Five Tools for Community Building

by Raven

I have been thinking about these particular tools as key for community building for years now.  I think that these are some of the most useful tools I know for decision making, relationship building, relationship maintenance, and relationship understanding.  And, as I have said several times here, communities are built on relationships and in a well functioning community it is important that all relationships are attended to.

The first tool I want to look at is Consensus.  This is a bit of a controversial choice.  There are people who believe that Consensus doesn’t work.  I have seen it work, but other folks have had bad experiences with it, especially when people don’t understand how to do it properly.  There was a back and forth in Communities magazine several years back that lasted a few years with advocates for Sociocracy and other decision making methods claiming that Consensus is too flawed to use and Consensus advocates giving lots of examples of it working very well.  My memory is that Diana Leafe Christian, who started the arguments and is a strong advocate for Sociocracy, having read all of the discussion came to the conclusion that Consensus works for small, homogeneous groups (that is, folks who are basically on the same ideological page), and Sociocracy and other methods work better for large, heterogeneous groups.  (Co-ops and small communes vs large cohousing communities and ecovillages.)  I suspect that this is probably true–but since this blog is focused on communes and any new ones are probably going to start small, I think that Consensus is a very useful tool as long as people take the time to really understand it.  (And I think the same could be said for Sociocracy, Holacracy, etc.  I sometimes wonder if the larger communes like Twin Oaks and East Wind might find something like Sociocracy useful.)

My second tool is the Clearness Process. Like Consensus, Clearnesses were taken from the Quakers.  However, what I think of as the Clearness Process is actually different from what the Quakers use and what has been written about elsewhere.  Rather, it’s what I saw in action in Acorn in 2012.  The biggest difference was that before we had a group clearness meeting, the person met individually with every member of the community and made sure that they were “clear” with each other and what happened in the group meeting came out of the one on one meetings. I see what they were doing at Acorn as a basic relationship maintenance tool.  In busy communes (and other places) folks often put off dealing with small interpersonal issues–until stuff builds up to the point that major conflict often ensues.  I think that doing this type of one-on-one Clearness is important both in the membership process (making sure that each member gets to discuss with the newcomer how they are feeling about being with them and the newcomer gets to talk about how they are feeling about being with the member, followed by a group report and discussion) and in the ongoing life of the community, with everyone asked to do clearnesses with all the other members annually.  In practice this usually comes down to two clearnesses a year between every two people in the community. (First,  A needs to do clearnesses with everyone, including B, and later B needs to do clearnesses with everyone, including A.)  Another useful set of tools for this kind of relationship building is Authentic Relating (talked about below), especially their use of Withholds.

Then there is Nonviolent Communication (aka NVC or Compassionate Communication).  Like Consensus and the Clearness Process, it takes practice to do this well.  I think that understanding the importance of trying to figure out what each person’s needs are as well as learning the difference between needs and strategies are incredibly useful in working out community conflicts.  Although Marshall Rosenberg’s work is key for understanding NVC, I strongly recommend Thom Bond’s Compassion Book (and/or his “Compassion Course”) as a great way to really understand the process.  Again, like the Consensus process, there have been problems with folks trying to use NVC as a tool without really understanding it.  If all you do is parrot NVC as Observations/Feelings/Needs/Requests, you will probably alienate people rather than improve relationships.

The next one is Authentic Relating.  During the years I had been thinking about these tools, I had thought to advocate using something that was being called Transparency Tools.  In the last six months I have been learning Authentic Relating and realized that most of the Transparency Tools have actually been taken from Authentic Relating.  I now recommend going right to the source for these tools.  Although Authentic Relating is not as well known as NVC, it is an important extension of it.  I would recommend learning NVC first and then learning Authentic Relating.  Using these two tools will deepen relationships and they are especially important for strengthening the bonds between folks.  Perhaps communities could start off with regular NVC practice groups and then, after folks feel comfortable with NVC, move on to Authentic Relating.

My final choice may seem a little strange: Permaculture.  Even many folks that know and use permaculture might wonder what it has to do with communities and relationships.  But Permaculture is not just about plants and ecosystems.  It’s about system design in general and communities are definitely systems. Permaculture thinks a lot about relationships, especially looking at relations systemically.  NVC is useful for looking at each person’s needs and how to meet them, but I think that what’s good about Permaculture is that it looks at needs as an interconnected system.  I think that each person comes with needs and gifts.  In Permaculture, the goal is to design systems so that each participant’s (whether plants, animals, or people) needs are met by other participants’ gifts.  Of course, the more folks there are in a community, the more different ways there will be to match up gifts and needs.

Now I’m not saying that there aren’t other useful tools for building community, but I think that these are among the most useful ones that I know.