- Welcoming, accepting, and inclusive
- Helping you up when you make a mistake
- Connection, not competition
- Love, fellowship, mutual support, & sharing food
- Nurturing space of honesty and loyalty
- Mutual care and respect
There is an underlying commonality in these answers, however, something is most definitely missing when a good majority of community members feel a sense of disconnection from their communities. I asked two follow up questions: Does the community you’re in meet your expectations? Why or why not? The answers were as follows:
- Never
- No, I feel unwelcome and unaccepted
- No, I am marginalized and judged
- No, I wish for a community more open minded and tolerant
- Yes, because I have multiple communities and each compensates for the other’s lacking
Interestingly enough, the final answer above was given by men only. The other responses were from multiple women. That made me wonder how influential patriarchy and male privilege/entitlement are in the failing of community environments.
In the 2015 article “What is Community Anyway?” by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, it stated that “…insufficient understanding of what a community is and its role in the lives of people in diverse societies has led to the downfall of many well-intended “community” efforts.”
While the article (found here: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/what_is_community_anyway) is focused on supporting community initiatives, it brings up a good number of points of what is often neglected, further hindering communities today.
These include forgetting that a community is still about the people—the individuals that make up the community, not recognizing where communities overlap, oversight of the fact that communities are created within other communities, neglecting the various formal and informal institutions that communities have developed for themselves, and lastly, not realizing that communities are organized in different ways.
As a child, your community is not one you create, rather it comes from your parents/guardians. It’s your family’s friends and their children. If you’re an immigrant or a refugee, or a child of one, often your community is of the same background. School is where we begin building our own personal communities. It is where we choose our friends, who we want to do group projects with or who we want to hang out with after school. This develops further through social networking—the old fashioned one, where folks actually socialized in a physical network offline.
Communities evolve through experience—individual or collective—and it is through this evolution that awareness is born. But how much power does awareness have on changing communities? And how long does it take? Activists, educators, and survivors have been speaking out for decades on social change, but communities seem to be slow in their evolution, especially the one(s) I grew up in. While we’ve started “addressing” certain stigmatized subjects, implementation efforts and follow through remain superficial and that has long hindered my ability, and many others, to feel fully embraced by our communities.
If I had to define an ideal community, I would define it with an Arabic phrase (بتسند الظهر) that essentially translates to support or has one’s back. A community should be a place of refuge, unity, acceptance, and shared growth. It should consist of openness, respect, and the recognition that it is made up of very diverse people, regardless of the shared characteristics, just like the backbone—different vertebrae, one essential goal. Idealistic? Maybe, but our community is long overdue for its evolution from crab mentality and selfish agendas.
Grief is an incredible indicator of community, specifically how well the community allows its members to grieve, regardless of whether it’s something personal or communal. While human beings share quite a great deal of commonalities, there are plenty of differences that have a right to be respected too. Understanding and implementing this is key for community success. The ways in which people grieve are extremely different. While some prefer the volume and crowd of company for healing, others prefer solitude to process and adjust. At the end of the day a heart knows its optimum coping strategies, any interference or imposition simply becomes stolen grief.
Mastering this requires empathy, not sympathy. Sympathy is essentially why communities are stealing its members’ grief. Sympathy creates an unbalanced power dynamic that reduces those suffering from grief to a “less than” status from those “offering” their services. Being there for someone is NEVER about you, it is about the person or persons you are supposedly there for. It is about working hard to listen to what those suffering need and what they desire. Imposing your presence, your words, your food, your coping mechanisms, are all perfect examples of how not to be there for someone. Just because you may desire someone to cook for you or be by your side, does not mean someone else wants the same.
Another factor to properly being there for others is understanding that it is not conditional. By this I mean, you cannot be absent from people’s lives during their times of light and success, and then expect to be welcome during their times of darkness and turmoil. This I emphasize immensely as my family and I experience it firsthand. It is utterly strange to us that people who turned their backs on each of us during times when we needed community to encourage our hard work, are now suddenly flooding our space, claiming to be longstanding beloved supporters. Grief can bring out very vivid truths, so to those enduring it I say be prepared.
Community can often stifle and steal more than grief so I write this in hopes that my generation does not repeat the cycles of what it has gone through. We deserve better communities, especially in such aching times socially, culturally, religiously, politically, and always personally. Community is where we should find our backbone, our strength, to keep going in this world.
However, when communities fail to offer that, we seek human connection through smaller groups. I am immensely grateful to the handful of villages I built in the failures of my communities, especially now in my time of grief. This year I chose to be even more vigilant of who I surround myself with and honestly it has been incredible. Reduce your social spheres, it will enhance your social experience. You become more conscious of your surroundings. You feel safe expressing your truths. You are understood, accepted, and rarely judged. And most importantly, a culture of mutual respect is developed.
Do not use your remedy on my wounds / I am not you. I wrote this a few years back and I stand by it just as strongly now as I did then. This is the epitome of community, especially in grief, recognizing the many diverse wounds, and then working to create the multifaceted remedies (plural) to heal and strengthen the people who house those wounds. Until then, our communities will remain fractured, further producing alienated members, carrying a facade of unity.
