An inspiring blog post from a parent and social worker talking about a workshop run by Caroline Tomlinson on behalf of In Control for Herts CLDS.

Do you have the balls to build community? Caroline Tomlinson certainly has.

Today I had the privilege of attending one of her training sessions on building community.It was a very full day and we all had a lot to learn, I'll try to remember and share some of what I've learnt.

We started the day by thinking about what 'community' means to us.

There were lots of thoughts on what 'community' could mean including…Geographical locations: Neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities, counties, countries, continents, planets…Interests: Sports, politics, religion, activities, clubs, groups…Online: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, blogs, hybrid, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn…We thought that a community could consist of two people or the whole human race. In our group we liked the words 'relatedness' & 'shared interests'.

We came to realise that we need to know what community means to every individual before we can hope to build it's capacity. In order to understand that, we need to learn how to listen to people so that we can build the community around them.

Listening is easier said than done. In pairs, we took turns listening to each other speak. Some of us found it VERY difficult to just keep quiet and listen. We MUST listen to people to find out what their gifts and skills are. People won't want to volunteer for things unless they know what it is they are being asked to do. We won't know what they can do unless we listen to them first.

You can read the rest of the post on the 'Change the world one community at a time' blog.