A band of courage

So, last night we had our Greater Manchester Community Gathering. What an amazing experience that was.

It’s really interesting how every time we come together we attract a core community and people who bring different things. Last night we had such a range of people there. We had a guy who works with big data and is a mathematician, then we had people with lived experience of care at home. We had people working in the health and care system and those who just wanted to get involved from the edges of the system. BUMPING up the difference in the room, led to some really interesting and action focused conversations.

For me the collaborate out loud communities are all about bring together people who work in formal spaces and informal spaces together in simple, surprising and social spaces. This diagram sums this up well.

We will be sharing our work on care at home soon but I wanted to use this blog to look at how we used bravery and bands of courage to encourage the community to be brave with their actions and aspirations.

What does it mean to be brave?

For me this picture sums up bravery….

It is taking an action that is outside your comfort zone, that you believe will take you forward in your mission and purpose. Below are two ways that we used bravery as a way of exploring care at home and our personal motivations and ambitions.

Loveyou2.org Notes

Inspired by Helen Sanderson who gave me one of these notes back in September, we have been exploring how we can use them to help build our community. There are a range of notes that are given out all over the world an you can find them at the address above. We used the notes that simply said ‘Brave is….’ and asked people to share hat bravery meant to them and brave actions they had taken that day. By doing this it allowed people to share personal stories, see connections and commonality and challenge their own concepts of bravery. This is a simple exercise that anyway can have a go at.

Bands of Courage

So in our case we had some glow band bracelets but these could be whatever you wanted them to be. We asked people at the end of our discussion to share the brave actions they were going to take and invited them to take a ‘band of courage’ as a symbol and reminder of their action. The photo above shows our community proudly showing their bands at the end of the session. There is a lot in people publically sharing their actions as this makes them more accountable to the group. There is also lots of evidence that rituals and symbols are effective ways of building communities, so this was just another simple way of doing this.

So, in essence we think that encouraging and supporting people to take the small and brave actions can take us a long way and we loved the passion, bravery and commitment in the room last night.