How to Build Community
• Turn off your television
• Leave your house
• Know your neighbors
• Look up when you are walking
• Greet people
• Sit on your stoop
• Plant flowers
• Use your library
• Play together
• Buy from local merchants
• Share what you have
• Help a dog
• Take children to the park
• Garden together
• Support neighborhood schools
• Fix it even if you didn't break it
• Have potlucks
• Honor elders
• Pick up litter
• Read stories aloud
• Dance in the street
• Talk to the mail carrier
• Listen to the birds
• Put up a swing
• Help carry something heavy
• Barter for your goods
• Start a tradition
• Ask a question
• Hire young people for odd jobs
• Organize a block party
• Bake extra and share
• Ask for help when you need it
• Open your shades
• Sing together
• Share your skills
• Take back the night
• Turn up the music
• Turn down the music
• Listen before you react to anger
• Mediate a conflict
• Seek to understand
• Learn from new and uncomfortable angles
• Know that no one is silent, though many are not heard
ª Work to change this
How to Build Global Community
• Think of no one as “them”
• Don’t confuse your comfort with your safety
• Talk to strangers
• Imagine other cultures through their poetry and novels
• Listen to music you don’t understand
• Dance to it
• Act locally
• Notice the workings of power and privilege in your culture
• Question consumption
• Know how your lettuce and coffee are grown: wake up and smell the exploitation
• Look for fair trade and union labels
• Help build economies from the bottom up
• Acquire few needs
• Learn a second (or third) language
• Visit people, places, and cultures – not tourist attractions
• Learn people’s history
• Re-define progress
• Know physical and political geography
• Play games from other cultures
• Watch films with subtitles
• Know your heritage
• Honor everyone’s holidays
• Look at the moon and imagine someone else, somewhere else, looking at it, too
• Read the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Understand the global economy in terms of people, land and water
• Know where your bank banks
• Never believe you have a right to anyone else’s resources
• Refuse to wear corporate logos: defy corporate domination
• Question military/corporate connections
• Don’t confuse money with wealth, or time with money
• Have a pen/email pal
• Honor indigenous cultures
• Judge governance by how well it meets all people’s needs
• Be skeptical about what you read
• Eat adventurously
• Enjoy vegetables, beans and grains in your diet
• Choose curiosity over certainty
• Know where your water comes from and where your wastes go
• Pledge allegiance to the earth: questikon nationalism
• Think South, Central and North – there are many Americans
• Assume that many others share your dreams
• Know that no one is silent though many are not heard.
• Work to change this.