You Have to Build It Before You Need It

What field research tells us about the part that comes after the run club: building the social infrastructure of a community before the moment you actually need it.

What this essay argues

On social infrastructure: why the relationships and structures a community leans on in hard times have to be built in the easy times, before anyone needs them.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. This essay synthesizes patterns across the field archive rather than profiling a single community.

The essay

What years of field research in intentional communities tell us about the part that comes after the run club

Sixty-three percent of Gen Z are choosing to spend time offline. Running clubs on Strava tripled last year. Pottery workshops are up thirty-four percent. Knitting circles, fermentation groups, analog photography collectives, the whole infrastructure of in-person gathering is growing faster than anyone predicted.

And every trend piece calls this a fix.

It isn't. It is the beginning of one.

I have been interviewing intentional communities for years, and the archive shows the same thing, over and over. The moment a group starts to gel, the real question shows up. Are you willing to build something here, or are you just passing through?

Sam, at Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal, put it like this:

"It just makes way more sense for me to put my energy into the collective rather than a really individual system."

— Sam, Traditional Dream Factory, Portugal

Sam is describing a specific decision. A choice, made deliberately, after a long period of sampling. What separates the run club you go to on Wednesdays from the place you decide to put your energy into for years is the choice to stop treating it as something you show up for and start treating it as something you are responsible for.

This is what the discourse about loneliness and fragmentation keeps sliding around. Gathering is a beginning. The move from attending to building is the actual work. And that move is a decision you make, on purpose, before anyone asks you to.

The archive is full of people who made that decision. And a smaller number who made a different kind of decision, one level up: the decision to build the structure of a community before the community actually needed it.

Those two things, the personal choice to stay and the collective choice to prepare, are what proactiveness looks like in practice. And they are missing from most of what gets written about how we fix fragmentation.

The people who chose to be there

Sam had been committed to the idea of TDF for four years before the group bought the land. But showing up to the reality was different.

"Actually being on the ground and seeing everything that it takes, it's like you have to wear so many hats."

The decision to stay played out over months. Every morning, choosing the collective over a simpler life. Sam also helped build something called the game guide, a single document that spells out how the community handles everything from conflict resolution to substance use. That document exists because someone sat down and wrote it before a crisis demanded it.

Aida, at Tamera in Portugal, took three years just to visit.

"For three years they were trying to recruit me to come and visit the project. But they wouldn't let go. For three years we were exchanging letters and exchanging questions."

— Aida, Tamera, Portugal

When she finally arrived, the choice went deeper than geography. Aida is Palestinian. She grew up under occupation. Her instinct was justice. Tamera asked her to try something harder.

"With the years, I found myself saying, if I can choose between justice and reconciliation, I would choose reconciliation. That was a big transformation for me."

That kind of choice costs something. And the cost continued long after she made it.

"Many people ask me, why do you stay? It's just so painful to be all the time in the role of educating, but also getting the hits and educating. It's tiring."

She stays. That choice, repeated year after year in a place that regularly asks too much of her, is the work. Community, for Aida, is something she builds every day, at real personal cost.

Amy, at Feytopia in France, arrived in crisis. She came without three years of letters or a political reckoning. She just showed up.

"When I first came here, I was so mentally unwell from 'what's next, what's next, what's next' and ambition. Here I got back a sense of just being. You do not have to earn anything. You can simply exist."

— Amy, Feytopia, France

And then something happened that she did not plan for. The community changed her.

"When you are around many pro-social people, you want to step into that role too. The place pulls people upward."

And then the part that matters most for the run-club question:

"People experience that here. They incubate this feeling and then go out into the world and start smaller communities where they live. They think, I do not want to go back to my apartment alone."

This is the sentence the Gen Z trend pieces are circling without quite landing on. The run club, the pottery workshop, the Wednesday night group, they give you a taste. The question is whether you let that taste change how you live, or whether you go home and scroll until next week.

The communities that built before they broke

The personal choice to show up matters. But the archive also shows something one level up. The communities that lasted were the ones that built their agreements before anyone was fighting about them.

Nitzan, at Spirala in Israel, watched other projects collapse before starting his own.

"I saw already hundreds of communities rising and falling because of this overjump."

— Nitzan, Spirala, Israel

The overjump: skipping the boring, expensive, unglamorous work of writing down how you are going to make decisions together. Spirala did it in year one.

"We put quite a lot of money and effort at an early age as a group to come up with this basic constitution that eventually worked well enough to carry us through this low energy moment that we had in the group."

A low energy moment. That is a generous way of describing the period where the initial excitement fades and people start asking whether this is really what they signed up for. Spirala had a constitution to fall back on. According to Nitzan, that document is the reason the community survived.

He also carries a relationship to the land that reframes what ownership means inside a community:

"The land owns us if anything. We will come, we will go back to the soil eventually. If we can see our purpose in life as guardians of the land instead of owners of the land, it makes a huge difference."

Parkash, at Ananda Kalyani in Portugal, did something similar. Before building his own community, he studied why others had collapsed.

"Before coming here I tried to understand mistakes from other projects in Italy. I noticed some patterns. When there is one charismatic leader the project grows fast. But when that person dies the project often declines."

— Parkash, Ananda Kalyani, Portugal

So Parkash designed around the failure. From day one, Ananda Kalyani distributed leadership across multiple people.

"From the beginning we tried to share leadership. Many people should carry responsibility. If I do something good I can give the benefit to someone else."

And then Parkash said something that stayed with me:

"The project is not the land. The project is the people and the process. If the place is destroyed you begin again."

If you are building something with other people, that line is worth sitting with. The Wednesday night venue can disappear. The lease can end. The group chat can go quiet. The agreements you made and the trust you built are what carry forward.

What this means for you

You do not need seventy-six hectares or a legal constitution to start. But if you are part of something that matters to you, a run club, a co-op, a friend group that keeps showing up, the archive says the same thing across every community we visited. Build the agreements before you need them. Choose to be there before it gets easy to leave.

The run clubs are a good sign. People are hungry for each other again. The question is what happens in six months, when the novelty wears off and someone has to figure out who books the route and who pays for the website and what happens when two people in the group stop getting along.

That part is up to you. And the time to start building it is now, while it still feels like it will last forever.

If this landed with you

If something in this piece landed with you, I want to hear about it. Reply here, or find me through the archive at togatherproject.eu. This is field research, and the best field research is a conversation.

If you know someone who is building something, a community, a co-living project, a new way of gathering people, share this with them. That is exactly who this is for.

And if you want to support more of this fieldwork, more interviews, more honest documentation of what actually happens when people try to live together, ToGather is currently running a campaign on Artizen.

Support ToGather on Artizen

Bringing this into your own community

Build the agreements while it still feels like it will last forever. Choose one group you want to outlast its next hard moment and write down, now, how you will handle decisions, money, and someone leaving. Make the move from attending to building explicit: decide you are responsible for the thing, not just a guest at it.

Read the original

This essay was first published on the ToGather Substack, written by Sharon Avraham. Read it on Substack.

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• Membership and Selection
• Supernuclear: A Guide to Coliving
• Tuckman's Stages of Group Development
• Emergent Strategy