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Community Building

John W. Gardner wrote a little book in which he details ten ingredients that can help build and maintain lasting communities. We believe that these 10 ingredients also apply as we build regional and statewide communities of people with lived experience of mental health recovery and dual diagnosis recovery.

  1. Place the "common good" first, while preserving each member's uniqueness. This means that we need to "keep our eyes on the prize" while affirming that each of us walks our own unique path to recovery.
  2. Agree upon a set of shared values, and build in ways to pass these values on to newcomers. These shared values come from focus group and events where we make our voices heard about what is important to our recovery. We pass these along to each other and to service providers.
  3. Build in ways to celebrate the achievements of members and develop ways for resolving disagreements. We are exuberant partiers and celebrate with flying pigs, pins, celebratory stones, and certificates the efforts to give back to the movement. We have also built in a formal conflict resolution process to help us resolve issues that arise, that evade resolution on a one to one basis.
  4. Communication within the community is important, but also important is communication between the community and other groups in the movement. Monthly meetings with the Recovery Learning Centers across the state helps keep us connected with each other and gives us an opportunity to celebrate the events and services being offered in each of the six DMH regions.
  5. Create ways to help newcomers get involved and develop their leadership skills according to their own interests. Each project needs support from volunteers to make them happen. We keep a running list of activities needed by each project coordinator and try to match volunteers to an activity of interest to them.
  6. Develop ways to keep the community focused on its mission, and to defend itself against outside forces that would change or water down its goals. Our member-run boards have developed our Mission Statement and Vision Statement and hold us accountable and support us when we are asked to compromise either vision or mission.
  7. Instill in members a sense of pride in the community, while acknowledging flaws, and be willing to accept criticism. We celebrate our "Reactive, Confrontational, Unapologetic, and inconvenient advocacy for systems change and believe in "dignity of risk" - even when we fall short of our goals.
  8. Because members continue to grow and move on, communities need to continuously recruit new members, and provide opportunities for them to contribute. We try to match volunteers with activities that inspire them or build skills they wish to develop.
  9. Healthy communities need a clear vision of what they want to achieve. Vision Statement and Mission Statements are stabilizing forces that help us when we encounter storms and in calm weather sailing.
  10. Healthy communites need to develop ways to get the work done, and to direct the work of its members. On limited budgets this is always a problem of balancing the work we commit ourselves to and the self care that workers and volunteers so strongly support.