The community is an integral part of an individual’s daily life. Maintaining and improving it is part of every member’s life. However, during dire times like the pandemic, it can be challenging to create a program that can aid everyone in their quest to grow and sustain themselves in the future. But by determining what is the common good in a community streamlines this process, creating a goal or a mission-vision as what some companies would call it, that each individual can strive to do to better themselves and the community.
The Common Good
The common good is integrated into various philosophies in the world. It’s also part of the principles of catholic social teaching. Currently, you might question yourself what these principles of Catholic social teaching are? We don’t need to necessarily go deeply into it because that’s an entire article on itself. However, one of the things we need to look into is the “Principle of the Common Good.”
The reality is that we are all at some point following the principle of the common good. It’s the main reason why the government is created in the first place, and as well all know, the government’s main purpose is to make it easier for us to achieve our goals as individuals. We then aid others in return to cultivate the common good within the community. However, various elements make the common good ever more confusing.
The Separation of Humanity
We all remember the story of the Tower of Babel. A tower made by man’s pride to reach the heavens to try and surpass God. This resulted in our separation as human beings through language, race, and purpose.
However, despite this, we continue to create communities and civilizations where we learn to understand one another and create meaningful cultures that propagate our lives as individuals in the community. What does this mean? It means that the common good is integrated into our soul as a species and that times of crises like the pandemic make us feel even more connected.
Times of Crises Make Us Ever More Connected
Today’s technologies have made us connect in ways that we might have never achieved years ago. This connection is one of the prime reasons we have avoided the massive death tolls that plagues had before in the world. Fatalities today have only reached a fraction of the Spanish Flu and Black Death. This shows how human survival has become much easier when everyone is connected. Survival is the common good that we all strive for as individuals and as a community. So what can the common do exactly do for the community?
What Can the Common Good Do for the Community?
The common good has many applications in the management and the improvement of the community. One of the first things you should do is establish your community’s common good, aside from the most basic, which is survival. Invite community members for a meeting and give them a module to make them realize their connections and what they can do for them as individuals.
Connection with Others Module
On a piece of paper, print out eight boxes with lines connecting. On each box, task a community member to write persons they deem to be the closest. After which, ask them to write things they can do to make their lives much easier this pandemic. There is no right answer, and answers as simple as social distancing applies. You can then tally the most common thing that your community members can do to make another person’s life so much easier. You can then integrate this common good into seminars and programs that help promote its existence.
Integration of the Common Good in Community Seminars and Programs
Ultimately, the common good in your community might not be the same for other communities. This is because we have different needs at a community level. Some might call for religiosity as a serious need, while others might consider that the most basic form of the common good, survival, is a serious need. The differences of needs in a community can contribute to their view of the common good. This makes the community seminars and programs you make flexible in nature.
You can hold training and seminars that tackle your community’s common good. Awareness is the first step in improving your community through this principle. Once everyone is aware of the common good in your community, they will slowly work into it during the pandemic.
Remember that the common good might shift after a particular crisis has been averted. So once again, it’s time to implement the module we have given out earlier to identify the common good in your community.
