Effort Welcomes 'Unlikely' People to Community Restoration

The co-creation effort underway in Cincinnati has made the welcoming of people who haven’t traditionally joined organized community interests an important part of its work.

The leadership team for this effort, called CoreChange, considers the welcoming of these people critical to the city’s future thriving.

“The whole idea of an alternative future is based on the welcoming of strangers into the conversation,” says CoreChange steering committee member, Cincinnati resident and author Peter Block, who has written in-depth on the invitation in Community: The Structure of Belonging. "Hospitality, the welcoming of strangers, is the essence of a restorative community," he writes.

The CoreChange team is taking two approaches to generate excitement and commitment from “unlikely” citizens.

The first is a speakers series featuring thought-provoking presentations and an overview or sampling strategy of the capstone event, the CoreChange summit slated for Feb. 17-19.

The second approach involves community conversations as a tool to open up the dialogue with more than the usual suspects.

People are inviting their neighbours, 10 to 12 at a time, and providing them a sample experience of the summit. They’re also inviting people to talk about community issues they’re most concerned about.

In some cases, managers are gathering their employees for an hour to discuss the same sorts of things.

Inviting "unlikely" people is not an easy task, Peter concedes, noting various approaches have been tried or considered, including asking street workers to invite those they work with, setting up booths at festivals, organizing garage sales, even hanging notes on door knobs.

In all of this, the intention is not just to get people to an event, he adds. As he writes in Community, “An invitation is more than just a request to attend; it is a call to create an alternative future, to join in the possibility we have declared.”

“We’re inviting people into a long-term effort to rebuild our urban core,” Peter tells Axiom News.

“The summit itself is an invitation to an ongoing, long-term (network) of projects and conversations about what’s going to help these neighbourhoods.”

For a related story, click below:
Summit in Cincinnati Creates a Future

To learn more about CoreChange, including the Feb. 17-19 city-wide summit, and how you can get involved, visit this link. You can also follow the @corechangecincy and @cincysummit Twitter accounts, as well as like CoreChange on Facebook.

Axiom News is storying the CoreChange effort in Cincinnati, including people’s commitment to this, possibilities they see and what can be expected. To share your story, please contact the newsroom at 705-741-4421 or e-mail michelle(at)axiomnews.ca.