The Community Course
Part 1 - The Significance of the Community
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1. What Is A Community?

Community as Association
A community is an association of individuals and families that plan and act in concert as an organized unit in meeting their common needs. Always some action is reserved for individual or family initiative. The extent to which action is unified and in common, and the extent to which it is individual or family action, varies endlessly, and therefore the term "community" cannot be closely defined. To whatever extent the general and varied needs and interests of groups of persons and families are dealt with by unified planning and action which grows out of a spirit of common acquaintance, interest, loyalty, and fellowship, and a sense of common responsibility, to that extent a community exists.

Neighborhoods vs. Community
A neighborhood is a group of homes in which there are social relations between families and individuals, but unless the general and varied needs of the group are recognized as common needs, as the concerns of the group as a unit, and unless varied needs and interests of the group are planned for and worked for by the unified action of the group, then the neighborhood is not a community in the sense in which we use the term.

Relationship vs. Organization
A community does not exist chiefly because of formal planning and organization, but through direct personal acquaintance and relationships, in a spirit of fellowship of people who to a considerable extent have cast their lots together, who share problems and prospects, who have a sense of mutual responsi­bility, and who actually plan and work together for common ends. There must be mutual understanding, respect, and confidence. There must be mutual aid--willing­ness to help in need, not as charity, but simply as the normal mode of community life. There must be a feeling on the part of each individual that he is responsible for the community welfare. There needs to be a common background of experience, a community of memory and association, and a common foreground of aims, hopes, and anticipations. There must be a considerable degree of unity of standards, aims, and purposes.

Need for Personal Involvement
It is doubtful whether the term "community" should be applied to groups of people who act in common only in a routine impersonal manner in supplying the rudiments of economic needs, such as water supply, sewerage, fire protection, highways, and even schools. Yet if a group of people lacking these facilities should meet together and plan and work together in intimate personal co-operation to supply those needs, the working out of those problems together would be evidence of a real community.

Organization is Secondary
What seems to be an unorganized neighborhood may in fact have the finest qualities of a community. In some small neighborhoods in case of sickness there is an informal but very effective distribution of co-operative effort in nursing and other assistance. There may be the same informal effectiveness of unified activity in transporting supplies, in buying, in entertaining visitors, in using farm machinery or other equipment, in carrying on the work of persons temporarily disabled. The existence of a community is determined, not by the amount of organization and social machinery, but by the extent to which common needs and interests are worked out by unified planning and action, in a spirit of mutual interest, and by the extent to which common purposes and standards are defined and maintained.

Need for Community Feeling
Negative illustrations of this fact are numerous. Sometimes where the machinery of producers' or consumers' co-operatives is set up, the members see the organization simply as a commercial concern from which they individually are to get as much as possible for as little as possible, just as they would from a private commercial firm that was dealing in the same spirit toward them. The inhabitants of a village may be having many of their needs supplied by tax ­supported or publicly administered services, including schooling, water supply, electric power, sewerage, fire protection, sanitary inspection, and street maintenance; yet most of the inhabitants may know and care so little about their common affairs that they scarcely can tell whether any particular service is performed publicly or privately, or whether it is by the village, county, state, or national governments. They may have little community feeling, and may be strangers to their next-door neighbors. As in many suburban towns and villages, their vital interests may be in a large city at some distance. There may be no more personal participation in the services they support by taxes than in the management of the Pennsylvania or New York Central or Illinois Central Railroads in which they go to the city each day.

Suburbs as Impersonal Groups
At municipal elections the inhabitants of such a suburb may not vote, or may vote after hurried inquiry about candidates that are total strangers. They may go their own ways as strangers, with no feeling of working together for common ends. Aside from the informal visiting of personal friends or limited associations such as golf and country clubs, the relations of the inhabi­tants may be quite impersonal and disinterested, or competitive. Many suburban villages and neighborhoods are of this character, and cannot be called communi­ties, even though numerous services are provided by the municipality. Most suburban communities, however, have developed some elements of community spirit. The idea of the community implies personal acquaintance and direct person-to-person relationships between its members. According to Sanderson (The Rural Community, p.612) the Poles define a community as being "as far as a man is talked about."

Definition of Community
We may define a community, then, as an association of persons and families living in the same limited area who plan and work in unison to satisfy a substantial part of their common and varied needs and interests, and to sustain common standards, and among whom there is a considerable development of personal acquaintance and personal relations, and a feeling that they are sharing risks and opportunities.

Single Purpose Associations
Single-purpose associations do not constitute communities in them­selves. A stock breeders' organization, a co-operative creamery, or a church, in which the association is for a single purpose, with social relations only as a minor accessory, scarcely deserve the name of community. One may get many of the emotional satisfactions of community living through belonging to and working with such groups, as in churches, lodges, social clubs, cultural societies, business and professional organizations, etc. These, however, give more of the emotional satisfactions of a community when specialized functions are supplemented by general community relationships. For nearly a century the temperance societies of Scandinavia have been among the chief agencies for social fellowship. Churches develop social life in addition to religious activities, as do literary and debating societies. The local advisory committees of the Ohio Farm Bureau have done the same.

Social Activity vs. Community Activity
Some of the chief values of such special groups are in their generalized community functions. When, through the fading of religious faith or for other reasons, there is a general dissolving of such groups, in the absence of well-developed community life, individual lives are not normal until some other com­munity relationships are reestablished. The influence of some purely social substitutes, such as bridge clubs, pool halls, country clubs, suggest that to isolate purely social functions from purposeful activity is not normal. A com­munity is most normal as a community when it is concerned with a cross-section of life. Where community life is not well developed people's purely social life tends to be accessory to some purposeful relation, such as labor unions, churches, employment in a firm, temperance societies, nature study clubs, music associations, professional associations, or farm organizations.

Single Purpose Organizations and Community
Sometimes what are commonly thought of as single-purpose organizations develop the general characteristics of a community. For instance, a Mormon settlement, though primarily religious, tends to be a real community. The layout of farm lands, town lots and streets sometimes is done through church agencies. The church officials sometimes do the selling of community produce and the buying of community supplies. Careful provision is made for recreation and social life. The poor of the community are cared for, education for vocations, including home making, is given careful attention, and in numerous other ways varied common needs are met by common planning and action. The spirit of being members of a community is present. Community organization with them is with the aim of serving the interests of life as a whole.

Community without Organization
Sometimes the essential qualities of a community are present even where there is no single unifying organization. If substantially the same group of people, in a spirit of working together to common ends, should use a variety of means for doing so, the fact that they used several types of organization would not prevent that group of people from constituting a community. Their education might be administered through a school district, their financial needs through a bank or credit union, their merchandising either through private merchants or co-operatives, their medical needs either through private practitioners or through a co-operative association. The essential character of a community is the spirit and the habit of meeting varied general needs by unified planning and action.

However, for the same people to be seeking to gain their common ends through a multiplicity of organizations may be wasteful of effort and may tend to dissipate community spirit. Intelligent planning will tend to an optimum degree of consolidation of such efforts.

Size of Communities
The quality of community or of acting in common for common ends cannot be limited to groups of any size except by convention and usage. Many different-sized groups have this quality in some degree--the family in the highest degree. It is not called a community, simply because usage has given that particular kind of community another name to define it more specifically. Beyond the community, as the term is generally used, are other groups which have some of the characteristics of a community, such as the city and the nation. The ultimate social ideal of the brotherhood of man would see the entire race as one community. The characteristics of a community--mutual respect, good will, living for and with each other by united effort for common ends, mutual acquaintance--are not limited to any particular groups. However, there are groups of a certain range of size in which men and women have lived for most of their history, in which community of effort and interest could find fullest and most normal ex­pression, and which seem most adapted to human nature and human capacity for intimate co-operation. Such groups range from a few dozen to a few hundred, or at most a very few thousand, persons. Modern technical developments tend to make possible larger true communities. It is to such limited societies that the term "community" is here applied. The use of the word "community" to describe such small groups does not imply that some community characteristics are not present in larger societies. Where present in larger society’s community attributes are enlargements and projections of traits originating in small communities.