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At the time of this event, we called it the “Innovation Community Builders Unconference 2024” but realized that the format and time allocated was more fitting for a Retreat.

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Overview

On October 13, 2024 we held the first instance of the Community Leaders’ Retreat. Attended by 20 community leaders from Bohol, Cebu, Pampanga, and Davao, the activity aimed to enable these grassroots leaders to ideate, connect, and collaborate on how they could nurture their local communities.

The anchor for this years topic proposals was “Roadblocks or challenges you’ve faced as a grassroots community leader“. The anchor phrase was kept ambiguous enough to allow for a variety of ideas to emerge through the Open Space framework.

To conclude the event, participants were encouraged to share notes and updates with each other post-event through a Facebook group chat where they could continue to discuss action plans they’ve formulated for their own communities.

Top-of-mind challenges

Below are the key challenges identified by the participants. The order of priority was determined through voting where each participant had 3 votes that they could allocate however they want to influence the priority of topics to be discussed.

  1. How do you measure if a community is “successful” or “effective”
  2. Organizing sustainable events where organizers don’t have to shell out their own cash
  3. Volunteer Commitment
  4. Community Succession
  5. For professional tech communities, do you see value in penetrating younger age groups with your advocacy, or is building with professionals with your stack better for you?
  6. Dealing with burnout due to many responsibilities in the community
  7. How do you effectively market community events in social media + stay consistent in posting?
  8. How to deal with politicians when it comes to tech community building?
  9. How do you combat imposter syndrome?
  10. No. of people required to be able to start a community
  11. Event number of participants: quality or quantity?
  12. How to build a movement
  13. What the f*ck is an Activity Design?