Community Building Tips: Gaining Momentum

At this Checkpoint

This is the third part of a toolkit series on community building and social change.

Read this if you have completed all of the actions in the previous stage and have little or no practical experience in your area of social change, or you are feeling overwhelmed, nervous, or any other hesitation about moving forward.

Skip this if you already have experience working in your area of social change and feel confident and self-aware about your related motivations and fears.

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The NGM Circle Community Building Journey Map: You are at the gaining momentum checkpoint.

In this series, checkpoints (represented by circles on the map) are critical reflection times where we find people get stuck. Checkpoints can be challenging moments where tough questions are confronted and choices are made. Congratulations, you’ve made it to the “getting momentum” checkpoint where you must decide whether or not you will go deeper into this journey.

By now, you’ve done quite a bit of internal work and network building reaching out to potential collaborators and allies in the previous stage. You’ve been reading, researching, and digging into the issues you want to address and making relationships with people who want to work toward similar goals.

Most likely, you’ve reinforced your own belief in the validity of your cause, hopefully with increased understanding and social connections to back it. Alternately, you may be questioning if it’s really worthwhile or if you have the capacity to be doing this.

At this point, it’ll be helpful to pause and reflect on your own motivations and fears before going ahead. In the last stage, you uncovered new ideas, worldviews, and relationships you may not have been exposed to before. These experiences might have given you some fresh insight into your own motivations. Take some time to ask yourself, given what you know now:

What really brings you to this work?
What’s changed for you since you started this journey?
What have you learned about yourself?
What have you learned about others?

These questions might be difficult to sit with, but embrace that tension. There will be many moments in community organizing that will feel uncertain and uncomfortable, that just means you’re growing. Be patient and take the time you need to feel healthy and confident in yourself. Social transformation requires personal transformation, and that doesn’t happen overnight. If you haven’t felt a bit uneasy, you might not be paying close enough attention to what’s really going on with you and the people around you. Change is challenging, it requires us to bridge the gap between the known and unknown in ourselves and society.

That being said, you likely have fears and hesitations that have emerged. That’s normal, change can feel scary. Get clear about the motivations of yourself and the others you’ve connected with, reconnect with your vision, the values and beliefs that make the cause important, and the change that needs to happen. When you feel confident with where you’re at and still want to go ahead, move on to the next stage. If not, go back to the start or spend some more time researching in the previous stage.