What communities are you part of?
While I walk to work in the morning, I often get the tube or train to get home. Are my fellow commuters a community of sorts? Like my street, we’re all side by side (we couldn’t be any closer!), but there’s hardly anyone I recognise day in day out and the train doesn’t create any opportunities for connection — everyone is focused on their phone or paper. When I worked at Demos, I carried out research about how we could create new forms of deliberative democracy through sparking conversation on the tube. It’s fair to say that the citizens assemblies I’m involved with are both more representative and more enjoyable! However, temporary ad-hoc communities can work! I’ve organised various “camps” from Visual Camp, Creative Campaigns Camp, Transformed by You or Outcomes Fest and participated in even more like Social Innovation Camp or City Camp, and these create communities around a common cause and a sense of urgency & passion to collaborate with other people to make & test stuff to specific issues.
When I get into work, I’m part of several communities. My team, my management team and various boards & initiatives I’m part of. These are communities which I’ve chosen to be a member of, because of their values and where everyone has a defined role. In my team, I’ve tried to create a sense of community, by getting people to showcase their skills by organising different activities, whether that’s exploring the different levers of change, styles of action, emotional threats & benefits or visits to inspirational spaces or organisations. The methods they use and the way they facilitate are all ways for each person to demonstrate their own distinctive personality…and leadership style.
What’s most exciting is when I help shape new collaborations which create their own communities, often connecting existing ones together, whether that’s the Loneliness Lab, between people collaborating to develop a masterplan, people from the local community, those tackling loneliness and others creating new forms of art in public spaces, or whether it’s Think & Do Camden, between people who’ve got skills in helping people live more sustainability, groups who are tackling the climate crisis, local groups for specific communities and people from outside Camden who come to provide external challenge (whether it’s citizen scientists, complexity thinkers or carers). In these examples, people form a community because of a common cause, but then shape & evolve it through the way they collaborate, and through that, people take on new roles, whether it’s the organiser, the connector, the storyteller, the maker or the critical friend.
Outside of work, I’m involved in other communities, including one that shares similar characteristics to the ones I talked about above, that was Transeuropa Festival and European Alternatives where we’ve shaped and pivoted the way we organise as a community across Europe to imagine, enact and demand new ways of collaborating across borders in creative ways.
The communities I’m not part of, yet, but am inspired by in their way of doing and being, include One Team Gov, from how its galvanised people to come together, take micro actions to improve government, enable different people to play a variety of roles that empower them and be able to scale in different ways — to other regions or countries and specific issues — like One Green Gov.
I’m helping organise a session to help Co-design next year’s activities for our Local Government Innovation Network. We’ll meet at the Design Council in London, and also at the FutureGov studio in Sheffield. Sign for the event now!