I’ve often wondered what it is that holds a community together — and what being in Community truly means.

I’ve often wondered why it is so very difficult to bring people together to create something novel yet ultimately needed by many — to improve lives, to move the needle, to share experiences and let those who need to hear it, that there is a way through whatever it is they are navigating.

A friend recently said to me that ‘it often feels that we are all shouting past one another.’

I’ve been sitting with this since I first read it imagining what the world might look like if an entire industry of leaders and their organisations only thought so far to shout out into the world, past one another, about themselves; and I can see a world that isn’t too dissimilar and disillusioned than our own.

For a long time, I assumed that Community was simply a neutral term; one that did not hold a specific kind of flavour beyond its existence as a label afforded to the most marginalised and less-privileged in our society.

My parents were told they were part of the ‘Migrant Community’ in the early years of their arrival in Australia from Greece. My friends and I were told we were ‘The Migrant-Community’s Children’ — a neat box for us to be wary of. A boundary clearly marked for us to play within.

Community was for me, both a label and a box. A much nicer and more palatable way of saying that You Don’t Belong Here, But You Belong Over There.

It wasn’t until I was pulled out of the comfort of my own city, that I began to slowly wake up from that early slumber of blissful unknowing. Standing in the middle of a remote-off-island town with my friend Ben about to begin three days of field research, dressed in our City Clothes after a short but roller-coaster flight in a very small plane did the very semblance of Community’s meaning begin to set in. The sun beating down on us in over 40-degree heat late in the day, the humidity creating slow-drip water falls on the sides of our faces as we watched a small group of teens run through their paces in a training drill on the local football ground. Mothers on the sidelines sharing their dinner, children not taller than my thigh, running around admiring, cheering and celebrating friends, relatives and kin.

What I saw and felt was Communal — a kind of togetherness linking people, place and culture. A connection and kinship that ran far deeper than shallow descriptors and labels but something marked with ritual and joy.

Everybody was smiling.

Everybody was together in some way.

Nobody was alone.

Our collective industries and sectors often speak in terms of collaboration and inclusion. Yet, there is a curious paradox at play; the very notion of Community can sometimes be commodified or hollowed out. Reduced to networks, clusters and cliques defined by convenience, trends or transactions. Genuine communal bonds, however, thrive on some else much more interesting and meaningful.

A shared purpose, empathy and an enduring commitment to walk alongside each other; be it surrounded by many, or just a few.

I came came to learn that true Community requires much more than proximity — my colleagues and I have worked dispersed across nations for a decade — and a willingness to listen, seek out our vulnerability and find our willingness to bridge our differences so they might become the thing that holds us together.

Community is slow like a stream that builds itself into the river of Culture. It is messy work to create and build, and to understand and trust, yet it is has an architecture, invisible, that binds us beyond the labels and boxes we were once forced to fit within.

Community is also an act of courage; to step beyond our own self interests and the noise of those that do shout at one another in an effort simply to be heard. It is an an intent-full act to find common ground and if that common ground can’t be found, it is the courage to work together and create it.

It isn’t a label, or a demographic marker. Community is the fabric of Culture and the rituals and stories that create a promise to the next generation; those people that will come after us. Those that are sitting in the office, the audience and the auditorium, looking at us for guidance.

It is the promise of belonging