What We Learned from Mapping Our Own Community
Written by Group 1 Staff: Elizabeth Ash, Kera Donaldson, Griselda Macias
"Community" comes from two Latin words: com, meaning together, and munus, meaning gift or duty. That root came up more than once this month, as New Futures kicked off All-Staff Working Days, a recurring, values-centered gathering replacing our annual retreat and standard all staff meeting. Each day is a pause from the regular day-to-day: time to reflect, learn together, and reconnect to our mission, centered on one core value. For our first working day, the value we explored was Community!
We didn't want a day that talked about community. We wanted one that made staff feel it, and see it. Here's what we learned trying to do that, for our own team, and for any nonprofit thinking about how to build culture with intention rather than assumption.
Start with a shared word, expect different answers. We opened with a simple prompt: think of a time you truly belonged somewhere, then choose the word that captures why: seen, supported, included, or trusted. The variety of answers makes it clear that community means something different for every person; no single definition suffices.
You can't strengthen what you can't see. The heart of our day was a Relationship Map activity, led by Mukta Ghorpadey, co-founder of the DC Post-Secondary Success Collaborative, a former Urban Alliance leader, and an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in Columbia Heights. Staff drew their own web of relationships: colleagues at the center, then Scholars, alumni, and donors, then the wider DMV ecosystem beyond our walls. In small groups, they compared maps: where one person's "strong" connection was another's "thin" one, and where relationships were missing entirely. Most staff had never actually seen their own network on paper before, let alone compared it to a colleague's. If you want people to invest in relationships, first give them a way to see the ones they already have.
One map is a snapshot. All of them together is the truth. Each map staff drew was personal, centered on them, shaped by their role. But laid side by side, those individual webs stopped looking like separate drawings. If you want to actually see your organization's community, you have to look at everyone's map at once. You'll see it's more than a web. It's a constellation, points of connection that only reveal their shape together.
Treat community as infrastructure. Our own values statement puts it plainly: we cannot do this work alone, and our community of families, partners, institutions, and supporters is necessary to make our work possible. That means building actual time, in actual working hours, for staff to name and strengthen the relationships the work depends on, not leaving it to a values statement posted online.
We closed the day in a circle, naming out loud our individual takeaways about our shared community. One idea kept surfacing: the constellation of relationships mapped that day weren't yet complete. They were started.
If your organization is thinking about how to build culture with intention, our advice is simple: don't just name your values. Give people a way to draw them.
