How to Create a Community

The gift is to the giver… it can­not fail. –Walt Whitman

Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift has taught me a lot; for one thing, it explains how gifts are the cur­rency of com­mu­nity. The les­son: if you want to make some­one a part of your com­mu­nity, be gen­er­ous to them. If they accept your kind­ness (and espe­cially if they are gen­er­ous in return) they are sig­nalling to you that they want to be in your group as well. In this way gift-giving binds us together. We become increas­ingly in each oth­ers’ debt. 

Early Euro­pean set­tlers to Pacific North Amer­ica noticed a lot of the native peo­ple apply­ing this idea through rituals:

When some­one in one of these tribes was mis­tak­enly insulted, his response, rather than turn­ing to a libel lawyer, was to give a gift to the man who had insulted him; if indeed the insult was mis­taken, the man would make a return gift, adding a lit­tle extra to demon­strate his good will, a sequence that has the same struc­ture (back and forth with increase) as the pot­latch itself. When a gift passes from hand to hand in this spirit, it becomes the binder of many wills (Page 36).

Hyde explains that this kind of response would do far more than make for a healthy, happy com­mu­nity, it would cre­ate a spir­i­tus mundi (a unan­i­mous heart) within the tribe. They were show­ing that they con­sid­ered their strength to be in each other, rather than in their own mate­r­ial gain.

Apply­ing this idea

We all like to feel we have strong, sup­port­ive rela­tion­ships. But how, in these rushed times, with friends

around the world and so many demands on our time, can we apply this kind of wis­dom? Here are a few ideas you can try:

1. Say it with art. We all appre­ci­ate get­ting a hand­made card with a poem in it. Any kind of artistry forces us to be con­sid­er­ate and orig­i­nal and peo­ple always love it when you make that kind of effort –whether you’re a nat­ural artist or not. It’s a bit like try­ing to speak to a local in their own lan­guage –they’ll love you for trying.
2. Don’t let them pay. The Gift tells a story of a daugher in Min­nesapo­lis who agreed to donate a life-saving kid­ney to her mother, but only if her mother would buy her an expen­sive fur coat. The mom felt betrayed and held-hostage. The daugh­ter saw the gift as a trans­ac­tion, so traded what could have been a stronger bond with her mother, for a coat.
3. Just as with birth­day presents, it’s not so much what is given, but the mean­ing behind it that mat­ters most. So…
4. Say some­thing sappy. Don’t just give a present and leave it at that. Say some­thing nice to add mean­ing to the gift, to let them know WHY you’re giv­ing it.
5. Be on the look-out. Do you have a coworker who stops by your desk every day just to say hi?  If you look for the signs, you might be sur­prised to find that a lot of peo­ple around you are try­ing to cre­ate bonds with you as well.
6. And finally (the most obvi­ous of all) look for ways to give your time.

Want more?

If this inter­ests you, you might enjoy reading:

• Guy Kowasaki’s The Art of Cre­at­ing a Com­mu­nity (a blog post) offers some prac­ti­cal advice for using tech­nol­ogy and ideas to grow a com­mu­nity. Or,
• Seth Godin’s book on “Tribes,” which totally applies here. In fact, one of the rea­sons I’m writ­ing this blog (besides try­ing to give some­thing mean­ing­ful to the peo­ple I care about: a gift :-) is because I want to cre­ate a group of peo­ple who col­lab­o­rate to help each other improve their qual­ity of life. I want to develop a strong Qual­ity of Life Tribe. I want to belong to a group of peo­ple who gen­er­ously sup­port each other in their efforts to improve their qual­i­tuy of life. Here are some tips on devel­op­ing a tribe.
• A great new post from Liz Strauss The Only Way to Attract a Vibrant, High-Trust Com­mu­nity online. An online com­mu­nity isn’t built or befriended, it’s con­nected by offer­ing and accept­ing. Com­mu­nity is affin­ity, iden­tity, and kin­ship that make room for ideas, thoughts, and solutions.

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