Abundant Communities in Action: Street Parks, Gardens, Steps, and Rainbows

When San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) and San Francisco Parks Alliance (SFPA) representatives gathered over the weekend to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the Street Parks Program, they were honoring something that is both quintessentially San Franciscan and something seen throughout the United States: our ability to find abundance where others see cast-offs.

It’s the sort of commitment documented by Peter Block and John McKnight through their Abundant Community book, website, and online discussions. It’s a movement beautifully grounded in Tactical Urbanism. And it’s a sustainable, community-based, volunteer-driven effort that celebrates the work of people we don’t often notice: the people behind the projects that make our communities far more rich than they otherwise would be. Not bad for country where we so often hear about how badly divided we are.

“The [Street Parks] project was started to enable and assist community members in adopting DPW parcels and then turning them from blighted lots into verdant gardens and community gathering spaces,” Julia Brashares, Director of Street Parks for the Parks Alliance, reminds us in a brief video prepared for the Alliance by students from San Francisco State University. “We, with community members, have seen the development of over 120 gardens in every district of the city.”

Those Street Parks projects are part of an ongoing program that brings City/County elected officials and employees, Parks Alliance staff, and hundreds of volunteers together to “activate” a string of City-owned parcels that, when combined, include approximately 500 acres of potential parkland. It’s an amazingly complex undertaking and, at the same time, it is amazingly simple. The complexity comes from the large number of stakeholders who have to be engaged to bring Street Park Projects to fruition; the simplicity comes from the idea that the projects begin when as few as two or three neighbors see the potential in an unused piece of public property and make the commitment to foster the numerous community collaborations required to produce positive results.

What’s even more fascinating is the obvious interest in transforming unused public land into additional green open space in a city that already has a magnificent, nationally-acclaimed park system, a reclaimed bayside gem in Crissy Field and an equally ambitious counterpart in the Blue Greenway project that is already in progress; the Green Connections project that is also underway as another effort to increase access to green open spaces throughout the City; an effort to create more vibrant plazas throughout the City; and many other local efforts where volunteers work with an amazing network of nonprofit organizations, City/County representatives, neighborhood organizations, local business representatives, and anyone else who sees abundant possibilities for community development and enrichment.

Street Park Program projects are, in many ways, the epitome of individuals setting aside individual interests to collaboratively produce a public good—often something designed to last far longer than the lifetimes of those who initially gather to produce the street park. We see individuals bringing neighbors together to turn a short, blighted cul-de-sac along a freeway into a community garden that attracted a new coffee shop to the block. We see neighbors next to another stretch of land adjacent to a freeway create a dog park where members of the community meet and enjoy each other’s company. A third stretch of blighted land becomes Progress Park—the site where we gathered last weekend to celebrate 10 years of Street Parks progress. A median strip in the Outer Sunset District becomes La Playa Park. Another lot becomes Pennsylvania Garden. And a set of concrete steps originally built in 1926 becomes the Hidden Garden Steps—the second set to be transformed into volunteer-maintained gardens and a beautiful ceramic-tiled mosaic (designed and fabricated by project artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher) in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.

Visitors on the Steps

The real payoff for any local or extended community comes when we spend time at any of those sites, as I so often do on the Hidden Garden Steps. I see my neighbors come out every Friday afternoon to sweep the steps so the site looks clean and inviting to weekend visitors. I see volunteers gather onsite monthly to maintain and add to the gardens. I see the results generated by the volunteers who maintain the project website, blog, and Twitter and Facebook accounts. And I see and talk with visitors from all over the world as they enjoy and admire the site, marvel over how the extended community adds to all the site offers, and blurt out wonderful observations such as “It’s like being in a rainbow.”

Working on any Street Park Program project is, in fact like being in a rainbow. It’s inspiring. It’s overwhelmingly beautiful. And it hints at greater aspects of life than most of us would otherwise encounter.

The 10^th-anniversary Street Parks Program celebration documents a bit of what that rainbow offers and brought volunteers together to dream of even bigger rainbows—those we can produce during the next 10 years. If we are successful, we will use what we have learned and done to inspire others to seek similar community-based collaborations to positively change our world.

N.B.: Numerous articles documenting the Hidden Garden Steps project remain available on this Building Creative Bridges blog. Steps updates can be found on the Friends of the Hidden Garden Steps blog. Stories provided by donors to the Hidden Garden Steps project are currently being added to the project website by Steps volunteer Liz McLoughlin, and a step-by-step virtual tour created by McLoughlin and by project volunteer Gilbert Johnson is also under development.

Gavin Newsom and Citizenville: From Virtual Sheep to Real Community Collaboration

One of the sweetest moments in what is a wonderful paean to community, collaboration, and the technology that can help foster those two critically important elements of civilization comes when Gavin Newsom, in the acknowledgment section at the end of the book he has written with Lisa Dickey (Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government), offers “thanks to all government workers whose work directly and indirectly impacts all our lives each and every day. And to elected officials of all stripes—a heartfelt thank-you for stepping up to serve the public. Thanks you for not sitting on the sidelines and for being willing to suffer the slings and arrows so often associated with public service.”

It is, in some ways, a shame that those words from a successful politician to his peers and others with whom he has worked in government appear after the formal conclusion of the text, for it is in that brief acknowledgement that the former mayor of San Francisco—currently serving as California’s lieutenant governor—reminds us that we have plenty of great colleagues working at all levels of government in spite of the overwhelmingly negative attitudes so many people openly express toward those involved holding elected or civil service positions.

On the other hand, it’s entirely consistent with the approach taken throughout the book: encouraging all of us to look for ways that we can use technology as a tool in playing more actively positive roles in shaping the communities we cherish rather than expecting others, e.g., elected officials and civil servants, to be prescient and powerful enough to create the world of our dreams without our explicit engagement in that process.

Written very much in the spirit of Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging, Block and John McKnight’s The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, Jim Diers’s Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Citizenville promotes the idea of individual community members collaborating with each other and their colleagues in government to produce positive change. More importantly, it pushes us toward an approach that already fosters levels of engagement in playful ways: transferring our love of game-playing for virtual results into a form of game with more rewarding real-world results, as summarized in this excerpt from the introduction to Citizenville:

“Shauna Robertson, cofounder of the Crowdrise fund-raising and social-networking site, asked me why we couldn’t transfer the principles of FarmVille to civic engagement. ‘Why can’t I take ownership of my little area of California and say, ‘This is what I want to do—I want to build my schools here’? Or fix the potholes or landscape the traffic medians? In other words, instead of taking care of a fictional farm, why can’t we create a game in which you take care of your actual neighborhood or your town?

“We could combine the fun of a game with the social good of solving real problems. Here’s one way it could work: Let’s say you live in a neighborhood of twenty blocks. If four people there want to play the game—let’s call it Citizenville—you can divide the neighborhood into four areas delineated by an interactive map on the Citizenville Web site. Each player takes responsibility for his or her area, and if others living there decide they want to play too, they can either join forces and create a team or subdivide into even smaller areas.”

Newsom is explicit about the challenges we face in attempting to use technology to increase citizen-government collaborations: “The sad truth is that the history of government is a history of technophobia” (p. 6); government workers often collect magnificent amounts of useful data without working to make it accessible (p. 22); government agencies are much better at attracting constituents to one-time events than to encouraging long-term involvement (p. 115); and “…government isn’t interested in solving problems so much as managing them” (p. 220).

That’s not a situation, he suggests, that is sustainable: “No one foresaw that sea change for newspapers, but in hindsight it had to happen. The same is true for government. It’s hard to predict exactly how this will unfold, but it’s absolutely inevitable that the relationship between people and government will change. If nothing else, the changing expectations of new generations, weaned on smartphones and the Internet, guarantee that we can’t just continue with business as usual” (pp. 174-175).

He offers plenty of positive examples, including the 68-page report titled Road Map for the Digital City—“a blueprint for how to propel New York into the digital age” (an updated version is available at http://www.nyc.gov/html/digital/html/roadmap/roadmap.shtml) and the New America Foundation release Hear Us Now? A California Survey of Digital Technology’s Role in Civic Engagement and Local Government (2011),” a report about technology and civic innovation.” He also reminds us that sites where participants clearly identify themselves rather than hiding behind pseudonyms produce much higher levels of discourse and engagement than those where the anonymous posters engage in “name-calling, insults, and flame wars” (p. 64).

My own explorations of and involvement in community-government collaborations convince me not only that Newsom is, overall, right on track throughout Citizenville, but that there are plenty of models we can follow, including the work cited above (Block, Diers, McKnight, and Putnam) as well as local examples such as San Francisco’s Hidden Garden Steps project, which I’m continuing to document on this blog. The Steps project, designed to create a second set of ceramic-tiled steps in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District while strengthening the sense of community that already exists here, is  nearing completion exactly through the sort of private-public collaboration that appears to be Newsom’s gold standard in Citizenville. Our local elected public officials and colleagues in City-County government have become as enchanted with the project as we are and, as a result, have been helping us create a volunteer-driven, community-based project even more dynamic, beautiful, and engaging than we originally envisioned. The collaborations have grown from numerous face-to-face meetings, online interactions using a variety of social media tools, face-to-face contact to reach the greatest number of neighbors possible, and partnerships with existing community organizations, local business representatives, and local media representatives.

And while none of this has played out within the context of an online game along the lines of Citizenville, the playfulness inherent in Newsom’s Citizenville model has certainly found its way into our tweets, our Facebook postings, our website, the results we are producing, and the overall approach we’ve taken to working with colleagues at all levels rather than falling into the destructively nonproductive trap of complaining about government and those involved in it rather than seeking opportunities to make it work for—and with—all of us. And then, as Newsom does in his acknowledgements, profusely thanking everyone who has contributed to making our community better.

N.B.: This is the nineteenth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.

Building Abundant Communities (Part 4 of 4): Hidden Garden Steps

New community possibilities emerge “when we and other neighbors know of each other’s gifts,” John McKnight and Peter Block suggest in their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods. And that’s exactly what we continue to see in the Hidden Garden Steps project here in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.

As has been abundantly chronicled in this continuing series of articles about the Steps and the overlapping shorter series about fostering abundant communities, an awareness of gifts, resources, and an enthusiastic commitment to collaboration has steadily moved us toward a very exciting phase of our efforts to create a second set of ceramic-tiled steps along with murals and gardens featuring California native and other drought-tolerant plants. Project artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher have, since September 2012, been working in their studios to build the 148-step mosaic that will eventually be installed on the 16^th Avenue concrete steps connecting Kirkham and Lawton streets. Community involvement in fundraising, marketing, and hundreds of hours of onsite work cleaning up a terribly ignored pedestrian corridor has drawn together an ever-growing group of volunteers and other supporters inspired by the beauty of the first step of steps (on Moraga Street, between 15^th and 16^th avenues) completed by the same two artists working with a different group of neighbors and other supporters.

Our next big step forward, at this point, is less than two weeks away: our two artists (on Saturday, December 1, 2012, from 1-5 pm), will lead the first of three community workshops for anyone interested in making hands-on contributions to the construction of the mosaic.

This will be a celebration of community and collaboration in action within a local church meeting hall (Christ Church Lutheran, 1090 Quintara, San Francisco). It’s a chance to learn how projects of this magnitude are literally pieced together. An opportunity to work side-by-side with neighbors on a process that not only will produce a new community gem but also contribute to the already strong sense of community that exists within the Inner Sunset District. And a pre-holiday chance to reflect on what our work together over a three-year period has created and continues to create.

It also is a visceral incarnation of the spirit of “making gifts visible,” as outlined by McKnight and Block in The Abundant Community (pp. 120-122): having members of a community teach and learn from each other; bringing together residents and local business representatives (a couple of our sponsors are donating refreshments for workshop participants); and attracting community members of all ages and backgrounds.

There is plenty to acknowledge and celebrate in projects like the Hidden Garden Steps. These community efforts help build connections between those of us who previously knew little more about our neighbors than what we garnered from hurried waves and cursory greetings as we raced from one personal obligation to another. They attract people from other nearby neighborhoods so that we develop an extended sense of community, support, and simple, pleasurable human interactions that often seem to reach no further than a few feet away from our own homes or apartments. They further connect us to those wonderful third places within our communities—the coffee shops, the libraries, the neighborhood farmers markets, and streets transformed into meeting places by community-operated street fairs. And they remind us—through the collaborations we establish with existing groups like San Francisco’s Inner Sunset Park Neighbors (ISPN), the San Francisco Parks Alliance (our fiscal agent), and the San Francisco Department of Public Works Street Parks Program (supporting our onsite work on City/County property)—that transforming a dream into reality doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to start from scratch in our efforts to organize for success.

“The expression of our gifs and their manifestation through association with our neighbors” is at the heart of abundant communities, McKnight and Block remind us in The Abundant Community (p. 109). “The challenge is to make these gifts visible among all in the neighborhood. These are the means for creating our social fabric. The task is to make more widely available these gifts in service of our core concerns for the child, the land, enterprise, food, health, the vulnerable, and our safety With the consciousness and ability to connect our gifts and make them practical and usable, we experience what we are calling community abundance (p. 120).”

And as Hidden Garden Steps current and prospective supporters move toward the day of our first mosaic-building workshop and continue with our fundraising efforts to bring this $300,000 volunteer-driven community-based effort to a successful conclusion, we all have plenty to celebrate—and to offer others in need of the inspiration we continually find from the families, friends, and other neighbors who are contributing to our own abundant successes.

N.B.: This is the fourteenth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco and the fourth in a four-part series of articles exploring abundant communities. 

Building Abundant Communities (Part 3 of 4): Inner Sunset Park Neighbors

When we’re lucky enough to have a group like San Francisco’s Inner Sunset Park Neighbors (ISPN) nurturing an abundant community in our own backyard, every day is Thanksgiving Day.

It’s as if the key members of this volunteer-driven community-based neighborhood advocacy group leaped right out of the pages of John McKnight and Peter Block’s The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods and from their Abundant Community website, for this dynamic and incredibly flexible organization, with less than a dozen board members and a membership of approximately 200 people, manages to be at the heart of many of the most visible and positive initiatives developing in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.

Explore the Inner Sunset Sundays street fairs that will have brought well over 5,000 people together in a festive block-long celebration of community by the end of 2012 and you’ll see the results of collaboration between ISPN members and other members of our extended community. Read the community bulletin board announcements posted in the heart of the neighborhood’s business district and you’ll see an invitation to participate in the wide range of activities and take advantage of the numerous services available in the neighborhood—because Inner Sunset Park Neighbor members worked diligently through the local permit process for permission to build and place that bulletin board in a key community meeting place.

Walk through the Inner Sunset Farmers Market that has been open nearly every Sunday morning throughout the year since June 2009, and you’ll see the fruit of ISPN collaborations with the Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association and others who transformed a drab, narrow street-level parking lot into a vibrant meeting place where neighbors shop, stop to chat, and learn, through their conversations, of the latest developments and community events that draw us all together into a community of citizens rather than a group of consumers anxious to buy and run.

This is an organization with a clear, appealing, and inclusive mission: “to engage with all Inner Sunset residents—renters, homeowners and business owners—to improve quality of life, build a sense of community, and generate pride in our neighborhood.” It’s also an organization that is neither rule-bound nor resting on its laurels. It offers an umbrella of support to groups interested in initiating and completing projects that further strengthen the sense of community and neighborhood, as is obvious through the support and collaboration offered to the current Hidden Garden Steps project. It also has board members that freely move in and out of the ISPN structure to support other independent neighborhood initiatives such as the Public Bench Project. And, through conversations that begin at gatherings such as the Inner Sunset Sundays street fairs, it fosters discussions about dreams along the lines of transforming a block-long area of the neighborhood business district into an attractive pedestrian mall that would further support the sense of community that places like the Inner Sunset District provide.

Conversation and exchanges, as McKnight and Block note throughout The Abundant Community, do help us in “awakening the power of families and neighborhoods”; that’s one of ISPN’s key strengths. Where the writers suggest steps including efforts at “making visible the gifts of everyone in the neighborhood” by identifying “gifts, skills, and capacities” that neighbors are willing to share with each other, ISPN members already informally engage in that sort of action by inviting neighbors to share their skills in venues including the street fairs. The November 2012 fair, for example, included neighbors providing brief workshops on more than a dozen topics including basic bicycle maintenance, bench-making, composting, garden tool maintenance, disaster preparedness, CPR, and juggling. Potluck dinners in a neighborhood church community meeting room have included opportunities to discuss and promote events and actions that contribute further to community development—an idea that parallel’s McKnight and Block’s proposal for “listening tables where community members “establish an agenda for community friendliness.”

The point of all of this is that we do have choices. We can allow ourselves to be buried under what appear to be insurmountable differences that prevent members of communities from coming together in any sort of mutually agreed upon plan of action. Or we can start, in small numbers, with those who are agile, creative, and determined enough to take tiny steps that lead toward significant and positive results.

ISPN members and supporters clearly understand that the hard work that goes into organizing these efforts can be rewarding. And fun. And well worth pursuing. It’s up to the rest of us to decide what we can do to be part of that process. And to support the groups that are already in place.

N.B.: This is the third of a four-part series of articles exploring abundant communities

Next: The Hidden Garden Steps as an Abundant Community Group 

Building Abundant Communities (Part 2 of 4): Trainer-Teacher-Learners in Action

Trainer-teacher-learners, in spite of frequently citing a lack of funding and other resources as an impediment to success, are often extremely effective at creating and sustaining what John McKnight and Peter Block call “abundant communities”—those gatherings of people who effectively find strength through a focus on people as creators and collaborators rather than consumers.

Our efforts as members and as the driving force behind the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), when we are at our best, serve as an easy-to-replicate example that seems to be pulled from the pages of McKnight and Block’s Abundant Community  book on the topic.

When the writers tell us that “a competent community has three properties” (they focus on the gifts of its members, they nurture associational life, and they offer hospitality through the act of welcoming strangers into their group), we immediately can picture any ASTD or any other well-organized and well-developed association that creates a potent, supportive, and dynamic community through individual chapters, informal regional consortia, and national connections firmly rooted in commonly-adopted mission, vision, and value statements.

We know for example that when we walk for the first time into a meeting of any well-functioning local ASTD Chapter, our previous agreement to affiliate with another chapter and/or colleagues at the national level makes us immediately part of the group of colleagues we are about to meet. It’s what I experience every time I go to activities sponsored by my own home chapter, the ASTD Mount Diablo Chapter. It’s what I’ve experienced over the past year with other California chapters as well as with the South Florida Chapter. It’s what I experience when small groups of ASTD members from all over the country meet over dinner, as we frequently do when drawn together by ASTD or other conferences. And it even carries over when ASTD members meet in non-ASTD venues including the weekly #lrnchat conversations via Twitter every Thursday evening.

This, for anyone engaged in a well-functioning association, is the best of all possible reminders of how abundant our communities are and can be in an onsite-online world. When we’re together—together in every sense of the word—our limitations and challenges somehow take a back seat to the benefits we reap from associating in these abundant communities: full of inspiration; full of colleagues dedicated, as ASTD suggests, to making a world that works better; and full of solutions to problems none of us would dream of tackling without the support of other members of those explicitly abundant communities.

And just as McKnight and Block consistently focus on an abundant community’s ability to awaken the power of family and neighborhoods, members of ASTD and other first-rate associations use their strengths and resources to contribute positively and significantly to the extended communities to which they belong and which they serve. California ASTD chapters, for example, are among those informally providing free learning opportunities to returning veterans under the aegis of programs that support Wounded Warriors; having documented initial successes from this sharing of what they bring to their communities, some of the California chapter leaders are beginning to explore ways to create a more formal consortium to expand what they had previously been doing completely at a local level independent of colleagues from other chapters—a great sign that this particular abundant community is pooling resources in a way that creates greater possibilities while also drawing more attention to ASTD, its chapters, and its individual members as potential community partners reaching beyond more local borders.

None of this, however, matters much if our community doesn’t carry through on its commitment to be as permeable as possible. When we are greeted, welcomed, and drawn into conversation the moment we walk into an ASTD gathering, we sense the draw and engagement of an abundant community: it makes us want to join the club. This doesn’t mean that every person entering our community will ultimately want to serve on a board of directors or become a major financial supporter of the organization’s activities, but what makes us strong is our willingness to accept all interested parties at whatever level is comfortable to them: occasional visitor, member of a local chapter, dual member of the local and national organization, member of a local chapter board, member of a national committee of volunteers dedicated to strengthening and promoting the organization throughout its extended community, and former board member who remains engaged at any sort of level that contributes to the continuity of the association.

And that, I would suggest, is the key element and resource that contributes to the success of an abundant community—one capable of holding our attention and setting up the continuity that creates something capable of outlasting the efforts and lifetime of any individual member.

N.B.: This is the second in a four-part series of articles exploring abundant communities

Next: San Francisco’s Inner Sunset Park Neighbors as an Abundant Community

Building Abundant Communities (Part 1 of 4): From Citizen to Consumer—And Back Again

To propose the existence of abundance at a time when so many people are discouraged and overwhelmed might appear to be a hard sell. But that’s exactly what John McKnight and Peter Block effectively do and nurture through their wonderful book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods and the Abundant Community website they maintain to support and spread their work—and ours.

A heartfelt and encouraging paean to the power of collaboration, The Abundant Community serves as a positive source of inspiration for rethinking many of our unquestioned assumptions; it also consistently serves as a useful handbook for those of us interested in and committed to building the sort of collaborative coalitions that make a difference locally, regionally, nationally, and globally with surprisingly little effort.

McKnight and Block begin the rethinking process by drawing a distinction between what they call “citizen” and “consumer” societies—maintaining that until we reverse the trend away from the citizen to the consumer model, we’re going to miss the obvious abundance of resources around us and the opportunities to overcome the challenges that leave so many people feeling incapable of effecting change.

Consumer society, they maintain, is predicated upon the belief that “satisfaction can be purchased”; the result, they consistently suggest, is that we try to buy solutions to everything ranging from healthcare and emotional challenges to education, safety, and security needs. Citizen society, in contrast, nurtures “social and civic life” so that we work together to create and support healthier communities that meet their members’ educational, safety, security, and other needs. It’s clear that the authors are trying to move us from being armchair critics to being actively engaged in creating healthy, thriving, vibrant communities where connections foster success and a high quality of life.

“The greatest tragedy of the consumer life is that its practitioners do not see that the local community is abundant with the relationships [italics added for emphasis] that are the principal resource for rescuing themselves and their families from the failure, dependency, and isolation that are the results of a life as a consumer and client,” McKnight and Block suggest. “Their ships and sinking, and they struggle to swim to safety, ignoring the life raft at their side. The way to the good life is not through consumption. It is, instead, a path that we make by walking it with those who surround us. It is the way of a competent community recognizing its abundance” (p. 18).

The writers are explicit about the problems we create when we fail to acknowledge and build upon the abundance that remains untapped within communities: we marginalize nature to such a degree that we lose sight of much of the beauty that surrounds us and the numerous benefits we might draw from nature; we surrender to marketing efforts that create and then require additional resources to alleviate dissatisfaction in our lives; we pay attention to little more than we can immediately see, thereby missing the opportunity to operate within a larger, more positive framework; and we become slaves to debt rather than freeing ourselves by having a goal of living within our means (p. 50).

They are equally explicit about the numerous, simple achievable changes we can make to address these challenges, e.g., learning “how to fix what is broken rather than replacing it. Shopping when we really need something, not shopping as a form of recreation.” And at a larger level, shifting from a primary focus on immediate challenges and needs to a focus that includes “a future orientation” (p. 54).

The abundant community that McKnight and Block want to help us strengthen is built upon several core beliefs that too few of us recognize: that what we have is enough; that we have the capacity to produce what we need; that cooperation and satisfaction provide a framework for organizing our world; that we each have definable responsibilities for and toward each other; and that there is a basic undeniable reality to the human condition within which we must live. The communities that incorporate these beliefs into daily practices are rooted in focusing on the individual gifts we bring to our communities, nurturing “associational life,” and offering hospitality to everyone—an idea based on a commitment of welcoming strangers to our communities rather than creating barriers to their acceptance (pp. 66-67).

And when we set aside all the theorizing and rethink our way into putting this into the familiar context of our own communities, we see that we’re really not talking about much more than what already exists in those that are successful. A neighborhood association (like San Francisco’s Inner Sunset Park Neighbors) that consistently improves the quality of life for significant numbers of people draws from all these ideas and practices. As does a local, regional, or national association organized around a specific profession (e.g., the American Society for Training & Development, which creates a tremendous learning community for those of us involved in workplace learning and performance, AKA staff training). And as is the case with the volunteer-driven community-based Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.

There are literally thousands of organizations like this all over our country and beyond our own borders. The challenge for all of us is to recognize them, appreciate them, and support them through our own involvement regardless of whether we can only give a few minutes/a couple of hours/a few dollars a month or whether we recognize that we are ready to become more deeply engaged through deeper commitments—not only to those entities but to the greater extended abundant communities that would not exist without them.

N.B.: This is the first in a four-part series of articles exploring abundant communities

Next: ASTD As an Abundant Community

Building Upon A New Culture of Learning with Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown

If doing is learning, there’s plenty to learn and do with the ideas Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown present in A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.

Working with the theme of social/collaborative learning that we’ve also encountered in The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner, in the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report 2012 Higher Education Edition  and “Communiqué from the Horizon Project Retreat” held in January 2012, the eLearning Guild’s new “Social Learning: Answers to Eight Crucial Questions” report, and many other books, reports, and documents, Thomas and Brown take us through a stimulating and brief—but never cursory—exploration of “the kind of learning that will define the twenty-first century.” And it won’t, they tell us right up front, be “taking place in a classroom—at least not in today’s classroom. Rather, it is happening all around us, everywhere, and it is powerful” (p. 17).

As we’ve already seen in a series of articles here in Building Creative Bridges, our learning spaces and the way we foster learning are continuing to evolve—which doesn’t necessarily mean, as Thomas and Brown note in their own work, that we’re completely abandoning classrooms and the best of the training-teaching-learning techniques we’ve developed over a long period of time. But the fact that plenty of effective learning that produces positive results “takes place without books, without teachers, and without classrooms, and it requires environments that are bounded yet provide complete freedom of action within those boundaries” (p. 18) offers us plenty of possibilities to rethink what we and the people and organizations we serve are doing.

Their summary of how Thomas’ “Massively Multiplayer Online Games” course at the University of Southern California seemed to be spinning wildly out of control as students more or less restructured the class from lots of lecture and a bit of demo to lots of exploration followed by short summary lectures at the end of each session leads us to the obvious and wonderful conclusion that, by taking over the class, the learners were also taking over control of their own learning and producing magnificent results—a story similar to a situation also documented by Cathy Davidson in Now You See It.

And it doesn’t stop there. As they lead us through a brief summary of instructor-centric and learner-centric endeavors, we see a theme that crops up in much of what is being written now about m-learning (mobile learning, i.e., learning through the use of mobile devices): that the new culture of learning “will augment—rather than replace—traditional educational venues” and techniques (p. 35).

What flows through much of Thomas and Brown’s work—and what we observe in our own training-teaching-learning environments—is what they address explicitly near the end of their book after having discussed the importance of learning environments: the need to foster playfulness in learning and the parallel need to work toward a framework of learning that builds upon the Maker movement and that acknowledges three essential facets for survival in contemporary times: “They are homo sapiens, homo faber, and homo ludens—or humans who know, humans who make (things), and humans who play” (p. 90).

We have plenty of examples upon which to draw: Michael Wesch’s experiments with his Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State University; the YOUMedia Center for teens at the Chicago Public Library; smart classrooms where technology enables creatively productive interactions between onsite and online learners; and even the information commons model that began in academic libraries and is increasingly being adapted for use in public libraries. There’s much to explore here, and that’s why some of us have been promoting the idea that it’s time to add to Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place concept of three key places in our lives (the first place being home, the second place being work, and the third place being community gathering places where we find and interact with our friends and colleagues away from home and work) with a new Fourth Place: the social learning center that onsite as well as online as needed.

Another theme that Thomas and Brown bring to our attention is the way communities—those vibrant foundations of our society that are so wonderfully explored by John McKnight and Peter Block in their book The Abundant Community and continue to be fostered on The Abundant Community website—are developing into collectives—less-than-rigid gatherings of learners and others who are drawn by immediate needs and then disperse if/when those needs are met.

“A collective is very different from an ordinary community,” Thomas and Brown write. “Where communities can be passive (though not all of them are by any means), collectives cannot. In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn. Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.” (p. 52).

All of which leads us to an obvious conclusion: if we are inspired to do the things within our communities, collectives, and organizations that Thomas and Brown describe and advocate, we will be engaged in building the new culture of learning they describe—while learning how to build it.