The basic principles of organising civil society communities, and their application in practice in social networks and on platforms for sharing experience, are common expertise created between civil society activists around the world. A community can include associations of people based on a commonality of interests as well as associations based on a commonality of values. However, there are key differences between the two. Groups of people can come together around common interests (e.g. a cookery club or a sewing course, or a club for timely help in very difficult situations), but if they are not united by shared values, there will not be a strong basis on which to act together and achieve common goals.
It is the shared values that allow a group of people to act as a community. In 2002, I asked myself the question, "When was the last time I had the opportunity to reflect on my deepest values and whether I was acting on those values in my life? If not, in what ways could I act on them?" The principles of community organising give us that opportunity. Why is this important?
Mahatma Gandhi once said: "Happiness is when what you think, say and do is in harmony!". In other words, to be happy, we must recognise our values and act in accordance with them. This is the principle behind the organisation of communities. No hierarchy - just a Community of like-minded people! What is a community?
Imagine a group of people who share common values and decide to act together to solve a common problem based on those values! What does it mean to organise a community? It is necessary to imagine a community organiser as a person who helps to build a team within a given community that collectively makes decisions, forms a strategy for joint actions of the community to achieve common goals that it defines for itself. These actions should be designed in such a way as to increase the likelihood of achieving the goals.
As the community begins to grow and attract new members, the issue of accountability becomes acute. Tasks for volunteers need to be framed in a way that develops their ability to act independently or make independent decisions, so that each participant is accountable for something and responsible for their choices. As new tasks arise, participants will become more motivated. The main challenge is to organise people not in a hierarchical, top-down way where they are told how to act, but rather to trust and let community members decide for themselves how to act, while sharing responsibility with them.
In the theory of civil communities, relationships between people are built horizontally rather than vertically. In reality, it is a daily challenge for the community organiser to help a group of like-minded people (the community) act together for some positive change. Is a leader a commander or an associate? One of the most important topics in community organising is the topic of leadership.
Leadership is the ability to take responsibility to enable others to achieve shared goals in the face of uncertainty. This definition is revolutionary because it implies that leadership is not a unique quality we are born with, but a choice each of us can make. It means either we accept responsibility and will act to solve problems that we define together with associates who share our values, or we don't. It is up to us!
This kind of leadership is not defined by appointment to a position, it is in the practical actions, the deeds we do, and it has no place in a vertical structure. The ideal community structure model is like snowflakes falling from the sky in winter. This structure assumes interdependent leadership, continuous contact and coordination between all members of the community, which allows leadership roles to expand to include new participants involved in decision making. What is important is that this structure allows the community to grow horizontally.
Become more brave - tell your story! Where does a community organiser start? With public narrative or storytelling. First of all, the person needs to understand what motivates him to act. Then he can tell a story that explains why he wants to act and appeals to the basic underlying values of the listeners.
In this way the organiser can attract people who will respond emotionally to his story and share common values. The story should evoke emotions that motivate people to act. This is the practice of public storytelling, which is where the process of building any community begins. This is how community organisers help others realise their values through the emotions that their stories will evoke.
In turn, these values translate into motivation. Yes, you need to be brave and have the courage to tell your personal and candid stories and open up to others. To succeed - share the intimate with others. Of course, there are many examples of such stories told by leaders in the Finnish non-profit sector.
I will always remember my meetings with Russian human rights activist and philanthropist Elizaveta Glinka. Her many years of work with the excluded and unpopular in society, who called her simply Dr Liza, resulted in great popular respect and public recognition. Everything has its moment, or the story of the present moment! Our personal story is made up of several components.
In the story of ourselves, we articulate our values and explain why we felt called to become a leader in our community. In the story of us, we tell what binds our community together, explaining why it is necessary to come together out of solidarity. In telling the "story of the present moment," we address what Dr Martin Luther King called "the hard necessity of the present moment." We explain why we must act now to achieve common goals and meet the challenges that face us in this, for all of us, very difficult moment. Our story should have three components: challenge, choice and decision.
When we tell these stories to our listeners, we transform their own goals into motivation to act. And the key to motivation is understanding what values inspire action through the emotions they evoke. Our stories have the power to motivate others to action. From feelings of fear to hope! We need to consider that there are emotions that prevent action, while at the same time there are those that inspire action.
So when we tell our stories, we help to move from the former to the latter, we can help others to move from inertia to urgency, from apathy to passion, from fear to hope, from isolation to solidarity, from doubting our abilities to feeling that we can change the world. We must not forget about building, between all of us, relationships - organisation is based on mutual relationships and creating mutual commitments to work together. If we pay attention to this, we can make the community stronger. Strong relationships based not only on a commitment to the vision, values and goals of the community, but also on the personal commitments that members make to each other are a valuable community resource.
New resources coming from each of us can lead to leadership, commitment to new ideas, and relationship development, which in turn can provide even greater resources. And new reciprocal relationships in our community create social capital, that is, a source of power to act that did not exist before the relationship was created. It also enables the community to take joint action. All members of the community must have mutual obligations.
Relationships are only possible when each party shares its most valuable resource - its time and its knowledge - with the other. Based on the new relationships we create, we can engage people at different scales - individuals, groups of people or entire organisations. The snowflake structure assumes that newly joined members will grow their networks by attracting new community members. The potential for growth in this model is infinite.
Building interdependent leadership teams assumes that all community members act together to achieve common goals rather than the personal goals of the leader. A successful team is a team with a stable composition whose members meet regularly and are interdependent, meaning their members bring different experiences and competencies to the table. It is ideal if it includes individuals with unique experiences, with no overlap. This makes each team member's contribution crucial and helps them support each other.
Such a team can increase the stability, motivation and accountability of its community members over time, and can help make better use of volunteers' time, skills and efforts. Deadlines are one of the key components of any project! Defining strategy is about how to convert the resources you have into an opportunity to act - how do you turn what you have into what you need to get what you want? To define strategy, we must ask ourselves a series of questions: Who are we, each of us,?
What do we want to change? What is our goal? How might we use the resources we have and transform them into power to achieve the goal? We will work through the answers to these questions in dialogue with our community. With the leadership team, we define the end goal, spell out our goals and objectives, and map out their timelines to determine the start, deadline, and peak activity of different campaigns leading up to the strategic goal defined by the leadership team.
The following simple questions help define our strategic goal: What is the problem? Why is it not yet solved? Will the world look different once it is solved? What will it take to solve it? We need to start with a working hypothesis for which we think through the basic principles. We use a very simple formula: we organise who to do what, how and by what deadline.
The deadline is one of the key components of any project, it is a monumental motivation factor that will help to unite and organise all the participants. From theory to practice. Examples of effective communities! The lion's share of the organisational work of all curators takes place online. Each of them will sometimes be required to use their talents and creativity 12 hours a day, seven days a week to motivate people and enable them to move from fear to hope, from emotions that prevented action to emotions that inspired, from apathy to action.
In 2006, I organised, on the Internet, together with about 300 supportive friends, WATERFALL OF DREAMS Innovation Project, which allowed mostly women to share their family problems - what they were and how they solved them. Over six years (from 2006 to 2013), more than 3 million people living around the world actively participated in the project. Over the course of the project, my assistants and I have received more than 110,000 stories from their lives. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, at the end of 2013 I had to close my project.
About 69,000 people wrote comments - more than 95 per cent of the comments were positive. In my opinion, the sustainability of my project was ensured by the use of tools, correct community organisation and strict adherence to the rules. We need to use qualitatively new technologies for more effective creation and promotion of different projects and teams that will solve various social problems. Organisers of this project, we create it because we all believe that the power to change our society and answer the global challenges of humanity is in the hands and in the hearts of communities of people close in spirit.
Our values include trust, co-operation, curiosity, flexibility of thinking, and the desire to create new and useful things for ourselves and others. There is a need to develop tools and knowledge of methods and new technologies that will help us, all of us living on our common planet, to come together and strengthen ties faster. I have tried to articulate one of the biggest challenges facing community organisers both in Finland and around the world.... It is the transformation of people's view of hierarchical community building to a horizontal model of leadership, where the leader is willing to share responsibility in order to act together to achieve common goals.
And it doesn't matter what country you are from or what conditions you live in - there are always deep values for community organising to make a difference around you.