CLS West Theme: We Are Family

Not surprisingly, I found my inspiration for the theme of our first West Coast Community Leadership Summit in Jono Bacon's new book: The Art of Community. Of course, I ordered a copy of the book as soon as it was available and have been reading it in small doses over time since then. This past week, I was reading chapter 10 which covers creating and running events when I found our theme in the section entitled Building Family Values:

"Great communities are built on great relationships. When people really feel a sense of belonging they are enjoying not only being productive but swimming in the tide of your community’s personality. When you put productive people together in a room (real or virtual) and they feel a sense of family, your community will be inundated with belonging."

I don't expect everyone attending CLS West to immediately feel that we are all part of one big San Francisco Bay Area community leadership family. However, our main goal with this first CLS West gathering is to begin to foster that sense of family. Thus, our theme for this year: We Are Family.

P.S. This is by no means intended as a sales pitch for Jono's book. It is freely available online to enjoy, share and modify under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike Non-Commercial license. If you can not afford to buy the book, you will find the link to the free ebook PDF download at the bottom of this page. In my opinion, it is a must read for people who are serious about community management.