Conflict and Community Building

Personally, we have been interested in conflict and community building all of our married lives. In 1987 and 1988, the nonprofit, tax-exempt institute that we co-founded, then the Colorado Institute for Conflict Resolution & Creative Leadership, organized two international conferences of experts in the field of conflict resolution. The first focused on “New Perspectives on Conflict Resolution and Creative Leadership,” brought together over 50 leading thinkers and doers from around the world to share their expertise on resolving conflict with 300 participants. This event helped us survey the field of conflict resolution and provided us with foundational research about what was working and not working in the field. This research helped us develop The Partnership Way of resolving conflict.

The second conference in 1988 focused on “The Creative Use of Conflict in Community Making.” In this participatory conference for 250 participants, leaders from education, business, the military, clergy, psychology, health professions and politics worked collectively (in the words of Scott Peck) “to transcend their individual differences, to fight gracefully and to resolve conflict without physical or emotional bloodshed and with wisdom as well as grace.”

Besides these two events, we attended other conferences on community building, and worked with numerous grass-roots groups wanting to create social and physical community. All of this helped us see what was missing from community governance models. Our research in this area culminated in the 2000 edition of our book, Conflict Resolution: The Partnership Way. It includes tools for working with conflicts in individuals, couples, families, community groups, schools, churches, businesses, and governments.

Our teaching at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs also provided us with another venue for our research on conflict and community making. In our classrooms, our natural tendencies towards inclusiveness, dialogue, experiential learning and being learners-among-learners made us natural fits for an educational paradigm known as constructivistic learning. In this model, the focus is on the needs, abilities and interests of learners and collaboration with each other and with the teacher as well. This level playing field in the classroom provoked a creative spark in the learning environment that helped participants personalize their learning experiences and ultimately transformed everyone. The absence of rigid, authoritarian rules and absolutes helped students become much more confident and self-directed, not only in their learning but in their lives.

During our time at the University, we recognized that The Partnership Way is a new paradigm in the field of conflict resolution. Our laboratory for testing it was large, including presenting workshops at international conferences in Western and Eastern Europe and consulting with the United Nations.  We tested the Partnership skills in our own relationship, taught them to our clients in therapy sessions and to counselors-in-training in our university classes. In 2009 we published an expanded and revised second edition to The Partnership Way.

We have begun using the research and development model contained in The Partnership Way for studying the social and governance structures of group-driven, developer-driven and hybrid intentional communities, now typically referred to as Co-housing Communities. Based on our research, we have learned much about the kinds of social and governance structures that work in successful intentional communities such as co-housing projects and eco-villages. We are presently working with an Ecovillage here in the Asheville area called The Villages at Crest Mountain (VCM) to help them create their social governance system (See their web site at www.villagesatcrestmountain.com).

We will keep you informed as we proceed with this project. We see the project as divided into three separate phases. The first phase is the research and development phase where we will search web sites, interview developers and people already living in these communities and attending conferences devoted to Community Development. We also will get to apply the principles of our Developmental Systems Theory in our work with the Development Team at the VCM and with the group of people who are planning to live in this community.

Our Previous Research on Community Building and What We Discovered

From the very beginning of our relationship, we have been interested in being part of a community. Over the course of the past 25+ years, we have met with about a half dozen different groups interested creating community. We watched all of these efforts dissolve before bringing their vision into form. One of the biggest problems we saw was people’s frustration with the overwhelming number of decisions involved and all the meetings they had to attend in order to make them.

The second problem was that community interactions confronted people with unresolved internal conflicts that involved their wants and needs and values and beliefs. We also saw how people’s unresolved family-of-origin conflicts from early childhood spilled out into the group process and disrupted it. Most importantly, we saw that people avoided conflict because they did not have skills for resolving it effectively. We also never participated in a community-making group that was willing up front to create a consensual framework for handling conflict when it emerged. Without this, the community making process eventually collapsed.

We saw that efforts to create community frequently brought up people’s fears that their wants and needs won’t be respected or taken seriously (“I have a pet that I can’t part with”) or that their values will not be understood and respected (“I value diversity and believe it is important in a community”). Such differences can cause conflicts that can be easily resolved, if those involved regard conflict as a healthy and necessary part of the community governance process, and if they have the skills to resolve them in a partnership way. These skills can easily be taught to the whole community.

We also discovered that people carry hidden and unhealed wounds that can “trigger” them from time to time in community governance meetings (“I have problems with outspoken and people who talk a lot at meetings”). Because everyone has these issues, they must be accepted as a normal part of what a group experience in the search for a consensual community. As trained group facilitators we can help people recognize these issues in themselves and in others, and show them how to resolve these kinds of conflicts.

From our experience, one of the most useful community-building skills is members’ ability to do silent self-reflection in conflict situations, so that they can determine if it is a conflict of wants and needs, values and beliefs, or related to an unhealed wound from the past. In some cases it can be a combination. Once people determine this, they can use the skills they were taught to resolve the conflict. These easily learned skills help people develop feelings of cohesion, connectedness, mutual trust, safety, and interdependence.           

Our research on community building revealed a promising new type of community that is becoming more prevalent and addresses many of the difficult issues inherent in bringing communities into physical form: the ecologically and socially aware developer-driven community. This route can by-pass many of the site-based frustrations in a community-making project. In these situations the developer takes responsibility for making decisions about the infrastructure and financing the physical site leaving the residents to work on the social and governance systems.

Our preliminary survey of successful communities clearly indicated that the community governance system is the make-or-break factor in community building. When it works, people stay. When it doesn’t there is social and relational chaos that eventually leads to breakdown.

The challenge in the developer-driven community model, however, is that the site technologies often are more sophisticated and proven than the social technologies. We think at this point in the evolution of community making that it is unrealistic to expect builders and developers to also have expertise in social architecture and governance methods. Ideally, an effective community requires a partnership between site architects and social architects who participate in a carefully planned and coordinated process.

 Since we have a three-year contract to design, implement and maintain the social governance system for the Villages at Crest Mountain near Asheville, NC we expect to learn a lot more about this process. In a separate post, we will outline the process that we are proposing to utilize in this project. We are also planning to build a home in this ecovillage and it will become the living-laboratory for us to further our studies of how to utilize The Partnership Way to create new forms of community.