Community as Becoming

I · Home

Home is not a place. It is a symbol.

Our individual experiences of home diverge wildly, but almost all of us recognise the same idealised version of it. Home is where the heart is. Home is not a place but a feeling. There is no place like home.

Since ancient times we have cultivated the idea of home as the original place where we felt safe. Our first home is our mother’s womb, and leaving it is our first encounter with pain. Every home we have built since has been an attempt to rebuild that shelter.

In the same book, home is described as “the goal of epic odysseys, spiritual quests and psychic transformations.” Which is to say: home is an inner state we aspire to. And to find that idealised place, we almost always have to leave the comfort we already have.

Ask a room of people what being at home feels like and the answers are remarkably consistent. Taking your shoes off. Speaking your mind. Being seen. Being heard. Being understood. Being fed. Being loved. Being cared for.

• Taking your shoes off
• Speaking your mind
• Being seen
• Being heard
• Being understood
• Being fed
• Being loved
• Being cared for

The path of a community builder is the path of someone who builds a home and welcomes others in to share it, own it, and help expand it.

That is the whole job description. Everything else — the programming, the platforms, the rituals, the metrics — is downstream of it. Your role is to make other people feel at home: to build spaces safe enough that people take their shoes off, say what they actually think, and are met rather than managed.

And the first step is not tactical. It is to feel at home in yourself. You have to be the first one to take the courageous step of being vulnerable and expressing yourself authentically. Not because you need to arrive fully formed — you never will — but because a home you have not moved into yet is not a home you can offer anyone.

II · The journey

Every story we tell is a story about going home.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Bilbo Baggins · J.R.R. Tolkien

From Odysseus’s long way back to Ithaca, to Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, to Dorothy carried off by a cyclone and walking a road of yellow brick, to Bilbo’s there and back again — home is the place we aim for, our true north, the destination that gives the road its shape.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell argues that myth is a real representation of our psychic journeys. What we set out to reach or conquer is a symbol of who we will be when we are most ourselves. We are always walking toward ourselves. We are looking for a state of being that gives us peace — a mental place where we can take our shoes off and be safe, whatever that means for each of us.

This is not only poetic. It is biological. Maslow put physiological needs and safety at the base of the pyramid and placed love and belonging just above — but human history suggests there is no literal safety unless we belong to a group. Picture yourself alone on the savanna three hundred thousand years ago, hunting, foraging and fighting lions with your bare hands. You would not have left descendants to tell the story. We learned to organise collectively simply in order to survive.

Safety implies belonging. Our bodies have always understood this, even when our strategies forget it.

So building a community is finding your way back home — or better, building a home you can belong to and be authentic in. And along the way we discover the thing the myths were telling us all along: what matters is the road. We dream of home as a destination, but it is the walking that lets us find ourselves. Through the people we meet and the obstacles we hit, we get stronger and wiser. Through the stories we collect, we build a sense of who we are.

The destination still matters. Naming an idea of home is what gives us direction. But the end defines the path, and then the path becomes the end.

III · The Cowardly Lion

It is the journey that makes the hero, not the other way around.

To share a road, we do not need to want the same thing at the end of it. L. Frank Baum understood this better than almost anyone, and he put it in a children’s book.

My favourite character in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the Cowardly Lion. He has no courage — or so he believes. As Dorothy, the Lion and their new friends walk toward the Emerald City, where they expect a Great Wizard to grant all of their wishes in one stroke, the journey keeps presenting obstacles. Each one calls for a different skill. And every single time a challenge requires an act of courage, the Lion steps forward to meet it, because he thinks he needs the practice.

Being a coward makes the Lion uncomfortable, just as being heartless makes the Tin Man feel bad about himself. All of the travelling companions feel inadequate for lacking something essential. Their insecurities are not surface-level — not the sense that they need a newer car to feel like enough. They are about something more fundamental. Baum’s characters share a vulnerable journey in which each of them is looking for the thing that defines them at their core. In short, they are all looking for the idea of home.

And here is the detail that turns the story into a method: what each character believes is missing is precisely what they practise most along the way. The Lion is brave the whole time. The Tin Man is the tender one, terrified of hurting anyone. The Scarecrow solves every problem the group encounters. Dorothy’s house in Kansas is a literal home, a physical place — but for everyone else on that road it is a symbol of what they are all searching for.

Most of the time, deep down, we already are what we intend to become. The journey is where we build the strength, the habits and the skills to become it fully.

I remember arriving at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela at the end of a three-hundred-kilometre pilgrimage from Porto. I felt restless and utterly at peace at the same time. What mattered was not the door I had walked to. It was the road I had just walked.

This is why Hacking Communities is not, in the end, a book of tactics. Community building is not a set of moves you execute. It is a practice that makes you into someone. It is the process of building a community that makes you a community builder — in the same way the road makes the Lion brave.

The word we need for that is older than any framework. Courage comes from the Latin coraticum — cor, heart, plus a suffix implying action. Literally, an act of the heart. Brené Brown defines courage as telling the story of who you are with your whole heart. I define it as acting from your core. Both require you to be vulnerable first.

IV · Thresholds

Belonging is built in the in-between.

Dorothy does not go looking for a road. A cyclone takes her house off the ground. Alice does not plan the rabbit hole. Bilbo has to be talked out of his front door. In every one of these stories, the journey begins with a threshold the character did not choose — and the moment of greatest disorientation is also the moment of greatest openness.

Real life works the same way. A new city. A new country. A new language learned as an adult. A first business. A first child. A career that stops fitting. These are the moments when we are between identities: the old description of us has expired and the new one has not arrived. We feel groundless. We feel, in the most literal sense, homeless.

That groundlessness is uncomfortable, and it is also fertile. Belonging requires a degree of vulnerability — a point at which people genuinely need one another in order to thrive, which is what moves them to show up and share. Transitions manufacture that condition honestly. It is the same reason it is easier to make friends while travelling: we are more open to connection, and more in need of it.

Significant life transitions are lonely places, and the highest-potential epicentres for better communities.

The scale of the need is not subtle. Harvard research has found that around 36% of Americans report frequent loneliness — rising to 61% among young adults and 51% among mothers of young children. John Cacioppo’s work links chronic loneliness to a roughly 20% increase in the risk of early death. We are the most connected generation in history and the loneliest. If we have the ability to redesign belonging, we have an obligation to use it.

I learned this the hard way. After years of building communities across four continents, I moved to San Francisco — one of my favourite cities in the world — and was profoundly lonely there. I had built my identity around being a connector, and I could not find my people. I felt ashamed. That period made writing this book harder, and it also made the book true. It taught me that community building is not only about knowing the methodology. It is about the state of mind you build from.

Which brought me to the only definition of home I still trust. A real sense of home is not found in a geography. It is found in three places:

V · Identity

Identity is shared journeys.

If community is a road walked together, then the question of who belongs together is not a question of labels. It is a question of journeys.

Demographics are a weak signal. Location plus one shared attribute — the logic behind most matching apps and most community strategies — produces encounters that are technically relevant and emotionally empty. What actually creates recognition is overlapping lived experience: the layered Venn diagram of what a person has been through, and what they chose. Inherited traits tell you where someone started. Chosen journeys tell you who they have become.

The strongest signal of who belongs together is shared journeys. The more layered our lived experiences, the more likely we are to find trust.

This is why relevance behaves like a trust accelerant. The more we see each other, the more we talk. The more we talk, the more we trust. The more we trust, the more we belong. Frequency, density and relevance are not soft variables — they are the physics of how strangers become a group.

It also reframes what a community builder is doing. In truth, there is no such thing as community building. Some people already belong together. The work is discernment: recognising who those people are, and then connecting dots that were always going to connect — faster, warmer and with better conditions than chance would have provided.

And because journeys keep moving, so does identity. We are all in a state of endless becoming. A community designed around a fixed label calcifies. A community designed around a shared transformation keeps making room for who its members are turning into.

VI · Story

A story is how a home gets built.

Every community I have ever seen work was, underneath, a story people recognised themselves inside of. Communities are stories of how belonging gets built — and the telling is not decoration on top of the community. It is the load-bearing structure.

This is what myth has always done. A story gives a shapeless experience a beginning, a threshold, a road and a return. It converts something that happened to you into something you can offer someone else. When you tell your story, you become a lighthouse to others who resonate with it — and the people who resonate are, by definition, the people already walking a version of your road.

Sharing your story is an act of care towards yourself and others. You are your first audience.

Place works this way too. As the placemaker Nani Kahar puts it, people make a place their own when they share stories — memories — around it. Rituals, rhythms and recurring gatherings matter because they generate a shared past. A group with a shared past is no longer an audience. It is a we.

Which gives us the actual sequence, and the order matters:

Most community strategies invert this. They start with the framework, look for a narrative to justify it, and hope transformation shows up. It rarely does. Design the path for becoming first; the architecture follows.

VIII · Keep walking

Essays along the same road.

• If there is transformation, there is community. And a story.

  Community compounds through transformation — and a story lights the path for others to walk their own becoming.

• How to come home to yourself (and build your village) through personal narrative

  Craft your narrative, break it into publishable pieces, build your village. On becoming a lighthouse.

• Designing relevant communities: identity = shared journeys

  Why lived experience beats demographics, and how to draw the Venn diagram of who already belongs together.

• Life transitions: a fertile ground to grow high-relevance communities

  Thresholds, vulnerability and loneliness — why the in-between is where communities take root.