Community Is A Verb

Inside Emergent Ventures Unconference 2024

Emergent Ventures India Director Shruti Rajagopalan holds court in the waning hours of the 2024 unconference in Arlington, Virginia near DC

The second part of Cornerstone’s mission is exploring the world we build for each other. I recently got to convene a mini-salon about the nature of community with fellow Emergent Ventures grantees, which yielded the above insight and affords me an opportunity to share my EV experience.

Tyler Cowen

awards grants through the program, which he founded as the faculty director of the Mercatus Center, a market-oriented think tank affiliated with George Mason University. (Mercatus produces top-notch housing research.) I won a grant for YIMBYs of Northern Virginia in June 2022.

Most grantees are young and many are students, but EVers are eclectic, including military historian and a local news blogger who became the mayor of his small city. This podcast Tyler recorded shortly after selecting me provides a solid overview of EV, which is largely aimed at seeding moonshot projects. At the time he was accepting about 10% of applicants, but that percentage has fallen as more folks apply. Tyler prefers to rely on word of mouth. He wants the grant to be substance, not signal. If you asked for a $1 grant for validation, he would say no. The application is intentionally simplistic, designed for people with no experience applying for grants. The only formal requirement is to deliver a progress report within one year, not to exceed one page in length. Email lucagattonicelli@substack.com if you are interested in the program, I would be happy to chat and help you discern a potential application.

Tyler at EV Unconference 2024 with his trademark sweater (Photo from Mercatus)

A self-professed collector of information, Tyler is a unique character. He coauthors the eclectic blog Marginal Revolution (which I started reading during the pandemic and has now been going strong for 20 years), writes a Bloomberg column, teaches econ at GMU, reads and writes tons of books, travels widely, hosts Conversations with Tyler, closely follows the NBA, is a connoisseur of music, and on and on and on. He lives in Fairfax and shares my reverence for NoVA’s sublime immigrant foodways.

Tyler also collects people, a proclivity on full display at regular gatherings of EVers called unconferences: Minimal rules and a free-form agenda of sessions organized entirely by attendees. Tyler commands us to leave a session without hesitation if we do not want to stay, abruptly modeling the behavior himself. (Doing that helped me get a lot more out of YIMBYtown.) Tyler did tell me he seeks out sessions to hear from EV winners he is less familiar with.

EVers truly come from around the world. There are dedicated EV programs for India, Africa & the Caribbean, and Ukraine. Ireland and Britain are overrepresented, western Europe is way underrepresented. It can be hard not to feel imposter syndrome, though there is not an archetypical EV winner, even with some large clusters. EVers feel a lot of mutual respect and camaraderie, especially in person. At unconference, STEM geniuses (honest-to-goodness geniuses) mingle with startup founders and think tankers and writers and humanitarians and a sprinkling of artists and, this year, a startling number of recent and soon-to-be high school grads. I kept my emotions in check better this year but the experience was still giddy and inspiring. Typically a bit reserved, Tyler openly basks in the EV unconference glow.

“How to resolve tension between: Individualism/Market/Prosperity & Collectivism/Community/Sense of Meaning?”

I wanted my fellow EVers’ thoughts on community. In typical fashion, I decided to knock it out quickly, proposing a discussion in the first block of sessions:

“How to resolve tension between: Individualism/Market/Prosperity & Collectivism/Community/Sense of Meaning?”

My premise, which I think was clear to unconference attendees, certainly if they read Marginal Revolution, is that market exchange is the one institution proven to actually create economic value and thus improve the material conditions of people in general — a go-to example is reducing infant mortality. And this raises the stakes of what I believe is sometimes called “the problem of modernity,” the observation that people living fairly comfortably, often in developed economies, feel alienated and existentially adrift, lacking a sense of purpose.

Poetically, humanity seems to have collective problems with individualist solutions, and individual problems with collectivist solutions. Stamping out global poverty and epidemic disease entails figuring out how to replicate economic development and stable political institutions. While the essential dilemma of the individual seems to be “man’s search for meaning.” I certainly believe that we find meaning in community.

Some unconference session hosts dive right in and dictate with a heavy hand, which can make sense. As I got my session going, I had everyone introduce themselves to seed an open conversation. To give it lots of room to breathe, I curbed my usual chattiness. The mood was relaxed and contemplative.

You can balance individualistic materialism and collective fulfillment, but tension is unavoidable. There is an inherent trade-off.

I set the scene with the opening vignette from one of my favorite books, Tribe, which explores themes of homecoming and purpose. Colonists in what became the United States reported a phenomenon of Europeans running off to join the tight-knit communities of native Americans, even though their lives were brutal and violent. The basic answer to my question was no, according to folks in my session: You can balance the two broad concepts, individualistic materialism versus collective fulfillment, but tension is unavoidable. There is an inherent trade-off.

Folks differed as to whether larger or smaller communities are easier for bad actors to exploit. One participant described the power of Jewish community, with its rituals and traditions. A conservative Jew can travel virtually anywhere on earth and know they would be welcomed into someone’s home and, if they were in distress, receive support from a strong network. Joining that community requires following strict rules, illustrating that community requires self-denial. Someone else noted that community can be stifling and judgmental, like village life. People come to the U.S. because they want to do something different, to pursue their own path.

Community is not necessarily homogenous either. And if you do not like one community, you can generally exit and find another. I must note here, many people are clearly not replacing the communities such as churches that they fall away from.

The biggest takeaway, apart from consensus about the tension and trade-off, was that community is a verb. Something you create by doing, not a static state. ‘Community really means doing actionable things to serve other people, putting in the reps, showing people you care about them, even if you have major differences.’ To me this offers hope that we can connect with people and start building community by finding something useful to do, however small. It reminded me of this pandemic lockdown survival guide: Do not try to think your way into a healthy state, move your body first.

I cherish this beautiful testimony from lawyer-turned-pastor Stephen Foster about how being put in charge of serving coffee at church transformed his life, deepened his faith, and gave him a profound sense of connection to the people around him.

The nature of love is sacrifice. Community entails putting others before yourself. I have so much more energy and desire to get on my feet if I need to help someone else. I crave little tasks at my parish. I started helping set up the weekly potluck (an institution deserving its own blog post) not only because I wanted to eat sooner, but also because I wanted to be useful. A common theme of Christianity, certainly of Catholicism, is that whatever we do should glorify God, even mundane things.

Though we must carefully consider opportunity-cost, I have come to believe that the value of doing something productive is largely innate, a product of the process. I also suspect the biggest impact we can have is on those we directly interact with, a theory of change centered on a web of deeply personal relationships and moments.

At some point I asked folks in my session who wanted a stronger sense of community or connection to the people around them. The vast majority raised a hand. I also asked how many people’s projects, maybe what they got an EV grant for or just the main thing they were currently focused on, required collaboration or working with a team of people. At least two-thirds of those gathered raised a hand. Longtime readers will know that teamwork has defined my experience with YIMBYs of NoVA, though I have tried not to fall into an unearned sense of friendship with members of my team.

I found the convened EVers’ widespread desire for community poignant and a bit surprising. One of my smarter friends, non-EV, told me once that highly educated urban yuppies still have fairly strong social capital. The big decline has been among folks without formal education or high-upside careers. As we will see, though, folks at the unconference really were yearning for community. Speaking for myself, as a kid I was pretty awkward, lacking socialization or almost any real friends. That experience is perhaps common among EVers. As I said during the discussion, I grew up thinking community was a cliche, an impression mostly confirmed by my college experience.

A partial explanation may be that EVers often live in a completely different place from where they were born, for school or work, and may have grown up in another different place. We are clustered in London, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Indian megacities, and of course a few of us are in the DC area.

EV Unconference 2024 session topics (Photo from Mercatus)

Satisfied with how my session had gone, I set out to enjoy the other two session blocks of the day. Unfortunately the session on domesticating raccoons — heavily attended and by all accounts a great success — was concurrent with mine, but I tried to find something touching on another quirky question, though not too weird, or maybe the hard sciences. In the second block I dipped into and out of a few sessions before settling into “The Death of Serendipity,” a discussion of algorithms and the thirst for unexpected in-person encounters and agenda-free quality time. It was really wonderful but ended up being pretty similar to my session. Round three found me bouncing around again before settling into a session called “Inward Exodus” … which was about alienation and community. I end up frustrated that I had fallen into a three-part series on the same topic.

The following day was a good rebound. I attended a small discussion with other organization leaders about managing stakeholders. Then I attended a lively session on the fertility crisis, wherein I believe I was the only parent who spoke. And finally a session on geoengineering as a response to climate change, particularly injecting small amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool the planet, which could be done unilaterally for shockingly little money. I polled the room by show of hands and everyone agreed it was an idea worth exploring, though we were cognizant that most people — regular folks, scientists, and intellectual elites alike — hate the idea.

Sleeping on my experience of the prior day also helped me see another insight about community, that EVers not only have a profound interest in the problem of social isolation, but also a personal stake in it. These folks have friends and big social and professional networks, and are doing extremely stimulating, collaborative work, but there was a consistent sense of longing for something deeper and richer.

I was in the minority that did not raise my hand to say that I lack a strong sense of community. I have close friendships, a blessing I will never take for granted. Urbanism and YIMBY have given me a profound sense of purpose. I am doing what I was meant to do, though many EVers clearly are too. Local advocacy has given me a strong sense of place and appreciation for where I live as unique and vibrant. I have a wonderful wife and three small children to keep me busy, which almost makes me an outlier. Moreover, my family found a church that is a true community, thanks to that great potluck tradition, which I think every church should adopt.

You must intentionally invest in your relationships. Host people at your home, regularly check in on friends, get to know people a little better, get coffee, get dinner, etc. Do not sit at home on a Saturday reading or streaming or whatever, even if you are tired, which we all are. As an extreme extrovert, it is obvious to me that most people are not as introverted as they think they are or claim to be. I worry that what we call “self-care” is making people lonely and miserable.

Secondly, I think we need to rediscover the art of hanging out, simply spending time together without an agenda or defined purpose. That is the essence of why people like fishing, watching sports on TV, and going to baseball games. On the margin, “wasting” time with other people might be the most valuable way for us to spend it.

So if you have read this far, call your mother, or father. Text a friend you have not talked to in a long time, tell them you were thinking about them. Ask that cool person on that other team at work if they want to get coffee. What should you say when reaching out to someone? How about, “I think it would be fun to hang out.” Or volunteer, a great way to meet entirely new people, which I wrote about here:

Community is a verb, so go do it!

Thanks to my 273 subscribers, especially my 7 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a topic suggested by a reader. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the all-volunteer grassroots pro-housing organization I founded, at yimbysofnova.org.