What is a community to you?

Community, by dictionary definition it means “the people who live in the same area, town, etc.” However, the dictionary is, in this case, woefully inaccurate. Surely ten words is not sufficient to describe one of mankind’s most complex organisations.

Indeed, a community is about giving and taking, about depending on each other, about sharing the joys and reducing the grief. A community is more than the people that make it up. Stripped down, a community is just a cluster of people that help each other to get through hardships and sorrows. It can range from the smallest of families to the largest of cities, as long as the people help each other out of pure will, it’s a community. A community is dominated by two things, interdependence and willingness to help others. Without these, everyone will just follow their own path and the community will collapse.

Interdependence, something we all cannot live without. People in a community usually depend on each other, whether it is for food in prehistoric times or for emotional support in today’s unforgiving world. Everyone will eventually need to depend on someone else, even Bill Gates, one of the richest men on Earth, still have to depend on others, namely his wife, when he needs emotional support. All of us probably had a neighbour that helped us through a tight spot, for example, a long time ago, when I was in primary school, my father had a spot of bother with some trumped up charge some man made up to charge him for. Our kind neighbour was kind enough to testify in court and clear my father’s name. This interdependence helps to keep the community tightly knit together and impervious to most threats.

Another defining feature of the community is that people are willing to give, even if it means they will never get anything back. Some examples are the community chest funds or, on a larger scale, charities. People readily give money to these charities in the hope that the money will help those in need. Three years ago, my father had lent money to the very same neighbour that helped him out of the court case earlier. He was in real need of it as his home was facing foreclosure. Naturally, he paid it back a few months ago, but the spirit of giving with no strings attached was there as my father had said there was no need to return the cash. Giving is rooted deep in our genes, where people in tribes shared food from a hunt to keep them all alive and happy. Giving helps to keep everyone healthy and alive, giving helps one another to survive brutal hardships beyond any human’s imagination, and most importantly, it keeps the community alive and functioning.

So the next time a worksheet asks you for the definition of community, throw away the dictionary, exit google.com and go and see the community in action for yourself.