Net-centric organizing: learning from Bill Traynor and Lawrence Community Works

Written by Diana Scearce on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Filed under Synthesis

Bill Traynor’s work comes up often as I talk to activists and funders about organizing, leadership, and assessing network impact. I’ve learned a ton from his work with Lawrence Community Works, and this post is an effort to pull together a few of the highlights. Mostly I’m drawing on a presentation he did for the Grassroots Grantmakers in late September, and his Nonprofit Quarterly article Vertigo and the Intentional Inhabitant: Leadership in a Connected World.

A little bit of background on Bill and Lawrence Community Works:

Lawrence, Massachusetts was founded as a manufacturing center in the mid 19th century. Today it is one of the 25 poorest cities in the country. Bill Traynor grew up there. After working as a community organizer for many years (and, in the process, developing a critique of Alinsky-style organizing), Bill came back to Lawrence. At the time, there was no vision for the city and the infrastructure for and spirit of civic engagement had both crumbled. So, Bill joined Lawrence Community Works (LCW) with the initial goal of creating an environment that drew people back into civic engagement. When he joined LCW it had a staff of two and a deficit.

Today Lawrence Community Works has over 50,000 members. They have attracted over $50 million in new investment in the community, and are projecting total investment to grow to $90 million by 2011. But these numbers don’t adequately tell the story of strengthened community ties, increased trust, and new sense of opportunity that is motivating locals to re-engage in their city.

Bill has made a significant investment in codifying and sharing his learning about net-centric community organizing. Here are a few highlights from his presentation to Grassroots Grantmakers:

The nature of place as a value has changed. In an era of increased telecommunications and physical mobility, our relationship to place is changing. However, Bill argues, place—our cities, our neighborhoods—is still a very important environment for connectivity, especially for people with limited options. Community organizing practices need to embrace this shifting sense of place – and focus on the power of connectivity and fostering network environments, as opposed to the creation of static organizational forms.
The forms of engagement are shifting. We’re shifting away from highly structured forms of long-term commitment to looser more flexible forms of engagement. We need to find the forms of engagement that feature – rather than fight – these trends. One of the ways LCW has embraced this shift is by offering many different doors of entry to the network and by creating more provisional, flexible, action-oriented forms of engagement. For example, at the neighborhood level they found that people weren’t engaging with block clubs or neighborhood associations in Lawrence because they were too entrenched, detached and issue (versus relationship) focused. So they started Neighborhood Circles. Residents come to dinners hosted by trained hosts. At the first dinner, people tell their journey to the neighborhood. The aim have good conversations, connect, and follow the energy. The result has been things like campaigns for budget reform and garbage clean-up –outcomes similar to what you would hope for from traditional community organizing.
Building a “connected environment” requires new tools and language. LCW is borrowing terminology from science, design, business and networks that reflects the flexibility of the space for citizen engagement that they’re creating. For example, they use terms like create a “demand environment” and talk about their work as creating “value propositions (versus programs for service delivery). I’ve been really struck by the power of language in our efforts at the Monitor Institute to make sense of what networks need for effectiveness. It’s easy to hold onto language used in organizational contexts – e.g.,“network “leadership” (versus network “weaving”) –because it’s familiar. The problem, I’ve found, is that the familiar language comes with associations that may not be relevant to networks. Using a new term, like “network weaving,” opens a conversation, in this case, about what it means to lead to in a network context.

I’ve also found his “FOLKS” protocol for network management really instructive. It embraces the power of network emergence, dynamic fluidity and openness with solid management principles to get the job done. Here it is (quoted directly from his NPQ article):

F (form follows function): We want to build only the level of structure and formality that we need to do the job—no more and no less. If we overbuild, it will require more resources to support and be that much harder to deconstruct.
O (open architecture is best): We try to build forms (i.e., committees, teams, and processes) that are flexible, informal, provisional, have provisional leadership, and are always open to new people. These forms are more in sync with a network environment.
L (let it go): If it isn’t working or if there is no demand, you have to let it go and let it go quickly. That goes for an idea you might have and for which you can’t get interest or for a program you have run for five years that no longer sells.
K (keep it simple): We need to keep simple things simple so that we have the time and energy for the complicated stuff. Anything that can be routine should be. A five-minute problem shouldn’t take 15 minutes.
S (solve the problem): In a flexible environment, we need to move through stuck places a hundred times a day. Everyone needs to make “solving the problem” the most important rule of engagement with one another.

So, how does all this look in practice? Certainly, take a close look at LCW itself. Also, look at the community development efforts that have embraced his principles of net-centric organizing, like Making Connections Louisville. MC Louisville, catalyzed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections initiative, works to increase engagement and community interaction in Louisville. The images and story of their slide show, The Power of We, paints a powerful picture of net-centric organizing, reminding us that: “Programs don’t transform lives. Relationships do.”