Control vs Facilitation

by Raven

I’ve written on this before, but I really believe it bears repeating.  You can’t build a commune the way that you build a building or a machine.  (Katarzyna Gajewska has written a great post about this.)  I believe that communities are living organisms.  That means that you can’t control them.  (There’s a song I like by Michael Franti where the chorus goes, “You’ve got to let go of remote control, you’ve got to let go of remote control!”) If you try to control a community too hard, you will either kill it or completely stunt its growth.

I’ve written about a fictional community I called the Totally Utopia Community.  In this community, an overbearing, freaked-out-about-climate-change guy and his partner keep a tight control on the community and it either dies or never grows.  This was based on three or four real life communities that I observed that all had basically the same pattern.  Recently, I posted a five year update on what happened to the real communities I based this post on.  (Spoiler alert:  the only one that has been really successful is the one where the controlling guy left.)

Not Totally Utopia–but from the original post

Kat Kinkade helped start three different income sharing communities.  They are all thriving, but when they started moving in directions that she didn’t like, she left them (often to help start another community).  Many times communities thrive because the founders leave but I think that it’s possible for a founder to stay–if they are willing to let go of control.  Instead, it’s important for them to see their role as facilitators, helping the whole group choose what it wants to be,

Kat

This isn’t easy.  Those who start a community usually have dreams for it, not unlike parents who have dreams for their children.  And like parents who are often disappointed when their children’s dreams don’t match theirs, founders are very often disappointed when the community decides to go in very different directions from what they intended.  A good parent nurtures their child and then lets them decide what they want to do with themselves, as long as it isn’t too destructive.  Many parents raise their children and enjoy the process of watching them grow up and make choices in their lives.  Likewise, I think a good community founder helps create a stable, thriving community and then watches as the community decides what it wants to become and actively encourages everyone to be involved and everyone to help the community make choices.

In essence, a good founder doesn’t really build the community so much as help birth it.  So my question to potential community founders is:  Do you want to be an architect or a midwife?