Who do you think of when you think of community?
3 mascots (or metaphors?) to inspire people-centeredness
✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG. So glad you are here. ✨
When I think about my earliest examples of leaders who wielded the magical ability to move communities of people, I think about my teachers and bosses and youth group counselors. I loved watching them squeeze chaos into control. I especially loved when they had room-hushing charisma and a blazing sparkle in their eye and were very prone to rousing speeches. I especially especially loved being singled out by them and warming under the sunshine of said sparkling gaze.
What I mean to say is that I’m, like, definitely super vulnerable to cults.
But also: what I loved in these early models might not have had anything to do with community-centered skills; I admired them because they had power over other people.
I didn’t know what else it could look like.
It wasn’t until years later that I would experience the beauty of a person who could hold space with a group of people so organically, so quietly, and so collaboratively that it felt like magic. The kind of person who listened more than they spoke and listened very deeply at all times. Who could alchemize all that listening into a perfect echo of the sentiment of a room at any moment, and then shape divergent perspectives into something everyone could get behind...because it was the group’s idea all along, just framed in a way that broke through to us.
These are the mentors – some I know, some simply with doodled hearts around them in their books – I look to now as the kind of community-centered hype person I want to be.
But that other person – the one who learned a lot from the people wielding power over others in community – is still within me, too.
It’s a part of me I expect to wrestle with and quiet down and unlearn for the rest of my freaking life. And maybe it’s in you too! It makes sense. There are janky examples of community leadership everywhere. Egomaniacs, top-down power structures, people who accidentally give TEDTalks whenever they speak, fundamentally uncurious people. We all know them and have all been versions of them.
To imagine a different way to be in community together, maybe we need to look to other sources, other stories, other phenomena. I find it helpful to have a few of these in my back pocket and consider them when I feel the inner boss or future cult leader in me clawing its way through.
When I think about the images and archetypes I want to represent as a person who designs with communities, here are a few of my faves:
The Pollinator
You get a bird’s eye view because you might literally be a bird. You fly and flit and flap and flop between beautiful things, picking one thing up and dropping it somewhere else. Ideas! Conversations! Connections! Maybe they thrive where they’re dropped. Maybe they don’t. The fruits and flowers sustain you and in turn, you sustain them.
You’re a nearly invisible but quietly essential part of the ecosystem because you make exchange more possible. You are not, however, the flowers themselves. You are part of a big and complex ecosystem of exchange! How cool!
✨ I like this metaphor when: remembering that I am only as helpful to a community as the ideas and people I understand. Great mascot for reminding you to stop being in your bubble and instead grab 15 coffees with people in your community to hear what’s going on for them.
An Astronaut Seeing Earth as a Pale Blue Dot
You’re hanging out in your spaceship far away from earth, and you look down and notice that all of the noise, all of the day-to-day drama and gossip and backed-up sinks and your favorite chips no longer being stocked at your grocery store – none of it matters, not really.
We’re just on a pale blue dot floating in space! And more than that, we’re all on the same pale blue dot and are more interconnected and reliant on each other than you ever realized. Time to go back to earth and share what you’ve seen!
✨ I like this metaphor when: needing perspective on an issue or tension consuming a group of people. Finding the space to zoom out, give grace, and reignite the awe and kindness needed for being in loving relationships with each other.
Someone Who Holds All of Your Bags While You Go Do Something Important
Your friend wants to crowd surf. Desperately. But they’re juggling all of their purses and water bottles and notebooks (don’t ask why they brought a notebook to a show). You offer to hold all of their stuff for them so they can go do the important thing (crowd surfing) while you hold on to the heavy stuff that might weigh them down, distract them, or be generally cumbersome while doing what they need to do.
✨ I like this metaphor when: acknowledging that “boring work” – aka spreadsheets, proofreading, notetaking, information systems designing – is actually core to the meaningful magic happening. It is making space for others to do their thing.
The thing about metaphors or mascots is that they can be such a powerful shorthand to reframe your thinking. It’s one reason why adrienne maree brown’s comparisons to nature as a source of inspiration for how people might organize themselves – murmurations of starlings moving together, fractals mimicking the branching of trees – are so bone-deep good. We can see ourselves moving in alternative shapes and structures than the ones we’ve been taught all along.
Metaphors can help us imagine other possibilities of being a Group of People Doing Things Together beyond our traditional shapes of ladders and assembly lines and pyramid structures.
Of course, these are just a few metaphors (I want to hear all of yours), and absolutely not limited to those with “Community Manager” or Organizer with a capital O beside their name. Ideally, everyone in a community holds roles like these. We should all be pollinating, being in awe of how small we are, and holding each other’s stuff for one another. That’s part of what disrupts that top-down dynamic.
When I think about these metaphors, I can literally feel my posture towards other people shifting. If I’m pollinating, for example, it’s not my job to force every idea or project into existence - I’m just here to spread the ideas around, connect others, and trust the magic to work.
Who – or what – do you think about when you think about community craft?
💫 Spadework by Alyssa Battistoni by way of
– always looking to and loving lessons from organizing as the deepest study possible on inspiring people to do things together
🌟 Speaking of Garrett, the fantastic Barnraisers Project fall cohorts are kicking off in just a few weeks (deadline September 8th) if you’re interested in learning more about anti-racist organizing and coming into contact with thoughts + readings you will never forget for the rest of your days (emphasis mine, similar experience likely yours)
✨ What’s a better community gathering than a Citibike spin class??
What if you shared this with someone who probably has a great mascot for community building up their sleeve??
Hi! I found you via Garrett Bucks' Barnraisers alumni spreadsheet and I just think this newsletter is the coolest! Thank you for creating this awesomely cool project!