Reimagined Community

Integrate mutual aid into existing public service ecosystems.

3) Commitment: What is expected of your community members?

Participating in community should involve a set of shared commitments–both amongst participants and between participants and the community group. What does the community group owe its participants? What do the participants expect of the community group? What do participants commit to one ano... See more

What is the ground on which you're standing to make those deeper commitments? And is that ground sturdy enough and resilient enough to bear the weight of the messiness of it all?”

As anyone who's been in a relationship or family unit knows, it's really messy work. The question facing us now is: “How do we build societal structures that can hold that... See more

Proximate, local leadership must be prioritized over distant, centralized control. Relationships, themselves, must be prioritized as essential ends, rather than instrumentalized means toward other ends.

this was probably amongst the biggest challenges to helping US neighborhoods come together: most people don’t have good reasons to meet their neighbors.

The answer, instead, is to do the very opposite of professionalization and technocratization. It is to, as the infinitely quotable Pete Davis recently explained, “promote public participation in governance and civic life” and “do the long-haul work of blurring the line between insiders and outsiders.”

The role of informal, everyday interaction—sometimes unpredictable and serendipitous—should not be underestimated. But this requires a place-based social infrastructure that encourages such interaction. Neighbourhood churches (or other places of worship), religious activities, schools, butcher shops, markets, town squares, beauty parlours, taverns,... See more

deliberately integrating mutual aid into the public service ecosystem can be extremely beneficial. Government agencies can consult with aid networks to learn from their work, involve them in policy design, and collaborate with community groups on outreach efforts.