Meeting the Challenges to Citizen Leadership

When members of a community have struggled for change and not succeeded, a fear of failure can paralyze people from taking the (perceived) risk of imagining and creating again. Hope is costly; it involves acknowledging real failure and disappointment, and still being willing to work on behalf of what is not yet visible. Citizens of an imagination movement must become ‘learning activists’, seeing failure as a learning experience and exploring how community strengths can be utilized to overcome potential pitfalls or conflicts. A focus on collective assets and strengths enables citizens to re-orient themselves towards what works instead of what doesn’t.

A second challenge for citizen leadership is a learned dependency on experts, government services, or external agents that can stifle and obstruct community-rooted imagination and action. Too often, we have placed our trust in institutions and resources beyond our reach. This includes the belief that money is what makes change happen. Nurturing a different sense of citizenship (and by design, a different sense of democracy) requires an increased personal and public accountability to each other and to our places, and a recognition of vision and commitment as driving forces for change.

People who understand themselves, their strengths and their spirit, and who are committed to sharing their understandings with families, neighbors and friends, are powerful agents of change. This extends ‘citizen leadership’ to everyone: young people, parents, grandparents, business owners, artists, teachers, and so on. While government services need not be discounted in this process, making the shift from dependency to accountability/responsibility means that those internally-rooted in their communities will be the keepers of what counts.

Another challenge comes from those who do not believe that certain communities are capable of positive change. Communities themselves have a kind of collective imagination and mindset, often shaped by media images of the community, which may have been internalized. Some organizations and communities are held up as always moving forward; local residents assume, "If we did that, we can do the next thing." Positive images become the basis for attracting more engagement and money. In other communities, only negative happenings seem to attract attention and get magnified; people imagine things getting worse. (Sometimes, this mindset extends even to countries and continents).

People find hope by being connected to things that are bigger than they are. To have a different future, communities must have hope that they can move forward as a whole, not just as individuals or small collectives. That requires positive images and mindsets, as well as connecting multiple institutions and individuals within a community, so that the sum ends up being greater than the parts. How can we work together to connect to bigger wholes from which we can draw and sustain courage?