Community Unity: Does It Matter?

Recently I became involved with a group in my home community that holds what they call a community unity dinner, free once a month and open to all. As the name implies, this sprang from the idea that these dinners would help break down real and perceived barriers separating people by race, gender orientation, socioeconomic status, and the camps supporting or opposing the city government.

While I have as much fun cooking, serving, meeting, and greeting as the next person, in the after-action evaluation, I'm often asking, "Are we improving community unity? How do we know?"

Last month I started thinking about whether community unity was even important. Sure, my heart aches for racial and ethnic equity and for fair treatment of people who are far different from me. But couldn't we all just be tolerant and stay in our separate corners without sparring all the time? Wouldn't that be sufficient?

I conclude that the answer is no. The benefit of all this planning, cooking, and mingling is that we are developing the capacity of our residents to empathize with people in other circumstances. It's a basic aspect of what citizenship requires of us, and a functioning democracy requires that we consider the welfare of all. But we don't usually develop empathy at the national level. That happens at the local level. That's part of what your community work is all about.

I liked this article about how to communicate better with neighbors from the OneRoof platform. This addresses the "why" question too.

For dealing with inevitable conflicts in neighborhood associations, see the article on that subject on our website. The best organizations accept and expect conflict but continue to use their mission as a lodestar to bring people back together.

So spend some face time with people who are different from you this fall.