Agreements and Policies #2

by Raven

2: The Importance of Visioning

This is my second post in a series on Agreements and Policies.  If you want to create a community and you’ve found some people, your next step is to make sure you are all on the same page.  Communities start easier when there are already agreements and policies in place.

Your first and most important agreement is on how you make decisions.  Once you’ve decided that, the next thing your fledgling potential community needs to do is to vision together, to create a Vision or Mission Statement or (preferably) both.  Why?

At one point in my community creating journey we were talking about a community I called the “Bus Community”, because we were in a city area and I got on buses frequently and on many corners several buses would come.  How would I decide which bus to get on?  I would look to see where the bus was going.  If I didn’t look to see where the bus was going, I could end up anywhere.

Likewise, when you get folks together to create a community, most of them want to do more than live together.  It’s good to make sure at the very beginning that you are all looking for the same thing and it is very disconcerting, after you’ve been working together for a while, to discover that many folks are looking for different things.

However, even if folks seem to be generally looking for the same thing, it is useful to spell it out right at the beginning because almost all of the other agreements and policies flow from this.  Having Vision and Mission Statements are especially important for membership policies (and for finding new members) but they can also help shape labor and financial systems  (if income sharing is part of your mission, for example, labor and finance are going to be very different from a community where everyone works separate jobs and has independent finances) as well as legal structures and ownership agreements which depend heavily on what you want your community to look like.

I’ve written already on Collaborative Community Design, which can be the prelude to writing your Vision and Mission Statements.  Knowing what everyone’s bottom lines and deep desires are can help shape Vision and Mission.  What’s important is the collaborative part.  You want to make sure that these reflect contributions from everyone.  Having buy in on your Vision and Mission is essential.  As I said in my Collaborative Design post,  you don’t want it to be one or two people’s vision.  A real community incorporates the visions of many folks.  When everyone has a part in creating the Vision and Mission Statements, everyone will feel a part of this new community.

So what’s the difference between Vision Statements and Mission Statements?  (In all honesty, I had to look it up.)

A Vision Statement is aspirational, focusing on the goal(s) of the community.  It’s why you are creating a community.  It is usually a rather short statement, often a sentence or two.  A Vision Statement might read, “We are creating this community to support each other and work toward a better world.”

A Mission Statement is more of a roadmap, focusing on what you intend to do.  It’s how you hope to achieve your vision. A Mission Statement might include the line, “We will create a community business that will fund our day to day community as well as our social change efforts.”

Yana Ludwig’s book, Building Belonging, has a whole chapter on “Visioning Your Community” and includes six actual mission statements from a variety of community endeavors that the author felt were good examples of clear, concise statements.  

Her biggest piece of advice is to avoid what she calls Rorschach words, words that can mean a variety of different things, depending on who is reading them.  These include words like sustainability, affordability, diversity, respect, safety, and even the word community. (I often tell the story of an early attempt at community building that I was part of where we slowly gathered a group of folks and had events and meetings, and when we thought we had a good solid group we suggested talking about living together.  We did not expect anyone to be surprised by that idea, but most folks seemed to be.  We asked, “What did you think we meant by community?” and found there were four different ideas of what various people thought the word ‘community’ meant.)

It’s not wrong to use any of these words, but make sure that they are clearly defined.  Yana includes a story of one of her attempts to create community that became something she didn’t expect because the three organizers were really looking for three different things and didn’t realize it until they had gathered a group which had three different visions.  There was something created out of this, but she says “it never really became a coherent community…”

As I said, everything should flow out of your Vision and Mission Statements.  You should spend a while crafting them and they should reflect the desires and goals of everyone involved.

Once you have decided what you are doing, you will probably want to look how you are going to get it done.  In my next post on Agreements and Policies, I will look at Labor and Work.