Community Focus Areas

Scott Myers

Community

Scott Myers

Good Place Publishing 2018

vii

Community Focus Areas

Creation Patterns . . . . 3 1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2. . . . . . . . . . . 5 3. . . . . . . . . 5 4. . . . . . . . . . . 9 5. . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Community

Creation Patterns

The Columbus Zoo has a wildlife refuge (The Wilds) with over 9,000 acres outside the city on donated, reclaimed land from a former strip mine. The white rhinoceros population they build up at The Wilds lives on not a few thousand square feet but on hundreds of acres. This space allows the rhinos to form social structures that support reproduction, which don’t form unless they have enough space. There are similar, human patterns when we live in a stable, healthy environment that supports the way we are created to live. This section - Community Focus Areas - describes one of them. The pattern described here occurs over and over in communities around the world. It is so common and we are so embedded in it that we have a hard time seeing it clearly. Many (most?) people in a community don’t see or care about the existence of this pattern. This doesn’t mean that they don’t function in it, just that their work doesn’t involve building the relationships and connections that build up the health and productivity of the overall system. The people who do (or could) work to improve the relationships and interactions between and among components of these systems will benefit from understanding: 1. the existence and recurrence of this pattern, and 2. its specific expression, incarnation, form, and functioning in their own community. People are gifted and called to work in different ways in different areas in these patterns. No work in one area is superior to work in any other area. While work in different areas can be different, each one is vitally important for the overall health of a community. Work in any area brings benefit. Disfunction in any area causes loss. No one’s work is more or less important than anyone else’s. It is important that everyone does what they understand to be their part. The people who have the gifts and calling to work on the system itself will benefit from understanding this pattern’s existence and function, as well as their own appropriate role in it. This short section hopefully can help with that understanding.

Community

Community FocusAreas

1. Everybody wants to live in a Good Place. People who don’t live in a Good Place want to make their place a Good Place. People who do live in a Good Place want to make their place better.

People who live in a Good Place want people who don’t live in a Good Place to be able to live in a Good Place.

2. People see ways to build up Good Places. People engage in activities to build up Good Places.

3. Often this work begins with an individual’s own actions. Someone sees a piece of trash on the ground in a public space. They pick it up and enter it into a recycling stream or dispose of it. Someone sees a person who is sight impaired waiting to cross a busy intersection and they offer to help them safely across the street. An individual family becomes aware of child who somehow has lost their home, and they take them in and care for them. An individual, or a small group of people, sees a person or a group of people who are homeless, and they begin trying to support them by offering food, clothes, and other basics.

Community

Community FocusAreas Gallery

Community

Community FocusAreas

4. Often this work progresses to forming an organization to address some particular aspect of keeping public spaces clean, beautiful, safe, and workable for people from 8 to 80 years old, caring for children who lose family support, or caring for people who become homeless, and so on. People who care about public cleanliness, beauty, safety children’s well-being others with other life challenges often find enough other people who care about the same thing, they find that they can work more effectively together than they can on their own as individuals, so they develop collective efforts to address the conditions they care about - more effectively and efficiently in coordinated groups than as scattered individuals. They organize their efforts into . . . organizations. These could be departments in local, state, or national government. They could be unincorporated volunteer associations. They could be legally incorporated, government registered, public charities with full time, professional staff. But somehow people form themselves into functional groups that address areas of common interest or concern more effectively and more efficiently than if they were a bunch of scattered individuals who all work by themselves.

Community

Community FocusAreas Gallery

Community

Community FocusAreas

5. What tends to happen is that even a small town is large enough that in a given area cleanliness, safety, beauty

caring for vulnerable children caring for vulnerable adults and so on more than one organized group forms, each working in the same area safety beauty children homelessness etc. Often those organizations - each working in the same general area - address slightly different aspects of that general area. The city places trash cans around town, Girl Scout troops go around town picking up trash, schools teach children not to litter. One organization provides temporary shelter for people who are homeless in one part of town, another organization does the same in a different part of town, another provides transitional housing, another provides permanent, supportive housing, another organizes health care for uninsured people who are homeless. Some, most, or all of the organizations working on different aspects of the same general area form an“ecosystem” (some would call it) of effort around an aspect of community life with the aim to build up a Good Place for everyone.

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Community FocusAreas Gallery

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Community FocusAreas

6. Usually,

whether formally or informally, sometimes highly functionally, sometimes semi-disfunctionally, all of the organizations addressing the same general area get together to discuss common concerns to coordinate their efforts to figure out how to work together for greater benefit than they could achieve individually without coordination. Like-minded people from these organizations get together to coordinate the work of their different organizations so that the work of their organizations can be more effective collectively than it would be as scattered, uncoordinated organizations. (Many/most of the people in a particular organization really just want to focus on that organization’s mission rather than look around town and try to understand what everyone else is doing too, and then work to figure out how everyone can work together.) We can call these efforts to coordinate the organizations working in common areas Community Focus Areas.

Community

Community FocusAreas Gallery

Community

Community FocusAreas

7. Further, some members from the different Community Focus Areas can get together to find ways to coordinate the work of the Focus Groups for even greater impact in building up Good Places.

Proposed Structure for Optimal CFA Functionality

1. Describe an Ideal Future State 2. Determine Current State

3. Identify the Gap between Current and Future States 4. Build a Scoreboard to understand how we are doing and what we have achieved 5. Develop and engage Plans to move from Current to Ideal 6. Communicate opportunities for individuals and organizations to participate effectively in building up Good Places 7. Tell Stories along the way from here to there; include successes, frustrations, and failures.

Community

Community FocusAreas Gallery

Published by Good Place Publishing 180 South Avenue Tallmadge, OH 44278

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