Not long after starting a community resource center, I began wondering if charity alone was really the best way to address the needs coming in week after week. People walking through the door needing rent assistance. Needing food. Needing help with utilities. Needing… something, anything. And my conclusion, after much agonizing, was that charity alone was not enough. Not by a long shot.
Here’s what I kept seeing.
The majority of those asking for help were in a state of chronic need. Not everyone, mind you. Maybe 20% of those coming into the center had simply fallen on hard times, through no fault of their own. Job loss. Medical emergency. A string of bad luck that anyone could find themselves in. These are the folks that just need a hand getting back up. A bridge, not a destination. Help them stabilize, and they stabilize.
But that left 80%. And the 80% were a different story.
These were individuals caught in a cycle; not just of poverty, but of low agency. Some had lost a sense of their own agency somewhere along the way. Lost it to trauma, to broken systems, to years of being told (explicitly or implicitly) that their choices didn’t really matter. And some had never had it in the first place. Never had a model for what it looked like to take an active role in shaping the direction of your own life.
Handouts weren’t going to fix that. Charity wasn’t going to fix that. What they needed was something harder to give and even harder to receive.
They needed agency.
So I started asking a different question. Not “how do we meet this need?”, but “why is this need so persistent?”
There are, of course, many factors. Structural poverty. Systemic inequality. Histories both personal and collective. I don’t minimize any of that. But something kept coming back to me. Something that felt upstream of a lot of the rest of it.
The absence of productive community support.
And I want to be precise about that word. Productive. Because community support, on its own, isn’t always enough. We can support people in ways that keep them stuck. Support that enables. Support that insulates. Support that subtly communicates: “you can’t do this without us”. That’s not the kind of support that builds agency. That’s the kind that surreptitiously erodes it.
Productive community support is something entirely different. It’s the kind that holds you accountable while holding you up. It challenges you. It expects something of you. It says: “we believe you are capable of more; and we are going to stay close enough to watch you get there”.
That kind of support is what helps people learn to be genuinely proactive in their own lives. To realize, maybe for the first time, that they really can play a more active role in how their story unfolds.
And increasingly… people are just not getting that from their communities.
Our modern world is deeply isolating. We get pulled into online worlds. Online “communities.” Feeds designed to keep us scrolling, not growing. Algorithms tuned for engagement, not empowerment. And the communities we find there (the comment sections and group chats and follower counts) rarely offer anything resembling what a real community can give. Online echo chambers are, more often than not, just virtual enablement. A place to feel seen without being known. Connected without being committed.
People need more than that.
People need to be actively involved in face-to-face community. They need relationships built over time through shared meals and shared problems and shared wins. They need networks that can catch them when they fall; not just “like” their posts out of habit. They need responsibility within a community. A role. A function. Something to show up for that isn’t just them.
They need accountability. And I don’t mean enforced accountability. I mean; they need to be inspired to want to be accountable. Accountable to someone other than just themselves.
Accountable to their community.
This is the part that people don’t talk about enough. Accountability gets a bad reputation. We hear it and think criticism. Punishment. But real accountability, the kind that comes from people who actually know you and care, is one of the most powerful tools for developing a sense of responsibility in your own life.
You rise to what’s expected of you. You step up when someone is watching what and who matters to you.
That’s not punitive at all. That’s love in action.
As members of society become more and more isolated, they lose access to that. They lose the natural, relational support network that, for most of human history, was simply the water we swam in. Tight-knit neighborhoods. Multi-generational households. Regular gatherings of people who knew each other’s names. We didn’t call that a “community strategy.” We just called it life.
Now we have to be intentional about it. Because it doesn’t happen by default anymore.
So one of the core ways I’m addressing the issue of chronic low agency is to work on building stronger communities. Real ones. Face-to-face ones. Communities where people find role models who reflect the life they’re moving toward. Communities where there’s genuine motivation to grow. Communities where accountability is possible because relationships are real.
When that kind of community exists, something changes. People stop seeing their circumstances as fixed. They start seeing them as workable. They start showing up differently; not just in the community, but in every other part of their lives too.
That’s the mechanism. That’s the leverage point.
There are many reasons to build community, many of which I come back to again and again in my work, but this one has been a guiding force in my own journey. The belief that community is not just a nice thing. Not just a supplement to a good life. It is, for many people, the missing infrastructure for becoming who they’re capable of being.
I work to build community. I teach others to build community. And I try to inspire a culture that understands just how much is riding on that.
Won’t you join me in bringing community life back? Not as an initiative, but as a way of being with each other again.
It’s something we all truly need.