What’s lost when we lose a sense of community?
The Obama Foundation recently announced that the Obama Presidential Library will be built in Chicago, where the President developed his skills as a community organizer in the 1990s. By choosing the city where he forged his identity as an activist and politician, the President is literally situating his legacy in the community that made him who he is today.
Erik Schneiderhan calls this “the politics of helping others.” And he notes the competing interests pulling at all of us who are looking to better our communities:
How do Americans act in the face of competing social pressures when trying to help others in their communities? … The conflicting social demands of individualism and community assistance comprise a challenge that many face—it’s the American’s Dilemma. Well-meaning people are torn, akin to Goethe’s Faust who bemoaned having two souls beating in one breast. Whether the president of the United States, a registered nurse, or a university student, at some point most Americans wonder how to help others while still working toward the American Dream, how to lend a helping hand and still be a bootstrapping success.
Schneiderhan makes a case for readers to take three specific actions in their lives: don’t get comfortable, watch out for selfish reciprocity, and connect with your neighbors. The importance of this third point can’t be understated. Much of my own work has looked at how personal connections matter. In 2006, I wrote Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America. The book followed the young canvassers you see so frequently on street corners, clipboard in hand, asking if you want to support any number of causes.
These canvassers are often the “foot soldiers” of political campaigns. But rather than working among their own local communities, these canvassers are more typically part of a large organization that treats these idealistic young workers like replacable cogs in their grassroots machine. These canvassers are the face of what I call “outsourced activism.” In the book, I compare outsourced activism, which has expanded on the Left all the way to the Democratic Party itself, to the more locally embedded system of mobilization on the Right. The book concludes that face-to-face interactions with friends and neighbors are a much more effective mobilization strategy than these highly professionalized and outsourced activities. In the 2008 election, it is clear that the Obama campaign noted the importance of these types of personal, local connections—and the rest is history.
The importance of connecting with friends and neighbors has been discussed by academics and policy-makers alike. Political pundits focus on this specific point when they explain why Barack Obama won both of his two elections for President of the United States. His Camp Obama training program for campaign workers specifically focused on making personal connections with potential voters, capitalizing whenever possible on connections among friends and neighbors.
At the same time, scholars and cultural critics have lamented the loss of true community connections. The start of the 2000s increased these challenges as more and more Americans were forced to move to follow educational and employment opportunities in the wake of the Great Recession. Moreover, as digital devices command an increasing proportion of our attention, life is lived through electronic connections, rather than on the sidewalks and streets of neighborhoods.
As digital devices command an increasing proportion of our attention, life is lived through electronic connections, rather than on the sidewalks and streets of neighborhoods.
Recently, I have turned my attention to pathways to participation, specifically focusing on enviornmental stewardship. My research shows that the people who are engaging in active participation in environmental stewardship—like planting trees to expand the urban forest in their cities or participating in a large-scale protest event against climate change—are much more actively involved in democracy across the board: they vote more, and they participate in a variety of other civic activities in their communities. This result made me curious to know which came first: the motivation for civic engagement, or the commitment to environmental stewardship.
It ends up that participating in environmental activities with friends and neighbors matters a lot. In a two-year study of volunteer stewards in New York City, the research concludes that planting trees with friends and neighbors serves as a gateway into broader forms of civic engagement; stewardship was an entry point for many to get more civically involved.
In studying participants at the People’s Climate March in New York City in September 2014, I found that roughly a third of the participants at this large-scale protest event (37%) had never before participated in a protest. Many of these participants were mobilized through social media and mediated-forms of communication to get involved, trying out this form of engagement to address what they identified as a social dilemma. The question that remains, however, is whether this type of face-to-face participation can create connections among like-minded people who may then realize that they are neighbors or even become friends.
There’s much more work to be done here to understand the effects of these forms of face-to-face engagement on the citizens who participate and on American democracy more broadly. The model set forth in Erik Schneiderhan’s book sets a clear, albeit challenging, path to follow. As we try to embrace his call not to get too comfortable, watch out for selfish reciprocity, and connect with our neighbors, I encourage everyone to take a look outside, literally. Helping clean up the local park or plant trees at your kids’ school might be the ideal first step.
Dana R. Fisher is a professor of Sociology and Director of the Program for Environment and Society at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America. For more information on her research, books, and publications, see www.drfisher.umd.edu
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