Why community? Community is the pathway to a balanced, interconnected way of being where all people can thrive.  Exploitation, oppression, and violence flourish with isolation and individualism.

We believe community building is the most radical form of resistance to the violence and oppression we currently face. Though community has been under attack for generations, it is an essential practice of humanity, rooted in hope and interconnection.

We practice, remember, interconnect and become unstoppable.

Community is? Across Resonance, we experience community as the deep relationship and energy generated when we live, work and play in the awareness of our interconnection.  

We understand that it can be the family we’re born into, our chosen family, friends, or a place.  It can be created when we come together with others who share aspects of our culture, identity, values, spiritual journey, work, or interests.

What is community to you?

What are we practicing? When we’re actively building community, we’re on a journey with others to be together in ways that reflect the norms of the world we want and deserve.  We do community-building through different activities and contexts, whether through sharing food or art, telling stories, or talking through disagreements together.

As we grow and deepen our connections, we can harness our relational power to transform not only the places we live and work, but also social norms, policies and structures.

An Invitation! The series of interactions that are part of this “Uptick” are geared towards defining, building and imagining the evolution of community building within a community of practitioners who are actively working in the field.

Join this conversation by contributing to our gallery of community builders: Respond to the question: “What is community to you?” Take a selfie, share your name, location and include a few sentences about what community is to you.

Peer Learning Calls:

• Tuesday, June 4th 12pm PT// 3pm ET, Topic 01: Learning from Each Other: Exploring Shared Experiences and Perspectives. In this first call, we will unpack how each of us define community; what is important about community in our work; and how we leverage community-building to push our work forward. Some questions that we might address in this call are: What is your process, what are the essential practices or ways of being that help communities thrive: breathing together, sharing food, sitting in circle, etc? How do you disrupt the roots of harmful power structures, colonization, and oppression in your practice? How do you create spaces for communities that are healing, fluid, and inclusive?

• Tuesday, June 11th 12pm // 3pmET, Topic 02: Where We Are: The Challenges and Opportunities of Building Community. In this second call, we will go deeper into what we experience as the assets and barriers to building strong, lasting and authentic community. In addition to examining in more detail the specific assets of community that support the work that we do, we will ask and answer questions such as: How do we support creativity? How do we build a bigger we?  What stops people from doing this kind of work? How do we engage people in meaningful and deep conversation that turns into action? What are the barriers and how do we address them?

• Tuesday, June 18th 12pm // 3pmET, Topic 03: Building the Now Creating New Modes of Community. In this third call, we’ll look at what community might be in our network, and in building beloved community overall. We’ll go deeper into thinking about how the integration of the emerging world view works within community, and how it might catalyze new forms of community that are decentralized, autonomous and mutually supportive. Questions and topics we will address in this call might be: How does your purpose continue to evolve and deepen? Once you have a community coming together how to you keep your stance open enough to invite others in and hold it intact? Are there themes in the Emerging World View to Organize Learning Around? How does everyone see their ownership and sacred responsibility? How do we build community when we are separate (distributed geographically)?

In Person Gathering: In this in person gathering, we’ll build on the discussions we had online and start to conceive of new strategies to build and sustain community together specifically addressing the barriers previously defined. The specific dates for this are TBD but will take place some time this fall.