What does community care look like? (Part 2)
Goodbye, stranger danger; hello, networks of care
Hello dear people,
This edition isn’t about the L.A. fires, because I have very little to say, but today’s issue is still relevant to that disaster, because all of us face climate chaos, and we must be ready. (Also: you can find a great roundup of ways to support those affected by fires over at Reimagined.)
This is a part 2 post, so if you haven’t read part 1, go back and check it out first to get the full background on why I’m going on about relationships and community in an environmental newsletter. I don’t want you to spend this whole post thinking, “Show me the carbon!”
Last time, we talked about strategies for strengthening the relationships we already have, but what about making new ones? What about supporting strangers or people we might never meet? That’s also an essential part of community care if the goal is to move society, as Lisa Sibbett of
writes, “in a kinward direction.”Build new relationships
It can be hard to meet new people as an adult, especially since the pandemic shift left a lot of people spending less time in public or shared spaces. Our worlds have shrunk, and with them the cast of characters that give our worlds life.
Yet even “weak ties” (which is what researchers call casual engagement with other humans) are incredibly important to our happiness and essential for safer, more resilient communities and for the big project of building a better, more sustainable world.
Before we can care for each other, though, we need to know each other. So, courtesy of this introvert, a few tips to connect with friendly strangers in your midst:
Join neighbourhood groups online. Your local Facebook group, WhatsApp, Nextdoor, or listserv can be a great way to find out what’s going on in your community. How would I know, for example, about the annual Halloween dog costume parade if not for such a group? Let these groups be a bridge to the in-person interactions, which is how online connections bring us the most happiness.
Share something you have in abundance and/or organize a swap. People love free stuff and/or sharing what they have, and that’s why so many Buy Nothing groups become community hubs. In sharing, we’re supporting an economy of abundance and reciprocity. (A way to power up these exchanges and foster even more good vibes: if you receive something you really like, leave a small thank you, like a chocolate bar or a few flowers. When people do this for me, I am beyond delighted at the gesture.) A swap doesn’t have to be clothing: I’ve attended great soup swaps, cookie swaps, plant and seed swaps, book swaps, and more. (In this frosty time of year, a soup swap is an especially great way to stock the freezer for you or someone you love who could use a few prepared meals.) RESOURCE: The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller is a great inspiration.
Go to a meetup for a common interest/purpose. Nothing brings people together like a shared passion. There are groups out there everything: ravine stewards, pickleball enthusiasts, BIPOC birders, corgi owners. The Toronto Star recently had a heart-warming piece about Reddit bringing solo symphony goers together. RESOURCES: Meetup.com and Eventbrite can direct you to events in your area.
Host some organized fun. For those of us who aren’t natural born charmers, structured activities make it much easier to connect with people. (I think this is part of what made making friends easier when we were younger.) If you want to mix some friend groups, don’t just throw a dinner party or cocktail party, include a game, activity, workshop, facilitated discussion, or even a shared ritual. More structured fun in 2025, please! RESOURCE: Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering has great guidance on bringing people together in ways that are fulfilling and memorable.
Volunteer or get involved in mutual aid. This deserves a deep dive, so we’re going there next . . .
Mutual aid & volunteering
During the pandemic “mutual aid” was a particularly buzzy phrase. It gets thrown around a lot and is often conflated with volunteering. From a community building perspective, both of these can be great, but there are a few key differences. Mutual aid groups . . .
start from a place of “people deserve” and don’t put conditions (e.g., sobriety, a faith affiliation, immigration status) on aid.
are non-hierarchical and rely on consensus decision-making that involves people who are most affected. They wish to undermine, not replicate, the power imbalances in the wider world.
operate from the assumption that individuals aren’t the problem, the system is. They support the dignity and self-determination of those they are supporting.
should be welcoming and allow people to jump into meaningful work and also allow people to contribute as their capacity allows.
To learn more about mutual aid, Dean Spade offers a wealth of information and inspiration in his book Mutual Aid and at the Big Door Brigade website.
Does that mean traditional non-profit orgs are bad? Not necessarily. Many still do great work, and I give money to a number of nonprofits, although it’s always worth looking into what kind of aid is being delivered, what strings may be attached, and whether affected communities are involved in decision-making.
Any kind of volunteering (whether in a mutual aid group or traditional org) can strengthen help you build community. Taking care of strangers is a muscle just about everyone can stand to bulk up and the only way we create the better, kinder, more generous world we want to live in.
You’ll get the most benefits if you commit to working in a group in a sustained way, but if you’re not quite there yet, here’s a few places you might start:
Bring food to community fridges. Community pantries and fridges allow 24/7 no-strings-attached food to anyone in need and are an easy, low-commitment form of mutual aid. Since sale shopping is my superpower, I keep my eyes peeled for especially good deals on things people frequently request. In winter, avoid items in glass or things likely to freeze and be ruined (like leafy greens). If you already bring food regularly, consider helping with cleaning or food distribution, or scale up by doing what reader Carey did — asking others if they wanted to support her monthly trips. She ended up with an extra $90 to shop with each month!
Give to someone unhoused. You might encounter people on the streets or encampments on a daily basis and not know what to do. When in doubt, ask someone what they need. RESOURCE: Frontline worker and activist Lorraine Lam offers some great advice for how to offer support in this post (and is very much worth following).
Organize aid informally in your community. A couple winters ago, my neighbourhood put together a spreadsheet of people who needed help shovelling and others who were willing to provide it. During COVID we saw lots of people offering prescription delivery, phone calls to the isolated, or grocery runs. We can still coordinate this kind of care, and your online groups are a great jumping-off point.
Be a drop-off point. Maybe a refugee family needs kitchen supplies or winter wear; a teacher needs books for their classroom; an encampment support group needs warm weather gear and fresh socks. Having one person as coordinator can mean people will be more likely to contribute. My friend Veronica, for example, raised the funds and did the shopping and wrapping for 554 toys this holiday season, and a local plumber coordinated sending over 5,500 cards to long-term care homes across Toronto.
Pick up and carry a free naloxone kit. If you’d be comfortable intervening in a suspected overdose, you can get a kit and basic training on how to use it from your pharmacist. (These kits are also welcome at most community pantries.)
Give blood if you qualify. This isn’t community building per se, but it is mutual aid, and I always feel a sense of affinity as I look around at the other people who took time out of their day to bleed into a bag. (Bonus: unlimited Oreos you can feel virtuous eating afterward.)
Take a first aid course or bystander intervention training. In a lot of situations, regular people can keep each other safe. RESOURCE: I took the free one-hour harassment intervention training from Right to Be; it was quick and concrete and empowering. They are running a whole bunch in January, some with specific themes like anti-Asian or anti-trans harassment.
All these ideas share some common themes: showing up physically, actually engaging with another person, and favouring social capital over economic capital.
Once you’ve tried a few things, commit. I deliver food from my co-op grocer to the community fridge every Tuesday and Friday, even though right now it means biking through frigid temps with half-frozen brakes when I’d really rather be cocooned in my duvet. But if I don’t go, that food will go to waste rather than into people’s bellies, and so I go. Nine times out of ten the effort makes me feel better, and ten times out of ten waste is avoided and people get food.
All of these actions foster generosity, trust, and inspire reciprocity that can mean one good act multiplies into many more. And in taking care of each other, we are also taking care of ourselves. In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer shares the story of an anthropologist learning from a hunter-gatherer community in Brazil:
[The anthropologist] observes that a hunter had brought home a sizeable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the meat. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question — store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of the meat in the forest, why didn’t the hunter store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.
“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.
I feel a great debt to his unnamed teacher for these words. There beats the heart of gift economies, an antecedent alternative to market economies, another way of “organizing ourselves to sustain life.” In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.
That last emphasis is my own, because there’s no better counterprogramming to the toxic individualism of the dominant capitalist culture than that. It’s true of our relationships with others, of our relationships with the Earth. Isolation is a myth we perpetuate: we are all fundamentally intertwined, and move together towards prosperity or towards peril.
Parting wisdom
“What to do with limited time? For me, on a day-to-day basis, I can feel an arrow inside my mind pointing me towards decisions that lead towards better community, less isolation. Sometimes I fucking hate those decisions and they’re hard, but when I really calm myself and let myself sit with them, I usually know which decisions are the right ones.” — Casey Plett, On Community
Link love
I often find myself enjoying wonderful articles, books, and podcasts and want to share them with like-minded folks. So I’m trying a little category of things I’ve enjoyed recently. If you’d like to talk about anything I’ve shared or recommend something to me, leave a comment or click reply to support the gift economy of ideas. Things I’ve enjoyed recently:
The Future Mending podcast, especially the “Buying Food with Buttons” episode about 541 Barton Street Eatery + Exchange, where mutual aid is built into its mission. (After listening, I immediately went online to buy some “buttons.”) In general, I find this lo-fi podcast about multisolving (what I’ve previously called “stacked benefits”) to be a soothing signal from corners of the world where there are good people working to implement win-win solutions.
“Practical Reverence — A Conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer” on the Emergence Magazine podcast. Emergence is where Kimmerer first published her serviceberry essay, and you can still read it there for free or listen to her read it to you in audio (highly recommended), but I’ve so enjoyed Kimmerer being back on the podcast circuit to talk about her Serviceberry book.
An Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, specifically chapter 7, on “radical mycology.” That chapter blew my mind and made me really feel the potential in the mycological frontier. (I listened to the book on Libby, read by the author, and Sheldrake has the sort of flat-affect Britishness that I find quite soothing.)
Once again, you can contribute to this online community by heading to the comments and sharing your tips for relationship building, your mutual aid wins, or any other wisdom, experience, questions, or advice that this post prompted.
In the year ahead, my plan is to keep appearing in your inbox semi-regularly. (Next: a classic FMFP exploration of the eco impacts of AI.) As always, if you appreciate this work, you can help me by clicking the little heart on this post, sharing with friends and family, or leaving a comment. That helps this newsletter stay visible in the algorithmic churn and tells me that what I’m offering is still of use.
Happy new year, my friends. May this year ahead be one of community, collaboration, care, and transformation.
xo
Jen
P.S. 🚨 Attention property owners: After cancelling energy efficiency rebates in 2018, the Ford government is bringing them back, because turns out, weirdly enough, making our homes more efficient is a good thing! Right now it applies to heat pumps, insulation, windows, solar, battery storage, air sealing, and smart thermostats, with rebates for energy efficient appliances apparently coming later this year. The program opens January 28, 2025.
Five Minutes for Planet is written by me, Jen Knoch, and edited by Crissy Boylan. Photo by “My Life Through A Lens” on Unsplash.
I love the idea of wealth meaning you have enough to SHARE, going to keep going with that mindset…
This is wonderful, Jen, thank you!