What does community care look like? (Part one)

Better worlds start here.

Head’s up before we begin: this is a longer one, but an important one. If you’d prefer, you can listen to it as audio, but there are some great resources linked in the main text.

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The why of community

My sister had very speedily scheduled knee-surgery recently: she had just days to figure out how she was going to get home from the hospital, get her meds, eat, etc. Often this kind of caregiving falls to a partner, but she doesn’t have one at the moment. No matter, though, she had a lineup of friends and family ready to help with all the logistics of healing. I took over from a friend who brought her home from the hospital, picked up her meds at the pharmacy, and brought her ice cream. As I was leaving from my shift as “night nurse,” two of her friends showed up at 7 a.m. with baked goods and good cheer, and it really warmed my heart. She asked, and her community answered.

You may be thinking, What does this have to do with the environment? A few things:

1. With every year that passes it becomes more apparent that we’ll see more climate chaos in our lifetimes, not less, and when it comes to dealing with trouble on the ground, your personal networks will be far more immediately useful than big institutions. As political regimes shift, and with them their priorities, our local support networks are also a source of security.

2. People who are in community make great things happen, and those things can often have ecological benefits.

3. People who have their basic needs met can turn their attention to bigger issues. If we are cared for we have more care to give.

4. And, perhaps most importantly, bringing care and reciprocity to our human relationships may open our eyes to the way we should do the same for all living beings, what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls getting in right relationship with the land.

Ultimately caring for the environment isn’t just about substitutions or hacks or boycotts or protesting (though I love all of those things), it’s about shifting our worldview away from disconnection, extraction, and short-termism toward connection, reciprocity, and long-term thinking.

It is painfully evident that the dominant Western culture is what psycholanalyst Sally Weintrobe calls “a culture of uncare,” which promotes short-sightedness and self-serving choices. We see this in all the decisions that sacrifice the future for the comfort of the present, forsake fellow humans to disaster zones, in the ways we may numb ourselves to the suffering we see, whether it’s victims of a genocide or an unhoused person lying on a street grate. This culture of uncare is fuelled by late-stage capitalism, by the toxic individualism of the American dream, the erosion of safety nets, the atomization of the nuclear family. Our dominant culture divides us, says we must do it on our own, protect our own, that we are all islands in the churning, rising seas.

Even if we are islands, that doesn’t mean we’re alone: we can build bridges, make boats, send supplies and messages; we can work for the benefit of all.

“In a world that is breaking down our connections, isolating us, and sub-siloing us to death, life-giving relationships are our best hope,” write Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes in Let This Radicalize You. And in her tiny but absolutely essential book The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, “The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods.”

Obstacles to community building

If we want to move from a culture of uncare to a culture of care, what does that look like? How do we do it? And how do we prevent it from being one more draining item on our endless to-do lists?

First we should acknowledge that for many, notably those who are racialized, disabled, and/or queer, community care is a long-established norm — something that’s essential to survival under the collective abandonment of the dominant culture. People are already doing this. Some of the wisdom I’m sharing comes from those communities, and I’m grateful for the ways they have tended this vital flame.

Another caveat: for some, taking on more care may not feel sustainable. Care work still disproportionately falls on women/femmes, and it is chronically undersupported and underappreciated. If, like in Iceland in 1975, women refused to perform their paid and unpaid labour, everyday life would grind to halt and chaos would reign. (I’M READY FOR IT. CALL ME.) For those forced into care work, often due to race and/or socioeconomic status, additional caring may seem abhorrent. And sometimes we are in a phase of disability or illness where caring for anyone else seems impossible. Don’t worry, the goal isn’t to add more labour, but to redistribute it and add more caring people into our personal networks. Writer and disability activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls for “care webs” that bring together many people to offer care in ways that aren’t strictly reciprocal or transactional.

It’s important to note, too, that care takes many forms and doesn’t always require physical presence/labour. Helping someone research therapists or writing emails to a landlord is also vital care work, and may be something you are more able to give.

Rather than overloading people who already do a disproportionate amount of caring, the idea is for more people to share care in different forms and contexts, what Piepzna-Samarasinha summarizes as “more care, more of the time.” In their book Care Work, they propose a “fair trade care economics” and compare it to permaculture, noting,

The more systems are not monoculture, the more sustainable they will be. The more there are a lot of different kinds of folks giving and receiving different kinds of care, the more there’s room for boundaries, ebbs and flows, people tapping out, and people moving up. Crips and nonnormative people have a lot of different gifts to offer, and normals and ableds often assume not only that we have nothing to offer, but that we can only be (patronizingly and abusively) cared for. But care doesn’t have to be one way. It can become an ongoing responsive ecosystem, where what is grown responds to need.

This kind of responsive care ecosystem is not a silver bullet for all of our problems, and it won’t be without challenges, but it should give more than it takes, and down the road it may be increasingly critical to our well-being and even survival.

The how of community

This is a huge topic, so I’ve divided it into two parts (the second will be covered in a later newsy):

1. strengthening the relationships we already have outside of the household unit, because why not start somewhere we have a head start?

2. expanding our circles of care even to people we don’t know.

I’m including as many practical resources and examples as possible to help us implement these strategies. Because principles aren’t of much use if we don’t know how to act on them.

Powering up our friendships

When things are good

1. Make hanging out a recurring event. If you make something a regular event, there’s no scheduling dance to do, no decisions to make, and generally lower standards around how “special” anything has to be. That might be drop-in pasta night every Wednesday, a phone call on Sunday mornings, or standing playdates at alternating houses (so rotating parents get a break), once a month art-making or book club. If you want to prioritize non-nuclear relationships, make them a priority in your schedule.

2. Connect more outside of screens. Be in the same physical space, or, if distance is an issue, try a phone or video call. Relationships are born of time + proximity. (A 2018 study out of University of Kansas found adults need an average of 94 hours together to go from acquaintances to casual friends, 164 hours to go from casual friends to friends, and another 100 hours to climb the summit of best friends.) Maybe you feel time poor, but you can catch up with someone while driving, running errands, folding laundry, or watching kids play. Not all quality time has to be something that is super memorable.

3. Practise asking for help. Most of us are more comfortable offering help than asking for it, but everyone needs help sometimes. You don’t have to be clinging to a piece of the Titanic in the icy Atlantic waters to ask for help. (And we all know Jack really should have asked to climb on that bit of ship.) Most people, in fact, like helping, and opportunities to care for one another are stitches in the quilts of our relationships. Your being vulnerable may inspire other people to do the same. RESOURCE: Get good guidance on helping specific people and define how they can help you by filling out a personal care guide and asking a friend or friend group to do the same and share the answers. Try the template shared by Anne Helen Petersen & Asking for a Frond. Make a copy to adapt it for yourself with this link. Bonus tip: I included contacts to key people in other friend or family groups, so that it would be easier to coordinate support.

4. Set reminders for check-ins. Life is busy and we all have a lot to remember. So when someone mentions an important presentation/medical appointment/whatever, I’ve been trying to put a reminder in my phone so I can follow up on how it went. 

5. Write a love letter. I mean actual mail, which has the biggest impact, but even a nice email or even a thoughtful comment on an IG post or newsletter (ahem lol) is rewarding to receive and also to write.

6. Be persistent. Maybe someone bails, maybe a phone appointment is forgotten. If you value that relationship, try again. In a great round-up of “village building” strategies in Rosie Spinks’s newsletter, someone advised, “Be the person who asks twice.”

When times are tough

1. Physically show up, especially when it’s hard or uncomfortable. Attend every funeral. I cried hardest at my grandfather’s visitation when my childhood best friend, whom I hadn’t talked to in over 15 years, showed up with her mom. She wasn’t even personally invited; she’d just seen the notice in the paper. Seeing someone who had spent so many days and nights at my grandparents’ special home, well, it meant everything. You might worry about saying or doing the wrong thing, but most people going through a tough time are glad you at least tried. RESOURCE: I highly recommend Emily McDowell’s book There’s No Good Card for This, which has amazing charts of what not to say in difficult situations and what to say instead. I’ve learned “How are you doing today?” is a good question for most scenarios. 

2. Offer specific help. Delete “Let me know if I can do anything” from your lexicon. It’s well-intentioned but useless, given the social bias toward self-sufficiency and the fact that in stressful times, our brains often struggle with the executive function needed to make decisions. Instead, make a specific offer within a specific time frame, with options if you can. E.g., “I’d love to take your kids for a playdate: does Saturday or Sunday morning work?” or “I have a casserole in the freezer. How about I drop it off on Monday at 5:30?” The Early Bird newsletter offers some great new-baby-specific examples, such as: “I’m excited for our visit! When I stop by, I’d love to chat and meet [baby], but I’m also happy to watch [baby] while you rest or shower, or help take care of things around the house if that’s more helpful. No need to decide now — we can make a game time decision based on how you’re feeling!” Borrow these and adapt them for other scenarios.

3. Bring food. Homemade food is almost always welcome and easy to make extra. Doubling your dinner recipe or your latest bake doesn’t take much extra time. Snacks are also useful and easy to assemble. RESOURCE: I love Julia Turshen’s advice for cooking as caregiving, which has excellent practical tips and examples, plus essential reassurance if you’re not a culinary wonder: “When someone is in need of care, I’d say ten times out of ten they’re not asking to be wowed. They just want to be taken care of.”

4. Coordinate care on behalf of others. When people need support over the long haul, one of the best things to do is coordinate other people to be part of a regular support network. RESOURCES: You can use a tool like LotsaHelpingHands.com or GiveinKind.com, which offer a central space to coordinate meal deliveries, errands, childcare requests, etc. A system like this removes some administrative burden and helps the cared-for know what to expect.

If you find yourself participating in a sudden surge of caregiving, it’s a good time to ask if there are people in your life that you’ve overlooked, for whom needing more support is the norm rather than the exception. Can you talk with them about how you might be a more regular support? We may be energized by the drama of a sudden mobilization, but able-bodied folks need to learn from disability justice models in which a sustainable pace and a long time horizon are essential. (Care Work is an excellent resource for this.)

It’s also good to know, as writer Kate Schapira advises, “what we can offer and accept freely,” which means “we’re less likely to see and respond to other people as threats to something we’re trying to preserve: time, space, food, value or worth, power, or just the way things have been.” As you start building your care webs, pay attention to what feels good and restorative to offer and receive and what doesn’t. This is a learning process.

Humans are, in fact, wired for care. It’s how Homo sapiens survived all those years ago. “We love to help,” writes Mia Birdsong in How We Show Up (a book I found incredibly inspiring). “Our best self gets a positive feeling from supporting others. It’s a feeling that’s not about the gratitude we receive or the points we earn, but an alignment with love and care that fills us. . . . It also reminds us that we are not out here alone, we don’t achieve or thrive, or survive or get by, on our own.” (Emphasis mine.)

Science confirms it too: the Harvard Study of Adult Development, an esteemed longitudinal study which has been running for over 80 years, has found the quality of relationships is the single biggest predictor of happiness throughout your life.

People have been taking each care of other in community for roughly 99.9997% of our history as a species. We’re wired for this, we know how to do it, and no one survives in this world without it. And if we can tend our ecosystems of care, I’m confident that a more just and sustainable world is waiting.

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Parting wisdom

“Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is also part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.” — Rebecca Solnit

“The savings account I’m really traveling on, the one that allows me to spend so little actual money, is the account made up entirely of relationships. I’ve been contributing to it slowly over the years, adding to it what I can when I can. An innocuous drink date that first summer, a trip to a concert the next. Casual afternoons at cafés. Concerts. Day trips out of the city. Weekends away. Until, one day, you realize you have a rich resource of relationships available to be tapped into. Goodwill. And concern. And shared joys and hardships. Something I often find all the more beautiful simply because it exists out of ritual. It is entirely self-created. It is voluntary. One shows up because one wants to.” — Glynnis MacNichol, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself

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Since this is a post about community, I’d especially love to share some wisdom from this community. What are your tips for strengthening relationships in good times, and/or providing care in more challenging ones? What’s something someone outside your household has done for you that made a big difference during a tough time? Please leave a comment so we can all benefit!

Part two of this post, about caring for people you don’t know well, will be coming at you soon. Big-picture synthesis posts like this take a lot of reading, writing, and wrangling to get into fighting form for you.

As we shift into the year-end mindset, I’ve love to publish a newsletter that’s entirely crowd-sourced about ways you’ve all worked to bring a more sustainable world into being this year. How have you used your energy, resources, ingenuity, and/or connections to take sustainable action? If you take a few minutes to reply by Sunday, December 15th, and I get enough to make a post, I’ll send a round up to finish off the year. So often we feel alone in our sustainability work, and I’d love to highlight all the good things you’re doing all over this country and beyond.

Take care, dear ones,

JK

P.S. Speaking of care, I’ve been finding it really soothing to watch people repair and upcycle things on Instagram. A couple favourites are @poppyluclothing and @refurbishedish.

Five Minutes for Planet is written by me, Jen Knoch, and edited by Crissy Boylan. Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash.