Thriving Communities: The Essential Role that Communities Play in Our Shared Future

Communities are essential for human flourishing. Throughout history, we’ve found stability and cohesion in community with one another, leveraging our collective capacity as a foundation for innovation, social progress and economic development. The critical role that community plays in our individual and collective success is undeniable, but recent trends point to a regression that must be addressed if we’re to safeguard our future.

The Illusion of Connectedness and the Essential Importance of Community

We’ve never been more connected, but somehow all that connectedness has failed to yield stronger communities. In fact, the opposite is true. The technologies that promised to bring us together have increasingly served to isolate and even divide us. The ugly truth is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be compromised and commoditized for the sake of an illusion. For all the ‘friends’ and countless ‘likes’, these technologies have yielded little more than dopamine-fueled isolation, cultural division and an epidemic of self-doubt and loneliness that is quickly becoming the greatest challenge of our time. It turns out that connectedness is a poor substitute for community.

Things were already headed in the wrong direction before the pandemic, but extended lockups and work-from-home schemes accelerated the trends in ways that had a profoundly negative impact on everything from civic discourse to public health. When we emerged from our homes, we found that the world had changed and our communities were not what they had once been. The bonds of human empathy were frayed and many of the places that we once held dear were either gone or somehow changed. The stakes were high and what had been lost was too important to ignore. For many of us, this was the moment we realised that community, as an idea and an essential for our shared future, is worth fighting for.

The Role that Communities Play in Human Progress

Human potential is an extraordinary thing. Modern culture tends to fetishise individual genius, but the reality is always more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Beyond the mythology, the story of human progress has always been one of co-creation and collective action. Of course, we need visionaries and iconoclasts to challenge our thinking and disrupt the status quo, but tangible progress requires a group of interested parties working together to make things happen. This speaks to the importance of community as a platform and a catalyst for realizing human potential.

In community, we find the stability required to pursue our individual and shared aspirations. It’s easy to take the idea of stability for granted, but for many around the world, this most basic of human expectations is far from guaranteed. With safety, security, infrastructure and public services taken care of, people are free to pursue activities that further their individual and collective well-being. From education and healthcare to economic development and policy reform, communities serve as a platform for meeting those higher needs. This is where things get interesting.

Community as a Platform for Local and Regional Transformation

Communities offer a kind of laboratory for experimentation. They serve as a platform for innovating to meet the needs of their people. This innovation takes many forms, and its expression is specific to each community. There are, however, lessons that are valuable for broader application. Great ideas travel, and scaling impact requires an ability to leverage the portability and accessibility of key concepts beyond their point of origin. Governments would do well to acknowledge the role communities play in originating, evaluating and embedding innovation.

Public and private funding should be focused on encouraging experimentation and cultivating innovation at the local level. It’s here, on the streets and in the cafes, in the hallways and conference rooms where business models and policy proposals take shape. It’s here in the real world where these ideas are implemented, evaluated and perfected. When an idea has broader applicability, governments should encourage and enable knowledge transfer, supporting the scaling of solutions at a regional and national level.

 The Promise of Thriving Communities

The stakes are high. We need thriving communities for the sake of our personal and collective well-being. We deserve places to gather and reclaim our humanity, embracing the opportunity to connect, engage with one another and go about the important work of creating a better tomorrow for our families and neighbours. Together, we can challenge convention and create opportunities for collaboration, realising the unique value of distributed networks of innovation and learning. The promise of thriving communities belongs to all of us. So let’s put down the smart device, let go of all the divisiveness and choose to see the remarkable opportunity that exists in community with one another. Our future depends on it.

A Few Final Thoughts

In the coming weeks, we’ll be introducing our approach to understanding and creating the conditions for cultivating thriving communities. This is more than a business for us. We want to be a part of a movement that’s focused on rejuvenating, activating and empowering local communities to realise their civic and economic potential while unleashing their capacity for fostering human flourishing. We would love to have you join us on the journey.