Why Building Community Is So Important?
Building communities is a crucial process that fosters connections amongst people and creates infrastructures for these connections to happen.
It’s difficult to come up with a unified definition of community, and this is why community building is so fascinating.
A community can be a virtual or a physical (or both) space where people sharing common interests, goals or/and experiences come together to share, connect, exchange and work towards shared goals.
While this is a very broad definition, perhaps event too vague, of what community is, it’s also enough for you to grasp the essential concept of community and to understand that community is a fluid entity, a virtual concept that can be actualized and put in place in many different forms, around every possible topic and through endless approaches and systems.
In whatever way you gather people together and whenever those people get the chance to exchange and connect, community spaces are born.
Why Building Community is so important?
COMMUNITY-BUILDING (CB) FOSTERS CONNECTION
We are humans and our socialization process (the way we are introduced to the social and cultural environments around us) happens within community spaces. These can be school, family, hometown, church, workplaces, etc.
People don’t like to feel that they are alone in experiencing what they experience and therefore, they seek to connect with other humans about things, experiences and topics that matter to them and may have in common with others.
In the modern world, more and more humans feel the need to create more meaningful connections, find and offer support to other humans with whom they can build relationships and systems of exchange.
Building communities is a crucial process that fosters connections amongst people and creates infrastructures for these connections to happen.
CB CREATES SPACE FOR SHARING
Building communities is a process that not only fosters connection amongst people, but it offers a collective space for experience sharing.
Community spaces — if designed through systems of safety, openness and good moderation — allow people to share their experiences and learn from one another.
The act of sharing becomes a very empowering practice that can turn into a source of motivation, inspiration, learning and support for the people in the community.
CB IS ABOUT COLLECTIVE LEARNING
The act of sharing can be a very empowering practice but also a major source of collective learning.
Community spaces call for ongoing exchanges between members, experience sharing that becomes knowledge sharing and often knowledge production systems.
People who feel safe to share what they know and are happy to involve others in this sharing process are the ones creating values by creating opportunities for collective learning.
CB ENGAGES WITH COLLECTIVE GROWTH
Collective learning means collective growth. Dialogues, community activities, open conversations, mutual support, knowledge sharing and experience sharing often translate into a process of collective learning and collective growth.
Community spaces offer opportunities for ongoing exchange. By getting multiple perspectives, opinions, experiences and expertise, people get the chance to advance their own knowledge and benefit from it for their own journey.
CB IS ABOUT EXPERIENCE
While it’s difficult to have a unified definition of community, it’s easy to affirm that community is defined by the experience the people make of it.
Community is the experience that the members make of it and how the community experience impacts them and help them grow. Community is the experience and experience is in the value that the community activities are able to provide.
Community building needs to focus on providing value-driven experiences that support the members to grow and transform.
CB ALLOWS TRUST-BUILDING
Community building practices contribute to creating spaces for people to strengthen their sense of trust with each other.
When it comes to businesses, organizations, product-based and service-based companies, community-building strategies and practices are crucial to building trust with their people, audience, users, clients.
Community spaces, knowledge and experience sharing, collective learning e joint efforts towards shared goals found the ground for a strengthened sense of trust and loyalty.
CB IS MOVEMENT FORMATION
Building communities is forming a movement. When people come together, they get stronger, louder and more visible.
Each community has the potential to amplify missions and causes and to set themselves proactively to organize mobilizations, activism programs, campaigns, or simple actions to engage with impact-driven transformations.
CB FOSTERS INNOVATION
Community spaces are collective spaces where a diversity of perspectives, backgrounds, experiences and opinions have a big potential to create innovation.
Many brains, souls, hearts and points of view working together result in higher chances to get brand-new solutions and approaches that can help coming up with innovative systems and answers to specific issues or challenges.
