Community building refers to the process of bringing people together to form connections, establish relationships, and develop a sense of shared identity and purpose. It involves creating a supportive and inclusive environment where people can come together to work towards common goals and address shared challenges.

Community building can take many different forms, depending on the context and the needs of the community. Some examples include:

Creating spaces for people to gather: This can involve establishing physical spaces like community centres, parks, or public squares, as well as virtual spaces like online forums or social media groups.

Facilitating communication and collaboration: Effective community building involves fostering open and honest communication between members, as well as encouraging collaboration and teamwork towards shared goals.

Providing opportunities for learning and growth: Community building can also involve providing educational or training opportunities for members to develop new skills and knowledge, which can help them better contribute to the community.

Promoting diversity and inclusion: Building a strong and resilient community requires recognizing and celebrating the diversity of its members and working to create a culture of inclusivity and mutual respect.

Addressing shared challenges: Finally, community building involves coming together to address shared challenges and work towards common goals. This can involve everything from organizing neighborhood clean-up events to advocating for policy change at the local or national level.

Overall, community building is about creating a sense of belonging and connection among members and empowering them to work together towards a shared vision for the future.

ChatGPT 29 March 2023

Have you been in a brainstorming session lately? In these sessions, we bring together a group of people to discuss a problem and ideate solutions until we come up with a list of potential options that we like. This is really good work for teams to do. It’s amazing what we can conceive when we gather people with diverse talents and perspectives. Unfortunately, this is often where the work stops. We have a dry erase board filled with ideas, but nothing changes in our work.

The tyranny of the urgent prevents us from moving ideas to execution. It is hard to do something new when our attention is constantly distracted by issues that require our full focus. But there is a reason a performance review is not called an “idea review.” Ideas happen all the time. But your leadership is not determined by the number or scale of your ideas. The real work involves execution. How do you bring the ideas to life? What does it take to fulfill the vision?

Execution can stall when we don’t track our progress. It is vital that you measure your movement toward your stated goal. How many people do you want to see in discipleship classes? By what date? What strategies will you use to communicate the goal? Without effective communication, people who need to be involved in executing the idea will not know what to do. But even if you are careful to take the necessary steps involved in execution, it’s important to expect resistance. New ideas lead to new plans — and people might not be excited to do something new. Be sure to plan for how you will work through resistance, because that might make the difference between a good idea and good execution.

Alban at Duke Divinity School. 15 May 2023. Aliaksandr Zadoryn / Canva