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Building Community & Embracing Diversity The Art of Compassionate Communication Facilitation Skills: Decision Making & Conflict Resolution Personal Empowerment & Leadership Skills Celebrating Life:
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Starting Community: the EssentialsBuilding community is not easy. Some groups never achieve it, as they are unable to get past the conflict stage into true community. To keep on as a community group is not easy either, since every community is a dynamic and living reality that requires a steady restructuring and a certain capacity to adapt to changes. If you are starting a new group project, the best thing you can do is to gather a small group of like-minded people with similar values and motivation - this will be your "core group." For a big group, it is difficult to reach consensus on the core principles, vision, and goals to achieve. Communities find cohesive glue in a common vision that is simple, clear and authentic. Articulating and recording this common vision is one of the first goals to be accomplished when starting a community. Once the collective purpose and deepest values are delineated and embraced by all, this provides healthy soil for growing as a group. Friendship, caring, mutual support: these are the qualities of human relationships that bind a community together. In an atmosphere of trust, communal processes flow with ease, laughter and lots of fun. But trust needs to be cultivated. Trust grows from deep heart-to-heart communication. If we allow ourselves to be seen by others authentically, with our weaknesses and strengths, if we speak our minds and our hearts, trust naturally arises. A sense of group well-being is created. And trust grows when things work well because we have developed a sense of organization and set up appropriate structures. Building community is a process involving different layers of action running in parallel. To create the structures, procedures and agreements allowing us to work well as a group achieving our goals, we need some skills that engage us in personal, interpersonal and collective levels. The next table (click on link aside), made up from Ken Wilber's Integral Theory, shows both structures and agreements needed by every group (lower right quadrant), and personal skills (upper left quadrant), interpersonal skills (upper right quadrant) and collective aspects (lower left quadrant) we have to consider and develop in order to build a sustainable community.
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The foundation of the Integral Theory is a map known as the Four Quadrants (4Q). The 4Q is a conceptual representation of the fundamental dimensions of “holons".
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