You need a village to raise a child
Personal thoughts on the power of community
Let’s talk about community. More precisely, about the power of community. But not in an academic fashion…
This will be the hardest text I write in a while. Not for its topics range, nor the wingspan of its philosophical arguments… but because it’s rooted on a very personal -intimate you could say- affair.
So, if you are not into reading some personal anecdotes, feel free to stop reading here: I promise I will return next week with my nerdy rambles.
In order to dig up the golden nuggets of why communities are so powerful, and why I care so much about building healthy ones, I have to (I want to) share some glimpses of the experiences shaping my worldview.
I. My personal experience with my community
I am a parent. And I could not agree more with the phrase “you need a village to raise a child”. The endeavour of helping a small human being to become all they can is a herculean task.
It could be more challenging in special circumstances, and there is where I have found community shines the better!
I got married somewhat young at 27 years old. Then I was starting my own company and working full time in a big Mexican company.
Nine months later our first son was born. A small, beautiful and unhealthy child. We received the news in the hospital: he was born with a genetic disease and he would die soon. The happiness of being new parents was suddenly transmuted into worries, uncertainty and pain.
Enter the community. Our son’s grandparents, families, friends, colleagues and a bunch of people came to support us.
From administrative issues (dealing with the insurance company, and later with the funeral paperwork) to daily basis chores, we were really protected and supported. My boss was very supportive and also was her boss (an executive and now a dear friend I met years before in my previous work).
We pass through this crisis with little scratches than expected thanks to our community.
After a while, we got pregnant again. Our second child. Happy news, with a sad ending: we lost the child.
This second trauma had an unexpected result: we found again great support from many members of our community (family, friends…) but we discovered something broken… too many people had faced this pain in solitude and silence. Only when we were “part of the group” did we learn about the suffering of many parents in our closest circle.
The community is there, ready to give support… but in this case, the silence raised as an obstacle.
Community only is powerful when there’s openness, transparency, trust. Of course, some themes are hard to be open about, but we need to ensure those traits if we want the community to be able to flourish. Shame, opaqueness, and taboos hinder the strength of the community.
Do I mean we should be shouting to the winds intimate and/or painful issues? For Goodness sake, no! Privacy and intimacy must be protected and greatly esteemed. But we need to find safe passages for those topics to be spoken and shared.
The years passed and in 2015 our third child was born. A healthy boy. Finally, what the doctors were telling us (that the two former cases were not related and we should be fine conceiving another child) became apparent.
Happiness and, again, the power of the community arose. We received tons of support again. For example, I was not in the city when my child and wife came home, and my sister and sister-in-law stayed with them for a long, tiring week taking care of the mother and the newborn.
My godparents were always available to help us in many ways, my mother-in-law was always supporting us to stay afloat with the challenges of a new baby while juggling the financial challenges inherited from the last two pregnancies and hospitalizations.
One amazing anecdote is that our company (my wife and I were first co-founders and then married couple) fastly became baby-friendly.
One meeting room was transformed into a child’s room, our co-workers helped with the boy when we had a meeting with a client or a supplier, our third co-founder hired a “corporate nanny” to help us take care of the child…
This transformation even had impact in our clients experience! Some of them had small children and we were able to give them a space to have them in our office while working with us.
Those are one of the happiest times of my professional memory, despite the financial challenges and the stress of running a small business while raising a child. And of course, it’s all thanks to the community.
2017 came and we knew we were expecting a baby girl… with close to zero chances of surviving due to a severe disability: in short, she had almost no brain developed.
I could express all the ways our community came to our help again… but I will only share that she is about to turn five and, despite being disabled and to the surprise of many doctors, is quite healthy.
Finally, in 2018 our last baby girl was born. Again with another (and unrelated) disability. When she was born, our community did something that led me and my wife to tears: without any warning, they organized a fundraising campaign to help us with her first medical bills. Our friends called their friends, they shared the campaign and suddenly people completely unrelated to us were sharing and donating…
…please forgive me if I write this too slow… I still have to cope with the flood of emotions when recalling those events…
…that campaign allowed us to overcome the first marathon of laboratory studies and move forward as a family. And from that point, the community has only but increased its impact:
The school where our eldest son studies gave us a scholarship for over a year. Our daughters entered a rehabilitation center that a member of the community recommended. Etcetera.
Communities do what communities do best: supporting its members. My community helped me to:
Move forward in my professional career
Protect my family
Take care of my children
Raise funds for my startup (thank you F&Fs)
Gave me feedback on critical issues
In terms of power: I’ve been able to do what I’ve done thanks to the community! I have the power to achieve things, because I have a community that:
Contributes capabilities
Allow me to leverage those capabilities
Enriches by me using those capabilities (I’m more valuable for the community to the extent I use those capabilities and keep bringing value to other members)
Am I privileged? A thousand percent yes.
II. Reflecting on the community’s dynamics
Let me here be crystal clear about something: of course, I have been focusing on those moments when we received from the community, but communities are not unidirectional: they are relationship-based.
The power of the communities emerge from the capabilities of the group and the thickness of the connection among its members: the more diverse the community, the biggest the catalogue of capabilities; the thicker the lines connecting the members, the stronger the relationship and the possibility to help each other and add more value.
I imagine the network of the community as a power grid where each node creates an amount of power that runs through the community’s inner relations. You want a huge tube to run an enormous amount of power.
I think this concept is important for us trying to build communities and community-based projects. Understanding thickness, connection and power may be the way to refine a strong approach to “minimum viable communities”1, for example.
Another concept I’d love to explore is that power and dynamics has a common ground in the greek concept of ability and potency (like in -able to). Communities are maybe the ultimate enablers because they are the best systems to conserve raw, inactive value and to transform it into active value with almost no loss!
But that’s an essay for another time…
III. Closing thoughts
I share all of this -with a good share of discomfort- because I have been thinking about all of this for the past two weeks and has helped me to understand better why communities are critical for the human race and why we must ensure we are cautious and deeply intentional in the curating of emerging communities in the web3 era.
The past two weeks I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been again under the protective umbrella of our community.
My youngest girl is in hospital (I am writing this sitting down beside her hospital crib while she sleeps). A surgery was mandatory to help her and we were forced to push it back for over a year due to COVID-19. So here we are, telling her she is a hero and telling ourselves to stay strong.
And this trance would’ve been much worse if it wasn’t for, you guessed, the community.
Friends, family, workers, partners… the village has been here helping with the other two children, with the to-do lists at work, with logistics, mental health and with many, many other things.
I ask myself again: Am I privileged? A million percent yes.
And that’s why I think I have a more profound responsibility in helping create human-centric communities.
Writting this essay was not easy. I’m not fond of sharing my personal and familiar stories like this. But if I said over and over again that communities are personal, and the past weeks I was not able to leverage my usual muscles to write another kind of text, I should stay by my words and be personal.
After all, that’s all I have the strength to be right now.
* edit: thankfully my daughter is in home now! ***
** edit 2: There are tons of other communities I did not mention, but I’m profoundly grateful to them as well
The concept is not mine. I first read it in a tweet by Alexis Ohanian:
I also have some Minimum Viable Community (MVC) some posts I wrote here - https://rosie.land/posts?topic=mvc
Respect and hugs to all you have been through. ❤️