How to skillfully build community, Part 1
spoiler: it involves trust, principles, and loads of human curiosity
Enough of you sweet folks nudged me a few weeks ago with solidarity regarding how not to build community and then challenged,
“Well, if you’re so handy at it, Kwinn, how do you build community?”
I’m glad you asked.
A thriving community is an ecosystem more than it is a machine, so be wary of analogies that rely solely on mechanical metaphor. The machine is the work a group of people might do, but the people are anything but. If you treat me like a nail, or a piston, or a cog, you will learn this quickly as I will rebel and mutiny.
I am not mechanically inclined, and likely neither are you.
It took me some time to realize this.
In two separate four-year batches, I navigated living on a college campus - a microcosm built of intricate communities contained in a few square blocks. First, I was a student. Second, I was a staff member. Once I migrated into staff, I often remarked that the only way to truly sustain such a system with any efficiency was to eliminate all of the pesky humans. They each had adorable individual needs and preferences, a quality most visible if you attempted to gather any number of them around a common meal, the unskillful and yet remarkably effective mechanism used to attract hungry students.
There were vegetarians and folks who kept Kosher, but there were also vegans and gluten free folks, paleos and macrobiotics. Raw foodies and a few born and bred hearty midwesterners, and occasionally someone deathly allergic to peanuts.
The people were the problem. With all of their unique and diverse needs. If we just eliminated the human element, it would be easy to plan a menu, right?
Wrong.
Indeed, the more we can know and appreciate about the individuals within the ecosystems of our communities, the stronger we can reinforce them and one another.
We build community unskillfully (accidentally) because we watch shows and films that stoke and reinforce drama, because it makes for good watching! We observe a unique quality in a person or group of people, and we rally around their other-ness as an exceptionally boring way to bond with everyone else. Outside of explicit humans, we’ll choose likeness and unlikeness to create passionate teams for or against. Loads of social psychologists will tell you that this process is evolutionary and designed to keep tribes together, and maybe that’s true, but it’s also stupid and wasteful of everyone’s time.
So… let’s stop doing it?
Prodding the outlier is unskillful and mechanical. We are all outliers in various ways, so the thought experiment of gathering by likeness is silly if we use it to be exclusionary rather than discover-ish. It’s simplistic and wasteful and backfires once we apply a second category to the sorting. The trite example is the cheerleaders vs. not, but then of course you can divide the cheer group if you add another category like class year or height or who has math before English. We segment - drawing lines between smaller and smaller groups of ourselves until we are a ridiculous archipelago - isolated from one another by some silly thing or another.
This is likely to be a multi (multi) part series that unfolds over the coming months, as my first attempt was so unreasonably long. It needs to be refined and summarized into snippets, both because it’s unwieldy and because substack as a platform does not permit long long form content.
What strikes me most about this week’s latte is that I’ve started into microbiology (after the first draft was already written), and microbiology is literally the study of communities. We might intuitively sink into us-vs-them thinking regarding antimicrobials and antibiotics, disinfectant and pasteurization, but in fact microbes apparently almost never live in isolation. They collaborate more than they compete, working out the best cooperative survival advantage.
While they sometimes accidentally kill humans (whoops!) they would rather use us a hosts, navigating a glorious equilibrium whereby we can coexist and support the expansion of their kind.
We can learn a thing or two from these pre-prehistoric ancestors.
Here are the seeds of my thoughts on ideas to consider in skillful community building. The start of an eight (or 80) part series…
Principles before Rules
I believe we get boundaries backwards, and this is an iteration of that thinking. While I agree wholeheartedly that we ought not to have glass containers around the swimming pool, simply posting a sign that says “no glass allowed” does not curate community.
(I understand why we do it, and I don’t think it’s bad. Rules are important, and I’m not here to talk about how to govern people, but how to facilitate community).
If you were trying to curate community, you would want to start with the yes. The principle is something we agree to with a living agreement and active participation. We desire a barefoot-friendly environment has more letters and words (and even a hyphen - gah!) but it goes farther than a simple rule which says nothing about whether you can scatter legos on the pool deck. I think of this every time I see the sign in the parking garage across the street, which used to say ‘no skateboarding’ but now says ‘no skateboarding, rollerblading, wheeling.’ I’m inclined to start riding a unicycle just to see if I can be added to the sign.
Principles reinforce autonomy and agreement. Rules reinforce authority and subordination.
It’s complex and problematic in the face of parking garages, because it makes us realize that sometimes our community creation is horrifically exclusionary. Try to invert ‘no loitering’ inside of a parking garage in service of community. “We agree to leave the cars unoccupied and unobserved in their rest” is the best that I can do, but what we really mean is “don’t be homeless here.”
To be fair, I don’t know that anyone is trying to curate community within a parking garage (although as an anthropologist whose apartment holds audience with one, I have observed many communities participate in ritualized activity there). But think about this idea in the context of party rules, or meeting rules, or unspoken rules of friendship or familyship. Places where one could argue we are trying to curate community with the unskillful use of bait (like food) or rules. What if - instead of house rules - we had house principles first, and rules second?
I recall all of the versions of myself who have had ideas about late entry to yoga classes.
At first, I was rigid. The door is locked at the time the class starts, and that is the way it is. That’s the rule was enough for me. Black and white. This only reinforced the ‘in group’ and ‘out group’ with literal IN and OUT. It may have reinforced community amongst the IN (and maybe the OUTs all went to Old Chicago… I’ll never know), but it was not a principled approach.
Then, once I started teaching classes with new parents and brand new babies, my position changed as close to 180 degrees as possible with the mantra “there’s no such thing as late to mom & me.” I left the door unlocked, and occasionally had someone join 45 minutes into class. The mamas celebrated the shared victory of the late comer having made it through all of the impossible obstacles that arise when attempting to leave the house with a tiny human.
What I desire - and am sometimes able to make possible now - is a principled approach, where everyone within this temporary micro-community can advocate for and weigh the needs of the many and the needs of the few. Last year I had the opportunity to try it out with remarkable success...
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