Earlier this week, I started a Meet-up group called "Better Life Community - Roseville." Starting this community, or something like it, is something I've been thinking about since I left Christianity, or in some ways, before I left Christianity. I wasn't particularly happy with the way I saw most Christian communities doing church.
I decided to start it now both because I need this community now and also because I think my life is more or less stable enough that I can handle getting it going. If you're reading this, you probably doing care much about my personal story getting here and even if you do, that's probably something better for a conversation over coffee than it is a blog post....
So, what are my goals with this community? What am I trying to create? And how do I plan to get it off the ground?
First, let's talk about goals. I want a community that encourages people to be their best selves, to improve their local community and also to enjoy life. The group would facilitate educational opportunities and discussions. It would create space for identifying goals of individual members and encourage those members to achieve those goals. It would identify opportunities to improve the local community and act on them. And - it would be fun and encourage people to have fun.
Also, it wouldn't be dogmatic. This is very important to me. I happen to be a practicing Stoic, a Humanist and am influenced by all sorts of other ideas and lenses, but... I'm not interested in forming a group to create replicas of myself. I don't even want an insular group. Instead, I want to create something that is always bringing in new ideas and interacting with various groups on the outside. While I think every community needs a core, I think that communities where the lines between insiders and outsiders is too clearly delineated or where the line between ideas we accept and ideas we don't it too strict... well, I think that can be a bad thing.
How do I get it off the ground? Well, I think every successful community like this develops with a good mix of direct leadership and organic growth. You someone with vision and I've definitely got one, but the implementation of that vision needs to be guided, often altered, by the community sharing it. The visionary is often wrong, particularly about implementation.
Nevertheless, here are my current ideas. I'm starting three separate groups, Roseville Runners, Better Life Community and Roseville Beautification Volunteer Core (not quite sure on the name here yet). The groups are separate, but have overlapping goals. The runners group will help people improve their fitness levels and hopefully increase use of public parks. The Beautification group will improve those parks. And the Better Life Community will be more about philosophy, philanthropy and fun, but will also encourage an active life.
All three groups are intended both to work together from time to time and also to collaborate with outside entities, both other Meet-ups and also Civic organizations.
And that brings me to my philosophy on leadership and collaboration with other groups. While I believe that self-improvement, community improvement and life enjoyment are uncontroversially good goals, my views on how best to achieve this, my methods and even those of the communities of which I am a part, will not always be best. Even when they're great, they will be incomplete in both the knowledge informing their approach and the talents and skills enabling their implementation. On account of this, I can't successfully achieve my goals without both the cooperation and even leadership of others.
Let's take the running group as an example. A good running group should have a good stretch routine. Now, I do know quite a bit about stretching, both because I'm a Soldier and we do a stretch routine after our workouts and also because I happen to have fairly tight hamstrings. But, I don't have a strong history with yoga. Over time, no doubt, someone who joins the running group will have that background. It only makes sense for that person to lead us in stretching. If we don't find such a person, and even if we do, it might only make sense for the Roseville Runners, once and a while to collaborate with a group that focuses on yoga or stretching for the obvious reason that we'll learn new things and meet new people, but also because this sort of cross-pollination enriches the community at large.
If this sounds interesting to you and you're in the area, here's a link to our Meet-up group
https://www.meetup.com/better-life-community-of-macomb-county/
No comments:
Post a Comment