There are no one-size-fits-all ways to build communities. Instead, many, many approaches exist, any one of which can make a difference. The people living in a particular place know which ones are right for them—or they can figure it out if they talk and listen to each other.
This list incorporates some approaches we’ve published in YES! Magazine and ones I learned about on my road trip. Some are major projects that require months of building skills and hard work. Others are simple things you can do tomorrow without breaking a sweat. All of them can help make communities more just, ecologically sustainable, inclusive, and supportive.
Think of this as a brainstorm list to spark your own ideas and imagination.
1 Learn about the original people whose land you live on. Acknowledge them.
2 Walk. Pause to talk with people you encounter.
3 Find out who in your community is not free—buried in debt, in prison, being trafficked. Support their vision of liberation, or, at least, help them connect.
4 Attend someone else’s ceremony or celebration.
5 Find out the names and stories of the people on your block. Share yours.
6 Convene talking circles to bring together groups that don’t normally interact: old and young, police and community, victims and offenders, people of different races.
7 Make space for everyone to speak for themselves, especially those often silenced or marginalized.
8 If you normally talk a lot, listen more than you talk. If you are usually quiet, take the risk of speaking.
9 Get to know the people who are just arriving in your community, especially refugees, and find out where they came from, why they left their place of birth, and their current circumstances.
10 Offer translation at community events.
11 Create a truth and reconciliation commission to get a shared understanding of local traumatizing events.
12 Get to know young people. Do they plan to remain in the area? What would make it possible for them to stay? What would they like to offer?
13 Connect school and criminal justice officials to restorative justice training and resources. Convene conversations about how and why to use restorative justice methods.
14 Celebrate youth who are working for the common good. Connect them to the elders so that both sides can learn and grow.
15 Find out who in your community is homeless; form a group to offer connection and support.
16 Join the Rotary, Kiwanis, Masons, or another service organization, and invite in others who represent the full spectrum of your community.
17 Organize a film series featuring the histories of various groups that make up your community, and follow up with discussions about local implications.
18 Form alliances across racial, cultural, language, and other differences via sister faith groups or sister neighborhoods.
19 Make films featuring the people, history, and cultures of your community. Collaborate with the subjects of the films on how they are framed and presented.
20 Introduce talking circles to schools so students learn a safe way to be heard and to resolve conflicts.
21 Find out who from your community is incarcerated. Help keep them connected with the community, and make a plan to safely reincorporate them in the community upon their release.
22 Hold celebrations featuring the diverse foods, music, dance, and art from the cultures and traditions that make up your community.
23 Ask for help. (Don’t be a martyr!) People often want to pitch in but aren’t sure how. Create spaces for leadership to emerge.
24 Learn where your drinking water comes from, how it gets to homes, schools, and businesses, and how (and whether) the system is keeping water safe, clean, and well supplied.
25 Turn waste into a resource #1: Set up a worker-owned cooperative to deconstruct buildings, instead of demolishing them, and to reuse the materials.
26 Turn waste into a resource #2: Harvest unwanted fruits and vegetables, and distribute them to neighbors or food banks, or make them into juices and sauces.
27 Turn waste into a resource #3: Turn food scraps and yard waste into compost that can transform degraded dirt into living, carbon-absorbing, water-retaining, fertile soil.
28 Reclaim unused land for farming and foraging.
29 Start a food forest.
30 Organize a cleanup day to remove invasive plants and trash.
31 Open a wilderness school to share the skills of wild crafting, permaculture, wilderness navigation, and foraging.
32 Learn about the resident birds and wildlife, where they raise their young, and which ones migrate through.
33 Create conservation easements or land trusts to maintain green space, but allow compatible human uses, such as foraging, hiking, and farming.
34 Clean and conserve water by creating wetlands and rain gardens.
35 Learn about the links between soil health and human health.
36 Hold plant and seed exchanges to share heritage plant species.
37 Grow food, whether in a single pot on a balcony or on an urban farm.
38 Identify and acknowledge your elders, especially those with a concern for the greater good.
39 Gently acknowledge trauma, yours and others’.
40 Acknowledge that many forms of trauma cross generations and arrive in ways you may not understand—some a result of racism, sexism, or homophobia; some from war, sexual assault, or childhood abuse or neglect.
41 Recognize that traumatized people need to define for themselves what they require to heal, and they don’t need to be second-guessed or “helped.”
42 Align your heart, head, and hands, so you know what you’re doing and why.
43 Know your own values and how you came to them—what you believe in, what matters most. Allow them to evolve, especially via encounters with others.
44 Share your favorite tradition and its meaning with people from other traditions.
45 Meet for coffee with someone who is feeling isolated.
46 Create sacred (or at least safe) times and spaces for contemplation and healing.
47 Convert a defunct warehouse or old theater into an arts cooperative with living/working spaces, plus teaching, rehearsal, and performance spaces.
48 Hold an annual harvest festival.
49 Celebrate the growers, processors, cooks, dishwashers, grocery clerks, and others who feed us all.
50 Hold a block party or street festival. Include young people and their favorite music. Do it a few years in a row, and it becomes a tradition.
51 Hold regular shared meals in parks, community centers, or churches. Make them free, so people who are hungry can participate without shame.
52 Create playful spaces and events for children and adults. Hold a dog parade.
53 Start a fab lab at a school or community college, where people can learn computer-aided design and fabrication with 3-D printing.
54 Celebrate or commemorate locally meaningful cultural milestones.
55 Get places and streets renamed after local unsung heroes and heroines.
56 Paint or commission murals that tell the unique stories of your place.
57 Hold open mics.
58 Open a space for live music, or support an existing one.
59 Create a theatrical production based on a story circle.
60 Build a free tiny neighborhood library.
61 Convene a book club.
62 Open a folk school where people can teach and learn the skills, cultures, and history of your community.
63 Grow local, shop local, share local. Avoid e-commerce and corporate chains.
64 Support local artists and musicians instead of watching television, Hollywood movies, or out-of-town acts.
65 Insist that institutions—public and private—that operate in your community are responsive to local aspirations. Question their legitimacy if they aren’t.
66 Create a licensed kitchen incubator where people can process their favorite salsa or soup to sell.
67 Create a business incubator, with training, mentors, and office space, where people can try out their start-up ideas and collaborate.
68 Resist big-box stores.
69 Start a food hub to distribute locally grown or processed foods to restaurants, schools, and other buyers.
70 Encourage retiring business owners to sell their businesses to their workers, and help the workers form cooperatives.
71 Find creative ways for your community to help finance co-ops and local business start-ups. Urge your credit union to finance cooperatives. Consider running for the credit union board.
72 Launch a state bank like North Dakota’s.
73 Encourage your library to loan out tools, bicycles, and clothes for job interviews, and to offer free Wi-Fi and heritage seeds.
74 Join a time bank, or start one, to exchange services.
75 Start a “buy nothing” Facebook page, where people can give stuff away.
76 Link sellers—like farmers and artists—with buyers via farmers’ markets, craft markets, or online spaces.
77 Create community-owned electricity generation, such as solar or wind power.
78 Start community gardens and farms.
79 Create a training program on how to start a worker-owned cooperative or retail co-op.
80 Create a business to install raised-bed gardens in people’s yards, in school yards, and in parks.
81 Hold seasonal swaps of children’s clothes, adult clothes, and recreational gear.
82 Form urban-rural alliances for food distribution, work exchanges, cultural exchanges, and fun.
83 Learn and teach the skills of working together, making decisions together, facilitation, mediation, and circle processes—techniques that allow groups of people to be creative and effective together, and to resolve conflicts.
84 Lift up the peacemakers, the healers, the worker bees. Acknowledge and praise them publically, especially those who get stuff done behind the scenes.
85 Run for school board or other local office. Nominate and support others who share your values.
86 Find out the mechanics of voting and ballot access, and make sure both are fair.
87 Pay attention to outside entities that are looking to exploit or privatize the commons and resources of your area, and sound the alarm.
88 Acknowledge and support the risk takers who stand up to exclusion, violence, and exploitation.
89 Crunch local government data on the impacts of policies on the well-being of various groups of people, the environment, and the community as a whole. Share with advocacy groups, journalists, and/or the public.
90 With your neighbors, prepare for natural disasters and other emergencies. Structure plans around the needs of the most vulnerable.
91 Learn about police practices in your community: Are people of color or immigrants disproportionately stopped, arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced? Are police confiscating property, or is people’s inability to pay fines resulting in extended prison time? What is the mechanism for civilian oversight?
92 Start a hyper-local Facebook page or blog for issues and forums.
93 Tell your story via your own podcast.
94 Begin by “doing for ourselves,” creating the world we want to live in. Don’t wait for permission.
95 Gather others for study circles to deepen understanding about the issues facing your community, this moment in history, and prospects for change.
96 Hold forums to set community priorities, and then invite elected officials to respond to your agenda. Ask for commitments and report-backs.
97 Introduce participatory budgeting: Work with elected officials to create parts of the city or county budget. Get each neighborhood to define its priorities.
98 Have visioning sessions, “Imagine [your neighborhood or city],” where you meet to discuss not what’s gone wrong, but what you want to create.
99 Sponsor election debates; the people who are most marginalized should moderate and ask the most questions.
100 Advocate for walkable and bike-able corridors or lanes.
101 Start a community radio station, using the airwaves or the Internet.