What is a "Community"?
How can we create that special sauce of belonging, inclusion, and boundaries?
Someday, I would like to write an adult children’s book just called, “Are You My Community?”
In it, a disenfranchised person in their late twenties to early forties will drive from city to city, attending events. They’ll land in living rooms, festivals, and concert halls, and ask:
“Are YOU my community?”
In each place, people will answer: “Yes! We’re your community!”
At the end of the event, however, the book’s protagonist will find themselves alone.
They may crash on communal couches for a day or two. But inevitably, their experience of belonging will fade.
People have work to do.
Not everyone likes everyone else.
Community is a weekend thing.
Not all parts of our protagonist are welcome.
So the seeker will move on to somewhere else. Big cities, small. Music jams, book groups. Everywhere they go, they ask their question:
“Are YOU my community?”
I’m currently working on a project with my beloved and a beloved friend, called “The Community Builders’ Collective”. Our aim is to help people create more and better local communities. As part of our work, we’ve interviewed more than 15 community-building experts, and even traveled to Edinburgh this past weekend to teach a 2.5-day workshop on how to build community.
Let me say, first: I do not consider myself an expert community builder.
Yes. That’s weird. I’m building a course on something I’m not an expert in. Stay with me here.
I’ve built event-based and place-based community in the past. I studied intentional living communities in college. But now, I lack community feeling of my own.
My living situation is small and practical, more like a working family. My friend groups have drifted apart. I lead events for international groups, who build community with each other but then go their separate ways. The town I live in is largely made up of small family compounds that do not interact.
I crave community. Thus, in building a course and a collective, I’ll get to test the skills I’m teaching. I’ll get to be a learner as well as a leader. Perhaps it will be a better course, for that.
That being said, if I (and others) crave community, why don’t we just go out and get it?
Let me illustrate this with another fable.
The Tale of the Missing Car
A man came up to a policeman and said, “I’ve lost my car.”
The policeman took out his note pad. “Describe it to me,” he said. “Does it look anything like that Subaru, there?”
“Well, not exactly. There was more of a softer, rounded feel, you see. And that Subaru doesn’t look very fast. My car could go real fast, you see! But it could also idle beautifully.”
“All right…then, what about the hatchback over there? The small red one?”
“Mmm, it was a little bigger. But not that big. Definitely more comfortable inside.”
The policeman began to get frustrated. “Sir, if you can’t describe the car to me, how am I meant to find it?”
The man put his hands on his hips. “Well I don’t know what the car LOOKS like! I just know how it FEELS!”
When we look for community, most often, what we are looking for is not a thing. It is a feeling. Specifically, the feelings of acceptance and belonging.
We will know our community because when we walk into it, we will feel at home. Our hearts will be warm and full. There will be laughter. People will look for us, and notice when we are gone.
Even writing that paragraph, I feel longing.
I am expert in creating that type of community in a weekend. But these days, we look to create community that fits into our busy lives, where we can schedule in an hour or two a week for that feeling of belonging and expect it will be there to drop into.
The problem is - insta-macy is fast but not durable. Creating ongoing community takes commitment. And to do it, first, we need to know what we’re trying to create. Or like the man with the missing car, we will be comparing everything to an ideal whose true form we do not even know.
So, let’s return to our initial question.
What is a Community?
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