6 Ways Social Change Organizations Can Be in Right Relationship with Communities

1.     By acknowledging that everyone is part of many communities and there is no such thing as community consensus.

When I do work with teams on community engagement, one of the questions I often like to ask is “how do you define community?” Often people will provide multiple answers – those with whom they live and work; worship, create, or volunteer; their friends and family or even people who share their identity or geographic region. We are all part of multiple communities, so if we are going to be “in right relationship with communities” we need to be specific about who that includes and doesn’t.  Are the Executive Directors of community groups sufficient or do we need to be hearing directly from the residents experiencing the problem we’re trying to solve?

Connected to this is the realty that communities are not homogenous.  In recent piece in Shelterforce, Jeremy Levine wrote:

no participatory process can accurately reflect the voice of the community, no matter how well run. The reason is fundamental: there is no such thing as ‘the’ community…separate studies [show], opinions and experiences with institutions vary, even in demographically segregated neighborhoods. To say that ‘the community’ is in support of anything is a misnomer.

2.     By honestly reckoning with history, harm, and power dynamics.

The concept of “right relationship” was one that I had heard many times from community organizers, but actually had never really delved into understanding until I began reflecting on this question.  A definition of “right relationships” I really love comes from an academic paper by law professor, John A. Humbach:

Right relationships are relations in which each (or all) seek, without abandoning themselves, to be attentive and responsive to the needs and emotions of one another…That is, a relationship is not “right” if participants seek to overbear in power (oppress), to overreach in resources (exploit), or to mislead for selfish advantage (manipulate).

Memorial for Children Killed During Siege of Sarajevo 1992-1995. Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Many social change organizations have histories of oppression, exploitation, and/or manipulation– of the people in geographies where they operate, of the people they serve, and of those they’ve employed.  And organizations (by virtue of capacity, resources, relationships, expertise, and/or being known) almost always have more power than individual community members.

To be able to work in “right relationship with communities,” social change organizations need to take steps toward reckoning, repair, and change.  Without that, the dynamics with communities and their members can and will not change.  At its root, this will require social change organizations to listen to community members deeply, and acknowledge, not dismiss or deny the past, build relationships and repair past injustices, and co-create agreements for lasting change. 

3.     By nurturing “right relationships” as an ongoing practice of love.

Loving interpersonal relationships are predicated on trust.  I often refer to my favorite framework on trust, The Trust Equation, which offers that Trustworthiness = Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy / Self-Orientation.

But, I’ll be honest that in working as a consultant as well as an employee of government, philanthropy, and nonprofits, I have often heard (and admittedly occasionally contributed to) conversations where organizations seeking to solve problems in communities talked about those communities as a nuisance, obstacle, disappointment, or even with disdain. This is damaging because these types of internal conversations shape our mindsets and interactions and can potentially become a self-fulfilling prophesy and do long-term harm to the relationship and the communities themselves.  In turn, this harms the work because if a social change organization is not in “right relationship” with the community, community members will stop engaging with you and be remiss to share their richness of experience and insights, ideas and solutions.

Children feeding pigeons, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

But, what of treating the communities like we do our nearest and dearest? We learn about them and they learn about us, we follow through on what we say we will do and they do the same. We share about ourselves and share in experiences. We support one another because eachother’s success brings collective joy. We make each other better, and we take responsibility when we fail each other.

4.     By recognizing that the community’s “context” knowledge is as important (if not more) as AN organization’s “content” knowledge!

In his piece “On Establishing “Right Relationship” Between Staff, Professionals, Service Organizations and the People They Assist,” Michael Kendrick wrote:

There is no advantage to capitulate to the view that professionals or managers automatically and unquestionably “know best”. On the contrary we need an ethic that permits a kind of egalitarian partnership to evolve that sees the person receiving assistance as a decisive agent in his or her own existence.…The act of deferring to professionals and managers would be done voluntarily by the person on its merits rather than this being a foregone conclusion.

I’ve always appreciated the way the Tamarack Institute frames the idea of community engagement as being a process involving two types of experts:

Content Experts are professionals, staff in your organization, service providers, and leaders with formal power who have the knowledge, tools, and resources to address the issue.

Context Experts are community members who experientially know about the issue and feel the impact it has on their everyday lives. These are individuals who know the issue intimately and experience it day to day.

Great content knowledge, without an understanding of how it can be applied in a particular context is doomed to fail.  And great context knowledge without content for driving change is highly unlikely to shift the status quo.

5.     By embracing that innovative solutions and decisions can come from anywhere and that not all the work needs to be done by everyone.

By virtue of being in right relationship and recognizing the equal value of context and content expertise social change organizations and communities can truly develop interdependent relationships.  One of the gifts of this way of working according to Adrienne Maree Brown’s book Emergent Strategy (p 87) is that the member of these groups, “can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others and they can lean on us.  It means we have to decentralize our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from.”

In moving away from perfunctory and ad hoc engagement of communities to abundant and ongoing “right relationships,” social change organizations – as Levine wrote –  can stop doing

public meetings—constrained by both time and space, where the optimal outcome is consensus and therefore ‘no’ has more power than ‘yes’…[toward] ongoing exercises that produce a high volume of information, persist even after particular projects are completed, make priorities transparent, and neither seek nor assume a singular position from “the community.”

It’s notable that in Levine’s framing, communities and their members do not have to be responsible for doing all the implementation work (that’s what those professional, content experts are for), but that their ideas and input are critical for identifying priorities and goals, and providing input and feedback at key decision points as the work moves forward.  What that looks like will necessarily vary based on the work itself and the context in which it is being done.

6.     By nurturing differing points of view and productive conflict as necessary for doing powerful work.

In collaborative work, there is always conflict and disagreement.  Just as community members do not hold homogenous views, neither do the folks working in social change organizations. Many fear or feel great discomfort when there is conflict, however with a strong foundation of right relationships, conflict can make the work better. Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy, p 159) offers an inspiring way to think about this:

notice who challenges you, who makes the edges of your ideas grow or fortify. I find that my best work has happened during my most challenging collaborations, because there are actual differences that are converging and creating more space, ways forward that serve more than one worldview.

Men playing chess in Freedom Square, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Conflict can also be productive because it creates urgency, as Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky wrote in Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis:

The art of leadership in today’s world involves orchestrating the inevitable conflict, chaos, and confusion of change so that the disturbance is productive rather than destructive… Maintaining the right level of disequilibrium requires that you depersonalize conflict, which naturally arises as people experiment and shift course in an environment of uncertainty and turbulence. The aim is to focus the disagreement on issues, including some of your own perspectives, rather than on the interested parties. But the issues themselves are more than disembodied facts and analysis. People’s competencies, loyalties, and direct stakes lie behind them. So you need to act politically as well as analytically. In a period of turmoil, you must look beyond the merits of an issue to understand the interests, fears, aspirations, and loyalties of the factions that have formed around it.

In social change spaces, there is often a tension between the people who want to skip right to the doing, and those who want to spend time building relationships.  I believe that for social change organizations, going forward it will be necessary to spend the time and put forth the effort toward being in right relationships with communities.  At the outset of this work it may feel slow and unclear and uncomfortable, over time it can serve as a foundation for developing and unleashing solutions to problems at a pace and in ways that had previously never been thought possible.

What are your thoughts on how social change organizations might be in right relationship with communities?  I welcome questions, critique, and input in the comments below or via email at alison@optimisticanthro.com!

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