Illustration by Carson McNamara
We’ve rediscovered the power and importance of connection during the pandemic, and as we come out of it, how do we use that rediscovery to ensure our entire community thrives?
While many of us spent much of the past year and a half in various degrees of isolation — physically distanced from coworkers, family members, friends and neighbors — many of us had the opportunity and ability to still find ways to connect. While much of that connection was virtual, it was still legitimate, enabling us to see each other, talk, meet and do the things that keep us together.
As vaccination rates climbed over the spring and our region more fully reopened, it became clear: We missed each other. We missed the opportunity to gather, to be in one another’s physical presence, to do things in groups and to connect out in the physical world. We are remembering how important all of that is, and we are grateful for opportunities to do it again.
We have rediscovered the power and importance of nurturing our sense of community, but all of us are not bouncing back. Some are struggling to recover and rebuild. It’s important to recognize that this pandemic’s devastation has been unequal, and there’s no guarantee that the recovery will be equal.
If we’re going to experience recovery together, if we’re going to thrive as a community, we need to tap into our individual and collective resilience, opportunities, and sense of nurture.
For those of us who emerged from the pandemic relatively unscathed — emotionally, physically or financially — how can you and I leverage our resilience, our opportunities and our sense of nurture to help others? How do we connect with others who’ve experienced more difficulty, challenge and loss, and help empower their innate resilience, opportunities and ability to nurture and be nurtured?
The answer is to share.
If we are the community we believe ourselves to be, we need to invite one another in and share more than we ever have, so we can strengthen our bonds and ensure that together, we recover, rebuild and thrive. Sharing empowers both the person sharing and the person receiving. By recognizing and activating our capacity to share, we can accomplish amazing things.
To accelerate sharing on a community-wide basis, we need to recognize that each person has at least one thing of value to share with others, and some of us might have several of these things. Some of the most valuable things we can share with one another include our time, our knowledge, our space and our connections. Here are some ideas for sharing your value — quite literally your values — with others to strengthen our community.
Sharing Time
Get involved. Don’t be a bystander; find a group or organization that needs volunteers and offer to help, especially in places and spaces you don’t normally engage in (get outside your comfort zone). Be generous with your time when you can: Meet with that person who needs career advice, take time to talk to that friend or colleague who is not OK.
Focus on being a wonderful listener. Show that you’re willing to share your time by just listening to people and groups who want and need to be heard; this could mean joining conversations on topics important to the people in your life or checking out a speaker who represents a lived experience you’re less familiar with.
Sharing Knowledge
You know stuff, so share some of what you know! I get it, if your knowledge is how you make your living, sometimes it’s hard to imagine giving it away for free, but I’m talking about making sure our community can thrive, and that includes you. So, what are your unique experiences that have resulted in unique wisdom, that you can share with others in our community?
Sharing Spaces
Make space for others in your world, as comfortably as you can. Offer up your spaces when you’re not using them for others who might need them; invite people who you normally don’t engage with into your space — and accept their invitations to visit with them in theirs. This exposes each of us to a broader and deeper sense of community and opens us up to new opportunities to learn and connect.
Share Connections
Our connections are valuable, and we can use them to help one another. Many of you do this kind of networking already, but this is about networking on a community scale to exponentially increase the impact. Be a willing participant in this process by offering to connect as often as you can, and in return, be gracious as others seek to connect with you.
By engaging one another through sharing, we can become more connected. That can help us solve more problems and create more opportunities and access. We become a stronger, more empathetic community. We thrive together.
James Warren has called Richmond home for 18 years. He is vice president with brand strategy and consulting firm JMI, and he’s the founder of the company’s storytelling offshoot, Share More Stories.
