Building Block 1: Understanding the Core Idea and Communicating It Clearly to All Stakeholders

The central link of a community is a common higher purpose, a shared mission and common ideals and values. All of these guiding principles emerge, for example, when an organisation or movement is founded. They are implicitly or explicitly clear and guide the actions of the founding actors, who are often personally connected to each other. They are often the founding impulse through which people first come together and through which the community can gain further members. However, these outsiders need to recognise the shared core idea and acknowledge it as their own. The prerequisite is that the core idea is communicated clearly and attractively and can be experienced so that it can be appropriated by outsiders. The communication must also include an invitation to become part of the community ("onboarding") as soon as outsiders find the core idea attractive and worthy of support.

The more inspiring and contemporary a core idea is and the better it meets the needs, ideals and values of certain groups of actors, the more strongly it is able to generate affiliation to the community. For community development, this results in the task of formulating the core idea explicitly, precisely and attractively and ensuring that it is transported in an appropriate form to different groups of actors relevant to the core idea. Understanding the diversity of the groups of actors and responding to them is another essential challenge for community development, which is dealt with in more detail in Building Block 5, Building Block 6 and Building Block 7.

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ACCESS

For the ACCESS context, the following questions arise:

• Do all relevant groups of actors currently act on the basis of the same core idea?
• Is the ACCESS core idea precisely and attractively formulated?
• Who originally formulated the ACCESS core idea?
• Who in the actor-network were the drivers that developed the core idea?
• Who in the actor-network has already committed themselves to the core idea?
• Which relevant groups of actors are not yet or not yet sufficiently aware of the core idea?

It is also important to check how the ACCESS core idea is formulated stylistically, whether it is only available in sober application language or whether it has been put into a form that can inspire, fascinate and thus have a community-founding effect across the breadth of the actor-network. Here it is worthwhile to develop new forms of verbal and visual communication in order to transport the core idea in an infectious way.

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