“Conversation – engaging people around the table on issues that matter – is the most basic tool we have in the toolbox of community building,” Peter Kenyon has told a series of meetings in the Christchurch region.

Peter Kenyon is an Australian social entrepreneur and community enthusiast who was invited to Christchurch to share ideas on how the region can recover from the two earthquakes that have devastate the city and surrounds.

Over the last decade he has worked with over 600 communities throughout Australia, North America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East seeking to facilitate fresh and creative ways that stimulate community and economic renewal. He is motivated by the desire to create healthy, inclusive, sustainable and enterprising communities.

His employment experiences have included Director of Employment in Western Australia, Manager of the Community Employment Development Unit in New Zealand and Coordinator of the Natal Kwazulu Job Creation and Enterprise Strategy in South Africa.

Peter became convinced that communities can’t be developed from the top down or from the outside in. It required communities to build from the inside out, and for their residents to invest themselves, ideas, assets and resources in the process.

Subsequently, he created the Bank of I.D.E.A.S. (Initiatives for the Development of Enterprising Action and Strategies), in 1990, to promote such a paradigm shift and assist with the necessary facilitation, ideas and skills.

“It’s incredibly exciting the way churches have responded to the quakes,” he told Christchurch churches. “But as time goes on, people tire. There’s a certain honeymoon period when everyone responds, but like any loss, it quickly moves into a grieving and an anger stage.

“I suspect over the next six months you’re going to need to be even more involved and resilient supporting people. As people’s sense of survival starts to get pretty thin, the role of the churches will be more needed.

“We have to help people cope with the present, but this is an incredible opportunity to get people focused on the future, not just the physical infrastructure – I’m more interested in what the place feels like.

“What is needed is the recognition of a very simple fact: the wisdom of the community always exceeds the knowledge of the experts. What is needed, is a process which empowers local people. The role of Christian leaders is to be activists, advocates for community. Whatever the issue, community is the answer. It gives us an incredible opportunity to bring people together in conversations, to talk about what type of community we want to create.

“A healthy community is where the community is engaged in the business of community – that we do everything in our power to get people engaged actively. Most of our communities have become spectator places; we wait for others to do things. We tend to see people as consumers of social services rather than becoming producers of services.

“The level of social capital in these communities has been reduced dramatically; we need people to start to re-engage in the community. We watch neighbours rather than get to know neighbours. We have people over for dinner half as often as 10 years ago; we go on a family picnic half as often as 10 years ago; people are not engaging as they used to.

“But one of the advantages of a disaster is that we spontaneously rediscover each other. We start talking to our neighbours. Why do we need a disaster for that to happen? What can we do to get people starting to engage in community?”

Peter said experience showed that conversation is the most basic tool, but it needs to be encouraged in fun ways. “Don’t organise a meeting when you can organise a party.”

He encouraged churches to find ways to build the stocks of social capital, which he defined as the levels of intensity of people’s involvement with each other. “In a time of crisis, what a great way for churches to stand up and look at ways streets can reconnect.”

He said a healthy community knows itself, and is constantly looking at what assets it has. But in his experience, few communities take any stock of these.

“Everyone has gifts of the head, hands, the heart, but we don’t seem to have mechanisms to find these out. I saw a survey recently which asked people why they volunteer, and 82 per cent said it was because someone asked them to do something they like doing. It’s a pretty simple formula to get people engaged.”

Bank of I.D.E.A.S. is assisting churches in Australia to carry out asset mapping – the people assets, the network assets, the physical assets, the business assets.

“These are all rich assets that we can mobilise to make a better community. We don’t do it to make a list of things, we do it find connections between those things. It’s about joining dots together, and then starting to use those connections to create outcomes.

“Yes, we have a lot of needs, but this is a great opportunity to build a stronger and more powerful community where everyone is felt valued and everyone has a contribution.”

He added that a strong community is where people care. “There is nothing more powerful than finding a community that knows what it care about and starting to engage in it.

“A healthy community also has vision. A healthy community is run by a leadership which has passion and vision, who can inspire people to step up and make a difference, who open doors and windows for people to get engaged. I long for the church to see it has the capacity to provide that,” he said.

The Bank of Ideas website (www.bankofideas.com.au) has numerous resources churches can download to assist them in developing community.

Another website resource has been set up by a small group of Christchurch people who have collated responses from a previous leaders meeting on how churches have been dealing with earthquake response.

The Christchurch Churches Resources Co-ordination Group (CCRCG) website (http://ccrcg.com/) will provide resources tailored to the region. For instance, a Google map will show earthquake co-ordinator details for each church, activity reports, and list needs. The group hopes it will become a major communication and co-ordination tool as churches bed in for the long haul of recovery.

CCRCG member Louden Keir said that it’s also important for the Church to be more upfront with what it does.

“The church is often very quiet about what it does, which means it gets overlooked. Yet the biggest NGO is the Church. There is a lot of resonance around the term NGO, and we need to use it more.

“We are suggesting to the Ministry of Social Development that they use the Church infrastructure as the building block for community. This could provide the government with one place to talk to the churches should it so wish.”