Full Circle Associates

In January Katy Pearce created a network of bloggers to join her and a bunch of young women from the Southern Caucasus in a blogging project, Young Caucasus Women. It was easy to say yes after all the wonderful experiences and learnings I had with my colleagues in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in 2000 - 2005.

Today it is my turn to kick off the week by posting on "Community is..." So here is my posting, shared here and on the Young Caucasus Women blog (as soon as I find my login and password. Community must mean you can write to Katy and confess you lost your login!)

Community Is...
... the air I breathe, the food I eat, the songs I hear, the art I experience, the pain I feel, the joy that reverberates through my cells. It is at once everything, but it is also almost impossible to define. So I'll start with a story.

A few years ago I was part of a project with Project Harmony in the Caucasus region. I had the joy of working with the country directors in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, mostly online. Through them, I was connected to their communities in each country - people who in many ways, changed our lives. We had 10 days together each in 2001, 2003, and 2004. The rest of the time our community was made visible through email messages, instant messages and occasional phone calls.

The various projects in the region had goals to use online interaction to serve community needs - some around economic development with small and medium businesses, NGOs, prevention of domestic violence, education, and others focused the diverse and very local needs of communities.

Each of these projects had a thread in common: if we could connect as a community, we could advance our goals. If we amplified our efforts, we could do more than we could alone as individuals.

Time and again, as people were connected, both face to face and online, they marveled at their shared experiences. They shared challenges and all of a sudden did not feel so alone against those challenges. They discovered strengths amongst them to contribute towards their goals.

They listended to each other felt heard.

I am still connected to many of those people, and they have become part of the constellation of communities that make up my life. I owe many learnings and a great deal of friendship to them.

The world can be a messy, challenging place. Few of us can face it alone. Few of us care to experience the joys alone. By connecting into community, we express our humanity and we take steps to make humanity the best it can be. By connecting with each other in community, I believe we are less apt to do harm to each other. In my wildest dreams, I imagine a world where just enough of us know just enough other people so that the threat of war would be unthinkable. I know that is rather naive, but it reflects my belief that we are less apt to ignore the suffering of someone we know.

For me, there are some big questions about community:

• Community also means finding the balance between our individual selves and the community. What of our individual needs and desires do we offer up for the good of community? What do we preserve for ourselves?
  
• How do we contribute and catalyze action in communities?
  
• How we keep our communities from becoming instruments of oppression on others? (There is a dark side to communities!)

These are life-long questions. I wonder if I will ever know the answers.

Now, to you!
What is the role of community in your life? What have you been able to do because of your communities that you would not have been able to do otherwise? How do you contribute to your community?