A TOOL
Community conversations can be a super helpful tool to help us navigate fast change, rising instability, and societal disruption. They don’t have to be complicated.
As things evolve around us, we will need to collectively figure out more and more things as a society. As communities. With conversations. In whatever ways we create. In whatever coalitions and alliances we build.
Community conversations can help us get together in ways we may not be used to, to talk about problems we may or may not have had before but which may be becoming more urgent, or need more creativity, or need larger coalitions to address, or which may be things we aren’t used to talking about. Or any number of other things.
WE CAN LEAN FORWARD & BE PROACTIVE
New or more challenging stuff is coming up around us all the time. That will happen more and more as things intensify.
We will likely handle it better if we lean forward into it, try to anticipate some of it, have tough conversations about options, explore possibilities, or build relationships before whatever the things are get harder and more challenging.
Community conversations are probably the core key tool out of all the stuff that Fierce Community focuses on as a nonprofit.
Community conversations bring together all of the things we advocate for. Fierce Community promotes civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, leadership, empowerment, alliances, and resilience.
STARTING: AN EXAMPLE STORY (PART 1)
Here’s a quick story about how I’ve gotten started toward encouraging, catalyzing, inspiring, and facilitating more community conversations where I live.
Yes, I’m working on this because it’s what I want to see this nonprofit encourage. Yep that’s nice. And true.
But I also want to see community conversations used as a civic engagement tool where I live because I live here and because I think we need these to help us get through this new era we’re experiencing.
So. I started by participating in discussions in a political group I was already in… where many participants wanted to “do something” more… but overall the group was absolutely not ready to do anything different than they were already doing. Despite the massive and spectacular changes in the risk landscape in the US.
So okay. Fair enough. I will come back to talk to that political group more, but there’s no need to start in a place with active resistance to trying this thing right now. I think this moment calls for speed, and not for pushing metaphorical boulders uphill. Locally we can create momentum elsewhere… and then invite folks from the hesitant group. It’s all good.
I did have coffee in follow-up to that meeting with a local person from that same group who was interested in thinking creatively about civic engagement. That person gave me some of the lay-of-the-land of local civic, activist, and volunteer groups who are regularly doing civic engagement stuff. It gave me some ideas, contacts for ways forward, and a civically involved person to coordinate with to grow this idea.
I also had a separate coffee get-together with a couple of local people I know who are concerned about the moment we’re in. They would like to see people and groups “doing something” more than what we’ve all been doing collectively up to this point. They are concerned about the risk landscape. They are concerned about changes that are happening and coming fast. They also live here locally and have family here and are concerned about how our community will deal with what’s unfolding around us.
Together we hatched a loose plan for community conversations that we could work toward.
What if we talked to some groups about doing a series of community conversations around our community later this year, starting in late fall?
We could follow an event structure that’s been shown to work for this (more on this later). We could talk to a few groups and build a coalition to get started with. They had ideas for how to start that process. We collectively had ideas for locations large enough to host this sort of thing.
Since then, two of us met with one of the non-political community leaders who could help. We explained what we were trying to do, explored possibilities, and learned about very current concerns of people in that community here in our larger community.
That led to an invitation to speak about this with a coalition of similar community leaders.
In that meeting, I was blown away by how much everyone was interested in the community conversations concept, by how many people had fantastic examples of how this had worked in other communities, and by stories of how this had been used here locally.
I’d like to write more about that meeting, but this post is long enough for today. It’s a start; toward some of the work this nonprofit, Fierce Community, will be doing this fall.
So: hold that thought, and check out what we’re planning in the section below.
MORE TO COME
We plan to talk more here about how people can do more community conversations. This is meant to be a starter post.
Two zooms on how to do this specifically are planned in October called “Do Community Conversations: A How-To Zoom,” on Monday, 10/6 (an earlier evening Zoom), or on Wednesday, 10/8 (a later evening Zoom).
Also, this nonprofit itself is starting our own weekly community conversations via zoom. They kick off this Thursday on 9/11, and will normally be on Monday and Wednesday evenings at different times.
These free Zooms are made possible by people who donate to this work through ActBlue, through Patreon, and through paid Substack subscriptions.
Take care where you are, and hope to see you soon.
Onward and forward.
Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community. This nonprofit work promotes civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, leadership, empowerment, alliances, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption. Vanessa is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er with a systems-level understanding of the pieces and parts that modern society needs in order to survive. She has over 25 years experience in resilience-building, civic engagement, coalition-building, critical infrastructure, systems thinking, big disasters, catastrophes, wildland fire, emergency management, incident management, land management, park rangering, homeland security, continuity of operations (COOP), continuity of government (COG), technology innovation, public communication, and disaster information sharing.