The Connected Community

 

From Collaboration to a Shared Operating Framework

Most communities are filled with people and organizations trying to do good.

Schools educate. Healthcare providers care for patients. Churches and faith communities serve families. Nonprofits respond to needs. Employers create opportunities. Coaches mentor young people. Arts organizations enrich community life. Governments provide essential services. Volunteers give their time, talent, experience, and resources.

And yet many of our most persistent problems remain.

Educational underachievement, poverty, homelessness, transportation barriers, healthcare disparities, addiction, domestic violence, workforce readiness, crime, trafficking, and social isolation do not fit neatly within the boundaries of any single organization.

They ripple through people's lives.

A transportation problem can become an employment problem. Lost employment can become an income problem. Reduced income can contribute to housing instability. Housing instability can affect school attendance, health, family stress, and opportunity.

A child struggling academically may be experiencing circumstances involving education, family stability, health, nutrition, transportation, housing, relationships, recreation, or economic conditions.

The organizations responding to these circumstances may all be doing good work.

But who can see the relationships among the work?

That question is at the heart of a new Community Mountain research paper:

The paper begins with a provocative proposition:

Communities don't necessarily suffer from a shortage of good organizations. They suffer from the absence of connective infrastructure between them.

Communities have spent decades learning to collaborate.

We create coalitions, partnerships, task forces, referral networks, community meetings, shared initiatives, and memoranda of understanding.

These efforts matter.

Research, however, suggests that collaboration alone does not reliably produce the population-level outcomes communities seek.

Perhaps that is because collaboration and connection are not quite the same thing.

Collaboration is an activity. Connection is infrastructure.

A meeting ends.

A committee adjourns.

A referral is made.

Leadership changes.

A grant expires.

Organizations return to their own programs, systems, measurements, funding requirements, and responsibilities.

The challenge may not be replacing collaboration.

It may be giving collaboration somewhere to live.

There is an older idea behind all of this.

It takes a village.

The phrase survives because it recognizes something fundamentally human: we need one another.

But the modern village is extraordinarily complicated.

People can live near one another without knowing one another. Organizations can serve the same families without knowing what other organizations are doing. Resources can exist only blocks away from unmet needs while the people possessing those resources remain unaware of them.

We have extraordinary technological connectivity.

Yet connectivity is not necessarily community.

Connectivity is not community. Relationship is.

The question becomes:

Can we use the capabilities of the modern world to recover some of the relational strength of the village?

The Connected Community uses the Seven Towers of Community as a way to organize the complexity of community life:

Fellowship • Education • Workforce & Economic Development • Healthcare • Arts & Culture • Sports & Recreation • Governance & Civic Engagement

The Towers are not intended to create seven new silos.

Quite the opposite.

The Towers do not eliminate complexity. They organize it.

A young person may attend school, play on a sports team, participate in a faith community, receive healthcare, discover a talent through the arts, live within a household affected by employment and economic conditions, and be influenced by public policy.

That is not seven different lives.

It is one life.

Our institutions are necessarily organized by function.

Our problems are not.

And people's lives certainly are not.

This leads to a different way of thinking about community.

What if the organization is not always the most important unit of community understanding?

What if the relationship is?

People are connected to households.

People are connected to organizations.

Organizations are connected to other organizations.

Needs are connected to services.

Volunteers are connected to opportunities.

Resources are connected to needs.

Interventions are connected to outcomes.

Today's circumstances are connected to tomorrow's possibilities.

Making those relationships understandable is the purpose behind the Community 

Relationship Framework (CRF).

Not to reduce people to records.

Just the opposite.

The record alone is insufficient because the relationships matter.

There is another important dimension of real community.

Traditional service systems can unintentionally divide us into two categories: people who need help and people who provide it.

Life doesn't work that way.

Sometimes we need.

Sometimes we serve.

Often we do both.

Someone who needs transportation today may mentor a child tomorrow.

A retired executive who needs companionship may have forty years of experience to offer an entrepreneur.

A teenager receiving tutoring may be wonderful at helping younger children.

A family receiving assistance may possess talents, relationships, knowledge, and generosity that can strengthen its neighborhood.

In a connected community, people are not defined by what they need. They are also recognized for what they have to give.

Community Mountain expresses this idea simply:

The framework does not command the service.

It makes the connection possible.

People choose what happens next.

A shared operating framework should not mean centralized control.

Organizations should retain their missions, identities, expertise, governance, and independence.

Individuals and families should retain their agency.

Participation should be voluntary.

The goal is something different:

Coordination without control. Accountability without domination.

Connection does not require consolidation.

A school should remain a school.

A church should remain a church.

A business should remain a business.

A healthcare provider should remain a healthcare provider.

A nonprofit should remain focused on its mission.

The opportunity is to help each understand and connect with the larger community surrounding its work.

Technology cannot create community by itself.

Data cannot manufacture compassion.

An algorithm cannot make someone care about a neighbor.

A framework cannot compel genuine service.

Something human must remain underneath the machinery.

Community Mountain describes that foundation through CORE — Crucial Organs for Regional Empowerment:

And perhaps the first illuminates everything else.

Not love merely as sentiment.

Love expressed through action.

Love that notices.

Love that listens.

Love that recognizes dignity.

Love that gives.

Love that receives.

Love that connects one person with another.

A connected community does not compel people to care for one another. It makes it easier for people who care to act.

Once meaningful connections persist, something else becomes possible.

The community can begin learning from what happens.

Which relationships made a difference?

Where are needs going unmet?

Where are resources available but disconnected?

Which interventions reinforce one another?

Where are people falling through gaps?

What changed?

What didn't?

What can we do better next time?

That progression can be expressed simply:

A collection of organizations can generate information.

A connected community can learn as a community.

That is the larger proposition explored in The Connected Community.

The evidence establishes that many of the challenges communities face are interconnected. The Connected Community proposes an architecture for addressing that reality.

Its effectiveness must ultimately be demonstrated through implementation, measurement, learning, and replication.

We do not need to pretend we already know every answer.

Perhaps we need to become better at learning together.

The Connected Community is not an attempt to replace the village with technology.

It is an effort to recover some of what made the village powerful—relationship, belonging, reciprocity, responsibility, and voluntary service—and give those human qualities connective infrastructure capable of functioning effectively and efficiently within the complexity of modern life.

The technology should remain in the background.

Organizations should remain free.

Individuals and families should retain agency.

People should choose whether and how they participate.

And service should remain something profoundly human:

one person freely choosing to help another.

Perhaps the future of community is not something entirely new.

Perhaps it is an ancient idea made possible again in a new way.

Someone has a need.

Someone else has something to give.

Help them find one another.

Explore the Research:
The Connected Community — From Collaboration to a Shared Operating Framework
Community Intelligence Series — Community Mountain