A key part of supporting community resilience lies in accentuating what is working in communities, giving it attention and putting to use. \u00a0Today my friend Jerry Nagel wrote from Minnesota to ask for advice about what to do with some of the communities who have been devastated by tornadoes in the last week. \u00a0My reply:<\/p>\n
\nMight be useful to go through an appreciative process of studying what happened to get people back on their feet. \u00a0What aspect about our community made it possible to look after those who lost their homes? \u00a0What stories of response do we need to harvest and celebrate and what do those tell us about our community? \u00a0Where did those values come from and how as a community can we support the continued development and practice of those values as we rebuild? \u00a0I would keep the questions quite grounded on people’s personal experiences and not do too much abstract reflection while the need and hurt is still very close to the surface. \u00a0The point of appreciative inquiry at this point is to surface the stories of life in the community and harvesting them so that the community knows its intangible assets better.<\/div>\nI have done similar inquiries in communities that have been hit by tragedies like suicides and chronic drug use or violence. \u00a0It helps a lot with the healing and it harvests what’s working to put all of that to use.<\/div>\nCommunities do this anyway. \u00a0With the perspective of time, everyone will tell the stories of how we came together and what worked and how we survived it. \u00a0For those that arrive in the community from this time on, they will always be “outsiders” to some extent for not having gone through the experience with others.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A key part of supporting community resilience lies in accentuating what is working in communities, giving it attention and putting to use. \u00a0Today my friend Jerry Nagel wrote from Minnesota to ask for advice about what to do with some of the communities who have been devastated by tornadoes in the last week. \u00a0My reply: Might be useful to go through an appreciative process of studying what happened to get people back on their feet. \u00a0What aspect about our community made it possible to look after those who lost their homes? \u00a0What stories of response do we need to harvest …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[14,49,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appreciative-inquiry","category-bc","category-facilitation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piBp1-IY","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2788"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2797,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788\/revisions\/2797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}