Last month, together with the Access Strategies Fund, we brought together more than 600 people as part of our New Networks, New Power Celebration, which highlighted 5 years of work to weave together diverse leaders representing almost every ethnic, racial, and immigrant community in the Commonwealth.
We called it New Networks, New Power for a reason: although Jarrett Barrios and I started the seminar as a skills training program -- and it is that -- to our surprise, what participants most value is the relationships that they gain across boundaries of race, ethnicity, municipal lines, and political hierarchies.
The dictionary offers one definition of network: "a group or system of interconnected people or things : a group of people who exchange information, contacts, and experience for professional or social purposes : a support network."
We started a training program, but we got a network.
Over the last decade, great strides have been made in our understanding of how networks work not just in our social networks, but in science, on the Internet, in diseases and medicine, and the economy. Malcolm Gladwell, of course, wrote an accessible best seller, The Tipping Point, which talked about the role of networks and the key role of mavens, connectors, and hubs in our social world. I recommend that book highly.
Another less well-known but deeper book, however, helped shape my understanding of networks and the role of Commonwealth Seminar in weaving together relationships among diverse leaders in Massachusetts -- Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means to Business, Science, and Everyday Life by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.
"This book has a simple aim: to get you to think networks...Networks are present everywhere. All we need is an eye for them. As you move from link to link within this book, you will learn to see society as a complex social network and to grasp the smallness of this great world in which we live."Barabasi outlines the history and key recent developments in network theory and then uses examples from human relations, molecular cell structure, the Internet, public health and medicine, and the economy to underline the fundamental role that networks play in our life.
There is a special role for "Hubs," that connect separate clusters together and build relationships where relationships would not normally occur.
One of our goals at the Commonwealth Seminar is to be a hub for the diverse leaders of Massachusetts -- a place where connections can made, relationships can be built and strengthened, and the energy contained in each of our separate clusters can be unleased to the world.
Our network at MassCS is created when diverse leaders -- who come to us with relationships to organizations like MassVOTE, the Brazilian Immigrant Center, the MIRA Coalition, the Asian Community Development Corporation, etc -- build personal relationships and weave together their relationships. Our new networks create a new power for our communities.
Posts
