Exploring the Depths and Breadths (and Breaths) of Community, Part I

Sharing my understandings of community and its different dimensions

What is community? I use this word a lot, as it sits at the heart of my work around bridge-building, conflict transformation, healing, re-storying justice, and more. So, here, and in my next few pieces, I wanted to take the time to explore it.

Webster's dictionary has a definition: “a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.” For me, that definition is to the point and also, at the same time, kinda missing it. Yes, communities share a commonality/ies of some kind, and what makes them a community goes much deeper.

I have learned to love word play, both from my husband Austin and from my friends Youssef, Zeina, and Mongy in Egypt, so I will pun around for a moment. Community could be “coming together in unity.” Community is finding the oneness in the many. The oneness can be around a shared purpose, or identity, or action, and yet, that alone will not evoke the feeling of community, much less sustain it. I have seen groups fall apart if they rely solely on that shared purpose/identity/action, because they don’t have the relational ties to weave them together, nor the skills and capacities for working through inevitable conflicts.

For me “coming together in unity” goes deeper. It is about fundamentally belonging – that I am part of you and you are part of me, that we are inextricably linked in our hearts and spirits, and sometimes physically present in our bodies too. Community also means that we are in this together – this moment, this place, this life. There is a practicality of being rooted in space and time – even when it is virtual/online or temporary. More than that, we come together to be together. For me, community sits at the intersection of being and doing together.

I credit my parents as my first and foundational teachers of community-building and community-sustaining. When they arrived in the US in 1972-1973, and settled in Chicago after a year in Lawrence, Kansas, they immediately set out to build community. One relationship at a time, they wove themselves into a circle of similar young immigrants from Rajasthan, India, who were starting their careers and their families in the US. We met with this group of families every weekend, rotating houses where the “parties'“ would be hosted, eating home-cooked food, sharing stories of struggle and success, laughing and playing, celebrating festivals, grieving when parents and grandparents passed away in India, and supporting each other, too. Our parents could take a break from English-language-US American culture and drop into Hindi or Rajasthani languages, wear their traditional clothes, and talk about the many things their American colleagues could not relate to or understand. There was comfort and security and freedom for them. These are some of my favorite memories of my childhood and adolescence, and I have so much love for all these Aunties and Uncles and their children, many of whom are/were my good friends.

I don't know if my parents actually called it all community-building, though, as an intentional action. I think it was more natural for them, something like the water they swam in and didn't really see as a kind of effort. They were born and raised in India, where whenever two people come into contact, it feels like the first engagement is seeking a connection, to find a common bond that ties you together (like knowing the same person or family, visiting each other’s hometown at some point, having a similar education, being raised in a big family, etc.). I find it very different than meeting someone here in the US, where I often feel like the intention is to notice how different we are from each other, or what makes each of us unique, rather than seeking out our commonality/ies.

My parents showed me a few of the core essences of community as “coming together in unity”: showing up in a consistent way, welcoming in our whole selves, being willing to give and receive from each other, which also means understanding that we need each other to survive and to thrive. Multi-layered purposes existed simultaneously in these interactions, and all of it was profoundly relational. And, of course, delicious food was abundantly available (the first rule of organizing anything, as I learned in high school).

In practicing this art of being and doing together, they/we co-created a feeling of belonging — which was pretty extraordinary in a time and place where they/we were also sometimes told to go back to our own country. How belonging could co-exist alongside other-ing and discrimination is a paradox I have taken with me into my work and life, which I will explore more in another piece.

While my parents initiated my understanding of community, my neighborhood and school expanded it. There, the commonality that brought my friends together was being US-born kids of immigrants — from India, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, Pakistan, Syria, Haiti, and more — and we grew, like my parents, a sense of “coming together in unity”. Our shared experiences as translators for our families, as bridging between US culture and our home-country culture, as being the first to do X in the family, as not being like the kids we saw on TV, all of these vulnerabilities and challenges forged a deep connection among us — particularly when we shared them with each other. I felt lucky to have friends all through my childhood and adolescence who could hold me, as I held them, in these complexities of just existing in the world. That is how I realized that I could be different in many ways from others, and yet, we could still build a community together. It was the act of sharing our vulnerabilities that provided the essential glue, and that expanded beyond our shared identity/experience/action.

I will take a little more time to build upon this understanding in the next piece, where I pun with community as “come and tie”. Later, of course, I will get into community as “come untie” or “co-mutiny”.

If you are willing to share in the comments, I would love to hear how you understand community - and all puns are welcome.