What I Learnt From The Author Of The Bible On Community Building

Everyone's talking about community-led growth these days, but building a thriving community is hard. In the era of the attention economy, people need a good reason to join, stay, and participate in a community. I spoke to Kai Elmer Sotto, the author of Get Together. This is what I learnt.

Start with the WHO.

Building a community is about what you and your people can do together. Ask yourself:

• Who do I care about?
• Who do I share an interest, identity, or place with?
• Who do I want to help?

The first community I tried to build is called Re:Imagine Learning. As the name suggests, it's about rethinking what learning should look like. I started with the what rather than the who. Big mistake. I eventually renamed Re:Imagine Learning to Teachers As Humans, a community for teachers by teachers. Now I have a clear who.

Define your WHY.

Thriving communities need a shared purpose. People need to know why they are coming together. This shared purpose has to resonate with your who. To figure out your why, consider:

• What do my people need more of?
• What's the change we desire?
• What's the problem only we can solve together?

With Teachers As Humans we want to create a safe space online for teachers to find peer support, to connect with and learn from other teachers who are not their coworkers. Teaching is incredibly tough, and Covid has only made it tougher. People talk about the social and emotional wellness of students, but overlook teachers' mental health. Teachers deserve more support.

Make people participate.

It's not enough for people to just show up. They need to participate in a shared activity. Kai gave the example of a dinner party. You can invite people over, bust out your finest tablecloth, open a couple of bottles of wine, and you have dinner guests. Or you can make everyone bring a dish. When they are in your home, get one person to lay the table, another to open the wines, another to bring out the snacks. You have participants at your dinner party.

Make shared activities repeatable.

One-off events are community killers. People show up once, and then what? In his book Kai wrote gave the example of We Run Uptown, a run club in New York City's Washington Heights neighbourhood. Every Monday at 7:15pm, as many as 200 runners gather to run.

Develop leaders.

The secret to growing a community isn't managing members. It's developing leaders. Kai shared this great line from the book Citizen Scientist, "the bulk of what gets done is by a small set of fanatics." Find the small set of extra passionate people who will push the group forward.

This essay doesn't do justice to Kai's book. To learn more about building a thriving community, read Get Together.?