In the corporate context, the word “belonging” is a relatively new one, and as language like “diversity and inclusion” has come into the political crosshairs, this concept of belonging has taken center stage.
Global community strategist Marjorie Anderson writes, “Belonging gets used as casually as the word community. Often it is used to describe environments where people can show up wholly and safely with others in the context of safe spaces. But belonging isn’t something you can impose on someone.”
As Marjorie astutely points out (and goes into much more depth about on this podcast with Erin Corine Johnson), “There is agency and individuality associated with how someone feels belonging. And while we can create the conditions and environment for someone to feel as welcome in a space as possible, their identity is what drives whether or not belonging comes up for them.”
Our obligation as facilitators of community or as leaders of Transformative Volunteer experiences is exactly this: creating the conditions for someone to feel welcome, for perspective shift, for challenging assumptions. This is all we have the power to do: create conditions.
This reality has the potential to feel either freeing or demoralizing, depending on how we look at it.
It may feel demoralizing if we think our job is to make everyone feel welcome. To make everyone experience perspective shift. To make everyone understand that, as humans, they have biases that may need to be challenged. If we believe our job is to hold the experience of the other, we will fail one thousand times over. Because, as it turns out, it is not our job to make anyone feel or experience anything.
When we realize our job as facilitators, as volunteer leaders, is simply to create conditions (e.g. using the Transformative Volunteering approach), we become free to focus on that, not controlling experience. And we gauge our success based on whether we’ve taken the steps needed to create those conditions, not whether an individual experienced a specific feeling.
Creating Conditions
If our job is to create conditions rather than control experience, the next question is: how can we create those conditions?
In the Transformative Volunteering approach, the conditions come down to three behaviors, what we call the three Keystone Behaviors. They aren’t complicated and they don’t require more budget or a specific type of volunteer project.
The Three Keystone Behaviors:
- The Brief is how we frame the experience for participants, creating an “alert” moment to surface assumptions and establish task significance by connecting the project at hand to who it’s for and why it matters.
- Guiding Volunteers means meeting them where they are while inviting them to their highest level of contribution throughout the experience.
- The Debrief caps off the volunteer experience by creating space for critical reflection and sense-making, including surfacing gaps between expectations and experience.
Smaller, Deeper, Closer
A volunteer leader’s job is to close the distance between volunteers and the communities they serve. Between what someone assumed walking in and what they actually encountered. Between who a person thought they were and who they’re becoming.
Closing distance doesn’t require massive scale, but it does need intentional design. A well-crafted Brief before a small volunteer experience will produce more durable change than a thousand-person day of service with no facilitation. Twelve people who’ve had their assumptions challenged and then reflected on what surprised them will carry that experience forward in ways that a stadium full of kit-packers with little context on their project simply can’t.
The Freedom in “Just” Creating Conditions
If we can’t guarantee an outcome like belonging, why bother designing for it at all?
When we stop trying to control what people feel and start focusing on what we can influence — the design of the Brief, the quality of our facilitation, the structure of our group’s time for reflection — we retain agency. We’re no longer responsible for an outcome we never had the power to guarantee in the first place. We’re simply responsible for a design we absolutely have the power to execute well. And that feels like a refreshing sigh of relief.
Our job was never to make belonging happen. Our job is to make it possible.
