People Who Build Community Need to Get Paid
To pay them we must explore the complexities of measuring relationship.
We are facing a global crisis of social isolation.
In the spring of 2020, just as the world was heading into lockdown, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released Together, a book arguing for the critical and underappreciated role of social isolation in public health. It’s not hard to imagine that social isolation leads to serious mental health problems, but there is equally compelling evidence that it contributes to problems from heart disease to obesity. Our bodies need relationship the same way that they need exercise and sleep.
For decades, experts have been sounding alarm bells about the increasing scarcity of this vital nutrient. From Robert Putnam’s documentation of the breakdown of social institutions in Bowling Alone to Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work on The Commons, leading thinkers have been championing both the critical need for, and increasing rarity of, meaningful human connection. Before the pandemic, 40% of adults in the US reported feeling isolated or lonely, up from 20% in the 1980s. The impacts of this loss go far beyond individual human health, touching everything from educational outcomes to economic resilience. Research has identified the rise in social isolation as a driving factor for a rise in domestic violent extremism.
Building Relationships
In order to address this crisis, we need people working to build and maintain relationships. This often unrecognized work is already happening within our families and communities, but it is not happening enough.
I have worked for decades to help people from queer kids to research scientists to senior tech leaders find community. In every case, community only happened where people put work into building and maintaining it. Someone had to organize events and bring food, someone had to make sure new people felt welcomed and heard, someone had to smooth over the tensions that inevitably arose in the group. Often I was the person who initiated that work, but in the most resilient communities others would step up to share the load, allowing the community to grow and thrive.
I have seen many attempts to address the social isolation crisis, from philanthropic initiatives to ambitious software projects, and none have succeeded without this particular kind of community labor. It is work that must happen at a human scale. I can meaningfully hold space for, at most, a few dozen people before either winding up on a path to burnout or letting many of those people fall through the cracks. If I want the community to provide more people with a path out of social isolation, I will need to help recruit leaders from among its ranks, or collaborators from intersecting communities, to share the work of holding space. The community can only gorw as large as the accumulated social networks of these leaders. Communities do not scale by growing membership, they scale by growing leadership.
This work of welcoming, facilitating, mediating, mentoring, and leadership development is critical to everything from public health and a functioning democracy. The best way to address our mounting social isolation crisis is to support the people already doing this work and invite more people to join them. Yet this type of work all too often goes unacknowledged and unrewarded. Many brilliant community organizers that I know struggle to maintain financial security; they take largely unrelated jobs to make ends meet. While friends of mine who have built failed startups are celebrated as edgy and innovative and showered with professional opportunities, other friends who have built communities which have transformed or outright saved hundreds of people’s lives are treated as if they have an interesting hobby. Many of these community organizers and advocates struggle with burnout or actively burnout, and too many of their life-saving communities fail as a result.
There is a strange chasm between the many, many people with resources dedicated to building community and the largely unsupported people who engage in the work of building and maintaining it. I believe that in order to address the mounting social isolation crisis, we must bridge this chasm by moving acknowledgment, emotional support, and financial resources to the distributed networks of people who hold the spaces where relationships form.
There are many ways that this chasm is already being bridged, from the innovative grassroots philanthropy of groups like the Third Wave Fund to the long lineage of direct support within communities of faith. Much more is needed. To bridge this chasm, I have been exploring a radical, and potentially dangerous, strategy: measuring where relationships are forming so that we can adequately resource the people who make them possible.
The oversimplified vision goes like this: Say you’ve got a big pile of money and you want to invest it in building an ecosystem of relationships. You need to divide it up among a diverse network of emerging leaders who are holding space for those relationships at a human scale, which is really hard to do. When you’re in the room and in the community being organized, you can feel when relationships are happening, your whole body lights up in relational space. But if you’re not in the room you more or less have to go on faith. A dozen people come to you, all claiming that they’re great at building relationships, all with different anecdotes and social media metrics to prove that they’re really doing it. How do you tell someone who’s just good at storytelling or good at amassing a large audience from someone who’s genuinely building a network of deep relationships?
Relational measurement could change all that. If we could point a magic crystal at a community that glowed whenever relationships were being built we could efficiently divide up a big pool of resources among many small communities. Rather than dumping resources on a charismatic leader at the center of the community, we could work with them to help it flow to all of the individual leaders holding space at human scale. Becoming a community organizer could become a career path for some and a side hustle for others. Instead of competing for validation and cash by increasing their follower count and becoming influencers, people could find support and security by building relationships and becoming organizers.
That magic crystal does not and cannot exist. Two things are simultaneously true: no mix of qualitative and quantitative measures will ever be able to capture the full complexity of a human relationship, let alone an entire community, and we can get substantially better at measuring relationships than we are today. Given the mounting social isolation crisis, given how critical relationships are to the health of our bodies, our cities, and our democracy, we must get better at measuring relationships.
Measuring Relationships
For the past decade, I have been exploring one way to do that. It’s not the answer, it may not even be an answer, and I share it here to provide a picture of what such measurement might look like.
Around 2012, I began experimenting with ways to mathematically model how relationships form. I believe that, at their core, relationships are about things changing one another. I can move through the world, randomly bumping into people in ways that change me and change them, and if I do that for long enough, I’ll be shaken apart, and I’ll succumb to entropy. But every once in a while, I’ll have an encounter that leads to something more; I’ll have a conversation with a stranger that goes on for hours and leads to a blossoming friendship. We’ll move from changing one another in a brief, random encounter, to changing one another in a consistent and evolving way. I set out to mathematically model this transition, from changing one another randomly to shaping one another in stable ways.
The result was a novel form of graph theory that I call an edgeless network. Generally, mathematics views relationships as static lines that either exist or don’t, like a “friend” status on Facebook. Within edgeless networks, relationships are constantly changing rivers of information that only exist when time is moving forward. And the more I played with these networks, the more I realized that the relationships forming within them had fundamental mathematical properties that felt eerily familiar.
For example: you can look at a bunch of edgeless networks and see which ones are most effective at forming and maintaining relationships. The answer seems to be an environment a little like a coral reef: tons of small niches where new things evolve and then crawl out to interact with one another. This outperforms both oases in a desert (where relationships form in isolated niches) and an open ocean (where everything can freely interact with everything else.) Relationality may be tied to fractal dimensionality.
Edgeless networks are also surprisingly opinionated about what we can and can’t know about relationships. It turns out that as these networks get better at forming relationships, they also become harder to predict. You can create a rigidly controlled environment like a factory that connects pieces in predefined ways, but as soon as parts of the factory start forming new and interesting relationships with one another it will break down. Conversely, if you want to create an environment where relationships thrive you have to give up on the idea that they will look the way that you want them to. Either you can know that a given environment will be great at forming relationships or you can know what the relationships it forms will look like, but you can’t know both.
Because of these sorts of eerie familiarities I’ve become curious about whether edgeless networks could be applied to the question of relational measurement. If (and this is a big if) we assume that humans changing one another in a community are in some way similar to nodes changing one another in an edgeless network, then we can take meaningful steps towards measuring where relationships form. Pulling from this and other frameworks in social science and complexity theory we can examine online and offline communities to get an partial picture of how relational they are, and we may even be able to have statistical clarity on how incomplete that picture is.
Relational measurement could be a powerful tool, but only to the extent that the measurement tools we have, like edgeless networks, accurately point to the much more complicated thing that lights up our bodies and makes our communities creative and resilient. Defining a relationship as two or more things changing one another is both mathematically elegant and a severe oversimplification.
Supporting Relationships
To see and support the complex work of building relationships we will need to artfully combine these oversimplifications: ones that leverage tools like edgeless networks, time-tested survey instruments from social science, and practices which have a deep historical lineage of creating community resilience.
If we are to understand and support relationships then the word “relationship” will have no one definition and no one measurement. In the way that doctors have a vast range of diagnostic tools for the human body, relational measurement must consist of a vast range of methodologies that provide insight into the profound complexity of communities. Edgeless networks may be, at best, one tool in that toolbelt. I am writing this piece because I believe that this is a toolbelt worth expanding.
My hope is to convene a small, interdisciplinary group that includes researchers from several fields, funders, on-the-ground organizers, and people working in relational fields to discuss practical applications of relational measurement to the resourcing of community work. To be successful, this work must center the needs of those building community and the communities that they serve over the needs of funders and researchers. It must recognize that relational measurement is a tool that can be used to create substantial harm as well as good: one that could be used to disrupt grassroots movements as well as resource them, or one that could be leveraged to promote conspiracy theories or voter suppression.
This very real risk of harm means that the work of relational measurement must be performed cautiously in an environment of accountability. Though relational tactics can be used to dominate, they have a deeper lineage among those who resist domination: in movements fighting for racial and economic justice, in disabled communities engaging in mutual aid, in queer families coming together for survival and liberation. Choosing the lineage that this work builds opon and is accountable to will profoundly shape the impact that it has on the world.
The systemic challenges facing us — from climate change to rising inequality to systemic racism — cannot be solved without millions more taking on the work of building community. It is critical that we recognize, learn from, and celebrate those already doing this work, that we accelerate a shift from an economy that creates human health and happiness through material goods to one which creates human thriving through relationship. The messy, early exploration of relational measurement is a critical part of this shift. It is a question worth asking.
