Intentionally Building Community with Conversation

We build community with conversations about dreams, small acts, gifts, and invitations.

Our dreams are how we describe the qualities and characteristics of a thriving community. Small acts are small experiments that help us realize our dreams. Gifts are the talents and assets we bring to the table. Invitations are the inclusion of those who can bring other gifts to the table.

The Dream Space Conversation

When people come together in community, they are drawn together by faith in a larger future. They seek relief from today's problems and yearn to be inspired by new possibilities. Problems have no power to inspire a future we create together. Dreams can be fuzzy or specific. They are not predictions of the future. Dreams enable us to see present gifts and opportunities more clearly. Dreams are possibilities we would love to see happen in our community.

The dream space conversation is about future possibilities that have the power to inspire, empower, and bring us together as never before. Anything we imagine one generation out (20 years) is a worthy dream. The way we imagine our communities to be. The choices we want people to have. The connections this community has to others. The ways this community renews itself. Dreams are ideal states we imagine and are passionate about. They're the way would love to describe the world far beyond meager solutions to problems. They are what we think about in dream space where we see the world with the eyes of hope, courage, and faith.

The Small Acts Conversation

A small act is something we can do to create something that expresses possibilities expressed in our dreams. It doesn't depend on the permission or support of others. It's within our capabilities and willingness. Small acts are the opposite of actions that seek speed and scale. Small acts aren't constrained by speed and scale. They are enough to spark movement in the direction of big possibilities. It's always a small experiment inspired by a future compelling possibility.

Small acts are relative to the capabilities of the people engaged in them. To an investor, a small act is a micro-loan or micro-grant. To a group of teachers, a small act is an event with a few students, parents, grandparents, and business owners. One person's small act may be another's large act. When small acts are connected, they create larger and often unpredictable impacts. In a dynamic and interdependent world, one small act can be the snowflakes that set off avalanches, small winds that power fleets of ships.

The Gifts Conversation

Everyone in a community has a skill or knowledge that has value to the community. Youthful imagination, aged wisdom and experience, degreed expertise, researched genius, passionate entrepreneurial spirit are all examples of gifts. When we're engaged in gifts conversations, we aren't distracted by what we're lacking, our deficiencies, obstacles, weaknesses, and shortfalls.

In a gifts conversations, we're talking about assets, talents, and resources in the community that aren't yet being engaged as we would want them to. We're talking about our own gifts and how we engage them in small acts inspired by big possibilities. We're constantly exploring, identifying, and discovering unrealized and hidden gifts. It's a self-fulfilling expectation where the more gifts we expect to find, the more we find.

The Invitation Conversation

Sometimes our gifts are not enough to do what we want to do. We need to invite other people with other gifts to the table. Or we need other people to help us transition from a small act to big possibility, or transition from a big possibility to a small act.

In invitation conversations, we're not interested in talking about people outside the room, no matter how compelling. We are clear that doing so is a distraction from inviting them and their gifts. We need people with connections, people with money, people with talents, people with resources. New futures always depend on new collaborations. Small acts often require more people than those in the present conversation. We may need to invite people who can join us in dream space where new big possibilities can emerge and reveal themselves.