Continuing our series from previous months – Read below about Chapters 7 and 8 of the book, 13 Ways to Kill Your Community.
Chapter 7—Don’t Cooperate: Within a community, failing is as simple as refusing to cooperate with any other organizations, businesses, agencies, boards or other communities. Of course, that is a purely passive way to try to kill your community. If you want to be more proactive in killing your community, your group should actively fight others. Compete with them on similar projects, the same volunteers and the same fundraising dollars so no one gets enough to get anything done. To kill your community, you should compete against your neighboring communities. Don’t work together on economies of scale to deliver services to residents, or on attracting new families and businesses. Those lines in the sand drawn over a hundred years ago by someone in a different world cannot be compromised if failure is what you seek. Protect your territory at all costs and keep neighbors divided.
Chapter 8—Live in the Past: The world is always changing, and it always will. Successful communities find ways to adapt to the change, or adapt the change to them. Those that fail often do so because they choose to ignore, deny, resist, or hide from inevitable change. The fear of adapting to change drives people and communities to live in the past, or at least to hold onto it until their last dying breath. That fear breeds anger, and anger is always evident in those who live in the past. They are angry about something that happened 20 years ago, or about something in their world that is about to change. It is always unjustified, however. Mistakes are part of the past, solutions are only found in the future, and inaction is the biggest mistake you can make. Inaction means your community is unprepared for what is coming and that means your community will change, but not the way you want it to. Living in the past will ensure your community becomes part of the past.
Stay tuned for next month’s recap of Chapters 9 & 10.
This article was published in the Venango Chamber’s May 2024 VenangoWorks! Newsletter.