be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged,” writes the philosopher Susan Wolf. Notice the verbs Wolf uses: “gripped,” “excited,” “engaged.” They describe response at some deep level, not a self-initiated conscious choice. These are the verbs our community builders use.
Anne Colby and William Damon of Stanford studied these kinds of community weavers for their book Some Do Care. There’s not a lot of moral reflection that goes into the choice to give yourself away, they found. There’s not a lot of internal battles, or adding up the costs and benefits. “Instead, we saw an unhesitating will to act, a disavowal of fear and doubt, and a simplicity of moral response. Risks were ignored and consequences went unweighed.”
A few years ago, Barbara Goodson from Houston started giving free haircuts to the homeless. At first it was just a few cuts a month. But then she started giving haircuts to people coming out of prison and battered women. What started as a few haircuts a month turned into hundreds. “What motivated me?” she asks. “Enhancing the dignity of every client.”
Recently a friend told me about a crossing guard he met in Florida. Standing there on the corner, he asked her if she did any volunteer work in the community. She said no, she didn’t have time. But then he learned she was in fact volunteering at that second as a crossing guard outside the elementary school so the children would be safe. Then, a few minutes later, he learned that she was going to take some meals to sick neighbors later in the day. The longer she talked, the more he learned about the ways she was giving to others. But she didn’t consider any of it volunteer work. It was just what you do.
We think of giving as something we do on rare occasions, on Christmas and birthdays. But the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that giving is the primary relationship between one person and another, not the secondary one. It is family member to family member. Friend to friend. Colleague to colleague. People to community. It is the elemental desire to transform isolation and self-centeredness into connectedness and caring. A personality awakens itself by how it gives.
I hear the word “abide” a lot when I’m out with community builders. They use it to suggest a kind of giving that is not heroic or cinematic. It’s just being present with other people year after year, serving in both routine ways and large ones. This kind of giving creates stability in life, a continuity of the self as the circumstances of life ebb and flow. In Some Do Care, Ann Colby and William Damon quote an anti-poverty activist who expresses this perfectly: “I also know that I am part of a struggle. I am not the struggle. I am not leading the struggle. I am there. And I have been there for a long time, and I’m going to be there for the rest of my life. So I have no unrealistic expectations. Therefore, I am not going to get fatigued.”
DEEP RELATIONALITY
The weavers I’ve met are extremely relational. They are driven to seek deep relations with others, both to feed their hunger for connection and because they believe that change happens through deepening relationships.
When they are working with the homeless or the poor or the traumatized, they are laboring alongside big welfare systems that offer services but not care. These systems treat people as “cases” or “clients.” They are necessary to give people financial stability and support, but they can’t do transformational change. As Peter Block, one of the leading experts on community, puts it, “Talk to any poor person or vulnerable person and they can give you a long list of the services they have received. They are well serviced, but you often have to ask what in their life has fundamentally changed.”
Relationship is the driver of change. Think of who made you who you are. It was probably a parent, a teacher, or a mentor. It wasn’t some organization that was seeking a specific and measurable outcome that can be reduced to metrics. It wasn’t a person looking to create a system of change that could scale. It was just a person doing something intrinsically good—making you feel known, cared for, trusted, unconditionally loved—without presuming to know how that relationship would alter the trajectory of your life.
In her book, The Fabric of Character, my wife, Anne Snyder,