Create a Culture of Belonging! Strong cultures help pe…
I highly recommend this book for outstanding principles, concepts, and organization practices around building a community. It is a concise read with worksheets and other exercises that are incredibly useful for anyone in a leadership position or working in a community or organization and wanting to help it to stabilize and/or grow healthily. In today's day where we tend to fall into mega-communities through social media platforms, it's even more important for us to have communities that are build on meaningful shared identities and/or goals. One really important idea this book conveys is that even if a community does not explicitly have values or norms, they implicitly have them. And so even if an explicit value is that "all are welcome," the reality is that there will be people who are more or less of a fit for any community. And contrary to current discourses, being able to be assertive about these boundaries and standards will benefit everyone. This book does draw some examples from small religious organizations, and the author derives some conceptual terminology from religious communities. However, as an agnostic-atheist who has studied religion in a social/historical context, I did not find it overly burdensome. One area that religious communities excel at is building, defining, and maintaining groups, so I believe that we can learn from these practices and apply them to secular organizations as appropriate. (appropriate the practices even - turnabout is fair play!)
