10 Principles for Healthy Communities by Meg Wheatley
One of the main questions we keep coming back to in our work is: what makes a community healthy? What allows a community to thrive in the long-term? How can it regenerate and sustain over time? As part of that research, I recently came back to these 10 principles by Meg Wheatley, who’s been a leading thinker and writer at the intersection of community and social change for several decades.
The principles are:
1. People support what they create.
2. People act responsibly when they care
3. Conversation is the way human beings have always thought
4. To change the conversation, change who is in it
5. Expect leaders to come from anywhere
6. Focusing on what is working gives us energy and creativity
7. The wisdom resides within us
8. Everything is a failure in the middle
9. Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together
10. Generosity, forgiveness and love
Below are videos from her keynote at the NDS Queensland State Conference in where Meg explains each of the principles.
1 — People support what they create
2 — People act responsibly when they care
3 — Conversation is the way human beings have always thought
4 — To change the conversation, change who is in it
5 — Expect leaders to come from anywhere
6 — Focusing on what is working gives us energy and creativity
7 — The wisdom resides within us
8 — Everything is a failure in the middle
9 — Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together
10 — Generosity, forgiveness and love
—
Interested in getting regular community building insights in your inbox?
Every few weeks we send out a short email with 3–5 of our favorite insights, blog posts and articles about building meaningful communities. If you care about bringing people together, this might be for you. Sign up here.
