Community building involves creating and reinforcing a sense of community among a group of people.
A significant challenge of community building is to eradicate feelings of dependency and encourage self-reliance, self-confidence, and responsibility. To achieve this, it is essential to establish contact, understand, and build trust with the surrounding communities.
Consider implementing a range of activities and initiatives that bring people together, foster a sense of belonging and connectedness, and promote collective action and shared ownership.
Community building can take place in various settings, including neighborhoods, organizations, and online communities.
Key Aspects
Find here a list of key aspects you should take into consideration when you want to design activities and practices to build and grow your Fab City Hub community.
There are three fundamental aspects you should consider to start building and growing your Fab City Hub community:
Organising
If you want to build a strong community attached to your Fab City Hub and co-create with them, you should consider organizing events or activities that physically bring them to a space. Fab City Camps are very effective events to start building your community, but they can be time and energy-consuming if you are just starting. In that case, you can also think about many other simple, easy-to-organize, and informal events that can take place as soon as possible. For example, meetups, World Café community meetings and Pecha Kucha event formats are highly flexible and easy-to-set-up events you can organize to start your local community. Have also a look to the Amsterdam Open workshop events , an easy and budget reduced event format that can help you to build and grow your community.
Building
Creating a community is an effort that is difficult to quantify in terms of time and resources needed. It can be scary and exciting at the same time, and it always presents new challenges. Nevertheless, there are a number of practices and tools you can experiment with to gain insights into the needs and aspirations of your community and to help you organize their engagement.
Outreach
Reaching out to the right people to be part of your Fab City Hub is a crucial aspect of your project, and there are many ways you could approach it. A very simple and effective exercise could be to organize a mini-campaign challenge. This tool will help you structure your thinking and plan your actions to create connections between a specific message, a target group, and a channel of communication. Another action you can consider is launching a crowdfunding campaign to fund a small project for your Fab City Hub. Such initiatives can serve as a testing ground for sharing your ideas, gauging interest, and measuring the level of engagement people are willing to contribute.
Tools/Stories
Find here a curated selection of Tools and Stories from the Fab City Hub Network that could inspire you to build and grow your Fab City Hub community:
Find here a list of resources collected to know more about community building
→ Take a look below at the initiative called Tomorrow Today Streets from Every One Every Day which promotes neighbourhood initiatives by sharing practices and resources, which can help you in your own neighbourhood.
→ find here a reference book that explains an emerging approach (1997) called Community Building in the United States. It is adopted to help address the problems and opportunities of impoverished neighbourhoods and rural areas.
