Позитивные изменения. Города будущего. Тематический выпуск, 2022 / Positive changes. The cities of the future. Special issue, 2022

• partnership with the government and business is strengthened — local associations and strategic working groups for territorial development are being created;

• financing is raised: 223 million rubles is the amount of co-funding raised for our projects; funding by Timchenko Foundation amounted to 407 million rubles (as of the end of 2021). Project leaders gain more experience and maturity year after year, their level of social capital increases, the results (both short-term and long-term) become more successful, giving a firm footing, partners appear, and some even manage to engage investors. The country discovers new small territories — Yuzha, Tulun, Totma, Rybinsk, Uryupinsk, and many others.

However, in eight years, only 31 projects have advanced so far as to become centers of sociocultural development that work systematically with the entire local community in all its diversity, not with isolated target groups or topics. Why did this happen?

The catch was the notion of leadership in communities. The local communities, which is important to note.

ABOUT COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP

The traditional concept of a leader describes a person who enjoys great, recognized authority, has influence in a group, organization, team, or unit that manifests itself as controlling actions. This classic notion of a leader is appropriate for an organization; it is also appropriate for initiating communities that are just starting to take shape. Perhaps this understanding of the leader can also be found in a number of professional communities (aka communities of interest), where there is invariably one person among the "equals" in status or level of interest, who takes responsibility for organizing the entire group.

If you break down most of the collaboration projects in a small territory, they turn out to be, in their content and meaning, the second type of communities — professional ones, where the strong team up with the strong, because it is beneficial for both sides.

However, this approach to leadership does not apply to local communities — which consist of people of different ages, social statuses, experiences, interests, principles, and values residing in the same area. How can one person, who has no legal, administrative and financial leverage, coordinate the interests of several hundred or even thousand different people? How can they balance the interests of business, government, activists, children, the elderly, young parents, and many others? All the while without forgetting themselves, their family, ambitions and goals. The answer is simple — there is no way.

Marshall Ganz at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, who has studied a large number of approaches to civil society organization processes, gives this notion of leadership specifically for communities:

• a leader is a person who takes responsibility to enable others in the community to achieve their common goal in the face of uncertainty. Here the focus naturally shifts from one person’s interests, ambitions and plans to the "cultivation" of a leadership network that grows continuously, making the community more sustainable. This reduces the risk of the leader burning out or moving, because the focus is on universal values that bring different people together. Not the interests of any professional group. Not a solution to an urgent problem that literally forced people to come together.

This understanding of leadership is used by Universal University, Strelka Online Institute, the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, the "People Make a Place" Urban Change Workshop, and other organizations in different areas — for territorial development, creative industries, and volunteer projects of various kinds. This fundamentally changes the approach to both the accompanying program for those who would like to work with the community and the focus for which they can come together.

In essence, the leader here is no longer a leader, but rather a facilitator, a coordinator who gradually moves further and further away from the "center of control," without preventing other active residents from expressing themselves and taking some responsibility for the common future and present. The self-development model of local communities assumes that the community itself (not just one person) is able to determine its priority problems, the forms and methods of their solution, the timing of specific projects. This is precisely the type of community that should manifest the very ideal stage of solidarity according to Jodi Dean’s classification — reflective solidarity, because the beneficiaries (various vulnerable groups, among others) are not simply engaged in the action from the start, but are full participants of the action.

When working with a local community, different principles come to the fore, because unification is most often about improving the quality of life for all residents in the entire area: