Thursday, January 22, 2009

Community

This is an essay I wrote about community for one of my classes.



We gather together. Perhaps it's around a table, or in a circle on the floor. We might bring food to share a pot luck and to feed each other. We gather to discuss serious business, or to offer healing and support to one another. We gather to organize ourselves for political reasons. We gather to celebrate ritual. We gather. And in the gathering we begin to coalesce into community. Community. A powerful word evoking so many images and thoughts.
As a displaced farm girl, I came to desire a clearly defined community. I grew up in a Northern rural community alongside the children of the people my parents grew up with. It was not an unusual experience to hear stories of my own childhood from people who could just as easily tell stories about my parents' growing up years. In this community there were events that drew the farmers and townspeople together on a regular basis: the Farmers' Day Picnic, the Boxing Day Dance, the Berwyn Fiesta, the North Peace Stampede. All were events that had been happening since before I was born. They were a steady part of community activities and they allowed a place for people to gather outside of the normal day to day activities to celebrate themselves, their friends, and their history.
Is a community where we live? Is it where we grew up? Can it be intentional? Perhaps it is all of these things. In this paper I will explore more thoroughly the meaning of community. I hope to more closely examine what it means to call oneself a member of a community. I will use my own experiences within a variety of communities to more closely examine my beliefs about community.

The concept of community is not a new one. People have been gathering together for thousands of years for various purposes, and have been doing so in a very “natural” kind of way. Communities seem to serve some benefit for the people that belong to them. Even if individuals do not necessarily recognize the immediate benefit of belonging, usually some benefit is gained.
Increasingly, along with geographical communities, people have been joining together in intentional kinds of communities. We see this particularly in religious communities. My sister and her family belong to an Evangelical Christian community. The people in this community have a strong bond. Many of the members of the community are involved in church activities two or three evenings per week in addition to Sunday attendance in the church. Members form friendships outside of church activities and children begin to play together. Relationship development is strongly encouraged within the community through formalized family groupings. Eventually, community members even marry within the church. This type of community is well structured, with many planned activities led by community leaders.
When my son was young, he attended an alternate school program called “Caraway School”. This was another intentional community. Within the Caraway program, parents became very active participants of the school curriculum. They co-facilitated learning with teachers. They led study groups and field trips. In so doing, the children developed relationships with other parents within the community. Some parents did naturally form friendships with each other, however relationship activities seemed to function primarily within the regular school hours. There were not a lot of planned extra-curricular activities that encouraged relationship development outside of the school. Nor was this seen necessarily as an important function.

Definitions

Communities can be described and defined in a number of different ways. The Funk and Wagnalls Canadian College Dictionary (1989) defines community in the following manner:
“1. A group of people living together or in one locality and subject to the same laws, having common interests, characteristics, etc: a rural community; religious community. 2. The district or area in which they live. 3. The public; society in general. 4. Common ownership or participation. 5. Identity or likeness: community of interests.” (pg 274).
To talk effectively about community, it would seem to be necessary to try to know exactly what one was trying to say. However, the definitions, themselves, can be problematic and restrictive just by the nature of definitions. In Rhetoric and Cultures: Contextualizing Discourse Communities, communities are described as “a group of people who are socially interdependent” (prgph 1); “people who have been able to accept and transcend their differences” (prgph 2); and “group of people lined by a communications structure supporting discussion and collective action” (prgrph 4). They seem to suggest that a community must be one thing or another.
Ife (2002), in his text on community development for social workers, suggests that it's less the definition of what community is and more the mysterious promise of what a community might be that helps us understand its importance in our society (pg 14). He discusses a nation wide study completed in Australia in 1990 that demonstrated that many citizens seemed to be experiencing a loss of what they believed to have been “community” in the past, but that no longer existed. The study seems to suggest that the general population believed that “rebuilding community structures was one of their highest priorities for their future” (pg 14).
Defining a community is less important to me than actually talking about what the function of a community is. As I moved through a couple of different crises in my own life, I found that those people who surrounded me were the ones that I considered to be part of my Spiritual Community. These were the people who brought food and fellowship to my door, and who took me in when I needed comforting. These day to day “duties” of friendship are, perhaps, the substance of a community.
A community is a group of people. It is the individuals that make the community stronger. I was fortunate enough to be present and participant to the formation of my own spiritual community in Edmonton. At that time there were loose affiliations of people doing similar things, but we called ourselves together for a meeting to begin to formally structure a community. In that room, at that time, we allowed ourselves to dream about what we hoped to create – for ourselves, for each other, and for the broader community in both the city and the province.
Over the years of our development, the concept of community has shifted and been recreated in different ways. The lofty goals and dreams have not yet been produced. Some members of the community have withdrawn; conflicts have arisen and been both appropriately and inappropriately dealt with. Those of us that were present at the beginning and continue to be present today are beginning to define our community differently from where we had initially started. Our idealism has been tempered to some degree. This doesn't appear to have been a negative result; instead it's allowed us to view ourselves, and our capabilities with more realism.
What is more evident to me now, however, is that our loose use of the term “community” made room for misinterpretations and misunderstandings. This, in turn, created false expectations for some people. Their needs weren't met, therefore they became disillusioned, frustrated, or angry. Perhaps, if we had recognized this earlier in our formation, we might have lost fewer members.
It is in this realization that I return to the value and importance of a working definition of community. Not one that restricts, but instead, one that allows a group to grow into itself. Perhaps the definition becomes a container; and the container, itself, something that is malleable. The definition grows into the community instead of the community growing into the definition.


References
English 521. (Spring 2002). Rhetoric and Cultures: Contextualizing Discourse Communities. http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/. Retrieved October 27, 2007 from http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~sg7/eng521spring02/communitydefinitions.html
(1989) Funk & Wagnalls Canadian College Dictionary. Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry and Whiteside Limited.
Ife, J. (2002). Community Development: Community-Based Alternatives in an Age of Globalisation, 2nd edition. New South Wales, Australia: Pearson Education Australia Pty Limited.