Community engagement and leadership
I’m putting together a presentation (including some slides) on community engagement and leadership for a gathering of First Nations leaders next month. In the spirit of seeking the wisdom of the blogosphere, I’m wondering if any of you have some thoughts or pearls of wisdom that I could share with this group of people. Here is the proposal that I’m working on:
We’ve moved on.
In the last century, government talked to citizens, and if they were feeling particularly charitable, they allowed citizens to say something back. This was called “consultation” and it had it’s origins in the ancient European model of the ruler seeking advice from advisors before making a decision.
That model has unravelled. We have moved from consultation to citizen and community engagement as we recognize that more and more, people need to be actively involved in the decisions that affect their communities. And now we are finding that the shift continues.
What if we moved from community engagement to just community? What if in First Nations communities we recovered that capacity for community members to work together to design and co-own the direction of their Nations?
It’s possible and it is happening all over the world, in indigenous communities on every continent as people realize that the responsibility for the direction of their communities rests with them.
People own what they design. Community engagement is now about community members designing, deciding and implementing the shifts that are needed in their communities. The days of someone else doing it for us are over.
This shift presents challenges and opportunities for leadership. Old models of top-down, command and control leadership are changing and new models of collaborative leadership and community building are rising to the fore. Leveraging the power of networks and self-organizing groups – even and especially in small communities – is the way forward.
What is community engagement now? What else could leadership be?
So my wise friends…thoughts?
So true in my experience Chris. The final blow came here on PEI – when the “in group” tried to steamroller a new set of guidelines for kindergarten.
The web was the tool that we used to energize the community – we ran rings around the bureaucrats and showed the politicians that they had stirred a hornets nest – with a lot of hornets (votes) – huge back down and reassignment of key figures.
So an emergency works as it attracts and builds energy. It breaks the inertia
The hard work is the plodding along to make real change happen once you have started.
In St Louis where we have used the mortgage crisis as the catalyst, we are making ground. Many of the NGO’s that never talk to each other now routinely meet – but with the station still being the convener.
Having a trusted and neutral convener seems to help sustain community movements. Again without a convener, it all falls apart.
So a crisis and a convener have worked in my experience. To get beyond the crisis seems to need the convener.
No crisis and no convener = nothing.
Thanks Rob…this is why I feel that the art of hosting and convening conversations that matter is so important as a leadership stance that is needed right now. To make sense of the what is going on around us, and to be wise as a group, rather than respond as a mob, takes a certain art. You’ve put your finger on something there.