Honestly, it felt for many years,
like screaming from the mountaintops into the void.
Nobody can do that.
And second of all, are you crazy?
It's a pretty lonely life.
You have a lot of people telling you it's not working.
You have a lot of people who are very sort of skeptical.
Yes.
What really gives me that sense of hope
is that I'm not struggling alone.
I'm struggling with many other people
who understand the vision
and want to deliver the best for the communities we're in.
We're all doing really hard work.
And it means something to be surrounded by other people
who are doing hard work.
Humans need support.
A bit of a cocoon where you feel safe.
You feel empowered.
There's laughter.
A sense of flow in between people, like an organism.
Co-creation.
[Off-Screen Voice] Joy.
[Off-Screen Voice 1] Understanding.
[Off-Screen Voice 2] Kinship.
You wanna dance? Of course, I always wanna dance.
You feel like you can do your best
because people believe in you.
You wanna grab each other and say,
"How are you and what's been going on?
And how can I help?"
You can be yourself.
And when you can be yourself,
you know you really belong.
The good parts of you, the not so good parts of you,
the anxious parts of you.
Openness to be vulnerable,
to not maybe know everything.
I think community is about power-sharing
and power-shifting.
That's kind of different
because a lot of the way the world works
is about concentrating power.
We all bring in different ingredients
to this bigger conversation.
Community's also about squabbles and disagreements.
All kinds of itchy, cratchy,
scratchy things that we do to each other.
The biggest challenge for communities is fear.
Fear of the unknown.
We have noble and important goals.
But the real work to get us into community together
is about the personal work you do
to make sure that you are an inclusive person,
that you can build a bridge
with the people who are different from you.
There's no way that only one person,
or even just a few people are gonna be able
to make the kind of difference and progress
that we need to see.
For us, it's important that community building
is really driven at the most local level.
Our job is to really come in and be supporters,
be better allies.
We have to empower people who are closest to the pain
in communities to really champion their rights.
Everyone talks now about equity,
but what does equity actually mean
when some people get drugs and vaccines
and other people don't?
The currency of community
of the social goods sector is trust.
It's not money. It's very difficult to acquire trust.
You can't simply go out and say, "Trust me."
If you wanna build a community,
you behave in a way where people will, over time,
build up a trust in your motives, in your word,
in what you stand for.
As we deal with all these intersecting crises
around the world,
there's a sense of comfort in knowing
that there's this group of people that are deeply committed,
deeply courageous, deeply innovative,
who are always ready to come together
to think about how we try and create something better
out of the mess that the world is in right now.
That shared purpose, that shared story of who we are,
where we're headed, why it matters,
what happens if we get there, what happens if we don't?
That's the kind of thing that brings people together.
It's not gonna happen overnight,
but it does happen if you do it right
and in a patient way and bring others along with you.
It's always everyday thinking.
Who needs to be part of this conversation?
Who needs to know what I'm doing?
Start from your sitting room, your bedroom, your kitchen.
Tell the people you live with
and ask them to tell the people they work with
and the people they interact with.
Before you know it, you have built a community.
Community, community, community.