Building community is not a platitude
But you have to actually do it
In my introduction post, I highlighted three priorities:
The need to shape our own future
The importance of building community as we grow
Putting our families first in policy making
In this post, I want to talk about my second priority, ‘building community’ - especially since it admittedly sounds like such a platitude! In reality, it’s the priority closest to my heart and comes from a place of deep and personal experience.
First, you have to understand that I serve as the president of downtown’s largest residential community. I moved here in 2019 and have written extensively about my experience moving my small family into a high rise in City Weekly and on Twitter. I covered why raising a family downtown shouldn’t be a pipedream and why legislators need to spend more time in the city to understand why we choose to live here, and how high density housing can be conducive to community building.
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Now when I moved into our community in 2019, I found a place full of wonderful people that basically didn’t know each other or spend meaningful time together. However, as a single father of two, I needed community and I so I started with the monthly board meetings. What I experienced in those meetings was stereotypical HOA stuff: arguments, condescension, lacking communication, frustration, impatience, etc. Not knowing much about board operations, I started with the things I did know: getting to know people and making friends. So I met some fellow neighbors at these meetings and we quickly began organizing building-wide activities for neighbors to get to know each other. Oddly enough, our building-wide social efforts were met with skepticism and sometimes downright opposition from board members and other owners. There was a very real concern that we would turn our historically quiet community into ‘downtown party central.’
Over the next four years, the “social” faction of owners would go on to replace every member of that 2019 board. And the campaigns to make this happen were very real: systematically meeting with hundreds of owners, and hosting dozens of candidate meet-and-greet events to flesh out the vision of what our community should be in this new era.
But along the way, I learned something very important: it’s not simply enough to get votes in support of your vision - you need to build the relationships to carry out that vision. Because perhaps this is obvious, but you can’t do it alone. We need as many people as possible moving from the sidelines of social media into the arena of consistent action and that mainly happens when people know each other and actually enjoy being around each other.
Fast forward several years and our community recently experienced what to me felt like an important milestone in our community’s development: we hosted a fantastic and diverse crowd of neighbors and friends in support of a wonderful local LGBTQ+ charity that, in a critical moment in our nation’s history, needs our support more than ever. And it was nothing but good vibes, as you can tell from the photo gallery.
But our community did not come together overnight nor did it come simply via new board positions or limited annual campaign outreach. It came together through concerted, monthly efforts, year-after-year to intentionally build community and use our board positions in support of relationship building.
I’d like to add my efforts to our current group of amazing precinct and house district leadership. I’ve been inspired by the friendly vibes and consistency of the Drinking with Dems group that meets monthly. I enjoyed the hell out of the Drinking Liberally group that has been meeting WEEKLY for literal decades at downtown restaurants to talk politics and enjoy a meal together. I would love to see more of this around our District and with an eye on bringing in groups that may not so easily see themselves fitting within our ranks (e.g., our non-drinking friends or new Democrats/wandering independents). Building a coalition of people that are involved consistently, outside of elections is critical and we should take every chance we get to do so.
Feel free to follow along at SaltLakeTom.com