The Little Field Guide for Sparking Community-Led Change: 10 Essential Questions to Build Civic Confidence and Momentum

Introduction

Creating change in communities is hard. That’s especially true for community-led change.

Getting people and resources in motion and keeping them aligned is a big challenge. Maintaining commitment is tough. Creating something sustainable is even tougher. Generating results can be downright elusive.

What are we to do? How can we get started in ways that increase the likelihood of long-term success?

Answering such questions typically starts with a discussion over which program, initiative, or strategy to focus on. At times, we become obsessed with these discussions. Research is commissioned. Data gets analyzed. Lots of meetings are held. An analysis is done. Timelines and multicolored charts are prepared. Funding criteria are set. On it goes.

Don’t get me wrong, these activities are important. Still, we can get so mired in them that we miss an essential part of what it takes to spark change—deep, meaningful, sustainable change.

Which brings me to the point of this field guide. If we want to spark community-led change, then how we do the work is as important as what we do. And the early steps we take matter—a lot.

Society begs for solutions to a variety of seemingly intractable challenges. Despite all our efforts, disparities and inequities are growing, not diminishing. Anxiety and fear have become rampant in our individual and shared lives. A lack of trust has turned into pervasive mistrust. For many, authentic hope is in short supply.

Meanwhile, taking effective action on society’s challenges has become more difficult. The loudest and most divisive voices often dominate the public square. Various interests seek to win public debates at any cost. Genuine collaboration seems harder today, just when it’s needed most. None of us can go it alone. The challenges we face demand a shared response.

This leads to some important questions regarding what it takes for effective community-led change to happen:

How can effective community-led change be sparked and sustained over time when progress so often stalls?

Under what conditions will different individuals and groups be willing to step forward when so much mistrust and fragmentation persist?

What does it take to build public will under our current conditions?

How can we marshal our collective resources?

What does it take to engender authentic hope and civic faith?

A desire to see fast and measurable change leads many of us to sidestep these and other vital questions. I don’t think it’s intentional, but I do think it’s the truth.

The problem is that, for most of us, these questions usually aren’t front and center. Even when they are, the embedded culture and practices of organizations, groups, and communities don’t truly support enough exploration of them. Nor do they support responses that require us to change how we do our work.

What’s more, when community change efforts become difficult, when efforts go awry—which, inevitably, they do—there’s a tendency to switch priorities without adequate examination. Or we stick with priorities when we need to recalibrate. The upshot is that by shifting too quickly or digging in too deeply, we aren’t squarely working through the challenges that require our undivided attention.

Furthermore, too many well-intentioned approaches simply are not aligned to a community’s context. Thus, we launch new efforts with great fanfare, only for them to sputter or stall out. They create false hope—just when people most need authentic hope.

We all want to see positive change in people’s lives and in communities. But let’s face it: We are all up against a variety of forces and ingrained ways of doing things that can mitigate our efforts. How can we increase the likelihood of long-term, sustainable progress?

WHY A FIELD GUIDE

This field guide is about what it takes to spark a new trajectory of hope in communities—one that is community-led and puts people at the center of our