How To Build Community

In 1998 our society’s longing to re-establish a lost sense of community meshed with SCW’s need to have signature products other than the Peace Calendar and Women Artists Datebook. “How To Build Community” (HTBC) spoke simply and clearly to a broad spectrum of people and its almost immediate success launched SCW on the path to financial viability. Ten years later its popularity in terms of sales and permissions to reprint continues unabated. Three stories illustrate the impact and importance of How To Build Community. About two weeks after the 9/11/01 attacks we received a call from a NYC firefighter who was familiar with HTBC. He asked if SCW could make some available to him for distribution and we donated 10,000 postcards and posters which were distributed from firehouses across Manhattan.

A woman wrote several years ago describing how she and her partner had made a point to fulfill each of the actions listed on HTBC, and the remarkable effects on their lives and their understanding of community. It took them about two years!
Then there’s the Vancouver story.

Vancouver & How To Build Community
One City’s Story

Our How To Build Community poster is a resource for tens of thousands of people looking for ways to feel connected to their neighbors. A lack of community was evident to Eileen Mosca at a Vancouver city hall meeting. Well, Eileen decided to do something about it. She contacted SCW with her idea, a guerrilla postering campaign in Vancouver! She began the process of organizing 150 volunteers to take 20 posters and a corner of the city each. Before long she had well over her initial goal of people, with at least 4,000 posters to paste. The postering project itself became a community-building activity! Elementary students, senior groups, doctors, longshoremen, government workers, people from all walks of life volunteered to help. Did their efforts have a positive effect? To quote the mastermind of the project, Eileen Mosca: “Because such things can’t be quantified I guess we will never really know. But you can be sure the posters touched people, made them think and perhaps made them decide to look up when they are walking...sing together...learn from new and uncomfortable angles...talk to the mail carrier and maybe even dance in the streets.

Truly, How To Build Community has been a tool for change.
Vancouver & How To Build Community