What are common practices among successful communities? What do those who try to start, nurture or maintain them most struggle with? What rituals and shared experiences keep a community strong? The Community Canvas, created by Fabian Pfortmüller, Nico Luchsinger and Sascha Mombartz is a useful tool for anyone working with communities based on years of hands-on learning and research.
Creators of Community Canvas write:
“We have spent the last 15 years building and participating in communities and found tremendous joy in them. Based on our own experience and with the generous help of leading community builders, we have developed a framework that helps build stronger communities and make our society a bit more connected: the Community Canvas.”
The canvas has 3 sections: Identity, Experience and Structure.
Identity explores the question, “Who are we and what do we believe in?”
Experience invites you to consider, “What happens in a community and how does it create value for its members?”
Structure involves, “What gives us stability in the long term?”
These 3 sections are further split into 17 themes. Each theme includes a set of worksheets and questions that will help community builders and cultivators find the right answers for their own community.
The designers clarify, “While the Canvas doesn’t give answers, we provide further background for each of the 17 themes, based on our observations and feedback from leading community builders. In future versions we’re going to include case studies for each theme.”
View the full Community Canvas, including worksheets and background at https://community-canvas.org.
