Ideas

Our society is deeply polarized, and people are more isolated than ever. It’s hard to talk about public life right now without getting angry, depressed, or exhausted. The problems feel huge, the stakes feel high, and the media and politicians are focused on division more than repair. We’re constantly reminded about how we’ve become so separated and alone, and not how to move forward to a better place for everyone.

Martin Luther King Jr. raised the existential question of our times in the title of his last book (1967): Where Do We Go From Here — Chaos or Community? Choosing community offers a powerful starting point that doesn’t belong to any single ideology, political party, or culture: community — not as a sentimental word or romanticized idea, but as a shared human experience and a strategic societal goal that transcends geography, identity, culture, context, and age. Throughout history, from ancient times until today, one idea keeps surfacing: if we can get to the core of what we all share, we can rebuild civic life from the inside out. That core, simply, is our sense of community with others where we live, work, learn, and play.

Why choose community

Community is compelling partly because it isn’t proprietary. It’s an experience that we all have and need for our well-being. The drive for community, be it at the local or country level, has forged the best and worst of humankind throughout history and shows up in every culture. In uncertain times, that matters. When language gets weaponized and even basic terms can trigger reflexive suspicion, community remains universally accepted.

But the real reason community holds power is deeper. Scientific research over the last 150 years has demonstrated the profound impact that having a sense of community has on the physical, social, and psychological well-being of individuals and populations. The drive for a community is its ability to meet shared needs and turn moral aspiration into something actionable. Research, as well as examples told in books and movies, shows how diverse groups of people can come together to act on common needs, and have those needs met while building relationships that were never thought possible.

We can use “cultivating” community as a strategy for powerful public and private policies and practices. Something we build with purpose and through shared values, supporting everyone no matter what their background and where they come from. In other words: community isn’t just what we wish for. It’s something we can build and strengthen. It is something everyone needs in the most important spheres of their lives (e.g., home, work, school).

Community is possible amidst today’s chaos

Absolutely, community has always been here and continues. There is definitely not enough community going on, but examples exist across the country — and many in what we have been told by the media and politicians to be unlikely places.

Leavenworth, Kansas is a town that famously votes Republican and is economically tied to the prison industry. Residents and local leaders pushed back against converting a shuttered facility into an immigration detention center. The opposition didn’t come only from immigrant advocates but from a broad coalition of local residents concerned about how a large ICE facility would affect their community. Concerns included potential influx of released detainees, strain on services, and the town’s reputation. Residents and officials even filed a lawsuit to block the permitting process.

In Nebraska, groups like the Heartland Workers Center have been actively building coalitions that include immigrant workers and local civic leaders (many from traditionally conservative small towns) to address shared challenges like workplace safety, housing, and civic representation. They’ve helped elect immigrant community members to local school boards and planning commissions and worked with mayors and business owners to improve life for everyone in small towns.

Morristown, Tennessee is a county that voted heavily for President Trump. After a major rural ICE raid, local residents from participated in organizing a vigil and rapidly raised funds (tens of thousands of dollars) to support the families affected. Many volunteers came from non-immigrant, socially traditional circles (churches, schools, local businesses) and were motivated more by empathy and community ties than by conventional partisan framing.
These examples demonstrate that cultivating community among seemingly diverse people is possible.

What a sense of community is

McMillan and Chavis (1986) offered a definition and detailed theory that has been heavily researched and validated across cultures in six continents and among various settings including neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, religious institutions, sports teams, yacht clubs, and virtual communities. According to that work, “a sense of community is a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through commitment to be together.”

Sense of community isn’t just a warm feeling. It’s a set of social capacities that shape health, well-being, and civic resilience. Four elements are consistently present to varying degrees depending on the community context and type. The strength of that sense of community, both individually and collectively, is based on:

• Meeting priority needs of members for that community;
• The sense of membership enables members to feel belonging, trust, and security;
• The influence, either directly or through their leadership, over the community and its environment (sometimes referred to as collective efficacy); and
• The shared emotional connection that comes through shared experience, identity, or history.

These four elements — meeting needs, membership, influence, and shared emotional connection — can provide the framework for addressing the isolation and polarization of our country and also advancing our greater social goals of physical, economic, psychological, and social well-being for all as well as advancing democracy and justice. While imperfect and difficult to achieve, historical and scientific evidence seems to show that it is as close to a panacea as we know.

Equity and justice are baked into a shared sense of community

A focus on community provides a much-needed new framework for achieving the goals for society that are inclusive of its diverse members and equitable in opportunity. As pointed out earlier, the term community is one that everyone shares in their hearts and minds. A strong community naturally pushes us toward fair treatment of everyone who we feel is part of their community, no matter who they are and where they come from. At the core is a simple idea: if someone is part of “us,” we care what happens to them. We don’t want them to get cheated, ignored, or treated like they don’t matter. We want them to have a real shot at success and be treated fairly, with respect and dignity, because that’s what it means to be part of the community.

That’s a different frame from the one we often hear about and practice, especially in today’s world. The community frame starts with a basic relational truth: if someone is “one of us,” their well-being matters. From there, “doing right by people” becomes less like a political talking point and more like a practical requirement for ensuring everyone’s needs are met so we can have healthy, productive communities.

This is also why community can be a bridge in tense environments. When people disagree about causes, labels, ideologies, and identities, they can still often agree on what matters every day to all of us: safe neighborhoods, good schools, decent work, respect, and the sense that the rules aren’t rigged. If we feel someone is part of our community, we care about them.

Community is ecological: systems within systems

A practical insight: community isn’t a single thing you “have.” It’s a “system within systems” and context matters. In fact, most of us are nested among multiple communities of varying sizes, much like the stacked Russian Matryoshka dolls, amongst our family, neighborhood, faith community, workplace, school, political party, racial or religious group, those of similar sexual orientation, etc. Family is the smallest unit of community (regardless of the definition of family), and that’s instructive. You can’t support a family well by focusing only on individual behavior; you look at the ecosystem around relationships, resources, stressors, and supports. Healthy connections with other families and communities are essential for our families’ well-being. The same is true for neighborhoods or nations.

This ecological view is a strong antidote to polarization, because polarization thrives when we reduce complex human outcomes to simple moral judgments: good people vs. bad, deserving vs. undeserving, us vs. them. Focusing on cultivating community among different communities doesn’t excuse harm — but it does move us from blame to repair.

Cultivating community is not without its challenges and problems

One of the strongest and most fundamental characteristics of the community are its boundaries — knowing who belongs and who doesn’t. It provides community members with a sense of security and identity. This phenomenon can lead to harsh and exclusive communities. Approaches to community “cultivation” need to intentionally focus on processes that have diverse members of the community work together on common issues to build relationships and the value of inclusiveness as a key component of the community.

Similarly, a strong sense of community can also keep different communities from working together. They can be forced by larger systems to be in competition. Here again, focusing on common issues across communities, or linking communities in social capital terms, can help mitigate the competition then create greater power among communities to change the larger systems (e.g., government) that are intended to serve them. Despite what we see in the media and from our politicians, there are many examples across this country, rural and urban, where seemingly diverse people work together on common issues.

These uncertain times create an opportunity for changes that are long overdue

That shared confidence that “we can do something good together” is one of the most underrated mindsets in public life. When people lose their sense of collective efficacy, they stop participating — or they participate only through outrage. When they regain it, they start investing in neighbors, in institutions, in problem solving, and in the long game. And importantly, we see this all the time, even if we don’t label it: neighbors help each other and residents organize around safety, schools, housing, and fair treatment.

One path, tragically common in American history, is to mobilize around exclusion: using policy and informal power to protect a narrow definition of “who belongs.” Residents have been organized to keep low- income people (i.e., Black, Latino, and Indigenous people) out of their neighborhoods, immigrants out of our country, or people of different sexual orientations out of schools. Now we have a chance to think about how we solve our social problems and move ahead as a stronger nation by looking toward cultivating community. Public and private policy can be evaluated by how it impacts human and community development by asking:

• How does it provide equal opportunities for health and well-being for everyone?
• How does it bring people together around their most important needs within and across communities?
• How does it bring people from diverse communities together to take action to address those issues and in the process, develop relationships and correct misperceptions about one another?
• How does it build the influence or power of those communities affected?
• How does it build linkages with more powerful, influential, or privileged communities?
• How does it build a shared emotional connection within and among communities based on a broader and more significant set of values and aspirations?
• Chaos or community? Choose community!

We are now in a time, more than ever in American history, where our political and social values and perspectives are formed by how we identify as a nation. Voting behavior is the most powerful contemporary example of how identity influences values and behavior. Many authors such as Ezra Klein (see Why We’re Polarized, published by Avid Reader Press in 2020), have shown how more rigid Americans have become in sticking to their party’s candidate no matter what — treating political support like team loyalty rather than evaluating actions, values, or results. This dynamic can show up across many kinds of communities and social identities.

Cultivating community is a political philosophy often referred to as communitarianism. Communitarianism is the idea that human identities are largely shaped by different kinds of constitutive communities (or social relations) and that this conception of human nature should inform our moral and political judgments as well as policies and institutions (see “Communitarianism” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Choosing to focus on community and commonality is not some “Kumbaya” moment or “touchy-feely” slogan. It is an evidence-based approach to enhancing human development, bringing people together, and creating a healthier society. It inspires a culture of caring and collective efficacy to create great things together.