Communities may face the challenges listed below when attempting to state their spirit. The list is based on the questions suggested above to test a community spirit statement for wide and deep resonance. This section offers general suggestions for addressing these challenges through the selection and preparation of meeting participants.
Challenge: Understand what is meant by spirit
Ideas for Meeting the Challenge Through Selection and Preparation:
Offer examples from other communities and explain the importance.
Explain it concretely: (1) a catchphrase, (2) a short sentence, and (3) a longer explanation and even an illustration if time permits.
Note that although a community may want to acknowledge a history of discrimination and injustice, going forward it can unite in its aspirations to be inclusive and just in the future.
Challenge: Listen to people they disagree with
Ideas for Meeting the Challenge Through Selection and Preparation:
Select participants who, while advocates for various viewpoints, can engage effectively and respectfully with people with whom they disagree.
Allow time for them to get acquainted, with facilitators attentive to this goal during dinner, breakfast, etc. Help participants understand the importance of task.
Send ahead ground rules for the meeting that make participants comfortable with candid discussions. Keep the preparation materials light in tone.
Challenge: Creativity
Ideas for Meeting the Challenge Through Selection and Preparation:
Give participants time prior to the meeting to come up with their own ideas. Perhaps create a protected online site where they can begin sharing ideas with other participants and read ideas others submit.
Challenge: Understand the community’s special characteristics
Ideas for Meeting the Challenge Through Selection and Preparation:
Research these (history, traditions, etc.) and present the research in advance of the meeting. Invite participants who together have an ear to all communities of thought within the community.
Challenge: Optimism
Ideas for Meeting the Challenge Through Selection and Preparation:
Interview people for ideas for the community spirit and send out a few of these ideas before the meeting. Recruit participants who tend to be optimistic, even while acknowledging the reality of past and current failures.
Recruit some participants with stature, recognizing that stature comes in many different forms (“If they care enough to carve out the time, there must be some likelihood of success.”).
Challenge: Care enough
Ideas for Meeting the Challenge Through Selection and Preparation:
Research the current challenges for the community. Summarize them in preparation materials and explain how a community spirit might help.
Recruit participants who care about the community’s future.
Explain in advance to each participant the unique role that each individual will play.
Challenge: Working within the meeting timeframe
Ideas for Meeting the Challenge Through Selection and Preparation:
Give participants the explanatory materials and get them thinking about ideas before the meeting.
Size the group after considering both diversity of viewpoint/background and the amount of time required for a group that size to discuss the issues.
The remainder of this part of the guide offers more detailed suggestions for the selection and preparation of a group of participants, beginning with research that provides the context for that selection and preparation.
RESEARCH
Research inquiries that will facilitate preparation in the ways just described include:
- What are the current challenges for your community?
- What diverse communities, including communities of thought, exist within the larger community?
- What is unusual about your community in terms of history (include accounts of injustice and suffering but also moments of strength that the community might want to claim now as its aspiration for the future, for example), geography, traditions, and more?
- What are some ideas for a community spirit from elsewhere or those already being floated in your community?
In the illustration that follows, Vancouver, Canada explains how its aspirations rest on its history and its process for reaching consensus. Note that, unlike Orlando and Pittsburgh, Vancouver’s spirit does not emerge from a tragic incident.
Vancouver, Canada calls itself the Greenest City and lists its aspirations in this regard. Its Greenest City: 2020 Action Plan con- nects this community spirit to its history: “In the 1960s, Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood residents stopped the construction of a massive freeway into downtown that would have leveled their community and altered the shape of the city forever. Today, Vancouver is one of a very few cities in North America that does not have a major highway cutting through its core. And our city was one of the first in the world to recognize the importance and gravity of climate change. In 1990, the groundbreaking Clouds of Change Task Force recommended the city begin reducing its carbon dioxide emissions. Today, Vancouver has the smallest per capita carbon footprint of any city in North America. We have been able to achieve this in collaboration with our energyutility providers, senior levels of government, and innovators in the business and non-profit sectors who see new opportunity in responding to this challenge. Because of these achievements, Vancouver is quickly becoming a new green economy hub.”
Fortunately, volunteers and students can do much of the research bulleted above that might help to prepare participants in a meeting to articulate a community spirit. Here are some ideas for conducting the research:
- Interviews of individual or groups of residents can provide helpful information and have the added advantages that:
- Word of the interviews will begin building excitement about the community spirit initiative, and
- People may add personal stories that will illustrate and bring down to a personal level the community spirit that ultimately emerges from the
- Community meetings on other topics can provide a basis for observing what matters to residents and where there are divisions among communities within the community, as occurred in Orlando, Florida.
- A media search, particularly of archives, can suggest concerns and divisions that have occurred over time.
In Orlando, Florida, following the tragic shootings at the Pulse nightclub, meetings were held to learn about concerns in the community. Listening to representatives of mental health providers and Hispanic and gay communities, a local foundation staff member distilled from discussions a suggestion for an Orlando spirit that ultimately, with modifications, caught the imagination of others.
Historical examples can anchor an idea for the community spirit (e.g., past creative collaborations that produced businesses that are now booming, individuals who displayed determination and resilience in the face of discrimination, the community banding together in face of a natural disaster when hope seemed to be lost, and more), as illustrated in the example immediately below.
Over the years, public and private leaders in Columbus, Ohio, took pride in their behind-the-scenes discussions of differences, characterized by a Midwestern “niceness.” They called this the “Columbus Way,” an approach taught by some business schools. More recently, the Columbus Dispatch editorials began urging community leaders to broaden the Columbus Way conversations to include those not currently in the power structure – to extend the Columbus Way to all parts of the community.3
Acknowledging a history that includes tragic mistakes will be important for portions of the community still enduring the after-ef- fects. However, the remembrance can lead to despair as well. As Fred Rogers of “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” suggested, one can discuss a tragic error and its ongoing effects without producing despair if one “looks for the helpers” – feature those who worked in those dark times to create a better society in which everyone has the opportunity to flourish.4
Before 2010, Danville, Virginia often identified itself with a moment in 1865 when Danville served as “the last Capital of the Confederacy.” Now roughly half of Danville’s residents are white and half are African-American. Representatives of the community want to find a new identity that will build a “unified vision of the future and a cohesive strategy for moving forward.” To do so, Danville and the rest of the Dan River Community began working with the University of Virginia in 2013 to create a project called History United. The History United website documents stories, including those of suffering and the people who struggled to overcome past divisions. The process of documenting this shared history is designed to build the connections among the broader community that will be necessary to arrive at shared future aspirations. “The city is working to reclaim and rebrand who they are, while at the same time, being honest with the past,” explained Chad Martin, Director of History United and Vice Mayor of Martinsville, Virginia. “We had people of different backgrounds from the community doing blood work to learn their genealogy. A [Confederate] flagger and a civil rights leader discovered that they are related. This changed the conversation between them despite their different views on politics.”
Polling data can offer a sense of what proportion of the community hold particular values – useful information because the interviews and groups may not reflect the community proportionately. Twitter hashtags may yield information about community concerns and aspirations, as occurred in Orlando.
After the Orlando nightclub shootings, the Twitter hashtag #OrlandoStrong was used widely by residents to vent and offer encouragement. Reviewing concerns captured by the “#OrlandoStrong” hashtag gave Orlando leaders a sense of the values that could be used for a local identity.
SELECTION OF MEETING PARTICIPANTS
If you plan a one-day meeting to articulate the community spirit, you may have more stakeholders than you can realistically include as participants. Listing all of the stakeholders makes it easier to remember to involve them in some way during the larger process and ensure that their views will be taken into account during a meeting. You can begin a list of stakeholders during the research phase, updating the list as you learn more. Stakeholders include persons who variously:
- Care about the initiative;
- Will be affected by the spirit that emerges (perhaps classified by viewpoint or experience – e.g., conservative Republicans, recent immigrants, racial minorities, various religious affiliations);
- Are necessary to spreading the word about the community spirit (media, social media experts, public officials); Have expertise that will help to craft the community spirit (historians, survey experts, speechwriters);
- Understand whether particular communities within the community will support the community spirit (clergy of various faiths, former elected officials, advocacy group leaders, law enforcement);
- Will provide resources (foundations, businesses);
- Will influence how the community views the initiative (influential individuals from the various communities within the community, media, for example);
- Might denigrate the spirit if not involved; and
- Are community bridge builders (United Way, bar associations, Legal Aid, NAACP, Chamber of Commerce, agencies providing social services, YMCA/YWCA, for example).
For stakeholders not included in the one-day meeting, interviews and small group discussions may engage these stakeholders, allow you to distill for the one-day meeting participants how viewpoints within the community converge or differ, and demonstrate for the community the breadth of involvement in the initiative.
Keeping in mind the stakeholders and varied interests, you can help produce meeting success by inviting participants who, in addition to representing these viewpoints, can:
- Understand the task at hand (to come to consensus on a community spirit, not policy choices such as more investment in schools, though a community spirit may help people work on these policy choices);
- Listen carefully to people they disagree with; Be creative;
- Understand what is special about the community – its traditions, history, and more – and its current challenges; Represent, or at least understand, the perspectives of many different groups within the community;
- Have enough optimism or commitment to the community that they become engaged in the process; Care enough to have high aspirations for the result, and not just accept any result; and
- Achieve consensus on a community spirit within the time they are willing to devote.
When deciding whom to invite to the one-day meeting on your community spirit, you may face a tension between, on one hand, keeping the numbers small to help the group reach consensus during allotted time and, on the other hand, representing as many of these stakeholders as possible. One happy medium may be to maximize the number of viewpoints rather than try to assemble the number of participants holding a particular viewpoint that is proportional to their representation in the community’s population. If you maximize viewpoints and therefore lack proportionality, you may want to test the outcomes resulting from the meeting.