How to Set-up a Community Meeting for Community Building

This is the second in a four-part series diving into the practical nuts and bolts of community engagement processes vis-à-vis community building and intergroup contact. These will be a bit longer than my typical missives, but they’re packed full of awesome content. Enjoy!

In a time of deepening social fragmentation, how do we build common identity amongst diverse residents sharing the same patch of earth? How do we conduct civic engagement practices to not just solicit input, but bridge different groups of people and strengthen place-based communities?

We can achieve positive outcomes to these questions by infusing our practices with Optimal Contact. This is the social-psychological mechanism at the heart of how humans bridge different identity-groups and form a shared sense of community. If you need a recap, check out this previous post, but below I summarize the core conditions of Optimal Contact:

1. Optimal Contact maximizes the interaction between people of different groups
2. Optimal Contact minimizes anxiety about intergroup interaction.
3. Optimal Contact induces empathy or perspective taking between people of different groups.

In my last post, we looked closely at the early stages of a community engagement process, sometimes referred to as “process design.” In terms of Optimal Contact, process design is mostly concerned with Optimal Contact Condition #1, maximizing intergroup interaction. This means getting people from different groups to turn out, and ensuring that the community engagement process is inclusive and representative. Forming a Convening Group is the most effective way to do this.

So let’s assume you’ve done that work, and corralled lots of different people into a room to collaborate or deliberate on something. Now what?

A quick note before we dive in: We’ll be focusing here on community meetings, since they are one of the most common techniques used in community engagement. They also hit a sweet spot between maximizing participation and perspective taking. But these ideas can apply to any type of event. A series of community dinners? Art making events? Every process is unique and needs customization.

During our community events, we are focusing largely on Optimal Contact Condition #2 (reducing anxiety) and Condition #3 (inducing empathy or perspective taking).

But there’s one part of the meeting set-up that covers all three Optimal Contact Conditions:

1. Provide Food

Food is the great motivator and unifier. Eating together is a universal ritual. Breaking bread accompanied almost every great coming-together moment in history. If you don’t provide food, people are less likely to show up. It is also more likely that their bodies will interfere with being in a relaxed emotional space for listening to others’ perspectives.

With the table set and everyone’s tummies satiated, you can employ some Optimal Contact strategies for the meeting set-up:

2. Always use name tags

Name tags are your secret weapon. Knowing somebody’s name is a powerful thing, and most of us are horrible at remembering them. Name tags make it much easier to approach someone whom you’ve only casually met, and helps cement who they are for future interactions, like bumping into them on the street the next day. This is especially important for when you…

3. Leave time for socialization at the beginning and end of your event

The informal chit-chat at the beginning and end of meetings is an under-appreciated time for making informal connections. Make sure the food is ready and then provide some fun prompts or visual stimuli, creating excuses for people to bump into each other or introduce themselves. If people show up and head to right to their seats, you miss out on an incredible opportunity.

This a great time to deploy your Convening Group members (remember them?) to meet, great, and welcome people into your event.

Conversing with or meeting even one other person helps put people at ease and reduces their anxiety. Feeling like it’s no longer a roomful of strangers paves the way to empathize with other’s ideas later. So include time for socialization, but…

4. End the meeting on time

People’s time is precious. You are lucky they have taken time out of their busy schedules to participate in your event. You might think what you are doing is the most important thing that could be happening right now, but know that just about every participant is watching the clock. They will get really anxious and distracted when meetings run over time, or even seem like it might run over time.

Verbally commit to attendees that you will end the meeting on time, verbalize your time management during the meeting to assuage fears that things are running late, and stick to the end-time at all costs.

5. Set up chairs in a ‘U’ shape

Room set-up is one of the most important factors for Optimal Contact Condition #3, empathy and perspective taking. A ‘U’ shape allows a facilitator to hold the group’s attention while simultaneously giving participants a chance to look directly at other people while they provide contributions and deliberate ideas.

I can’t overstate how important this is. We are wired to relate to other people through eye contact and physical presence. The ideal empathy moments are one-on-one in close proximity. We can’t do that in a community meeting with 50 or 100 people in the room. But the more we can move closer to those conditions, the more success we have at seeing each other as humans and developing a shared group identity.

Unless you don’t have a choice, do not sit people in rows facing the front of the room. Participants end up looking at the back of each other’s heads, and this creates conditions that lack visual accountability. You might as well be on an on-line forum or comments section. It encourages passive receptivity and poor behavior. And poor behavior generates anxiety and impedes hearing other perspectives.

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Meeting set-up is an essential component for conducting community events that reduces anxiety and maximizes perspective taking between different groups of people.

By infusing Optimal Contact into the meeting set-up, along with all our other community engagement practices, we can maximize its potential as a socially cohesive force. We can have some contribution, if not leadership, in altering our fragmenting social trajectory. And we can contribute to our evolving Great Democratic Experiment of how diverse people can reside alongside each other and collaborate on their shared future.

Next time, we’ll dive into the introductory rituals of a community event. We’ll assume you’ve done the work to get a representative maximum turnout, and set-up your event for Optimal Contact. Once we are underway, what tools and techniques can we use to further reduce anxiety and encourage perspective taking?

Read it now in Part 3: “Transform your Community Meeting with this Three Easy Techniques!”

What Else I’m Reading:

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk. In this fantastic book, Mounk argues that the world has not yet seen a true diverse multi-ethnic democracy, and holds optimism for the next evolution of the Great Democratic Experiment.

In the New York Times piece, They May Be Just Acquaintances. They’re Important to You Anyway Paula Span makes the case for the mental and physical benefits of “weak ties” – those incidental relationship with others who reside nearby.