Creating new Public Spaces for Learning

SUB-COMMUNITY APPROACH

A learning community can be driven by focusing on a special neighborhood, a specific sector or a special group of learners – with the perspective of widening the activities to the entire community at a later stage, or to function as a satellite for the larger community.

The sub-community approach is a genuine bottom-up approach, offering strong empowerment and involvement perspectives.
In many cases the first learning community steps are taken, not at community or city level, but at very local level: a neighborhood initiative, a migrant initiative, a sport initiative, or a small group of stakeholders carrying out highly focuses activities to meet the needs of a group of citizens (handicapped or young drop-outs for example).
This sub-community is by definition highly focused on its mission, but along the way new perspectives emerge: using the activity or the sub-community itself to address the community at large, or to create a new network around the initiative.
In special cases suburbs to big cities or satellite communities act as such sub-communities, as it is often not possible to address a metropolis at large.
In these cases both top-down and bottom-up approaches are needed to create learning communities or a learning city.
The challenge to such sub-communities is, of course, the “sub”: how do we get from “sub” to community?

The most important challenges to the “sub” approach might be:

• To widen the scope of the initial mission and take the mission to a community level
• To adjust the mentality from “super-local” to “community”
• To maintain local values when going to community level
• To link to similar sub-communities in the community, if possible
• To establish the needed funding

 However, the sub-approach contains many valuable assets to learning communities:

• A high level of direct involvement and inclusion
• A high degree of free initiative
• Transparency in all structures and initiatives
• Highly visible impact and change, linked directly to needs and interests
• Possibly a good balance of volunteering and professionalism

SPECIAL RECOMMENDATIONS
Maintaining strong learning community values when addressing the community at large