Lonehill: Be Patient, Be Persistent, Be PASSIONATE..!

Oh shame, I feel for the poor unknown scribe in the LRA Newsletter - Wednesday, 11 June 2008 - who laments the response of 'less than 300 contributors' to the environment fund project.

Let see, 300 at R60 p.m. is R18 000 p.m. Less the R10 000 p.m., which we were told is paid to vendors to cover the monthly voucher award... leaving a nett R8000 p.m.

At least it's a small profit that can be ploughed back into our community... but clearly not what the unknown LRA scribe is looking for.

One can understand the frustration of those who have been driving the project for over a year to 18 months now, and after apparently 'campaigning for the past week', resulting in the comment: 'The extremely poor feedback we’ve received is both heartbreaking and concerning.'

Especially if, as I suspect, the scribe has pinned his/her hopes on this one specific strategy to increase revenues and it is not going the way, and at the pace, that he/she wants it to. A little irritation is bound to set in.

Particulary too, within a community, where in my experience, logic is almost always over-shadowed by personalities, politics, and even just the plain 'ol pathetic.

Here's my word of encouragement, if your OFFER to the community is truly irrisistible and makes sense then... be patient, be persistent, and most of all, be PASSIONATE..!

Compelling offers, if really that good, will be taken up.

The flip side, of course, is that perhaps the offer is just never going to be that exciting to the targeted consumers... and that would clearly not be the fault of the targeted consumers.

In that instance, I'm not one who believes that 'guilt marketing', or sharing one's frustration, has much impact in a mature community.

Having coined the phrase - 'apathetic communities arise from pathetic leadership' - I am always sensitive to the poor universal standard employed by typical impoverished community leadership around the world, which is to conveniently blame their community as 'apathetic' when leaders don't get what they want.

The 'heartbreaking and concerning' statement in the LRA newsletter comes dangerously close to this old finger-pointing chestnut.

There may well come a time when leadership has to make the call to defocus the cause of their frustration and adopt an alternative strategy or two.

Most everybody has heard the definition of insanity described as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

What we need is a willingness to CHANGE... to explore NEW possibilities.

And that's where my own patience, persistence and passion for our Lonehill community keeps me hanging in on this forum to continually challenge our LRA leadership to broaden OUR strategies... broaden OUR participants... broaden OUR exploration into new ideas from willing residents who WANT to contribute.

In a previous post - Lonehill: We ALL See Things Differently - I talked of just this one individual having '..a range of MASSIVE ACTION projects ranging from raising an extra R100 000 p.m. to R500 000 p.m. for the LRA coffers, to MASS PARTICIPATION projects to bring the community together, to INTERNATIONAL recognition projects to have the eyes of the world on us.'

And, I'm sure that I am just one individual amongst many other creatives living within our +-6000 households that must have some incredible ideas that could be explored and implemented as alternative strategies to achieve the results we all want in our community.

And, let's see, R100 000 p.m. at nett profit would be equivalent to another 1666 contributors to the environment fund... and R500 000 p.m. would be the equivalent of 8333 such contributors.

So why wouldn't any community leadership want to seriously consider all the available options? Go figure!

As I've said before, in a community, logic is almost always over-shadowed by personalities, politics, and even just the plain 'ol pathetic... and I've said, it takes GREAT LEADERSHIP to make a community truly great..!

This forum has repeatedly recommended what is required to happen in Lonehill.... just 3 simple things:

1. ..to RAISE Standards... continually... especially those of service delivery, openness and transparency.
2. ..to unleash the Abundant Potential that lies within our community... open up to include everybody who wants to participate.
3. ..to facilitate a regular major indaba of all key stakeholders, decision-makers and interested contributors in this community.

None of the above have happened to any serious degree yet!

Why not?

Regards
Trevor Nel - Lonehill Resident
011 - 705-2790