Community For Sale; Or What Does "Community" Even Mean Anymore?
We convened in December 2021 for this conversation.
We gathered to explore community and what it means when running a business. Can you prename a community? Or does a community need to decide that it's a community? Can you charge for community? What does it mean to be in deep, close community?
The root of this brainstorming session was a conversation around trying to understand if we're commodifying what "true" community is and should be when it's used for products and offers inside of our businesses. We also explored alternative words/language that could possibly be used in place of the word community.
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This is not meant to be a definitive guide to this topic.
While BFTP members come from various backgrounds with unique life experiences, there are details, layers, and dimensions missed simply due to the fact that there are a great deal more nuances of opinion from a much greater variety of sources out there in the world.
Furthermore, this paper merely reflects the ponderings of the group from a single session at a singular point in time. This paper does not reflect the exact opinions of any given individual or the group as a whole but is an aggregate of unique points expressed during our conversation. There’s bound to be much left unexplored and unsaid. These are topics worth revisiting as we grow and the nature of our reality shifts.
Nevertheless, these thoughts are being published with care and consideration. We hope to spark further reflection and conversation around this topic by sharing our thoughts out into the wild.
What Is Community?
To set a foundation for our discussion, we needed to define terms. In this case, what the word community means to us.
Straight off the bat, it became pretty clear that there’s a huge disconnect between what we feel a community is versus how it is used on a day-to-day basis.
On the one hand, we’ve become desensitized to the word as every organization in the world has taken to labeling their followers as a “community.”
On the other hand, most people probably recognize that the word “community” holds different weight in different situations.
Traditionally, communities were tied to spaces. Families were the foundational building blocks, and people who lived in the same locale and relied on each other in daily life were built on top of that.
In the 21st century, spaces aren’t just physical anymore. There are digital spaces where we spend nearly as much time. But creating and inhabiting a space doesn’t automatically make it a community.
Communities aren’t just a collection of people with shared interests or values.
Community comes from an interplay of relationships. There is a collaborative and relational aspect to them. It can’t be solely facilitated or led by one person.
There needs to be mutual care and trust. Reciprocity.
Often, a characteristic of a community is the ability to stay in relationship when things get hard. This is related to building trust, knowing that people will show up for each other.
There are expectations and responsibilities that come with being a part of a community.
There need to be ways to deal with conflict and harm. Conflict is not a reason to abandon relationships.
A community grieves together.
Being in community is a commitment. People need to opt-in.
“While most organizations in the world optimize their performance towards external goals, communities optimize for trust… Without trust and relationships, it becomes a project, an initiative, a movement.”
Fabian Pfortmüller, What Does “Community”Even Mean? A Definition Attempt & Conversation Starter | Together Institute
Most “communities” are not real communities.
The word is often co-opted for use by organizations to put a shine on a transactional customer-company relationship.
It is used to make people feel a sense of something that’s not really there. The bar needs to be higher than “there are other people here in this space.”
Communities are made up of a web of various interconnected relationships. A group where everyone is connected to one (or a few) central figures isn’t a community.
The Sober Reality
We live in a system of domination and oppression. Our relationships and relationship-building skills have been eroded within these systems.
Many people lack a sense of belonging and care. This lack also leads to not knowing how to foster relationships or be in community with people.
As mentioned above, the word is now used as a marketing tool to play on people’s emotions, preying on the scarcity of connections and people’s desire for them.
It’s predatory to use the word when there’s no intent to genuinely facilitate a community. And, of course, it’s also predatory if you know you don’t have the ability or capacity to hold space for it.
Going back to the idea of physical and digital spaces. People have this need and desire for community, and they keep joining these things people have named “communities” and aren’t finding it.
There’s a gap between the creation of spaces and people being able to form relationships with one another.
There is a reason for this. Our technology has been built with the same underlying structural faults as our society.
It is no surprise when we find that so much of our digital infrastructure is built with a top-down, individual (“influencer”) approach.
The internet was literally not built with community in mind. It was designed to reward building followings.
Communities involve reciprocity. Online, people are just hanging out. There’s nothing reciprocal there. These are transactional spaces fueling individual achievement.
This is all happening simultaneously with the breakdown of communities in physical spaces.
So many of us are lacking community in person.
At this point, it’s also important to name the struggles and safety considerations of existing as BIPOC, queer, disabled, and any number of marginalized identities in an ableist white patriarchal cisheteronomative world.
People are seeking alternatives in the digital world, but realizing that all too often, that reality is a reflection of the same dystopia we wake up to everyday.
Community and relationship have been eroded to support capital and capitalism.
There’s a high cost to survival under capitalism. We don’t have the hours to devote to the community care that we’d like to give or receive.
Furthermore, there’s the reality of people not feeling comfortable enough to ask for help in a society that deems it weak or wrong. There’s shame in asking for support.
In a world where people need to spend all of their time in order to support themselves, there’s very few people who can be community holders.
It takes time, labor, and consideration to build community.
All of this leads us to wonder: How did we get people to be so disconnected from each other? And how do you have people let their guard down to rebuild these connections? And regain the skills needed to do that?
Potential Solutions
Practice.
If caring and nurturing relationships are at the core of communities, then we need to practice relationship building.
It’s important for us to reconnect little by little, with people. With animals. With nature.
Start small.
Start with 3-6 people and practice reciprocity. Increase our relationship-building skills. Our capacity for holding others.
Normalize asking and receiving.
We need to create spaces where we can be vulnerable separate from spaces that are about creating value. We need to chip away at the idea that we need to always be productive.
We can create spaces with the hopes of becoming a community.
Knowing that we can’t prename a community, we can welcome and invite people in.
Express that we’d like relationships to form and that we believe community is possible here, but that it will take time, trust, care, and consideration. We aren’t a community, but it’s the goal.
And let people show up.
Of course, someone needs to start it, tend to it. If enough people decide to truly opt-in and commit to sharing the burden of holding that space, then, perhaps, it might become a community.
There is no shame in not being a community, or not having the capacity to nurture one.
We can use different words to accurately describe what we do:
This is a space where you can connect with like-minded people on a similar journey. There’s a chance to build relationships, but no promise of a “community.”
At the end of the day, there are underlying societal problems that need to be addressed for all of us to be able to show up for each other fully.
Perhaps, where we are now, it’s not about finding the solution, but to understand the breadth of our responsibility.
Lingering Questions
Can we charge for community? Is that predatory? Ethical?
As business owners, this one is important to consider.
As mentioned in the section above, a community can’t be pre-named. But there is a hypothetical situation where a community can develop from a group you’re facilitating.
We gave it some thought.
Time constraints and the cost of living under capitalism makes it difficult to build communities, that’s why we need to pay facilitators and those who can hold space and others in this manner. In the past, there were societal roles dedicated to this, from elders to spiritual leaders. Colonialism and capitalism have all but extinguished these necessary figures in our societies.
In an ideal world where everyone is taken care of, we would have time to show up for each other.
In our current reality, facilitation is labor, and paying for it makes sense. Facilitators and space creators shouldn’t be devalued.
The arrangement should be transparent. It would be predatory if it’s misleading or promising things that aren’t there.
Of course, this leads to other questions.
Can a group that is monetized be a community? If one person holds the keys to the “community,” and money is what allows you to stay in it, is it a “community?”
There’s inherently a conflict of interest when it comes to community and business. Communities are small, but something that is money generating tends to necessitate growth.
What is our responsibility as business owners and entrepreneurs towards the idea of “community?” If there is something we can do to repair our capacity for community, what does that look like?
For all of us, where are we now? What are we after? What is our responsibility?
Business For The People is a virtual co-werking and learning space for entrepreneurs, creatives, healers, and guides who are dedicated to doing business differently. We care about the businesses we’re creating, the work that we’re doing, and our direct impact on the collective.
Every quarter we gather to collectively explore a topic related to how we think and practice business as people who are trying to dismantle systems of oppression and domination. Want to join us? Learn more about our membership here.
