Transform your Community Meetings with these 3 Easy Techniques
The opening rituals of a community meeting can transform your event from community engagement to community building (Reading Time: 5 minutes)
Hi! This is the third in a four-part series diving into the practical nuts and bolts of community engagement processes vis-à-vis community building and intergroup contact. Enjoy! ~Eric
Transform your Community Meetings with these 3 Easy Techniques
The opening rituals of a community meeting can transform your event from community engagement to community building. (Reading Time: 5 minutes)
How can community engagement be a counterforce to our increasing social fragmentation, polarization, and loneliness?
Taking this challenge to heart will require a shift in community engagement practices. Rather than just soliciting input, we also need to focus on bridging the social gaps between different identity groups and creating a shared sense of belonging in the places where we live.
This requires a cross-pollination with critical insights from social psychology. The most important of these is Optimal Contact, the simple but profound mechanism at the heart of how humans move from “Us vs. Them” to “We.”
If you need a recap of Optimal Contact, check out this previous post, but here is a summary of its core conditions:
Optimal Contact maximizes the interaction between people of different groups
Optimal Contact minimizes anxiety about intergroup interaction.
Optimal Contact induces empathy or perspective taking between people of different groups.
Over the last few posts, we’ve focused on infusing Optimal Contact into community engagement practices. First, we discussed how to calibrate our outreach efforts for Optimal Contact Condition #1 (maximizing group interaction). And then we looked at how community meeting set-up can contribute to Optimal Contact Condition #2 (reducing anxiety) and Condition #3 (inducing empathy or perspective taking).
Today, we’ll tackle the opening rituals of running a community meeting. We’ll assume that you’ve corralled lots of different people into a room to deliberate on something. And we’ll assume you’ve set-up the meeting so that folks feel calm, welcome, and have had a chance to get to know one another.
Now what?
There are some important things that contribute to Optimal Contact Condition #2 (reducing anxiety) and Condition #3 (inducing empathy or perspective taking).
Let’s dive in:
1. A Jargon-Free Introduction of 20 minutes or Less
Have you ever attended a meeting that started with an “expert” going on and on for 45 minutes (or more) in jargon heavy talk with all sorts of details that don’t really matter?
It’s head-against-the-wall bewildering how common this is. And it’s a recipe for meeting failure. Science has shown that our attention span for listening to speakers is about 20 minutes before we get antsy or distracted.
So keep your introduction to a breezy 20 minutes. But just as important, strip out all the jargon and keep it simple. Every profession has its specialized terms and sometimes we forget that most people aren’t familiar with them. Jargon can serve as a tool of exclusion, so leave those words at the office. Pretend like your grandma or your 5-year-old child is in the audience.
The introduction should cover everything the event participants need to know in order to make thoughtful and useful contributions to the question(s) you are asking. What are the project’s limiting boundaries or criteria? Timeline? Budget? Who’s involved and who is deciding?
Without this clarity, folks get anxious about the potential change your project may bring. And then they will fill in the gaps with their own fears. People’s imaginations are extraordinary. So focus them on the purpose of the meeting, not on distracting theories about what’s really going on.
Rehearse your opening presentation in front of your Convening Group - remember them? As representatives of the community, they will help you craft the most succinct and accessible introduction possible.
2. Establish Ground Rules
Before any discussion starts, present a set of “ground rules” or a “community agreement.” These are a shared set of expectations for behavior. They are things like: “Keep an open mind and be open to learning something new” or “Be respectful of others.”
Remember, folks get nervous when you stick a lot of different people into one room together. It’s just human nature. The more you can provide some structure or oversight on how to interact and behave, the less anxious people are. Yes, you can do that with good facilitation (more on that next time), but the Ground Rules level-set collective expectations about how to interact.
Good ground rules will set the stage for people to listen respectfully and consider other people’s ideas. They also give the facilitator something to fall back on should someone behave poorly. Poor behavior raises anxiety and collapses the space for listening to others’ perspectives.
In the interest of brevity, I won’t dive into the details of particular ground rules. But a quick web search for ”Ground Rules for Community Meetings” or “Group Meeting Agreement” will turn up some good examples.
Is there some poor behavior that you anticipate at your event that might benefit from emphasizing a particular ground rule? Your Convening Group can help you customize these for your event.
3. Focus on Positive and Constructive Questions
If we want to limit negative behavior and maximize the exchange of perspectives, it’s best to focus people’s attention on their vision for the future. What you ask at a community event should be positive and seek constructive answers. What does it look like if the best thing happens? How can we make this better?
In a good event, ideas bounce around and feed off of one another. Participants see their ideas in the context of others, and a general sense of shared possibility arises.
Town Halls or Listening Sessions are awful at this, and I’m still dumbfounded why people even bother with this type of performative event. Their open-ended format inherently generates negative energy that spirals into complaining and grandstanding. People stop listening to each other, and they focus on making sure that their specific idea is heard louder than others. Ugh.
By directing the collective gaze towards future horizons, we provide a pathway to share our perspectives and empathize with others. We catch glimpses into each other’s humanity. What do we value and what kinds of places do we dream of inhabiting?
Yes, ideas will need to be prioritized and decisions made, and that’s not always easy work. But with a community event that maximizes Optimal Contact, there is more understanding about tradeoffs and collective good. You stand a better chance of minimizing the sentiment that “they” are getting something that “we” are not.
Most importantly, folks will walk away having seen their neighbors, however different, as fellow humans with whom they share this patch of earth. And given our national epidemics of loneliness and polarization, that’s a step in the right direction.
Next week, we’ll dive into the role of a facilitator, and the tricks and techniques that can be used for Optimal Contact.
Read it now in Part 4: “5 Tips for Powerful Community Meeting Facilitation!”
~Eric
What Else I’m Reading:
In the NYtimes Op-Ed, We Have Become a Lonely Nation. It’s time to Fix That, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy launches his campaign to combat our Loneliness Epidemic. It’s wonderful to see this get this public health issue get more attention. Thank you Vivek.
I am about 5-years late to this one, but Erik Klinenberg’s book Palaces for the People is as relevent as ever. Klinenberg makes a compelling case for why we should invest “social infrastucture.” In fact, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy lists social infrastructure investments as his first solution.
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