In communities and organisations that have experienced significant conflict, failure or collective loss, one of the most stubborn obstacles to renewal is the weight of the unacknowledged past. The history of what went wrong, who was hurt and who was at fault tends to live in the collective memory without ever being properly addressed. It shapes how people relate to one another in the present without anyone naming what is happening. Attempts to move forward without attending to this history tend to produce the same conflicts in new forms.

The Mending Fences practice addresses this obstacle through a deceptively gentle but deeply intentional act: the invitation to share stories of past cooperation. Not stories of failure or conflict, not a forensic accounting of what went wrong, but stories of the times when the group surprised itself, when people who did not expect to work together found that they could, when the community demonstrated a capacity that nobody had anticipated.

The power of the oral testimony

The Mending Fences practice begins by inviting community members or colleagues to share oral testimonies of past collective cooperation. These are not formal presentations or written submissions. They are the personal, first-person accounts of moments in the community’s or organisation’s history when people came together to make something better. The specificity of these accounts matters: not the general statement that the community is resilient, but the particular story of the time when the neighbours on a specific street organised a care rota for a family in crisis, or when a team found an unexpected solution to an impossible deadline through sheer collective ingenuity.

The oral form of these testimonies carries a particular quality. It is more immediate, more personal and more emotionally accessible than any written report or slide presentation. When someone tells a story from their own experience, using their own words, the people listening receive it differently than they receive data or analysis. They feel it as well as understand it. And in that feeling, something shifts in the room.

Documentation as a community archive

The second phase of the Mending Fences practice involves documenting the stories that emerge from the testimonies. This documentation is not primarily for external reporting or institutional evaluation. It is the creation of a community archive: a visible, accessible record of the group’s own capacity, told in the voices of those who experienced it.

This archive serves multiple purposes. It provides a resource that the community can return to during future periods of difficulty, when the temptation to adopt a deficit narrative is strongest. It creates a shared evidence base for what the group has already been able to do together. And it preserves the stories that would otherwise be lost as the people who lived them move on, retire or simply forget to pass them on to those who come after.

The public display as collective monument

The Mending Fences practice reaches its fullest expression when the documented stories are displayed visually in a shared space. This might be a community noticeboard, a wall installation, a digital display or any other format that makes the archive accessible and visible to the people who inhabit the shared space. The display functions as a collective monument: not to a singular achievement or a named individual, but to the accumulated capacity of ordinary people working together over time.

The effect of this public visibility is significant. When a community can see its own history of cooperation displayed in a shared space, the deficit narrative that an external assessor might apply to the same place becomes harder to sustain. The community has, in the most literal sense, posted its counter-argument on the wall. It has made its capacity visible in a form that cannot easily be dismissed or ignored.

Mending fences as ongoing practice

The name of this practice is deliberate. It is not called fixing fences, because fixing implies a single intervention that resolves a problem once and for all. Mending is an ongoing activity, requiring regular attention and care. The relational fabric of a community is always in some degree of need of mending: new conflicts arise, old tensions resurface and the stories of collective capacity need to be retold for each new generation of participants.

Making the Mending Fences practice a regular feature of community or organisational life, rather than a one-off response to crisis, ensures that the archive of cooperation is continuously replenished and that the habit of looking to the past for evidence of present capacity becomes part of the cultural baseline of the group.

Questions for reflection

What visual or symbolic space in your environment could you use to showcase the hidden talents and cooperative histories of your peers or neighbours?

How does transforming a dry archive of past successes into a public, creative story installation alter a group’s collective pride and its belief in its own future capacity?

Think of one story of past cooperation in your community or organisation that has never been formally told or recorded. Who could you ask to tell it, and where could it be shared?

What would it mean for your team or neighbourhood to make the collection and public display of cooperation stories a regular practice rather than a crisis response?

Inspired by: Russell, C. and McKnight, J. (2022) The connected community: discovering the health, wealth, and power of neighborhoods. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.