Managing Micro-Community Well-Being

So, we've defined 'well-being' elsewhere well enough that it can be measured.

Now what?

How do you apply this to managing well-being for micro-communities, like all the neighbors that live on a city block, or all the homes on a suburban cul-de-sac?

Well, a few things are needed:

1. Digital Communication Channels

2. Full Community Enrollment

3. Realistic Leadership Roles

4. Simple "State" Submission & Tracking

5. Automatic Connection to Community Services

6. Meaningful Community Building

Let's walk through each.

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Digital Communication Channels

Gone are the days of low internet access & usage.

While there are fringes of the community that still don't have access or choose not to, you can expect 90-95% of all communities to have a way to communicate digitally, either in real time, or frequently enough for our purposes.

Most micro-communities have naturally evolved some mix of digital communication, usually:

• Facebook Groups for the entire group

• A Messaging App for direct communications (FB, Apple, WhatsApp, etc)

• Email for more formal efforts

We recommend something similar, with:

• A primary Facebook group, or something similar, to manage general PULL communications (where users passively pull information as they need it, but there aren't any push notifications). All announcements / updates would be done this way.

• A messaging app (community's choosing) that can be used for more immediate / real time communications. Standard texting or WhatsApp messages are recommended for this.

• For those with low digital use or access, email or even paper can be used, but it should ONLY be used for community members with specific access issues (ie. Old folks and people with no wifi/data)

This should allow 90-95% of communications to happen in real time, with nearly everyone, and an easy / simple / resource efficient way to communicate with the part of the community with minimal digital access.

A more advanced version for places with less than 90% community digital access can involve both wifi extenders / neighbor wifi access, and device sharing / donations.

Full Community Enrollment

This works only if there's a concerted effort to enroll the entire community in the digital channels, and create mechanisms to include the few outliers, so community enrollment in the program is 100%.

While people can decline inclusion, the program itself should strive for 100% enrollment, and continue working with those who aren't participating so that they do eventually enroll.

Since there is always some turnover within communities, this includes talking to realtors and landlords, to help make enrollment part of the move in process, and seamless.

This task would fall to a small but defined leadership team for the community, who's primary task is enrollment and well-being management.

Realistic Leadership Roles

Leadership roles today often ask too little or too much.

This leads to people:

• Being underwhelmed and quickly disinterested in the process, as it serves no real purpose, or

• Overwhelmed and quickly burned out, since the role has many responsibilities, but little support and structure

The appropriate balance has:

• Micro Community Connectors: this role covers 10 homes or around 20-30 people. Their role is simply to make sure everyone is connected to the larger community, knows who they are, and feels conformable coming to them for issues.

• Macro Community Connectors: this role manages the Micro Connectors, and helps manage relationships with larger entities that service the community.

This means a handful of people in a community can do a lot more with a lot less effort, and far more sustainably.

Simple "State" Submission & Tracking

Without getting too bogged down in details, how someone or something on the block is doing can easily be reported and summarized using the "Well-being size" model to the left.

Effectively, a simple reporting form can allow people on the block to identify:

• The state (size of + or -)

• Who/what the state represents

• It's duration

As people report these things for the block, they can not only be kept as a historical record, but can be built into the block management processes to help improve the lives of those living there and used to help improve decision making.

Each community can built their own tracking and reporting mechanism, but we can also provide it for them.

Automatic Connection to Community Services

The obvious next step of maturity for these programs is to be plugged directly into the larger organizational structures that have paid staff to help service the needs of the community.

So, while the above structure creates a simple, easy, and nearly automated way for people to communicate their state of being, and the state of different topics in the area (like trash), these volunteers and systems don't have the capacity to fulfill these needs.

However, connecting them to large professional organizations that exist to fulfill these community needs can be done with a little coordination, either through simply granting access to the submitted data, or through a more complex technical solution that routes and imports service requests into the appropriate service providers system.

Meaningful Community Building

If we've learned anything useful from 2020, it's that we don't need to be in person to get things done. This includes community building.

However, when we are in person, we should make the most of it.

So, each community should have leadership that helps create ways for the community to build meaningful connections through their digital resources, while also providing opportunities for people to get together to have fun and build relationships together in person, as appropriate.

When people live (and now often work) a few feet from each other, this isn't a terribly difficult task. But, it should be deliberate, and meaningful, built around a strategy that leadership uses to manage & improve the well-being of the community.