13 Things You Can Do to Kill Your Community
by Doug Griffiths, MLA Battle River - Wainwright

Have you ever been part of a project (big or small), whether it be family-, friend-, or community-based, and noticed that the energy, or rather synergy, of the group fired up to a point where it seemed to take half as much effort to get twice as much work done? Have you been on the type of project where groups join forces, combine their energies, and bring their individual strengths together and accomplish things that exceeded any one group’s abilities? If you have you know that the experience always ensures one thing - success.

In order to ensure that doesn’t happen in your community it is important to resist any instinct to partner or cooperate. The least you can do is ignore the activities of other groups, ignore the benefits of potential economies of scale through partnering with others, and ignore the talents and abilities of other groups that could complement yours, because any and all of these things may lead to successful partnerships. This, however, is simply a passive way to work towards failure.

If you want to be more proactive in your pursuit of failure, your group, organization or service club should actively fight other organizations and service clubs. You can do this by competing with them on similar/identical projects, by applying for and fighting for the same grants, by drawing from (fighting for) the same volunteer base and by competing for the same community fundraising dollars to ensure that neither your group, nor another, is successful in completing any one project or activity. Of course, other groups may catch on to this and avoid you and yours like the plague, which would only ruin you efforts to cause failure, so there is an even more devious method you may want to consider.

The final and most effective way to destroy cooperation is not to avoid partnerships and not to fight partnerships but to actually enter into them and destroy them from the inside out. Yes, I mean join forces, through a board or agency or club, under the guise of cooperation, and then undermine all work that goes on. Convince the other partners that what you are working on can’t be done, that it isn’t feasible, that other options aren’t workable, and that what you are working on is completely impossible. Bring a sense of hopelessness and futility to the project itself, be negative and pessimistic, never offer workable or realistic alternatives, and stall and drag out progress. You will ensure failure… and you might even be praised for it if you can make your negativity and pessimism sound like it is based on good sound reason and logic.

Now, take this approach to the work you do everywhere. Apply it to all of the groups you work with. Use the final method approach to reach out to other towns (under the guise of cooperation) and kill their spirit and energy too because your community can die even faster if you take other neighbouring communities down with you. You can be assured of leading your community to failure if you are determined and cunning enough.