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In community, I am part of a circle in which kindness is evoked and valued and named. To deal with an individual property and a collective property, we can consider … ways that [such] a property can be brought into the world. [We ask] “How do we do it together?” Suppose I say, “Let’s you and me and her cook dinner for those people across the street who have lost a loved one.” In this case, we are doing kindness together. We are collectively kind; we are performing an act of kindness as a group.

What is one need you see in your circle? A fellow community member who needs assistance or a little space to recover? How might you reach out to two or three others and offer something together, a meal, a gift of a weekend away, a group project rebuilding a porch. Resist the temptation to lead it all on your own. Instead vulnerably bring a few people together and include the person you want to show kindness toward.

McKnight, John. The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (pp. 72-73). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Hospitality is the welcoming of strangers. This is a… major property that defines an abundant community: There is always a welcome at the edge, regardless of how bonded the members of a community might be. A neighborhood is not really a competent or abundant community if strangers are not welcome. Hospitality is the essence of community competence.

Bring to mind one group or association that you frequently connect with. What are the common points that bring you together? Is it an affinity for plants or motorcycles? Is it a life stage like caring for aging parents or being unattached and able to travel frequently? Is it a belief or culturally familiar religious group?

Now consider who might be the strangerin such a group? How might you make an effort to engage the stranger as a group- to welcome them and be curious about them. How would you do this without asking them to conform to your group’s sameness?

At our final 2018 Common Good Fellows video conference call one organizer said this was a group of people that he would have never chosen to hang out with, and that, in contrast to likeminded or sameness, this group gave him something new he hadn’t experienced. How might you be such a stranger to a group, or welcome such a person into an existing group or association.

McKnight, John. The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (pp. 78-79). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Another way of thinking about creating a competent and abundant community is to consider it a form of community organizing. Being connected in the way we are speaking of develops confidence that we can create change based on the gifts of all: the neighbor, the deviant, the care filled, the troubled, the elected official, and the formal leader.

This parallels how traditional community organizing developed common cause, which was by identifying a common enemy and relying on opposition to create a sense that we were in the same boat. Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing, framed it as being bedfellows, having no permanent friends. This can be powerful and has a noble history; it is just not what we are talking about here. Plus, bringing people together against an outsider is the opposite of hospitality.

Community competence based on abundance is about bringing people together around possibility, not disappointment. This is in line with combining our gifts and valuing association. What we are giving voice to in our discussion is a more relationship-based organizing.

How might you notice a possibility and bring people together toward that? Notice, today, one association or group that you presume to be for a short term. What is one way that you could grow closer with that group, making it possible to be friends for the years to come? What might make that possible?

McKnight, John. The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (p. 78). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Our discussions on community point out how it is messy, chaotic, and frequently less structured than a system approach that determines roles and outcomes in advance.

This is not an argument against structure and order, just about how they are produced. What we are talking about, in taking the path to community competence, is changing our relationship to order. Community has a unique relationship to order. It creates the minimum that is needed. In systems, the first thing we do is create more order. What helps us to find common ground between system and community life is that we create order without predictability. This is what chaos theory and emergent design are about. You can always create the structure that takes you another step, and then you look around and see what you have. This is emergent order.

Often order helps protect us from feeling vulnerable with one another. If its a job and you don’t do it, we feel we have the right to blame or confront, but we rarely ask- how might we restructure this to fit your commitment, skills, and current reality?

Look around you. What order is working? Is there a gap between someone’s “place” in a system and what is needed? How might you have a conversation with someone about this, asking- what new order is emerging?

McKnight, John. The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (p. 77). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Order is created in various ways: by systems in self chosen community.

The system way is an ordering for the purpose of somebody other than the people producing it. The community way absolutely depends upon whatever is produced being what people want to produce. Community structure is based on desire; the system way is based on third-party interests and needs analysis.

Self-chosen order does have its challenges. People who hear about self-organization say, “But what if people don’t want to do such and such?” The honest answer is that it will not get done. Then they say that someone has to do it, and they do it themselves. This is how an organic process works. No one claims that a community system is efficient. The question is, are we willing to live with some failure—that the banner did not get put up, the newsletter was three days late—in service of keeping people connected and accountable for fulfilling their own desires?

And what are we going to do anyway, fire people? Volunteerism was never designed to be efficient, only satisfying. Systems were never designed to be satisfying, only efficient. If productivity and low-cost results are our main purpose, the community way will frustrate us.  [But frustration is not a reason to abandon that way]…

This is not an argument against structure and order, just about how they are produced. What we are talking about, in taking the path to community competence, is changing our relationship to order. Community has a unique relationship to order. It creates the minimum that is needed. In systems, the first thing we do is create more order.

Think about your community—be it an association or neighborhood. What frustrates you about the structure? How might you find ways to honor the relationship to order that minimizes your control while still calling forth desire and commitment?

McKnight, John. The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (p. 76,77). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.