HOW TO BUILD COMMUNITY AND EMPOWER YOURSELF!
 
It's a foregone conclusion that any sort of human LINKAGE, any NETWORKING, any trace of the Community synergy being maximized equals power and obtaining one's desires. We lucky citizens of the 21st century have big crises looming --true, but we also have bigger 'fix tools' that no activist or entrepreneur has ever had in recorded HISTORY! Craig's List, Twitter and Face book are high powered adjutants to any  effort by an individual citizen to create COMMUNITY which can then change laws, create businesses, create funding, achieve media attention and ultimately CHANGE SOCIETY FOR THE BETTER so that the NEW AGE ENTREPRENEUR can link workers/ employees, volunteers and clients to their business. Or link politicians to needed legislation.

How and WHERE are community empowerment gambits ordinarily found? Well for the past hundred years, through RADIO and TV SHOWS that built communities of FANS among audiences. That resulted in the lowest form of community we can have. A lot of passive recipients of amusement with dumbed down sensibilities made the worst community a world can have. It was entirely suceptible to being manipulated through propaganda, too, so we got BIGOTS of every stripe you can imagine. You got tolerance to oligarch maneuvers which became quasi sacrosanct. We got slave populations drinking SOMA as BRAVE NEW WORLD predicted would happen from ENTERTAINMENT HALLS. So we got ourselves into big trouble. Jerks responded, thought and were programmed to act in unison by media and entertainment. So let's DUMP THAT COMMUNITY! Or find out how to USE IT! POLITICAL ISSUE FILMS MAYBE? See The FILM INDEX for that. Documentaries are a terrific way for a group to make money and promote ideas.

Note how for the last thousand years, BEFORE WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION and the ENSUING PROPAGANDA CHANNELS came along, People linked through two activities, SCHOOL FORCE & political parties. Those who joined in a school or party become empowered and surged to the top in their societies. This was done in COFFEE HOUSES and taverns in LONDON,  Washington and New York in those days. Today we have the INTERNET so we can all cut down on booze and caffeine and get the same job done. And better! So Today, Writer RK MOORE sends me a piece on COMMUNITY and I rewrite the text slightly to get it to fit NEW AGE ENTREPRENEURIAL GAMBITS. Leaving no signs of what were his words. Hey, the below is MOSTLY made up of HIS WORDS. See: http://cyberjournal.org/ for many other articles of philosophic import.

Let's get started on EMPOWERING OURSELVES to make change in our world.
The dictionary suggests these usages of 'empower' ---"I empowered my
agent to make the deal for me" or "The local ordinance empowers the board of
health to close unsanitary restaurants". PEOPLE get empowered. LAWS get
empowered. When PEOPLE AND LAWS get together, IDEAS and EVOLUTION
itself will be empowered.  For instance, we see a GREEN REVOLUTION now,
complete with funding for green businesses. That came from a few tree
huggers and whale watchers tilting glasses of jamba juice and figuring out ways to make the headlines!

In this same sense, in and through our political system, local elections
empower the local government to manage the affairs of the community. It
is the government that is empowered, not the community. In order to do
the managing, the government has dialog processes, such as city council
meetings, staff meetings, public hearings, etc., by which the government
makes up its mind what to do?.

If the community itself is to be empowered to manage its own affairs,
then there must be dialog processes by which the community as a whole
can make up its mind what to do?. And everyone's voice must be included
in those processes, or else it is some minority that is empowered, not
the community. That is to say:

An empowered community is a community that manages its own affairs by
means of inclusive dialog processes. A good definition of an empowered
community, is one that meets online, or in person, or has a newspaper of
some kind, a blog and lures new visitors to its media outlet who then
join. That is the most certain way of building community. SHARED
interest in a specific kind of evolution. We've seen it work with
TEABAGGERS who wanted the MEXICAN wetbacks and anchor babies out! They
organized, had a media outlet, had meetings which made the papers, and
soon spores sprouted up all over America, not just Arizona!
 

Such a MODEL of a community is extremely feasible, for any idea, for any
drumbeat, in the context of our modern societies. It is not clear what
the processes would be. A blog that could include everyone's voice, that
allows write ins? YAHOO GROUPS offers those. A TOWN MEETING HALL with
OBAMA present once a month would be the biggest of its species, a
practical and effective IDEA SHARING. Oprah used to do these with her
GURUS online and a million people tuned in. Being no tekkie, I don't
know how she did that. I guess she owns a server.

But dream up your OPRAH model, one that people would actually
participate in, and that everyone would be reasonably happy with.

Consider Wisdom Councils and Dynamic Facilitation as a starting point
for our thinking about what kind of processes might do the job.

There is another aspect to empowerment as well. If we empower someone to
pave the street, that makes little sense unless that someone has the
means to do the paving. Similarly, an empowered community makes little
sense unless the community has the means to take care of its needs.

And in fact there is a need for communities to find such means, in an
era where global resources and supply lines are under threat, and the
global economy is not functioning well. The program-based localization
initiatives are aimed at providing the necessary means, by which a
community can take care of its needs based on what's available in the
local region.

The localization movement, taken as a whole, contains the ingredients
out of which an empowered community could evolve. If the community
begins implementing programs appropriately, and if this process
gradually comes to be owned by the whole community, through increasing
use of dialog processes, then the community would be evolving toward
empowerment.

I am not suggesting that the localization movement adopt community
empowerment as a goal. A reasonable argument can be made that survival
takes precedence over empowerment, that time is running short, and that
a dedicated group of informed leaders / activists might manage the
process of implementing survival oriented programs like jobs,
entrepreneurial start ups.. better than could any process of community
dialog. For that we need GUERILLA CAPITALISM WORKSHOPS that fire up and
motivate artisans, designers, tekkies to create their own business on the
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL model, leaving UNCLE SAM and the TAXMAN out of it until
they are big enough to pay for those licensing fees, those taxes which
the gov has only been using for war anyway.

Instead, let's review the barriers that are preventing the program-based
initiatives from escaping from marginalism,
and we'll be looking at how dialog processes could be used to overcome 
those barriers. Rather than being a diversion from the programs,
community dialog can be the means of generating greater local support
and involvement in the programs.

The main theme of this chapter is the exploration of potential synergies
among the various localization initiatives. I suggest that the pursuit
of those synergies can be expected to naturally lead communities toward
empowerment.

The more people get involved in the programs, the more successful the
programs will be. And the more successful the programs are, the more
people will want to get involved. Enabling people to get involved, so
that their voices matter, is where dialog processes come in. Taken all
together, there seems to be a natural feedback loop that can be expected
to push communities toward the realization of empowerment.

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