Different Communities, Different Ways Forward

A Recent Example: When Ownership Begins to Take Root

At CETis 109 in Mexico, the Peace Circle did not remain a concept introduced from somewhere else. Teachers and students began giving it forms that made sense in their own school.

Students and educators at CETis 109 in Mexico gather around their Peace Tree, giving the shared purpose a locally shaped form through Heart, Head and Hands.

An Earth Cup, a peace anthem, school radio, competitions, a Peace Tree and a Wall of Peace emerged around the shared purpose. Students could participate voluntarily through different interests and abilities. Some found their place through music, some through communication, some through environmental action and some through creating something visible for the whole school.

The most important sign was not the number of activities. It was the gradual change in authorship.

The students and teachers did not simply copy the original idea. They interpreted it. They connected it with their own culture, needs and possibilities. The idea changed form as it entered the life of the school.

That change was not a weakening of the original purpose. It was evidence that ownership was beginning to spread.

Shared Ownership does not mean that everyone must contribute in the same way or with the same intensity. It means that more people can recognise the purpose, influence what happens next and carry responsibility for the work. The original invitation is still present, but the initiative no longer depends entirely on the person or organisation that first introduced it.

CETis 109 does not provide a model that every school should reproduce. Its deeper lesson is precisely the opposite: an idea becomes locally meaningful when people are able to make it their own.

From the Mirror to Different Next Steps

The Community Mirror described in the previous essay is not a scoreboard. It does not judge a community as good or bad, successful or unsuccessful. It helps people see how their values, understanding, actions and ownership are connected—and where that connection may have become fragile.

Once something has been seen, another question appears:

What does this particular community need in order to act together from its own starting point?

There is a temptation to answer with a method, checklist or programme. Yet bringing people together does not mean making communities do the same thing. Communities have different histories, relationships, resources and ways of making decisions. They also begin from different points in the reinforcing cycle.

A school may have a clearly expressed value base but need to connect it more closely with everyday relationships, decisions and student agency. A neighbourhood may already contain many quiet acts of care that need to be recognised and connected rather than replaced by a new campaign.

In an organisation or company, the missing connection may be between strategic values and people’s daily work: I matter. I am part of something larger. In a volunteer or international network, strong commitment may already exist while knowledge, relationships and responsibility remain concentrated around its founders.

These are not prescriptions or fixed categories. The underlying movement may be similar: shared values are interpreted, expressed through action, made visible and gradually connected with wider participation and ownership. But its practical form must be allowed to vary.

The question is not how to implement a model correctly. It is what is already alive in this community—and what connection needs strengthening next.

The contrast between CETis 109 and ENO helps show why this matters: one is a recent example of ownership beginning to grow, while the other is a longer lesson drawn from more than two decades of work.

A Longer Lesson: When Survival Is Not Ownership

My own experience with ENO taught me the same lesson from another direction.

ENO began in the municipality of Eno in Finland in 2000 as an online environmental school. In 2003, I moved the work to Joensuu, where it continued to develop and eventually grew into a wide international network. Schools in different countries connected environmental learning with local realities, shared their work across borders and planted trees together.

Students and educators at 15 schools across Finland planted trees for peace during the first ENO Tree Planting Day for Peace in 2004—an early example of one shared purpose taking different local forms.

Yet in the city where the programme was being coordinated, ownership within the local education system remained much more difficult to build.

For more than a decade, I was unable to root ENO in the schools and structures of Joensuu as deeply as I had hoped. There were moments when wider institutional cooperation appeared possible, but they did not become durable structures.

In 2013, the city entered into a cooperation agreement with the association running ENO. This support was important and real. It brought recognition and continuity. But the association continued to carry the work. ENO was present in the city without becoming deeply embedded in the ordinary structures and shared responsibility of the local education system.

Support was not the same as ownership.

Looking back, I believe ENO was ahead of its time. In 2004, when we began planting trees with schools around the world, I remember that the idea was sometimes met with amusement. Years later, tree planting became a widely recognised form of climate action. The work had not suddenly become more meaningful. The surrounding culture had gradually learned to see its meaning.

Sometimes an idea arrives before the surrounding system has developed the language, structures or readiness to carry it.

The value was already there. The system’s capacity to recognise it came later.

But being ahead of one’s time is not the whole explanation. In retrospect, I have also come to understand something about the relationship between an initiative and the person who carries it.

The structures did not carry the work, so I carried it. That was what allowed ENO to survive and grow. Yet because I carried so much of it, part of its fragility remained hidden.

When shared structures did not develop, we had to carry more. The more the initiative depended on me and the association, the easier it was for the surrounding system to continue seeing it as our project rather than something it could make its own. It was a systemic loop in which timing, relationships, structures and personal responsibility reinforced one another.

This was not simply a personal failure to let go. Nor can it be reduced to the actions or motives of individual decision-makers.

Could I have created more room for others earlier? Possibly. I can now ask that question more clearly than I could then. But Shared Ownership cannot be created by the initiator alone.

The initiator must allow others to interpret, decide and lead. At the same time, the surrounding system must give them the legitimacy, time, information and structures through which responsibility can be carried. Making room does not mean abandoning the purpose. It means allowing other people to form a relationship with it strong enough that responsibility becomes meaningful to them.

ENO found ways to survive outside the structures that had not yet learned to carry it fully. That survival made international growth possible. But alternative structures do not automatically transform the original system around them.

The city had begun to support ENO. The education system had not yet learned to carry it.

Survival is not the same as institutional ownership.

Two Stories, One Lesson

CETis 109 and ENO reveal the same truth from different directions.

At CETis 109, ownership began to grow because people could interpret the shared purpose and shape the work together. The idea changed as it entered the life of the school, and that adaptation allowed more people to become its authors.

ENO survived and expanded internationally, yet its local institutional ownership remained fragile because the surrounding system did not learn to carry it in the same way.

Neither story is simply a success or a failure.

Both show that lasting change becomes possible when meaning, agency and responsibility can move beyond the initiator and become shared. They also show that this movement depends on timing and on the readiness of the surrounding system. Sometimes people are able to make an idea their own quickly. Sometimes the value is present long before the structures learn to recognise it.

There is no single way forward.

But every community can ask:

What is already alive here?

What is still carried by too few?

What have our previous attempts taught us?

And what is one next step that more people can understand, shape and carry together?

The answer will be different in every community. That is not a weakness in the work. It is the condition through which the work can truly become shared.

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Turning Values into Visible Actions – Essay Series

This essay is part of a six-part series exploring how strong communities emerge, how Shared Values become Shared Understanding and Visible Actions, and how connected actions develop Shared Ownership and strengthen communities over time.

Part 1: Turning Values into Visible Actions  (link)  Part 2: Shared Values – The Foundation of Strong Communities (link)

Part 3: The Power of Visible Actions (link)

Part 4: Shared Ownership – When “Mine” Becomes “Ours” (link) Part 5: The Community Mirror (link)

Part 6: Different Communities, Different Ways Forward