21 Mar On Community

While writing my Master’s thesis, i was lured by that delightful word: Community. It’s like a party in the brain. It beckons alluringly from the recesses, teasing with all the delightful nuances that only such a delicious word can.

My chairs (bless them), smiled knowingly and gently encouraged me to maybe stick to something more concrete for now – pointing to a colleague who’d nearly been driven mad by that particular rabbit hole. “People write entire books on community,” they said.

I did ask my question during the interviews i did for my Master’s thesis – i wanted the data just for myself. “What or Who is ‘the community’ of Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic?” I was asking a small group of people – mostly directors, supervisors and outreach workers (mostly because of time constraints and the IRB) – so i could start to get a sense of what such a nebulous term could mean.

For six years i’d heard about The Community of Odessa Brown – i’d even used it. But i realized as i sat down to theorize about community that what my thoughts might be on the subject were (if not wholly, then at least) somewhat inappropriate.

Those whose lives are somehow entwined in a community are the only ones who can know what that community is. It is nebulous and constantly morphing. For some, the community of OBCC was the black community  – not just of the Central District, but of all of Seattle. For some it was specifically every child and his or her parent / guardian. For others, it was the clinical and non-clinical staff. For one, particularly, it was every human being who had ever walked through our front door.

So how is it, then, that we as academics have any sense that we can even begin to decipher what “the community” is if it’s not even our own? The OBCC community was my own – i had worked there, healed there, become driven to reach my potential through my six years there. But as soon as i sat down to theorize it, i felt myself lose my grip on what it was, exactly.

Maybe that’s exactly what community is – that very personal understanding of positionality amongst others. And maybe that is exactly where our interconnectedness (even globally) comes to be grounded – in that self-defined nexus that not only describes others but also our relationship to them. And in some ways, helps define or is defined by what is most important to (each of) us.