My wife and I volunteer at a community fridge and one of our policies is that we don’t judge what people take or how they take it. There’s a lot of disrespect going to on with the property and occasionally people take all of the food at once, and I’ve had people say Things about my Gender, but the minute you start telling people they can’t come to the fridge or they can’t take food, you’re fucking up the whole idea.
Over time, that continued kindness of just. Cleaning it. Turning up. Restocking the fridge and the larder. Not chasing people away for using it as a meeting spot or to smoke or drink. Saying hello as people turn up. Showing up at the farmer’s market to bring home the extra and be amongst the crowd.
It gathers interest, people help. The community joins in and starts to donate and begins to take a little pride in what was built. Maybe the guy that called me a tranny one time has started acting a little more sheepish around me and maybe he’ll take that lesson going forward.
When you let people be human and fuck up and let those discomforts interact in a way where nobody is going to corner anybody, they start to put their guard down. When they start to put their guard down and get to know you, they have a person to refer to when they’re thinking of other people like you. And maybe they see that other person as more human because of the human they know.
Two key things that have really stuck with me during this process are: “if you want a village, you must be a villager” and “inconvenience is the price we pay for community.” This does not mean you must disrupt your life every time someone needs something from you, but it does mean that sometimes you will have to go out of your way to pick up a piece of trash or stop an extra 90 seconds at the crosswalk to let someone cross or give up 15 minutes of your Tuesday to check in with a neighbor.
Community also doesn’t require physical labor from everyone. It can be offering your organizational skills to maintain a sign-up Google sheet, being the co-admin of a discord server, designing or printing signage, volunteering child, elder, or pet care, registering for Narcan or first-aid training, donating toiletries, craft supplies, or books to your local library or shelter, leaving out water or snacks for delivery drivers, and a million, billion other things.
Community is not all or nothing. Whatever you can commit to at whatever cadence still matters.
None of us are in this alone.
