Project Ideas
Every BWB project looks different, the important thing is to create collaborations and bring as much creativity and fun to the project as possible.
Every Community Has Different Needs – What Are Yours?
Every community is unique, with its own set of challenges and opportunities. Successful projects are built through collaboration, harnessing creativity, and avoiding assumptions. Whether big or small, impactful projects find the conditions that allow social change to happen. By working together, we can identify and create the right conditions to make a difference. What does your community need, and how can we help you achieve it?
How to start kickstart local civic & community projects:
1. Identifying Local Needs
Needs can be defined as a gap between what is and what should be. A need can be felt by an individual, a group, or an entire community. It can be as concrete as the need for food and water or as abstract as improved community cohesiveness.
What is it that your community needs? Is there an individual need that can clue you into what the larger group needs? Are there issues in your community that you ignore because they seem so pervasive? What do you care about on a local level? How can this community support these ideas?
2. Grow Your Team
Community makes community happen. Building an enthusiastic and committed team is key. Reach out to individuals in different sectors and parts of your community. Building a diverse team can help you tackle diverse problems down the road.
What makes Burning Man awesome is the diversity of gifts being given, and it’s no different here. Remember to empower people to bring their gifts. When people feel empowered you’d be surprised as to what they might bring.
Don’t worry if you put the call out for participation and just a few people show up. In our experience, the right people show up if there is good leadership and it will grow.
3. Listen Carefully // Create a Clear Mission
Creating a clear mission is essential to keeping your team on task, as well as for explaining what you do in an understandable way. Listen carefully to the community you are serving when developing your mission. If your mission revolves around a general topic such as ‘Food’, are you working on access? Education? Quality? Each of these subtopics are related but require a different skill set and knowledge base to tackle the problem.
4. Meet Peers. Neighbors. Supporters & Adversaries!
Look around for other organizations and people that are working in the same community. Working in isolation is rarely effective and you may find surprising allies. People are often generous with advice, and they may have learned lessons or pitfalls that can help keep your project on track. Chances are somebody out there wants to help you!
Look for organizations with a similar mission to yours and let them know what your plans are. If there are opponents or adversaries to your work, sit down with them and listen! Your differences may not be as stark as you think, or, they may have experience or knowledge you haven’t taken into account yet.
5. Gather Resources
There are excellent tools out there already created to help you, whether it be financially or organizationally! Take time to research what others have already created, the internet is a wonderful resource, but so are your local government organizations. Ask others to point you in the right direction.
Consider doing a community asset map.
6. Take Action (but don’t forget to have fun!)
Taking action and creating change is what you’ve been working for the whole time. Make sure to divide the labor so that no one is overworked or will experience burnout. Sometimes actions are large, sometimes they are small. It’s impact that matters.
Also, make sure that fun is a part of the equation. When fun is involved you’ll keep people interested and engaged. We’re burners, damn it! We know how to have fun while we work too!
7. Report Your Success!
Find ways to evaluate your impact and let people know about it. Reporting to donors, neighbors, friends and peers will let you practice your story, as well as keep stakeholders engaged. A solid story is the *best* way to continue the momentum with both the media as well as project partners.
**Remember to utilize BWB resources for storytelling! We have room on our website, blog and social media, as well as access to Burning Man Project communication channels to help you share your story!**
8. Celebrate
Not everything will go according to plan, but when it does, don’t forget to celebrate it. This work isn’t easy, and sometimes it gets seriously frustrating. So remembering to celebrate will keep everyone’s focus on what’s working and what’s successful about your project.
Our biggest tip when it comes to organizing civic projects:
*Eat with people. Share the Table. Break bread.*
Looking for Financial Resources?
– Space Hive (crowdfunding civic projects UK based)
– CitizinInvestor (crowdfunding civic projects US based)
– IndieGogo
Need Organizational tools?
– The Community Tool Box built by the University of Kansas
– Check out our Resources Page
Ready to start your own project?
Evaluating your projects:
ð Assessment: How did you discover what mattered to the community? How did you identify local needs and resources to address the community’s concerns? (150 words or less)
ð Planning: How did you involve the community in developing a plan for what you would do to achieve the intended results? Please describe your group’s mission (i.e., what you intend to do and why), objectives (i.e., intended results), and strategies (i.e., general approach). (150 words or less)
ð Taking Action: What did your group do—the major activities—to try to achieve the intended results? How did you mobilize people in the community for your group’s effort? (150 words or less)
ð Evaluation: How did you evaluate the effort to see what was being done and whether results were being achieved? Did the evaluation suggest that the activities were having an impact? How did you use the information to make adjustments along the way? (150 words or less)
ð Sustaining the work: What are you doing to maintain valuable aspects of your effort? How will you keep it going after the project is over? (150 words or less)