Naming the Features of a Relational Community Engagement Strategy: Cultivate Commitments to Shared Values
Photo by Jael Rodriguez on Unsplash
Note: This is part of an article exploring Relational Community Engagement Strategies and what these strategies should (in my opinion) include. If you haven’t yet read it, you may want to check out the introduction to this exploratory series.
Relational engagement begins when those involved agree to honor, share, and uphold the values and principles they believe should guide the relationship. What does this mean? It means setting aside time during the start of and throughout a relationship to surface and explore the values and principles that guide the groups’ efforts. It also means committing to adhering to and cultivating these values and principles in authentic and meaningful ways. Committing to shared values is a humanizing experience and is one way to prioritize human connections over transactional exchanges.
These agreements may be implied or explicit, but a process that prioritizes relationships will include a process for everyone involved to describe their guiding values. For instance, if you’re working in a neighborhood to design a new park, start by co-creating a set of principles with residents. These could include values like mutual respect, inclusivity, and transparency. These values become the compass that directs every decision, conversation, and gathering. The selected values and principles should reflect the engagement plan’s choices, activities, and processes. In this way, the founding values and principles you have identified will serve an important function later when evaluating the relational community engagement plan.
An organization developing its relational community engagement plan should commit to at least two discussions in identifying the values and principles it wants to carry into this work (but ideally, many more than two, and then repeat at least annually). The first discussion will be internal: which values and principles does the organization’s team want to uphold and see reflected in their plan? Which values do they want to learn more about when enacted? While it’s okay to start by simply generating a list of possible values, you’ll likely find that narrowing this list down to a few core values commonly demonstrated in an organization’s practices and culture will be more helpful than a list of thirty-plus values.
The second time an organization will engage in values visioning is when it completes this process with key community partners and residents to determine the whole group’s values and principles. It’s okay for an organization to bring its own internal values to start the conversation, but remember that this value visioning opportunity aims to arrive at a new list that captures the values and principles the broader community group believes to be essential.
Remember that what matters here is not only identifying shared values but also cultivating a shared commitment to uphold these values. This practice prepares the soil of the relationship to support and nurture what will soon be growing and flourishing. In the words of the 13th-century theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart, “What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.” This practice makes the culture work of relational engagement the culture work of relational engagement. Culture and cultivate share the same Latin root, cultus, which means “to grow.” Here, not only do we work to uphold the values we deem essential in the current moment, we are also attempting to seed and grow the ideal culture and cultures we desire in future generations.
To grow a culture of commitment to shared values, I suggest two opening practices to help surface shared values and cultivate commitments to uphold them. The first is storytelling, in which participants use stories to reveal and arrive at shared values. The second is using a process of description to make these values concrete and tangible in everyone’s mind, to visualize the values so as to make them less ephemeral.
To use storytelling as a way of cultivating a culture of commitment (apologies for the alliteration overload), ask people to tell stories about memories or moments in which they felt core humanizing feelings. For example, “tell a story about a time you felt trusted?” Or, “tell a story about a time you felt needed or seen by someone in your community.” In this instance, storytelling about past experiences can be a basis for world-building, a process of using creativity, intellect, and emotional intelligence to begin to describe the world you aspire to live in. For example, asking someone to “tell a story about a time you felt needed or seen in your community” is an excellent precursor to asking someone to begin to describe a community in which everyone feels needed.
Another suggestion I like to offer during this stage is to think about how these values could look or feel when implemented and then to describe and act out these features in as much detail as possible. I like to call this activity “Describe the invisible force,” but its goal is to invite people into creating and describing “as-if worlds”by explaining how living in a hoped-for world would look and feel.
In this practice, we begin to describe what it would be like if someone were under the control of an invisible force. We emphasize observable actions and outward expressions. How would they behave, speak, feel, or treat others if controlled by some as-yet-unknown invisible force? Then, we start dropping in different values as these invisible forces. For example: “Describe the invisible force of respect.” “Describe the invisible force of authentic dialogues and listening. How would someone act or behave if they were truly committed to authentically hearing and speaking with others?” Or “describe the invisible force of reciprocity. How would someone who upholds reciprocity act or talk? What would make you begin to think their motivations were sincere?”
This kinesthetic and participatory learning practice allows individuals to connect real-world expertise to developing leadership practices that cultivate shared commitments to values. By acting out and playing pretend, we can demonstrate to others experience connectedness and community. This form of learning allows one to feel as if this imagined scenario is real, generating creative and socio-emotional benefits for participants.
Finally, whenever we talk about guiding values and foundational principles, I think it’s important to ask, “How would a bystander recognize this value in practice?” Spending time answering this question as a group in as specific details as possible will begin to reveal concrete and tangible outcomes associated with particular values and principles. This helps determine if you are actively living out these values or just talking the talk.
For example, imagine your organization believes its engagement plan should be guided by the value of respect (a pretty common value considering how important it is in life, let alone relational engagement plans). If that’s the case, the following suggestion would be to offer a quick example of how someone might recognize the value of respect. How might it show up and be demonstrated? What does respect for others look like when it is actualized? Visualizing the values by offering concrete examples is a practice to connect actions based on the values that should be driving them. In our example of respect, how does this value show up in the office in the community? How could this value be practiced when engaged with the community so everyone feels respected? Name these attributes, feelings, actions, and behavior. It helps to be as specific as possible. The more detail provided, the easier it is to imagine.
The values selected, described, and decided upon will be a touchstone throughout the relationship. Still, they can and should also be reviewed and updated from time to time as desired.