Getting Involved In Your City Is Tough...but Worth It. Here's Why.

Tiffany Owens is the founder of Cities Decoded and a member of the Strong Towns Advisory Board. This article first appeared on Cities Decoded, and it is republished here with permission. You can connect with Tiffany and Cities Decoded at www.citiesdecoded.org, on Twitter, and on Instagram.

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Many of the processes that drive community engagement in our cities are broken, so most of us avoid them. They take up a lot of time, involve a dizzying amount of coordination, require divine measures of patience, and rarely lead to the satisfaction of seeing something worthwhile accomplished in a quick and sustainable fashion. 

Yet, despite the frustrating brokenness of the system, being civically engaged is worthwhile—not just because it is through these experiences that we form our communities, but because of the ways these experiences form us. Like learning to get along with family members, community participation requires us to constantly negotiate with people whose interests diverge from our own and we grow in character, as a result. 

Here are three ways becoming more connected to our communities helps shape us at the personal level, too:

Image via Unsplash.

1. Becoming more connected to our communities sharpens our vision of the world, empowering us to move through it with more clarity. 

These days, with our increasingly customizable information landscape, we can find ourselves trapped in a bias-confirming echo chamber we never signed up for. Technology, with its preference-detection algorithms, is constantly curating our exposure to the world such that everything is tailored perfectly to our taste. In the short term, this is pleasurable. It’s nice that Spotify knows my favorite music, that Instagram knows I’m looking for black linen shorts, and that Google can predict the news stories I might be most interested in. 

Yet, in the long term, such a buttressed experience of the world is actually weakening us. Borrowing from Jordan Peterson: 

“You see what you aim at…you’re a lot more blind than you think. There’s a lot of the world that you don’t see. You see most of what’s in front of you in a very blurry way. Your peripheral vision is extremely low resolution. You see clearly a tiny focal area that’s where you’re pointing your eyes, and you point your eyes at what you want to pay attention to…and what you want to pay attention to is generally associated with what you want.

The world reveals itself to you in relationship to what you want. That’s really helpful because you wanna see the world so you don’t stumble blindly through it. You want to get to where you’re going.”

Participating in the life of our city is a way of directing our focus and learning to see the world more fully. This process has a payoff. Not only will we be able to see more clearly through our own biases and assumptions, but we’ll gain more information about the way the world really is. Being involved in our community positions us to hear other people’s perspectives on the city (and the world), thereby filling in our blind spots, making us less vulnerable and decreasing the likelihood that we’ll, well, fall into a pit. 

Image via Unsplash.

2. Becoming more involved in our communities builds humility. 

Presently, our cities are facing seriously complicated issues: crime, tensions with the police, unstable economies, rising inequality. Reading and thinking about these issues or listening to a trending podcast from the comfort of our armchair is easy. 

But getting down into the nitty-gritty requires more patience and humility. Becoming involved in our city, even in a small way, will show us very quickly how complex these issues are, how little we control, the untenability of human nature, and the slow pace of change. 

This can be dispiriting. None of us want to be reminded of our limited capacity to effect change, yet if we can embrace the process and the discomfort, we will find ourselves more tightly anchored to reality (thereby decreasing our vulnerability in the world) and set on the path to true humility. 

Image via Unsplash.

3. Becoming more involved in our communities challenges us to put our beliefs into action.

Perhaps the most important benefit from becoming involved in our communities is the opportunity it provides for us to put our beliefs and values into action. This is important because it is only through action that our beliefs and values truly become part of our character, and part of our identity.

Taking action in our communities puts our beliefs and values to the test, and this is the kind of testing we need in order to become people of integrity. Community involvement also brings a level of accountability that isn’t present when we stick to our comfort zones or engage in virtual activism. Living out our values in comfortable spaces strokes our egos, but won’t push our buttons…and it’s from pushed buttons that we grow in character. 

Getting involved in the city will look different for everybody. For some of us, it will mean attending neighborhood meetings. Others may find joy in organizing a neighborhood happy hour, creating a petition to clean up a park, or volunteering at a community garden. A few brave souls will run for public office.

Regardless of approach, the personal benefits—seeing the world more clearly, growing in humility, and becoming more integrated—are available to all of us, no matter how big or small of a step toward civic engagement we take.

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