COMMUNITY VISIONING

Many local groups are identifying a need for broad community visioning processes that provide a larger framework or vision for connecting the varied Earth Community initiatives found in most every community. We see an interesting pattern that affirms our basic thesis that most people share a common Earth Community vision of the world they want. This explains the striking similarity among the documents produced by such visioning exercises.

We also sense that such statements have relatively little practical impact on what happens, which suggests that the vision is not the issue so much as the path to its realization.

Yes. We must hold the vision in our collective mind, but the vision gains power only as we mobilize our energies as a community behind a common understanding of what we must do to actualize the vision.

This requires a different kind of discussion.

Definitions

Bill Cleveland offered these definitions after a recent conversation among a handful of Navigators about Community Visioning:

Community: Groups of people with common interests defined by place, tradition, intention or spirit.

Community–based: Activities created and produced by and with community members that combine significant elements of community access, ownership, authorship, participation and accountability.

Sustainable development: Sustainable development is locally generated economic, social and cultural development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Asset-Based Community Development: The word sustainable has roots in the Latin subtenir, meaning 'to hold up' or 'to support from below.' Asset-based community work assumes that a thriving community must be supported primarily from within - by its members, resources and capacities, for the present and future.

Cross-Sector: Many people feel sustained community development requires collaborative effort that emphasizes a holistic, systems approach. This is because many community issues are diffuse, multidisciplinary, multi-agency, multi-stakeholder and multi-sector in nature. In this context, cross-sector refers to community development activities among and between often separately defined areas of influence and expertise such as education, public safety, human services and the arts.

Arts-based community development (ABCD) is arts-centered activity that contributes to the sustained advancement of human dignity, health and/or productivity within a community. These include:
· Activities that EDUCATE and INFORM us about ourselves and the world
· Activities that INSPIRE and MOBILIZE individuals or groups.
· Activities that NURTURE and HEAL people and/or communities
· Activities that BUILD and IMPROVE community capacity and/or infrastructure.

Historically ABCD is a modern iteration of perhaps the oldest “field” with a lineage that stretches back to pre-historic shamanism.

Local ownership: The success of community-based work is often tied to role the community has in identifying its own needs, formulating possible solutions, doing the work and owning the result. If there is broad community participation in, and ownership of, the processes and products developed through an initiative, then the work has a better chance of contributing something lasting and worthwhile.

Cohesion: Community cohesion is a critical foundation for change. Cohesion is not consensus. Cohesion occurs when commonly held interests, values, and beliefs are formed by a depth and breadth of common community-affirming experience among members of a group. Deeper and more sustained common experience produces greater cohesion. A community’s capacity for change increases as the accumulation of common experience forces it to challenge assumptions and expectations about “who am we.” For significant change to occur the stamina and resilience that characterize community cohesion needs to be stronger than the impulse of individuals and sub-groups to identify with, and advocate for, narrowly defined single issues and/or special interests.

Trust: A significant symptom of community cohesion is trust. Trust-grounded partnerships have tested and reconciled the inevitable gap between intention and practice through common experience over time. This is building community through doing. It is not a technique. It is way of engaging the world that personifies the simple idea hat means and ends are interconnected. Distrust is often an intuitive response to disconnected “means” and “ends.”

Head, hand and heart are all essential components of change making. Thinking and talking are head-centered experiences that often dominate well-meaning, but unsustainable, community development initiatives. Hand work disrupts the tyranny and impatience of head-centered (straight-line) change processes. With hand work the clock and the calendar are not always in charge. With hand work there is a synthesis of time, environment, material, learning, expertise and intention. This integrated context produces a unique rhythm that could also be characterized as “integrity.” Changing a worldview is hard work. It cannot happen in the absence of a community of open and vulnerable hearts. Integrity and trust can open hearts. Integrity and trust are soil and water for the seeds (or the castor beans) of change. This garden can make powerful medicine, but you have to remember to take your castor oil one teaspoon at a time.

Art: The creative process is humankinds the most powerful capacity. Art making is a natural synthesis of head, hand and heart. We use art to explore mysteries and make meaning. This extraordinary power can be used for good or evil.

Change-making is dangerous work.

Center for the Study
of Art & Community
www.artandcommunity.com