Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption
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gil
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Creating a (new) communityHow does one go about creating / fostering a new [sense of ]community, in whatever context ?
For example, I was at a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) oral history workshop at the weekend : participants from teens to eighties. And a very wide cross-section. The younger folk were saying they really valued the opportunity to meet and discuss with older people. The project has also become one focus for bringing LGBT people together from the whole region, many of whom have previously been living in comparative isolation, or just leaving for the cities as soon as they could. Maybe we have here the beginning of another much-needed form of community and belonging.
It is quite something, and quite a responsibility to be creating a new community - what do we want it to be like ? What form should it take ? How to maintain the sense of diversity, tolerance and inclusiveness that it has at present in its early stages ?
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Mrs Fiddlesticks
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can you actually 'create' a community or does it just evolve by itself? You can set up the frame work, yes - the place to meet, the right invitations and people mix, common ground and good hospitality, but can you really do more? We've all been to those sort of parties...
Humans don't like being 'pushed in to a corner and told to get to know someone' 
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gil
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| Mrs Fiddlesticks wrote: | | can you actually 'create' a community or does it just evolve by itself? You can set up the frame work, yes - the place to meet, ...., but can you really do more? |
That's a very important question. Depends on whether there is a felt / perceived need or will for a particular community to exist, to be formalised, or to have a visible profile.
The workshop at the weekend was part of a much larger, national oral history project with an historical / archiving / public records agenda of its own, linked to the National Museum of Scotland.
Other events have arisen because of council funding in support of diversity / equal opps / recent anti-discrimmination legislation.
The implementation of Civil Partnerships legislation also plays a role.
So in that case, there is a variety of background factors coming into play at the moment, plus a history of there being no [visible] LGBT community in the whole of the region, and little or none in the rural areas of the surrounding counties [Ayrshire, Borders, Cumbria, Northumberland] either.
Whether any lasting form of community will emerge or evolve is quite another matter.
Another example :
The local town set up a regeneration 'Initiative' group, partly, I suspect, on a 'me too' basis, because a couple of surrounding towns had one, and also because it was thought that an organisation might have a chance to attract council / EU funding to the town for projects to improve life in the community. It seems to have foundered - got mired in debates about whether or not to build a skateboard park (which have taken so long that all the kids involved will have grown up by the time it gets resolved, and skateboarding will be completely passe).
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Mrs Fiddlesticks
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we're probably back to defining 'community' aren't we. I belong to so many (that overlap of course) from family and personal groups of friends, to fundraising commitees, the school as a community (which it undoubtably is - although there are some parents who chose not to engage in it in any form) the street I live in etc etc.
And of course here!  Although this is slightly surreal in that few of us have actually spoken face to face and in all likely hood never will.
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