Growing communities for social change is best done gently

There are - as I have pointed out ad nauseam in previous columns - many similarities between 'developing' a community and making a garden.

Communities are things that grow spontaneously and are, if left to their own devices, self-organising. So are gardens. Communities require, and instil, humility in their leaders. The best gardeners approach their gardens with the same sense of humility. Good gardeners are very 'umble people, Mr Copperfield.

If you approach a garden with a prepared awareness, you can learn a great deal - principally about yourself. The same is true of a community.

The question arises: Where do we start? How and where do we sow those first seeds, how do we engender that first sense of 'community'? What to do if the 'soil' is bare, if there is no community 'ground' prepared?

We know where we want to get to: we want a mature, self-organising, self-tending community. One that fully participates in its own destiny; that positively buzzes with the activities and links that sustain the social fabric, which (to put it in today's words) 'build social capital'. We want a community that makes us feel an integral part of the whole. But how to begin?

First, set yourself your primary goal, which must be "to work myself out of a job".

Gardening - and community 'development' work - is not like other work, it's essentially self-therapy; and the first thing you will need to conquer in yourself is the desire to be needed. Remember humbleness? That's what it means: to not feel that you are, or need to be, at the centre of things.

What am I talking about?

Well, the role of a 'community developer' or a social worker, or a 'change agent', or a gardener for that matter, is to act as a catalyst - and then to stand back and watch the result, the reaction, the combining of elements, the growth of the system. Without interfering.

Communities grow, and develop, and mature, and change, all by themselves. They simply need a start, that initial combination of elements that starts the process. It's a bit like the ancient art of alchemy - the refining of base metals (people) into gold (community). And a lot like gardening.

If the 'community development' worker continues to (attempt to) 'manage' the community, there's a very good chance that they are being paternalistic. "You should be going this way!" Not so - if the community wants to run off a cliff, that's their affair, not yours. Let 'em go - after making sure that there are signs to more positive 'outcomes'.

The principal job of the community development worker is to set up the community 'structures' that allow the members of the community to act effectively within and outside the community - and then to stand back.

That is, to (gently) direct a particular sort of organisational form onto the community, so that the members of the community act toward each other, and toward 'outsiders', in a particular way. (We have masses of evidence from psychology that context is an important factor in shaping behaviour). By structuring 'the system' in a particular way, the members will act in a particular manner. It's like the garden: by imposing a certain sort of organisation at planting time, you will get a certain style of garden growing, and the individual plants will all contribute to the overall design in their own way.

Community development - indeed, life itself - is all in the form, all in the (self-) organisation of the materials, or the citizens.

Once the 'form' is established, the garden, and the community, can be left to get on with it. So our first starting point for establishing a garden, or a community, is simply that old discipline 'design' - with the proviso that we are talking about the design of adaptive, self-organising, sustainable systems, in which the role of the leader or creator is minimal.

None of this, of course, is to deny the value, or the importance, of 'nudging'. Nudging is what the best 'change agents', and gardeners, do to their systems.

You see, a self-organising system, such as a community or a garden, follows a certain 'track' (known theoretically as an 'attractor'). It sets it own pattern, makes its own path, follows its own star.

Trying to change the track of that system, that community, can be very difficult if done against the 'natural flow' of the system. It's like trying to make a wild garden into a formal garden - it requires a great deal of horsepower, and surgery, and expenditure of energy. It's against the 'natural flow' of the garden.

Better to move the community, or the garden, when it is in a state that indicates it is ready to move on to the next level, or system state, or different path. Then, it's a matter of a gentle push, a 'nudge', and the system falls onto the new track easily and naturally.

Knowing when to 'nudge' is a matter of observation, preparedness, and timing - three essential qualities of the good 'change agent', community developer … or gardener.

After all, you don't plant tomatoes in winter.