Connecting with the Community and Allies

Relevant teams: Alliance Building, Outreach and Integration

Before you attempt to bring a community together in Assembly, you need to actually familiarise yourself with that community. This will help you to select an assembly question that matters to the people around you, and to design an assembly event that is appealing to your local community.

Think: Who makes up the community in question? Where are they? Who are the obvious future participants? Who are the less obvious ones? Which communities are hidden from you? Where are the community connections that already exist happening? Are those connections deliberate or organic/cultural? Who are the influencers, the stakeholders, or the ‘Elders’ within this community?

Whilst we are connecting with the community, we need to connect with ourselves as well. We need to ask ourselves what assumptions we carry about the community we are trying to reach. We must challenge our own blind spots and prejudices at every opportunity, and continue to do so throughout the process.

It is also vital to develop active listening skills, so that when you are engaging with others in your community, you are taking time to understand them, their needs and their wants, rather than trying to push your own agenda.

To help you better connect with your community, take a look at the following modules in the Trust The People programme:

• Personal Processing - This module encourages you to think about your identity, your biases, and your relationship to society.
• Deep Reflection: Understanding Ourselves and Understanding Others
• Engaging Communities - This module supports you in reaching out to others and forming relationships founded on trust.
• Deep Hanging Out Guide
• Active Listening Guide
• Door to Door Listening Guide

To help boost your ability to connect with those in your community, consider the following:

• Hold meetings in open and oft-frequented places (i.e. a local pub or cafe), so that many can easily participate.
• Be visible and open to conversations – find ways to bring those around you in.
• Attend existing community events – if relevant, you might run a stall.
• Contact existing community groups and connect to their issues and experiences.
• Organise events such as seed swaps, ‘free’ markets, community meals, music evenings, Empathy Circles or Cafes.

In the same phase of your assembly planning process, you want to put your feelers out to local organisations and see if any of them are up for organising an assembly together with you. Working together with other organisations will not only increase the diversity of your audience but will also bring new ideas to the event organising process that you might never have thought of on your own.

Dare yourself to reach out to a group that you have never been in touch with before. XR groups are most commonly in touch with unions, environmental and faith groups or unions. How about getting in touch with a local racial justice or LGBTIQ+ group?