The 5 C’s of Community
How do you structure a community to promote accessibility, sustained engagement, and personal growth?
Sam here - I’m excited to share our first original post with y’all, which is all about the “how” of community-building. Since coming up with this simple framework when I was with ASAP, I’ve observed it in nearly every durable community group I’ve come across. I thought sharing it could be helpful–for active leaders of community groups, for those considering starting or leading them, or for community members who want to shape their groups. We’ll be back next Thursday with our usual roundup of articles, research, and practice.
What does it take to make a community group work?
This is a question I got a lot when I was leading the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP). It’s one I’ve been getting again more recently (probably because I’m writing and talking about these things too much). And it’s one I’ve thought about a lot, both while I was with ASAP and after I left. So, in today’s newsletter, I figured I’d share one of the ways I’ve attempted to respond to this question.
Before I get into it, a quick note about what I mean by community–here, I’m drawing on my experience running a community group that is place-based and in-person, serves a specific population (veterans, service members, and their families), and offers a specific set of activities (the arts, broadly defined). I’m not referring to a virtual group, a distributed network, or a vaguely defined constituency, or anything else along those lines.
From a community design perspective, I think about answering this question at three different levels:
Community/macro level: How do you structure the collection of programs, events, activities, and interactions that, as a whole, comprise a community?
Programmatic/meso level: How do you structure the arc of a specific program or initiative within your community?
Day-to-day/micro level: How do you structure the arc of a specific session of a program or activity?
In this newsletter, I tackle the first question (I may address the other two in future newsletters). I recognize that there have been several books and articles written on these questions. What follows is not the only answer–and it may well not be the right answer–but it’s the answer we arrived at after years of refining the ASAP approach based on our community members’ feedback. So, without further ado, I present to you, “The 5 C’s of Community.” My apologies in advance for those who prefer lists of three.
1) Compelling: What is the “hook” that will get people to participate?
The activities of your community should have a compelling angle that encourages your target constituencies to become involved. In short: you need to offer activities that people actually want to do. Religious communities have God, salvation, prayer, and the like. Non-religious communities don’t, so they must come up with another compelling angle.
Example: For ASAP, our hook has always been stand-up comedy–we typically received significantly more applications for our comedy class than we had space to accommodate. Historically, comedy created a cool, accessible, and culturally relevant entry point to our community for many veterans who weren’t necessarily interested in the arts or didn’t think the arts were for them.
2) Comprehensive: What are the different entry points into your community?
The activities of your community should be sufficiently comprehensive to promote accessibility and sustained engagement for your members. Depending on who you work with, comprehensiveness can take many forms, including the types of activities you offer, the structure of those activities, and where and when you offer them.
Example: At ASAP, our community members had artistic interests beyond comedy–that’s why we offered programs in improv, acting, storytelling, writing, and more. If you were a veteran interested in the arts, we offered an art form for you. And many service members and reservists couldn’t commit to a seven-week class. This is one of the reasons we hosted our weekend workshops–they allowed people to participate even if they couldn’t make a two-month commitment.
3) Commitment: What is expected of your community members?
Participating in community should involve a set of shared commitments–both amongst participants and between participants and the community group. What does the community group owe its participants? What do the participants expect of the community group? What do participants commit to one another? Without responsibility, reciprocity, and shared sacrifice, you don’t have a community–you have a transactional exchange of services.
Example: Participation in ASAP involved several shared commitments (more than I have space to write). For example, ASAP committed to train our instructors to deliver high-quality programs. Community members committed to attend the programs for which they signed up. And everyone–instructors, mentors, and participants–committed to support one another’s learning and growth within and across our programs.
4) Consistent: When and at what frequency can people expect to participate?
Your community should host consistent activities–those that community members can expect to participate in at some defined frequency. This allows community members to plan ahead and it engenders them with a sense of trust and reliability in the organization. As simple as it sounds, consistency is one of the key drivers of sustained engagement–without consistency, even the most enthusiastic community members can become disconnected.
Example: For ASAP, consistency took numerous forms–weekly classes hosted three semesters per year (spring, summer, fall), workshops hosted every weekend, and open mics and performances hosted on a monthly basis. Whether you were a new or existing community member, you could count on having consistent opportunities to participate in our programs.
5) Continuous: What avenues can you provide for continued engagement and growth?
The activities within your community should have some defined pathway for continuation. That’s because community members are often looking to grow through your community–by learning new skills, by connecting with and serving others, or by assuming leadership roles. Essentially, when someone completes an activity in your community, you need to be able to answer the question: what comes next?
Example: Alumni of ASAP classes had four key avenues for continuation: (1) enroll in the higher-level classes of our community arts partners; (2) participate in other ASAP classes or our weekend workshops; (3) perform in our open mics and community shows; and (4) train to become an alumni mentor or lead instructor for our classes. What’s next? We usually had several paths to explore.
What do you think? What’s worked from your experience, either as a community member or community leader? Are any of these principles unclear? Are we missing any C’s? Feel free to email us your thoughts or share them with us in the comments.