Characterizing Community

Maureen

One day when I was about 12 years old, playing outside, my mother called me to tell me she didn’t know where my sister was, and we needed to find her. This was the early 1960s, so the first thing we thought of was not that she had been kidnapped or anything, but we were anxious to find her. I started biking around the neighborhood calling out here name. Soon, all our friends and neighbors were doing the same, looking high and low for my sis. No one had to be asked to do this; it was just the kind of thing one did. WE were going to find my sis.

This is quite a narrow, focused example, but it does seem to exemplify basic notions of what a community is about. As we’re committed to building communities, it behooves us to at least explore what the concept means, so let’s take the lay of the land.

Why is it important to understand what Community is?

Philosophers often resort to a dirty trick when debating a point – defining terms. Despite the often maddening trips down rabbit holes that this practice sometimes entails, I can see the point. If we’re to become the most effective practitioners of building Community, we need to have a realistic, rigorous definition and model with which to work. It’s like wanting to be an effective leader without referencing a relevant, supported definition and model of leadership, including the values embedded in the definition in question. The landscape of the ‘left’ is littered with these constructs – ‘radical’ and ‘feminist’, e.g., are so often misunderstood, misused, and abused that the left (hell, even that term has lost its meaning!) has confused these notions as conceptual touchstones for important movements. Let’s not let this happen to us who would build Community. If we want to engage in this work, we can’t rely on vague or inconsistent notions of what we build.

Despite my impassioned plea for intellectual rigor, and although “Community” is often discussed in the popular media, social sciences, and elsewhere, there is not nearly as much effort spent in pinning down the construct in a useful way. Carolyn Shaffer and Kristin Anundsen (2005) offer that because the term ‘community’ can take on so many forms, it “resists being pinned down by definitions” (p.10). Of course, it might well be that “Community” seems to take on so many forms precisely because it has not been rigorously defined.  Be that as it may, we attempt to do just that, recognizing that we’ll eventually have to rely on a discussion of community’s characteristics to flesh out our understanding of what this means.

Community, then as a first approximation:

A collective of interrelated, interdependent entities (“members”) who interact with each other in such a way as to maintain their common good. In the process, members create an entity greater than the sum of their individual contributions and relationships.

Thanks to Shaffer & Anundsen for the last element of the definition. 

Note: Earlier conceptualizations of Community emphasized a focused geographic area. We, and many recent scholars, agree that virtual communities are rising in prevalence and relevance, and we include them in our view.

Dimensions of Community 

“Community” though, is not an all-or-none notion. One way, for example, to examine your group as a potential “real” community is to see how well it stacks up along three dimensions, described by Shaffer & Anundsen:

Were you a participant in the No DAPL protest at Standing Rock? If so, you may have experienced a profound sense of community with your comrade protestors. And while there may have been a wide range of people at Standing Rock (save for Right-Wingers), the depth at which you shared your feelings, for example, other than with respect to environmental and social justice issues, likely was lacking. More telling, even the most dedicated Standing Rock protestors were present for days, or perhaps weeks, and then moved on, even if they were to continue their good work. 

On the other hand, maybe you’re a member of Wild Cooperative, a self-proclaimed community:

We are a community that cultivates cooperative and facilitating relationship with nature and each other and that shares the knowledge of our regenerative and responsible living experiences. We are focusing on changing our life’s perspective from human-centric to bio-centric where all life is part of our family and relatives. We are creating a natural and regenerative ecosystem that energizes all life, allows for individual growth, and shares and returns the surplus of energy and knowledge. This healthy village with resilient social, cultural, economic, educational, and ecological guilds is a building block of a biotic culture.
https://wildcooperative.wordpress.com/mission-statement/

Given Wild Cooperative’s mission, it’s fair to say they share a wide range of facets of life. What we don’t know is the diversity of people involved, although they are clear that community members do not include just people, and in that regard are pretty diverse. Conversations with members of this group indicate they also participate in deep conversation and sharing with each other. While Wild Cooperative is a recent development (less than 5 years), they stack up impressively in the other dimensions.

So what? 

Why is it important to engage in this reflection, this audit of community dimensions? Because your community may not be a community at all. A group that is only together for a short time, and does not meet the other dimensions of breadth or depth, is more likely a Proto-Community. While groups like these “provide great opportunities for experiencing mutual support and connection” (Shaffer & Anundsen, p 13), and while they might serve as platforms to practice community-building skills, they do not serve a wide range of functions, and in general do not last as long as true communities. (Think also of a group of people who band together to help after a flood, or a support group.) Because of these limitations, community builders may seek to move beyond the temporary, less durable form of the Proto-Community.

Functional vs. Conscious vs. Deep Community

In the communities we’re generally most familiar with and maybe grew up in, survival and well-being were primary. Members mutually looked after the physical and social welfare of the members. In the example at the top, our neighbors looked for Maureen to attempt to assure her (and our family’s) safety. We were a Functional Community, in Shaffer & Anundsen’s taxonomy. Functional Communities traditionally ensured members were afforded the essentials (foods, shelter, education, etc.) so they could “be productive and maintain the social order” (p10). However, our neighbors generally did not know a lot about each other’s private lives, and we didn’t do much ‘emotional labor’ concerned with our internal dynamics.

More recent, although less popularized as yet, is the Conscious Community. While Conscious Community maintains the survival and social control aspects of the Functional Community, this form seems influenced by the neoliberalism rampant in the dominant culture. In that regard, Conscious Community also emphasizes “members needs for personal expression, growth, and transformation” (S&A, p 11). Despite the individualistic identity orientation, however, Conscious Community exhibits a redeeming feature or two. For one, members reflect on their common purpose, internal processes, and group dynamics. In this sense Conscious Community evokes qualities of an effective team. Shaffer & Anundsen point out, promisingly, that Conscious Communities incorporate a “systems understanding of reality” (p 11). While the systems they describe are mostly internal, likening members to components of a living body, there is some recognition of the importance of avoiding isolation from the human and natural systems the community is part of. This interdependent focus keeps Conscious Communities flexible and wiling to embrace new people and ideas. Despite a nod to the external world, this is clearly not a dominant focus of this model of community building.  

As a Conscious Community matures, its members might aspire to becoming a Deep Community, in which the attitudes and behaviors associated with maintaining and improving their internal processes “have become so internalized they are second nature” (p 13). Shaffer and Anundsen declare, “members easily and naturally attune to what is best for themselves and the group” (p 13). Deep Community doubles down on the internal focus, on the individual, and leaves a bit of space for the group. And for many community builders, Deep Community is a laudable goal; community members absolutely should know “how to lead, follow, listen, speak from the heart, and mediate conflicts, and perform these functions spontaneously whenever a situation calls for them” (p 13). 

But CPR followers and friends understand more is needed from communities. The forces of the dominant culture are too powerful, and the dangers to life on this planet, clear and present, necessitate more of us. Radical Community is the necessary critical response. We love our sister and brother Communities focused on healthy relationships with each other and the land, and want them to succeed. However, our situation is desperate enough to ask them to reflect on moving their focus to a more radical orientation, or to incorporate a radical ‘arm’ into their existence.

Radical Community

First, we reassure the weak of heart that Radical Community is distinct from a community of radicals (not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that). What we aspire to is not merely a collection, a herd; it is Community much as it has been described here. We respect and seek to achieve Deep Community, but we aim for more.

Melissa Merin (2019) provides a useful starting point:

In the world we currently inhabit here in america, community is often a loose concept that is devalued or destroyed altogether by the need to create and maintain material possessions and capital. People don’t have time to build, nurture and grow their communities…. I add “radical” to community. Radical community is here defined as a group of people who intentionally come together and are unified toward common goals outside of acquiring property and material wealth. Those goals can be food, shelter, self-governance, public education – all of these things and more happen toward a common purpose which is betterness. Betterness is what we build and who we become out of the ashes of oppressive institutions…

(p 20)

The Radical Community (that Protects and Resists) indeed comes together for a common purpose outside the capitalist norm of acquiring property, and in pursuit of our own notion of ‘betterness’, which is encapsulated in our Vision. We are intentional. 

Sure, our orientation is part internal, and we aspire to aspects of Deep Community. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a community that emphasizes healthy, open and honest internal processes? 

But as a Radical Community we also maintain focus on the external. The forces of the dominant culture infiltrate all living systems, commoditize and destroy them in part and in whole. We are morally obligated not merely to escape their influence, but to oppose them. Radical Communities are oppositional: we’re not content merely to rise from the ashes of oppressive institutions; we actively oppose them in all their forms. An example of a potential oppositional Community is Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), a radical feminist organization dedicated to the total liberation of women. WoLF fights to end male violence, regain reproductive sovereignty, and ultimately dismantle the gender-caste system (http://womensliberationfront.org). WoLF is also an example of a virtual community, focused on protecting women regardless of physical location.

We believe it also true that a Radical Community need not have been formed with radical or oppositional intent; rather, many traditional, geographic-based communities might shift to a radical focus as they recognize the threats to their existence and that of other communities or classes for whom they care. Alternately, it may be that a traditional Community finds it necessary to maintain their original focus and to incorporate a (possibly covert) radical feature to their organizing. Our work is dedicated to them, too.

A Radical Community is not necessarily an effective one, though. We hope we’re not putting too fine a point on things, but we distinguish between the (radical) orientation of a community, and its effectiveness in either managing relationships internally or pursuing its radical orientation externally. On one hand, maybe your community emphasizes internal (process) focus over external, or vice versa. Or perhaps it’s just not coming together well, or is ineffective in realizing its intent, whether stated or implied, of protecting and resisting. What the world needs is Community that is not only committed to internal process as well as radical orientation, but strives for effectiveness in both aspirations. Stay with us, and together we’ll work to figure out how get to where we need to go.

Maureen redux

Did you make it this far, and are you the slightest bit curious? Maureen was up in her bedroom the whole time. She got sleepy and went for a nap.