Community Building Resources
For Healthy Integration of Individual Talents and Creativity With Group Endeavors
Community building harnesses individuals' talents and creativity in co-operation with others to build something no one alone could achieve. However, to be effective, an organization's participants must move to that point where they can lay aside agendas and pre-determined notions and work together, trusting and appreciating each others input.
From non-profit organizations, neighborhood projects to homeowner association boards, these community building resources can serve as an educational treasure trove to help "let's do it now" people start building healthy organizations as they are learning. Parents will find many of the techniques helpful to eliminating conflict in the family and root out unspoken family rules that can make life miserable.
| Resource | Resource Information |
|---|---|
Gene Sharp
|
Coming soon!
|
 
|
The Different Drum - Community Making and Peace by M Scott Peck In recounting his own experiences with communities and building communities, M. Scott Peck delivers a profound work that helps us understand the four stages of developing a true community. Since the early stages of community building include working through emotional upheaval, reassessing personal perspectives and working through chaos it is helpful to have The Different Drum as a guidebook. At the end of the book Peck gives ways for people to start their own communities. Given the Peck found "Joy is an uncapturable yet utterly predictable side effect of genuine community," and that we are capable of becoming a stronger force for beneficial change through community, this book can help you take the quantum leap into community building and realization. |
 
|
The Starfish And The Spider by Ori Brafman, explore the potent ability of decentralized leaderless movements to harness the creative power of individuals acting in co-operation with each other, either as an organization, business or social group. The book shows how non-attachment figures as a saving grace of spiritual groups since the authors found "The moment you introduce property rights into the equation [be they intellectual, physical, or otherwise], everything changes: The starfish organization turns into a spider." A good study of how "open-source" can be successfully utilized in organizations.
|
 
|
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter by Juanita Brown Cafe Conversations brings people together to have conversations whose context, process and content lead to groups planning, tracking and creating meaningful change in their schools, businesses and organization. Similar tot the "Starfish" analogy, these conversations have "coherence without control" - a focused creativity. The Cafe process has been used in many different cultures ...and in many different types of communities and organizations. It doesn't matter who the people are - the process works. It works because people can work well together, can be creative and caring and insightful when they're actively engaged in meaningful conversations around questions that count." |
  |
Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning by Chris Argyris This book helps groups overcome the organizational defenses - cultures that reward that paradoxical situation where in order to stay in the organization, one must act contrary to integrity and cover up errors in the name of loyalty, satisfaction and keeping the morale up - what government employees love to call plausible deniability to all errors. This book is a necessary guide for those seeking the path of just stewardship and do not want organizational defenses blocking the evolution and growth of their organization, regardless of how big or small their group is. |
 
|
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M Senge "Learning disabilities are tragic in children, but they are fatal in organizations" writes Peter Senge. Our old ways of learning, the school of hard knocks, only sets up organizations to fail - limiting us to solving future problems with solutions that worked in the past, but won't address current needs and situations. Senge's five disciplines enable groups to overcome group learning disabilities and shape a better future, for ourselves, our organizations and those we seek to serve.
|
 
|
Great Boss Dead Boss by Ray Immelman "How to exact the very best performance from your company and not get crucified in the process". Written in story form, Ray Immelman explains the foundations and attributes of tribes -how families, companies or any social organization interact. A handbook for creating healthy organizations and pinpointing the cause of unhealthy organizations. This indispensable book trains you to walk into any company or review any political speech and understand the whether the dynamics of creativity and growth or coercion and dysfunction are the covert or overt modus operandi. |
 
|
Leadership and the New Science Discovering Order in a Chaotic World by Margaret Wheatley This work addresses three forces at work in organizations: quantum physics, self-organizing systems and chaos theory. One more guide post on the road to working in groups with our eyes, minds and hearts wide-open and creatively scientific. Find the balance between the forces of order and change, creative self-direction and control, structure and flexibility, planning and innovation.
|
 
|
The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork by John C Maxwell The 17 Indisputable Laws correlates very closely to Immelman's findings in Great Boss, Dead Boss. There are basic rules, which, like them or not, hold true for every size of team, whether it is a married couple, a small book study group to a powerful earth-changing organization like the Worldwide Ashram. This is a book you can open to any page, read a few paragraphs, and figure out one more way to fine tune your approach towards your teammates...and yourself.
|
  |
Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future by Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, & Betty Sue Flowers "Drawing on the wisdom and experience of 150 scientists, social leaders, and entrepreneurs, including Brian Arthur, Rupert Sheldrake, Buckminster Fuller, Lao Tzu, and Carl Jung, Presence is both revolutionary in its exploration and hopeful in its message. This astonishing and completely original work goes on to define the capabilities that underlie our ability to see, sense, and realize new possibilities—in ourselves, in our institutions and organizations, and in society itself." "If you believe, as I do, that an organization is ultimately a human community, then nothing is more important than how we sense our future and act to create it together. This is something all creative business leaders know yet have found almost impossible to talk about - until Presence." |
 |
New Era Community by Agni Yoga Society Inc. Wisdom from the Eastern Adepts on building community and the role of education, harmony and cooperation in helping the evolution of the planet. "Community - cooperation - is the sole rational means of human living together. Solitude is the solution of the problem of life outside the community. All intermediate manifestations are different steps of compromise and are doomed to dissolution. People speak about an inherited theocratic power - the very construction is absurd. The words heritability and Theos are incompatible. And who will define the degree Theos? Only consciousness of cooperation - community - affirms the evolution of the biological process. |
  |
Synchronicity The Inner Path To Leadership by Joseph Jaworski Synchronicity is an inspirational guide to developing the most essential leadership capacity for our time: how we can collectively shape our future. Joseph Jaworski offers a new definition of leadership that applies to all types of leaders: community, regional, national, international, corporate, political. "Synchronicity illustrates that leadership is about the release of human possibilities, about enabling others to break free of limits - created organizationally or self-imposed. Although this book describes the author's personal journey, it contains profound messages about organizational learning and effectiveness." |