Group items tagged

It appears that Barbara Ganly is interested in so many topics that I love to learn about. I'm glad she has joined our social artistry group and I'll have a chance to learn more from her. "After all, a healthy community is a basic premise through which deep learning and meaningful work come to life.  And yet it has been the messiness, the shifting, emergent nature of geographic communities and online communities outside the structure of semesters, grades, classes, disciplines, departments and majors that has really brought home for me how and why we need story to make sense out of the maelstrom of sensation and information-to slow down the rush of impressions, to make us confront our biases and fears and habits, and how we need storytelling to connect us and to build trust and curiosity and to push us past the façade of what we think we know so we can immerse ourselves in meaningful, creative work to bring better worlds into being".

In the referred blog, Esko writes: "...communities seldom grow beyond the group that initiated the conversation, because they fail to attract enough participants. Many business communities also fall apart soon after their launch because they don't have energy to sustain themselves...". Are there any known mechanisms or techniques that help in sustaining community energy?

Lately, I have spent much of my time studying places of service: schools, community organizations, advocacy groups, healthcare facilities. Those that are most alive and vibrant have in common a kind of blessed confusion about who is giving to whom. People, no matter their role, seem infused with a gentle and expectant gratitude as they interact with each other. A doctor enters an examining room, preparing to be cared for. A professor wonders how her students will teach her to understand the world in new ways. A soup kitchen volunteer is ready to find her spirit nourished by the person she is serving. In each encounter of service there comes a choice. We can continue to awkwardly push our skills and expertise at someone or we can remember to take a step back, breathe and say, "Here I am. Meet me, and we will both receive something we could never find on our own." This perspective is simple, but its implications for the various personal and institutional calls to service we participate in - healing, nurturing, instructing, speaking for - are drastic and disarmingly hopeful. In my own work as a teacher, writer, and community practitioner, I find that I am most helpful to others when I am most reverent toward what they are offering me. I think this is true because what we are called to give is also what we most fiercely need. A gift is a perfect conspiracy, meant to open us up to the possibility of becoming something new. What is asked of us, then, is simply that we pay attention.

The Noun Project exemplifies the reaching out to one another beyond verbal language. Social artists constantly seek ways to communicate effectively.

This is part 6 in a 12 part series. The first five skills were Pattern Recognition, Environmental Scanning, Network Weaving, Foresight, and Conscious Awareness.