SocialJustice

The How Part 1: Your First Big Decision

Assuming that my last blog post convinced you that activism-based communities are necessary for activists’ survival, you’re probably thinking, “Oh $#!+, I don’t have one of those.” Deciding how you want to gain community is the first step to solving your conundrum. Luckily you have three options. I will list them all in order of ascending difficulty and describe the pros and cons of each of them. Read on comrades!

Option One: Find a Community

The Pros

  • This one is listed first for a reason. Once you’ve found a community, the rest is pretty easy. You will have to put effort into becoming an active member and time into building relationships and learning the norms of the group. But the logistics should be done for you.
  • A bonus perk is that you’ll learn community-building skills from the leaders of the group. The best way to understand communities to join one.

The Cons:

  • Thriving activism-based communities are hard to find, and finding one that fits your needs may be next to impossible. There are options. In big cities like Boston, cooperatives are popular (but that involves moving), the Sunrise Movement has hubs around the country (but that’s geared towards young folks), and there’s always From the Ground Up (but that’s just me humblebragging). But none of these may be what you are looking for. That’s the issue.

Option Two: Enhance an Existing Organization

The Pros:

  • If you’re already a member of a thriving activist organization that doesn’t have a community element or a community that should really be doing more political work, now is a great time to improve your organization! With already established relationships and structures, this is far easier than trying to create a brand new community. In fact, in the weeks after the 2020 BLM protests, a member of my Harry Potter and the Sacred Text group organized meetups for non-Black members to educate ourselves so that we could practice better allyship.

The Cons:

  • Easier does not mean easy. You’ll have to change or add to the existing structures within your organization. This could mean holding additional meetings, reevaluating leadership hierarchies, and/or disrupting routines. While some members of your organization may be all for it, others may be resistant.
  • Activism organizations that have never built community or community organizations that haven’t participated in activism may have a lot to learn. Communities that aren’t explicitly political will need to adapt to having political conversations. Activist organizations that don’t build community will have to learn to have conversations outside of politics. Don’t be surprised if these changes don’t happen overnight.

Option 3: Build Your Own Community

The Pros:

  • We need more activism-based communities. Period. More and more people are turning to their jobs to build community out of desperation. And, despite recent election wins, we still need political action. By building an activism-based community, you will be part of the solution.
  • You’ll gain all of the leadership skills you’ll ever need.
  • You can start by inviting the friends and comrades you already have. It’s a great way to enhance existing relationships. 
  • It will be the most rewarding experience of your life. From the Ground Up has changed everything for me. Everything.

The Cons:

  • It will also be the most difficult experience of your life. It’s a lot of work. It requires social skills, logistical skills, and balancing idealism with practicality. It’s a 24/7 job. 
  • You might fail.

That may seem like the worst possible note to end on, but failure is part of the process. And I don’t mean that in the Edison-failed-10,000-times-before-creating-the-lightbulb way. (In fact, he probably tried closer to 3,000 times, but no one really knows.) I mean that the very act of trying is an act of political resistance. Even if you don’t find a community to join, or the community you work to enhance resists, or the community you build falls apart, trying involves imagining that community is possible and worth fighting for. As adrienne maree brown put it, in her book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, 

“I believe that all organizing is science fiction—that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”

adrienne maree brown

Imagine a community that reimagines the world. It’s the first step towards liberation. 

Why I Build Community Part 1

If you haven’t read my last post, check it out! It provides crucial context for this one.

Here is everything the church did for my parents (besides supposedly handing them their ticket to heaven):

  • free/affordable childcare twice a week after school, plus several weekends per year
  • free/affordable food, one meal per week for them, three for me
  • professional emotional support during hospitalizations 
  • younger parents they mentored
  • older parents who mentored them
  • recognition of my father’s military service and support throughout his deployments
  • weekly social gatherings
  • access to a small library of religious texts
  • free musical education

Below is a small chart of how the three organizations I’m actively a member of at the moment (sled hockey doesn’t count because pandemic) do/don’t fulfill these needs for me:

A diagram of El's needs which reveals that From the Ground Up, Emerson College, and Harry Potter and the Sacred Text only fulfill five out of the seven needs they could.
Yes, I know the key is as large as the diagram. My fine motor skills are as wonderfully disabled as I am.

Religion’s success is no accident. Any organized community that provides this range of services to its members will likely succeed. Christianity provided my parents with a built-in safety net. Despite the fact that our congregation had well under five-hundred members, it served as a source of a financial, emotional, and logistical back-up. 

Christianity, and other religions, filled this role for centuries. As Casper ter Kuile, a co-founder of the Sacred Design Lab and the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast, put it in an interview, 

“So, in 1920, or 1880, or however far you want to go, you would have been, let’s say, a member of a Catholic Church, and you would have not only received your moral guidance and social connection but also a place for your kids to be educated. You would have had a shared ethnic group because you were part of the Italian Catholic Church. You would have had access to health care and education and mutual aid societies.”

But for most of us, it’s not surprising that Pew Research indicates that the number of people participating in religious life is dropping. (If you’re under the age of 45, how many of your friends go to church every week?) Ter Kuile believes that millennials replace church with a thousand different organized communities from CrossFit to fandoms. Yet, these communities lack the intergenerational and safety-net benefits provided by organized religion and are fundamentally built around capitalism. We have a country that’s becoming less religious during a time where the financial and social structures organized faith provides are vital. 

Americans, as a whole, have struggled to fulfill our social needs for the past decade. Even before the pandemic, studies indicated that loneliness was on the rise. According to an NPR article, a study conducted by Cigna indicated that Americans’ loneliness rose 13% between 2018 and early 2020. COVID exacerbates this problem. The Harvard Gazette cited a study showing an 11% increase in loneliness since the beginning of the pandemic, with levels as high as 61% in adults between 18 and 25 years old. This is a mental health crisis. Not only do we know that loneliness has physical health effects, but America is running headfirst into a mental health crisis. 53% of American adults report increased mental health distress according to a report by CBS. 

Of course, I don’t believe that replacing every Walmart with a cathedral would solve anything. (Although, I wouldn’t be opposed to Targets taking their place.) I don’t believe that god provided the free childcare my parents needed. People did. Lots of loving, kind, if not ableist, people. And the world has the same number of amazing people that it did a decade ago.

We need community right now. The U.S. government needs to serve the national community that it’s supposed to protect. We need to draw upon mutual aid funds. We need to check-up on the mental health of our friends, neighbors, and family members. But these are merely short-term solutions. In the long run, we need to build more inclusive organized communities that serve us all. Best of all, these communities can be designed to do activism work that serves the most vulnerable. But you’ll have to wait until my next post to read about that.