How to build community
We’re keep us safe…but how?
If your social media feeds are anything like mine, at least a couple of times a week you get inundated with messages about the importance of community, especially as the pandemic rages on, people continue to become ill and disabled from long COVID or lose their jobs to mass layoffs, and the violence of colonialism continues relentlessly in the form of multiple genocides around the world, in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo.
At least as often as I’ve seen these cries for community, I’ve also seen a despairing response: How? How do we build community? How do we keep us safe? What are the actual steps?
One of the things that makes my work as a therapist, especially a therapist who is a new solo parent, at all tenable is the community I’ve built over the past several years, which really started to blossom over the course of my pregnancy in ways that I am humbled and moved by daily. My community is not overly large, and it’s not going to save the world — no one group of people is going to do that. It is, however, consistent, and consistently developing. More important, it keeps me feeling safe, loved, supported, and most importantly, it helps me stay connected to hope, even when the chaos and violence of the world threatens to take me under.
