Community by Necessity

Why you can't buy the village you're looking for

You won’t find community until you truly need it.

When we first moved to the California Gold Country where we would raise our five children, we had absolutely no community. My parents were still in town, but all my siblings were either in college or had moved away. I think my husband and I thought we’d start some sort of intellectual pursuit or book club, and that would be how we’d meet “our people” and find our post-college friends.

What we discovered in short order was that the locals did not take readily to the organized activities we thought would inspire lasting friendships. Instead, we found that community and friendships almost spontaneously arose, without much effort, around necessities.

The concept of necessity or unfilled needs is perhaps easier to see in rural spaces, where there are so few people and resources are stretched thin. My suspicion is that there are actually unfulfilled needs in all of our communities: urban, suburban, and rural alike. We may have trained ourselves not to see them, but these needs that nevertheless stare us in the face might actually be the best basis upon which to build the kind of lasting, energetic communities and friendships we all crave.

For example my husband and I would do a book club or host a Bible study and five to ten people would show up, but if anyone needed help moving across town or if anyone had an illness in the family dozens would show up to help, sometimes without invitation. When we organized a gardening group or outdoor recreation club we would get the usual friend group, minus a few families who were busy that weekend. But if a neighborhood was evacuated due to wildfire, or if someone in town opened a new business, or if a family had a cancer diagnosis, we’d be tripping over the crowds of people trying to help.

We often think the things we do with our extra time—our leisure—are the proper foundation upon which to build community. Most of us would prefer to be known by our pursuits and hobbies, anyway. Not by our needs; it’s uncomfortable needing anything from anyone. But cultivating all our friendships around leisure and hobbies can be a failure to allow other people to share our actual life with us.

What most of us mean by the word “community” is in fact the people we do daily life with. Community is born of necessity; and the strongest communities arise out of the real needs of the various community members. This can be difficult to accept for two reasons: one, because modern American society is based on an unspoken need to never need anyone, and second, because most of our childhood and college friendships were rooted in shared interests, hobbies, and circumstances. The reality of the post-college friend experience is that our friend group is now shaped more by necessity than by leisure. And while this seems a distant second to the school friends and pleasure-based cliques of our youth, the reality of daily-life friendships can be profound.

You will quickly forget who came to the book club, but you will remember who showed up to help you when you really needed it for the rest of your life.

Often people write to me to ask where they can find community. Where can they find a free-standing, pre-fabricated community, complete and functioning and just waiting for newcomers to plug in and benefit? I think perhaps young people who were never part of a big community growing up feel that there are communities existing “somewhere” out there, ready-made, that they can just pay to join. I want one of those. Where is the best one of those?

And to be fair, it is possible to purchase a sort of ready-made community. For example, private schools basically offer a pre-formed community that one can immediately enter and benefit from. Another example would be team or travel sports, particularly in large cities and suburbs. Pay up, plug in, and you can receive everything community has to offer.

Or can you?

There is nothing wrong with private schools and club sports, of course, but do these organizations really offer the type of community that young families are craving? Some of these pay-to-play communities can be so well-rehearsed and transactional that they don’t really allow individual members to form and shape the organization at all. Community requires more of us than consumption, doesn’t it?

We’ve all had that experience of the college campus or high school homecoming game when our class is no longer there, and our time at the school is long over. It’s community-by-nostalgia. It’s still your colors, still your mascot, but the people who were there and who fleshed out the community in your time are gone—and worse—all these strangers have come in and have taken over your place. That awkward feeling of a community that has passed you by speaks to the necessity of the particular people being there, and not just the enduring organization.

These school and sports communities are good at both telling you what you require and fulfilling that specific need. It’s more like a club that you can belong to for a few years while your kids are attending, and then once you age out, the community sort of moves on without you.

What if you’re a young family looking for a more stable, lasting group that will remain with you as your kids grow up, and even after your kids move on? What if you crave the type of community that would notice when your family ages out and you’re no longer there?

The location temptation causes us to think that where we live—red state/blue state, urban suburban rural, etc. will be the determining factor in whether or not we can successfully access a lasting community. But what if the community we seek is not something premade to plug into, but instead something that doesn’t exist until we come around and make it ourselves?

How does one go about “needing things” from people in the 21st century without just being a total failure of an adult? For modern families, American life is sort of set up such that you don’t really need people to do all or most of the things necessary to raise children. If you have enough money, you might never need to rely on community members for child care, food and shelter, or safety, at all.

But most of us don’t have enough money to never need anyone, and further the standard American childhood is now problematic and miserable enough for all involved that we should ask ourselves if buying “everything the child needs to be happy and safe” really amounts to a happy childhood.

There are a few obvious examples that come to mind when we consider needs or necessities of life that are very difficult to buy: the first is obviously friends for ourselves and our children. Private school tuition, safe upscale neighborhoods, and travel sports will certainly put our children in the path of many eligible peers, but these organizations do not necessarily deliver life-long friendships. Is it possible to organize a community around our children’s need to have friends that never age out of the organization that supplies the friendship in the first place? Is it possible to base friendships off of our need to properly launch our teenagers into successful adult life?

Right now the upper middle class script is to send the teenagers away to college to give them skills necessary to be useful to adult society at some point. But what if we could help them to plug in and start to make social connections when they are 15? Could we organize apprenticeships and work groups designed to introduce kids to career and work experiences in our own neighborhood? What if we decided to notice our intense need to create a local community that could make use of our teens while they are still in the home, and what if those bonds and social connections could beckon them back here to plant roots of their own once they finished school?

Or, another example: If we allowed ourselves to see the disrepair and wretched state of our parks and libraries, public spaces and children’s playgrounds, could we organize community and build friendships off of our shared need to revitalize our physical spaces? One of the odd paradoxes of modern American life is that we are so used to having all our needs met, and all our necessities cared for, that we have trained ourselves to ignore things that aren’t as they should be. I think in the past, Americans were more likely to see hollowed out spaces and unsafe public areas as a problem only the local community could solve. There are many reasons we no longer see things that way, but I wonder if our yearning for community and our abandoned public spaces and projects might have some relation to each other?

For most families, childcare and the difficulty of raising young children is our greatest pressing need. How can we give our kids the best childhood possible, and how can we find people to help us do this while we work? When both parents work full time, the reality is that childcare must simply be purchased and plugged into. But if we could spare some time to make connections and build community with other busy families in our neighborhood, I wonder if our shared need for childcare could inspire creative arrangements, pooled resources, or rotating childcare responsibilities that might fill this need more efficiently.

If community was something we made rather than something we bought, would we find that the end result of our social efforts fits our lives and fulfills our needs more completely?