I was very fortunate to be a teenager during the 1960s, a tumultuous and inspiring era. I remember being excited about ideas like communal living and sharing of belongings. During three of those years at the end of the decade I was a student at High Mowing School in Wilton, living with just 80 other students in a sequestered environment (the school was much less involved with the larger community than it is today), so sharing many resources was inevitable.
The Sixties was not the first era where such idealism flourished, but it was for me as I was coming of age. It ran its course – the sharing of LPs and girlfriends became problematic, and in time most of us settled into a more conventional value system.
Still, I feel that the experience of the Sixties advanced our society a notch, and that the ideals which we simplistically embraced nurtured a long-term desire to collaborate, both between individuals and organizations.
There are certainly case studies in the business and nonprofit world to verify some trends in this direction in recent years, and projects like the Nubanusit Neighborhood harness components of communal living at a somewhat more organized and functional level than the hippie communes of the sixties.
One important thing to know about collaboration is that it is a lot of work. It’s not a matter of saying “Oh, this will be easier if we collaborate”, but more often, “This may be harder, but it will yield better results than we would each get on our own.” Another thing is that this is not something that comes easy to New Hampshire folks. Probably more than any other New England state, we have an obsession with autonomy that frequently resists the suggestion of collaboration.
Want to get people roused at Town Meeting?
Try suggesting that the town government, the Fire Department, or the Highway Department think about sharing resources with other towns.
Collaboration requires a foundation of trust, and there are many reasons why that is an important part of our society.
Then, it requires keeping an eye out for opportunities – being willing to advance ideas when they occur, not becoming discouraged when most of them don’t pan out, and being willing to work hard at it when they do.
It is rare that a collaborative project will require equal energy and resources from all participants, or will yield exactly equal results, and that can catch people of guard and be discouraging. But what effective collaboration will yield is a satisfaction of knowing that something was made possible that otherwise might not have been, and that our community is a better place for it
Gordon Peery is president of the board of directors of the Monadnock Center for History and Culture in Peterborough.