How to Build an Organic Community… Inorganically
By: Angela Okune
Across the science and research world, we talk a lot about community. Funders want it, scientists need it, and consultants are often hired to “create” it. But anyone who has tried to build a genuine community, especially in highly grant-dependent environments, knows the tension: you’re asked to cultivate something organic through a fundamentally inorganic process.
At CSIDNet, we’ve spent the past year navigating exactly this. Having observed for decades the ebbs and flows of grant-funded networks that come and go, we know it takes more than just funding to establish a sustainable community of practice. It takes community ownership and buy-in. And in these times where everyone is stretched and over-committed, these are not easy to cultivate.
As 2025 comes to a close, we offer reflections from our year of community infrastructure building to other community managers, consultants, and network builders who find themselves in a similar position.
1. Start With Questions, Not Requirements
You may know what the donor wants. You may even have a multi-page list of requirements attached to the grant agreement. But if you lead with those, you’ll lose the room. No scientist wants to join a volunteer community purely to execute a donor’s agenda. If that’s what you need, hire consultants.
If you want people to gather, participate, and genuinely care about the collective, then the starting point must be their needs and interests. Not yours, and not the donor’s. Ask questions. Create space for people to articulate what matters to them. Build from there.
2. Resist the Urge to Over-Prescribe
Academics and scientists spend so much of our professional lives performing, to donors, peers, review committees, and increasingly, to the public. Your community space should be the rare place where they don’t have to perform.
Design spaces where people can show up as their authentic selves. That may mean unstructured conversations, reflective exercises, or small-group dialogues that let people connect across departments, disciplines, or geographies. Values matter here: collaboration, care, and shared humanity are just as foundational as the technical topics.
3. Don’t Forget: You’re Allowed to Have Fun
If you’re lucky enough to have funding for community building, use it to actually build community! Don’t bring people to a beautiful place only to lock them in a hotel conference room for three days. Go out together. Try local food. Explore the context you are working in.
We’ve observed the deepest connections form not during structured sessions but while getting lost climbing up Table Mountain, trying the spiciest foods in Thailand, or laughing over something unexpected. We are whole human beings, not only brains. Nourish the full person.
4. Design for Belonging
Everyone wants to belong. Icebreakers, social activities, and creativity in facilitation are not trivial. They are tools to help people feel seen and connected. Avoid defaulting to classic academic meeting formats; instead, focus on the objective (build connection!) and choose activities that support that outcome. Emotional safety and shared joy are just as important as intellectual alignment. As the community facilitator, your job is not to lead the community, your job is to create containers for the participants to fill with their expertises, personalities, and characters. This is a subtle but important difference that often gets lost because PIs selected for community building projects are often topical experts in the field. Your key skillset as a community builder is not necessarily your ability to lead on the topic but rather your ability to enable others to connect on relevant topics.
5. Co-Create the Vision (Not Because the Donor Said So)
A community’s ethos cannot be dictated. It has to be co-created. Set up governance structures that allow members (not secretariat staff or donors) to make real decisions about strategy, activities, and priorities. This requires putting boundaries on your own power (as the founder) and designing for your decision-making power to decrease over time. Communities last when members shape their own future.
As part of this principle, it feels like the right moment to share that at the end of the year I will transition out of the interim Managing Director role that I held during CSIDNet’s launch year. That position is now retired. Beginning in 2026, I will move into a new role, Head of Strategy, within a non-hierarchical staff team, where we report to a member-elected advisory committee. We designed this shared structure intentionally so that our operational model reflects the values of peer collaboration, mutual aid, and dismantling of unnecessary hierarchies that we ask of our community. I am excited to continue supporting CSIDNet next year and to work with the community to build out the next layer of programming on top of the strong foundation we created together this year.
In summary, if you want an organic community, choose the messier, more uncertain path
- Start with questions.
- Create room for authenticity.
- Design for belonging.
- Co-create the vision.
- Create community structures that give people real power.
And most importantly, let the community become what members need it to be, not what the donor wants to report. Community is not just a project to be “managed”. If it really is organic, it is messy, complicated, fun and challenging. Needless to say, it is difficult to turn community engagement into a “project” to be executed and it needs to be an ongoing process with ideally unrestricted funding.
Building an organic community of practice takes more time, more listening, and more comfort with unpredictability. But it also creates something real that hopefully lasts beyond the grant cycle. At CSIDNet, we’re learning this every day. And we hope these reflections help other community managers and science facilitators trying to build something meaningful in a world where “community” is too often treated as a checkbox.
Credits: All photos by Natthaphon Sakulvanaporn and the Bangkok VDO team.