The Role of Community in The Life I Want

As we hunker down at home, with schools and workplaces closed, our local community becomes more important than ever. So many of us choose where we live for work, and now we’ll find out: When work is upended, are we living in the right place, where we’re OK to self-isolate for an extended period of time? Do we have neighbors and friends we can count on if we need help, and is anyone counting on us? Are there outdoor spaces where we can get distance-appropriate fresh air and exercise? Are our local officials doing everything in their power to take care of our most vulnerable citizens?

The topic of community had already been front of mind for Eva and me, even before this pandemic hit. My talk from TEDxMcMinnville just went online, capping off an experience that defined my new community for me. Eva just returned to Australia after her family’s annual six-week trip back to Oregon, where she’s from and where both of her parents still live, which always calls up questions for her of where home is and why.

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In this talk, I describe three parts of the system of work—employers, community, and government—that Eva and I believe are levers of change to make work better. (No coincidence that they’re also critical to addressing today’s crisis.) You’ll hear more about those three parts and how they fit together in future posts; in this piece, we’re all about community.

Defining community is relevant to many of us, pandemic or not: Nearly 8 percent of people globally move every year, and 21 percent move at least once every five years.

Last summer, I was one of those people. On our very first day here in McMinnville, Oregon, last July, I went with my husband and our kids to one of the local grocery stores. I stopped to scan the bulletin board and saw a flyer calling for speaker applications for TEDxMcMinnville, due that night. I dashed back to our AirBnB and tapped out my application, and was thrilled to be accepted a few weeks later.

As preparations got underway, it quickly became clear to me that the real prize of participating was not the chance to stand on that round red carpet, but to get to know my new hometown. The TEDx committee, including leaders from across the city, convened the speaker cohort early and often, and encouraged us to get together in between our official gatherings. I got to know my fellow speakers not through idle small talk at school pickup (though I crave that now), but through their “ideas worth spreading,” as TED’s tagline goes.

“I get energy from serendipitous encounters underpinned by a shared sense of place.”

Soon, I began seeing my new friends around town—at our kids’ soccer games, at the grocery store—which I’ve come to realize is important to me for feeling at home, and I’m missing terribly in our current state of lockdown: I get energy from serendipitous encounters underpinned by a shared sense of place.

Running into acquaintances isn’t unusual in this city of 34,000, but it also happens with surprising frequency in the other place I call home: New York City. In contrast, part of why I never felt at home in Seattle, where we lived for three years, is that I never ran into people I knew, even in the places where I felt like I should: at kids’ concerts, at events related to socially responsible business, at road races, in my own neighborhood. Perhaps I didn’t try hard enough, or the “Seattle Freeze” is real; I’ll never know.

For me, New York City will always be home, and I miss its diversity and energy; in times of crisis like this one, I miss my birthplace even more. But McMinnville is the right place for us right now: My husband is A to Z Wineworks’ first Artist in Residence, and we are a six-minute walk from a picture-perfect public elementary school, where our kids are thriving (and presumably will be again when schools eventually reopen). We are living a simpler, less expensive, more sustainable life than we could in New York, which is what we want at the moment.

So McMinnville is home for now. And thanks to the TEDx experience, it feels like home. This makes the pandemic all the more painful, since I know many of the small business owners and community members for whom this is devastating. The pain is the same sort of heartache I feel for New York, so I feel its meaning. I’m starting to see this community—my community—band together in amazing ways, which I hope to be able to report on in the future.

What makes home feel like home to you? When you’ve moved to a new place, how did you build community? How are your communities, in and outside of work, supporting you during this pandemic? Tell us at hello@thelifeiwant.co.

Photo by Liam Pickhardt of a very happy and relieved group of TEDxMcMinnville speakers following the event, January 25.