Community Organizing
Community Organizing
Getting the community to come together can take a lot of effort, but its okay to start small. Start up conversations with those interested in similar topics as you are. Get friends together to game plan how you are able to support each other in times of need, so that you have proper expectations of what's available for you, and what you're available to give. You can even decide if you want to get together and gather all your own friends to do acts of service for the community. This can look like anything, picking up trash at a park, to donating clothes to the homeless shelter. When getting rid of furniture of working appliances, ask around your community to see if someone was thinking about getting one, but couldn't afford it. It just takes putting your awesome thoughts into action, to really accomplish something amazing together!
Building Trust
Building trust is going to look different for everyone, because we have all experienced our own traumas. To respect that, we adivse that you find trust in your own set our requirements, but we do have some suggestions. Trust is an important component of any community, and here we are trying to find what we can do with the resources were given. So build trust in small acts first, and make sure you are doing it with the right intentions. Trust may not always come from acts of kindness and that is okay.
When trusting people look for truthfulness, honesty, and compassion. You want to make sure they are doing the best to be a caring and reasonable individual. We know as humans we all make mistakes, but it is about what they do when they realize their misdooings that really impact their personality. Look out for grooming, manipulation, and other tactics to build false trust.
Common Ethics
Finding the people in your community is awesome! But it's important to come up with rules or ethics that you will all agree to stand by. This shouldn't look like a constriction on expression or individual's action; however, it should set a principle for what you all agree on upholding in values.
You can set these values, and re-evaluate them when times call for it. We may think were all on the same page, but this is an extra safety boundary of what you expect from one another. In times of crisis we have to support one another through it, because we are eachother's person/people. We have the compassion to love and take care of our community. So lets make it happen!
Understanding Eachother
Finding ways to communicate is important, but making sure you are listening with intentions of learning, and not responding to the stories told. Sometimes the people around us are telling us stories we can relate to, but it is still not always our place to say it. We know that there are other factors that determine experience of a situation. Oppression, as well as our unique way of understanding information, can impact our experience. This makes it very important for us to discuss our experiences but not to compare to one another. We can also achieve this by just supporting people with our prescence and other support in times of crisis.
Honesty in Darkness
It is hard to tell ourselves that in a world where everyone lies, that it may be important to say, and embody the truth. If you find yourself as a truthful and honest person, it will be much easier to build trust. That being said, we know that lying can be a protective measure, or one that adds layered protection in undefined social situations. We have to find it within ourselves to talk to one another about our truths in order to find commonalities in the human condition. Alot of the feelings/experiences we believe are singular to us, are actually that of many; we just find the conversation embarrasing.
Reality through Fog
It can be very difficult to see the reality of the world and country, in it's place at the current moment. It has become more and more indistinguishable what the facts and truth ultimately are in our everyday news and gossip. Finding ways to, as a community, come to together and analyze the news in hopes of finding the facts, is a better way for us to gather information on whats actually going on outside of our areas. It's important for us to remember that just because we are not affected, in our perception, doesn't mean we aren't. We should also care about those in the areas effected even if we don't know them personally.