Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)

Source: Nurture Development

Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) is an approach to sustainable community-driven development. Beyond the mobilisation of a particular community, it is concerned with how to link micro-assets to the macro-environment. Asset Based Community Development’s premise is that communities can drive the development process themselves by identifying and mobilizing existing, but often unrecognised assets. Thereby responding to challenges and creating local social improvement and economic development.

This page will describe ABCD through five key aspects.

Asset Based Approach
Deficit Based vs Asset Based Comparison
Power of Associations
Principles for facilitating Asset Based Community Development
Asset Based Community Development in Practice

Asset Based Approach
Asset Based Community Development builds on the assets that are found in the community and mobilizes individuals, associations, and institutions to come together to realise and develop their strengths. This makes it different to a Deficit Based approach that focuses on identifying and servicing needs. From the start an Asset Based approach spends time identifying the assets of individuals, associations and institutions that form the community. The identified assets from an individual are matched with people or groups who have an interest in or need for those strengths. The key is beginning to use what is already in the community. Then to work together to build on the identified assets of all involved.

The first key method of the ABCD approach is that development begins with the recognition of asset categories that can be uncovered in any community and place. When applying ABCD principles communities are not thought of as complex masses of needs and problems, but rather diverse and capable webs of gifts and assets. Each community has a unique set of skills and capacities it can channel for community development.
Asset Based Community Development categorizes asset inventories into five groups, Individuals, Associations, Institutions, Place Based and Connections.

INDIVIDUALS – EVERYONE HAS ASSETS AND GIFTS.
At the centre are residents of the community who all have gifts and skills. Individual gifts and assets need to be recognized and identified. In community development you cannot do anything with people’s needs, only their assets. Deficits or needs are only useful to institutions.

ASSOCIATIONS – PEOPLE DISCOVER EACH OTHER’S GIFTS.
Small informal groups of people, such as clubs, working with a common interest as volunteers are called associations in ABCD, and are critical to community mobilization. They don’t control anything; they are just coming together around a common interest by their individual choice.

INSTITUTIONS – PEOPLE ORGANISED AROUND ASSETS.
Paid groups of people that generally are professionals who are structurally organized are called institutions. They include government agencies and private business, as well as schools, etc. They can all be valuable resources. The assets of these institutions help the community capture valuable resources and establish a sense of civic responsibility.

PLACE BASED ASSETS – PEOPLE LIVE HERE FOR A REASON.
Land, buildings, heritage, public and green spaces are all examples of assets for the community. Every place where people choose to be was chosen for good reasons, and whilst people remain those reasons remain. A place might be a centre of natural resources, a hub of activity, living skills, transit connection or marketplace. Whatever the strengths of a place are, the people of the community will be the closest to understanding it.

CONNECTIONS – INDIVIDUALS CONNECT INTO A COMMUNITY.
Asset Based Community Development recognises that the exchange between people sharing their gifts and assets creates connections, and these connections are a vital asset to the community. People whose gift is to find and create these connections are called connectors. It takes time to find out about individuals; this is normally done through building relationships, person by person. The social relationships, networks and trust form the social capital of a community. ABCD recognises the value of these assets, and is a practical application of building relationships to increase social capital.

Global Platform

UNLEASHING POTENTIAL

We support youth networks, movements, organisations and individuals who promote the agenda of progressive youth-led change.

Global Platforms is a worldwide network of training hubs for youth empowerment and activism. We train and inspire young people to be the creators of social and political change.

NETWORK FOR
YOUTH-LED ACTIVISM
WE BUILD CAPACITIES, CONNECT PEOPLE AND CAUSES AND INSPIRE ACTION
Global Platforms is ActionAid’s network for youth-led activism. We support movements, youth networks, organisations and individuals who promote progressive social, political and economic change around the world.

Through capacity building and support to various youth-led initiatives, we seek to promote young people as drivers of change towards a more just, sustainable and democratic world.

Link: https://www.globalplatforms.org/

The Human Library

A WORLDWIDE MOVEMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

DON’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

The Human Library™ is designed to build a positive framework for conversations that can challenge stereotypes and prejudices through dialogue.

The Human Library is a place where real people are on loan to readers.

A place where difficult questions are expected, appreciated and answered.

THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN LIBRARY

The Human Library or “Menneskebiblioteket” as it is called in Danish, was developed in Copenhagen in the spring of 2000 as a project for Roskilde Festival by Ronni Abergel and his brother Dany and colleagues Asma Mouna and Christoffer Erichsen.

The original event was open eight hours a day for four days straight and featured over fifty different titles. The broad selection of books provided readers with ample choice to challenge their stereotypes and so they did. More than a thousand readers took advantage leaving books, librarians, organisers and readers stunned at the impact of the Human Library.

THE EARLY YEARS – STOP THE VIOLENCE

Once upon a time in Copenhagen, Denmark. There was a young and idealistic youth organisation called “Stop The Violence”.

This non-governmental youth movement was self initiated by the youngsters Dany Abergel, Asma Mouna, Christoffer Erichsen and Ronni Abergel from Copenhagen after a mutual friend was stabbed in the nightlife (1993). The brutal attack on their friend, who luckily survived, made the group decide to try and do something about the problem. To raise awareness and use peer group education to mobilize danish youngsters against violence. In a few years time the organization had 30.000 members all over the country.

In 2000 Stop The Violence was encouraged by then festival director, Mr. Leif Skov, to develop some activities for Roskilde Festival. Events that would put focus on anti-violence, encourage dialogue and help to build positive relations among the festival visitors. The Human Library was born, as a challenge to the crowds of Northern Europes biggest summer festival.

THE REASONING BEHIND THE METHODOLOGY

One of the main concerns of the creators inventors was what would happen if people would not get the point? Or if the audience just simply did not want to be challenged on their prejudices? Well given that there was a total of 75 books available, the conclusion was that with so many different people together in a rather small space for a long time, then they are bound to start reading each other if no readers come. And so it was to become. Before the first reader could take out a book, the talks where already going on extensively and the feeling of something very special was in the air. The policeman sitting there speaking with the graffiti writer. The politician in discussions with the youth activist and the football fan in a deep chat with the feminist. It was a win-win situation and has been ever since.

CRUCIAL PARTNERS IN THE DEVELOPMENT

One of the creators, Ronni Abergel, realising the potential of the idea, decided after the first event, to begin to work to promote the idea to potential new organizers. Since then he has founded the Human Library Organization, produced a guide to new organizers with the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Council of Europe. Travelled to many countries to help train new local organizers, plan launch events and present the idea to interested organizations and public authorities. Today it is estimated that the Human Library has been presented in more than 7o countries around the world, most of them in partnership with local organizers.

COST EFFICIENT ACTIVITY

Further to having good partners to realize the project. The Human Library has another advantage to organizers around the world. Its not very expensive and can be organized no matter how big or small your budget is. The biggest ressource needed to facilitate a Human Library is time and idle hands to do the tasks. And due to this great quality it has been possible to stage events in a wide range of countries and with very little funding. This feature has made it possible to present Human Libraries in Romania, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Italy, Holland, Slovenia, Belgium, Portugal and Australia – to mention a few.

Link: http://humanlibrary.org/

In defence of ecovillages: the communities that can teach the world to live sustainably

by Anitra Nelson

Associate Professor, Centre for Urban Research (GUSS, RMIT), RMIT University

What types of communities do the best job of living with a minimal impact on the planet? I asked myself this question when I read a recent article on The Conversation, which argued that even if everyone on Earth lived in an ecovillage we would still be using too many resources.
I am more optimistic — some ecovillages provide a much better blueprint than others.

As a 2013 study of 14 ecovillages by US political scientist Karen Litfin shows, ecovillages can be regarded as “pioneer species”. They show people how to improve their sustainability: the ecovillages Liftin studied used 10–50% fewer resources than their home-country averages and, being whole communities, were more influential than a single sustainable household.

Litfin’s assessment took in a wide range of factors – ecological, economic, even psychological – but one example of how ecovillages show the way forward is in power consumption.

Mainstream households tend to rely on national or regional supplies of gas or electricity, with no (or little) control over their sources. In places like Victoria, which has a very emissions-intensive power sector, this can make it difficult to make sustainable choices. However, ecovillage neighbours who have banded together to access renewable energy, say solar or wind power, can make off-grid environmental savings.

While there are financial (and other) barriers to setting up environmentally sound residential neighbourhoods, there are useful rules of thumb. In general, small is beautiful and sharing is efficient. One simply cannot fit as much “stuff” into a smaller house, and sharing accommodation often economises on consumption of goods and services.

Some ecovillages shame others in reducing their environmental footprint. Where ecovillages re-inhabit and renovate old buildings, they save on resources. A good example is the postcapitalist eco-industrial Calafou colony, northwest of Barcelona, which houses some 30 people in an old textile factory complex.

Members of another community that I have stayed at, Ganas in New York City, live in renovated residential buildings and operate several second-hand businesses at which residents work. Residents at Twin Oaks in Virginia, where I worked for three weeks, have a surprising level of collective sufficiency, with residents working on farming and making hammocks and tofu to sell, the proceeds of which are shared between the group.

Such experiments can be scaled up, settling residents in ex-commercial and ex-industrial premises — effectively shrinking cities by encouraging higher-density, more sustainable collective communities.

Crops and solar panels at Twin Oaks in Virginia. Author provided

The global village

This feeds into the idea of “planned economic contraction” or “degrowth”, which as Samuel Alexander argued on The Conversation is necessary in order to live sustainably. But I don’t share his pessimism about the ability of ecovillages to show us a way towards this sustainable life.

An analysis of Findhorn ecovillage in Scotland showed that an average resident travels by air twice as much as an average Scot, yet their total travel and overall ecological footprint was half the Scottish and UK averages.

Residents of Findhorn and of another UK ecovillage, Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED), make significant savings in terms of car travel. It follows that just by avoiding air travel, these residents would have even more environmentally sound practices.

Managing without money?

Members of ecovillages such as Twin Oaks not only share “one purse”, but also complement their efforts at collective sufficiency with minimal use of money. (Avoiding money is part of the culture of squatters generally.) Members of Calafou put in money to the community on the basis of their individual capacity but share governance and benefits equally. Here social and environmental values dominate.

In contrast, money is the principle on which capitalism revolves. If we reduce consumption — and we will need to, to become sustainable — then production has to be reduced. But capitalist producers have no successful operating systems for shrinking. Most often, when consumption decreases it results in unemployment and austerity, rather than orderly degrowth.

Money pressures us to opt for more rather than less, or else risk poverty and powerlessness. Thus it applies a systemic pressure to expand. Growth is not simply a result of people’s greed – even not-for-profit cooperatives aim to create a monetary surplus. How would you run a business or your household using money income in a shrinking market? What would happen to prices and savings?
Many suggest a guaranteed minimum income, but the value of the currency will prove unstable in such conditions and, anyway, what really matters to us is what we can purchase with that income (meaning that prices matter).

Such questions lead us to the conclusion that strategies for degrowth must leap not only beyond capitalism but also beyond money. This is the strength of Litfin’s focus on ecology, community and consciousness, incorporating skills which we need to replace production for trade on the principle of money.

In the future, collectively sufficient ecovillages could operate environmentally efficiently on the basis of direct democracy and arrange production and exchange within the commons they lived off without the use of money. Instead, ecovillagers would make non-monetary exchanges, where necessary, on the basis of social and environmental values.

Thus we could reduce our footprint and stay within Earth’s capacity.

Source: https://theconversation.com/in-defence-of-ecovillages-the-communities-that-can-teach-the-world-to-live-sustainably-44967

How to Integrate Gift Circles into Any Community

By Regina Gelfo

 

Community: the Missing Ingredient to Happiness

I first learned of Gift Economy in a geodesic dome in the gorgeous middle of nowhere, Utah at a Reality Sandwich retreat in 2009. Charles Eisenstein was there speaking, and the sparkle in his eye was infectious. I remember scribbling madly in my notebook as he sat cross-legged with his spine perfectly straight, like a modern day messiah, sharing the good news: We get to do what we love! We NEED to do what we love! The WORLD needs us to do what we love! And there’s enough room for everybody! At the time I didn’t know it mentally, but I felt it in my body: those words were the beginning of the next era of my life. 

Just 8 months earlier, I had been laid off from my job as a web designer for Current TV, a hip independent media startup. I was making more money than I had ever made in my life, sitting around ideating and designing all day with brilliant, attractive people, and enjoying yacht parties with karaoke and free booze, late nights at the office with my adopted family, and – most importantly - a feeling of being part of something. I was on a trajectory. 

And one chilly day in November, myself, along with about 50 other employees, found ourselves not so gently ejected from that trajectory. I still remember walking to the pier next to AT&T Park in San Francisco near my office, my body pumped full of adrenaline, not knowing whether I was more terrified, exhilarated, pissed off, or euphoric. Now I could really do anything. I could travel, teach yoga, go back to school, or start my own dang startup. Anything! How exciting!

I quickly slipped into a depression. I got another great job so it wasn’t money that was my concern. But I was working freelance from my apartment. I missed the coffeemaker banter, my teammates, who had become like brothers to me, and our silly lunchtime and post-work adventures. In the months and years after Current, I quickly realized that the creative fulfillment and fair compensation were actually secondary benefits of that job, which still ranks as the Best Job I’ve Ever Had. The biggest benefit was the sense of community, something I had been hungering for since finishing college. 

It was wonderful to access such a sense of belonging and ‘tribe’ in the workplace. Yet there are serious problems with attaching that baseline sense of security to a community based on commerce, performance, and business decisions. The role of community is to provide a stable and consistent container. This is simply impossible when profit is at the core, driving all decisions. The feeling was right but the expression was wrong. We need ways to weave this glue of community more widely into contemporary society. So what if there was a way to create more community, instill a deeper sense of belonging, and begin bringing healing to the vast sense of isolation experienced in modern Western culture? 

What is a Gift Circle?

The Gift Circle, as founded by Alpha Lo and spread by Charles Eisenstein, is a group facilitation format that holds great possibility as a way to match resources with needs, create community and inspire gratitude and generosity. The goals of a Gift Circle are simply to provide a warm, free, and welcoming space for community to gather and share Gifts and Needs, most often while literally sitting in a circle.  Perhaps most importantly, I believe that variations of the Gift Circle format also hold the potential to cultivate healthy interdependence in communities, providing a sense of psycho-spiritual belonging and connection to ameliorate the vast sense of alienation and scarcity experienced by so many. (To be clear, I’m not talking about the thing where a group of women get together and ‘gift’ a large sum of money to one another. This hotly debated phenomenon just happens to share the same name as the type of Gift Circles I am talking about.)

How to Organize a Gift Circle: the Berkeley Model

Myself and a small group of folks were inspired to co-found the Berkeley Gift Circle in 2010 after another retreat with Charles where Alpha was also present. Alpha mentored us as we got it started. We met regularly, taking turns bringing main dishes for the potluck and facilitating the circle. We would eat and socialize a bit, then gather sitting in a circle, and go around the circle with each person speaking what gift they’d enjoy sharing with the community. For instance someone might offer giving a massage, making a custom mix CD, giving a life coaching session, dance class, or a home-cooked meal – the gifts were generally more service-oriented, though there was an occasional item gifted as well, like a futon or pair of headphones. 

People who were potentially interested in receiving the named gift would raise their hand, and a notetaker would sometimes notate who wanted what. Other times, the gifter and potential receiver/s would just take note of one another and connect at the end of the meeting. There was a great sense of glee in the room as we watched the hands go up to accept various gifts – the giver always looked happy that someone wanted what they were inspired to offer. The receivers were often thrilled too.

After the first round where we shared gifts, we would then do a round where anyone with a need could speak their need, and likewise, people who were interested in helping meet that need would raise their hands. Needs ranged from things like help moving, assistance with home repairs, website design, reviewing someone’s resume, a bike, a ride to the airport on Tuesday morning, to some courageously shared personal needs like more friends, sex, and cuddles.

Most importantly, there would be a time at the end where we’d leave 20-30 min for givers and receivers to connect with one another directly and coordinate a time to meet up later to give or receive whatever it was. It was highly encouraged to schedule the gift or need session during that meeting, while the energy was still fresh.

One thing to note is that this was explicitly NOT a barter system! Charles and Alpha talk about this format instead as “circular giving,” where you give with no request for compensation or exchange, knowing simply that it will come back to you in some way (kinda like the concept of karma). And, sometimes even more challenging as you receive without necessarily giving anything back to the person you received from. The lack of direct exchange added a magical and more spiritual feeling to the experience. I found that it generated feelings of pure satisfaction in giving, and deep gratitude in receiving.

The first few months were sweet. We were so inspired and falling in love with one another! Turns out that generosity and vulnerability are both very heart opening. Many members of the group already knew one another through a local meditation community, but there were plenty of opportunities for new connection and deepening those existing connections. People would report happily for gift circle, sharing their magical gifting encounters of the week prior with warm smiles: “Bill gave me a coaching session,” “Yes, and Tiffany gave me the best massage!” Witnessing the gifts was a key piece of how the circle keeps good feelings flowing.

‘Star givers’ started emerging- those folks who were always happy to support the person most in need, or do that odious task. The guy I considered my ‘star giver’ stepped up to help me move, fix a cabinet in my kitchen, and bring me a truckload of compost for my garden – all things I had no immediate capacity of doing on my own. He felt like an angel sent from heaven, making me feel so supported as a not-so-handy woman living alone. And he was the humblest, sweetest guy, who truly did not seek anything in return. Sometimes I worried about whether he was getting enough back. So my whole being filled with joy when I learned several months later that he had started dating a woman from the gift circle. They wound up getting happily married!

The Traditional Gift Circle Format

This is taken from the Open Collaboration website.

1. Check in - People say their names and a little bit about their recent or current experience(s).This helps everyone get to know each other better and get comfortable.

2. Sharing of needs - People share what their needs are. This could be a ride to the city, finding a housemate, someone to walk the dog, editing services, etc.

3. Service offering - People offer something to the group, just “putting it out there” for whoever might need that service or object. Alternatively an offering can be made to the group as a whole. One way this can be done is to write on a slip of paper the services you have to offer and then put that in the middle of the circle. Then anyone who wants can pick up that slip of paper up.

4. Giving thanks - People express gratitude for services and things they have received from previous circles.

5. Scheduling - People get together and share when they can get together to give/receive their services. Scheduled services as well as unscheduled offers and requests can be emailed to a group listserv.

Common Challenges of Gift Circles

As much as the good vibes were flowing, some challenges began to emerge after several months of circling. The same people were showing up week after week, and generally had the same gifts to offer, and sometimes even the same needs. There was a fatal lack of diversity. Another challenge was the format itself. It was lengthy and took an entire evening. After the novelty wore off, sometimes it felt a bit boring listening to the same people say their gifts and needs around the circle, one at a time. I found myself starting to feel drained when imagining going to the gathering. I had moved and was now living half an hour across town from the house where we gathered. It didn’t feel convenient anymore. And I was hesitant to set up follow up meetings that would involve a commute, as well.

Another factor is that living in the Bay Area, there’s always a lot going on - the blessing and curse of the abundance of pretty much anything you could want to do being available most of the time. I call it the ‘Bay Area Blight,’ which produces low commitment levels and scattered attention spans. After the honeymoon phase of the Gift Circle wore off, it started feeling like a less appealing option than any of the 5 other things that were on my radar to do on that same night. And as the novelty and my commitment levels faded, it became harder to create space in my life for the circle and its offshoot activities and meetups. If I had an urgent need, it was easy to prioritize attending the circle, but the energy of only going if you needed something rather than going consistently to give and receive felt contradictory to the intentions of the circle.

Adaptions to Integrate Gift Circles into Existing Community

It's helpful for the format to be either incredibly convenient and efficient (eg, not time consuming) or engaging, interesting, and deeply socially or spiritually fulfilling in order for a Gift Circle to be lasting. While involved with the gift circle I was also serving as the Director of the Bay Area Evolver Spore, organizing and facilitating monthly events focusing on transformative culture. I started bringing some aspects of gift circling to the Evolver events, which led to some interesting and more efficient formats. 

One of my favorite formats was “Gifts and Needs Name Tags,” which we used as an ice-breaker at a few Evolver Spores. When people entered the event, they would grab a name tag and write their name, one Gift they wanted to share, and one Need they had. The events generally began with about 30 min of mingling time, and the name tags were great conversation starter that led to some successful transactions, with much greater efficiency than a full gift circle. Then the bulk of the evening was spent listening to speakers and curated content, providing a more compelling ‘feature’ event than sitting an entire evening in a circle listening to everyone say what they wanted to give or receive, one at a time.

The efficiency of the name tags showed that it is possible to find out what gifts and needs are in the room quite quickly. However, without some interpersonal connection as glue, I question how motivated folks would be to give to or receive from one another. So an efficient way of mining gifts and needs would be to tap into an existing community of people who have some baseline level of connection. Some applications of this would be to incorporate a physical or virtual bulletin board into an existing community like an office, college campus, or church or synagogue where people gather regularly – they key piece is that it is somewhere folks are going to go anyways, filled with people they kind of know or at least share an identity affinity with or are inspired to build community more deeply with.

I’d love to see a Gifts and Needs bulletin board by the bathroom in a small to medium sized workplace, or in the café at a university. The benefits to placing the gifts and needs in physical space rather than virtual space are that many people are struggling with email overwhelm and information overload in their online life, so catching their eye in moments of real-world down time rather than creating another “thing to check” may work better for many people. That being said, websites like Craigslist and email lists like Freecycle are immensely popular, so there is certainly a place for Gift and Need sharing in the virtual space as well. 

In my recent years as a grad student, I would fantasize about having a “Gifts and Needs On Campus” Twitter feed where I could send something out like “I am in the cafe and desperately need a neck massage!” or “Anyone want a 20 minute sound healing session? Meet me in the meditation room.” This would be an easy way of creating community across students, staff and faculty if it were open to everyone in the campus community. The challenge would simply be bringing awareness to the program and getting folks engaged, which I think could be as simple as some well-designed fliers. 

Another application of Gift Circles I always wanted to see was a hyper-local neighborhood-based Gift Circle. With the degrees of isolation and busy, walled-off lives in many middle-class American neighborhoods, this could be more challenging to get buy in. But the convenience factor would rule and it would be a great way to create stronger neighborhood networks. Apartment buildings could easily have a bulletin board. Larger, more spread out neighborhoods like the one I live in could potentially start with a Gift Circle potluck meeting to discuss the best vision for application in the local community, perhaps deciding on a central spot for a bulletin board, or utilizing an existing neighborhood email list.

If you’re interested in bringing Gifting into your world, I’d recommend starting by thinking about what communities you’re already a part of, the physical or virtual spaces you share, and if there are certain types of gifts or needs you commonly perceive in these communities. I believe that this format will be most resilient if it spreads and adapts new forms based on each unique environment it enters. Not everyone is a Berkeley meditator hippie who wants to spend 3 hours on a Tuesday night sitting politely in circle nodding and smiling after each person shares their gifts and needs. Even we Berkeley hippies got a little tired of it! Maybe bring a modified gift circle to your group of friends while watching sports or having weekend barbeques or set up a sticky note gift exchange board at work.

At present time, I’m all jazzed up to be a part of the new Hub Oakland co-working space, and bursting at the seams to bring a Gifts & Needs bulletin board into the Hub office in downtown Oakland, imagining all the ways that could bring deeper connection and efficient sharing to that burgeoning community.

So if this lights you up, try it out. Start small and see what works. Consider geography. You may find that it lights up some part of you that is totally fed by giving. You may find that it brings out whatever resistance you have to receiving, so you can do your personal growth work on that and bring more love and abundance into your life.

Caution: Gift Circles May Change Your Life

For me, Gift Circles were a gateway into a larger trajectory of supporting the sharing of gifts in community. Five years after being laid off, I am now integrating my life’s work as I build my own company, Sacred Work, which outshines the ‘Best Job I’ve Ever Had’ as the ‘Best Job I’ve Ever Created.’ My business helps agents of personal and planetary healing bring their unique gifts into the world and turn them into profitable endeavors, using my skill set as a coach & consultant, sacred space facilitator, and visual designer.  I feel fulfilled seeing the joy in my clients as they come into greater resonance with their personal path of right livelihood. I frequently find myself secretly thinking “OMG, I can’t believe I am getting paid to do this!”

I don’t know if I would have landed here without the transmission I got from Charles, or my participation in the Gift Circle, solidifying this framework and way of viewing the world. Like my friend, the “Star Giver’s” marriage, I couldn’t see it coming at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes perfect sense. As I do my work, I know the fundamental tenet of gift circles to be true: the gift truly is in the act of joyfully giving. I get to do what I love because I never stop sharing my gifts. Keep giving your gifts and it will flow back to you full circle.

Resources

Here are some links about gift circles. Feel free to add other resources in the comments section of this article!

Gift Circle Philosophy http://www.shareable.net/blog/charles-eisenstein-gift-economy-gift-circles

Gift Circle FAQs http://opencollaboration.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/gift-circle-faq/

Gift Circle Guiding Principles http://opencollaboration.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/gift-circle-principles/

Source: http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-integrate-gift-circles-into-any-community

Developing Collective Wisdom in Communities, Cities, & Regions

We serve the vision of a world in which place-based communities become increasingly thriving and resilient. Rather than relying on the government to authorize and drive change from the top down, we believe that the shift to a global wisdom culture must also be initiated on the ground through the efforts of ordinary citizens within their home communities and cities.

Thousands of innovative approaches to community growth have been developed and successfully applied in real communities to bring the diverse voices of the community together to produce wise, collective visions and actions. The fundamental goal of these approaches is not to achieve an ideal state for a community but to develop an ongoing process through which a community can constantly recreate itself by mobilizing its own resources and collective wisdom in response to the challenges and opportunities it faces.

Leading community thinkers across civic, corporate, and social organizations consistently say that an integral, whole-systems approach is an essential factor in developing long-lasting community wellbeing. They consistently point to the interior dimension of relationship and culture as the primary social development need. Many outer tangible solutions to our ecosocial issues already exist. The inner cultural will and commitment to use them does not.

What community wisdom systems are strengthening the people and places where we live today? The regional and national organization and network hubs listed in the Movements section are a treasure-trove of useful information. We offer summaries of local ecosocial approaches here.

Transformative Co-leadership: Stewardship for Today and Tomorrow

In our interdependent society, co-creating a healthy community requires committed participation from across the “megacommunity” of the major organizational sectors: civic, social, and corporate. Multi-stakeholder community councils, whole-systems planning and analysis, and collaborative organization and funding structures are examples of geographic community leadership tools for both today and tomorrow.

Community stewardship today tends to be concentrated in specific sectors or domains in a community, often operating rather independently. More integral community stewardship systems are emerging, with new forms of partnerships, networks, coalitions, and alliances working across traditional grassroots and organization boundaries to address complex eco-social issues.  Key elements are common spaces for community dialogue and action and an open inclusive attitude. Leading resources include the books Megacommunities, Abundant Community, the reports in EcoSocial Design Strategies, and the following approaches below.

Art and Soul: Celebrating Beauty, Peace, and Circle of Life

Artists, healers, and faith and spiritual leaders tend the inner heart of the community. They provide spaces and places for people to simply be together in a meaningful way, to focus on the values and beliefs that are important to them and to develop and heal their relationships. Community groups embrace beauty, peace, and diversity through a broad range of creative expression in music, art, and theatre. Artistic expressions such as community theater productions or local talent shows, can also be memorable ways to knit the fabric of community. and through a wide variety of gathering centers honoring many faiths and beliefs. They maintain the rhythmic heartbeat of the community through honoring life and community passages with ceremonies and rituals such as weddings, funerals, and group prayer and meditation. Leading resources include interfaith organizations such as the United Religions Initiative (www.uri.org), community art projects such as quilting bees, and local/global peace campaigns such as the UN International Day of Peace (internationaldayofpeace.org). Community healing circles are a local approach.

Community Healing Circles

In indigenous cultures, the primary role of the shaman was to maintain the delicate balance between the human and nonhuman worlds through rituals and trance journey work, for the health and harmony of the community. Through their rituals the shamans would remind the human community to honor the sacred dimension of the greater Earth Community of which the humans were just one part. In the modern secular West, we have largely forgotten this perspective or often reject it as primitive superstition. Yet the consequences of our failure to respect the intrinsic worth and sacredness of the nonhuman worlds have, of course, become alarmingly clear in the reports of the mass extinction of species, vast deforestation, climate change, and other deeply troubling dimensions of the global ecological crisis. Furthermore, there is now considerable research from the field of consciousness studies that strongly suggests that our prayers, meditations, and intentions do have nonlocal healing effects (Nicol, 2010).

Accordingly, we believe that convening community-healing circles that explicitly honor the sacred dimension of ourselves, our communities, and our natural environment is a vital element of a truly integral approach to community development. These circles could involve shamanistic healing ceremonies, collective prayer and/or meditation, or any other form of spiritual practice that resonates with the group and is directed toward healing and blessing the community at large. Like many things in life, the most important elements are the intention you bring to the work and the consistency of your practice.

Leading resources include the book Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown (1998) as well as organizations Deep Ecology.org (www.deep-ecology.org) and Permanent Peace (www.permanentpeace.org).

Education and Communication: Learning and Getting Along

The more we listen and learn from each other about our communities and the broader world we live in, the better we understand and appreciate our own place within the community.  This awareness can bring comfort and satisfaction from a greater sense of belonging  and more capacity to make effective change where we live. Educating ourselves about our local communities at history and cultural centers, the local Sierra Club (www.sierraclub.org) or land trust, and other uniquely local learning opportunities is a fabulous way to have fun, meet our neighbors, and learn useful skills. Learning about the local/regional/global connection through the media (such as YES! And National Geographic magazines, public television and radio) and seminars (ShiftNetwork.org, dialogue)

The opportunity and challenge of today is learning together in community so that we can think together in community. Participating in classes and gatherings together as community members and leaders to explore and discuss local ecosocial systems is a necessary ingredient in developing the trust and the expertise for wise local stewardship. Meeting in smaller circles about resilience/security (www.localcircles.org), sustainability (greendrinks.org) or any issue is equally important in building neighborhood trust and expertise.

Bringing people closer together in community also inevitably involves encountering our differences—different political views, educational backgrounds, communication styles, cultural assumptions, and so on. Our communities are healthy to the extent that they can allow these differences and integrate them in a higher creative synthesis. Easier said than done! Many of us have painful associations with conflict and tend to avoid it where possible. Others of us may tend to jump right in but later wish we didn’t. Furthermore, many of us have had disheartening experiences of our current legal and political approaches to resolving conflict, which, because of their adversarial frameworks, often exacerbate the tensions between the people involved, involve a huge amount of time and money, and leave lasting rips in the fabric of community. Yet with the right kind of “container” (and plenty of courage and commitment), sitting in the fire of conflict can bring communities closer together and unleash tremendous creative energy. The following innovative approaches are examples of intelligent frameworks for dealing with conflict and differences within communities.

Convening: Hosting Community Conversations

Bringing community members together for respectful, inclusive conversations is fundamental to building healthy communities. Effective conversations can take the more free-wheeling form of a community salon or the more deliberate and meditative form of a talking council or circle in the spirit of indigenous wisdom traditions. Leading resources include the book Change Handbook and Open Collaboration and the websites for the World Café (www.theworldcafe.com), Commonway (www.commonway.org), Open Space (www.openspaceworld.org), Conversation Café (www.conversationcafe.org), Future Search (www.futuresearch.net),  Change Handbook

Community mediation

Community mediation involves the use of trained community volunteers to provide mediation services as an alternative to the judicial system. Community mediation offers many advantages over traditional legal approaches to conflict resolution, such as:

• It provides a forum for dispute resolution at the earliest stage of the conflict;
• It uses mediators who reflect the diversity of the communities served; and
• It is committed to providing services to clients regardless of their ability to pay.

According to the National Association for Community Mediation (n.d.), a typical community mediation program has 1.5 equivalent full-time staff, 30 active mediators, and a $40,000/annum budget. Many community mediation centers have well established programs for schools that help to create a culture of nonviolent conflict resolution among the children and teachers.

Leading resources include the book Peace Skills: Manual for Community Mediators by Kraybill (2001) as well as the National Association for Community Mediation (www.nafcm.org).

Health and Recreation:  Wellness, Play, and Celebration

Public health and wellness is a vital component of a thriving community. Local governments and schools play an important role in community health, with faith and other organizations helping to create a safety net for people in need. Many familiar nonprofit institutions such as the YMCA.org, UnitedWay.org, and the Lions Club and newer emerging networks such as care2.org and communitycommonrs.org include health as a core part of their mission. Individual health providers and support groups such as twelve-step fellowships for addiction recovery provide

Social groups, sports leagues, parks and recreation programs provide group settings for fun and play, a necessary spice of life. Community fairs, festivals, and parties like Green Festivals (www.greenfestivals.org), EarthDance (www.earthdancenetwork.com), and Burning Man (www.burningman.com) are enjoyable celebrations which build connections between community members in relaxed, informal settings. Creative approaches such as InterPlay (www.interplay.org) have been developed that work with art and/or play to intentionally foster community transformation at a deep level.

Giving and Rights: Caring and Sharing Services

Volunteers, donors, and community service civic and social organizations tend the outer heart of community. They operate from a sense of community caring, ethics or values and dedicate their time and money to community welfare. The poverty-fighting network Community Action Partnership (www.communityactionpartnership.com), community foundation network Council on Foundations (www.cof.com), Rotary Clubs (rotary.org), are examples of large local/national network serving community needs. Service efforts usually focus on a particular aspect of community support, but by helping one part of a community, they contribute to the whole. The opportunity and challenge today is to develop megacommunity (corporate/social/civic) awareness and collaboration to leverage the talents and capacity of all our community resources. Social wellbeing can no longer be sufficiently funded by nonprofit donations or taxes alone. Crowdfunding (eg. www.indiegogo.org) is one example of a new collective funding mechanism.

Equitable human rights of North Americans across race, religion, gender, and economics, is a social justice imperative championed by thrivingresilience movements across the spectrum, from established institutional networks like the United Way to more recent phenomenons like the Occupy movement. The concept of intrinsic rights for local communities is also emerging in America. Communities and cities are adopting charters of community ethics including the Earth Charter (www.earthcharter.org) and the Charter for Compassion (charterforcompassion.org). Some communities are creating codes of ethics and legal sovereignty to steward their local commons resources such as water rights.

Governance and Design: Social Contracts & Ecosocial Technologies

Governance and design systems involve the agreements we make to live together in a specific place and the information and technologies we use to design those agreements. Governance includes the legislative, executive, and judicial aspects of government: public policy advocacy, creation, engagement, and enforcement. The civic renewal movement works to establish neutral forums for public deliberation on critical community issues, increased public involvement in the development of regional community indicators, and more collaborative approaches to local and regional planning processes.

Ecosocial design systems include information systems, research and development, and analysis tools and indicators required to understand local community ecosocial systems. Design systems originate from action research institutes like the PostCarbon Institute (www.postcarbon.org) or Sustainability Institute (www.sustainabilityinstitute.org) and literally thousands of universities across the country, corporate products like GoogleEarth (www.googleearth.com), and nonprofit efforts like regional analysis tools from BALLE (www.livingeconomies.org) and Ecotrust (www.ecotrust.org).

Here is a sampling of the latest interesting approaches to systemic governance and design.

Community Democracy

Tom Atlee (n.d.) and others have argued persuasively that our current democratic processes need to evolve to reflect the whole systems worldview emerging from advances in both the natural and social sciences over the past century and to make our democracies more truly representative of the voice of the people. As Atlee says, truly participatory democracies that tap into the collective intelligence of the people would do more than measure opinion polls or simple majority votes. They would devise processes that, firstly, built the capacity of the whole community or society to reflect on itself and, secondly, elicited the collective wisdom of the whole for the benefit the whole. Innovative democratic approaches that invite a deeper level of participation from ordinary citizens in the governance of their communities include citizen deliberative councils, wisdom councils, and stewardship councils.

Leading resources include the books Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All by Tom Atlee (2002) Civic Revolutionaries: Igniting the Passion for Change in America’s Communities by Henton, Melville, and Walesh (2004), and the websites for citizen deliberative councils (http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-CDCs.html), the Center for Wise Democracy (www.wisedemocracy.org), America Speaks (www.americaspeaks.org), and the Democracy Collaborative (www.democracycollaborative.org), and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (www.deliberative-democracy.net).

Restorative justice

Restorative justice is an umbrella term for community-based approaches to criminal matters that emphasize repairing the harm caused by the crime. In a restorative justice circle, victims and offenders meet face to face, along with key members of their communities and a skilled facilitator, to address what happened in the crime. Victims are thus given an opportunity to express their pain, and to feel heard and understood. Offenders are given the chance to realize the full impact of their crime and to make amends. Both victims and offenders tend to rate this process a “highly satisfactory” way to deal with crime. Since 1989, New Zealand has made restorative justice processes the hub of its juvenile justice system (Restorative Justice Online, n.d.).

Leading resources include The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr (2002) as well as organizations Restorative Justice Online (www.restorativejustice.org) and Centre for Restorative Justice (www.sfu.ca/crj).

Asset Mapping

Many recent approaches to community development challenge the traditional focus on identifying a community’s needs and argue instead for the benefits of mapping a community’s assets. Mapping assets helps to connect people and resources within a community, stimulates the local economy, and provides a great foundation for community visioning or strategic planning processes. Furthermore, many communities have used an asset-mapping process as a springboard to develop their own Quality of Life indicators, another innovative way for a community to know itself better and to track its progress by its own standards.

Leading resources include the book Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets by Kretzmann and McKnight (1997) and the organizations Integral City (www.integralcity.com), Sustainable Seattle (www.sustainableseattle.org), and Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (www.livingeconomies.org).

Necessities and Exchange: Secure, Sustainable Stuff

Necessities and exchange systems concern the tangible practical stuff we people in communities need to live our daily lives. Necessities refers to the food and water supplies, air, land, shelter, clothing, energy, emergency medicine and services, and biodiversity we need to survive and thrive: the must-have abundant resources in a thriving, resilient society. Exchange involves the things we trade to fulfill our fundamental needs and the infrastructure systems we use to exchange them: transportation, business, finance, etc.

Leading resources include books Go Local by Michael Shuman and Sustainable World Sourcebook by Sustainable World Coalition and websites onthecommons.org, resilience.org, shareable.org, and greenamerica.or

Source: http://thrivingresilience.org/tools-and-approaches-overview/community-tools/

Giftivism: Reclaiming the Priceless

Full Transcript of Video:

‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ – Oscar Wilde

More than a 100 years later we’ve put pricetags on things that Oscar even in his wildest dreams (or nightmares!) could not have seen coming. For example, today for 10 dollars your company can purchase the right to emit a metric ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For $75 hundred dollars you can hire a human being to be a guinea pig in risky drug trials. And for a quarter of a million dollars you can buy the right to shoot an endangered rhino in South Africa. We’ve somehow managed to put a price tag on life, death and almost everything in between. So in a world where everything has a price --- what happens to the priceless?

That’s the Golden Gate bridge. One of the most beautiful and most photographed bridges in the world. It is a testament to humankind’s technical ingenuity, and also to our moral failure. The Golden Gate Bridge is the second most common suicide site in the world. This is John Kevin Hines. At nineteen, suffering from intense depression he showed up here. He walked the bridge past crowds of tourists with tears streaming down his face. Longing for a moment of human connection. That’s when a woman in sunglasses approached him and asked -- if he would take her picture. She didn’t notice his tears or even stop to ask if he was all right. John took the picture. Gave the woman her camera, and then took three running steps and jumped. He’s one of the rare people who’ve jumped the bridge and miraculously survived. One of the most haunting things he’s shared since his rescue? That if someone, if anyone had given him a smile that day, he would not have jumped.

We live in a time where we have mastered the art of “liking” each other on Facebook but have forgotten the art of loving each other in real life. Disconnection is a growing epidemic.  And it’s not a problem isolated to teenagers. It’s a growing problem the workplace. According to a recent study 70% of people are emotionally disconnected at work. And yes we even have a price-tag for that disconnection. It’s calculated to be 300 billion dollars in lost productivity annually. So this is not just a social or spiritual problem. It’s also a business problem, an economic problem.

What’s the solution? Making meaningful products is worthwhile and necessary. But it’s not enough. In fact another study recently showed that the majority of people worldwide wouldn’t care if most of our brands disappeared tomorrow. Our purpose doesn’t lie in our commodities it lies in our sense of communion. It lies not in products, but in the realm of the priceless.  You can’t put a price on the smile John didn’t receive that day, just as you can’t put a price on any of our deepest gifts. Compassion. Empathy. Generosity. Trust.  So what happens when we as leaders and thinkers bring these priceless gifts back into circulation?

That’s the beginning of Giftivism: the practice of radically generous acts that transform the world. History has seen giftivists in all corners – Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and so forth. People who believed that when we change ourselves, we can fundamentally change the world. But this ability isn’t restricted to social change giants. The seeds of giftivism lie in each of us. But to tap into it we have to do something all these people did. We have to upturn one of the core assumptions of economics – the assumption that people always act to maximize self-interest. The assumption that we are inherently selfish beings. Giftivism flips that idea on its head. What practices, systems and designs emerge when we believe people WANT to behave selflessly?

ServiceSpace evolved as an answer to that question. It started in Silicon Valley at the height of the dotcom boom. At a time of rampant accumulation. when a group of young friends began to build websites for non-profits free of charge. Money wasn’t the focus. The intention was to practice unconditional generosity. We delivered millions of dollars worth of service, but it was all offered as a  gift. And everything we did had to follow our  three guiding principles. [None of these principles by the way made ANY sense to the business world :)]

Our first principle was to stay 100% volunteer-run. We have no paid staff. People looked at that said we wouldn’t scale. Our second principle was don’t fundraise. We wanted to serve with whatever we had. People warned us that we wouldn’t sustain. And the third was to focus on small acts. No strategizing for grand outcomes. We were told we wouldn’t have impact. But here’s the thing -- these constraints pushed us to discover new forms of value. We sustained, scaled and blossomed into an entire ecosystem of service that now has 500,000 members across the world.

Along the way we chose to create services that are difficult to monetize. Like good news. Bad news is a lot easier to sell. That’s what drives the fear narrative and sensationalism of the headlines. But that’s not where the priceless lives! To counteract this we started a daily news service that shares inspiring real-life stories, then we started a site for uplifting videos. Another realm that’s hard to monetize and yet crucial is kindness. So we created a portal to spread kind acts. Later we started a pay-it-forward restaurant and a whole slew of other efforts… in all our adventures we learned repeatedly that generosity is always generative -- it generates new value. And giftivism organizes that value through 4 key shifts.

The shift from Consumption to Contribution:

People in cities see roughly 5000 ads a day (most of them subconsciously). The marketplace primes us for endless consumption. But the truth is we’re hard wired for contribution. That’s not wishful thinking. It’s actual neuroscience. When people give to good causes it can trigger the same pleasure response in the brain that doing something nice for themselves does! We don’t need neuroscience to tell us this – we know from experience – giving feels good!  So we decided to unleash a series of experiments in micro-contribution. We began doing small acts of kindness. Like paying toll for the car behind you at a tollbooth, or buying coffee for a stranger at a cafe. A friend traveling first class spontaneously decided to trade his seat with an elderly woman in economy. Now imagine being on the receiving end of any of those acts. These small, counterculture gestures light up the giver and receiver. Everybody wins because generosity is NOT a zero sum game. Then we created Smile Cards. These little cards can be passed on with the kind act. They explain to the recipient that someone anonymously reached out simply to make their day, and now they can pay-it-forward by doing a kind act for someone else and passing the card along. The smile card becomes an invitation to create ripples of good everywhere. We’ve shipped over a million cards to people in over 90 countries and run a website that hosts tens of thousands of real life kindness stories. Imagine a world where people are continually reaching out to each other in this priceless way! Every moment becomes a gift. It’s a beautiful thing because it starts to rewire your mind when you into every situation and instead of asking “What can I take” – you’re constantly asking what can I give? What can I give? Soon you find that your actions begin to catalyze a rich network of ripples. And you tap into the joy of purpose. 

The second shift is from Transaction to Trust

Karma Kitchen is a prime example of this. It’s a restaurant we started and what makes it unusual is there are no prices on the menu. At the end of the meal guests receive a check for $0.00 with a note explaining that their meal was a gift from someone who came before them. If they wish to keep the circle of giving going they can pay-forward for someone who comes after them. When we started we didn’t know if this crazy idea would work! But six years later Karma Kitchen is still going strong. Amazing things happen when you count on people to be generous. It sparks something deep inside. One time we had a computer scientist serving tables. At the end of the meal one guest who was skeptical about the whole pay-it-forward idea handed him a $100 bill, “You trust me to pay-it-forward,” he said, “Well, I trust you to bring me back the right change.”This wasn’t part of the plan. Our volunteer ran through a list of options in his head. Should he split the money 50:50? Should he try and calculate the price of the meal? Suddenly the answer came to him. He handed the $100 bill back to the guest, and then opened up his own wallet and added an extra $20. In that moment, both waiter and guest experienced a mini transformation and “got” what Karma Kitchen is about. It wasn’t about the money. But when we drop the habit of quid pro quo you enter the natural flow of giftivism. You don’t know who paid for you or who will receive your contribution. But you trust in the whole cycle. Things move beyond the control of the personal ego, and every contribution becomes a profound act of trust. And trust generates a web of resilience. Today Karma Kitchen has chapters in six cities around the world.

The third shift is from Isolation to Community

The mindset of me-me-me is isolating and has limited power. But what happens when you move from me-to-we? That’s our friend Pancho, one of the most fearless giftivists I know. He lives by choice in East Oakland-- a neighborhood full of gang violence and poverty where there are more liquor stores than grocery stores. But the doors of Pancho’s house are never locked. There’s a garden in the back where they grow fruit and vegetables. They run outdoor yoga classes and a weekly meditation gathering. Anyone can join. And every week Pancho and his friends collect all the unharvested fruit from the neighborhood and organize a fruit stand that offers local, organic produce to the community for free. They have created a context for people to share their gifts with each other. Now people clean the streets together, they water each other’s plants, and take care of each other’s children. They used to hide under their beds when they heard gunshots. Now they come out onto the street to see if anyone needs help. When you move from isolation to community you tap into the power of synergy. The sum is always greater than the parts.

The fourth shift is from Scarcity to Abundance

Scarcity is a mindset. Gandhi once said there’s enough in this world for every man’s need but not every man’s greed. When you move away from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of “we have enough” you unlock new forms of capital. Social capital, trust capital, synergistic capital...you discover breakthrough models of abundance.  Like the one this man created. This is Dr. V -- my granduncle. In 1976 he, and his five brothers and sisters started an 11-bed eye hospital in India called Aravind. At Aravind no one who needs care is turned away. They do 60% of their surgeries for free. They don't do any fundraising or accept donations. And yet it is a fully self-sustaining enterprise. How does it work? Patients can choose if they want to pay or not. The revenue from paying patients goes towards covering costs for the others. The quality of care whether you pay or do not is worldclass. It's a brilliant, elegant and breathtakingly compassionate system that REALLY works. Today Aravind is the largest provider of eye care on the planet. Over 38 million patients seen. More than 5 million surgeries performed. It has redefined the impossible. Harvard Business School has been studying it for years trying to understand how a place that breaks all the rules of business still succeeds. The thing is Aravind doesn’t succeed in spite of the fact that it breaks these rules. It succeeds because of it.

Giftivism isn’t a utopian vision for the distant future. It’s part of our priceless inheritance in this very moment. The rewards are built-in. As we shift from consumption to contribution we discover into the joy of purpose. As we move from transaction to trust we build social resilience. As we move from isolation to community we tap into the power of synergy and as we replace the scarcity mindset with one of abundance, we identify radically new possibilities.

I began this talk with the story of one desperate teenager. I’d like to close with the story of another. Julio Diaz was coming home from work one night when he was stopped by a teenager with a knife. “Give me your wallet,” the boy said. Julio pulled out his wallet and handed it over. As the boy turned to run Julio said, “wait you forgot something.” The boy looked back. “You forgot to take my coat,” said Julio. “It’s cold. And if you’re going to be robbing people all night you’ll need this.” The boy is now utterly confused, but he takes the coat. Then Julio says, “It’s pretty late, why don’t you join me for dinner. There’s a restaurant I like around the corner.” Incredibly, the boy joins him. So there’s Julio dining at a restaurant with his robber. Treating him with nothing but compassion. At the end of the meal, Julio says to his new friend, ‘Look I’d love to buy you dinner but --you have my wallet.” Sheepishly the boy hands the wallet back to him. Then Julio leans forward and says quietly, “I need  to ask you for one more thing…can I have your knife too?” Without a word, the boy slides his knife across the table.

What we will do for love will always be far more powerful than what we will do for money. What we can do together will always be far greater than what we can do alone. And when we cultivate the heart of giftivism within ourselves, our companies and our communities, we begin to unleash our true prosperity.

We begin to move from being a market economy to being part of a gift ecology.

It begins with small steps. I invite each one of you to think about what your small step will be. What is YOUR giftivist resolution?

May we each take that step. May we change ourselves, may we change the world.

---

Pavithra Mehta is the co-author of Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World's Greatest Business Case for Compassion. She is highly susceptible to the poetry of everyday life. The above is a transcript of a talk in France in 2013.

Source: http://www.dailygood.org/story/644/giftivism-reclaiming-the-priceless-pavithra-mehta/

Five Ways that Games are More than Just Fun

As a game designer, I know how creative and inspiring it can be to play. But we can all benefit from being more playful—and the act of playing a game can be more about just having fun. Ready, set, play!

1. They make us more social.

Games bring us together. Think of how many people you've met while playing sports, board or video games. Yes, we often think of the stereotype of a gamer playing in their locked room but, as many of us know, playing games is an experience that is enjoyed best when you share it with others—online or offline. There is value in the social nature of games. 

When playing together we share a common ground, what in games we call a "magic circle" that helps break the ice between people who might not know each other—and often marking the beginnings of a new friendship. The magic circle defines the invisible yet unbreakable boundaries set by the rules of a game. Within it we feel safe to be playful and share common experiences without being judged. 

Imagine playing a simple game like the folk game Ninja. Before the game began, you were wondering around your usual business. But while playing, you are transformed in this fierce ninja, battling your opponents within the magic circle of the game. In the game, you don't care who the person you are playing with is, but how well you play together. 

2. They empower us to be creative.

Games trigger our creative juices—through  solving problems, navigating complex systems, and managing resources. What games do is present us with hard problems; like solving a puzzle or defeating a boss. As players we need to be creative and come up with good ideas to solve those problems. 

Games also empower us to change the rules. Whether it's creating fan art for your favorite Final Fantasy heroes or building your very own Minecraft Empires, there is no reason why we shouldn't look at games as open systems. With a variety of easy and free to access tools more and more players are becoming makers of games.

While we might think changing the rules is hard to do, think of kids-play and how you might have hacked your favorite toys or games when young. Growing up in Athens, Greece, I played with all the kids on the street, and some were older and some were younger. We played soccer and tag and we would change rules and tweak them so the younger kids could play and it would work for all. There's always freedom to change the rules and turn a game you love into something new. 

3. They help us develop empathy.

Consider the act of playing with others. You're trying to guess your opponent’s strategy and think what are they going to do next. Or you think of your team and wonder, how can I support my co-player to beat this goal?

When playing games, by default you have to develop these sorts of skills such as understanding someone else's' point of view. There’s the great Plato quote: "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."  

4. They make us act playful and silly.

There is a shared sense of humor when you play games that creates a safe environment for us to be silly. And when you think of our everyday endeavors and going through life as adults, we're not really encouraged to be playful. But when we play games, we relax and become more receptive and less judgmental. They make us more playful in our way of being and experiencing life. 

I particularly love games that take place in public spaces or offices for that reason since if you think about it in these worlds we're encouraged to be kind of serious since there are social norms of how to behave. But playing a game creates a safety net for us to act out silly things without feeling afraid of being judged.

5. They force us to tinker.

There is something to be said about the action of tinkering within games. It's all about trial and error. Any game you play—ever—you will probably suck at it in the beginning. And you will fail many times. But strangely even if you will probably not feel so bad about it.  

So let's say you are playing a super hard game and you're really struggling and you're like, I lost again! But then you say, now I know what I'm going to do next. And you try again. Whereas in real life you might fail and be depressed about it and not try again because you think, I'm not good at this. In games, you are in the state of flow and you still have confidence. It's a strange but lovely thing.

Mozilla is presenting a Maker Party series of events. Find out how you can be involved—to attend an event, make something online to share with the community, and/or create your own event and teach or learn with your peers.

Source: http://www.good.is/posts/five-ways-that-games-are-more-than-just-fun

Seeking communities

By Paul Born

"The Seeking Community is organizing around three themes: enjoy each other, care for one another, and work together for a better world. To enjoy each other is build the social capital and resilience between us. The premise of social capital is that resilient relationships are the glue that binds us. If we know each other well enough and enjoy each other’s company, we will be more likely to look out for one another and care about their well-being.

When mutual acts of caring happen, you will most often find a deep sense of belonging. There seems to be a connection between giving and receiving, caring and feeling cared for. Jeremy Rifkin’s book The Empathic Civilization has inspired us greatly. As humans, our ability to share in another’s plight connects us. Empathy is innate and natural.

To combat our fear, we can simply gather with others to first make sense of the worry and secondly, to work together to improve the condition. However, we do not want to organize against others and to allow our fear to drive our response. Instead, we want to unite our altruistic intentions, a process we call collective altruism to better the conditions around us. The joy of working together for a better world in this way opens us not only to others but to each other.

We all have many communities in our lives and that we have a choice about how deep or shallow our experiences of community are. Living in a neighbourhood means you live in a community. Waving to your neighbour as you drive into your garage may be all the community you want—this is a shallow experience. On the other hand, inviting your neighbours to join together with you and each other in friendship is a deeper experience. Community, I say, is not an option, but the experience you choose is."

Source: http://communities.ic.org/articles/1662/Seeking_Community

The Rise of Social Media and The Sharing Economy

Written by Sean McColgan on December 1, 2010

• http://www.promotionalcodes.org.uk/frugal-blog/21058/the-rise-of-social-media-collaborative-consumption/

 Are we in the midst of a shift away from the hyper-consumption of the 20th century to an age of shared product usage and reduced sole product ownership?

In todays blog post we delve into a recent study on “the sharing economy” by the Latitude Group and Shareable Magazine. The study reviews future consumption trends,  one of them being Collaborative Consumption.

What is Collaborative Consumption?

Collaborative consumption re-focuses the motivation around consumer goods to encourage models of sharing, swapping, lending, trading, saving or renting.  The concept, championed as: “a new socio-economic ‘big idea’, in: “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption” by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, promises a revolution in the way we look at products and the way we consume. The idea is concurrent with the environmental zeitgeist and thoughts of sustainability coupled with an eye for economic frugality in the wake of the global meltdown.

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<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/promotionalcodes.ae/collab-consumption-infographic.png" title="The Rise of Social Media and Collaborative Consumption"><img width="600" border="0" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/promotionalcodes.ae/collab-consumption-infographic.png" alt="Collaborative Consumption"/></a><br/><a href="http://www.promotionalcodes.org.uk/21058/the-rise-of-social-media-collaborative-consumption/">Collaborative Consumption Infographic</a> By <a href="http://www.promotionalcodes.org.uk">Promotional Codes</a>

What makes Collaborative Consumption so viable is its compatibility to technology, which is creating a movement on a scale never seen before. Collaborative Consumption is accessible to everyone, and is a game-changing opportunity to transform businesses by creating greater flexibility and less dependence on ownership rather than availability. On a personal level, if you’ve used Zipcar, donated or benefitted from Freecycle, or thought about the benefits of renting your property on AirBnB, you are already part of the rise of Collaborative Consumption.

From the traction Collaborative Consumption has already created it looks like it will continue to grow and evolve to outstrip previous models of consumption. Most importantly, Collaborative Consumption is making us think and challenge what we consume and the way we consume it. Ideas of ownership and assumed identity from product purchases may change from a personal to global perspective highlighting the importance of the use, design and wear of the product as a higher necessity. New marketplaces such as Zilok, thredUP and Bartercard are placing the power in “peer-to-peer” transactions, potentially making them the default channel for the way people exchange. The result could be corporate to grassroots power shift in product exchange.

Social sustainability - Create strong communities

• http://www.berkeleygroup.co.uk/sustainability/socialsustainability


BG Socail Sus Essay PART1

BG Socail Sus Essay PART2

We need to build a lot more homes in Britain, urgently. But you cannot separate this issue from the social question of what kind of places we want to create. The physical and social fabric of a community are inextricably linked.

The problem is that we are much clearer and more sophisticated when it comes to addressing the former. We know how to deliver good quality homes and assess their design quality and environmental performance. But talk about the social dimensions of new housing and the conversation quickly gets confused. People use words like cohesion and resilience which mean very little in practice.

This is a fundamental concern because of the National Planning Policy Framework.The NPPF has given us a presumption in favour of sustainable development. That's good. But if we cannot define what we mean by sustainable development, how does it help local authorities make quick decisions with confidence? This report is our first attempt to solve the problem. We have created a framework which defines social sustainability and how you measure it; and we have tested it on four Berkeley developments built over the last ten years.

It is not yet the finished article but it is well on the way to providing developers and planners with a way to prove that we can deliver a lot more than housing. We can help to create strong communities which offer people a great quality of life, now and in the future.

Further details of our social sustainability framework can be found in the review below:
Social Sustainability - Creating Strong Communities - Part 1 (PDF Download)
Social Sustainability - Creating Strong Communities - Part 2 (PDF Download)
Social Sustainability - Creating Strong Communities - Appendices (PDF Download)

Planning for Healthy Living: the Next Challenge

by Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard

http://www.livablecities.org/articles/planning-healthy-living-next-challenge

It is common today to talk about health only in terms of physical health. The “Active Living” program is often considered the solution to all health problems. In fact, even as cities enact “Active Living” programs to solve obesity, they discover the programs are ineffectual if the society is fragmented or the individual is marginalized. Social health is the foundation for physical health. This has serious implications for planning and urban design. A healthy city must have a healthy "social immune system".

Humans are social beings. Contact with family, friends and social circles is not just pleasurable, it is essential. An individual’s very sense of self is shaped and maintained through social life. The quality and quantity of social interaction and sense of belonging strongly influence physical and mental health (Baum and Ziersch 2003; Warr et al. 2007; Poortinga et al. 2007; Cohen et al. 2008; Echeverría et al. 2008; Beard et al. 2009; Dahl and Malmberg-Heimonen 2010).

Social Isolation

Suburban environments do not provide sufficient opportunity for positive social life. We began to see evidence of this in ‘50s when depression became common among stay-at-home housewives and valium was thought to be the solution. Now we see it in the prevalence of psychological and social problems suffered by children, youth and elders that echo the symptoms of social isolation. Dangerous, fragmented inner city neighborhoods exhibit similar symptoms of ill health, related to the isolation of individuals in the fragmented built, and social fabric.

High-rise housing has been associated with greater rates of juvenile delinquency (Gillis, 1974), greater feelings of alienation (McCarthy D & Saegert, S. 1978), and more depression among young mothers (Richman, 1974). Gifford (2007) provides a comprehensive review of the literature on the effects of high rise housing on children, mental health, social behavior, crime, and suicide. As he summarizes, “the literature suggests that high-rises are less satisfactory than other housing forms for most people, that they are not optimal for children, that social relations are more impersonal and helping behavior is less than in other housing forms, that crime and fear of crime are greater, and that they may independently account for some suicides.”

Harlow (1964) dramatically raised awareness of the effects of social isolation. Rhesus monkeys, isolated at birth, developed signs of depression, violence and self-immolation. They developed “autistic” behavior, “repetitive stereotyped movements, detachment from the environment, hostility directed outwardly toward others and inwardly toward the animal's own body, and inability to form adequate social or heterosexual attachments to others when such opportunities are provided in preadolescence, adolescence, or adulthood” (Cross and Harlow, 1965).

Partial social isolation, where they could see and hear other monkeys but had no physical contact, resulted in blank staring, repetitive circling, and self-mutilation. They were helpless in a social environment because they had not developed social skills.  When placed with normally raised monkeys they were shunned, bullied, or became violent. Many never learned the social skills necessary to become integrated.

Human beings react in similar ways. Indeed, one of the most serious punishments we can inflict is solitary confinement, which can result in serious existential crisis (Grassian, 1993), and deterioration of mental (Kernes, 1998) and physical health. Prison studies have shown that solitary confinement leads to physical illness, mental anguish, violence, terror, even suicide (Grassian, 1993). Over time, symptoms experienced by isolated prisoners are “likely to mature into either homicidal or suicidal behaviour” (McCreary, 1961).

Elderly

Breakdown in community social life has particularly serious health consequences for elders. An increased risk of ill health and death exists “among persons with a low quantity, and sometimes low quality, social relationships.” (House et al, 1988;)  According to Cohen (1988) and Berkman (1995), lack of social ties or social networks predicts mortality from almost every cause of death. According to Berkman et al (2000), “The power of these measures to predict health outcomes is indisputable”.

With insufficient or negative social interaction elders especially are vulnerable to suffer loneliness, low self-esteem, social anxiety and depression (House et al, 1988; Hawe and Shiell, 2000; Cohen-Mansfield and Parpura-Gill, 2007). Bellah et al (1985) proposed that without a meaningful sense of connectedness to others, and without a clear involvement in a meaningful social fabric, individuality and life itself lose meaning. As Durkheim (1897; 1951) proposed, the underlying reason for suicide is lack of social integration to a supportive group.

In early studies of schizophrenia, Faris (1934) observed that insufficient and unsatisfactory social interaction can lead to further withdrawal. One study found support for the hypothesis that the “shut-in” or “seclusive” personality, “generally considered to be the basis of schizophrenia, may be the result of an extended period of ‘cultural isolation’, that is, separation from intimate and sympathetic social contact”. He adds that “seclusiveness is frequently the last stage of a process that began with exclusion or isolation which was not the choice of the patient” (p. 159).

Social isolation and neighborhood fragmentation proved an involuntary death sentence for hundreds of elderly during the 1999 Chicago heat wave. Klinenberg (2003) found that disproportionately high numbers of elderly deaths occurred in neighborhoods “dominated by boarded or dilapidated buildings, rickety fast-food joints, closed stores with faded signs, and open lots” filled with “tall grass and weeds, broken glass and illegally dumped refuse…”  In these areas, elders lived in isolation, afraid to go onto the street, and far from people or places that could help them survive the heatwave.

In an adjacent, equally poor neighborhood, elders were protected in the heatwave. “First, the action in and relative security of the local streets pulled older people into public places, where contacts could help them get assistance if they needed it. Second, the array of stores, banks and other commercial centers in the area provided senior with safe, air-conditioned places where they could get relief from the heat. Seniors felt more comfortable in and are more likely to go to these places, which they visit as part of their regular social routines, than the official cooling centers that the city established during the heatwave…. The robust public life of the region draws all but the most infirm residents out of their homes, promoting social interaction, network ties, and healthy behavior.”

Children

Sprawl has created a world in which children have fewer friends than ever before. The absence of accessible, lively public places where children can meet, forbidden to play on the street, and under strict instructions to stay in the house, teens spend more time alone – 3 ½ hours per day – than with family or friends (Eberstadt, 1999). With long work hours, long commutes, and long drives to run simple errands, parents leave kids “home alone”.

Most time alone is spent interacting not with a living world, but with technology, where children are exposed to and shaped by the dysfunctional and violent role models presented in the “virtual” world. (Lennard and Crowhurst Lennard, 2000). As Hochschild (1997) reports, “children who were home alone for eleven or more hours a week were three times more likely than other children to abuse alcohol, tobacco or marijuana.”

“Spending extensive time alone can be stressful. Young people report having lower self esteem, being less happy, enjoying what they are doing less, and feeling less active when they are alone.” In considering the social consequences of “children raising themselves”, Eberstadt comments, “One does not have to read Durkheim to see the isolation writ large in these numbers, or to speculate about the effects of such endemic isolation on a chronically melancholic adolescent temperament” Eberstadt (2001).

When children lack social contact, they do not learn the social skills needed to maintain health and well-being throughout life, and to strengthen resilience in avoiding social pathology. Positive social interactions, membership in a social support system and a sense of belonging protect and promote good health (House et al, 1988).

In the US today, children are not experiencing the community social support they require for healthy development and success in life. Moreover, all aspects of child development benefit from positive social contexts within which this learning is embedded. Too many children lack the experience of belonging to a supportive complete community and will therefore not be able to pass this knowledge on to the next generation (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).

Shyness

Given the lack of real social networks, it is no surprise that children and adolescents find difficulty in social situations. Shyness is increasingly treated as a medical problem, termed “Social Anxiety Syndrome”, for which medications are often prescribed – though these occasionally lead to violence and suicide.

Lynn Henderson (Henderson and Zimbardo, accessed 2008), Director of the Palo Alto Shyness Clinic, maintains that “this rise in shyness is accompanied by spreading social isolation within a cultural context of indifference to others and a lowered priority given to being sociable, or in learning the complex network of skills necessary to be socially competent.” She proposes this may be “a warning signal of a public health danger that appears to be heading toward epidemic proportions.” Lack of real life social skills may also lead young people desperate for some form of social contact into inappropriate, predatory or damaging exchanges in technologically mediated social networks.

Depression among adolescents

In the US, 8.3 percent of adolescents suffer from depression (Birmaher et al, 1996). Since young people with limited social skills do not know how to solve problems through negotiation and discussion, they may act self-destructively, particularly if they are being bullied and made to feel worthless. Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for children aged 10-14 (Friday, 1995). 60% of high school students reported having considered suicide, 9% reported having tried (AAP, accessed 2011).

Bullying

Combative youth lacking social skills to resolve differences, and needing to increase their self-esteem may be violent towards others, especially towards those who are different and who lack social skills to defend themselves. A recent study showed that 29 percent of the students who responded to a survey had been involved in some aspect of bullying (NICHD, accessed 2011). “People who were bullied as children are more likely to suffer from depression and low self esteem, well into adulthood, and the bullies themselves are more likely to engage in criminal behavior later in life” (Alexander, accessed 2011). School shootings are committed by “adolescent outcasts” (Eberstadt, 2001). Gang warfare provides youth a sense of membership, and a feeling that their existence is of significance to others. Homicide was the 2nd leading cause of death for young people aged 10 to 24 years old (CDC, 2010b).

Stanley Greenspan (1997) warned, “as children become more alienated from the lives of others… we can expect to see increasing levels of violence and extremism and less collaboration and empathy.” He emphasizes that children need “to grow up amid a network of close interactions with adults.” Until recently, he observed, “even in cities, families spent their days mostly within the compass of neighborhoods one could easily traverse on foot… Ordinary life thus naturally and routinely provided the conditions that the complex human nervous system needs to fulfill its potential.”

It has been suggested that “In Western societies, we have perhaps lost sight of the crucial role of social support in preparing children for their adult roles. Families are often fragmented and socially isolated, relationships transient, and the roles of parents, schools, and other institutions unclear and discontinuous. … there are many Western children and adolescents for whom the discontinuities are defeating, and who fail to make the transition from childhood to competent adulthood for lack of continuous and coherent social support.” (Tietjen, 1989)

Social immune system

Positive social interactions, membership in a social support system and a sense of belonging protect and promote good health. It has been found that social capital protects against negative health outcomes and mortality (Berkman & Syme, 1979; House et al 1988). For people of all ages, physical and mental health is improved by face to face interaction and membership in a community (Resnick et al, 1997). It is through frequent informal face-to-face interaction that social ties develop (Greenbaum, 1982).

Circles of friends and familiars form a “social immune system” to buffer stress, improve coping, and protect health. Social support prevents isolation, improves psychological well-being through being valued, receiving signs of love, and knowledge that help is there if needed. Integration in a social network produces positive psychological states (Cohen et al, 2000): it fosters self-esteem, self-assurance, sense of security and well-being (Berkman and Glass, 2000). Social circles “maintain, protect, promote and restore health” (Nestmann and Hurrelmann, 1994).

Kawachi and Berkman (2000) conceptualized three pathways through which social capital could affect health at the neighborhood level: access to services and amenities, psychosocial processes, and health-related behaviors. The significant psychosocial processes were refined by Berkman et al (2000) as: a) Social support, meaning emotional, instrumental and informational support; b) Social influence, i.e. the general consensus within a social network about healthy behavior, values and norms, i.e what Erickson (1988) called “normative guidance”; and c) Social engagement: “Getting together with friends, attending social functions, participating in occupational or social roles, group recreation, church attendance” etc. These ties give meaning to an individual’s life and a sense of being attached to one’s community.

It is through frequent informal face-to-face interaction that social ties develop (Greenbaum, 1982). Frequent meetings and greetings in the public realm allow people to become familiar with one another, to “learn one another’s stories” (Berry, 1994) which builds trust and caring. Higher levels of trust in a community are associated with lower rates of most major causes of death, including heart disease, cancers, infant mortality, and violent deaths, including homicide (Kawachi et al, 1997). Kawachi and Berkman (2001) analyzed the varied mechanisms by which social ties contribute to mental health.

At the neighborhood level, Lochner and colleagues found that social capital, as measured by reciprocity, trust, and civic participation, was associated with lower neighborhood mortality rates after adjusting for neighborhood material deprivation (Lochner, Kawachi, Brennan, & Buka, 2003).

Mental health improves when people feel less lonely or isolated (Beard et al. 2009; Maas et al. 2009a; Maas et al. 2009b; Odgers et al. 2009; Berry and Welsh 2010; Yang and Matthews 2010). Children as well as adults need to feel they “belong” within a community (McMillan and Chavis, 1986).

Children and youth

Good social skills, and the ability to take pleasure in social interaction are fundamental to maintaining good health, to all aspects of child development, and to achieving success and well-being later in life (Levine, 2002).  Social skills do not develop automatically. They are learned in the community social contexts in which children are raised. They learn this through observation of how adults around them behave, and by reenactment of the same behavior.

Children must learn the skills of making friends, and of maintaining friendships. They must learn how to interact with people very different from themselves – involving the ability to understand a person’s character, and to distinguish between “friend” and “foe”. “The more varied and reciprocal these interactions, the richer will be the individual’s self-image and the more comprehensive her consciousness” (Greenspan, 1997).

For adolescents, supportive relationships with adults in the community are particularly valuable in preventing psychological harm from stressful life experiences that place a burden on the mental and physical health of children and youth (Rutter, 1983). Social support helps children to develop resilience and to successfully cope with stress (Garmezy, 1983; Werner and Smith, 1982). Youth in dysfunctional settings who have one good relationship are at lower risk of psychiatric disorder (Rutter and Giller, 1983). When comparing communities with high rates of healthy youth to communities with low rates, the healthy youth were found to be better connected to a variety of social systems (Blyth and Leffert, 1995). Leffert et al (1998) emphasize that “young people need multiple constructive experiences and supportive, caring relationships across the many contexts in which they interact” and the effects of these interactions are cumulative in preventing adolescent risk behavior.

For adolescents, supportive relationships with adults in the community are particularly valuable in preventing psychological harm. This is especially true for vulnerable adolescents with few personal assets (Blyth and Leffert, 1995). African American youth, especially adolescent girls, who have neighbors who look out for them are less likely to report feeling depressed than adolescents in less supportive neighborhoods (Stevenson, 1998). This is also true for adolescents in high risk neighborhoods.

Adults & elders

The opportunity for social interaction, companionship, people-watching, and a “friendly neighborhood” were reported as reasons why adults chose to walk in their neighborhood, whether to shop, run errands, recreate, or simply to get exercise (Ball et al, 2001; Giles-Corti and Donovan, 2002; Booth et al, 2000; Ståhl et al, 2001; Humpel et al, 2002). Indeed, as Ståhl reported in a study of adults across six countries, “The social environment was the strongest predictor of being physically active.” More active adolescents considered that the social environment and neighbors with recreational facilities are associated with higher levels of physical activity (Mota et al, 2005). Social support for physical activity among adults (Eyler et al, 1999;  Castro et al, 1999; Corneya et al, 2000) and among college students (Leslie et al, 1999) is a strong correlate of physical activity.

Social capital at the neighborhood level, as measured by reciprocity, trust, and civic participation, is associated with lower neighborhood mortality rates (Lochner et al, 2004). As one interviewee recorded by Altschuler et al (2004) reported: “I feel that my neighborhood contribute(s) to my health, and it does so in many ways. (If) something, an accident happens and I break my leg in my house I know my neighbors will come to my aid. (But) I think that over time even a greater impact is having a sense of belonging and a sense of neighbors that I trust around me helps reduce anxiety and it’s good for my mental well being.”

Numerous recent studies have supported the thesis that a sense of belonging is an influential determinant of mental and physical health (Wilkinson, 1996, Hawe and Shiell, 2000; Baum and Ziersch, 2003; Ogunseitan, 2005; Warr et al., 2007; Poortinga et al., 2007; Cohen et al., 2008; Echeverría et al., 2008; Beard et al., 2009; Dahl and Malmberg-Heimonen, 2010).

Communities with high collective efficacy, i.e. “mutual trust and a willingness to intervene in the supervision of children and the maintenance of public order” (Sampson et al, 1997) generally experience low homicide and violence rates and low levels of physical and social disorder, while neighborhoods with low collective efficacy suffer high rates of violence and significant physical and social disorder (Earls, 1998). A functioning neighborhood community in which people take some responsibility for others helps children to develop positive social skills, even in neighborhoods with problems of high vandalism and crime (Earls, 2005), and it helps elders to continue to live a normal, healthy life in their community.

Intergenerational community

Peter Benson (2006), President of the Search Institute observed, “Instead of embedding our children in webs of sustained relationships, we segregate them from the wisdom and experience of adults, raising them in neighborhoods, institutions, and communities where few know their names. Instead of celebrating them as gifts of energy, passion, and hope, we view them with suspicion in public places and places of commerce and deny them meaningful roles in community and civic life.”

He recognized that the key problem that thwarts these efforts is that our physical environment does not support community, and adds, “If there were only one thing we could do to alter the course of socialization for American youth, it would be to reconstruct our towns and cities as intergenerational communities. Cross-generational contacts would be frequent and natural.”

Healthy Urban Fabric

To support a healthy immune system, we must rebuild the compact, mixed use built urban fabric characteristic of traditional towns. Here, people’s paths cross in multiple situations – on the way to work or school, at the market or running errands, at a “Third Place” or relaxing -- and in different social contexts – alone, with family members, friends or business associates. Community members' normal everyday lives overlap. Meetings may lead to introductions that expand social networks. This promotes resilience in the community's social immune system.

A significantly greater sense of community is found in mixed use neighborhoods (Nasar and Julian, 1995; Leyden, 2003, Lund, 2002). The availability of local shops and restaurants is seen by residents to be health promoting. “The provision of decent housing, safe playing areas, transport, green spaces, street lighting, street cleaning, schools, shops, banks, etc. impacts upon participation in that their presence facilitates social interaction and a ‘feel good’ sense about a place.” (Baum and Palmer, 2002). Mehta (2007) emphasized additional factors supportive of social interaction, such as hospitable commercial streets, mixed use streets with shops and restaurants , wide sidewalks and a personalized public realm. As Cozens and Hillier (2008) stressed, it requires a great many more factors than simple street layout to create a neighborhood that fosters social interaction.

Frank et al (2004) showed that the greater the degree of land use mix, the less time adults spent in cars and the lower the rate of obesity. Small city blocks, street connectivity, mixed land uses and proximity of shops are associated with an increase of walking (Cervero and Duncan, 2003; Duncan and Mummery, 2004; Frank et al, 2005).

Dangerous settings discourage individuals from building social ties (Evans, 2006). Public places must be designed to feel safe as well as to prevent criminal activity. This is achieved by encouraging a sense of ownership, ensuring eyes on the street, maintaining active use of the space and surrounding buildings, and controlling access (Crowe, 2000). Even a courtyard in an apartment building can provide some support for a significantly greater development of community among residents than exists in an apartment building without a courtyard (Nasar and Julian, 1995).

Style of housing and land use patterns have been found to affect social networks (Cattell, 2001) and thereby to affect health (Macintyre et al., 1993; Macintyre and Ellaway, 1998; Macintyre and Ellaway, 1999; Macintyre and Ellaway, 2000). Their data showed a strong link between social interactions and ‘local opportunity structures’—‘socially constructed and socially patterned features of the physical and social environment which may promote health either directly or indirectly through the possibilities they provide for people to live healthy lives’ (Macintyre and Ellaway, 2000), p. 343]. They argue that: “Social capital is often seen to be inherent in social interactions and social relations, but we would like to suggest that these might be facilitated by local opportunity structures, often of a mundane kind.” (Ibid, p. 169]

Williams and Pocock (2010) emphasize that the more informal “third places” there are in a neighborhood, the greater the opportunity for serendipitous social interaction that can lead to caring relationships and social capital. They also stress that people of different age groups need different kinds of places that facilitate unplanned meetings. Some third places such as cafes and bars cater to specific population groups (adult drinkers, those who can afford to eat there) and some exclude children. Pendola and Gen (2008) demonstrated that neighborhoods with main streets have a significantly higher sense of community than exists in high density neighborhoods of suburban style neighborhoods without a main street. Of still greater value for community social life that includes children and youth are central public plazas open to all.

Public space design

The key element is the public realm, specifically, the availability of community squares that support positive face-to-face social interaction between young and old. The intrinsic value of personal social contact consists in the boost to self-esteem, pleasure, and sense of well-being associated with eye contact, being acknowledged and confirmed by another human being, emotional reciprocity, an “authentic” encounter, and knowing others are concerned and interested in one’s well-being (Buber, 1965). “The unavowed secret of man” stressed Buber (1967) “is that he wants to be confirmed in his being and his existence by his fellow men and that he wishes them to make it possible for him to confirm them… The architects must be set the task of also building for human contact, building surroundings that invite meeting and centers that shape meeting.”

When located at the heart of a mixed-use neighborhood, with a farmers market, surrounded by shops serving daily needs, and a residential population overlooking the square, these places are powerful catalysts in building community, and the social support systems that protect health (Crowhurst Lennard and Lennard, 2008). Successful plazas are places people need to visit, or pass through on a frequent basis to go shopping, to go to the market, or to go to work. Only this level of use by a local community can generate the high degree of community life required to develop inclusive community ties. 

Conclusion

In the Netherlands, where recent declining health levels have been linked to decrease in social contacts, public health researchers have called for “a more developed and detailed governmental policy to promote community” (De Vos, 2003). In North America, I would suggest, we would be wise to follow suit.

If we want to improve physical and mental health, reduce social pathology, and strengthen community “social immune systems”, then we must rebuild our sprawling suburbs and inner city neighborhoods so that they support the development of face-to-face interaction and community in traffic-calmed streets and lively neighborhood squares.

All the elements necessary to successfully foster social life and community are outlined in the IMCL “Principles of True Urbanism” (Crowhurst Lennard and Lennard, 2004) and discussed in IMCL publications such as Livable Cities Observed (Crowhurst Lennard and Lennard, 2000) and Genius of the European Square (Crowhurst Lennard and Lennard, 2008).

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