The commercialisation of community

Yet we do.

Most obviously - in government circles - we treat citizens as customers. While governments and agencies 'deliver services to their customers', communities continue to provide care and compassion to people. While agencies 'manage outcomes', community members check to see that we are alright. The personal versus the aggregated.

Of course, no agency can provide the 'levels of service' that a community can provide on an individual basis to its members. Aggregation is a necessary thing; yet in doing that aggregation, we lose something. We start to focus on 'programmes' and 'outcomes' and 'delivery structures' and 'social capital' in the conglomerate sense. We become paternalistic - we know what's good for you, and you're going to like it.

The new renaissance of community development is our only antidote; this time, there is a chance that we got it right. Now we have to make the "powers-that-be" listen, and understand. Or perhaps just become the "powers-that-be" (there is much more truth in the old nostrum of 'people power' than most people realise).

The best of community development is personal, bottom-up, and self-organising. It focuses on the development of individuals, who then go on to form communities, Spontaneously. Communities with a spirit of caring, compassion, common purpose and joint future.

Communities are, in general, not things you construct - and certainly not things you manage. They are things that, like Topsy, just grow. The means of 'constructing' a community is to become like a gardener - to lay down some substrate, some soil, some nutrients, to plant some seeds, and then to stand aside and let nature take its course. To intervene only when a judicious application of more nutrients will aid in the formation of the flowers. And to marvel at the 'outcome', the mature, fruiting plant.

The Tao Te Ching: "Govern a country as you would cook a small fish." And again: "When a good leader has finished, the people think they did it themselves".

Indeed, the people must do it themselves. We must all do it ourselves. Here endeth the commercial.