COVID-19 — The Crisis We Needed to Strengthen the U.S. Community

America has been suffering from fragmentation, isolation, and the weakening of communities. Books like The Big Sort, Bowling Alone, and The Filter Bubble all document this in different ways.

We definitely see this in politics— with Congress and the general public becoming more divided with every session.

Nationally, we have become a weak community.

Why? Interestingly peace and prosperity mask our co-dependence on each other and on the earth. It allows us to believe that we don’t really need each other because most of our needs are things we can address on our own. There is nothing pressing that is bigger than ourselves that forces us all to work together.

The last time every individual in the United States was impacted by the same event was during WWII when rationing and the draft impacted the lives of everyone. Subsequent crises like the Vietnam War and even 9/11 were certainly universally discussed and had an intellectual and emotional impact but neither required every individual to change their behavior. Add to that decades of different economic and educational trajectories and we have developed strong but fragmented sub-communities. You can see this in the division of Republicans and Democrats, moving further apart by the decade.

My work with communities makes me look at and analyze this dynamic from that lens. At The Community Roundtable, we define a community as ‘A group of people with unique shared values, behaviors and artifacts.’ There are a few things that define a strong community.

Strong communities tend to have the following characteristics:

• A compelling shared purpose that excites its members
• A shared value — something that the community creates together — that could not be accomplished in any other way
• Empowered and engaged members who distribute and pass leadership to each other based on context

The COVID-19 crisis is a compelling shared purpose in that doing nothing will dramatically impact death rates and risk our lives and the lives of people we care about most. The shared value is social distancing and avoiding large groups and crowds, reducing the ability of the virus to spread quickly. We are compelled to act and understand how the change to our behavior creates value — in other words, we are empowered to engage and act in a way that addresses the shared purpose effectively. And so we do in large numbers.

The Coronavirus is the first crisis in more than 50 years that has forced us all to change our behavior in response to a universal threat. A threat that does not differentiate or discriminate. A threat that lays us bare — and exposes our equality. It demands that we all act and change. It gives us all the same thing to resist and address. If we do well, we will save lives by working together. We will succeed or fail together.