When we talk about community here on the HandsOn blog, what we usually mean is a group of people connected by geography. We talk about the people who live in the same city or the same neighborhood.

Community isn’t restricted to geography, though.

Communities can be tied together by a common interest. Increasingly, communities are seated in technology rather than geography. The internet is a phenomenal tool for people with similar interests to find one another and have shared experiences that let them create a sense of community.

Are communities required to produce change?

An individual can affect someone by being a mentor, or can clean up a park by themselves, or tutor students on their own. Groups of individuals, though, coming together for the shared purpose of helping youth or improving their environment are able to accomplish more than the individuals alone.

A sense of community helps to support the engaged individual and the work that they are doing.

How do communities come together to do this? What happens when someone wants to bring a group of people together to clean a park instead of doing it on their own?

Lets say that they put a notice up in places in their neighborhood-at the park, in the library, in the grocery store-asking people to come together to talk about cleaning the park. People come to the meeting as strangers, maybe they bring a friend with them, and are driven by individual needs. Everyone comes together by virtue of their location and spends time together planning the clean up event.

After the logistics of the event are worked out, the clean up day comes and everyone comes together at the park. As they work together, they achieve their goal (a clean park) and the group members gain a shared status of people working together to make their neighborhood better. After a few more projects, members of the group bring in their friends and the group grows in size.

Communities come together based on individual needs, but become bound by location and contact between individuals. Shared experience and investment in the group help to make individual bonds stronger, and so does the sense of status that surrounds membership in a group.

Community helps to improve and support the work of individuals. A community helps to support its members and brings together a set of shared resources that makes the community more able to act and have an impact than the individual could on their own. A community of people is stronger and more able to have influence than any individual member of that community.