Community Building
Building Community
Building community is work. A lot of work. A lot of hard work. It requires both individual and communal reflections and accountability. It requires commitment and trust. It requires vulnerability and de-centering of the self. Solidarity is the foundation of co-operation. Co-operation is the foundation of community. We are taken care of as we take care of the community. This is the better world that is possible. It starts with us as individuals changing the way we live our lives. It quite literally is creating a new lifestyle. We are frozen in isolation by capitalism fueled with white supremacy and colonialism. The destruction of community by our society is because community is a threat to the system. We, especially those of us in the belly of the best, have so internalized this isolation that we don’t know how to communicate, we don’t know how to healthily be in conflict, and we don’t know how to be accountable. We cannot be in effective, sustainable, intentional community as individuals until we work through our internalized beliefs and behaviors. And no one is immune to them. Living under capitalism means we have all internalized capitalist beliefs to undo. Living under white supremacy means we all have internalized racist and settler-colonialist beliefs to undo. Living under the patriarchy means we all have internalized sexism and bigotry to undo. The internal work is to challenge how you have been conditioned in your thoughts and values. Community building is challenging that in your actions. It’s not an easy journey. It can be shameful, frustrating, and isolating. That’s why we do it in community. We all grow as community grows. We all survive if community survives. We all thrive if community thrives. The better world that we believe in is a thriving intentional community and it starts with you.
Types of Community
Intentional community is a group of people who come together with an expressed intent and purpose. An affinity group is the core of your intentional community. These are people who share the same values and goals for their community. They are committed to each other in solidarity and trust.
Unintentional community is people connected to each other through unintentional ways - location, race, gender, sex, orientation, ethnicity, economic status, etc.
Local community is the people in your local area. The folks in your neighborhoods, at your kids’ schools. Depending on the area you like in, it could be your block or it could be your whole town. Local community is a form of unintentional community. You are connected to people in your area through geographical location. These communities can be broken down in smaller space - an area of town, a school, or a building.
Other unintentional communities have to do with innate parts of a person that connects with others like us. These connections matter and are important to building an intentional community. We build relationships based on connection, and we build community based on relationships.
For clarity and understanding in this piece, when I am referring to community, I am specifically referring to intentional community. These spaces can be online or in-person, all forms of community and connection are valid.
So when we talk about community roles, we are talking about roles for people who:
- Share a set of values and ideals
- Are working toward the same ends goals
- Voluntarily participate in co-operation and solidarity with each other
Types of Community Roles
Community roles are the spaces where people’s skill sets and abilities are used to support the community. Different roles within the community support different parts of the community and usually a person has multiple roles, depending on their abilities.
Internal Support Roles - these roles are ones that internally support the community; it could be food, administrative, childcare, mental health care, housekeeping. These roles often go unseen and are extremely underappreciated. They are almost some of the most needed roles to fill. What happens publicly cannot happen without these roles. These roles are the core of organizing.
External Support Roles - these roles are ones that will work or crossover with outreach and direct action to help meet external community needs; mutual aid is the biggest part of these roles. Also organizing support for protests, street medics, evacuations, and community defense roles fall under this category. These are organizing roles, but some education can happen in these roles.
Direct Action Roles - these roles are for people ready to take a risk and put their bodies on the line for liberation. They require skill, patience, and training. These are your agitation roles.
Outreach Roles - these roles are for recruiting and teaching; tabling at events, community meetings, connecting with different people and people outside the intentional community with the purpose of education and organizing.
What are some Internal Support Roles?
- Data - collecting, analyzing, helping folks understand it
- Food - organizing meals, cooking, making sure everyone has enough, distribution
- Childcare - during meetings, protests, whenever it is needed
- Communications - watching livestreams, listening to channels, relaying info
- Housekeeping (doing or providing space for) - cleaning, laundry, a safe bed
- Administrative - spreadsheets, documents, some event organizing and calendar management, scheduling for shifts
- Project Management - keeping everyone on task and projects going
- Jail Support - tracking arrests, bail fundraising
- Mental Health Support - making sure folks eat and take meds, checking in, great for mental health professionals to form groups like Therapists for Protesters’ Wellness
What are some External Support Roles?
- Jail Support - bailing people out, waiting for release, rides home
- Mutual Aid - coordination with needs in external community
- Resources - buying water/snacks for protests, gear, crowdfunding
- Communications - car routes, social media, art, propaganda, music, security
- Events - tabling, organizing meetings, organizing protests
- Street Medics - for protests and events, trainings
- Community Defense - car routes, watchers, event security, cop watching, domestic violence support, trainings
- Transportation - to and from events/protests, evacuations, with jail support
- De-escalation
What are some Direct Action Roles?
- Front Lines - physical bodies on the front lines of protests to protect the crowd, black bloc, de-arresting
- Agitation - banner drops, graffiti, wheatpasting/stickering
- Community Defense - cop watching, ICE raids, DV support
- Mutual Aid - meeting needs in external community
- Propaganda - theory, art, music, film, writings, memes, content creation, etc
- Street Medics - assigned medic roles at events, certifications
What are some Outreach Roles?
- Events - community meetings, town halls, film nights, tabling events, book discussions
- Mutual Aid - coordination with needs in the external community
- Propaganda - theory, art, music, film, writings, memes, content creation, etc
- Community Building - connecting with other orgs, networks, external community members
As you can see, there is a lot of overlap in these roles, and more often than not, a person is fulfilling multiple roles at the same time. This list is by no means comprehensive nor a rule set. Each community will have different needs and adjust the roles according to those needs. These needs can also change with time or timing - pivoting to what is needed the most in the moment.
Within an intentional community, you want to have people who can spread out their skills among all the roles needed. As your community grows, you continue to let folk plug in where they feel they best fit. Sometimes this comes with growing pains but not everyone fits where they want to fit. Some of the roles require formal knowledge and training, such as Community Defense or Street Medics. While you don’t want to gatekeep roles, you do want to ensure that someone is capable of fulfilling the role they want to play, so having skill shares and trainings in communities is vital. You want to offer ways for folks to get involved and become a deeper part of the community, providing opportunities for education and growth.
Intentional Community Layers
There are four major layers in Intentional Community:
- Affinity Groups
- Internal Community
- Connected External Community
- External Community
- Affinity Groups
Your affinity group is made up of the core members of your community. People you know and trust. People who are committed to each other. (The term affinity group can also be used to describe your “go to protest together” group and the same things apply in that scenario.) When things fall apart, this is the group that stays together through it all and is the foundation for the intentional community. Affinity groups can start small, 2-3 people, and grow up to 15-20 people. You can be a part of multiple affinity groups as communities network and grow. There can also be multiple affinity groups within a community based on the work they are doing - a direct action affinity group, a mutual aid affinity, a community defense affinity group, etc. You also want to make sure that different support roles are represented in your affinity group - medics, mutual aid, community defense, etc. Especially in a protest setting, you want to make sure you have at least one street medic in a group of five. It is generally good to have medics and security working together, but neither should be on the front lines. There are some tactics for front lines affinity groups that come out of a long, rich history of black bloc and direct action movements.
These are some great resources for affinity groups:
Activist Handbook: Affinity Groups
History is a Weapon: Affinity Groups & Support
- Internal Community
Your internal community is folks who are committed to the same principles and values as you who are voluntarily connected to you doing that work who have all made a commitment to each other and to the community. It’s where all the affinity groups come together to form a community that is built upon a shared worldview and belief system. Having a principles of unity or values is vital in the internal community setting, an understanding of shared responsibility and ownership for the community, accountability within the community, and expectations of how the community interacts within itself and with external communities. This is where the co-operation and solidarity happen. This is where internal support roles happen. This is where people who have made the informed commitment to the intentional community plug into roles and affinity groups. You want to vet people before letting them into an internal community. This can be done through probationary periods of letting them engage in the internal community. People who have moved from external community to connected external community and are doing the internal work are good candidates for the probationary period in community. Folks who have experience but are new to the circle are also good candidates for the probationary period in community. You want people who are going to fit and work well together in your internal community. Sometimes people just don’t fit and that is okay. Ideally this community is diverse in nature, but that can depend on location and external communities. You want to avoid a community that is built on privilege and make sure that any community you are building is focused on centering the needs of the most marginalized and vulnerable in it. Conflicts happen in internal communities and that is okay. Not every conflict is abuse or harm. There are ways to work through them.Accountability is key for where harm does happen. Internal community takes commitment and work. Not everyone is going to fit into your internal community and that is something you will have to come to terms with as you are building.
These are some great resources for building intentional internal communities:
Come Hell or High Water: A Handbook on Collective Process Gone Awry
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
We Will Not Cancel Us And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice
Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Meditation
Building Communities of Care & Liberation
Liberatory Spaces (creating spaces for collective liberation)
Community Liberation Collective
Liberation Newsletter: How to Begin Community Building
The Forge: Liberation “Looks Like Permanently Organized Communities”
Starting Somewhere: Community Organizing for Socially Awkward People
- Connected External Community
Your connected external community is people in your circles that you are actively working to bring into your community. Maybe these are folks who you met at a protest, maybe they are the PTA at school, maybe they are some co-workers you’ve been having conversations with. These are people who you are connected to that need to address some internalized stuff and do some internal work before they are ready to make a commitment to the intentional community. They are folks your outreach and external support roles are focused on. This is where your interactions and conversations are gently nudging people into awareness through relationship building and connections.
This is also where you connect with other intentional communities working together for a common cause. You network and coalition build by connecting with other internal communities. It is also important to have those other intentional community connections in case someone is not a good fit for your community, you have an opportunity to say “I think you might do better over here…” It is also important to maintain connections with other communities to communicate about bad faith actors, abusers, predators, and other harmful people.
These are some great resources for coalition building and organizing with other intentional communities:
Community Catalyst “Strength in Numbers: A Guide to Building Community Coalitions
The Advocacy Workshop: Coalition Building
Commons Library: Coalition Building Start Here
Activist Handbook: Grassroots Organizing
Activist Handbook: What is Coalition Building
Community Organizing 101: How to Start a Social Movement
- External Communities
Everyone else is your external community. Your external communities are the folks around you, whether digitally or physically, that you come in contact with. These are folks you interact with but haven’t built a relationship with. It is also everyone else not in your intentional community. This includes bad faith actors, people ideologically opposed to you, etc. It is entirely up to you how you choose to interact with the external community and in your intentional communities we want to make sure that folks from the external community don’t have an opportunity to cause harm in your spaces. Ideally you are able to create relationships with external community folks to move them into the layers of community, but the reality is that not everyone is ready for that, and some people may never be ready for that. You will have to come to terms with the idea that some people will continue to reject what is best for them in spite of any information you can give them. The important part is to make sure you are utilizing Outreach and External Support roles to give them the option of connection.
Ultimately community building is building for a better world and every single person is responsible for building their community, for themselves and their community.