The power of a community

Together we are a collective genius April 10, 2021

I followed the permaculture teacher training with Graham Bell and Rakesh Rootsman Rak. They are both such a wonderful and dedicated facilitators. I would like to share some things that I learned during that course and I definitely going to take with me in further permaculture practices.

First of all I want to say that the permaculture community as I know it is a warm nest where we accept and respect each other just the way we are. We also have a common interest in making the earth a better place for everyone that lives on it.

Today I wanted to share with you the power of a community and my perspective on it. I think the picture of this blog is a good example of how a community can work. There are many ways in which a community can help you. One of them is synergy or 1+1=3. With a group of people you get more done than when everyone would work individual. You can also learn new things from people in the group since people have different cultures and maybe look in a different ways at thing than you do. By culture I mean collections of beliefs, ideas, values, priorities, norms, parameters, phobias, behaviors, preferences, aversions, rituals and much more or as Looby Macnamara says "A complex web of seen and unseen patterns of thinking, behaving and interacting" She also wrote a book about cultural emergence. Emergence means 1 + 1 = totally something new. Something unimaginable beforehand that exist in a combination that did not exist before such as bees+flower=honey. In a community perspective cultural emergence means that when we come together new cultures emerge and unexpected ideas and insight and interacting with each other will arise. Together we are a collective genius which is far greater than we could ever imagine. Therefore cultural emergence differs from synergy where synergy gives more strength in a system when acting alone, cultural emergence creates something new.

During the teacher course I had such a warm community around me and that was a really nice experience but how did this happen?

The power from a community revolves around creating a safe environment where people can be themselves and express themselves in a safe way, without judging other people or being judged. To create a safe environment it is important that you bound with people in your community by for example sharing stories, playing music and games together, cook together, meditate together or other things you like to do together. By doing this you create a deeper connection with people in the group and it is easier for other group members to encourage and support you and it will be easier for you to share things with people. Creating new ideas together can be very powerful as well.

On paper it sounds all nice and easy but why did I experience this specifically with this group where we saw each other on screen? Graham and Rakesh immediately emphasized on creating a safe space at the start of the course. We got clear roles the teachers are here to facilitate the learning process. The task from the students is to create a pleasant learning environment and ensures that everyone feels comfortable.

We started with a culture board. Here could everyone write down a post-it with certain values that they think are important for creating a nice culture in the group. During the course we could shift this post-it from seed to flower to see how things are advancing in the group. If one person in the group did not feel that a post-it could be moved the posted would not be moved and instead we could ask how we could help this person to feel comfortable with what is written on the post-it. Of course the check-in, bonding exercises and the check-out also helped with this.

During all lessons this topic of community and feeling safe came back. I think this made it also easier for people to share things with each other. Seeing that everyone has so much understanding for each other and supports each other where possible. This is very beautiful, it empowers yourself and this is what we need more from in this world instead of polarity. It does not mean that you always have to agree with each other as long as you keep it respectful to others.

We were also divided in guilds consisting of 4 people and at the end of the training we had guild time. Here we could share things with each other and give feedback to the bigger group. I think this is really useful because for some people it is easier to share things with a smaller group. During one of guild meetings I talked about my homestead design for Krokvåg and Dyhöjden and I got a lot of positive feedback and new ideas developed. It came just at the right moment when I was thinking how am I ever going to bring my teacher skills in practice.

It is very nice to learn the practical things during this lesson, but if you really want to convey and share things with others, a nice community environment is very important. This creates a deeper connection with each other, which results in better collaboration. This is one of the most important things that I experienced and that I am going to take with me when teaching permaculture myself.

For all the people out there go out and do what you love. You don’t have to do everything alone there are people out there that happily want to help you. So please go out and find or create your community. Together we can do it.

If you would like to learn more about community building, Cultural Emergence from Looby Macnamara is a good way to start.