Dreaming of Community

I dare you to spend time thinking about and dreaming of community – how do you define community? who would be a part of it? how would you spend time with one another? what would wealth redistribution look like? how would you practice care?

N’Deye Oumou Sylla

I had three “ah ha” moments in July 2024 about my community building:

Chatting with my Accountability Group
Chatting with new pal Haley about the meetups I host
Participating in the Imagined Futures exercise at a KAIROS event

My biggest goal (and life purpose) is to build community, aka offer consistent space and time for folks to come together and add to their circle of acquaintance. I talk to A-Club about this a lot. Talking it out is helping me figure it out.

Haley specifically asked if there were regulars who come to multiple events I host. Yes! But her next question stumped me.

“Would any of them drive you to the hospital in an emergency?”

I said no…well, maybe one.

I explained my confusion with how friendships are maintained, how people interact in their closeness. And she said: “maybe that’s why you do what you do.”

In the Imagined Futures exercise we were directed to cast our ideas of an ideal climate future. To choose a specific time and place and write a story about a character, considering the society, people and technology that could be there. I imagined my son 30 years from now, living in what I consider an ideal neighbourhood and community of people.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I answered a lot of questions from the quote above in my brainstorming.

IMAGINING AN IDEAL FUTURE

Using the story that I built, here are my answers.

How would you spend time with one another? I envisioned a future where my son volunteers around the community while he isn’t working on his own projects. He helps out at the garden – not as a gardener, but using his mechanical skills on the water system. He fixes and rebuilds gaming systems, and works with the kids in the community to pass along these skills.

What would wealth redistribution look like? I hope that in 30 years we have abandoned the current economic system and the way we distributing wealth is already more equalized. In my story, I started to write about communal gardens and food sharing, skill sharing and positive unpaid labour.

How would you practice care? Care is as small as holding the bus for a neighbour as they run to catch it, or driving a friend to their chemo appointment. Care gets really significant when you can practice it for folks who are not your direct friends or family members.

How do you define community? Community are the people on my street and in my neighbourhood, but they are also the people I work with, ride the bus with and see at the grocery store every week. These folks are of every age, orientation, ability and background. And they are each equally valued for their contributions, however that is shaped. Community is intersecting groups of people that we should be able to rely on for big or small acts of care.

These answers and ideas will continue to grow as I grow. But it was exciting to push out the timeline and envision the potential for the work I am doing now. I know I sound ike a broken record, but the way things are going now proves to me that unless we make some serious changes our future is going to be very difficult. But it can still be filled with care and fun. And we are going to need the community we are building now to get us there.

FRIENDSHIPS VS. COMMUNITY BUILDING

I continue attempting to express and explain my lack of understanding of friendship maintenance. Some folks seem to do it so effortlessly – maintain friendships that is – and I cannot see how. It is smoke and mirrors for my brain.

Like math.

But community building is not the same as friendship.

Perhaps I can unlock the code of friendships, but in the meantime I will continue to dream of and build a community of caring people who can rely on each other in the hard times.

Dreaming of Community