Learnings from Community Building: Despierta.
Back in 2016 I was really pissed off with the world. I had been around several “social movements” or impact related networks and was quite deceived in seeing that we carried on many practices of our patriarchical society along with us.
And I’m not talking about the superficial type of inequality, of course, but the subtle power dynamics that are so embedded in our culture (both in men and women). When I asked about gender inequality in a given network, the answer I usually got was that the network was “post-gender” or that this issue did not play a very significant role. I could only observe the contrary.
To me there is no systemic change possible without addressing gender inequality in depth. So without having any specific plan (first mistake, but there was a lot of emotion there, I was really angry), I started doing Feminine Leadership workshops in Barcelona: monthly gatherings on assertive communication, presence, negotiation skills, etc.
Out of this activity I met Minerva, a coach also working on fostering women’s equality with a strong focus on personal development.
In 2017 we had our first meeting to launch Despierta, a community that would create a space to allow women to develop themselves in the direction they wished to, free of social pressure.
Over the course of two and a half years, we organised a total of 30 workshops around a community of about 400 women. We talked about women in the labour market, sex, healthy relationships, marketing, communication, storytelling, money…
The endeavour proved much more challenging than we expected. An experience that reminded me, yet again, of the importance to work as long as possible on building a strong basis. It reminded be of being realistic about my priorities, my real goals and needs, to be true to myself and to others. All of this personal stuff that is so easily forgotten, but is at the heart of any personal project and that, in my opinion, gets magnified in social impact communities.
From these almost three years of activity I learned a lot, mostly about myself and quite a lot about community building, here I leave you with some of these learnings:
a) Top personal learnings:
1. Leave enough time for the Groundwork. A lot of time for the Groundwork, it’s rarely enough: My partner in this endeavour and I did not know each other before starting the Despierta community, but we clicked immediately.
We were both surprised on how easy everything seemed: very similar working culture, approach to life, opinions, tastes… it’s a great friendship we still preserve, but we realised too late that our approach on the community was completely different.
My colleague’s approach was very content-based, with an expectation to some income from it and with a closed governance.
Coming from Ouishare, my approach was much more experimental, networked-based and with an attempt to shared governance.
This looks so obvious now, but I wasn’t able to figure this out during the process. It was obvious that our approach to communities was very different, we kept trying to make it work through middle-ways that did not make any sense in the end. And I tried to convince myself that a more “start-up classic approach” would work for me as well. And yes, we did go through many business canvases and all sorts of blah blah methodologies.
I think we did not have the key painful conversations and we didn’t have the right practices in place to make this project sustainable for us.
What could we have done differently? I’ve experienced this many times already: you’re in a team you love, you think you’re talking about everything you should be talking about, you put regular team retrospectives in place, you fantasize that you have a good foundation…and then you realise that the foundation is not really that strong.
I’m trying to incorporate more and more the groundwork in my work and life. It’s not only about following a methodology to touch upon all the relevant points, it’s about diving deeply into it, giving time for what matters, having conversations on simple, yet powerful questions. And, most importantly, implementing practices that embody those agreements and conversation openers.
I’ve had groundwork as a main topic in my mind this year, because I feel its absence in almost every project I engage in. In our fast-paced society, we’re building projects on mud foundations.
2. Vulnerability culture (or lack of it): All the way from the beginning of our collaboration, I was afraid of losing a good friend. My fear prevented me from speaking up my mind. But I never said this (of course…). My colleague is a perfectionist, a hardcore one. I told her half-jokingly many times, but never with the assertion and pointing to the consequences that this had on us. She was doing most of the work, so who was I to tell her how to do things? How to tell her to invest less energy on actions I did not see as necessary? Back then, I thought I had said all of these things, and I did, but I know I wasn’t clear enough. It’s one of my pitfalls, I’m unclear because I want to be polite and I don’t want to hurt other people, but as Brené Brown would say, in reality, I’m being unkind. Clarity is an act of generosity. And I wasn’t.
3. Mentorship: After the first year, once we started moving from the in-person workshops to the online content, we started losing overview. We couldn’t see the forest anymore, only one tree and we were obsessed with it. And the more we thought about it, the bigger it became, we were so busy with that tree…An external person asking the right questions might have grounded us in crucial moments. I’ve been in mentorship programmes and it’s bullshit most of the time. I’m not talking about that, but about real good mentorship that knows how to ask the right questions. If we would have had a good vulnerability culture, we would have been able to do this on our own; but neither we evolved into a vulnerable culture nor did we look for a mentor, so we just had no perspective.
4. Host yourself to host others: So much wisdom in this short sentence. It’s so clear and understandable and yet so challenging to apply. Taking care of yourself is an additional job, the most important factor to be fully present, for me it’s still work in progress.
b) Top learnings on community building:
1. Minimal-viable-everything culture: We did apply the minimal viable product (MVP) approach in a great number of occasions, but we drained our energy with irrelevant stuff the community did not care about (a very beautiful website, several one-hour content videos, etc.). As said above, perfectionism took its toll on us way too often.
This is applicable to any start-up, project or organisation, but for community building this is all the more relevant because you have to adjust much more to what the community wants and needs. We should have probed with many little experiments and check where the energy of the community was. If there is no energy in the community, then you have to change direction and keep evolving with them. We did a take radical change of direction, but once it was too late.
2. Take care of the community core. A crucial step in community building is to be aware of who the engaged community members are. Identify them and support them. Connect them, enable them to undertake the actions they burn for, leave them space in the community governance so that they can make decisions autonomously. It’s not about telling them how great they are and giving them perks, it’s about creating a space for them to develop, to engage. For someone to take space, someone else has to leave room for it and that’s challenging, our habit is to take control and community building has little to do with that.
We did have a core group from quite the beginning of the community, they were the ones that supported us with a monthly membership fee, the ones we would usually ask for feedback to, that would come to the workshops every now and then, commented regularly on social media, etc.
But we never found a way to really involve them. At some point instead of producing all the content ourselves, we started getting nourished with the community’s expertise, that was a good step, but somehow we stayed on a sort of provider-client relationship, quite paternalistic, instead of a contributor approach.
3. What is actually community building? I do not believe in centralised communities. That’s not a community to me. Communities emerge and are decentralised by nature, there is always a source, one or several stewards that enable it, but its members have a say in what direction it should take.
Communities can also be designed as relatively centralised and that’s clear to me professionally, but for this personal initiative I should have stayed true to what I believe in.
Community building is as old as humanity, but in our current system I fear we’ve forgotten what it really means. We talk about the Airbnb community, community managers (!) and other distortions of that what is our natural way of connecting with each other.
There was also a very interesting dynamic I’ve seen many times already: confusing digital platforms as the base of a community.
How this applied to our context: Many of the women in the Despierta community wanted to promote themselves professionally. Many women get expelled from the job market because they’ve become mothers and need to reduce their working time, and so they land in job offers that are less attractive; others because of the glass ceiling, etc. So they look for a way out as self-employed. Promotion was key to them. They requested it and we fell into the trap of building some sort database with everyone’s skills and hashtags. A platform can support a community, but a community is not a platform.
4. The How creates the social glue, the Why makes sure action is undertaken long term.
Our community members loved the connections built in the workshops and the online calls, we put a lot of effort into it and it worked well. They wanted to be a part of it. That is the how, the being together.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to cnack the why till the very end. Why were we getting together? What did we want to achieve together? We had a purpose the two co-founders believed in, but it didn’t evolve with the community, we just gave it to them with the illusion of the good feedback we got. But it did not match their needs, these women (the ones we attracted) needed professional connections to survive as freelancers; in the end we did shift into that direction, but once there was no more energy left from our side.
We did very good work on how we were together, we just didn’t get to working on the why on time.
And this is how it went and 8 of the learnings I got from this valuable experience. Community building is highly energising, working on it is a privilege because it taps into one of the main sources of sense in this life: connecting to others. Yet, if it doesn’t go in the right direction, it’s extremely draining.
I still think it’s relatively simple if we understand the emerging nature of communities, if we listen deeply and if we really connect to and are sincere about our own needs and goals. Unfortunately, all of these three points are highly challenging in our society.
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There’s a lot more to community building, so I hope to keep putting my thoughts together to help me reflect on my learnings and continue the conversation with other people interested in this topic. If you’re one of them e-mail me at alicia@ouishare.net
