An Introduction | The People are the Community | The Purpose is the Mission |
Growth is Diversity | The Rules are the Culture | Putting it all Together
Communities are everywhere you look. You wake up at home with your loved ones, that’s a community of family. You walk into the office to tackle a day of work with your co workers, that’s another community, a work place community. After work you do some activity with your friends, and that is yet another community, a friendship community. Even though these communities or groups are seemingly exclusive from each other, they have the great ability to blend with each other.
When new people come into a community, that allows a lot of great things to happen including the sharing of new experiences, the exchange of new ideas, and the teaching of new lessons. When that blending happens within a community, diversity at work. The more diverse a community is, the larger it can grow, which means the stronger it can get. Ultimately giving the community a great chance of sustaining itself.
Now, all of that is great and all, but what exactly is a community? You can’t just buy one from the store. There are plenty of text book definitions that use a wonderful string of words to give a simple definition, but the words offer no depth to the concept. They basically say a community is a group of people who share a common interest. During my 18 or so months of knocking on doors, I visited hundreds of neighborhoods each being their own little community. Taking that experience as well as my 15 years of entrepreneurship, I started defining community as a self sustaining group of individuals, who share a commonality that come together for a purpose while following a code with the ability to grow.
The best communities possess all of those characteristics and I’m going to go through and explain why each one is important while giving relatable examples along the way.
Let’s build a community.
LeRoy J. Watkins III 