Building High Engagement Communities
The Power of Grassroots & Network Leaders
2009 Jack Ricchiuto
Since the beginning of human time, people have thrived because they lived in communities. In communities of place, purpose, perspective, practice, and past, people have found that there is more abundance in shared gifts. Today, communities exist in the forms of neighborhoods and regions, organizations and institutions, networks and economic clusters. Some are high engagement communities, though certainly not all.
In high engagement communities, people dream together; they create common definitions of a desired future. They learn together, do projects together and share resources together. They collaborate to advocate for their common causes and connect one another in rich and agile networks.
In low engagement communities, people wait for established leaders to define their vision of the future for them. They do projects that serve self-interests and learn in isolation. They spend more time protecting than sharing their resources and ideas. They expect everyone to be self-sufficient. Leaders in low engagement communities occasionally gather people to give voice to complaints than to give their gifts in creating new possibilities in the community.
The difference between high and low engagement communities is palpable. No one has to do expensive studies. You just walk around, look, listen, talk, and feel the vibe. You ask people what they're up to, who they're talking to and what they're talking about. You listen to the quality of conversations that make up the fabric of the community's culture.
Low engagement communities are the norm. People harbor their own dreams and cautiously protect them from dream poachers. When people have no common dreams, they have no reason to share common learning and projects. There is no greater constraint on a community's growth than isolated efforts in learning and projects. Everyone has their own resources and never as many as they would have if they were shared.
Examples of low engagement communities cross all sectors. They can be found in corporations and neighborhoods, in regions and faith communities. They exist in economic clusters, school systems and social programs.
Low engagement communities exist because we can build anything without building community.
Developers can build 40 story residential buildings and literally do nothing to build community among tenants there. Cities can build rich malls and retail centers and do nothing to build community among the businesses, employees and customers within them. Organizations and institutions can create all kinds of departments and divisions and never intentionally build community within and among them. Communities of faith can have hundreds of services and programs every year and intentionally do little to build community among the people who attend them.
The good news is that low engagement communities can make the transformational transition to growing into a more high engagement community.
Leaders can help. In every community, there are many kinds of leaders. There are established leaders who have validated positions of leadership. There are grassroots leaders who invite others in small acts that engage gifts in the realization of common dreams. And there are network leaders who simply introduce and connect people to explore a new possibility of any kind.
Grassroots leaders organize people to get things done that have value for the community. They are people who take initiative and invite others to help. They bring people together in conversations, get people doing research and creating proposals or starting new small projects under the radar.
Network leaders are network weavers who continuously listen in the community for new opportunities to introduce and connect people in new collaborations and sharing of resources. They’re the ones who connect projects with resources, experts with learners, funders with innovators, problems with ideas, and assets with actions.
Grassroots and network leaders invite people into conversations about what-if. They ask who else should be in the conversation at hand. They make it easier for people to demonstrate mutual trustworthiness that accelerates collaboration and courage. They are constantly scanning their landscape for underutilized resources and talents. They’re always looking for ways to give voice to small ideas and big dreams. They are committed to translating big dreams into small acts. And their bias for action positions them to believe that anyone can learn their way into new possibilities. They practice the belief that the impossible just takes longer.
While very few people in any community can be an established leader, there is no limit to the possibilities of grassroots and network leaders. It's interesting how many grassroots and network leaders can emerge even in the most hierarchically structured organizations, institutions and civic spaces.
They emerge and engage others without position or permission. They live by the perspective that a leader can be anybody, anywhere, at any time who is willing to engage the passions, strengths, and trustworthiness of others.
What engaging leaders have in common is a durable unwillingness to encourage much less join in on conversations that prevent community. These are conversations about problems, what's wrong. They are conversations about deficiencies and blame. They are conversations about postponing action until we get "enough" consensus" from the whole. Engaging leaders are willing to start a movement with three people because their priority is not just to make something new, but to do something new in a way that builds a highly engaging community.
Many communities move from low engagement to high engagement because of a groundswell of grassroots and network leaders who invite and inspire engagement in small and sometimes dramatic ways.
What gives them power is their willingness to invite the sharing of people's gifts in the realization of common dreams. Communities become more highly engaging when more grassroots and network leaders emerge to invite engagement.
The best news of all is that anyone in a community can become a grassroots or network leader. Anyone can invite people to dream and collaborate in creating a future different from the past. Anyone can invite people to generously share their gifts with one another. Anyone can connect people with ideas and people with projects. Anyone can connect people to become smarter and better together.
Communities can become more highly engaging from the inside out rather than from the top down or bottom up. All it takes is the kinds of conversations that have the power to build community in ways it has never been built before. With the vast landscape of low engagement communities, the opportunities and possibilities are endless.
A grassroots and network leader is someone who engages people in the kind of conversations that can create a future different from the past. These kinds of conversations are often the accidental conversations that happen before and after formal meetings and gatherings, They happen at kitchen tables, at water coolers, and in hallways. They happen in coffee shops and bars and in the rich emerging array of online spaces where people can connect in new ways.
The more grassroots and network leaders a community grows, the more highly engaging these communities become. And the more these leaders grow new leaders, the more engagement accelerates and scales.
Growing new grassroots and network leaders is the work of staying aware of people in the community who seem to express a passion for change and engaging them in projects where their leadership potentials can blossom. It's the work of connecting potential and emerging leaders to existing leaders and to other resources in the community. Quality connections happen through quality introductions and invitations into collaborations and resource sharing.
When communities grow in engagement, new ideas inspire new actions. New combinations of strengths lead to new expression of passions people have. People spend less timing waiting and hoping for things to happen. People engage themselves and each other in whatever needs to be done to move things in the direction of our dreams.
