The Connective Collective

The next Connective Collective will meet in late August at Monarch Integrative Care.

The Connective Collective launched on Saturday, May 31st from 10:00-11:30am at Constellation Studios. Larry Sternberg (click here for his bio) facilitated a guided reflection – Life’s Board of Directors.

Engage in the Connective Collective in ways are aligned with your strengths:

  • Attend Connective Collective social gatherings.
  • Help plan the occasional guided Connective Collective event.
  • Serve on an advisory council to the Lincoln Youth Mentoring Youth Expansion Project

What is the Connective Collective? A quarterly gathering for anyone with a desire to help Lincoln flourish. What communities do you enjoy being a part of in your free time outside of work and home? Do you host or help organize a social gathering for people who are engaged in a leisure pursuit (e.g. bowling, sewing circle, pickleball group, etc.) that adds to the vitality of Lincoln? Are you a researcher, scholar, inventor, or entrepreneur who organizes socials with your peers that are open to friends of science, the humanities, technology, and entrepreneurship? Do you volunteer, work, or participate in a compassionate endeavor that leads with strengths (e.g. being in a recovery group, therapist, social worker, domestic violence shelter, food pantry, etc.)? The Connective Collective is for you!  

We socialize and share about our communities and best practices. We will occasionally have a facilitated experience. We understand how gathering people around a shared interest strengthens the mental wellbeing and social health of the people in our ecosystems. We are people who appreciate and are curious about wellbeing science (strengths, self-determination theory, hope science, awe, flow, play, aesthetic experience, etc.) and how it can elevate our connectedness and community building. 

The primary modes of community engagement that we focus on are rooted in compassion, playfulness, and generativity.

Compassionate engagement (e.g. is about the prevention and alleviation of suffering.

Playful engagement (e.g. hosting social gatherings where people pursue leisure activities together like music, painting, quilting, recreational sports, book clubs, discussion groups, etc.) is about pursuing, doing, and/or creating interesting things or experiences.

Generative engagement (e.g. mentoring and community leadership programs) is about helping others to discover and develop their strengths and hope building skills (goals thinking and pathways thinking) and guiding them in channeling those capabilities into the creation of positive changes that benefit the community today and ripple forward for the betterment of future generations.

Of historical note, NHRI Leadership Mentoring, which was led by Bill Hall and Don Clifton beginning in 1949, pairs UNL students with students from LPS. Several roots of wellbeing science (generativity research and strengths psychology) emerged from this mentoring program.

S.T.A.P.L.E. ( Science, Technology, Arts, Place (neighborhood associations, planners), Leisure pursuits (quilting, recreational sports leagues, gardening groups, etc.), Entrepreneurship) is way of conceptualizing some of the social ecosystems that aggregate to form the cultural life of our community and the resources that support it. Science, technology, and entrepreneurship are fields that co-create resources that can expand our community building toolkit and the quality of life of our community.

Weekly and monthly social events (free and open to the public where informal socializing is encouraged before, during, and/or after the event):

General:

S.T.A.P.L.E’s:
Science: TBA
Technology: TBA

Arts:

Place:

Leisure (recreational activities): TBA

Entrepreneurship:

Annual Community Events:

  • The International Day of Happiness
  • Juneteenth
  • Harvest Moon Festival
  • Latino Festival

The Lincoln Youth Mentoring Youth Expansion Project:

A signifigant finding from prosocial behavior research is that the act of mentoring increases the mentors’ generativity and sense of social responsibility. In other words, the act of mentoring (formally or informally) was the spark that ignited the community building fire within many of us. Some community builders are born with that impulse and may never mentor, some will mentor and love it and be good at it and never engage in community building. For many, the act of mentoring is the catalyst for the emergence of the community builder within. 

Pershing Pals is a mentoring program that pairs a high school junior or senior from Northeast High School with a fourth grade student at Pershing Elementary. They all meet in the cafeteria during 7th period once a month. 

The schools are about half a mile apart. The distance is similar to that between Lincoln High and Elliot Elementary and between Lincoln Southeast and Calvert Elementary. We will suss out the current level of interest in mentoring at these other schools and offer community support for the expansion of mentoring between high school students and elementary students. We can predict that we will see more community builders emerging as the quantity of mentoring goes up. To that end, the Connective Collective will serve as an on-call pool of community builders of those willing to mentor emerging community builders.  

Rationale and Roots of the Connective Collective:

The Knight Foundation commissioned the Soul of the Community study to discover why people who love where they live love where they live. Out of ten variables, the top three across the 26 cities that were studied were:

  • Belongingness: the degree to which everyone in the community feels welcome here.
  • Aesthetics: the natural and created beauty in a community.
  • Social offerings: the feeling that there are interesting things to do out in the community. 

History of community conversations organized by Positivity Matters aligned with Soul of the Community findings:

Belongingness:

International Day of Friendship
July 30, 2017
www.facebook.com/events/1866850833592558

Happiness LNK (Love, Nobleness, Kindness)
December 4, 2016
www.facebook.com/events/338267529884694

Social Offerings:

For the Feeding the Soul of the Community conversation series, I brought together people who were organizing community events that were free and open to the public to share about their projects with each other and the community.

Feeding the Soul of the Community II
October 12, 2013
www.facebook.com/events/533503973365410

Feeding the Soul of the Community
January 26, 2013
www.facebook.com/events/285356094917846/

Aesthetics:

Placemaking for Wellbeing
November 6, 2016
www.facebook.com/events/191123291313809

The Lincoln Journal Star published an article about our creative placemaking conversation and it was published in a dozen or so communities across the nation through the AP. 

Interplay: Wellbeing and the Arts
September 18, 2016
www.facebook.com/events/1757802094435571

We eventually started hosting an annual celebration on March 20th, the International Day of Happiness!Nick Hernandez
Mobile: 531-739-8372
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