Welcome to City Makers

A community of relationships for energizing, creative and effective city work.

About Us

The City Makers community brings together people who are energized to improve the community around them. We are working on (or starting!) awesome improvement initiatives in our cities, neighbourhoods, and communities. Big or tiny.

Relationships are the best way to create the conditions for our cities to improve, so they serve us better. The most energizing, creative, and effective work we do happens in a community of relationships.

Instead of feeling the grind of the impossible hanging over your head, you can work with brilliance and curiosity. You can be energized by your work and the results. You can be energized by the people working with you. Even the ones you disagree with.

It’s totally possible.

Join Beth Sanders and your fellow City Makers to make the impossible possible. 

City Makers are never standing alone. Even when it looks (and feels) like we are.   

A Bit of Backstory

This community is an evolution of the Integral Nest City Mighty Network, founded by evolutionary city explorers Beth Sanders and Marilyn Hamilton. While that first effort to create a community on Mighty Networks put on display the combination of Beth and Marilyn’s books—Nest City and Integral City—a new name with a new focus accomplishes the following: 

  • Create a sense of identity for members by using a noun—-city makers

  • Provide a name for our work and practice to improve our cities, communities, and neighbourhoods

  • Expand the focus of our community from bodies of knowledge to the practice of city making work 

Invite members to inquire about what it means to be a city maker in an ongoing, never-ending reflection about city making as personal and collective practice

What We're About (and why you should join)

We will learn from and with each other by creating quality social habitats (in live courses, small group coaching, and community gatherings) in ways that will allow you to connect to and expand your purposeful work. When we do this as a community we ensure that each of us is able to make significant contributions that improve how well our cities and communities serve citizens.

Membership

As a member of the City Makers community, you and your fellow city makers will:

  • Connect people and projects within and between our cities neighbourhoods, and communities 

  • Convene communities in ways that amplify their wisdom and enable action

  • Navigate conflicting ideas and values 

  • Implement awesome projects with unusual partners 

  • Work effectively with citizens, governments, community organizations, and businesses 

  • Be citizens who serve our cities well

  • Make cities, neighbourhoods, and communities that serve citizens well 

You can expect to transform your “civic practice,” the way you work with yourself, others, and the community you call home. 

6 simple things

We offer 6 simple things to members of the City Makers Mighty Network community: 

  1. Experience exclusive content and conversations you can’t find anywhere else

  2. Meet people who share similar interests (and find out if they live near you!)

  3. Meet people from around the planet who do the same things, or who care about the same topics

  4. Make better, well-informed decisions about the things that are important to you

  5. Swap stories, experiences, and ideas (not advice) around our shared purpose

  6. Find a little inspiration, thought-provoking conversations, and expert perspective—from members—each and every day

What to Expect

Community 

You have access to a range of community activities included with your membership to the City Makers community: 

  • Ask burning questions. You have a pool of city making expertise at your fingertips.  

  • Meet each other. We have scheduled events for our community to meet face-to-face online two times a month: Street Corner Visiting and LET’S TALK ABOUT. Feel free to organize your own events around topics, or in a particular city, whatever you are called to organize. 

  • Connect with each other. This is a place to nurture new or existing relationships, to support each other in our city work. Jump in and post an article, discuss, explore ideas together. Contribute when you can, anytime. 

  • Quick little courses to grow your civic practice. Learn to create quality social habitats in the “Social Habitat Series,” offered a few times a year. This will develop our foundational skills as a community and as individuals working with our cities, communities, and neighbourhoods.  

  • Grow your capacity to convene in ways that foster connection, relationships, conversation, community, and change. 

Courses

As a member of the City Makers Community you have access to courses only offered in the City Makers Community:

  • The City Nestmaking Series of courses includes City Making, Working with Tension, and Engaging Inquiry. These are four-week courses to set you up with quick lenses and tools to help you work with the complexity of cities.

  • The Community of Civic Practice is a four-week experience to help you find renewed (or new!) focus on your work or a project, whether paid or unpaid, in the company of a small group of fellow city makers. 

  • Watch for other courses to be offered by community members. 

Choose what works for you, when it works for you.

A bit about money

Three options (or free if need be) are available for membership in the City Makers community:

With paid membership, these are the commitments we make to ourselves about money: 

  1. Members pay what they can to participate in the financial sustainability of our community. This means not paying so much that you’re anxious about money, or so little that you don’t pay attention to our community. Free membership is an option. 

  2. Membership fees pay for the costs of running our community. This includes the annual fee to Mighty Networks, financial transaction fees, financial administrative work, moderation, activity hosts, technical support to members and course instructors, and to people who deliver free courses to members. 

  3. When the costs of running our community are met, scholarships are offered for members to take courses that involve a fee in addition to the membership fee. 

  4. Course fees will pay our instructors for their contributions. 

  5. The online “infrastructure” for our community has been paid for and hosted by Beth and her company, POPULUS Community Planning Inc., since 2019. The money moves through POPULUS and Beth commits to financial transparency and will, every year, share a financial summary of the revenue generated in our community and how the revenue was distributed.

  6. The people who work to create and support the City Makers community are paid. We have a relationship of reciprocity, acknowledging that there is an abundance of structural, community design work that enables our awesome community of city makers to thrive.



 

Our Social Habitat

We are a community that is as strong as the contributions we each make. This is an invitation to jump in and share ideas, insights, practices, and stories. It is the sharing between all of us that will make us each stronger in our work to improve our cities.

We use "social habitat guidelines" to shape our interactions with each other. At the heart are these agreements: 

  • We share personal stories only with permission 

  • We listen with compassion and curiosity

  • We ask for what we need and offer what we can

  • We embrace confusion as a creative space emergence

  • We stretch together into our highest mutual possibilities

  • We expect something novel, vital and important to happen at any time