What is your major question regarding community building? #EduCommunity Answers (Part 5 of 5)
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3 min readMar 20, 2018
GETTING STARTED
Where do we start?
- Where to start?
- Where / How to start?
- How do people at various stages of community-building figure out next steps?
- A strategy for beginning the community building process — pitfalls and successes
- Where, why do communities most often get ‘stuck’?
- Many scattered ideas → in need of FOCUS
- What is the scope of the vision?
- How can I bring my vision to my local community?
- What can I do tomorrow to deepen community relations in my school?
Who do we work with?
- Need to understand my community BETTER
- Who to talk to / bring to the table
- Who to share my idea with and when?
How do we reach them?
- How do you find diverse interested people?
- Determining and approaching partners / members
- Need to be associated with community leaders
How do we work together?
- How do you build collaborative teams that push for greatness
- I want to learn how to build CONSENT even without CONSENSUS around tough issues
- How do you get everyone rowing in the same direction?
- Getting stakeholders to take the next step
- How do we include all stakeholders in creating results
- DISTANCE — How to pull people together
- How to build community investment and momentum? → More diverse stakeholders to the event
- Bringing (ALL) education community stakeholders together to address local and meaningful needs
Especially when there’s need to build buy-in?
- How can we pull people together who have been “assigned” to work together?
- How do you encourage people who are uninterested?
- How do you create buy-in from as much of your community as possible?
- How to engage an apathetic, complacent, and/or entitled community to desire and hunger for innovation in schools
- How to form communities in hostile political climates
LEVELING UP
What are tools and models for building community?
- What are some successful tools, models, for building community?
- What tools do you use in convening and activating the group
- How to balance organic, grassroots development with framework and structure to support and advance
How do we build community online?
- How to get more people engaged online
- Need help with building Twitter community
- Need tools for organizing and facilitating Twitter Chats
Get funded?
- Funding a non-profit
- FUNDING
Improve our events?
- How to improve consistent engagement / attendance of meetups
Influence policy?
- How can my community influence local and state school policy
REFLECTING ON THE PERSONAL
How do I take care of myself?
- How to focus your energy and time with so much work to be done
- TIME — I need more
- How to get the spark back
And what’s my own role?
- Do I launch a new thing or join someone/thing that is doing similar things?
- Do I launch this learning community on my own OR try to join existing versions?
FOCUSING ON EDUCATION
How do we build community in education specifically?
- How do we blur/remove boundaries on ACCESS to education
- How might we better engage folks in my community around Education?
- How to bring the community together on the issue of education in our community?
- What are sys. barriers to innovation in education? AND where are those barriers already broken? ← schools, districts, communities
With parents?
- Want to engage parent community in our brand new school from the beginning
- How do you build a stronger, more engaged PTA?
- How do I convince parents to make decisions that I can’t prove will help their kids?
With young people?
- How can I motivate kids to take care of their education… not just feeling that mommy and daddy will take care of that… me
- How do we encourage our students to reach out?
- Access to students from a private company?
With technologists?
- Ideas for engaging the tech sector in the training of welfare recipients to suit their tech needs
With educators?
- How to engage more DIVERSE educators in mixed-group (educators, ed tech, entrepreneurs, etc.) community?
See
- Part 1: What is education innovation?
- Part 2: How do you define community?
- Part 3: What type of community are you building?
- Part 4: How do you design for diversity, inclusion, and equity in your community?
The #EduCommunity Answers series transcribes answers to questions given to participants in Growing an Engaged Education Innovation Community, a SXSW EDU workshop by Jessica Falkenthal, John Baldo, and Deborah Chang.