A ‘winter initiative’ was held from July 9-12 2022 in the Wellington cluster, followed by a ‘whānau festival’. The friends shared their insights and reflections in a comprehensive report which is summarised below.

The purpose of the winter initiative was to build capacity within the Wellington cluster and adjoining clusters for meaningful and uplifting conversations in a neighbourhood setting. Friends from three clusters participated (Wellington-43; Triumph-6; Wairarapa-3). 80-100 conversations took place within the Naenae neighbourhood in Hutt City. A special feature was that five families were active participants during the four day winter initiative.

As in the summer initiative in January 2022, we tried to consciously focus on this learning objective rather than on outcomes. However, we did have a specific event in mind during our conversations – the Hutt Whānau Festival on Sunday 24 July.

One of the key objects of learning was to learn about the characteristics and dynamics of a meaningful conversation about community building:

Most of the friends were able to sustain longer and higher quality conversations with neighbours than in other outreaches they had participated in.
A few friends found that focusing the conversation on the invitation to the whānau festival led to a shorter and more transactional conversation.
Other friends found that the invitation to the whānau festival worked quite well as one element of a broader conversation that included questions such as: How long have you lived in this area? How do you find it? What do you think helps make a vibrant community?
Conversations seemed to lead to stronger friendships when some enduring connection or point of collaboration could be found, such as having children of around the same age, living near to one another or having a common interest in an issue facing the neighbourhood.
At one point the friends used role plays to share their experiences and insights. The friends tried to recreate actual conversations they had had by acting them out. It was felt that this kind of role play was more effective than the usual approach of role playing an imagined conversation shortly before going into the field.
Conversations enriched our reading of the social reality of the neighbourhood. For example a number of people made reference to a Naenae community Facebook page that is widely used, as an example of the kind of community conversations that are already taking place. Another common theme was break-ins around the neighbourhood.

Programme

The winter initiative included:

Devotions and study in the mornings (extracts from Books 2, 6, 7, 10.1)
Outreach in the afternoons from around 2 until 430 or 5pm, followed by reflections
Evening sessions including a meeting with Counsellor Scrine (Saturday), a screening of ‘Dawn of the Light’ (Sunday), a printmaking art workshop (Monday) and the Feast of Kalimat (Tuesday).
The programme for Sunday also included an observance of the Martrydom of the Báb Holy Day.

Follow-up

During the 10 days following the winter initiative some of the friends involved continued to make home visits to:

Consolidate friendships and continue conversations about the community
Follow up and check who was planning to attend the whānau festival
Introduce ourselves as people from the neighbourhood, in situations where the team that made the initial contact were all from outside the neighbourhood.
Revisit contacts who weren’t home when we called on them during the Initiative.
Connect with Bahá’í households and invite them to the whānau festival.

The response to these follow-up visits was strongly positive. People were generally quite happy to see us again, and many offered an RSVP for the festival during these follow-up conversations.

The follow-up visits were made possible by integrating them into a family’s plans for the school holidays, and by having conversations with the friends involved in the initiative to identify times when a few friends could make visits together.

Whānau Festival

The whānau festival took place on Sunday 24 July from 1pm to 7pm. The plan for the whānau festival emerged from the reflections on the Hutt Valley conference held in May 2022. The friends felt that the main limitation of the conference was that not enough quality conversations took place beforehand to invite people, because many community members were unwell or isolating during the April expansion phase.

In this light, the purpose of the whānau festival was to replicate most of the features of the conference but with more invitations to friends from the wider community. The Local Spiritual Assembly took overall responsibility for organising the festival – although much of the work fell on a few individuals, they were able to report back to the institution and get help with distributing tasks and responsibilities. A shorter programme was created to make the logistics of the festival more manageable than the conference. The theme of building vibrant communities was selected as it seemed both well-suited to friends who are new to the process, and clearly connected to the core activities.

The programme included:

A plenary introduction, including a showing of the introduction to the film ‘A Widening Embrace’
Small group study and discussion of materials adapted from the conference
A group art activity that everyone contributed to
Plenary sharing of reflections and art
A speech from Race Unity Speech Awards national champion Sheryl Chand, followed by a Q&A session
Live music and dinner

We think that a total of nearly 100 people attended the festival, including a significant number of friends of the Faith from Naenae. Initial feedback on the festival has been positive, including from a key contact who is a person of capacity in the local community and who works for Wesley Community Action, an NGO that owns the venue that was used for the festival.

An area of learning is how whānau festivals can provide an effective social space for expanding the circle of friends who are willing to contribute to the community-building process. We found that people were highly receptive to the whānau festival as a welcoming social space within the neighbourhood where they could have meaningful conversations about the community. A significant proportion of those we visited responded positively to the invitation to the festival, and a total of 74 friends of the Faith indicated they would attend. We had a lot of no-shows and late apologies, but still ended up with a total of over 30 friends of the Faith at the festival. The festival was focused on the theme of building vibrant communities. There were programmes for each age group, and a collective art activity where participants illustrated some of their ideas about building vibrant communities on a strip of paper, and all of the strips of paper were woven together into a whāriki.