Thanks to the 25 folks who joined members of the NICA Board at East West Bookshop on August 21 for a presentation and discussion with Diana Leaf Christian on “Three Aspects of a Healthy, Thriving Community.”
The three aspects are:
- Community Glue: taking time to do shared enjoyable activities that tend to generate feelings of gratitude and trust
- Good Process and Communication Skills: the ways members gather together specifically to get to know each other better, consider ideas, understand each others’ emotions or upsets, or discuss and resolve conflicts and the ways people talk with each other, both in groups and meetings and one on one
- Effective Project Management: the ways a community creates and maintains its legal entity(s); the ways it finances, purchases, and physically develops its property; organizes and tracks its internal community finances and member labor requirements; attracts, processes, and orients new members; and maintains the community’s documents, policies, and decisions
Effective community governance, according to Diana, is at the center of all three aspects of healthy community — and benefits and enhances all three.
She was also kind enough to provide a printed summary of her talk (excerpted above), which can be downloaded from the following link:
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Diana is writing a series of articles in Communities Magazine on sociocracy and will be returning to British Columbia in February. Watch for future updates; we may be able to catch her on her way through again.
