Last week in class, Organizations and Communities, we were put into groups and were told to build a community. We had very little boundaries and drew up a city through combining our groups ideas. It seemed like it would be easy to come up with an ideal community, but it was much harder than expected. It is difficult to think of everything that makes a community work. The first thing we decided on was our population. From there we had to consider a government, health care plan, jobs, education, crime and numerous other things. It was difficult to make everything work together. It was very interesting to see the rest of the classes' ideal communities. After listening to everyone present their communities, it made me think of all the factors we might of forgotten to take into consideration. After presenting the different communities, Professor Rhodes asked us what our community would do in certain situations. After discussing these situations among the class, we realized that certain communities could handle certain situations better than others. My group used their imagination and built a community on the moon. Our solution for everything was to send everyone back to earth. I really enjoyed this in-class activity and it really made me realize how it would be impossible to make a perfect community because of the amount of conflict that arises everyday throughout our society.
I started to think about our readings while thinking about this in-class activity. Our textbook, Generalist Practice with Organizations and Communities, discusses the different types of communities that exist. It was interesting to think back about the different communities people decided to create or how many groups combined different types of existing communities. Our textbook also discusses community resource systems and gives a list of a variety amount of resource systems and organizations that could exist in a single city (Figure 8.2 p. 298). Examples listed were different government units, professional groups, social services groups, consumer groups and many others. After looking these over, I realized how many resources that are influential in a community that did not even cross my mind when creating one.
Observation:
I realized this past week how many people are unaware of current news and events.
I really like how you mentioned that there can be no perfect communities because of the conflicts that come with being a human. You are so right, there will always be some form of conflict that will invade our perfection.
ReplyDeleteOn your observation, that is so true. I used to be one of those people. But then I started to listening to NPR on the radio when I drive to and from work. Whoo NPR.
Comment #6
ReplyDeleteVery well written. My group struggled also with trying to remember every type of resource that an ideal city should have. Towards the end of the activity we remembered a couple of crucial ones that had been forgotten, but most of the space on our paper had already been allotted to some other resource. I imagine that most real life communities are missing needed resources as well, either they were forgotten in the initial building of the community or there’s no space for their implementation now.