A few families, deciding to do something together.
Wherever community-building work has taken hold in Ontario, an essential development has been the emergence of groups of families — neighbours who organize their own activities, support one another's children, and slowly weave a culture they want their children to grow up in.
Not a programme — a way of life together
A group of families is not, in the formal sense, an activity organized by the Institute. It is what tends to emerge when several families on the same street or in the same building begin to share a few weekly activities — a devotional in one home, a children's class in another, a junior youth group held in the community room of the apartment building.
Over time these families begin to take responsibility for the activities as their own: coordinating among themselves, hosting one another's children, inviting friends and neighbours, holding a family festival on a long weekend. The arrangement is informal — there is no roster, no committee — but the commitment is real.
What is being learned
In Ontario, the friends are learning that the strength of a neighbourhood depends on whether the parents of the children in its classes, and the siblings of the junior youth in its groups, see themselves as participants in the broader work — not bystanders. Where the parents are themselves engaged in the institute process, the whole pattern is more stable.
We are also learning that the family is itself an educational environment. Conversations at the dinner table about the qualities being studied in a child's class, prayers said together at bedtime, decisions made together about how to spend a Saturday — all of these are the substance of community building.