situations.
Some of the tools you will find can lead you to believe that if you only use them, success will be guaranteed. Resist that temptation. Don’t fall in love with a tool or a process. When you can blend many different tools and methods to meet your community’s needs, you will be well on your way to creating your very own effective process. It’s the only way; there are no shortcuts. Do your homework and make your best guesses. Learn and unlearn. And embrace the idea that your community will always be a work in progress.
3. REMEMBER THE BIG PICTURE
It’s important to keep a big-picture perspective when your plan for community improvement is evolving. The holistic framework provided by the essays in Section II, the Principles of Engagement, and the Key Elements of Process can help you remember the larger context in which community change occurs. Without that vision, your efforts risk becoming fragmented and isolated—and random acts of kindness, while important, can’t be expected to have lasting impact in a community.
4. LOOK THROUGH A NEW LENS
“Seeking first to understand, before being understood” is one of the seven habits of effective people identified by Stephen Covey. They idea of shifting from trying to make your argument or ideas heard to trying to understand another person’s point of view is not easy—but it works! We must continually remind ourselves to listen and seek to understand our other community members. We must change our lens if we want to reframe our thinking. If we fail to do so, we—and our communities—will be condemned to remaining exactly the way we are.
5. ACTIONS, EVENTS, AND PEOPLE ARE INTERRELATED
In today’s world, people, their beliefs and actions, and resulting events are interrelated. Communication is instant, and information is available to almost everyone. Globally, governments have had to reconstruct their foreign policies in response to the shrinking world. What does this mean for your community? Simply that if we look at any element of the change process in isolation, we miss the totality of their collective impact. A “business as usual” approach won’t work anymore. We can no longer divide and conquer. We need to change our mindsets and the language we use to describe our interconnectedness.
6. LEVERAGE, LEVERAGE, LEVERAGE
Too often, we don’t take full advantage of opportunities for change. We fail to realize the full potential of events, or our efforts are too narrowly focused. We therefore miss a chance to accomplish much more in a variety of areas. What could have been a great success becomes a good one. We settle for less, when with a more inclusive vision we could have done so much more.
A comprehensive process of community improvement leverages community strengths to squeeze every drop of improvement out of them. Every idea is an opportunity to expand on the vision and connect it to others in a meaningful way—to build relationships, trust, and common language. If we don’t see the bigger picture, or understand how all people and actions are connected, we can’t leverage these opportunities. But when we do leverage every resource around our shared goals, we can truly make a difference.
7. ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
It isn’t nearly as important to have the right answers as it is to ask the right questions. By this we mean that everyone needs to understand and buy into the ideas surrounding community improvement. Telling people how to act or feel will not work nearly as well as finding the questions that will lead them, one at a time, to their own discoveries.
Each person is different—that’s part of what makes a community so rich, after all—and finding the key questions for each person is not easy. Some of the questions we find useful are embedded in the essays in Section II. Others include:
- Who needs to be involved to make this work?
- What strategies will be most effective?
- Where do we look to reach the right people?
- How do we really get them engaged?
- How can we involve young people?
- If we are successful, how will we know it?
- What changes will occur as a result of our efforts?
- How will our new efforts be different from approaches used in the past?
- Are there other efforts out there that we could combine or leverage to help us with this effort?
- How do we demonstrate that we are serious about being effective and will we sustain our efforts over time?
Those questions start to frame a dialogue. Continue to question people until they understand the entire challenge before them. We have found that the more serious we are about being effective, the more precise our questions become. It’s okay if you can’t produce all the answers; that proves you are part of a work in progress and are not trying to be the authority. When all else fails, ask what other choice people have, other than doing nothing.
We can’t tell you every question to ask, but we can promise that practice will make you better at asking good questions. The more you understand, the more questions you will have. One last note: earlier, we suggested that if you are not impacting the kitchen tables of your community you are not being effective. If you tie your questioning to that outcome, it may provide a useful starting point. The important thing is to get started and let the questions begin.
8. CULTIVATE A NEW TYPE OF LEADERSHIP
Leadership is a hot topic these days. There’s good reason for that: many community development efforts begin with leadership initiatives. But most leadership models promote a traditional view in which leaders must be heroes or highly placed individuals. We see a new leadership model emerging.
It is becoming very important for communities to develop their own new, young, diverse leaders. The “good ole boy” network doesn’t work in today’s complex society, and the “community godfathers,” while important, are unable to meet the demands of our global world. The power of leadership must fall into hands of the many, not the few. Our bet is that the communities that have the most relevant leadership will be the best places to live in the 21st Century.
9. GO BEYOND ACCOUNTABILITY AND COMPLIANCE
All sectors feel a need to be accountable and in compliance with various regulations. However, we believe that simply being accountable and in compliance doesn’t guarantee that strategies will be effective. And effectiveness should be our focus. Why be accountable if you’re not going to make a positive difference? What difference does being in compliance make when nothing of value happens? Use the outcome you seek to drive change and you won’t have to worry about accountability or compliance. It’s hard to argue with success!
10. SECURITY STARTS IN OUR HOMES
By creating a Department of Homeland Security, the United States government acknowledged the premium we place on keeping people safe. In a free society, we must feel secure in order to be truly free. To improve security, the federal government will look outside America’s boundaries for enemies that are attempting to disrupt our way of life. It will keep a close eye on people within our country who might cause us harm. Our civil liberties may take a beating, as the profile of “a terrorist” causes us to see many innocent people as potential threats and attackers. Populations of people who have long felt discrimination will again risk having their rights trampled, as the overriding need for security outweigh the need for personal freedom. How does a community balance these concerns?
We believe that homeland security starts in our homes. A connected community is the best defense against terrorism. An environment that fosters personal and collective improvement helps to secure a community from attack from within. When you weave a tight-knit community, you decrease the probability that citizens will become alienated. And when the community fosters trust, people are less likely to overreact to frightening situations. Quite simply, there will be more security.
An intentional plan for community improvement will not guarantee a community’s security, but it will increase the odds of the community being safe. The real threat to our way of life lies inside our society, not outside.
11. ABUNDANCE VERSUS SCARCITY
Is your glass half full or half empty? How you answer that question depends on whether you approach the world from an abundance or scarcity perspective. We will never make progress without an abundance mindset. In fact, we could discover the perfect process for improvement but be completely ineffective if we approached it from a scarcity orientation.
The essence of Community Weaving is the idea that we need to build capacity within community organizations. Capacity building starts with a recognition of the potential that exists within all people and organizations—a belief in possibilities. There is a significant difference between understanding and accepting problems and being negative or hopeless about them. To succeed in the community weaving process, we must determine where we are, know where we want to go, stay positive, and take it one day at a time.
We are not urging you to view the world through rose-colored glasses. To the contrary, we want to be realistic in our assessment of the situation. A true assessment, however, can look at the community from either an abundance or scarcity mentality. The vision is not a sentence; it is a choice. Which will you choose for your community? Will your community fill your glass to overflowing, or will your community drain the glass dry?
12. THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUST
Are you getting tired of our emphasis on relationships and trust? Well, here we go again! Building relationships and raising levels of trust is community weaving. We can’t think of one instance where people have been successful without those resources. So before you initiate any community improvement effort, check to see if the level of trust is sufficient to support it. If not, take a step back and work on building trust. Take time for that important step, or anything you do will have only limited success.
13. TYING IT ALL TOGETHER
The themes outlined above may seem very much alike. We agree! They are very intertwined, but each presents a slightly different picture of community weaving. Community challenges are very complex, and the texture of the fabric is filled with many strengths and flaws. When woven in a careful pattern, however, using many techniques and machines to complete the task, each thread and strand becomes stronger until it can serve its intended purpose. Just so, the image of community members taking advantage of every opportunity, maximizing all resources, understanding how one act impacts another, and uniting all efforts under a shared purpose has real power.
After you finish weaving, you can look at your product and appreciate what you have accomplished. You can also look back and see what you could have done differently to improve the effort. You learn by doing, and the next time you try to add to the garment you do it better and faster. With growing confidence, you may attempt more complicated techniques.
Next section: Keys to Civility > Civility