Building Community

These are the most vital elements of community building:

1. Shared sense of place
2. Willingness to connect and engage fellow community members
3. Belonging actively to two or three local organizations
1. Church
2. Neighborhood organization, HOA, etc.
3. Special interest group

                                                              i.      Political

                                                            ii.      Social

                                                          iii.      Charitable

4. Passionate about education excellence and life long learning
5. Walkable neighborhoods and shopping districts
6. Housing access that is need driven, not want driven
7. Shared sense of future for the community

 Those are my magic seven elements for community building. In my gut I feel that if these seven things are working well and engaged by a large cross section of the community, the community will live well, prosper and grow well and happily into the future.

On the opposite side of the coin if any of these seven are missing or seriously misfiring, then that community has problems to attend to. And that is not all bad. Identifying a problem and agreeing on its scope and definition is an engaging task for a community. That is the beginning of strengthening the community in the first place.

Left alone to worsen over time, however, and you get sick communities that cannot manage the major challenges they will surely meet.

When I think back on the towns, cities and village in which I lived over the past 70+ years, I think kindly on most of them. Pasadena/Altadena, California was a pleasant place with an urban feel but also a heavy concentration on single family homes, foothill neighborhoods and gorgeous weather. Big city advantages were available for the most part in downtown Pasadena. I don’t recall any downtown Altadena but there were some commercial areas in various neighborhoods. Of course the bounty of the Los Angeles metro area was at hand for us to explore whatever we needed.

In other California towns, Glendora stood out as a small self contained community with a vastly changing culture. Small but then facing major growth of suburban sprawl, Glendora was soon transformed into a major commuting suburb in the LA Basin nestled up against the San Gabriel Mountains and Mount Baldy. Inyokern in the Mojave Desert was a manufactured town in the middle of nowhere to satisfy Naval defense research needs, and that’s why we were there for nearly 3 years. A base on a dried up lake bed (China Lake) was where we actually lived. I didn’t get much sense of community there, but then I then I was a tot at the time!

Pittsfield, Massachusetts, however, was a major culture shock to my system. We moved there when I was 11. The town was actually a city in the Western part of the state in the Berkshire Hills. Boston was 120 miles to our east; New York City was 150 miles to our south. And those two megalopolises shared their burgeoning populations with us on weekends the year round – skiing, summer stock theater, summer home of the Boston Symphony, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Theater, South Mountain Music Center, and all the rest. A town of 50,000 then (now only 30,000+) was the home of major defense industry players, mostly GE, but also manufacturing of electrical hardware, transformers and the like. The county was also home to several insurance companies and financial institutions.

Pittsfield was founded in the late 1600’s and its history is legend to its denizens. There is definitely a sense of place. Their problem was actively building a community that would sustain itself economically. Today it is severely recessed and unable to retain younger generations.

Syracuse, New York was our next community and it was much more urban and suburban. Glorious scenery and vistas were readily available on a short Sunday drive. But once again, major corporate employers held sway for too long while local leaders assumed they would remain forever. They didn’t because economics became global, higher tech, smarter manufacturing took over in micro factories, and the world of brains and shared interdisciplinary thinking occurred in places far removed from Syracuse. Today it is a recessed area struggling to survive.

Illinois was my next journey’s stop but with several communities. Living in each of them I noted an inadequate commitment to public education, no realization that education was a life long enterprise for each of us, and housing stocks simply didn’t keep up with the needs of people. This is an economic issue, of course, in the main, but it is also a question of determining what a household needs as opposed to what it wants. Class distinctions always seem to provide the ‘want’ category of housing, but it wastes resources that would better be used on building vital communities.

Today it is clear that a successful community is one that provides walkable neighborhoods and an engaged, active citizenry. Without those elements we don’t get to know and understand each other. Once that is in place we can tackle just about anything, starting with education. Our kids must be socialized and educated so they are able to take their place in the communities of their future. Along the way we must provide for them the skills to learn and adapt to the inevitable changes that will affect their lives. We know that because we faced inevitable changes to which we had to adapt. If we didn’t we experienced job loss, declining financial household income, lower standards of living and a declining sense of self. The latter is the death knell of any community if it is wide spread enough. 

I wonder how well our communities are doing these days? Perhaps we should measure them? And yours?

July 7, 2016