What comes to your mind when you hear the word “community?” Since you’re a blog reader, you may immediately think of the growth of online communities . . . virtual spaces rather than geographic places.
This week MCF is all about communities. On Friday we’ll convene nearly 100 representatives of Minnesota community foundations at a conference on Leadership: Evolving Roles in Your Community. Next week our Fall edition of our print newspaper, Giving Forum, will hit snail mail boxes; its featured content explores how community philanthropists can lead and collaborate for good. The issue also profiles several of our 41 community foundation members, some of which serve a geographic area (such as the nine-county West Central Initiative) while others serve groups of people with common interests (such as the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota).
In the lead article in Giving Forum, Cindy Ballard, executive director of CFLeads, laments the loss of our traditional Main Street gathering places and challenges community foundations (and their nonprofit colleagues) to become the new leaders and conveners:
“Leadership, as we traditionally have experienced it from our community’s business and civic leaders, has eroded,” she explains. “The concept of the town hall meeting and the public square – what was quintessential America – does not exist anymore.”
Ballard asks, “Where are people from varying sectors meeting? Who will form the coalitions that will make things happen? Who will cross the sectors whose interests are connected to other groups?” The answer, she says, is community foundations. “They need to promote the ‘public space.’ They need to be that organization whose mandate is as broad as the community itself.”
The phrase “public square” conjures up historic images for me . . . a quaint New England town, the village green, an orator on an overturned soap box, an engaged crowd of onlookers. If those places are mere memories, what will our new public spaces look like?
Join the conversation: What’s your vision of “community?” In what spaces and places does your community function? Are your communities taking on new leadership roles, convening and connecting others for the common good?
- Wendy Wehr, MCF V.P. of Communications and Information Services
September 25, 2008 at 11:08 am
As an all-volunteer organization- we are grappling with increased regionalism in our communities across the state. Historically, we have been a place-based organization where people have gotten involved becuase they want to improve their local community. In the last ten years or so- we’ve seen a shift to a more regional focus- where a chapter in a small town may pull its members from the surrounding 5 towns and everywhere in between. For instance, we have a metro chapter where NONE of the members actually live in the town where the chapter is based.
This is challenging to get a handle on, but we are starting to see that this really ISN’T an issue for the local volunteer. Increasingly, people view community as a regional, statewide, or international collaborative sort of environment. It is challenging for an organization with a traditional structure to change and adapt in order to reflect that. Traditional models no longer match up with what is actually happening on the ground.
As an organization of volunteers stepping up and learning by doing, providing hands-on leadership development in a community, we talk a lot about the push and pull between the physical and virtual-how do we tie ourselves all together? As a statewide organization, we believe in the power of connecting all of our local volunteers together- over and over again it has been proven that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Community for us is increasingly about what connects all of our efforts as leaders around the state- and creating the safe space to learn from each other.