Since the presidential election, I have seen many exhortations to lean into community. I agree, I have tried to do that myself. But what the often anodyne exhortations fail to explain is that community is challenging.

It’s hard to be with a disparate group of people trying to do a thing together while hewing to norms and standards that can be very different from what we encounter at work or in our algorithm driven online interactions.

Community can be found anywhere; from a group of parents whose children play team sports together to an open water swimming club. They are all good. I am primarily thinking about what I call intentional communities.

The phrase “intentional community” is often used to describe a residential arrangement where people volunteer to live in communities organized around specific principles and/or shared tasks or spaces.

My definition is broader. I mean any group of people who work together to do something positive in the world. They gather with shared values and goals.

The neighborhood group that clears invasive plants from a nearby forest. Volunteers who run a food pantry. A community theater group. A church or synagogue is often host to a number of intentional communities gathered around shared interests like a men’s scripture study or a jail ministry. Animal rescue groups, environmental justice coalitions, support groups, recovery groups. You get the picture.

I have been a member of groups like these for most of my adult life. And getting that kind of group to make decisions and work together effectively requires almost the opposite skills that we learn in the corporate world. Some of my communities are pretty countercultural, so there’s the added interest of working against capitalism, patriarchy and exploitation of the earth.

It's interesting to watch people move from a corporate world driven by a capitalist mindset into an intentional community. I’ve done it, and I’ve watched other people do it, and we often struggle with some of the same things. It can be like watching a bull plow through the proverbial china shop, snorting and tossing his big head and wondering why everything is so complicated.

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