Community Development & Imposter Syndrome

I've been hosting parties since fifth grade when I remember biting my finger nails worried that the cool girl wasn't going to show. Those elementary school parties eventually transitioned into high school dance parties, college murder mystery parties, and career woman brunches.

My favorite part about these events has always been introducing cool people to cool people and seeing what happened next. It's not uncommon to run into somebody you don't know at a Chrystina party. In fact, it's equally common to not know anybody at the party. But you always leave with more friends you came with.

In high school this manifested as doing quick support-group style "hellos" around our kitchen island to make sure everybody knew everyone else's name before beginning a game of capture the flag. In college I managed to so deeply ingrain the concept of icebreakers into a party itinerary that at my 23rd birthday party when I didn't have one prepared the attendees decided to create their own. (What's your favorite salad dressing?) And most recently I included a passive icebreaker game at my wedding so that even if I wasn't there to facilitate, there was a mechanism by which people could introduce themselves to each other (and win a doughnut).

These habits easily translated into the workplace for me. I quickly joined some business resource groups and took on roles in the event committees. I planned post-work happy hours, built icebreaker games into the beginning of every meeting, and started sending a quarterly professional newsletter to my colleagues (to mimic my personal quarterly newsletter).

When I started blogging in 2011, I found myself quickly searching for community. I knew there were large blogging communities in Texas and New York, but where were my people in Philadelphia? I was determined to find them. What started as a small email chain grew into a 100-person Google Plus group and then a 300-person Facebook group accompanied by an annual conference and monthly in-person events. I learned a lot about building communities from scratch, managing social platforms, partnering with vendors, finding event sponsors, overcommunicating, and managing teams to build the community.

All this time, I've been considering what I've been doing to be community building. All of a sudden, there's a new phrase at play, community development. This feels different to me. To me, community building feels more organic, friendly, and soulful, where you end up in conversations where you don't even mention your day job because instead you're talking about what makes you tick. And to me, community development feels industry-focused, closely aligned to the word networking, and much more action-oriented. Community building feels personal while community development feels professional. This is where my imposter syndrome begins.

I feel like I haven't made the leap yet from taking community from personal to professional. Even the community I've built at the office has morphed into friends and family. I'm much more likely to be found with someone by the virtual water cooler discussing what they more recently watched on television than the most recent regulatory guidance. Only once in my life have I gotten excited about the possibility of selling somebody services. I even printed out custom business cards that list everything I do in one place so that you can equally see that I'm a management consultant, blogger, and podcaster all in the same place.

I think the extreme difference between these two concepts is that community building (as I am calling it) focuses on the people, while community development ties to the system. You must take all that you learn about the people and what motivates them and how they like to spend their time and use it as an ingredient for change. I don't think you can have community development without community building, but how do you move from one to the other? How do you change the conversation from being inwardly focused to externally focused??

When community building, you work hard to create a safe space where everyone feels free to be themselves and will feel supported. When you move to community development it seems you need to more okay with conflict and talking about hard things. These hard conversations will bring about answers to tough problems which will help push communities and individuals to grow. It's doing the work.

Up until now, I feel like I've only done half the work. I feel like what I'm going to learn during my sabbatical as a GPLEX Senior Fellow at the Economy League will teach me how to do the other half of the work. It will help to push me beyond creating the communities I'm comfortable in and start to push me to create communities where I feel a bit more uncomfortable. And through this discomfort can come real change.

Do you think that community building and community development are two different things, or is this a limiting belief that I've developed through the years?

In what ways have you?had success moving groups from inwardly focused to externally focused? How do you do more than just sit around the table and talk?

This is the second of a series of essays I will release on my understanding of community development throughout my sabbatical. My full-time job is working in federal grant compliance and my sabbatical volunteer gig is working in community building & development. I plan to explore the nuances on community building & development and what it means in today's post-pandemic world.