How to Develop Your Community

How to Develop Your Community

So you have a community and you want to develop it? The basic idea here is to look for a community that is farther along in development than yours, take the best ideas from them and adapt them to your environment. Muslims in America seem to have this tunnel vision that they are doing something revolutionary in building a community. People have built and have run very successful religious based communities for hundreds of years. Do you think that your problems are unique? Do you think that arguments, poor planning, and conflicts are unique to your organization? There is not a single problem that you could possibly have that some other group hasn't had to overcome already. Thanks be to Allah, that today we can look to some very successful Muslim communities and learn from them. There is also no reason why we can't learn from the organizational success and mistakes of non-Muslim communities. Not everything that works for one community will always work someplace else but human beings are human beings. Islam is the best religion. If someone is using a highly effective and positive technique for doing something good, chances are that technique is an Islamic one.

But before we look elsewhere we should first look at our successful Muslim communities in North America. The leadership from developing communities should go at least once a year to visit and talk to the local leadership of a more advanced communities. And let's remember that degree of development is relative and can be uneven. A community may excel in one area and have ideas to contribute while it benefits from hearing from others for another area in which it has problems.

The following is a collection of a few ideas that have been proven successful. If you have a successful program in your community please E-mail suggest@isna.net .

Very Important things to do:

1- Work with people not over them! Everybody thinks themselves to be an expert in community development. When people work with each other sharing their ideas and compromising for the greater good of the community everything works well. The moment someone gets the “Pharaoh Complex” and tries to order people around or force his opinion then development stops no matter how good the Pharaoh thinks he is. Allah is the best of planners and every person that raises him/herself above others will be destroyed in the end. Always remember that modesty is a branch of faith and Allah may send you wisdom and guidance from places and people you never expected, or even from those you don't like.

2- Establish a study session among the imams & leaders in your area. This is a critical establishment for improving working relationships and it facilitates the formation of a unified vision amongst the leadership. Many city-wide organizations have grown out of such study groups

3- Have imams/leadership in training. Any community that Allah blesses with a highly effective individual MUST attach someone to that person for training. The goal of any person who becomes successful in doing something must be to pass on that ability to the next person. So the person in training must slowly be given more and more responsibility and opportunities to perform.

4- Go only as fast as you can do it right. With every organization there is always pressure to do it bigger, cheaper and faster. It is the dream of many community leaders, for example, to have the biggest Islamic school, built for next to nothing and done today. Over the long term, this attitude is destroying more community infrastructure than probably anything else. Communities get excited, throw up a building and pay through the nose maintaining it and then fight over it. It takes time to build infrastructure. Take things slowly, remember that the people infrastructure also needs to be built. As a community leader you need to control the energy of the people and protect them from over exerting themselves and guide them to long term success.

5- Fill the needs first. Too many community leaders get in charge with their agenda of things they want to do. Most of the time these ideas are not bad things to do but many times they do not reflect the immediate needs of the community. Before embarking on a project see if there is something more immediate that you are missing. For example if the imam is having to deal with a lot of marriage counseling issues then dealing with that issue should take a higher priority than trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist yet, like remodeling the library etc.

6- Reaching out to people. Far too many times we alienate people from wanting to be involved. For example, a sister might not be the best Muslim and so comes to the Masjid without wearing a scarf. Many times the reaction of the ignorant but well meaning brothers is to verbally chastise the woman and then she never comes back. This is the same thing for the youth. They don't want to come to a place just to be lectured about how bad they are, how bad their friends are and how they are all going to hell. We have to deal with the fact that in America the majority of people are not the best practicing Muslims. However, if you reach out to these people and ask them to help with things, they will help, provided you show them respect as human beings and you are not dumping a junk project on them. As they become more involved and are around Muslims more often then over time they will improve.

7- Community ownership and team building. One really good program is the community night. This is where the families of the community get together and are split up into mixed teams. The old are mixed with the young and the different teams compete against each other on community related projects. For example each team might be given a budget to spend on building a file community or they might work together to start a community newsletter or each team might be responsible for making a skit on Islam in America Etc. This type of activity builds a fun environment to get the youth involved in taking the community seriously and it gives the adults an opportunity to listen to ideas they wouldn't normally be interested in listening to. As more of a community spirit is developed then the foundation is stronger for real community events.

8- Strong government structure. This is a critical element that is often neglected but is very easy to fix. There are all kinds of constitutional pitfalls that communities run into. Either they make the construction so complicated that it is unworkable or they make it too simplistic to be of any use. The answer is simple, go to a community that has already developed a strong constitution through years of hardship and trial and error and adopt it for your community. Why do you have to go through all those same problems and mistakes?

9- Continued education. This is critical to successful community development. The community must establish a continued education fund for its community leaders and activists. They are there working long ours to serve the community so the least the community can do is pay for training so that the community activists can so their jobs better. This doesn't have to be extravagant, maybe one year the training is paid for so that the Imam can become a trained registered mediator. Maybe the next year the Board of Directors takes a class on motivation or conflict resolution Etc.