The communities we need and can build right now!
Our communities are key to our future. It’s in our communities where we experience upheavals, both societal and ecological. Communities are places where we can learn, adapt, and transform.
Our communities are key to our future. It’s in our communities where we experience upheavals, both societal and ecological. Communities are places where we can learn, adapt, and transform. For that to be possible, they need to be completely different.
To meet our challenges, we need different communities
Once you become a parent, you realize you need another social network. The massive transformation from being a couple to being a family touches almost all aspects of your life. And that internal change needs an external change, too: the friend overseas you used to talk to frequently won’t be able to hold your baby when you need an urgent nap.
Humanity is in the midst of a similar transformation, one that touches all aspects of our lives and demands another form of community. Climate change dramatically alters our landscape in some areas. This has a local effect, touching communities and economies, and also a global one, altering agriculture and food production, chains of production, global trade, and policy making. Our current economic model, with high international dependencies, simply falls apart, and with it, the political sphere that’s built upon that economy.
Now, societally, we aren’t able to deal with that. Our political systems are incapable of creating a shared understanding and finding solutions; instead, they create more problems. Our social fabric creates dependence, sickness, and helplessness instead of agency and self-leadership.
Three essential criteria for community-building
In this situation, we have a choice. We can wait until we are forced to act, or we can deliberately prepare ourselves and create new communities that differ from existing ones in three essential ways:
They are transformative. Those communities are a place to experiment, because we will need to find new ways of learning, working, making decisions, and producing food, and new ways of creating a culture of agency, self-leadership, and curiosity.
They are healing, both for nature and for us. They regenerate nature by shifting our worldview from one of scarcity to one of abundance, and they help us heal ourselves by overcoming our fragmentation, polarization, and collective trauma.
They are integrating local communities, built with and among the people who share a place and a time, built on difference and diversity, allowing anyone to follow their own path and their true calling.
The task ahead
Humanity can create intentional communities around a belief or an idea. But we have yet to create intentional communities that go beyond exclusion and integrate everyone who’s there. That’s the task ahead, and it’s an excellent opportunity for individuals, communities, and humanity to thrive.