When you are driven by your passion to make a positive difference to help your town thrive, you need to take your local community with you. It is not a one person show. This can be an incredibly frustrating and lonely journey. It is especially demotivating because it is often the people who would most benefit most that put up the fiercest resistance to change.
Being able to share your journey, learn from others’ experience, and build networks beyond your town can be a life saver for people constantly working to overcome resistance and bring about positive change locally.
Becoming part of a community of practice where you can share, learn and interact beyond your own community is
- Smart: Because you can get access to talent and resources, and learn from others so you don’t waste time making mistakes they already made and learned from.
- Motivational: You are not alone on this journey. Just today I experienced again how invigorating it is to find someone on the same crazy journey that I am on, and talk to them. Their journey not only gives me hope, it inspires me to continue on mine!
- Cost-effective: By becoming part of a community you do not need to cover the full cost of everything you need. You get access to workshops, discussions, resources, etc. that you only pay in part for.
- Expansive: Not only will your horizons expand as you participate, but you will help others so theirs grow as well, because this is a community across New Zealand. In fact, for many of our online services it is across the globe.
- Saving you time: If you could get access to information, programs, discussions, workshops etc. that are all curated with a razor sharp focus on what will add value for small town living, small town business, small town change making, that will be neat!
Of course you want to be part of a community that will enable you to be more successful without demanding more of you. It will be stellar if it can actually save you some time, so you have more energy and inner resources for other important aspects if life (like your family and friends, and how about some me-time?)
Should this community be regional, national, or global? My experience with small towns in a number of towns is that they share similar constraints, issues and opportunities. How to engage with those differ between contexts, but not so much what the issues and barriers are. My vote is for global if possible. Even better if it can be all of the above.