EG Partner: Communities of Care

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Learn the skills and tools to advocate for and build cultures of care, prosocial behavior, inclusion, diversity, problem solving, harm reduction, and joy in community.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

So many of us long to create a culture of care and nurturance in our communities – and to enjoy the benefits of membership in such communities at work, at school, in our neighborhoods, in our affinity groups, and our social circles. This course aims to prepare students to advocate for, contribute to, and co-create cultures of kindness and compassion, inclusion, diversity, problem-solving, harm reduction, and joy. As you move through the course, you will sense answers to the question originally posed by Nora Samaran: “What would it feel like to trust the fabric of our human community so fully that we could take the risk to belong in this way, belong as our whole selves?” Through this study, you will encounter the intellectual and theoretical frameworks for caring communities and hone concrete tools and skills to cultivate such communities. After building self-knowledge and exploring the meaning and making of community, you will learn communication and leadership skills as well as problem-solving and decision-making processes. You will also learn to distinguish conflict and harm and be able to address each productively. The end result is a web of reciprocity and commitment that enables us to mend brokenness, cultivate possibility, and center joy in our communal lives.

Learning Objectives:

This course provides an opportunity to:

define what communities of support mean to you; find where you live in such communities, who is present and who is missing;
identify your own values and will learn to listen for the values of others within and outside of communities of support. You will learn how to use these values for generative planning processes.
recognize and define the mission of communities of support in which you participate;
experience and practice communication skills for community building;
explore decision-making processes and how decisions are made in community. You will learn methods for understanding those with whom you disagree , and how to hold productive discussions;
distinguish conflict from harm within a community. You will explore conflict resolution, harm and repair on individual, interpersonal, and community levels;
identify your own priorities for growth, further education, support, and connection.
experience creating a virtual community during the class.

This course was created through and is part of :

COURSE-AT-A-GLANCE

Communities of Care is one of five (5) thoughtfully and intentionally created courses that features the voices of several experienced, well-learned and inspirational movement builders and activists. These include:

Fatuma Emmad;
Med Bradbury;
Dr. Monica Coleman;
The Reverend Charles Howard;
Isabel Foxen Duke;
Dr. Lia Howard; and
Reginal Hubbard.

The topical overview of the course below provides an early taste of what you can expect as you embark on this 16 module learning journey.

Module 1: What is Community?

Module 2: Right Relationship

Module 3: Diversity in Community

Module 4: Benefits and Challenges of Diverse Communities

Module 5: Inclusion Attunement

Module 6: Centering Care

Module 7: Clear Communication for Social Good

Module 8: Communicating Across Differences

Module 9: Boundaries in Community

Module 10: Needs Assessment

Module 11: Building Trust

Module 12: Trauma

Module 13: Conflict and Harm

Module 14: Repair

Module 15: Pleasure and Joy

Module 16: Final Words on Wisdom

AUDIENCE

This course is designed for:

established and budding activists, organizers, community leaders, and coalition-builders;
leaders, staff, and volunteers affiliated with organizations making change within their spheres or seeking to have greater impact in the wider world;
anyone interested in building stronger and more resilient communities;
anyone who wants to pause and consider what is needed psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually to feel resourced and prepared to find their place and purpose in challenging times.

COURSE FEE

The total and regular cost for this course is $750. This fee includes the cost of course tuition and materials.

LEAD CREATOR

Michelle Auerbach (she/her) is a world builder and community maker who uses all her geeky skills to support and educate change shapers. She works toward a more just and loving place where more people get taken care of better. Michelle works as a consultant, educator, and writer focused on change shaping, creativity, and leadership for individuals, organizations, and communities.

Michelle has been studying change and developing her change shaping practice for over 40 years. She has worked with institutions (the NY City Department of Health, Kaiser Permanente, and The National Institutes of Health), organizations (from Fortune 50 companies to NGOs and nonprofits) and communities (through activist movements, consulting, designing change processes and facilitating), and she creates communications and storytelling strategies for universities, legislative change groups, and pro-social businesses.

Michelle was trained in facilitation and change management as well as individual and group coaching at the Columbia University School of Public Health, Kaiser Permanente, and the New York City Department of Health as well as through movements and teachers on the ground. She was a professor of Ancient World Languages and Humanities for a decade and served as chair of the Arts and Humanities discipline for the State of Colorado Department of Higher Education. Currently, she teaches communication and story for changemakers at The University of Colorado and Sterling College.

Michelle was also trained as a chef in New York City at the Natural Gourmet, where she studied nutrition, Chinese medicinal cookery, and healing traditions as well as studying pastry at Peter Kump’s Institute for Culinary Education. She worked in restaurants and has done food writing for the New York Times, the London Guardian, and Sunset magazine as well as other outlets. MIchelle has a particular passion for supporting food sustainability and justice.

Michelle’s PhD dissertation was written on story as a trauma sensitive change technology for individuals, organizations, and communities. She studies the way we respond to change from wisdom traditions that go back 6000 years to the neurobiology that drives our connected selves. Her book, Resilience: The Life Saving Skill of Story came out in 2022 and her second book on change shaping and storytelling is due out in 2023. If you want to read her novels or her nonfiction you can find it, and more of her writing at www.michelleauerbach.com.

Agreements & Terms

Enrollment provides access for one year and represents an annual commitment. There are no refunds. If you decide to stop participating in a course or certificate program, you remain responsible for completing any remaining payments on your payment plan in full.

To participate in any learning community spaces (such as discussion boards and videoconferences), you agree to follow Sterling College’s Code of Online Conduct.You also agree not to reproduce or circulate proprietary materials from this program.

You agree to respect the identities, privacy, and confidentiality of other learners in this program and will not share screenshots, recordings or information disclosed in our learning community spaces with other parties. To foster a dignified, respectful, brave space and model accountability, learners who do not uphold these requirements may have their access revoked without refund.

Course descriptions on this webpage are for informational purposes only. Content may be updated or changed as planning evolves. Sterling College reserves the right to alter the program specifics, including details about course content, instructors, collaborations, field trips, facilities and pricing, at any time without notice.

Lessons17

Here is the class outline:

Welcome to Communities of Care! This module includes introductions to the course and your instructor, as well as some advice on navigating NEO.

You are already in community and are probably pretty clear about that. So why the entire class about it and why bother to define it? It may seem strange to define something we live in all our lives, but defining community is meant to bring those interlocking worlds in which we all live into clarity. Doing so helps us look at them with the heart of a change-shaper.

Right relationship starts with yourself and works its way out in concentric circles through the world in which you live. This module will help you define right relationship for yourself and for the communities in which you live and shape the future. You will read one article on social change movements and right relationship with community. There is a podcast interview with Nora Samaran to listen to and excerpts from Braiding Sweetgrass to read. Finally, we will learn a little about Emergent Strategy from adrienne maree brown who popularized this older concept. You will use your journal to write about the relationships you see in your world and to put them into connection with each other.

Diversity in community means a lot of different things to different people and we need to pay attention to all of them. However, diversity within a community is not the end of the story or the only sphere in which diversity matters. We will build on this learning about diversity in community when we turn to building diverse coalitions of communities and organizations in our study of political empathy. We will read an article about “Coalitions as a Model for Intersectionality.” We will then look at some hidden or less obvious kinds of diversity that need care in community. We will also read about neurodiversity and about other forms of hidden diversity. Finally, we will get to hear some guest speakers talk about their experiences of diversity in community. We will ponder in our journals about where we fit in communities and about how inclusive and intersectional our communities are.

Diversity is crucial to our success as change shapers and it is difficult to navigate in a world where we have been taught to fear it, judge difference, and use difference as a tool of oppression. First off we will listen to Dr. Charles Howard talk about life on the margins. We will read a chapter on “Respect For Diversity.” We will read a Psychology Today article on why we need diversity. Finally, we will listen to Resmaa Menakem and Robin DiAngelo talk about their experiences of working on racial justice across diverse contexts. We will be real with ourselves about how hard this practice of being in community is and how diversity can make that harder.

In this section, we take a look at how orienting community toward inclusion or attuning ourselves to the experiences of others changes the way community functions. There are two guest speakers in this section talking about attunement and inclusion: Lia Howard and Isabel Foxen Duke. There will be an exercise from Lia Howard’s talk that you can practice as you think about what attunement is and how it works.

Centering people, voices, and communities is a practice. Centering those who have been pushed to the margins is a practice that all who find themselves in the middle need to learn to do well and repeatedly. We will take a look at what this means and how different groups go about centering the needs of the marginalized. The first thing to do is to watch Dr. Charles Howard talk about moving people into the center from the margins. Then, there are two pieces to read for this module. The first is an article about Black Lives Matter and their Twitter feed and how they use it as a centering tool. The second is a first person account of what centering looks and feels like to the people who need it. We will take a look at our communities and map out who is on the margins, who is in the center, and what kinds of centering need to happen to fill in the middle of our communities and leave no one out on the fringe.

Clear communication is a whole course worth of topics and developing communication skills individually, and as part of a community, is crucial to creating brave and open places to live, play, work, and love. In this module, we will delve into what kinds of problems in communication come up because of our attachment styles and our nervous systems and we will talk about two skills to address these issues: direct communication and boundary setting or requests.

Difference impacts communication. Difference is important to healthy and active change making. So, learning how to communicate across difference is a skill that future shapers need to have to be successful inside of a community and across coalitions.

In community, we will need to say yes and no. We will need to ask for things from other people and make requests or make our needs clear. This module will be a quick tour of what this very specific kind of communication is and how it works.

Taking a needs assessment after learning to listen is a very different experience than writing one for a grant or a project. Knowing how to understand your community’s needs and their relative importance is a skill you will use forever.

Now we get to put together a lot of what we have learned about how our nervous systems work and talk about attachment theory, polyvagal theory, and psychological safety and how they impact community work.

Trauma in community is a huge topic and one we will visit with throughout the rest of the courses in the certificate program. Here we will focus on understanding two parts of the subject: (1) that trauma impacts how we build and live in communities and (2) that there are pathways to healing trauma that coexist and even support our work as change shapers.

We need to define conflict and harm in social movements and learn to separate out conflict from harm from abuse.

We are going to work with transformative justice and healing justice as ways to create community repair and as a place we can find the tools and skills we need to repair community harm.

We all need to develop practices of pleasure and joy in our communities. These are celebrations but also moments when we re-connect to ourselves and to each other. Pleasure can be a radical act of love and is not a luxury.

Wrapping up the course, and hearing once more from a few of our guest speakers.

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