There are books about this, so I’ll save you with a snappy, pithy, inverted list, as is my nature.
HOW NOT TO BUILD COMMUNITY
1. Tell everyone this is a ‘safe’ space.
Safety is a feeling, not a fact. What - precisely - makes a space safe? High walls? A moat? It depends. I cannot make you have a feeling, nor can I broadly assume that what makes one person feel safe has an equal action on someone else. Example: In the decade past, when I co-owned a prenatal yoga studio, my co-owner and I had to sit and have deep discussions about what to do when people repeatedly brought their handguns into our baby yoga studio. We determined that this practice curates the feeling of safety in some folks and horror in (most) others.
The exception here is if you are hosting a shelter in a disaster area and you are speaking in relative terms - hurricane addled vs. not. No need to mince words if you’re a lifeguard.
2. Force the breaking of theoretical ice.
First, this practice assumes that there is ice between people, and (apparently) that the introduction of oneself to another ought to involve some amount of effort or a metaphorical axe. No one’s favorite activity is ‘two truths and a lie,’ and the prospect of sharing something intimate with someone you have not met before is perhaps part of why we have so many therapists in this country (and why they all have waiting lists). Unskillful intimacy serves no one.
The exception here is if you are breaking real, actual ice in service of plunging or fishing.
3. Rely exclusively on social lubricant.
Regardless of how you relate with alcohol, let’s just say that creating a community based on ‘getting a few drinks into people’ is a less-than-skillful mechanism. Instead of greasing the social wheels, what we are doing under the influence of alcohol is inhibiting our frontal cortex - the one that plays by the rules and allows us to consider both past and future. While we could posit that ‘the now ‘is a lovely idea (and possibly the only moment that matters), perhaps we’d be better served by starting a conversation with a philosophical nugget than debilitating our guests?
I know you’re waiting for me - the teetotaler - to make an exception to this one! Well, I suppose if the whole reason you’re communing is to engage in behaviors that require you to lower your standards, this would be one way to do that…
Hope this helped you laugh,
K
When people tell me that one of their principle values is ‘community,’ I am deeply confused.
Have you ever participated in an activity that begins with someone distributing a prefab list of ‘values’ and asking everyone to pick three faves and discuss them? This is unsettling. First, I don’t like picking favorites. Second, community is not a value.
If we’ve met, you know that all of my students are my favorite. All of my supervisees are my favorite. All of my babies are my favorite. This is how I feel about values.
They are all great. We probably all share most of them.
This activity of selecting a few is weirdly divisive. It asks us to cull and refine, vote out and then build community based on this exclusionary process. This is like making friends at summer camp by picking on the kid with a lisp, and then voting for the prettiest camp counselor. Unskillful, elementary, and cheap.
Community isn’t a value. All humans value community. We are communal creatures. We might like to engage with community differently, in terms of our frequency or intensity. In terms of how we run towards and where we back away, but we are all reliant on the interdependent nature of our species. I picked none of the coffee beans in my cup, know no one who built the building I live inside of, and wouldn’t have any reason to write if you weren’t here.
Community is no more a value than air or water or shelter.
Do you value shelter?
(Doesn’t that feel like a silly question?)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Virtual Latte to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.