A letter to companies, societies, and DAOs:
Get up, go to your job working together to provide solutions to people’s problems; lunchtime arrives, check in with your book club forum to drop a few literary first impressions; end of the workday and it’s time for drinks with your friendship group; maybe on the weekend you’re doing some volunteering, or playing for a local sports team.
Our lives are a constant journey between communities. They change the world for the better – even if it’s as simple as building friendships and social capital between members of a boardgame club. A lack of quality communities is a sure-fire route to social isolation and loneliness. In the UK, research by The Big Lunch initiative found that disconnected communities are costing the UK economy £32 Billion every year.
So, how do you as an individual find community and all the social rewards that it brings, and how can we all as potential community builders form communities that bring people together?
The theory
A foundational model of community comes from David McMillan and David Chavis in a 1986 study. They suggest that a ‘sense of community’ relies upon four factors: membership, influence, reinforcement, and emotional connection.
‘Membership’ means knowing you are part of a community. ‘Emotional connection’ pertains to the feelings evoked by this membership. These two ideas can be summarised as ‘belonging’.
‘Influence’ refers to your ability to make a difference within the group, while ‘reintegration’ is about meeting members’ needs by providing useful ways to participate. These two concepts combine in a community’s ‘purpose’.
Ultimately, healthy community boils down to these two ingredients: purpose and belonging.
Creating Purpose
Purpose provides direction and form. It’s impetus for individuals to become involved in something larger: from discussing the novels of Sally Rooney, to organising clothing for refugees. A community’s rituals and rules develop to serve its purpose.
Even if it’s yet to be verbalised, most communities have an implicit purpose already, but it pays to pin down what that purpose is. According to Fethr Founder and CEO Julian Issa, ‘by allowing a well-thought community mission statement to shape your membership, people tend to feel more at home’. By being as specific as possible you strengthen your community because those people who fit the tight criteria are going to truly believe the community is for them. When you have a good handle on the purpose of your community, continue dialogue to ensure that experiences within the community feel universally consistent with the stated purpose.
In this way, every member of your community will be continuously driving it towards its purpose. To incentivise this, a community’s strongest advocates should feel like they get back what they put in. It could be a seat at the table when decisions are made; it could be financial recognition of good work done; it could be as simple as recognising and appreciating when somebody goes above and beyond.
Creating Belonging
Paradoxically, belonging starts with exclusion. Barack Obama’s aunt once told him, ‘if everyone is family, no one is family’; communities must be selective to ensure that members feel like they belong to something with definition. Having gatekeepers and community rules ensures that this identity is maintained.
But the delineation of community should be intentional. Don’t allow people to settle into what they expect a D&D club or church group to be. Random dress codes. Rules that encourage off-the-wall conversations. By encouraging quirky traditions or replacing standard etiquette with a whimsical set of rules you shock people out of stale conventions into a more meaningful culture of interaction. Belonging to a unique community becomes a mode of self-discovery rather than merely ‘fitting in’.
Ultimately, shared passions and purposes that bring people together in community should be cemented by emotional bonds. According to community building expert Jono Bacon, this relies on radical trust between people. In The Art of Community he writes that community builders should be ‘an accessible, approachable, sensitive person, and trust is required for any of these roles.’ Friendships deepen only when people feel comfortable showing vulnerability.
According to psychiatrist Scott Peck, when a group first meets in what he calls ‘pseudocommunity’ they present their most friendly and sanitised personas. But as they begin to trust one another they move through ‘chaos’ and the revealing of their ‘shadow selves’ before finally achieving ‘true community’ where popularity is foregone for the sake of truly hearing and helping one another. In this way, belonging means a safe space for conflict and diversity rather than superficial harmony and homogeneity.
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