Cultivating a Sustainable Community

With all the challenges of the modern world, how do you create a community that will survive? Cultivating a Sustainable Community: The Cycle of Collaboration By Brad Smith and Barbara WishingradTo survive peak oil, climate change, economic failure, and ecological collapse, we must make fundamental shifts in our collective way of life. Individual change is necessary but not enough because our means of survival are embedded in complex social and economic systems. On the other hand, direct change of the massive business and government institutions we now depend upon is unrealistic because the nature of all large institutions is self-perpetuation, not transformation. The practical domain in which we can effectively create a sustainable way of life is our local community. We can understand the social process of cultivating a sustainable community as a collaborative cycle that emerges through four phases. The first encompasses how we connect with one another. The second, how we communicate with each another. Third, how we co-create our community together. And lastly, how we coordinate our on-going social, economic, and political relationships. All four phases, connection, communication, co-creation, and coordination are essential for a healthy community and build one upon the other.   Cultivating a Sustainable Community – Connection In our present cultural milieu, independence and self-sufficiency are valued far above cooperation and collaboration. We pass our time in separate homes, cars, jobs, and mindsets, severely limiting how often we meet and interrelate with one another. This, in turn, limits the mutual understanding necessary to create and maintain a healthy, sustainable society. Our very first order of business, therefore, is to structure ways in which community members can connect on an ongoing basis. We need permanent commons spaces in which we may come together freely and often. By being together for long periods of time they were…

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