One Question I Brought Home from NEB

Last week, I returned home from the New European Bauhaus (NEB) Festival in Brussels. Throughout the week, discussions often returned to the same core themes: participation, trust, resilience, and the ability of communities to act together.

But there was one specific conversation that stayed with me long after the festival ended.

From a Question to an Idea

During a discussion with Danish urban strategist Helle Søholt, we were exploring how community support, participation and shared action can strengthen communities and build resilience. At one point, she asked a simple yet thought-provoking question:

“Do you have a way to measure that?”

My answer at the time was honest:

“No, not yet.”

But I also shared a thought that immediately came to mind. While trust and resilience are difficult to measure directly, perhaps the actions created by a community can provide clues about its underlying strength.

The question stayed with me throughout my journey home. What surprised me most was not the question itself, but the feeling that I had somehow been expecting it. For more than twenty-five years, I have worked with schools, communities and networks around the world. Looking back, I realised that much of my life’s work has revolved around this very question:

How do we recognise when a community is becoming stronger?

Beautiful, Sustainable, Together

The New European Bauhaus is built around three core values: Beautiful, Sustainable and Together.

As I travelled home, I found myself reflecting on how these values become reality in people’s everyday lives. Beauty inspires us. Sustainability helps us understand the world around us. Together creates the conditions for action. And it is through action that communities become stronger.

Communities do not become stronger simply by sharing values. They become stronger when values are transformed into action.

What 30 Million Trees Taught Me

I have seen this happen repeatedly.

Through the ENO Programme, schools in more than 150 countries planted over 30 million trees. The trees were the visible outcome, but the deeper impact was something less tangible. People experienced their own ability to create positive change together.

When actions were shared, recognised and valued by the community, people saw that their contributions mattered. Community support reinforced individual action, and individual action strengthened the community. One action encouraged another, participation grew, confidence grew, and communities became more capable of acting together. Repeated over time, this created a reinforcing cycle in which both individuals and communities grew stronger together.

Reflecting on this experience, I began to wonder whether part of the answer to Helle’s question might indeed be found in action.

Perhaps we have become very good at measuring outcomes, while paying less attention to catalytic effects. We can count trees planted, participants engaged and events organised. But do we pay enough attention to what those actions make possible afterwards?

Perhaps part of community resilience lies not only in what a community achieves, but in its ability to generate new meaningful action over time.

We often measure attitudes, perceptions and opinions. These indicators are valuable. But perhaps we should also pay attention to what communities actually create together.

Not every meaningful action is visible. Yet when communities learn to recognise, name and share their actions, those actions gain meaning, inspire others and strengthen the cycle of participation.

The Power of Recognition

Visibility alone is not enough. What matters is that actions are recognised and valued by the community.

This is why visible action matters—not because visibility creates value, but because it helps communities recognise the value that already exists.

When people see that change is possible, trust grows. Trust strengthens the capacity to act together. Communities that repeatedly experience their ability to create positive change become more resilient. In that sense, resilience may not be something that appears suddenly in difficult times. It may be something that is built gradually through repeated experiences of collective action and shared success.

How Many Actions Lead to New Actions?

As I travelled home from Brussels, I found myself asking a slightly different question.

Perhaps the most important question is not how many actions a community creates, but how many of those actions lead to new actions.

A single action can be an event. An action that inspires further action may reveal something much deeper: trust, participation and resilience at work.

I still do not have a complete mathematical answer to Helle’s question. But after twenty-five years of observing communities around the world, I increasingly believe that trust and resilience reveal themselves through a community’s ability to create and sustain meaningful collective action over time.

Communities grow stronger when people experience that together they can make a difference. Perhaps the true strength of a community is not defined by what it has. Perhaps it is defined by what it is able to create together.

As I travelled home from Brussels, one thought stayed with me:

The true value of an action may not lie only in the action itself, but in its ability to make the next action more likely.

That is one of the thoughts I brought home from NEB.