Our work with the Community Canvas has allowed me to see the state of “community building” from a bird’s eye view. Through the Canvas and the Facebook group we started I met community builders from Australia, Singapore, China, India, the Middle East, allover Europe, Russia, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Canada and unexpected places across the US. On this journey I learned two simple things:

1) There are incredibly talented community builders allover the world. There are so many people who love bringing people together and who are good at helping them build trust and belonging. As far as I can…

Over the last two weeks I participated in several community retreats. At all of these gatherings the discussion circles with the full group took longer than they had been planned for and at the end of it people were still hungry to continue talking. People had a lot they wanted to say.

At first I felt exhausted by the people who would dominate the collective space, by speaking often and in long, winding monologues. It reminded me of the underlying, unspoken power dynamics, because the people who speak a lot tend to be men, often white men.

But then I…

A few weeks ago I was part of an inspired dinner conversation where one of the guests told us that many Canadian engineers — like himself — wear an iron ring as a proud marker of their profession and reminder of their work’s ethics.

I had never heard of that. As I was digging more into this story, I realized that this is an incredibly powerful community ritual, with a rich history and the flavor of a long gone era.

Here is what I learned (all sources via the Calling of an Engineer and Wikipedia)

• It originated in 1922 as…

A few weeks back I saw Ants Cabraal from Enspiral present at AIME 2019 in Melbourne. He gave a fabulous talk about how community can transform the ways we work together. One of his opening slides showed a big bonfire with people sitting around it and he reminded us that community and community building is as old as humanity. Ever since we learned about the power of the fire, we have been sitting around it, telling stories, building relationships, making sense of the world around us. …

I recently spoke with a UN agency who is building a global community of practitioners. In our conversations I was reminded of a particular image of “community” that I come across often in my client work:

• Community = an annual gathering
• Community = a digital social network
• And often the intersection of the two: Community = an annual gathering and a social network

This perspective then drives resource allocation conversations: if we want to improve the community, we should create a better gathering or increase the features of our social network.

I find this perspective limiting. I think nurturing a…

These insights come from user interviews in the last few months, the Canvas 2.0 survey and a 3 day workshop the team held in NYC in February 2019. We’d LOVE to hear any feedback or reflections you have, you can leave a comment below or email us at team@community-canvas.org. This post was collectively put together by our project team: Daniel Brooks, Chris Chavez, Erin Dixon, Michel Bachman, Sascha Mombartz, Sita Magnusson and myself.

Big picture reflections

• The current version of the Canvas feels overwhelming and intimidating, partially due to the number of themes and a lack of guidance on how to use it…

As we are working on the next iteration of the Community Canvas, an existential question keeps surfacing: can communities even be planned? My feeling is yes and no 🙂

No, communities can not be planned

• A community is a living being, not a machine that can be drawn up on a piece of paper and then be put together according to the plan. When we use the word “community”, really what we mean is the collective set of relationships and beliefs among a group of people that exists over an extended period of time. …

We have been working on the next version of the Community Canvas for the last couple of months and this post is a summary of the clarity we see on where we are headed. We’d LOVE to hear any feedback or reflections you have, you can leave a comment below or email us at team@community-canvas.org. This post was collectively put together by our project team: Daniel Brooks, Chris Chavez, Michel Bachman, Sascha Mombartz, Sita Magnusson and myself.

Project intention

Here is what we are sensing for version 2.0 of the Community Canvas:

• We believe we live in a disconnected world where communities…