Practicing Community

Discovering and Living Into Our Collective Vision

I wrote last time that we have to “deeply imagine the world we want to live in, and find ways to create it and live into it here and now.”

In my personal version of that exercise, I realized that to regularly encounter joy I have to practice showing up. And that to live in a world where I can be fully myself I have to embrace the emotional work and spiritual practice that frees me from a too-limited view of my own identity and helps me sink roots deep enough to withstand the buffeting of the world’s expectations.

We face a similar challenge as a collective. Nobody I know likes where we are. But until we can collectively imagine and live into something better, we’re stuck here. So how do we do that?

As I wrestled with the question, it struck me that the practices I named actually have collective counterparts and might at least be a way to approach the challenge.

The first practice is simple: we have to show up. All of us.

That doesn’t mean we all have to show up for every protest, take on every letter-writing campaign, sit on every committee, care about every issue. If one of them is yours, by all means show up! But, if not, don’t waste your time doing other people’s work. Find what’s calling to you, what makes you passionate. Show up for that because it is the most direct way for you to live into the future you want.

But it might also help us collectively imagine that future.

In the latest Civic Forum conversation, Adam Przeworski said that “what we need desperately is some kind of a positive vision of the country ... an alternative to what’s going on now and to the conditions which brought the current state about.” Before and after him Sue Stokes and Steven Levitsky spoke of the need to be engaged, to show up for the issues we are passionate about in community with others. At the end Daniel Ziblatt brought the threads together, saying that being engaged and talking with others “is where Adam’s ‘big idea’ of a better future ... comes from.”

In other words, the very practice of showing up can help a common vision emerge even as each of us works to bring our particular vision into existence.

But everyone flinging themselves into their individual passions isn’t enough on its own to bring us to a collective vision and identity. That’s where the second practice comes in.

In Emergent Strategy, adrienne marie brown recalls a poster that hung in the home of Grace Lee Boggs: “Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.”

Just as my ability to grow into my own true identity requires spiritual roots grown through spiritual practice, growing into our collective identity requires building and becoming rooted in community. We can’t create collective identity without the collective.

That collective must be rooted in real relationships, of course: individual people encountering other individual people deeply enough to actually know one another. But even small organizations surprisingly quickly hit a limit to what is possible through direct relationships.

That’s where community organizing comes in.

Building community at scale requires more than just creating relationships. It’s also about creating a story that people connect to even when they can’t all connect to each other, one that both bounds and binds the community.

It’s a story that tells us who and how we are.

But just as my desire “to be fully and unapologetically who I am” implies that I can lose my way, be less than fully myself, perhaps even betray my own identity, the same is true collectively.

This country suffers from just such an identity crisis and has from its inception. Our founding documents offer an inspiring vision for our collective identity. They also embody and create the conditions that betray it. Our country has lived that contradiction ever since. It lies at the heart of our national soul-sickness today. We need a process of healing to allow a better, truer version of ourselves to emerge.

My spiritual director (and former therapist) has a simple instruction for praying: “Show up, tell the truth, and listen.” His therapeutic approach was basically the same.

We already talked about showing up.

Telling the truth is the next critical practice toward healing. We can’t begin to tell a new story about ourselves until we recognize the story we’re in now; we can’t fix what we can’t acknowledge. It seems to me we’ve begun to do that, perhaps more broadly than at any other time in this country’s history. I think the desperation and viciousness of the current backlash is the greatest sign we have of that.

And listen ... What does that mean in a collective context?

An easy interpretation is that we should listen to each other. Sure. We should. Unfortunately, “should” usually gets us nowhere.

I think of community-building as focused on fostering relationships and community organizing as the strategic effort to build the collective story, usually with an eye to using it to focus the power of the collective on creating change. It involves a structured process of listening to individuals and small groups, then reflecting back what was heard for the whole body to hear, gradually building a sense of what’s shared and important in a particular community.¹

This isn’t about any particular organizing framework. It can be used with a variety of frameworks and at different levels, from building relationships and allowing stories to emerge within individual organizations to figuring out ways to connect and carry the process out across coalitions and entire communities. The key is a deliberate, organized cycle of listening, synthesizing, reflecting back, and acting.

That last phase, acting, is critical. It’s important for the obvious reason that the point of community organizing is to create change through action. But it’s also important because acting on the emerging story both brings it further to life and also generates feedback the community can use for ongoing learning and adaptation.

There’s a deep connection between what I’m talking about here and the ecosystem thinking that I’ve written about for much of the past year. The kind of community organizing I envision here is very much about creating the connections and flows that make for a healthy ecosystem, about using story-building as a way both to discover and to foster mutually beneficial relationships and common-cause values, and perhaps most importantly, about creating a framework for effective, adaptive, collective learning, all of which are at the heart of community resilience.

---

A Quick Note

Most of the articles I’ve written over the last few months have been a bit theoretical. I have been trying to work out how to think about creating community resilience and driving systemic change, given the rich insights from energy flow science and socio-ecological resilience science.

Given that I’m still me, you definitely haven’t seen the last of those. But I’m hoping to transition over the next few articles to more practical applications of these ideas. Fingers crossed.

---

Afterthoughts

• Show up, tell the truth, and listen. Much of the way I think about social and personal change has been deeply influenced by the spiritual and therapeutic work I’ve done over many years with Dan Snyder. If you’d like to learn more of his thought directly, I highly recommend his book, Praying in the Dark: Spirituality, Nonviolence, and the Emerging World. The book explores the intersection of spirituality, depth psychology, and strategic nonviolence and offers a model for personal and political transformational change.

• Narrative Change as a Tool for Health Justice. After Asheville passed a reparations resolution in 2020, the Every Black Voice Campaign set out to ensure that the region’s Black community was involved in every step of the reparations process, from imagining to implementation. This excellent article by local leader Rob Thomas describes the project and the importance of sustained investment in community-led data infrastructure to ensure that policy reflects community needs. Not only was the project an interesting example of a process of listening to community voices in order to generate a collective vision, it is timely since the Reparations Commission was officially dissolved this week with no indication of what will happen with the recommendations they developed.

• The Collapse of Oligarchic Capitalism and the Rise of Regenerative Learning. Dr. Sally Goerner is one of the authors of the article on the principles of a resilient social ecosystem that I wrote about in May and that has driven so much of my thinking about building community well-being ever since. In this 2019 paper, she uses the same rules of system vitality to outline a “practical path to building systemic socioeconomic vitality by revitalizing human networks, energizing collective learning, and clarifying why oligarchic capitalism is a distortion of our original democratic free-enterprise dream, which is now careening toward collapse.” I am grateful to Dr. Goerner for allowing me to offer a non-paywalled link to the paper here.

• The Civic Forum Podcast. I have found Rory Truex’s Civic Forum Series an interesting and helpful resource for understanding what is happening in this country. The session referenced above was the concluding session of the live event series, but the conversations will continue as a podcast at the link here.

If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.

1. I have no idea if practitioners would agree with this distinction, but I have found it personally helpful in thinking about how to approach building community at scale.