A Community Network

 Let me describe and idea for you. I’ll start with a question or two. 

In what kind of community do we want to live? Is it a community where we live in isolation, disconnected from our neighbours, commuting in and out of the neighbourhood for work, leisure and meaningful relationships?

I believe most of us would like to live in a community where we feel some kind of connection. Connection is important. Johan Hari in his book Lost Connections lists disconnection from other people as one of nine possible causes of depression.

This idea of a connected community is not some utopian dream where everything is good and there are no problems to solve. It might well be that a given problem is what drives us to connectedness. But we ought not to allow the problems to set the whole agenda. Rather we should strive to become a community defined by what brings us together, what we share, how we enable each other to thrive, to live a good life. 

In their book The Connected Community, Cormac Russell and John McKnight define this good life in terms of local relationships and connections rather than consumerism. Working together as neighbours and communities to create a sustainable and meaningful future. They argue that healthy, thriving communities are built on strong relationships between neighbours. Social connection is not just a “nice to have,” but a key driver of wellbeing, safety, and resilience.

To become a connected community we need to understand:

What we know as a community?

What we have as a community?

What we love as a community?

What we miss and what can we do about it?

As we begin to answer these questions we begin to discover the building blocks of connecting. Things like the gifts, skills, passions, experience and knowledge that residents contribute to the collective well-being of the neighbourhood. Clubs, groups, small local organisations and networks who create the vision and implement the actions required to make their vision come true. 

This is at the heart of the vision for a Community Network. It is: 

A broad association of groups, individuals & services who build community and serve the community.

It’s not a formalised entity and it’s certainly not just a list of people, groups and businesses, important as that may be. It’s about relationships, a loose series of flexible connections the goal of which is to build a connected community where everyone has the opportunity to thrive, contribute to and participate in community life. 

Of course there are lots of things to work through. But remember this is about relationships. It is built upon knowing each other and sharing our passions, gifts and skills. It is a bottom up not top down model of problem solving, an opportunity for creating and care-giving in the neighbourhood. It’s about being connected to one another.

In fact it’s about a shift from being consumers to being citizens of our neighbourhood. Being consumers allows the likes of Amazon, Starbucks and Apple to write our story for us. Becoming citizens gives us the agency to write our own story for our own community.

I grew up in the countryside. When we walked anywhere you listened to the sounds of birds and animals and the occasional car. Then came the Walkman and the iPod. As someone wryly observed: we didn’t know we needed to carry our whole music library with us until Steve Jobs told us we did. 

In his book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, Jon Alexander describes three stories of the self. These are:

The subject story. People were dependent on rulers and a ruling class.

The consumer story. People are independent they became individualistic consumers focused on choice and self-interest.

The citizen story. People are empowered to co-create solutions and build better communities.

This new, emerging narrative challenges the narrative of consumerism and opens the door to participation with creativity, cooperation, and care. Real change can happen when people are trusted, included, and invited to contribute. 

As Alexander puts it:

In order to survive and thrive, we need to step into the Citizen Story. We must see ourselves as Citizens - people who actively shape the world around us, who cultivate meaningful connections to their communities and institutions, who can imagine a different and better life, who care and take responsibility, and who create opportunities for others to do the same.

So where would you start? Let me share an example in which I am personally involved. 

We live on the newest part of an expanding community. There’s a piece of ground that has been left largely untouched for probably the whole period of development. This is because it will come under the Borough Council once adopted. But for now no one looks after it. Well no one until recently. Walking past it I regularly wondered what could be done and by whom.When I found out that it didn’t come under any management and was waiting to be adopted by the council I decided someone ought to do something. So I set off with my lawn mower and began to cut the grass and do a bit of weeding. There are now four of us who are trying to get the weeds sorted and keep the grass cut. 

We don’t do this for any altruistic reason. It just needed some TLC. It’s the same with things like litter. We can all see it and maybe, without looking to outside agencies to do it for us, we could tackle it ourselves. Through these simple, small-scale activities we can build the connections that might take us towards a more connected community.

Now, let your mind wander and think about the things you could do in your community. About how you can write your own story. Think about the things about which you are passionate that could make a difference to your community.

This is being connected. This is the heart and soul of a community network. 

This an adapted version of a piece I wrote for our community website in the UK.