Community Building Tips: Creating
At this Stage
This is the eighth part of a toolkit series on community building and social change.
Read this if you have a community engagement coming up and want to know more about structuring and facilitating the gathering.
Skip this if you’ve completed your event and are wondering how to keep things going.
“Gathering— the conscious bringing together of people for a reason— shapes the way we think, feel, and make sense of our world.”
The NGM Circle Community Building Journey Map: You are at the “Creating” stage.
Game time! You’re now doing something in public, bringing people together and holding space for something you care about deeply. Here are some things to consider before your gathering takes place:
Before the engagement
Mentally setting up
Set yourself, other organizers, and people that will be joining the event up for a meaningful conversation by establishing safety and belonging.
Give participants the benefit of the doubt, the people who come might not have the same knowledge or beliefs about this as you, but they care in some way or they wouldn’t be there. Keep this in mind amidst the other things you’re juggling and remember that whoever shows up is whoever needs to be there.
Try not to get bogged down in your own expectations and assumptions, community building is a slow and imperfect process.
Physically setting up the space
If you can, choose a space that suits the purpose of the gathering, it will make it more memorable and meaningful for participants. What does it tell guests that your event is at a school rather than a bar or restaurant? A gymnasium?
The space itself is a signal of what is supposed to happen there.
Of course, you won’t always have the liberty of selecting your space and setting it up exactly how you’d like, but here are some things to consider for whatever space you’re in:
Think about how the positioning of objects will structure interaction and conversation. Often you will have tables and chairs, think about how different a conversation will feel and flow in different arrangements.
Rectangular tables can be hierarchical or worse, adversarial. Whoever sits at the head of the table holds more spatial power. Not having heads at the table can make for a leaky container. Don’t worry, this isn’t a deal breaker if you only have rectangular tables, just make extra efforts to equalize power.
Round tables are more egalitarian but still create a physical barrier between your guests. This can be a barrier in conversations that are very sensitive and require elevated vulnerability and openness.
Sitting in a circle, either in chairs or on the ground can be conducive to open and honest dialogue.
If this is a more structured dialogue with a speaker or facilitator, consider how different the space will feel if desks or chairs are placed in a classroom or theatre arrangement (prioritizing individual experiences of a presentation and passive engagement) vs a semi-circle or U-shape (promoting interaction and engagement between participants as they can see each other as a group).
Keep the energy from leaking out and have a contained perimeter that suits the size of the group. A room that is too big will feel awkward and not conducive to small group conversation, you can get around this by creating a perimeter using lights or objects like a flip chart to create a boundary.
“A contained space for a gathering allows people to relax, and it helps create the alternative world that a gathering can, at its best, achieve. ”
During the engagement
Facilitation
As an organizer or facilitator, guests will look to you for guidance. it’s your responsibility to create safety and belonging in the group before and during the event, remind yourself to remain calm and open minded. Meaningful conversations happen when many signals are communicated to establish psychological safety. You can use belonging cues throughout the event to communicate safety and belonging:
Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group. Like any language, belonging cues can’t be reduced to an isolated moment but rather consist of a steady pulse of interactions within a social relationship. Their function is to answer the ancient, ever-present questions glowing in our brains: Are we safe here? What’s our future with these people? Are there dangers lurking?
-Daniel Coyle, Culture Code
Coyle writes that belonging cues have three basic qualities:
Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring
Individualization: They treat the person as unique and valued
Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue
Here are a few belonging cues that are easy to implement and go a long way:
Welcome people to the space
Co-create ground rules or collectively agree on principles for how to converse and interact in the space. Art of Hosting has created these principles for dialogue:
Speak with intention
Listen to learn
Be aware of your impact
Practice grace with yourself and others
Provide some time for a brief check in to ground people
Center marginalized voices, people who may not speak up otherwise
Give everyone a chance to speak, share, and contribute
Create space to debrief and close the gathering
Going in depth into group processes is beyond the scope of this post as there are many freely available resources you can read about online. You can find the links to some recommended resources in the summary at the end of this post.
Documenting and Harvesting
Remember, everyone is gathering at this event for a purpose, they want to be a part of something and create something collectively, they want to see change. Make sure a volunteer is ready to document and harvest the stories, wisdom, and events that take place with the consent of the participants in the room.
Tracking or documenting is usually a more formal process, that might be necessary to support the development of the group (for example, a funder may want to know how many people were reached), whereas harvesting is the more human aspect of creating something representative of what the group did together that day, it is collectively shared and owned by everyone in the group.
Choose to do this in a way that is meaningful for your group, this could mean sharing the photos from the event, creating a blog post out of the takeaways shared at the debrief, filming a presentation or speaker, or having an artist do a graphic recording.
After the Engagement
Make the most of the energy generated by your event and invite newcomers to join you:
Invite them to join the next meeting
Stay in touch by sharing contact info
Invite them to sign up for a newsletter.
Celebrate and reflect with your team, even if briefly! You just did something big together, appreciate that.
Schedule a debrief and planning meeting with the other organizers while the event is still fresh in your minds and have the documentarian share their notes so everyone can remember what happened.
Take time to process the events as needed, sometimes organizing an engagement can feel heavy or like a release. Take care of yourself so you can keep advancing the cause.
Summary
Actions to take before moving on to the next stage
Host a community engagement
Invite newcomers to join your group
Schedule your next meeting
Resources
Hyper Island Toolbox: This online toolbox has tons of structured activities organized by time and purpose that can help bring out ideas and different perspectives.
Liberating Structures: Liberating Structures provide a range of group processes and activities that you can use.
Adaptive Action: A process for navigating uncertainty
Appreciative Inquiry: A process for creating positive change in groups.
Thanks for reading! This is part of a toolkit series on community building. Stay tuned for the next installment!
-Ryan