Inspiring local transformations to create resilience
Erwin Boermans
Navigating local community transformations to thriving local circular-economies
How do we win, alone or together?
The greatness of of working with amazing people in communities in transition, is that you always learn and inspire each other, to take on even more interesting challenges.
Before the race starts, as navigator, you put a few pins on the map and explain the racecourse and the rules to your team. Then you always have the talkers and doers that have to overcome some missing links. If you get a chance to work closely with your team and have individual team members confident enough to identify changes/challenges you have the serious potential to win any race. Often I knew that before leaving the harbour!
Equipped with an holistic view on a community, you can deep listen to the local people, reflect on unknowns, building trust in the team by asking challenging questions. Fun and mutual respect are essential factors to reach that common goal with your team. The navigator takes care of a lot of the factors to tactically maneuver to the finish. It is impossible to do that alone!
To win, I personally like a mixed multidisciplinary team, made up of talkers and doers from a range of backgrounds. The more diverse, the more fun and better the parties are usually! We spend such a long time in isolation, doing what we do. To treasure that rare moment to let off steam with your team is VERY important, preferably at the start of a race or project. There are are always bumps/ barriers/ obstacles along the way. Unfortunately what we see too often in our modern hyper-connected society is awfully risky ‘zombie-behavior’, very selfish & ignorant… You can hear the people say ME… ME… ME… NO… NO… NO... instead of YES WE CAN. The LEGO hero Emmett sang: ‘everything is awesome’. We need confident heroes for fragile environment...
By just addressing issues like this, as a Dutchie living in Australia, with a strong accent that can not be hidden, It became a trademark! To win with your own regenerative community, requires aligning with nature to give back to nature requires at times to say it how it is, with respect, roll up your sleeves, just do it, together with your amazing team full of legends in the making!
Author Erwin Boermans [1968] is with COMFORTiD active in community renewable energy implementation and education. about.me/erwin.boermans