Key Concepts
CARE as the beating heart of a community requires a holistic, encompassing, attitudinal approach that considers both the process of community-building and the nurturing of the formed bonds and relationships. It involves approaching care as a spirit that considers the natural and human environments in which the community unfolds.
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This playbook approaches community care from a decolonial perspective. This means emphasizing the importance of uplifting all members of the community by recognizing the value of sharing local knowledge, experiences, and hidden stories and celebrating our histories, cultures, and identities. Furthermore, a decolonial perspective for building a community of care focuses not only on forming community relationships but sustaining them. Sustaining a community of care is an ongoing and dynamic process which requires constant collaborative experimentation.
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Care is a hands-on practice and about giving and receiving. To practice care, we need to be able to be open to someone else’s vulnerability and welcome them from a place of vulnerability. But care is not only about taking care of someone else, it is about self-care too (and learning to receive). Practicing care implies listening, being tuned into the environment we are in and improvising. Care is about acting when we perceive there is a need, without plans, giving up control of outcomes and reactions. It is about closeness.
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Hospitality is both about giving and receiving. It is the act of welcoming someone into one’s own world. It is about gifting others the best version of ourselves as much as we can. Therefore, practicing hospitality requires an active approach. But it is not a unidirectional process, it is reciprocal generosity and welcoming each other. Furthermore, it is never-ending and it is constantly changing: It is a constant exercise, and the acceptance that we do our best, but we cannot always be our best (self). It is a learning process that is practiced together while recognizing differences and accepting limitations. With hospitality, we welcome outsiders and make them insiders.
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Acting from the perspective of decommodification means being able to go beyond monetary value and seeing the added value of everyday things and actions. It implies reflecting on the value we give to non-marketable resources. It is about not taking them for granted and recognizing (and contributing to) the abundance of resources and knowledge. Nowadays, decommodification lies in the grey area of informality.
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Informality refers to an unofficial state, something that is not subjected to stiff conventional practices. This can be associated with the understanding of something that is in progress, that is unfinished according to official standards. In a community setting, practicing informality can be about fostering familiarity and intimacy. This can also include being spontaneous, easygoing, and flexible. It reminds us of crafts and friendships.
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Sustainability emerges from an appreciation of diversity, from curiosity about the world around us, and how things work. This also entails respect and engagement in non-exploitative practices to support long-term ecological balance and community survival. To promote these conditions, communities that can practice exploration and experimentation, remaining open to change, are able to create the conditions to nourish an environment that encourages distributed growth and regeneration. Sustainability must be understood as a constant mindset that requires commitment and the formation of habits.
The Pathway to Community
The process aims to promote the evolution of a community from a centralized network to a decentralized one. What this means is that the beginning of the process will usually start out centralized around an individual or small set of people that want to form a community. Over time, they will work towards expanding beyond centralized dynamics to instead occur from a wide array of members of the community.
Stage 1 · At this stage, the community is just getting started. Most activities will be initiated by a small set of people that are looking to get the community started. They will usually occur in the same places and the focus is on meeting new people, sharing values and finding kindred spirits. Driving constant engagement and participation is key to consolidating a reliable group of people that will later become a community.
Stage 2 · In this stage, a collective of individuals have discovered shared interests, values, and beliefs that are pulling them together. More actors will be more proactive in the community and activities will be initiated by them. The key difference between stage 1 and 2 is that there is a higher degree of community ownership in the sense that participation is driven by a more diversified range of members. Furthermore, since in this stage there is a stronger sense of community identity it is also necessary to reach out to better include more members of the community.
Stage 3 · This stage entails maintaining a community of care and reflecting on what has happened in your community so far. At this point, community members will share a strong feeling of kinship and belonging which allows for greater experimentation and a less structured approach to activity planning.
Fostering a community of care is in many ways like knitting a textile. With the same tools, wool, and techniques you can make fabrics of varying shapes and sizes. In a comparable way, this playbook provides the “needles”, “yarn” and guidelines to “knit” a community of care. Following the same metaphor, just as a textile has two main components (threads and stitches that hold those threads together), a community of care is made of two main elements:
Knitting the Fabric of Care
The Infrastructure
The Threads
A constant set of dynamics that are always happening and set and maintain the foundations for a community of care.
The Activities
The Stitches
A series of events through which the community comes together in diverse ways and generates bonding.
While the infrastructure tends to be more permanent and foundational, the activities are flexible, dynamic and adapt to the various stages of community building (just like how there are distinct kinds of stitches for the same thread of wool when knitting a sweater). Therefore, in the Activity Lab activities are made by a diverging combination of mindsets, themes, and operational characteristics that come together with your own creative input.
