Local Community

Strong ties like family, close friends, and churches are where ideas are nurtured and meaning is deepened. They are necessary, but limited. Weak ties are how information travels, how opportunities surface, how culture spreads. It is part of why social platforms are powerful. They dramatically increase our number of weak ties.

Strong ties create... See more

Over the last 50 years, people have shifted away from meeting and volunteering regularly in associations and informal gatherings such as support groups and Bible study groups, choosing instead to engage through “checkbook participation,” where we outsource and pay local and national organizations who hire professional staff to do the good works and... See more

Living among different people also deepens empathy. If you grew up alongside refugees, it is harder to fear them. If you recognize the face of the unhoused person on your block, it is harder to dismiss them. Familiarity makes humanity harder to ignore.

For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together. Finland is offering a great example because the Finnish government has sent a letter to all of their citizens warning of future emergencies, whether they’re earthquakes, floods, droughts, or... See more

Humans have always known we cannot survive alone, and that to protect ourselves, we need to persuade others to care about us. We cultivate trusting reciprocal pacts with other people – blood relatives, but also friends and neighbours - through which reassure ourselves we can both care and be cared for, if the necessity strikes. These ties can have... See more

The first thing is shrinking the service area. We serve four neighborhoods — about 8,000 to 12,000 people. If you have too big of a service area, you can't cover it effectively. We ensure that everybody gets access. Access is a big deal. We're aggressively pursuing clients, versus waiting for them to come to us. Some people don't know how to ask... See more

To me, the vision is a civic life that invites all people to have the experience of collective life that we've been talking about. This civic life would involve a set of civic institutions that are accessible to all different kinds of people and offer them the opportunity to participate in the transformative work of engaging with their neighbors.... See more