A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighbourhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms.

Durable good relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, TV network, society, or humanity at large. Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, “community” may also refer to large group affiliations such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.

The English-language word “community” derives from the Old French comuneté (Modern French: communauté), which comes from the Latin communitas “community”, “public spirit” (from Latin communis, “common”).

Human communities may have intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, and risks in common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

Sense of community

🔗Sense of community

In a seminal 1986 study, McMillan and Chavis identify four elements of “sense of community”:

1. membership: feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness.
2. influence: mattering, making a difference to a group and of the group mattering to its members.
3. reinforcement: integration and fulfillment of needs.
4. shared emotional connection.

To what extent do participants in joint activities experience a sense of community?

A “sense of community index” (SCI) was developed by Chavis and colleagues, and revised and adapted by others. Although originally designed to assess sense of community in neighborhoods, the index has been adapted for use in schools, the workplace, and a variety of types of communities.

Studies conducted by the APPA^[who?] indicate that young adults who feel a sense of belonging in a community, particularly small communities, develop fewer psychiatric and depressive disorders than those who do not have the feeling of love and belonging.

Socialisation

🔗Socialization

The process of learning to adopt the behavior patterns of the community is called socialization. The most fertile time of socialization is usually the early stages of life, during which individuals develop the skills and knowledge and learn the roles necessary to function within their culture and social environment.For some psychologists, especially those in the psychodynamic tradition, the most important period of socialization is between the ages of one and ten. But socialization also includes adults moving into a significantly different environment where they must learn a new set of behaviors.

Socialization is influenced primarily by the family, through which children first learn community norms. Other important influences include schools, peer groups, people, mass media, the workplace, and government. The degree to which the norms of a particular society or community are adopted determines one’s willingness to engage with others. The norms of tolerance, reciprocity, and trust are important “habits of the heart”, as de Tocqueville put it, in an individual’s involvement in community.

Community building and organizing

In The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace (1987) Scott Peck argues that the almost accidental sense of community that exists at times of crisis can be consciously built.

Peck believes that conscious community building is a process of deliberate design based on the knowledge and application of certain rules.

He states that this process goes through four stages:

• Pseudocommunity: When people first come together, they try to be “nice” and present what they feel are their most personable and friendly characteristics.
• Chaos: People move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their “shadow” selves.
• Emptiness: Moves beyond the attempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to human beings.
• True community: Deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community.

OFF GRID COMMUNITY PLANNING TELEGRAM GROUP

This group is for those who want to live off grid relatively soon, form community’s in the UK and abroad. The group is also open to sharing ideas on: prepping, self reliance, food storage, gardening and food preservation.

🔗https://t.me/Offgridcommunityplanning

Common Law & Sovereignty