One of the primary projects at Civity over the past year has been developing Do-It-Yourself pages on our website. And we are thrilled to announce that DIYcivity is now up and available! We invite you to peruse, browse, take a gander at one of the resources linked to – and take Civity out for a spin. Try it on your own. Do Civity Yourself.
We have three touchstones for our work at Civity – for creating a culture of civity in communities. The first two form the core of our workshops:
- Relationships are foundational; and
- Connections across difference are powerful.
The third Civity touchstone links the micro to the macro:
- Individuals can transform communities.
This is where DIYcivity comes in.
Each of us, all of us, every day, and in every interaction we have with the other people we touch and talk to and even just see from afar – together we create the culture that we all live in.
How are we with the check-out clerk at the grocery store, with the unhoused person we pass on the street, with members of the community who look different from us, with people who have very different views? What happens if we approach them with the recognition that each of them has not just a single story but many many stories? That they are multi-dimensional rather than cardboard cutouts? If we intentionally bring a “fellow human being” lens to the places and spaces in which our paths cross?
The vision and mission of Civity the organization has always been to support, to facilitate, to enable, to encourage, to elicit, to make more possible and likely in any way we can the creation of a culture of civity – which means not us, but you.
The message of DIYcivity is that you don’t need us to create civity. Our role is coach, cheerleader, booster. We are here for workshops and coaching if that is helpful. We are here to partner with your organization. We are here simply to walk by your side. And through all of this, YOU are the star, the actor, the main event, the civity impetus and energy.
One of my all-time sheroes is Ella Baker.
When we think of the Civil Rights Movement, it’s likely that the first person who comes to mind is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But Ella Baker – who was she?
She was, first and foremost, an organizer – with the NAACP, with the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), with SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee).
Bob Moses, who was a member of SNCC and who spearheaded the voter registration project in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964, said this about Ella Baker:
“One of the characteristics of organizers is that their work emerges, and they themselves subside. If you think of the waves in the ocean, at a certain point they subside back into the ocean, and what you see is what they organized or their work. SNCC is the work of Ella Baker. But it was SNCC that emerged, not Ella.”
We at Civity see our work as being part of a wave. Our work is to do whatever we can to make the work that all of us do to create a culture of civity more possible, more probable. Civity the culture emerges as the collective effect of our individual relational contributions.
We are all part of the wave.
Individuals can transform communities.
Creating civity is something all of us can do.