Two Little Words that Create Community

How you frame your work in speech and writing can make all the difference. If your messaging fosters a sense of community, people will want to be involved. Certain words can subtly and powerfully undermine the atmosphere of equality and mutual support on which real community is based, while other words just as quietly and compellingly boost community feeling, transforming how people feel and what they do. Replacing just two tiny, common words can dramatically shift both your messaging and your results, so that people feel eager and gratified to be part of your community and support you.

The First Little Word

When you write about doing things for or to your constituents, you set up a well-meaning but divisive hierarchy in which you are the one in power. Your constituents/clients appear to be needy, humble, passive receivers of your assistance, who have nothing to offer in return. However, this is never truly the case. For your assistance to be effective, receivers have to be actively engaged in the process. A therapist cannot do therapy to a client, only with one. A GED teacher cannot teach students who are not actively trying to learn. Even a soup kitchen cannot feed people who don’t participate by making the choice to come, chew, and swallow.

In actuality, mission-based work is always a partnership. If you frame it as such, you make people feel more comfortable accepting your assistance, because they feel like active participants instead of helpless receivers. You also foster a sense of community in which the hierarchy is gone and all people, whether givers or receivers, see themselves as participants creating a more compassionate community and a better world together. Therefore, the first little word is with. Write about doing your work with people instead of for or to them.

Example:

Youth House mentors provide enriching after school activities for inner-city youth.

This sets up a division between Youth House mentors and inner-city youth, so that the mentors stand above the youth and provide them with a service that they passively receive and are enriched by. The mentors are the only ones with something to offer, and the statement supports the stereotypes that inner-city youth are lazy and impoverished culturally, intellectually, and emotionally.

At Youth House, inner-city youth partner with local adult mentors to create and participate in inspiring after-school activities.

This statement shows a partnership between youth and mentors, blurring the line between the two groups and demonstrating that the youth are active leaders trusted to create and maintain their own activities. By mentioning that the adults are local, it also shows the organization’s care in selecting mentors who are part of the same community as the youth.

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