Community, Two Ways

In the spring, some sweet friends of mine assembled not a book club, but instead an “article” club, designed for the reality of our hectic lives where instead of consuming a novel together we consumed a cultural article (this one decades old and related to fashion), and met around a bottle of wine to discuss.

I realize that I both desperately want and need to gather these days, to see people’s faces and feel their energies and be able to tell how they’re doing versus how they say they’re doing, to figure out how to support each other and to talk about unscripted things and discover things together, in a way that I have not personally found replicable through a phone or computer. I don’t take the privilege to be with people lightly, and a lot of the energy I am putting toward 2024 planning is designed around the idea of being together more.

Aside from touting the genius of my friends who arranged this discussion (especially three of them whose newsletters are very much worth following, including Neverworns, Passerby, and Club Vintage), it is the first time in memory that I brought up for discussion something else I read this spring, from the writer and hospitality activist Ashtin Berry, and if you’ve seen me in person this year there’s a very high chance I’ve brought it up in conversation because I honestly have thought about little else for nearly eight months.

In the spring, Berry posited that many people have lost the ability to discern between two ways of being:

1. being in community with someone, and

2. being in proximity to someone.

When stated this way, it makes an enormous amount of sense. Because of the way media companies have been able to further capitalize social currency (especially the pursuit of it) into a marketing tool, we have also now been trained to go out and select communities we want to be identified with, much the way that kids apply to college looking for all of the positive associations of their future alma mater. The promise of marketing is that if you Shop Here, Use This, Buy These, Subscribe To This, you will become a part of a “community” that you idolize and want to identify with.

But what that is actually describing is proximity. Being around the right people, being seen at the right places, wearing the right clothing on your body, these are all conditional and geographical (to some extent) data points. The question becomes: when you reached the place, be it virtual or physical, and you saw the people, whether you just met them or you gave them a big hug with a wiggle at the end, what was the behavior in that space? Did you fill each other up? Is there mutual, circular support amongst that group? Are the members reliable, accountable to one another? Is one person’s comfort more valuable than another - or in other words, are people’s respective comforts arranged around keeping just a few people happy?

These are all questions I have been asking myself all year, trying to understand in what ways I create proximity versus community, and figuring out how I can tweak or grow or even just answer the voids that I find when I’m looking at the way I walk in the world. I’m sharing this not to suggest that I am the epitome of community engagement, but rather to share some of the ways I am asking myself to aim higher next year, and to invite you to add it to your personal list of things to consider as well.

Over the last few weeks we have watched Eric Adams strip funding from the community composting program in New York City, meaning that the community collection sites processed by the network of composters that have been holding this service together for years (such as Grow NYC, LES Ecology Center, Big Reuse, Earth Matter) will lose the government financial support they depend on to keep performing this essential service. If you do not already follow Save Our Compost, it is a great source of information and action points around this issue.

Some of you readers already know this, but at the start of the pandemic I created a very modest website called NeverSleepsNYC, which was just a directory of all of the mutual aid and community support efforts taking place around the city, from restaurants crowdfunding meals for hospital staff to organizations looking after LGBTQ+ unhoused teenagers and many, many more. I did it because I am an Excel person (only god can judge me), and I wanted a central point of information to gather information about these efforts, and I thought as long as I was doing that I should share it with others.

I was not naive entering into that project, I had already had lots of touch with non-profit and support services throughout this city in the previous 10 years, so this was not as much of an eye-opener as a further drilling down into the reality of the way this city works and the importance of all of us protecting community efforts.

The services we rely on to keep this city running every day and especially to support the marginalized is largely held together with a network of scrappy grassroots NPOs and mutual aid organizations that are making the most with volunteers and a shoestring budget to provide essential services to people like you and me. Full stop. That is the end of the fact.

New York City produces more waste than has anywhere to go, and the city administration has no solution for this problem.

Community composting is waste management. Community composting is not any more disposable than are the kind people on trucks that come at dawn to collect our trash and recycling certain days of the week. It is just not a service being performed by a private waste company, and thusly it can be marginalized, condescended to in the way we consider its impact or its budget or its necessity. And I would venture that a large part of that is because it is called Community Composting, not Municipal Composting, and we have been trained to believe that things titled “Community” are disposable.

But things deserving of the title “Community” are some of the most important concepts we can protect.

So I humbly ask, if you haven’t yet, please take a moment to reach out to your representatives, let them know that you need and expect waste management to be fully funded in all its forms, even if they think when we do it ourself it is somehow less valuable. What you do yourself, at this moment, may in fact be the most valuable thing to your community.

xx A