Give & Take: Building a Cultural Commons Through Social Learning
InCommons Collaboration Challenge
Give & Take: Building a Cultural Commons Through Social Learning
Economic and geographic trends point to increased social polarization in urban, suburban, and rural communities. Give & Take (www.give-take.org) is an innovative social platform designed to combat this trend in a fun, educational, and empowering social setting. Our program encourages strangers to become neighbors, building social capital for stronger, smarter, more cohesive communities. This begins with the deceivingly simple act of getting to know each other.
About You
About You
First Name
Colin
Last Name
Kloecker
Country
United States, MN, Hennepin County
About Your Organization
Organization
Works Progress
Organization Website
Organization Phone
612-839-0810
Organization Address
2409 29th Avenue South #4, Minneapolis, MN 55406
Organization Country
United States, MN, Hennepin County
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Your Story
Collaboration Title
Give & Take: Building a Cultural Commons Through Social Learning
Country your work focuses on
United States, MN
Describe your locally-based collaboration and the problem it sought to address
Economic and geographic trends point to increased social polarization in urban, suburban, and rural communities. Give & Take (www.give-take.org) is an innovative social platform designed to combat this trend in a fun, educational, and empowering social setting. Our program encourages strangers to become neighbors, building social capital for stronger, smarter, more cohesive communities. This begins with the deceivingly simple act of getting to know each other.
Tell us about the community in which this collaboration took place
Redefining notions of community, Give & Take establishes a momentary commons around the unifying desires to learn and share. Our pilot program (from 2009-10) invited anyone to use Give & Take as a platform to share their passions and connect with others. Those attending and participating in this monthly program varied considerably by age, social class, and education background.
Issue Selector
n/a
Partnership
Who was involved in co-creating or implementing your collaboration (other organizations, leaders, community members, etc.)?
Each Give & Take event is a collaboration between program facilitator Works Progress (www.worksprogress.org) and attendees, who co-create content and connections through community-sourced presentations and socially-focused games. The event has also relied on a strong partnership with our pilot program host, Intermedia Arts, and financial support from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.
To what extent does your collaboration involve partnerships that are outside or cross traditional organizational or sector boundaries?
Works Progress, the group behind Give & Take, is an interdisciplinary collaborative focused on connecting people and ideas across traditional boundaries to create a vibrant and resilient cultural ecology. Works Progress aims to create an organizational and program structure that is fundamentally diverse in its skills and interests, and Give & Take is a reflection of this approach.
Innovation
What makes your locally-based collaboration innovative and unique?
The list of challenges facing communities is long, and addressing them requires collaboration and innovation. Give & Take builds the necessary social networks and creative capacities to address a diversity of issues. Our project borrows from web-based social networking platforms, but brings connecting back into a tangible, tactile environment. We encourage strangers to inspire, inform, and connect, building a foundation for future collaborations in a community. Over time the impact is an infectious sense of possibility, and a web of new projects emerges. Our intentional form of social interaction blends teaching, learning, and socializing in a supportive atmosphere.
Volunteer presenters share their knowledge and passion, assisted by Works Progress, whose expertise in storytelling, visual media, and participatory tactics helps them tell their stories. Social games and activities throughout the event provide a fun and non-competitive way for people to connect. We frame the experience around two simple questions: 1) What do you know? 2) What do you want to know? This puts the expertise of the community at the forefront, allowing for unexpected and deep connections to flourish.
Did you take risks in establishing this collaboration? Explain
Give & Take began as an experiment. We were not sure whether it would work as intended, and left ourselves open to the possibility of failure. We knew that participants would need to take risks in order to engage fully with strangers, and we would need to take risks as facilitators. So far, we’ve been amazed with the level of enthusiasm that participants bring, and have learned so much.
How did this collaboration differ from the normal way of doing your work?
Works Progress creates and facilitates a variety of exhibits and public programs, but Give & Take is unique in the level of control we give up to the audience. Most of what happens at the event depends on impromptu interactions and the curiosity or knowledge of those in the room, while most of our other programs are more precisely directed.
Impact
How do you know your collaboration has been effective?
When the interactions we facilitate lead to genuine connections between people who had previously been strangers, we feel we’ve successfully expanded local social networks and built cultural capital among participants. We know we are building leadership capacity in individual community members, and in communities. We’ve been told of many instances where people who did not have the confidence to share their skills or knowledge gained the confidence to do so by participating in Give & Take. We’ve also been told of several spin-off projects that developed as a result of an interaction sparked at Give & Take. Ultimately, our success is measured by the capacity we’ve built to address common goals and community issues, which is hard to measure, but over time, substantial.
What progress or impact has been made?
We have honed the balance between content, interaction, and unstructured socializing and have learned how to create conditions where people are receptive to new experiences. In building social capital in our audience, we’ve made impact beyond our program, leading to a number of new projects and collaborations. And finally, we’ve increased the leadership capacity in the community where we work.
Next Steps
How would you go about continuing, expanding, or replicating this collaboration?
We plan to continue our successful collaboration with Intermedia Arts. We’ve also started uploading video content from our pilot Give & Take program to our website, www.give-take.org, which we use to recruit presenters and to promote scheduled programs. We plan to grow our online presence, sharing select stories from Give & Take with a much wider audience.
With financial support from InCommons we would establish three new Give & Take programs across Minnesota, partnering with community organizations and businesses in one urban, one rural, and one suburban community. We would approach this as an opportunity to learn in tandem with new partners just how this platform works in diverse social, economic and cultural contexts.
Our ultimate goal, after establishing Give & Take in three new communities, would be to create and market a ‘Give & Take Community Kit’ that would help individuals and groups establish new Give & Take programs on their own terms. Our website would also be expanded to accommodate these new partners, and would provide additional resources and networking tools.
Describe the current stage of implementation and desired next steps
With over a year of the project under our belts, we feel confident that the program is worth the investment. We currently have interest from a number of groups who would like us to bring Give & Take on the road to their neighborhood or town. We simply don’t have the financial means to do so at this time. Many of the individuals that have approached us come from communities facing difficult social, economic or environmental challenges and have observed a breakdown in the dialogue around critical issues. Through conversations with these groups we have begun to see the potential of the Give & Take platform to catalyze community connections and to help lay the foundation for critical dialogue. We believe that this program can help to strengthen the resilience of communities by restoring some of their connective tissue.
Our strategy would be to first assess the interest and identify possible collaborators in a diverse range of communities. We would prioritize communities facing immediate social, economic or environmental challenges. We would work to develop a program and outreach plan, and would connect with businesses in the community to build local financial support. Over time, we would transition the program over to the control of a sponsoring community group.
One important priority would be to develop our website to serve as a hub for existing and new Give & Take programs, aggregating content and outreach. With financial support we could build this website, and fully document each programs, sharing video and other resources online.
We would also look for assistance from a group of evaluators, both from inside and outside the communities where we work, asking them to help evaluate the effectiveness of the program. With information gathered from evaluators, and documentation of these events, we would create and market a ‘Give & Take Community Kit’ to help individuals and groups establish Give & Take programs across the state.
| 133 weeks ago Colin Kloecker updated this Competition Entry. | |
| 136 weeks ago Colin Kloecker submitted this idea. |
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