Catching up on yesterday that I missed: Monday 27th July

Modern consumer culture has done something quietly devastating to our understanding of community. It has repositioned us, almost without our noticing, from producers to consumers in every domain of life. We consume food rather than growing or cooking it together. We consume entertainment rather than making it. We consume health rather than generating it through mutual care. And we consume community itself, treating our neighbourhoods and organisations as services to be evaluated and complained about rather than as spaces we are responsible for creating and sustaining.

The Connected Community offers a direct challenge to this assumption. It asserts that a neighbourhood, a team or any gathering of people in a shared space is not primarily a container for institutional services. It is a primary stage where local sustainability is actively produced. Community is not a noun describing a place or a group. It is a verb describing something that people do together, collectively and continuously.

The shift from consumer to producer

The difference between a consumer of community and a producer of community is not merely philosophical; it is practical and visible. The consumer of community waits for others to fix the broken street light, organise the social event, address the conflict between neighbours or manage the morale of the team. They evaluate the community by what it provides to them and express dissatisfaction when provision falls short.

The producer of community does not wait. They ask what they can contribute, what they can organise and what they can initiate using the resources already available to them. They treat deficiencies not as evidence of institutional failure but as invitations to citizen action. The shift from consumer to producer is not always easy, because it requires us to give up the comfortable position of the critic and take on the more demanding and more rewarding role of the co-creator.

What communities produce

The argument that community is a unit of production becomes more concrete when we consider what communities actually produce that no institution can replicate. They produce care: the informal, freely given attention to the needs of neighbours and colleagues that forms the invisible safety net of any healthy social environment. They produce belonging: the lived experience of being known, valued and missed that no service can manufacture. They produce resilience: the collective capacity to absorb shocks and recover from adversity that emerges only from dense networks of mutual trust.

They also produce, more prosaically, goods and services that would otherwise require institutional provision: shared childcare, mutual aid, the exchange of skills and tools, the maintenance of common spaces and the welcoming of strangers. When we look at community as a unit of production, we begin to see the vast economic and social value being generated by people who are not being paid, not being counted and not being adequately supported by the institutions that benefit from their labour.

The consumer trap and how institutions maintain it

Institutions, paradoxically, often benefit from maintaining the consumer identity of the communities they serve. A population that sees itself as a collection of clients is a population that depends on institutional provision. This dependency justifies budgets, staffing levels and professional roles. When communities develop the capacity to produce what they need from their own internal resources, they become less dependent on institutional services, which can feel threatening to those whose livelihoods and identities are built around providing those services.

This is not a conspiracy; it is a structural incentive that operates largely without conscious awareness. But it does mean that the shift from community as consumer to community as producer requires citizens to actively resist an institutional logic that tends to pull in the opposite direction. It requires the deliberate choice, made again and again in small everyday decisions, to produce rather than to wait, to contribute rather than to consume.

Community as a verb

The most important implication of the producer model is the one captured in the phrase: community is something we do. It is not a state that either exists or does not. It is a practice that is either maintained or allowed to lapse. When we stop doing the things that produce community, such as greeting strangers, tending common spaces, sharing skills and checking on the vulnerable, the community does not simply pause. It dissolves. And when we begin doing those things again, it begins, slowly, to reconstitute itself.

This means that every act of neighbourliness, every learning conversation, every gift offered and every stranger welcomed is not just a pleasant social gesture. It is an act of production. It is the making of community in real time, one small contribution at a time.

Questions for reflection

In what areas of your life have you slipped into being a passive consumer of community services rather than a co-producer of care?

What is one essential function that your team or neighbourhood is currently outsourcing to an institution that you have the internal power to produce yourselves?

Think of a recent week in your organisation or on your street. What did people produce together, and what was simply consumed from an external provider?

What would it mean for your team or community to declare itself a unit of production rather than a collection of clients? What would be the first practical consequence of that declaration?

Inspired by: Russell, C. and McKnight, J. (2022) The connected community: discovering the health, wealth, and power of neighborhoods. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.