Loneliness had been on the rise before the pandemic. It only became more apparent during these last few years amongst teenagers and adults as bouncing back from the pandemic and returning to normal has not been what people thought it would be. Across the country and around the world, people saw for the first time how important human connection was to their well-being. Building community will be critical to our success as we look toward an uncertain future. How do we start to make human relationships part of our everyday reality when we are so busy and engrossed with our lives?
The simple answer may lie right next door, do you know your neighbor? Today according to Brown University research fellow Marc Dunkelman in his book The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community. Communities have been replaced with networks in which you keep in touch with only your closest friends and family; gone is the age of the township. Instead, the typical story today tends to be that we don't know who lives next door to us, and we are not trying to get to know them. While having a close network of family and friends is lovely, it often does not allow us to grow in the ways we need. We get set in our practices with the people we already know, stagnating our understanding of community.
Before the smartphone existed, people often went to people’s houses to see if they were home to hang out, get to know them, welcome them to the neighborhood, and discover what made them who they were. Instead of checking their Facebook to see if they had any new "friends," the community might have held a monthly or annual barbeque; as a member of the neighborhood, you may have spoken to your neighbors on the street about the yard that needed mending. These were the moments you looked forward to when you got home.
Today many people live in isolation, and even the "neighborhood conversation" has become connectionless through apps like Nextdoor. People ask for your Facebook or Instagram handle instead of your phone number so that they can review you online before hanging out with you in person. As humans, we naturally crave intimacy, connection, and belonging. The new world that has emerged during the last decade conflicts with what we refer to as humanity. A recent statistic noted by Exploding Topics found that the average American spends over seven hours of screen time a day and the average South African over 10 hours. The obvious concern is that so much time spent interacting with screens leaves little time for in-person relationships.
Since the technology usage rate is unlikely to slow down, it puts the onus on each person in society to step out of their box to reach out and connect with other human beings. After over two years of isolation in our homes, people are out of practice knowing how to be neighborly. To take a step towards relearning how to create community in our world, I reached out to founder Barry Braun, the founder of Happy Community Project and Happy Community Builders. He started these organizations because he believes his grandchildren will need the support of their community as our world continues to evolve. Happy Community Project and Happy Community Builders have continued to bring people back together throughout the pandemic.
My Interview with Barry Braun
Tell Me About Happy Community Project.
“It started with me reflecting on my grandchildren's future. I was looking out into their future and seeing a concerning picture. I decided I wanted to do something about it. I tried to mitigate that outcome the best that I possibly could. I noticed that communities were going in the wrong direction, breaking up and people becoming isolated and separated.
We live by the stories that we have. They guide our behavior. If we look at what we do, it's consistent, for the most part, with the story we have about ourselves; the same is true about community. I've learned that communities have a story, and if I talk to half a dozen or a dozen people in a community, they will tell a common thread. They'll say, you know, we're so divisive that all we do is fight about things, or they'll say it's such a wonderful place. We know everybody, and what a great place to live. Whatever the story is, they'll live by it.
For the communities that are struggling to be communities, what we learned is to shift the community story. That's what we call Happy Community Project. We've learned that we can take people through an 18-month process, where the community citizens give themselves new experiences and, through those new experiences, come up with a different story. A story that is in the direction of isn't it great to know each other around here? We accept all the people in our community, including those who are different than what we would typically think of ourselves as, and we look out for each other; we care about each other. So that becomes part of their story when that changes; that's how they behave. Then they become a much more robust community.
In the process, we've learned that they also become economically more prosperous as a community and have a greater sense of well-being.
Happy Community Builders takes a different track than that. Happy Community Builders is about the world of people trying to improve communities. Sometimes they're called community developers, community builders, or changemakers. They all try to do the same work, making their community a better place to live. We've found, through experience, that many of these people feel that they're living in a silo and doing this arduous work, but they're being unappreciated.
They're doing it with a sense of aloneness, so we’ve created a platform called Happy Community Builders, where community builders get to provide peer-to-peer support for each other. They put on workshops. We have a workshop every week. They bring a lot of experience and expertise from many different perspectives and share that through workshops. They form groups to work on special projects. They engage themselves in conversations. We hold at least one monthly conversation where anybody can join called Coffee Connections. When someone's struggling with something, they call out, and if there isn't an actual real solution, they get moral support from people who know what they're going through. So those are the two ways we're enabling people to build more connection, belonging, and caring communities.”
What Do You Believe Has Changed From 30 Years Ago in Communities?
“Once upon a long time ago, we lived in a world where the doors weren't locked. If you needed a cup of sugar, you wandered into the house next door. If they weren't home, you let them know you borrowed a cup of sugar. We've gone a long way away from that. People are still longing for the ability to trust their neighbors. We've been trained to be afraid of people. I had a seminal experience in my work early on before Covid. I would put 15 or 20 people in a room, and I did this several times, and I'd say, why don't we do something straightforward?
Knock on your neighbor's door and say, hi, I'm your neighbor. I'm here if you need any help. One in four people would say they wouldn't do that or couldn't. The reason, they said, well, I'm not qualified. What do you mean you're not qualified? I haven't taken the course nor been checked for criminal and sex offending. If I did knock on their door and something went wrong, they'd sue me, and I'd lose my house. I found that incredibly disappointing because it tells us how afraid we are of each other. Everybody is dangerous in our minds, and the statistics are that people are no more dangerous today than they were 40 or 50 years ago. We're afraid to reach out to them.”
What Do We Need to Worry About For Future Generations?
“My way of getting out of worrying about future generations is to reestablish a community around myself. If we all reestablish community, learn how to be community orientated, and take responsibility for the well-being of others and what goes on around us, rather than leaving it up to other people, we all feel safer. We can feel a lot more comfortable with each other and that there's greater hope in the world because we'll have more positive experiences than negative ones. The news will never change; it will always be negative, but we can always have positive experiences around us. It would be great if we had positive experiences with the people who live closest to us, our neighbors.”
What are families missing these days?
“Family in society is much more mobile than it used to be, meaning families are close emotionally but not necessarily close physically. If you need somebody to run down to the drugstore for you because you're sick and can't get out, and if your family lives on the other side of the country, they're not going to do it for you. Part of the reason for loneliness is that family is far from home. The other idea is that we have developed competition as being normal in a zero-sum game which means that if you got something, then I didn't get it; I'm a loser.
We've got this competitive attitude or style of doing things; it's ingrained in us from when we first start school and maybe even earlier. There are winners and losers. Winners get stuff, and losers lose stuff. There's been a lot of research that's happened recently that shows that cooperation brings us a lot more than competition does, where there is a substantial net gain for everybody through collaboration and that we all become winners through cooperation. For example, there's a lot of talk about global warming, and there are two ways of approaching that. One, I'm going to burn up as much gasoline as possible right now so that I have some advantage, or two, we can all ask ourselves, what can we cooperatively do where we all use up fewer fossil fuels and make our world a better place? The survival of humanity is based on how we cooperate about this. If it's one country against another country or one community against another, we're all going to lose. That's an illustrative example of the power of cooperation. Healthy communities bring back to the community; healthy communities are where we are cooperative with each other. We look out for each other. I might do a favor for you today, and it doesn't get me any gain whatsoever other than a social gain where I can expect that because I did something good for you today.
You or somebody else will do something good for me tomorrow when needed. This idea of competitiveness, the Hatfields versus the McCoys, it's a concept that's passed in time. If we keep competing, we become more divisive. We get the kind of politics that's going on right now. We get the world going down a path of environmental disaster. We end up shuttering in our houses alone because we don't want anybody to have an advantage over us. That's not going to work out well for anybody.”
What Are the Keys to Creating Community in Your Neighborhood?
“You must believe it's possible, which is the first step; creating a sense of possibility for the community, no matter how challenging and daunting. It creates hope and may generate some energy for people to do things, but it doesn't necessarily make the change.
It’s like growing an onion; you start with an onion seed. Start with little things, where people can experience different from what they used to have. That then starts attracting more people to it. The onion gets bigger, and you keep giving them more and different experiences. You need more than one experience; you give them continuous, ongoing, and multiple experiences. When that starts happening, they start changing their belief system. Then with that process, they also start changing the story. It's about getting a core group to lead and creating experiences for others. Through their experiences, people begin to say that the old story doesn't fit anymore; we got a new story now.”
Appreciation and a Lending Hand
“People trying to do something to improve the community often get two pieces of feedback that are very discouraging for them. One is you're doing it wrong and wasting your time.
The other thing is they get lots of advice from other people not doing anything; meanwhile, they're working their heart out, putting a great deal of effort in, and somebody's piling something else on them that they should do. No one is going out and appreciating the people who are trying to do something.
The other one is to help start bringing people together. Reach out to your neighbor and say, hi, I live next door to you, and this is who I am. Who are you? Start having a street party for the neighborhood. It can be in the backyard, or block off the road and have it on the street, whatever works in your community. It may not be a street because many people live in apartment buildings, so go around knocking on all the doors and invite them over for a party in the hallway. It doesn't even have to be inside the apartment. Have an apartment floor party.”
What is the Importance of Creating Community in Your Neighborhood?
“The community has been foundational for humanity since humans became humans. We relied on the community for our well-being and survival forever until around the 1980s, when something started to happen. We began emphasizing the importance of self-reliance and independence. We started using the word freedom in a new way; freedom to be independent and not responsible for anybody else, just me. That's when we started moving down the path toward loneliness. Around 75% of the population does not know their next-door neighbor, so we've lost the sense of interdependence that we used to have and our sense of responsibility for each other, which is what community means.
At Happy Community Builders and Happy Community Project, we’re refocusing on enabling people simply to know each other again. Then out of knowing each other, developing a sense of belonging, and out of that sense, start assuming responsibility for looking out for each other. One thing I always hear is that people long for connection. They want that again. I think Covid taught us how important that is, that we aren't as independent and self-reliant as we thought. There's a strong desire in the world to create that community again.”
What is The Biggest Lesson You Have Learned Since Starting Happy Community Project?
“The biggest lesson is how much people long for a sense of community. Almost everybody wants more sense of community than what they have. They don't know how to do it. The biggest lesson is that people want to do something about it.
Windsor, Nova Scotia, is a small community of 12,000 people and is not a prominent metropolitan place. 700 people in 18 months volunteered their time to come forward and help make their community a happier community. People wanted to do that. They wanted to contribute to making the community a more joyful place; it only took a little bit of leadership to show them what they could do to make that happen.”
Tell Me the Best Story You Have About What You Are Doing.
“A fellow from England said, I learned that it doesn't matter where the community is in the world; we're all dealing with the same issues. We're all dealing with the same problems and trying to make our communities the same kind of communities; connected, caring, and providing a sense of belonging. That was a big success.”
What Are the Purposes of a Community?
“Research says that we have greater mental, physical, and economic health when we cooperate and communicate with each other when we don't see each other as an enemy. The benefit is that we're happier, healthier, and economically better off if we cooperate in a community and look for opportunities to help each other.
One of the biggest things we deal with is fearfulness; we want security and safety. The best way to have safety is to know who's around you, who you can trust, and can't trust. You can't do that by pre-assuming that everybody is untrustworthy. You must actually know them.
How do you know if you can trust them if you don't know them?”
About Barry Braun
Barry Braun is the founder of Happy Community Project and Happy Community Builders and created these organizations because he believed his grandchildren will need the support of their community as our world continues to evolve. Throughout the pandemic, Happy Community Project and Happy Community Builders have continued to bring people back together. With his organization, he has been able to help people see the vital role of creating a neighborhood and getting people connected through volunteering, working together, and gathering; to bring life to the world and themselves. To find out more, go to: www.happycommunityproject.com
About the Author
Annmarie Hylton-Schaub, Head Marketing Strategist and Content Developer at Project Good Work, a boutique marketing group focused on helping individuals who want to launch social impact projects, charities, and change-making initiatives. The marketing group works to develop branding, marketing strategy, and content to connect clients with the people who believe what they believe so that their project and business can thrive.
If you have a passion for an unserved community, a social justice problem, or want to change minds, contact Project Good Work at ProjectGood.Work to start your project of change today.