There's a saying that people often repeat these days: "It takes a village to raise a child." Coming together as a community allows society to provide its new generation with more than just the parental guidance it takes to nurture a child. Parents have a lot to offer their offspring, but a community has even more. The idea is that, when a child is nurtured by an entire community of invested, caring individuals along with their parents' watchful eyes, that child will likely grow up to be a healthy, productive member of society.
The value of a property goes far beyond its appearance or where it's situated. In a strata context, an engaged and interactive community can make a world of difference to what people are willing to pay for units in a building. Of course, this means that a property that suffers from the opposite – a disengaged and unfriendly community, or none at all – is going to see affordability and property values hit in a big way. This is where the manager comes in.
The worth of communal participation is immeasurable.
Being engaged with one's community involves more than just being on friendly terms with the people who live next door. It requires a shared sense of belonging, a coalescence around a set of norms that each person within that community respects and accepts. In this way, community serves as an almost "definitional" ingredient in what makes our neighbourhoods and the people who inhabit them worth respecting.
Building a strong social fabric is one of the primary objectives in the work we are doing. To foster connections that strengthen our community's social architecture requires us to support the development of social spaces.
To encourage community engagement, one can create social spaces within the strata property. For example, there could be parks, playgrounds, barbecue areas, or other gathering spots designated for use by everyone who lives there. These would be the focuses of socialization for the development or condominium. People would come together in those spaces, making the development into a community.
Fostering Communication:
To create a powerful society, you must establish effective lines of communication. This is especially true in the world of residential communities, where people must live in relatively close proximity. Communities thrive on good communication, and they often wither when communication is poor or non-existent. This is where the leadership has a vital function to perform. Skilful, proactive strata management can establish effective communication channels that allow residents to "speak" via various media and to be "heard" as part of the decision-making process.
Diverse and inclusive, we celebrate.
An all-inclusive residential community, in my opinion, prospers when it is populated by an array of diverse individuals. The very act of embracing individuals' unique ways of being allows a vibrant community to weave itself together—ultimately United. Not all communities, however, have fully adopted this view. For the communities that have not, my essay here is intended to inspire some serious thinking on this front and to offer some best practices for strata corporations that want to strengthen their communities based on this idea.
In conclusion, ...
Fostering community engagement is so valuable for a strata's residents in so many ways. It's not just the "feel-good" activities that happen in common spaces or during shared time; when residents take part in the creation of a community, they enhance strata managerial value. Proactive strata management can and often does generate substantial property value. Even when the community forges itself without any input from strata management, anything that adds value to all units in the community, as long as it doesn't result in a similarly substantial increase in a neighbouring property, must also work to improve a community's suffering.