“What brought me the most joy was that the tools we learned in the CA program work in practice. When you give people space to talk, incredible miracles begin to happen. The community starts to interact more, people set aside their grievances and connections begin to form.”
Římov is a small town (pop. 1,000) situated just 14 kilometers from the larger city of České Budějovice. The town’s Church of the Holy Spirit, Loretto chapel and cloister containing Baroque and Rococo murals are important pilgrimage sites. With a central square, church and Baroque vernacular architecture, Římov retains the atmosphere of a traditional small Czech town, but it is clearly growing and changing as newcomers settle there. Many of the new residents commute to the larger city of České Budějovice for work.
Pavla Ticha, a visual artist who lives in Římov, has long organized community events in the town. In 2024, she was hired to manage the municipal gallery, which is located on the main square, and given freedom to hold community activities there.
Lucie Černická has led various community improvement projects and regularly advises community groups on engaging residents in community activities. She first participated in Community Alphabet (CA) in 2020-22, when she became enthusiastic about two approaches:
The Pomalší Local Action Group (LAG) is dedicated to rural development in the Malše River region, which includes Římov. The LAG saw value in having Lucie lead an asset mapping effort in Římov to identify people who might be interested to co-creating community activities. On the LAG’s suggestion, Lucie began by interviewing Pavla. Pavla then began helping Lucie select and contact other people in the community to interview.
Lucie explained: The original plan was to do detailed mapping interviews with all opinion makers from Římov, with people, who have part of the Římov community concentrated around them, opinion leaders, leaders, prominent people, etc. The aim was to map the need and potential of people for the development of community life. We are now interviewing people from different social groups and we hope that some of them will be willing to interview other people from their own social bubble, so interviews will spread among the whole community. We already spoke about how to reach people from the Orthodox Christian part of the community, for example.
Over the next weeks, Lucie led six detailed mapping interviews with selected residents. She asked each person about knowledge, skills or interests s/he would like to share with the community. In the interviews Lucka also tried to map the resources of the town of Římov, such as buildings or places to hold meetings and events. She learned that Římov has a Museum of Pilgrims, a wooden building for events and a large old building with a dancing hall. She also learned about people who were already supporting community engagement in Římov, such as a progressive priest who allowed a group of residents to renovate a small wooden structure in front of the church, where they served wine during Christmas events and celebrated the St. Martin’s holiday. Residents also expressed their needs for community life – e.g.a meeting place for smaller groups of people, thematic events, opportunities for sharing, etc. Through the interviews, a group of residents also found a common interest in art films and began making monthly excursions to a cinema in the city of České Budějovice together.
At the same time, Pavla became very enthusiastic about Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) and things began moving very quickly. She was hired by the municipality to manage the Římov Gallery and organize activities based on local residents’ interests. She also began offering a co-working space at the gallery for free. As residents began coming to the gallery for activities or co-working or just as they passed by, Pavla began engaging them in conversation to explore their interests and the types of community activities they might like to participate in. Lucie noted: She has a soft approach, she listens to everyone.
Based on what she learned about residents’ interests, Pavla began to organize a range of activities, from painting workshops to a Mother’s Day gathering for local women, exhibitions of local artists, exhibitions about interesting people born in Římov, etc. Both Lucie and Pavla were amazed at how quickly people began to connect around common interests.
“[Pavla], who was enthusiastic about connecting the community in this way, created a safe space where people could sit down over coffee and share what they like to do, what skills they have, and what’s important to them. And through these conversations, people with similar interests or needs began to connect. They started getting together, the community began to grow and suddenly their activities multiplied beyond what anyone from the outside could have imagined. In Římov, community life began flourishing and now they have watercolor classes, bread-baking sessions and monthly excursions to an art film cinema. It’s based on personal relationships, and that’s how it should be, I think,” Lucie noted.
As they watched how organically things developed, the gallery became a natural gathering place and people started to connect and co-organize activities, Lucie and Pavla concluded that the original plan of holding detailed interviews with opinion leaders was neither necessary nor natural. Instead they started using other, less demanding and less formal methods to learn about the potential and needs of the community. Lucie explained: We started to use various lists and brainstorming methods, including the sticky note method, which proved to be the best, where people wrote what they would like to do and what they could offer on sticky notes, which they then posted on two large-format papers during meetings at the Gallery. So we are slowly collecting their ideas, needs and offers for the community. We also used group interviews, which were conducted by Pavla, but in a less structured and less formal way. She is a local and this helps a lot. We decided that given how well the Gallery began to work in terms of community, further interviews would be rather poorly received for the moment and would seem forced (a stranger – why does he ask? What is the purpose? etc.). People from all social groups and all ages come to the Gallery.
Lucie and Pavla found that informal conversations and an active listening approach can uncover shared interests and build small connections between residents that can be natural springboards to new community activities. Lucie said: “Community Alphabet gave me a set of practical tools to learn how to shift from being the person at the helm to creating space for the community to solve things themselves.” Now there are so many community activities underway in Římov that they scarcely fit into the timeframe of the municipal gallery. The municipality is considering reopening the public library which closed some time ago and possibly shifting some of the activities to the library.
The Gallery activities are bringing together people who didn’t interact before and enabling connections that reach beyond the Gallery. Talking about an exhibit and musical event, Pavla noted: A neighbor came who had never attended a similar event involving community members he didn’t know and he brought others with him. And, after visiting the Gallery, they sat with us for a long time at one table in the pub. Lucie, who is responsible for books in the library, was there with us too. If someone had told me ten years ago that this unusual group would sit together around one table at the pub, I would have said it could never happen, but it did. And some ultra alternative mothers, with their young children running about, also stayed with us until very late. People connected in that traditional village way that I had never seen here before to that extent.
Barriers between groups also seem to be easing and some residents who scarcely greeted one another in the past are now taking part in joint activities. Lucie told us: The church is quite powerful. Some people don’t want to do a particular activity because it was not that way traditionally. [Yet] some of the strict ‘rules’ are beginning to melt i.e. some people are beginning to take part in activities that they wouldn’t have previously.
Lucie continues to support Pavla, providing a space once or twice a month to talk around her work and challenges that arise. Now, Lucie sees her role as being more on the outside, to just support what is possible in the community, not to project your own ideas and needs. She has a new appreciation for the role of the supportive outsider, working closely with a local partner who knows the local context and individuals.
