Development Note #12
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My involvement in community development evolved over time, the way some people’s careers take a path they couldn’t have predicted. In fact, I think it all started, for me, with an interest in how and why people choose their careers. I’ve always been curious about people’s career paths—perhaps because mine was so varied, and because curiosity, in general, has always driven me.
This curiosity led me to interview others about their work—first friends, then strangers. Over time, I spoke with sixteen people, including an accountant who had played team handball in the Olympics, a New York City police sergeant from the South Bronx who took pride in never having fired his gun at anyone, and a female flight instructor back when there were very few women in that profession.
This side project had nothing to do with my actual career as a clinical engineer, where I was responsible for maintaining medical equipment in hospital settings—but it became increasingly compelling. Over the years, my focus shifted from work itself to the relationship between people and their environments; how individuals connect to their communities, and the kinds of social or institutional support they receive. What began as curiosity about careers evolved into a broader inquiry about technology, relationships, and quality of life.
When you write about technology, you soon find yourself writing about society—about the environments we create for ourselves. The following paragraphs are taken from the introduction to an early manuscript somewhat critical of technology:
Technology, whether software or hardware, nano or mega-scale, is a tool. As our tools have become increasingly complex and adaptable, we humans have become increasingly detached from completely understanding them. As a result, we have also lost the ability to contain or manage the direction technology takes us. Because technology can do something, we let it, without fully understanding or appreciating the consequences.
We’re living in a complicated world, one that offers the powerful tools of technology with little guidance and few, if any, guard rails. We are offered a fragmented media environment where we have the option to believe anything we want to. Or to avoid believing anything, and not care about any of it. The tricky thing is that we all adjust to the everyday world we inhabit—what happens every day becomes the new normal and natural way of life.
As I began studying the social effects of technology, my attention turned to how people communicate. That inevitably led to an examination of online social networking—a phenomenon that both connects and isolates. It’s a double-edged sword: we gain access to one another but risk retreating into our own curated realities.
Thinking libraries
While reflecting on networks and connection, I had a moment of insight: libraries are the original social network. Public libraries have always connected people to information—and by extension, to one another.
- Libraries exist in almost every community.
- They serve as cultural anchors.
- They can counter social isolation and foster civic engagement.
- They are trusted, accessible, and require little “marketing.”
It was my immersion in technology plus my view of technology’s effects on social connections that led me to consider the public library’s position in communities and its potential to bring people and resources closer together. I wanted to promote this idea—the public library as a networker and manager of material and social resources for the community. It struck me that libraries could evolve into true community networker hubs—linking people and resources in ways that strengthen local life. I explored this idea in a 2014 article for Public Libraries, published by the American Library Association, titled “Public Libraries: How to Save Them” (not a modest title).
The following is an excerpt.
This is not a call to abandon the service of providing books. It is a call to address new and serious problems impacting our communities and society as a whole. One service that libraries can provide is to list or catalog individual and community needs. This is reference desk work, just of another kind. This resource reference could take the simple form of a loose-leaf binder, or be as complex as a Wiki-like, web-based database. Either way, consider what this reference could mean to local communities if residents could have easy access to all available services.
I argued that libraries should expand their mission to catalog community needs—creating a kind of “reference desk for social life.”
I was continuing on a community-development trajectory.
Accessing information is not the same as sharing information. The future may require those living within a community to work and live more closely and more effectively with each other. Within this environment, it’s how we share material resources (which may become increasingly scarce), how we make a living (relying on fewer employee benefits), where and how we can live (in a changing climate), and how we help each other (including the elderly) that will represent critical change—not so much how we read text, whether on paper or an e-reader.
From a writer’s perspective, a published article can feel like a victory, but from the standpoint of a community development goal, not so much—it’s barely the beginning. To put ideas into action, I created ossiningcommunitydirectory.org, a demonstration site listing local resources. Later, I expanded these ideas in my book Library Community Network: Unhiding Our Communities (2020), clarifying how libraries could serve as hubs for both material and social resources.
As the following excerpts from that book show, my view of community development was evolving. I emphasized that good community planning builds structures that promote positive interactions and a sense of belonging.
In this era of a forever-changing world—e.g., climate change, resource depletion, geopolitical conflict, pandemic disease, technological innovation, data hacks, social networking dependence—there is one issue that communities will need to address, one way or another, sooner or later, and they will need to do it mostly on their own. They will need to find ways to facilitate interpersonal communication so that local communities can more effectively respond to changes in their environment, that is, their sociopolitical, economic, and climate-related environments.
Charting my ideas helped me clarify them. Graphically mapping local resources revealed the many potential participants in a community-centered solution and highlighted the importance of a structured process. I began thinking less about how to teach people to improve their communities and more about how to reshape institutions—laws, policies, and programs—so communities could naturally thrive.
At this point, I was beginning to think in development terms, and to consider which of two development approaches I should follow:
- Instructional—show local people how to improve their community.
- Structural—recommend changes in community institutional structures, the local administrative functions of laws, policies, and nonprofit programs. These include procedural changes that would better enable local people to make the kinds of quality-of-life changes they would want to consider.
I chose the structural approach.
The BEST Community
I experience stress in my local community—from cars honking as soon as the light turns green, to people passing on a narrow sidewalk and not smiling or saying hello, or trustees not being friendly when citizens speak at a meeting. It’s easy to accept this kind of daily life as, well, normal. When actually it isn’t.
My changing view of community has led me to perform a thought experiment: imagining that I was looking out at my local environment and seeing everything exactly the way I want it to be, a kind of heaven on earth. I imagined a healthy, vibrant environment, a “best” situation that I could contrast with the way things actually are—which is not nearly as good. This experience helped me not only to clarify my own needs and desires but also to identify what is missing, in my community and communities in general.
One interesting outcome was realizing that, when people live in a healthy environment, they are less likely to require radical interventions. In this imagined community, social problems like loneliness and depression rarely required intervention, because the environment itself fostered connection and care.
A community focused on fixing social problems such as depression can offer many things: suicide prevention information, hotlines, support groups, and emergency services. Sometimes, such interventions work, but sometimes they don’t. Suppose someone is on the shy side, and finds reaching out by phone or in person intimidating? Perhaps they will get desperate enough to take action… but maybe not.
In my BEST community, this person has already had contact with a range of people and resources, before they are drawn into depression:
- Meeting neighbors at local events.
- Chatting with a police officer hosting a “Coffee and Conversation” table.
- Being noticed by a library workgroup focused on social isolation.
- Learning about a local hobby group through a community festival.
- Knowing that the community directory lists emotional support services alongside other local resources.
In such a place, help arrives naturally—through community interaction rather than crisis intervention.
Paths to the BEST
Creating a BEST community requires institutions that encourage participation and strengthen human connection. These development organizations can target specific community issues, offer programs that increase citizen participation, promote communication skills in a group setting, and enable locally-based skills to become recognized and utilized. Citizens also need a welcoming and engaging government, one that encourages and supports grassroots-initiated ideas and participation.
I recognized that an efficient way to move this vision forward was the structural approach to community development, mentioned above. Modifying this community approach can have effects that ripple out to many people.
Here are some examples of structural modifications that share the ultimate goal of increasing interpersonal interaction and communication within a community:
- Creating a community mission statement
- Encouraging in-person social connecting
- Trading some official meetings for at-home, in-the-park, or otherwise casual workgroups
- Using the public library to network resources
- Creating a community-based marketing group
- Creating a community-based risk management group
Over years of research and reflection, I’ve come to see that the essence of a healthy community lies in coordination and connection at the local level.
Modifying the institutional framework of a community can represent a paradigm shift in thinking—away from focusing on specific problems and towards modifying the institutional structures that enable healthy, versatile, and locally-tailored responses.