Many years ago, just around the time the 2011 India Against Corruption movement was taking shape, I had the privilege of visiting Ralegan Siddhi. Anna Hazare wasn’t there but it didn’t matter so much. The people I met, from the sarpanch to the villagers, exuded a sense of empowerment, meaning and well-being. Their affection and deep respect for Anna was unmistakeable, and so was their faith and pride in themselves.
That day often returns to my mind when I meet people who seek to lead communities through designations, shows of competence, inducements of upliftment, promises that they know the one right way. Gradually, in conversations, we discover that the person who moves a community is someone with no title, who simply cares enough to convene others and stays long enough to be trusted.
The recurring tension that pulls at would-be leaders is the strong desire to fix: to bring a solution, a programme, a resource. But communities are quick to sense when something is being done to them rather than with them. Often communities will succumb – but then the result is dependence or unpublished resistance. The leaders who last are those who accept that they do not own the problem. They recognise its sharedness, not only among those who speak up, but those whose voices have often not been heard.
It has always felt to me that, like in the other leadership arenas that we have talked about here, true community leaders can wait, rather like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. They bring together people who would not otherwise sit in one room. They let the community name its own concerns in its own language. They value local knowledge as seriously as expert knowledge. They don’t just share credit freely; they actually believe that their effectiveness owes everything to the community. It then works so that the community's capacity grows while the leader's necessity shrinks – like I saw in Ralegan Siddhi. They also display a rare kind of moral courage: the willingness to speak for those who are not in the room.
To practice community leadership is, above all, to dwell in humility and presence. It means showing up repeatedly, even when, perhaps especially when, there is nothing to announce. It means listening to those who speak least and learning the past of a place before proposing its future. It means feeling the steadiness to stay with disagreement long enough for something shared to emerge. And it means building the capacity to find the meeting place of one’s own sense of purpose and the service of the community.
That commitment to dialogue is not merely an effective way for conflicts to turn into cooperation, for disagreements to be held patiently long enough to not cause ruptures of relationship. Especially for disempowered communities, it is often a hugely empowering thing; they get something constructive, something ennobling done, all on their own and in a way that could never happen in its absence. That is worth a lot.