How to Build Community, The Book

by Raven

I’ve written this before, but for the last five years, the most popular posts on this blog have been my posts on “How to Start a Commune” and “Four Steps to Building a Commune” and Paxus’s piece on “So you want to start a community”.  Obviously, there’s a lot of folk that want to create communes and communities.

I’ve reviewed books written about how to create communities, most notably DIana Leafe Christian’s Creating a Life Together.  Yana Ludwig has also written a couple of books that talk about (among other things) community building, but the FIC just published her latest book, Building Belonging, which simply focuses on it and may be the best thing I have ever seen on how to build community.

This book fits well with my ‘Four Steps’.  Chapter 2  is entitled “What Makes a Good Founder and Founding Group?”  (That is, it starts with the people.) Chapter 3 is entitled “Phases of Community Creation”.  The first phase is “Set the core patterns for this community” and mentions  the following ‘pieces; ‘Vision and Values’ (which is covered in Chapter 5), ‘Decision-making system’ (which is covered in Chapter 7),and ‘Membership processes’ (which is covered in Chapter 8), before talking about ‘Economic structures’ and ‘Labor structures’ (both covered in Chapter 9).  Phase 2 is “Property acquisition”  (a lot of which is covered in Chapter 11).  My four steps are to find the people, work on vision and agreements together, figure out sources of income (more important in an income-sharing community, but as Yana points out, economic and labor structures are important for any community), and then look for a place.  Notice that Yana’s order and mine are basically the same.

When she gets to Part 2, Yana devotes the first chapter (Chapter 5) to “Visioning Your Community”.  As I’ve worked with and visited more and more communities, I have come to believe that everything flows from your (collective) community vision.  This is why I’ve given a couple of workshops on ‘Collaborative Community Design’.  I think that this is the most important first thing (other than possibly deciding on your decision-making process) a new group can do.  Yana writes “This visioning work is often the first real chance to practice sharing power.” She gives a story from her community building attempts where they didn’t start by visioning together called “Learning from my pain on visioning”. And finally, she reprints six different mission statements from successful groups that she thinks are “really good”.  I will write a post in the future about why I think that vision and mission statements are so important.

She also has a bunch of exercises for groups that want to start a community to do and refers to more from her Cooperative Culture Handbook.  I could go on and on about why I think that the individual things in this book are absolutely key (she covers things like “Culture, Diversity, and Justice Work”, “Power, Conflict, and Decision-making”, “Some Basics of Community Design”, and “Becoming a Good Community Member” among many other topics) but I just want to say that I think this is the best, step-by-step book on creating community that I have seen.  If you are one of what seems to be many, many folks interested in starting a community of any type, this book is for you.  This is especially true if you are interested in starting an income-sharing community.  Where Diana Leafe Christian’s book on Creating a Life Together has a bit of a bias against income-sharing communities, Yana Ludwig’s book has a little bit of a bias toward it.

Building Belonging is published by the Foundation for Intentional Community and is available from them.  What more can I say?  You want to build community?  You want to read this book.

Yana Ludwig