What are your community's values?
By Community Engagement Project ·
Most communities describe themselves as friendly, welcoming and active. Those are adjectives, not values, and the difference decides whether a community draws real passion from its members.
Adjectives are not values
What are your community's values? The usual answer is a list like this: friendly, welcoming, active, warm, inclusive, vibrant, caring, family-oriented, inspiring, authentic. Add "a home away from home" if you are feeling ambitious.
Now ask whether these are really values, or just adjectives that describe a well-functioning community. Here is a test: could a very different community say exactly the same? A golf club is friendly and welcoming. So is a book club, a gym and a parents' WhatsApp group. If your values would fit all of them, they do not tell anyone what makes you distinct, and they will not make anyone care more than they already do.
Keep asking why
To get past the adjectives, start with what the community tries to achieve. What is its purpose? Then ask why, and why that, and why that again. Eventually you will run out of answers and reach "because that's just who we are". That bedrock is probably your value.
Here is an illustration. Suppose a shul is asked what it is trying to do.
- We run a lively children's service. Why? So that children enjoy coming to shul.
- Why does that matter? So that they still come as teenagers and adults.
- Why does that matter? Because we want Jewish life to carry on in this community from one generation to the next.
- Why that? Because it's who we are: a community that hands Judaism on, and where every generation belongs.
The last answer is a value, and it can be tested. It explains why the shul bothers with a children's service and a youth minyan, and why the over-60s are actively involved in the leadership, rather than being thanked and retired: a community that hands Judaism on needs the people who carry the experience to stay in the room with those who will inherit it. It also tells you what the shul is not: it is not primarily a place for the most learned, or for the quickest davening. A shul whose bedrock answer is different, say a love of serious Torah learning, would make different choices with the same budget.
How many, and how will you know?
Aim for somewhere between two and five values. They shouldn't be fluffy, because their job is to make you distinct from other communities.
Don't expect to get there in one sitting. It can take a long discussion with leadership to work out what your values really are, and the disagreements along the way are useful, because they show where the leaders do not yet share a picture. But it is worth the effort, because it is extraordinarily useful to be able to express them.
Once you have found them, you will know. They resonate strongly, and people recognise their community in them. Two checks help:
- The distinctiveness test. Would a very different community be able to claim the same value?
- The pin-back test. Can anything the community does be traced back to one of the values? If you can't explain why you run an activity in terms of a value, ask whether you've fully clarified the value (or whether you should be running the activity!)
Why this is the first ingredient of an engaged community
If you have found your values, congratulations: this is the first ingredient of an engaged community.
As we saw in the last article, people give their time when the organisation's values overlap with their own. That overlap is what we called value fit in the first article. Members cannot see an overlap that has never been put into words, so a community with unclear values leaves it to chance. Such a community is viable, but it will not draw out passion from its membership. People may like it, and attend, without feeling it is theirs.
Clear values also mean that some people will fit less well. That is not a failure, it is a consequence, and a community that tries to suit everyone usually ends up with values that mean nothing. How wide a welcome to offer is a choice for each community to make.
Values are not the mission
The mission is not the same as the values. A mission is one thing that could be done as a result of the values: the what, where the values are the why. The same value can lead to very different missions.
Take the value "promoting halachic observance" in two completely different organisations:
| Organisation | Shared value | Mission that follows |
|---|---|---|
| A local kashrut authority | Promoting halachic observance | Make reliably kosher food available to everyone in the town, from the corner bakery to the wedding caterer. |
| A university Jewish society | Promoting halachic observance | Make a Shabbat meal in a fully observant setting a weekly option for every Jewish student on campus. |
The value is identical, but one organisation inspects kitchens and the other cooks for students. Neither mission would make sense to the other, and both make sense to the people who share the value. This is why values come first: they tell you why you are doing the work, and if the mission stops working, they help you find a new one.
Finding your values is only the start. In a later article we will discuss what to do with them once you can articulate them successfully.
In short
Friendly and welcoming describe how a community behaves. Values explain why it exists, and a community that can say so in a few distinct words gives its members something to belong to and to give for.