HARNESSING THE POWER OF COMMUNITY FOR COMMON GOOD

COMMUNITY in different human contexts can be based on interest, action, plan, practice and circumstance.

Many of the world’s current and emerging issues are experienced at the neighbourhood and household level.

Not all neighbourhoods’ and households’ experiences are the same from shocks to the economic, social and ecological environment because of geographical location, equity, different historical trajectories, equality and so forth.

Aggregating the different dominant national or regional issues to represent the challenges experienced at the neighbourhood level is flawed.

Different neighbourhoods have different needs, depending on their physical location, proximity to economic opportunities, access to resources (water and land), employment profile and sense of place.

These issues give rise to many social, economic and environmental impacts that positively or negatively affect neighbourhoods through feedback loops.

Many neighbourhoods can (and have) become isolated from district and regional development.

There is growing interest to restore and develop neighbourhoods, improve collaboration between and within neighbourhoods, and to create an alternate future where these communities can foster an environment and social dynamic that improves conditions to the household and individual level.

How does a community of place (neighbourhood) benefit from other communities such as communities of interests (share the same interest or passion), communities of expert practitioners (in science, engineering, technologists, humanities), and communities of action (trying to bring about change)?

Many community initiatives fail because they organise interventions around a key actor – this can be a funder, implementer (practice), community activist(s) or interest groups (action), political party (interest) and a ward system based on political affiliations.

These individualistic approaches often lead to interventions that do not have the support by all because of differences in beliefs, values, methods, and techniques.

The concept of “common good” has been around since ancient times, popularised by philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato.

Amitai Etzioni defines it as “those goods that serve all members of a given community and its institutions, and, as such, includes both goods that serve no identifiable particular group, as well as those that serve members of generations not yet born”.

Based on Aristotelian principles, “it is attainable only by the community, yet individually shared by its members”.

A community in Limpopo has been using this co-operacy model to improve its water security.

Water services to several communities are not where they should be and many communities were still receiving water at or below the 25 litres a person a day RDP standard.

Rigid and hierarchical approaches rarely support the dynamism required for the active and equal participation of the different communities.

There must be a shift in trust, relatedness and the nurturing of our social capital to create a new movement that will help us create an alternate future.

We can expand this model to different challenges faced by communities to improve service delivery, food security, social ills and sense of place.