Cultivate Community

A Guide to Tending Digital Spaces

Ashley Lin

• Éditeur: New Degree Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781636764610
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Organisational Behaviour

Did you know 64% of Gen Zers and millennials feel better understood by the specialized online communities than by their family and real-world friends?

Today, more people seek connection online, but not every online group flourishes. As a community builder, you can't just throw people in a group chat and hope community will magically form. Digital communities are like gardens that need careful tending; one results in beautiful flowers and the other offers a space where members are understood, nurtured and embraced.

Tending communities is no easy task. It requires time, energy, and hard work but, like gardening, it's a skill that can be learned. Cultivate Community explains the step-by-step process for how anyone can create digital spaces they need and want to see.

In this book, you will explore:

• Why digital-first communities are necessary complements to in-person ones
• What structures, processes, and cultures the best communities share, including provocations like "lead with love, " "decentralize power, " and community as a garden
• How you start your own community or help existing groups become more community-spirited

Ashley Lin's Cultivate Community reminds us that we all have the ability to create flourishing digital-first communities in our own lives-and discover our power to change the world.

Part 1. The Case for Digital Communities

1.1

DEFINITION OF COMMUNITY

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“Some people think they are in community, but they are only in proximity. True community requires commitment and openness. It is a willingness to extend yourself to encounter and know the other.”

—David Spangler

Like many young people, I’ve spent most of my life trying to figure out where I belong, how I contribute, and why it all matters. I didn’t realize there was a term associated with the things I was looking for: community.

Merriam-Webster defines community as “people with common interests living in a particular area.” Growing up, I closely followed this definition and thought community was people who lived close to me—a belief reinforced through my exposure to local community service activities such as picking up trash on nearby hiking trails, planting trees in city parks, and delivering meals for seniors in the neighborhood.

As I was having conversations while making this book, one student I spoke with asked, “What even is community building? Is it like building houses?”

This mindset isn’t uncommon—and if it’s where you’re at right now, you’re not alone. Community seems like it’s used to describe all sorts of things. It’s a pretty word, but also pretty vague and sometimes just plain confusing. It’s also hard because as you see above, community means different things to different people.

Here’s my understanding of community: a group of people who build power together through belonging and mutual care.

Using this definition, I’ll show you community is more than a plot of land or building houses. It’s even more than a group of people with a common goal or shared identity. Digital technologies change what it means to be local and allow us to connect whenever, wherever, with people and experiences previously out of reach. It is critical for us to expand the meaning of community, in order to tap into its full potential to bring people together and help them achieve much more than they would’ve been able to alone.

* * *

It’s an understatement to say my personal definition of community has evolved over time, as I’m sure yours have as well.

My own definition started to shift from people who live close to me to people who look like me in middle school. I’d always attended Sunday Chinese School, and as a child, hung out a lot with my parents’ friends—who also happened to be Taiwanese immigrants. Naturally, in sixth grade when I had to find people to sit with at lunch, I gravitated toward others who looked like me.

In high school, community became people who did things with me. My high school has over 2,000 students and over thirty clubs and organizations on campus. In ninth grade, I signed up for everything: STEM Club, Key Club, Interact Club, Future Business Leaders of America, and more. I started feeling a lot more connected to fellow club members than “other Taiwanese immigrants in Vancouver, WA.” Participation in school clubs prompted me to realize a community isn’t just a collection of people with a common geographical location or cultural identity. Deeper forces are at work to create a sense of belonging, which doesn’t just magically appear; people have to do things together. Through club meetings, service projects, pizza parties, and more, the practices we engage in spark connections of trust and care.

During my junior year of high school, my definition of community changed yet again: the group of people I invite into my life. Up until this point, I largely believed communities could only form in-real-life. But during junior year, I wasn’t at school much due to traveling for meetings and conferences. As a result, I stepped back from a lot of school clubs and the communities I had found within them. It wasn’t a surprise the sense of closeness I felt rapidly deteriorated. After all, I wasn’t seeing people in person every day anymore.

What did surprise me is how I was able to find other communities online to fill the gaps without ever having in-real-life club meetings and pizza parties.

I joined #BuiltByGirls, a Slack community of over 2,000 female and non-binary young people interested in careers in tech and social impact. I found myself spending hours in the #girls-building-now and #you-glow-girl channels, where I was able to support and team up with people—something I previously believed could only be done in-person. When I was intentional about caring for others, even online, I was able to recreate intimate community.

This revelation was exciting to me. Suddenly, I could belong to so many more communities! My experience greatly contrasted the traditional definition of community as a plot of land.

Finally, the most recent shift in my perception of community came in March 2020. To be honest, I didn’t think much about community before COVID-19. Did you? For many of us, community was always there, something that kind of just happened. In-person connections of convenience, from bumping into people in hallways to spontaneous conversations at lunch, allowed us to get to know each other and facilitated deeper relationships over time. Where community bloomed, it was beautiful. Where it didn’t form… no biggie, right? We can suck it up and make it through a lifeless club meeting or two.

But COVID made me realize it was a biggie, and we can’t afford to cross our fingers and hope community magically forms on its own—especially online, where it’s even more unlikely to happen. Online communities are completely opt-in, and because people aren’t required to be in them like school or work, it’s impossible for communities to accidentally blossom. Furthermore, social distancing exacerbated difficult emotions people grapple with, like feeling lonely, out of place, or ignored. The pandemic made it impossible to continue pushing these feelings under the rug. Instead, it called for new digital community structures and processes that helped us become aware of what the people around us are going through.

We could no longer ignore the importance and significance of being part of flourishing communities.

And community isn’t just about the well-being of individuals. Many of them exist to tackle real problems and injustices. But how can we make an impact when every community member is not adequately cared for and supported? How can we make the world a better place if our own community isn’t flourishing?

Community building starts with creating a culture where every community member feels connected, supported, and empowered. In the process of helping people discover and hone their gifts, we realize community building is about building power in people. It’s showing that by pooling together our resources and making decisions together, we can take care of each other and the world around us.

Dustin Liu, the ninth Youth Observer to the United Nations, once told me, “A community that’s very strong for me is one where I can bring my full self. Making people feel special, making people feel seen, and making people feel heard is just so crucial.” Communities should help people feel as though they are growing with each other into the best versions of themselves. By doing so, positive communities help people realize their full potential and be of service to the world.

This is the arc that shaped my understanding of community: people who live close to me → people who look like me → people who do things with me → people I invite into my life → people who make me feel powerful through a sense of belonging and mutual care.

Whereas my definition of community used to be limited by geography and identity, I’ve realized community is about caring spaces that enable me to grow into my authentic self.

* * *

Interestingly, this definition forces us to realize many of the “communities” we belong to are less community-like than we expect.

Ruqaiyah Angeles is a Muslim Filipino woman and a computer science student at San Francisco State University, passionate about increasing representation within the tech industry. She recognized early on the importance of community between people of color, women-identifying folks, and other marginalized people in STEAM. As a result, Ruqaiyah relentlessly searched for spaces where she could meet like-minded people with similar aspirations and vision for the future.

When I first came across Ruqaiyah’s LinkedIn profile, I was intrigued by the sheer number of online communities she belonged to. In her search for belonging and solidarity as an underrepresented person in the tech space, Ruqaiyah had amassed a number of roles—almost all of which had the word “community” somewhere in the title or job description.

I could see why Ruqaiyah found these organizations so attractive. They had bold visions, such as “to connect, inspire, and empower girls in STEAM” and “to build wealth and prosperity in diverse communities through jobs in technology.” It seemed these were places where she could find her people. By calling the group a “community,” these organizations promised care and belonging—something many weren’t prepared to offer.

This became clear within the first few minutes of my conversation with Ruqaiyah, who described one of the organizations: “As far as virtual community goes, it’s very one-sided. They kind of lecture, lecture, lecture, talk, talk, talk. It’s not necessarily a collaborative thing. During meetings and other big events, the community is very dictatorship-like.”

This completely blew my mind. It confused me how community and dictatorship could describe the same organization and how community could ever be a one-sided thing.

Why did Ruqaiyah feel like this was a community? It was the idea people with a common interest came together in one place—online. This understanding was similar to what I thought community meant before I experienced the connection that comes from doing meaningful things together. Ruqaiyah reached a similar conclusion: Just because people are in one place, associate with the same identity group, or label themselves a “community,” it doesn’t mean connections magically emerge. Connections on a deeper level require work, no matter how many “things in common” people start out with.

From a marketing perspective, “community” is sometimes substituted for groups with demographic similarities. Fabian Pfortmüller is the founder and CEO of the Together Institute, an organization dedicated to building healthy, caring, and impactful communities. He notes “the term ‘community’ is really hot in the sales, marketing, and events spaces, because it alludes to more than just a transactional customer-company relationship.” Tacking on the community label to products and experiences provides a sense of cohesion and good intention.

The term community is similarly hot in the youth changemaking space because it alludes to more than just a transactional student-organization relationship. In a world where students often start organizations for clout, calling something a community softens and adds a positive connotation. You can even see this phenomenon in how we describe our schools: I’m not just a student; I’m part of the learning community at Union High School. See how that leveled it up?

Fabian believes when most people say “community,” they mean “a series of monthly events, a Facebook page, a group of customers that has loyalty toward a specific brand, a yearly conference, all social media followers, everyone who uses Twitter, people who happen to vote the same way.” The incorrect use of community has immense repercussions. We end up promising things we can’t provide, which leaves community members feeling disillusioned by the idea and even a bit betrayed. The more we use it incorrectly, the more “community” loses its meaning.

In the case of most youth-led nonprofits, clubs, and friend groups, this deceit isn’t intentional. Most people want to do good, but simply don’t know how to create spaces of belonging and power, or what structures and practices they can adopt to do so. As a result, many groups and organizations never become true communities and realize their full potential.

Ruqaiyah told me about a few more “communities” she was a part of: “It’s very much run by the people who started it. Everyone else kind of jumps in and out whenever they want to.” For another one, she said, “It’s a community as far as everybody’s down to support and help out and be a part of things… but we don’t talk to each other really.” Almost as an afterthought, Ruqaiyah asked, “Does that make sense?”

She paused a bit, and with a slight shake of her head, answered her own question. Communities can’t form if people don’t even talk to each other.

* * *

There is a growing problem where we call things communities, even when they’re not. Part of it is a simple misunderstanding of what community is. I’ve spoken with dozens of people in quasi-communities, who share it’s hard to know whether you’ve discovered a real community if you haven’t personally experienced one before. Instead, anything that involves shared identity is now a community, even if it doesn’t cultivate a sense of belonging or collective power.

This begs the question: What do thriving digital communities look like? How do we create them?

Before we dive into the step-by-step “how to build community” section, I want to share two different stories of people who have redefined community and created the online spaces they need. We’ll explore the themes in these stories—creating space, giving people real power, small experiments to foster community spirit—in later chapters. For now, let these stories spark your questions and ideas about how the different components all fit together.

First, the rest of Ruqaiyah’s story.

As she continued traversi...

Table des matières

• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1. The Case for Digital Communities
• Part 2. Starting & Scaling Digital Communities
• Part 3. The Path to Digital Communities
• Acknowledgements
• Appendix