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The basic goal to promoting and maintaining a healthy, safe community is co-operation. People that you already know are likely to co-operate with you. You need to develop positive, respectful relations among members of your community by organizing social, recreational or outreach events that will provide opportunities for people to get to know each other and build respectful relationships.

Each of these types of events can be a one time event celebrating an occasion or to raise money for a specific purpose, or on-going events such as weekly family at the movie nights, teen drop-in, company anniversaries, etc…

With each event you develop you will find that it is impossible to gear your activities to meet the needs of all the members of the community; however you must ensure that all members have the opportunity to attend some of your events. The best way to ensure that the communities needs are being met is to find out what they want and plan your activities to meet their needs. Never try to plan the whole event yourself, the more you involve as many people as possible in some aspect of the planning, organizing, preparing and facilitating, the more likely your event will be judged a success.

Co-operation with others is at the root of all healthy communities and healthy communities encourage diversity among the members of the community. Like all aspects of life there are benefits and barriers to getting to know others.

Benefits:

• Promotes respect between members of the community.
• Develops warmth and deeper relations, trust, and respect.
• Makes people fell good having and giving friendship.
• Supports and encourages balance decision making.
• Can create positive future activities fostering a continued relationship.
• Helps build confidence and trust
• Provides good examples for children of how to get to know new people, build relationships and respect differences in opinions, life styles and cultures.
• Helps develop health, caring communities.

Barriers:

• Conflicts with other members can take away out interest in getting to know each other.
• Lack of motivation to socialize.
• Lifestyle, childcare, health, language, cultural challenges.
• Lack of respect for others
• Social, economic barriers that prevent people from attending events.

In order for any planned activity to succeed, you must establish clear goals. Write your goals in a manner that express exactly what you are going to accomplish. It must be possible to verify that the goal has been achieved. Use a consensus-seeking process to ensure total agreement and commitment by all. Set deadlines or timelines for completion, and most importantly, make sure you have the appropriate resources available for task to be completed.

Lastly, make sure you have a good action plan. You will need a system for collecting and analyzing information and tools to help make choices. A good action plan will help you to keep organizations steered towards objectives, with clearly defined tasks for each member of the community, thus ensuring success of your event.

© Debbie Long
www.designsbydebbie.ca
debbie@designsbydebbie.ca

Debbie Long is a writer/illustrator and founding member of 'The Muse Program', a literacy program for children. She has currently published her first children's book, in the Imagination Series, 'Short Stories with Imagination. The second is due to be released July 2005. For more details visit http://www.designsbydebbe.ca Permission to re-print this article must be granted by the Author by emailing debbie@designsbydebbie.ca

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