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Insights

In recent years, many NGOs and corporations started to adopt the methods of community revitalization to tackle the problems of certain groups or communities, so as to improve their quality of lives. The 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China also raised the policy of “innovate community governance, advocate joint construction and sharing”. In this article, we would like to share our understanding of community revitalization.

What is Community Revitalization?
As summarized by Prof. Luo Jar-Der from Tsinghua University, “the core of community revitalization is to revitalize people, i.e. to transform people into ones that are civic-minded and have subjective initiatives to participate in public affairs”. In addition to such transformation, community revitalization is based on emotional relationship, e.g. the love between friends, family or neighbors, as trust between one and another is the key.

Why is Community Revitalization important?
For NGOs, it is not uncommon to see their serviced targets fail to sustain the changes after they left or even before. Community revitalization can be the solution of this challenge.

1. How
As Einstein said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. Community revitalization is to cultivate inner motivation of the community, i.e. a higher level of thinking, to change its behaviors that cause existing problems.

2. By Whom
The driving force from both inside and outside the community are indispensable and complementary. As for the inside driving force, it will be able to detect problems, explore solutions, and to ensure everything meets the true demand of the community. Such self-driven process would allow the community to have strong sense of ownership over the solutions they come up with and thus to better implement it for longer term. As for the outside driving force, it provides professional resources and support to the community so that the solutions can be better implemented and even scaled up.

How to Carry Out Community Revitalization?
Step 1, identify the influential and proactive KOL(s) in the community. Organizations from outside the community can provide resources to such KOL(s) and support he/she to implement programmes of his/her interests, e.g. singing or dancing groups of the community. For instance, in Dashilar community in Beijing, many retired officials and Peking opera amateurs were identified as KOLs. The principle here is to respect the free will and interest of the KOL(s) and to let them run the show.

Step 2, encourage KOL(s) to motivate other community members to form community self-organizations. For examples, members interested in dancing initiate a community dancing team. Outside organizations can guide these self-organizations to operate more efficiently, e.g. helping with activity-planning, and to offer resources, e.g. providing funding for activities. So far, the Dashilar community in Beijing has developed over 20 self-organizations, the purposes of which include cultural heritage, sports and entertainments and etc.

Step 3, KOLs lead community members to identify the problems of the community and to find out the solutions. For instance, with the support of environmental protection NGOs from outside, the community dancing team realizes the problem of waste in the community and would then organize campaign for waste sorting. Only when self-organization members are actually engaged in community affairs, will they be able to find out what the community really needs. Along this process, outsider organizations can provide technical and intelligent support, funding and expert guidance. In Dashilar community, the Community Revitalization Research Center of Tsinghua University organized the annual micro-venture philanthropy competition, where self-organizations raised the community issues they intend to solve and submitted their solutions and the Center provided relevant coaching for the teams.

Last but not least, to assess whether a community has been revitalized, the key criterion is whether community insiders can continue implementing the solutions and/or sustain their behavioral changes after outsider organizations leave the community.