This is the first of 3 blogs in which Cormac will be exploring issues of citizenship, power and democracy and what these mean to asset based community development.
Recently an ABCD Community Builder in Gloucestershire commented that in the neighbourhoods where he works there are three kinds of people:
- Connectors: those that bring people and energy together.
- Conductors: those that constructively hold negative energy and creative tensions and either help others channel these in a positive direction (like lightening rods) or ‘earth’ them… In other words bring them to ground before someone ‘blows a fuse’.
- The third he described as Circuit Breakers. These are people, institutions and sometimes places that break connections and the flow of energy, sometimes with very negative consequences, but often, even in the apparent negativity, they create new learning that can’t be experienced by going with the flow.
