What actionable steps can you take to build community?

Volunteering is a good place to start. Most places have community centers and food pantries and such that are always looking for volunteers. This puts you directly in line for helping your community members.

Introduce yourself to your neighbors. Do the neighborly things like bring their bins in for them, check in with them when there's a storm, etc. Learn their names. Strike up conversation when you see them outside.

Join local sports or running club or something similar. Getting yourself physically in places with others and being open to befriending people is the quickest way to immerse yourself in community building.

How tf is this question controversial?

Weird to frame it that way.

Build community through mutual interests, hobbies and passions. Identify and define, communicate and collaborate.

Supporting shared ideas, stories, concepts and strategies.

Define the interest, see who’s onboard, communicate the intention and call to action.

Disseminate, discuss and determine how to do it better, what was missing, who else can be involved and do it again.

Make a point to engage the people you interact with. Be a good neighbor. See where and when you can help or support those around you.

What are u asking op?

Most important question I've come across so far! Great job, thanks! Saving this post for later!

Get to know all your neighbors

We host a free cookout at the end of our block every week. Nothing fancy, hotdogs and smores, chips, beers, water, soda... Every time someone walks by we ask them, hey, want a hotdog? All kinds of folks show up -- white middle class, punks, fellow queerios, Black and Latinx neighbors, kids, teenagers, sr citizens...

Sometimes we block off a section of the roundabout and play four-square

Absolutely the best thing I've seen for building relationships -- community --within the few blocks radius.

No permits, zero affiliation with "open streets" (cop funded) or any other municipal grant.

The highlight of my week

How tf is this question controversial?

Weird to frame it that way.

More the specifics that can be controversial - for example, moderation policies, broad appeal versus exclusivity/specificity, which forms of outreach work or don't, how power structures should be organized, ect. Obviously its not all heated debate, but there often are strongly held opinions for or against different methods.

What are u asking op?

I am intentionally leaving it broad, but generally looking for more specific answers. For example forming/participating in interest groups is a good start, but also: How do you structure them? How do you fund them? How do you expand it beyond the limited scope of the hobby? I'm hoping to get meaningful discussion on not just broad suggestions, but also specifics.

The core of a community is consistent interaction with community members. The easiest way to develop this is to have some kind of regular meeting that people have a reason to attend. A bar can be a community, a church can be a community, a library can be a community, a park can be a community, an online game can be a community, a web forum can be a community. You can also have a community without a specific regular meeting place, as long as the members are willing to make the effort to meet in different places (this is more difficult, and works best for small groups of friends). What matters is that people keep showing up and spending time together.

It becomes a real community when the members begin to care about each other, so much so that they will go out of their way to ensure the well-being of other members. This takes time to develop, and benefits greatly from community leaders who set an example of care, which can be as simple as asking how someone is doing and genuinely listening to the answer. It's easier to do in person because you can often look at someone and know that something is wrong, and they can't just run away embarrassed without making a scene. It's harder to do through the Internet, people will simply disappear. Bluntly, the less people have invested personally the more likely they are to just leave.

Churches are actually an instructive example - religious worship has been the center of communities for much of humanity's past. Small churches tend to build communities very easily because they have:

1. Weekly meetings in a dedicated space - no one has to guess when or where to be, or if anyone else is going to show up
2. Mutual support - the religious aspects of the group encourage members to care for each other
3. Guilt tripping - there's a lot of peer pressure to show up every week, and social consequences for not doing so

If you want to build a community, try to be that example of a community leader who checks in with others and cares about their well-being. It's tricky though, trying too hard too fast with this is not socially acceptable and will push people away. Starting out the most important thing is communication and coordination (e.g. making sure people have transportation to and from the meeting). Start small, start simple, and this might seem counterintuitive, try to be the invisible glue that holds it all together. For the community to form, the members must develop relationships with each other that are not dependent on the leader, which means you can't insert yourself into every relationship within the community - you can't be everyone's best friend, you might not even know everyone directly, and that's okay. You need to facilitate the growth of relationships (by introducing people to each other) but not be the center of all of them (single point of failure). If you're successful, the community will grow beyond yourself and take on its own form, which may be different from what you visualized at the start.

Also keep in mind that there's a degree of getting lucky required to make this happen. You can set a table and invite people to sit down at it, but you can't force them. People have to choose to join you, and choose to come back, and that means you have to find people who are in the right place in their lives, the right mindset, and have the time to be involved. Getting lucky typically involves casting a wide net, repeatedly over time, being patient, and accepting failure. Starting from scratch is hard.

The last community I created spawned off Reddit before the final nail in my permaban coffin.

Local subreddit had left leaning counter culture folks wanting a safe space to learn and train in firearms. We’re spread out in smaller suburban communities, small city nearby..bigger cities 150-200 miles away.

I’m an organizer and planner and saw that they needed me to put it all together build our community. We opted to be non-affiliated directly with the SRA/Pink Pistols and have contacts, people in those orgs we’ve collaborated with.

I created signal group, we joined one of the local gun clubs. We talk, we plan, train and collaborate. I’ve organized multiple Stop the Bleed trauma response trainings and opened the community other folks of mutual interest.

The foundation of community building is from training martial arts most of my life.

Start somewhere, look at you list of goals, pick one and start doing it. Connect with those around you. Be open, receptive and compassionate..you will meet your people as you walk through life.

One thing I want to do is set up a disaster response station. My area is situated near a fault line and some neighbourhoods in my city have a sea-can full of supplies (water, food, solar panels, lights, first-aid, etc.) and they recently hosted a workshop to teach people what to do in the event of a major earthquake/natural disaster, what supplies were there, and how to use the tech stored in the can.

There were a lot of people there and many of them stuck around after wards to talk with each other. Likely they were neighbours, but that's part of community building I think.

*https://dunbaremergency.ca/services/map-your-neighbourhood/ <- Info if you want to create a similar meeting point for your community

Getting to know your neighbors and joining or creating mutual aid groups is a good way to build community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

Check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.

There's also some projects you can do that help build community (and can be fun in themselves!). My instance put together a list of ideas, just scroll down to the "Fun Projects to Build Community" section

I don't have an answer, but want you to know I've been wondering about the same thing.

I think for me it's going to be about music--finding other musicians to hang with and make music with.

But I absolutely agree, society is collapsing to a collection of disconnected individuals (easier to control and manipulate).

If you want the science on it, the ur-text is Bowling Alone.