What I learned from the human towers community
25 Feb 2019What I learned from the human towers community
Almost three years ago I joined my local team of human towers, now they are my second family. It has been one of the best experiences in my life, and I have learned and still learning a lot from it. I will share with you what I have learned from the community building point of view, because if we count everyone on every team, it’s one of the most significant communities in Catalonia, and one of the most important in the Catalan culture.
This is one of the most inclusive community I have ever seen, we have from children to older age people. It’s hard to manage such a diverse community, but we manage to achieve our goals by the end of the year. I will try to explain what I think are our main problems and how we solve them to be successful.
1. Involve everyone
On my team, we are about one hundred fifty people active at the moment, but there are teams with more than five hundred people. Focusing on my side we need everyone to be participant and active if we want to achieve our team goals. But how we can get everyone active? The answer is somehow easy. If you wish to more participation by the current members, just involve them. In a community, there are a lot of things to do, assign different tasks to everyone, make them feel important inside the team.
We have so many teams inside our community, we have coaches that changes every two years, we have the children’s group, a social events team, a communication team, a welcome team, and many more. The idea is to involve everyone in a team for many reasons, to divide the work and engage them.
2. Don’t burn out your community
In my team, we train two days a week and a kind of competition almost every weekend from March till November with a one month vacation in summer. That’s a lot of activities, and just for our main activity, we also have other social events and activities to raise money for the community.
In the end, it’s a lot of work and people can burn out, in our case we just accept and understand this behavior. In the other hand, everyone knows that there are some moments during the year that we need the most people possible, that’s when the community truly shines. Even old members show up and collaborate with the team.
Make sure everyone in your community knows when it’s important to show up!
3. The next generation
In our community, everyone is essential, from the children that climb on top to the oldest one. Make sure that you have the next generations ready for when you need them. What I mean can be applied in multiple things, for example, the next generation of children that will be able to climb or the future community leaders.
4. The communities inside
In a big community like my team, we have lots of different people with the same interests, and they can become a small community inside the community. And that’s good if the community knows how to maintain the small communities it can help the big community grow even more. For example, we have activities for children and families, parties for teenagers and adults, etc. It’s also important to connect the small communities in our case through the human towers.
The small communities makes the community big
You will never walk alone
The motto of our team can be translated to something like You’ll never walk alone, and I think its the best description to what we do. We get together so a child can touch the sky, and it wouldn’t be possible without everyone involved. Also, I have seen our motto applied in many ways inside our community, and I think that’s what makes our team a big family.