What is a Community Governance

http://www.participatorybudgeting.org

Participatory Budgeting will be a project within a project. Some of the Youngish Seniors will team up with them to create projects that the local government will want to fund. "local people directly decide how to spend part of a public budget."

This was introduced to me by Marti Brown http://northfranklindistrict.com/

“The prime requisites for them that take counsel together are purity of motive, radiance of spirit, detachment from all else save God, attraction to His Divine Fragrances, humility and lowliness amongst His loved ones, patience and long-suffering in difficulties and servitude to His exalted Threshold.” Referring to their consultations, He states: “The first condition is absolute love and harmony amongst the members of the assembly.” “They must be wholly free from estrangement and must manifest in themselves the Unity of God”, He continues, “for they are the waves of one sea, the drops of one river, the stars of one heaven, the rays of one sun, the trees of one orchard, the flowers of one garden.” He counsels that they must express their views “with the utmost devotion, courtesy, dignity, care and moderation” and warns that their task is to “search out the truth” and not to “insist upon their own opinion”, as “persistence in one’s views will lead ultimately to discord and wrangling and the truth will remain hidden.” He further forbids any one to belittle the thought of another and states that ill-feeling should not be allowed to arise. “In short”, He avers, “whatsoever thing is arranged in harmony and with love and purity of motive, its result is light, and should the least trace of estrangement prevail the result shall be darkness upon darkness.”

"...the organizing of assemblies of consultation,..."

"First, the elected members must be righteous, God-fearing, high-minded, incorruptible."

"Second, they must be fully cognizant...of the laws of God, informed as to the highest principles of law..."

"Let in not be imagined that members of this type would be impossible to find."

This is an excerpt from "Prosperity of Humankind" Author: Bahá’í International Community
http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/bic/PRH/

What Bahá’u’lláh is calling for is a consultative process in which the individual participants strive to transcend their respective points of view, in order to function as members of a body with its own interests and goals. In such an atmosphere, characterized by both candor and courtesy, ideas belong not to the individual to whom they occur during the discussion but to the group as a whole, to take up, discard, or revise as seems to best serve the goal pursued. Consultation succeeds to the extent that all participants support the decisions arrived at, regardless of the individual opinions with which they entered the discussion. Under such circumstances an earlier decision can be readily reconsidered if experience exposes any shortcomings.
Viewed in such a light, consultation is the operating expression of justice in human affairs. So vital is it to the success of collective endeavor that it must constitute a basic feature of a viable strategy of social and economic development. Indeed, the participation of the people on whose commitment and efforts the success of such a strategy depends becomes effective only as consultation is made the organizing principle of every project. “No man can attain his true station”, is Bahá’u’lláh’s counsel, “except through his justice. No power can exist except through unity. No welfare and no well-being can be attained except through consultation.”

The vitality which the organic institutions of this great, this ever-expanding Order so strongly exhibit; . . . the high courage, the. . . resolution of its administrators. . . the. . . unquenchable enthusiasm. . . the heights of selfsacrifice. . . the breadth of vision, the confident hope, the creative joy, the inward peace, the uncompromising integrity, the exemplary discipline, the unyielding unity and solidarity. . . the degree to which its moving Spirit has shown itself capable of assimilating the diversified elements within its pale, of cleansing them of all forms of prejudice and of fusing them with its own structure—these are evidences of a power which a disillusioned and sadly shaken society can ill afford to ignore.

Compare these splendid manifestations of the spirit animating this vibrant body of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh with the cries and agony, the follies and vanities, the bitterness and prejudices, the wickedness and divisions of an ailing and chaotic world. Witness the fear that torments its leaders and paralyzes the action of its blind and bewildered statesmen. How fierce the hatreds, how false the ambitions, how petty the pursuits, how deep-rooted the suspicions of its peoples! How disquieting the lawlessness, the corruption, the unbelief that are eating into the vitals of a tottering civilization!34

That this process [development of the global Bahá’í Community] will continue to gain in scope and influence and the Administrative Order demonstrate in time “its capacity to be regarded not only as the nucleus but the very pattern of the New World Order” is clear from his writings. “In a world the structure of whose political and social institutions is impaired, whose vision is befogged, whose conscience is bewildered, whose religious systems have become anaemic and lost their virtue,” he asserted so emphatically, “this healing Agency, this leavening Power, this cementing Force, intensely alive and allpervasive,” is “taking shape,” is “crystallizing into institutions,” and is “mobilizing its forces.

Burgeoning Communities

Welcome to Burgeoning Communities

What is a Community Governance