Letting Community Define Itself

What does “community” mean? This is the question our first Evergreen intensive class grappled with. What constitutes a community? Do you have to identify yourself as part of the community? Do you have a choice if you’re a dissenter of a particular community?

We struggled to come up with a workable definition of community; an evergreen definition, if you will. The questions posed above are ones we asked ourselves after coming up with definitions that included: shared goals/vision, self-identified, people connected over time/space/geography, a real or perceived network etc. When consulting the literature, community means different things to different people, not only in a linguistic sense. There can be communities within communities; so how best to define them?

Discussions of this nature beg the question, when agreed upon universal definitions do not exist, how can public policy properly address them? Throughout my experiences working with Indigenous peoples in Canada (both from government and personal) and Ecuador (through an Indigenous non-profit), I have gathered that governments do not often capture “a” or “the” community in its fullest sense. Government policy neglects communities, addresses half of a community or speaks on behalf of a community. Here I refer to “a community” as it is defined by the people within them.

It is often non-profit groups, local organizations and the people themselves that best know how to represent and define their community and each unique set of challenges or circumstances. However a non-profits ability to fully participate and engage in policy is a difficult one for many due to policy, network or program capacity.

Consultation remains a crucial avenue for public policy to make meaningful and evidence-based (though not necessarily in a quantitative statistical way) decisions about the communities it seeks to affect. I believe that having a big-picture objective view can be important for policy making, however, without consultation or understanding, decision makers make decisions in an ivory tower without understanding the community’s needs, definitions or experiences. This too, translated into policy has run its risks. Articulated here with Michael Gist’s op-ed on “Too much of a Good Thing”.