Connection & Belonging in America: Two Decades of Exploration!

Last week thirty people showed up for an evening event to talk about connection and belonging, organized by Leadership Mountain View (LMV) . A lively Q&A session followed a conversation between myself and my LMV colleague Rakhee K. . Guided by Rakhee’s moderation and questions, I shared my knowledge and experience on the topic, and then we opened it up to the room.

You can watch a recording of the full 60-minute event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHt_5_6f8g

Concerns About Declining Connection Are Urgent But Not New

To give an overview of the current situation, I shared highlights from the US Surgeon General’s advisory on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, and the excellent report A Call to Connection: Rediscovering the Transformative Power of Relationships by Casper ter Kuile et al. To emphasize the point that concerns about the disintegration of American community are not new, I also highlighted Robert Putnam’s seminal book Bowling Alone, which was originally published nearly 25 years ago.

What Does It Mean To Connect, To Belong?

Do we even know what we’re concerned about … What does it mean to connect with someone? What does it mean to feel a sense of belonging? I briefly shared ideas from several books: Community: The Structure of Belonging, by Peter Block ; How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, by Mia Birdsong ; Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World, by john a. powell and Stephen Menendian; Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild; and Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, by Vivek Murthy . I was very pleased to see that many participants came up at the end of the session to take photos of the books. There’s at least the intention to know more.

Atlas of Care and Mapping Ourselves

People were fascinated to hear about my explorations and innovations on this topic, especially given that the NASA Ames Research Center, where I began my career, is just a mile away. While there are lots of aerospace engineers around here, it’s not too often people run into one who’s found himself working on family- and community-building. So people listened closely to my 10-minute summary of a 4-decade career, focusing of course on the nonprofit Atlas of Care, the Mapping Ourselves approach, and my experience teaching these ideas to a wide variety of people in the last decade. As part of this I shared similar work, including the Quantified Self community, and the Dear Data project.

So Many Innovative Weavers

To open people’s eyes to the innovative efforts being done by many to strengthen communities across the country, I told them about the Weave community, and shared a few stories. To convey the wide range of effort required from simple to complex, I talked about projects by Orly Israel (Here to Listen), John Noltner (A Peace of My Mind), and Sarah Hemminger (Thread).

A Lively Q&A

By design, over half the time was spent in an open Q&A with the audience. These were the highlights of this conversation:

The sad reality that volunteering in the community often does not result in deeper connections. Many of those present had found that people in volunteer settings get very task-focused — they are there to help people, to plant trees, to beautify the park, etc. — and seem to feel they are wasting time, doing something wrong, if they use their time together to just talk with each other, to get to know each other, to luxuriate in each other’s company.

Several people who have lived in both New York City and Mountain View talked about the similarities and differences between neighborliness and sense of community between the two very different cities. For what it's worth … there was a wide variation in people’s experiences … there was no consensus!

The notion of “micro-connections”, the opposite of micro-aggressions.

One person contrasted the reality of her small current apartment complex, where people barely know each other, to the neighborhood she grew up in and where her parents still live (nearby in Palo Alto) which has had a regular block party for over 60 years. It led to a discussion of both how important it is to put in the effort to cultivate neighborliness and how much work it takes to get such a thing started.

The highlight of the event was the event itself, that community members had come together to talk about community / connection / belonging … without an agenda, without focusing on “what do we do next?”… to just hear each other and to be heard … to simply be a community.

The event was the result of the work of several people on the Leadership Mountain View Alumni Engagement Subcommittee notably: Lynne Hansen , Shomaila S. , Rashmi Singh, PMP? , and me.

Photo: by Rashmi Singh