What is your major question regarding community building? #EduCommunity Answers (Part 5 of 5)

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.