Is community a muscle we've stopped flexing?

Is it time we learned how to be in community again?

When I set out on this journey with ACTionism, I thought it was simple.

This platform and project would give people the inspiration — show them that there are other ordinary people who've stopped waiting for someone else to fix it and are doing amazing things themselves — and once everyone has seen how simple and joyful it can be, they'll all join the party.

But that's not how it happened. And I've found that really hard to accept — to the point of feeling frozen.

Recent conversations with Gav at Re-Action, and reflections on a workshop Olivia and I are designing for The Big Retreat, have got me thinking. While every small action and conversation is vitally important — sending ripples that will one day become a flood wave — right now, I am frustrated by the lack of measurable success and impact - but perhaps, as both Jon and Gav have come to show me, this is because I have spent too many years in the Consumer story - measuring everything, including my self-worth, by numbers and impact.

I know this feeling from my work with clients. "I've written this amazing book with incredible ideas — how do I get everyone to read it?" And every time I remind them: It's not about vanity metrics - you don't need everyone to read it. You need the relevant and engaged people to read it. The ones it will actually move, impact or help. If it's an idea for everyone, the ripples will do their work.

As is always the case, it can be hard to take your own advice.

I've been feeling stagnant, stuck and blocked. Partly energy levels, partly a sense of failure that kept prodding me. In February, having spent six months taking part in Wintering — an in-person community of women who come together to honour the dark, be with nature through the season and emerge into the light of spring — I sat around a fire at our last session and listened to others talk of emerging refreshed and energised, many with new direction and focus.

When it was my turn to share, I just cried. Feeling like I was failing - being pulled between ACTionism, this entity that is still very much composting, being slowly turned by the ecosystem around it, being there for my children who are navigating some pretty intense emotions right now, and for my 'work, work' - the one that pays the bills.

It's also shocked me to realise I still have one foot in the Consumer story — measuring my success by output, delivery, productivity.

Plus, I hate not knowing what is coming out of the compost. But, as Gav keeps reminding me, sometimes it's in the pauses that clarity emerges.

What I discovered in the compost

I've always been a talker. Nosy, which is probably why my first career was in journalism. Always unable to resist chipping into other people's conversations in coffee shops, sharing something I've learned or someone they should connect with. I even found myself telling my daughter's geography teacher about the Climate Majority project at parents' evening last week, because she mentioned how hard it can be to teach climate anxiety.

But this week, I realised I'd been feeling really low - rarely leaving the house except for the school run. I don't talk to many people these days, unless you count my cats. So when I dropped my eldest at school after a medical appointment, I took a different road, stopped the car, and went to an independent café I'd never been in before.

I tried to read my book, but found myself drawn into the conversation at the next table - a local group trying to figure out how to reach people about their Emergency Climate screening. Two things I know plenty about: bringing people together around important ideas, and community action. But I just sat there. Not interjecting or sharing. I felt numb, almost like I was standing on a diving board and couldn't make the leap. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I didn't know how to engage with people I didn't know — even though we had shared interests and lived within twenty minutes of each other.

I am out of practice; I've stopped flexing my community muscle.

And this made me realise that the barrier for so many people runs deeper than inspiration. Most of us simply aren't skilled at building and sustaining community. We've lost that muscle.

For me, it's working from home, being self-employed, and being mentally exhausted by the gravity of the collapse we are living through. But for many others, social media has quietly done its damage too — stopping us from talking, from starting conversations face to face in the local café, making us believe we don't need to be in the same space to feel things.

I know this personally. My husband and I have our best conversations via Messenger these days. We don't even call. We just text. That's not relational. That's transactional. And I think that's true for so many of us.

The biggest blocker that keeps so many people from stepping into their agency as Citizens and finding the others, isn't whether we care. It's our lack of skills for being in community, and without the guidance that elders once offered, too many of us don't know where to start.

The part where I get to the point

While ACTionism continues to adapt, compost, and emerge, maybe that's what it is becoming: a way to hold people while they practise those skills. To create enough safety that, before they know it, they feel confident enough to chip into the conversation across the café — to find the others.

But we've been looking at ACTionism from a place of inspiring rather than prescribing. When I once suggested devising a toolkit for Citizen Collective, Jon Alexander reminded me that the Citizen story doesn't prescribe - it's up to Citizens to choose their own path. And I believe that. But I've also seen that most people are between stories right now. We need more than inspiration. We need scaffolding. I don't think people are passive because they don't care, but because they're so used to being told what to do.

The stories we showcase aim to light the spark — to show people that if they can do it, so can you. But perhaps we also need to help people reach the jumping-off point to action first.

What if what comes next is less about inspiring people to act and more about helping them flex the muscles they need to be in community?

How to have difficult conversations.

How to find the others.

How to look honestly at what's stopping you from talking, sharing and showing up.

How to discover that there is real joy and safety in being in community.

So, my question is, is that the bridge that ACTionism has been missing? Not more inspiration. A way into practice.

But who wants and needs this most?

I'm acutely aware of the risk of trying to build anything when you come from a place of privilege and a desire to 'help others'.

People like me who call themselves 'changemakers' do so much good — and in equal measure, we can perpetuate the very hierarchies and harms we're trying to step away from. A movement about community that only ever reaches white middle-class people with the time and privilege to volunteer is not what the world needs. I want to be part of something that welcomes all, operates from real lived experience, and is diverse not as a tick-box exercise, but because it genuinely reflects the places and people embracing it.

So what if the next chapter of ACTionism as a project isn't about inspiring more people, or creating a blueprint for community action, but about passing the baton via training facilitators in different regions — people with lived experience of the communities they're part of — to co-create the conditions for building community themselves? Not how to get funding, or sort the legal side of things, but how to actually find the others in the first place, who then train another local community - and so the ripples spread.

ACTionism as a project provides the seed to get people talking and the scaffolding to help them grow. But how it lands, what it looks like, what it becomes — that is shaped by and belongs entirely to them, and they pay it forward to others who need some scaffolding support.

Because what worked for Billy in East Marsh is not what worked for Parisa in Bromley. One started a weekly litter pick and went on to launch a community housing share offer. The other started as a conversation between local parents and went on to become a diverse, well-used community hub. Both found their people. Both went from there. Neither needed to be told what to do; they just needed the confidence to start flexing their muscles — and the willingness to embrace the unknown, welcome others in and build from there.

Got something to add to this?

If this has got you thinking about what your version of ACTionism might look like - or if you think you might be the kind of person who could help hold this space in your corner of the UK - we'd love to chat, the cats might even make an appearance! ;)