Gift community is an experiment in community wellbeing based on three simple ideas:
A life well lived is a creative life.
We are all creative, but in very different ways.
Even better is a life of big, ambitious creativity,
together with others.
But when we do big things together we tend to start organising ourselves top-down.
This undermines the benefits.
What if creativity in community is more dynamic, better for us and much more fun, when we completely avoid top-down organising?
Big, ambitious creativity without top down organising requires a very different approach. It starts with three keys: listening, creativity and gifts. To discover how it works, you are invited to take one, two or three steps:
A taster: spend an evening with a group of about five people, listening to each others stories and creative aspirations
A six week program with the same group, spending time together once per week to develop mutual trust and support
Continued involvement in a growing community in the ways that work for you
In this way we hope to build a community culture based on five pillars: creative freedom, voluntary support with commitment, spontaneous harmony, trust-work and positive reciprocity (pay it forward).
To learn more about all of this please get in touch, or read on for more detail.
A lot of us are concerned about the way the world is headed at the moment. In both global events and day to day life, it all feels a bit like a pressure cooker. Powerful voices are getting louder and angrier about what’s to be done, but perhaps what’s really needed are the voices of normal people. I’m convinced that the shift we need can only start right at the bottom.
Wouldn’t it be great if the way out of the pressure cooker for each of us, and for the wider world, were one and the same? We often think that doing the right thing is all about sacrifice and selflessness, but what if it’s the simple things we all need, things like human connection and creativity, that are the best path to a saner world?
With gift community we are looking for an answer to this question. We start with some simple observations:
One of the best ways to improve our lives and the world around us, is through community
Many of us have less community connection in our lives than we’d like
Truly strong and lasting community is not an easy thing to build
We humans are naturally communal beings, it’s just how we’re made. The decline of community is a tragic and unintended downside of modern life. And we clearly want it back—the word community is everywhere these days. But still there is a lack, something is holding us back.
Which brings us to creativity:
Another powerful way to bring meaning, satisfaction and joy into our lives is through creativity
Creativity is more powerful when done together, but true creativity demands freedom. There is a tension of two opposites here.
This tension—between freedom and harmony—makes community difficult.
The goal of gift community is to create a powerhouse of creativity by discovering a kind of freedom, and a kind of harmony, that pull in the same direction.
That might sounds nice but it’s a bit vague. To speak more practically, the community projects I’ve witnessed over the years have taught me a few things. One is that real community building starts when we do something together. Community just for the sake of being together is great, but it’s limited. It’s when we get creative together—putting on an event, starting a project, helping people—that the transformative power of community starts to emerge.
But too often that’s also where the trouble starts. The community begins to struggle with something that it can’t quite get to grips with. Feelings of goodwill and generosity are diminished by tricky relationships. Differences of opinion and communication problems lead to tensions. The spontaneity that is so energising starts to ebb. Certain unwelcome features from the workplace start to show up: rules and meetings, rank and authority. The joy we find in creative freedom finds itself at odds with the need to coordinate and organise. Worst of all, it’s only too easy for trust to break down.
So here we have a real puzzle…
Communities that don’t engage in ambitious creative work fall short of their potential, but those that do often lose something vital. If we could find a way out of this conundrum something incredible could happen.
Finding this way is what gift community is all about. We can have freedom and harmony together. There are three keys: listening, creativity and gifts.
Listening, because trust is the foundation that everything is built on, and listening is the best way to build trust. The first step into gift community is simply to sit in a small group for an hour or two and really listen to each other: to our stories, to our inspiration, to our challenges. We do so carefully, without interrupting, without competing for talk time, everyone having their turn, the others fully attentive. The effect is remarkable.
Creativity, because true community power starts when we do work together, and we do our best work when we act from inspiration, imagination and freedom. In gift community the creativity we seek is the one that bubbles up spontaneously inside each one of us. Together we strive to amplify each other’s creativity without getting in the way of this inner inspiration. We respect and support the creative autonomy of each person.
Finally, gifts bring it all together. For the greater part of human history it was not buying and selling but the circulation of gifts that held community together. And one of the greatest gifts we can give or receive is support in our creative endeavours. Gifts are the secret that allow harmony and freedom to come together. By giving and receiving support voluntarily, we become intertwined in a fabric of generosity and gratitude, free from the binds of controlling organisation.
Gift based communities have been part of human life for a very long time. One of the most important lessons we know from history is that these communities rely not on rules but on a shared culture to keep the gifts flowing in a way that is balanced and sustainable. One of the hardest aspects of rebuilding modern community is that we have lost this culture. We need to build a new one for ourselves. The three keys give us a way to start. To keep things going, we have five pillars of gift community culture:
Creative freedom. For work to be inspired and energised, direction and decision making must belong to the single person who is the source of that work—the author. We respect the gifts we each have.
Voluntary support with commitment. We combine our strengths through voluntary support of each other’s creativity. There is no need for or place for authority, but we honour our commitments. We respect the gifts we each give.
Spontaneous, interdependent harmony. The harmony and direction of the community emerge spontaneously, never through planning or authority. This simple act of letting go of control is the secret that lets harmony and freedom shift from tension to integration: harmony enhances freedom, freedom enhances harmony.
Trust-work. Without trust we have nothing. We know that trust must be actively developed and tended to. There is a lot we can learn to do this more skilfully. Trust can be broken easily and unintentionally so the work never ends. More than anything the work is listening.
Pay it forward. When our gratitude is expressed directly as a return gift there is a loss of momentum. Instead we turn our gratitude into a gift for someone else. In this way the gift never stops moving and the community is energised. The gifts we give return to us from an unexpected direction.
Here is what it means in practice to be part of a gift community.
The first get together, for about five people, is an hour or two spent sharing our creative intentions and listening to each other’s stories. We do this not as an unstructured conversation but in a form that makes it much easier to listen properly, taking turns to speak, without interruption.
The next step is an invitation to commit to meeting once a week for about six weeks. Each week we share an update on our creative work, and then one person gets the chance to share a specific challenge with the group and to learn from the insights and understanding that the others bring. We do this each week until everyone has had a turn, and conclude with one more meeting where we look back at what we have gained.
In parallel to the case clinics, we use one-to-one meetings to help each other identify and share with the group the strengths we bring and the needs we have. In other words, what we are able to give, and what we would like to receive. Spontaneously we will see these start to line up, and the fabric of interdependence starts form. All such support is of course entirely voluntary, but we ask each other to honour the commitments we make.
Once everyone has had a turn at the case-clinic, we have a chance to decide what to do next. This is a good moment to drop out gracefully if the commitment is difficult. We may decide to keep the group going and go deeper. Some of us may join a new group. We may keep the one-to-one connections going and occasionally meet with a full group. All combinations of these are on the table.
If being part of such a group appeals to you, please get in touch. We will start when enough people are ready.