<aside> 🕰️ From Guy's Lifetoward wiki : GroupFunctions, January 2014 as part of a development workshop with the Ethical Society of Austin.

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The Functions of Groups

Our Premise

An effective group must provide some kind of service or support for its members or else it won't persist. In addition, any group must carry on some basic functions to sustain itself. A specific group will specialize in some of these and might completely leave out others. As long as there's a net positive value experienced by the members, the group can still thrive.

Supporting Individuals' Goals

The items below represent goals or needs of members and the descriptions include examples of groups that address those needs and what it seems to take to support them.

• Celebrate - People have a need to be reminded of what's good and shared and worthwhile about life and perhaps the most effective way to experience it is to practice it socially. Celebrating might take the form of square dancing, reciting mantras in unison, or any other participatory act in which communion is central and the goal is to share joy, feel alive, and have fun. Facilitating celebration seems to mean providing a sense of unity and exciting purpose around a shared participatory act.
• Produce - Some groups exist to facilitate the productivity of their members. A sewing circle is a good example. Writing groups help people be productive by holding the writers accountable to the group for putting pen to paper. Productivity can be supported through developing and providing tools (including techniques) and materials, encouraging discipline and focus, establishing and applying standards of quality.
• Explore - A travel group obviously supports exploration. But exploration could be in any realm of learning or expanded experience. Book clubs and science clubs would qualify, as would tantric yoga classes. Exploration seems to be supported by identifying muses or subjects to explore and scheduling group pursuit of those subjects, sometimes with an interpreter or educator at the helm. The reason exploration is facilitated in groups is because exploration happens faster and more meaningfully through several shared perspectives rather than alone.
• Connect personally - People need a chance to share what's going on with them personally, their challenges and their joys, their experiences and interpretations. It's how they validate their internal lives as real and meaningful. It's also how we all moderate our feelings to some sort of even keel. Listening is essential, and feedback is extremely valuable if it can be delivered in a safe manner. Facilitating personal connection could mean just helping individuals find others for 1-1 connections. A group that can provide that context of safety within a group setting can do even more.
• Express talent & creativity - A dance troop is a simple example of a group which facilitates expressing creativity. The idea is like being productive, but here the focus is on bringing out individual talents and group leverage to aesthetic or spiritual effect. Members seek to experience a spotlight and a chance to be appreciated beyond any economic criteria. Here the goal is to touch hearts and open minds through art.
• Gain leverage - Some groups exist to make things available or possible which could not be attained by individuals working on their own. A political action group would be an example, but so would a flying club which is able to own airplanes in common while passing on reasonable dues to the members and spreading the burden of ownership. Economic co-ops work the same way, boosting purchasing power through scale. Leverage is facilitated almost inherently in any group, but focusing on the purpose and administration are the keys.
• Help others - It's been proven that helping others improves one's own sense of quality of life. But sometimes we need some support to help others as much as we wish we could. Service groups identify missions and organize efforts to impact the communities and individuals around them. They help individuals find a place to lend a helping hand. Habitat for Humanity does this sort of thing. They surround members with other people who see the same benefits and can help break through barriers that might come from being unsure about how to proceed or what to expect. They facilitate volunteering in the society at large.
• Improve oneself - Many people seek to improve themselves, not so much in making their own life better, but in becoming a better person themselves for what they could see as larger reasons. Whether learning methods for dealing with anger or alcoholism, or learning techniques for spiritual enlightenment or better communication, groups of many kinds support individual members in this way, even if their primary mission is something else.
• Practice relating - Implied in group engagement is always the practice of relating to other people socially and in common causes. Even though most groups provide this opportunity implicitly, it should not be underestimated as a real value which is both consciously and unconsciously sought by members. Especially in current culture which tends toward social isolation in so many ways, social practice as almost all groups provide it is highly valuable to its members and the society in general.

Sustaining the Group Itself

A group must be sustained somehow. If it's a self-empowered group, the members perform these functions perhaps even to an egalitarian degree. Some groups have a separate administration from the membership, meaning there's a big distinction between the lay members and the administrators. Either way, the group must expend resources in some fashion to accomplish these functions.

• Maintain - The practical maintenance of a group means the fulfillment of its defined roles or procedures by its members, agents, and administrators. It means doing the accounting, making the purchases, and paying the bills. It means organizing and leading activities, making plans, and tackling logistics. It means representing the group in the external community, to new members, and to its regular membership. It means doing the things that group does according to its designed structure for its intended purposes.
• Develop - Carrying out the ongoing maintenance of the group can be seen as distinct from another function which is just as important to its continued existence: It must be founded (conceived and planned) initially, continually monitored and evaluated against its goals, and adjusted as necessary to adapt to changing times or simply to improve itself continually. The development function engages the group's structures and procedures as its object. It tweaks those elements to help keep the group vibrant.

There's something especially efficient about a voluntary self-empowered group. If the members are performing the administration and they are able to see those roles as fulfilling their own goals (like helping others, expressing creativity, or practicing relating), then their service to the group is magically "for free", which can reduce the hard economic expense of the group's persistence to resources rather than people.