Not so long ago, the word “community” was largely applied to groups united at least to some degree by geography. In the digital age, it’s expanded to become almost a default term to describe networks of people who have never met each other face-to-face. Often, they know each other only through the Internet. But Satler is one among many who aren’t buying the new definition.

Extending Yourself Past Your Door

“I just don’t think iVillage is a village,” Satler says flatly. “In the global context, local still matters.” At the same time, and somewhat for the same reason, she also doesn’t believe the buzz that the Internet is a threat to true community, nor does she believe that communities were necessarily any more tightly knit before the Web came along. Communities now, Satler says, are just as healthy—or unhealthy, as the case may be—as they’ve always been.

“I don’t live in a virtual world; I live in a real world,” she says, ticking off some of the activities that force most people to engage with that world: working, grocery shopping, calling someone if there’s a problem with the plumbing. “There is this… nostalgia that creeps in about communities of the past,” she says. “I don’t think the world I live in is devoid of people who would help me if I asked them.”

Maybe, she suggests, the problem is that we set the bar too high, expecting the neighbors to prove their neighborliness by dropping off a freshly baked pie. “Who do you know that bakes to begin with?” she asks.

Cue Dawn McCarty.

McCarty is the kind of neighbor June Cleaver might have expected to have, had the Cleavers settled on Long Island. In her 10 years in Northport and four years in Stony Brook, McCarty understood perfectly well that no one was going to swing by her house with homemade baked goods—but she hasn’t seen any reason she shouldn’t do that for them.

“When I saw someone move in,” she says, “I’d drop ’em off a banana bread and say, ‘Here’s my phone number.’ ”

McCarty is the sort of person who smiles and says hello to strangers, gives water to laborers in her neighborhood, makes a point of offering help if it seems needed. When some neighbors in Stony Brook were doing work on their house and it fell down, literally, she decided it was time to introduce herself to them rather than pretend she hadn’t noticed their misfortune.

At the same time, she didn’t push herself on people who clearly weren’t interested in fostering a relationship—like the man across the street who never responded to a “hello” or a “good morning.” McCarty never even learned his name. “I couldn’t tell you if he was an ax murderer,” she says. “He made it very clear that he didn’t want to be part of his community.”

McCarty, however, was such a dynamic part of her community that her three kids used to plead with her when the family was out and about in Stony Brook. “Don’t chat. Let’s get home,” they’d tell her.

But this summer, when the family moved nearly 3,000 miles to Irvine, Calif., the kids stopped asking their mom not to chat. Possibly because they were suddenly living in a place where they didn’t know a soul, which would cut down on even the most gregarious individual’s chattiness. But just maybe it was because they suddenly recognized their mom’s friendliness—her habit of collecting people, constructing networks of friends and acquaintances, willing communities into being—as a skill that could come in handy.

“In New York, what I found was that I made my community,” McCarty says. “And that benefited us.”

Big City, Big Community

The suburbs can be tougher terrain than the city for people looking for community, Satler says, and not because there are fewer people and fewer kinds of people. “In many suburban communities, it’s kind of structured around car and backyard and private space,” she explains. In the city, there’s a much higher chance of running into people on the street or in the common areas of an apartment building, and because of that, it’s actually harder for urban dwellers to avoid becoming a part of their communities. They can go home and close the door just as people can in the car-to-house suburbs, Satler says, but they have to walk past other people to get to their solitude.

The most successful suburban communities, she says, are those with public spaces: a livable Main Street dotted with small shops, a park where people can gather, perhaps a train station. Each of those places encourages socialization and familiarity in a way that an Anytown, USA, suburb filled with generic big-box stores and chain restaurants does not.

But in any community, Satler says, there is one sure thing that will band people together: need. That’s one of the reasons that ethnic and blue-collar communities are often among the strongest communities. People in those enclaves rely on each other in order to survive.

Short-term need is also a uniting force. Such cohesion occurred on a broad scale in New York after 9/11, but it also happens when a town is hit by a flood or a neighborhood experiences a string of crimes, or when some other outside force threatens to disrupt the status quo. People react to those events by mobilizing as a group, and they learn they’re more effective that way. “When you learn that lesson, you’re joined,” Satler says. “You have that common history.”

Needs-based Societies

More personal needs can also bring a community together, as Satler saw a year ago, when her father died and she, an only child, was suddenly caring for her elderly mother. The neighbors at her apartment complex in Queens didn’t say, “If there’s anything I can do...?” Instead they simply did it, whether it was bringing food or announcing that they were going shopping and asking for her list.

“Everybody understands illness. Everybody understands death of a family member. Everybody understands birth,” she says. “Those common threads bring people together. Not once and forever, but in gestures.”

For McCarty, making such gestures is a sensible and vastly preferable alternative to isolation. While having children made it much easier for her to meet people, she says, she didn’t have any kids when she moved to Northport 14 years ago. She found people less friendly than in Connecticut, where she’d grown up, and it was difficult for her to forge connections. But as a child she’d watched her father belong to a slew of community boards and her grandparents entertain loads of friends, so she became a joiner, signing up for groups and running blood drives—doing all the things that put people together and gave them something to talk about, and it paid off. She met people, she introduced them to each other, she made sure to be friendly and have a kind word to offer, and she found herself a community. “I think small gestures made my community big,” she says.
McCarty worked hard to become part of the fabric of her Long Island towns, and is still very much connected to them from California. But she can’t help noticing that people are “huge on community” in her new town. Standard practices like carpooling and public places like parks bring people together. People also practice courtesies, like saying hello and picking up after their dogs, which she didn’t find to be the case on Long Island.

And then there’s Californians’ peculiar openness to newcomers. “Every single person that I’ve met has felt personally responsible for welcoming us to California,” McCarty says, awed.

When you get right down to it, community-building begins the moment one person gets to know another. From there, connections can grow and community can take root.


Tips for Community-building

1. Be willing to make the first move. “If you’re waiting like a wallflower, it may not happen,” Dawn McCarty says. So say hello. Smile. Introduce yourself.
2. Make your community grow by introducing people to each other. A lot of people ought to know each other, because of where they live or what they’re interested in, but no one has put them together.
3. Volunteer.
4. Take the time to ask people how they are, and wait for an answer.
5. New neighbors moving in? Welcome them, and let them know you’re a resource for them.
6. Be helpful.
7. Join groups. The group you’d like to join doesn’t exist? Start it.
8. Feel people out. Not everyone wants to be an active part of the community, and it’s not neighborly to push.
9. Be a familiar, active presence in your neighborhood, at your kids’ school, at your place of worship.
10. And, counter intuitively, “Ask somebody to help you,” Gail Satler advises, “because then you’re going to strike up a conversation.”