The Fireflies Field: How is youth redefining 'Community' for themselves?

For most of recorded history, communities have been organized based on location, identity, ethnicity, customs, etc. Leaving out larger-than-life events like a war or a famine, which pushed for movement and dynamism most communities remained put in one place. 

The past few centuries of perpetual and global conquest pulled all sides of the globe together - forcefully, one must argue. But what we are living today is the immediate result of it. Today, with overt globalization, while divisions haven't diminished there is a more agile movement across communities formed on the basis of subtler identities. The term that is often used to describe the result of such a phenomenon is 'intentional communities'. 

As one starts to scratch the footnotes of history - one finds there are several rich accounts in the ancient history of what today is deemed as 'intentional community' - in the form of ashrams, monasteries, Pythagoras commune, etc. While the term was coined in the late 40s after World War 2 the practice of it existed since antiquity.  

In the past half-century, especially in the west, a number of communes, ecovillages, and intentional communities emerged - most of them colored as flaky, non-compliant, and at times cultish. Yet they also showed hope in the form of offering higher social cohesion and an alternative lifestyle to the mainstream over-consuming, extractive one. Several social and political movements that changed the face of societies in the world have drawn from communal experiments. 

Given today's fluidity of communication and greater accessibility to knowledge, on one side, along with greater than ever inequity and violence on nature, on the other - we are in the strangest fix, together. Several groups across the world are advocating for mass/group action - where subtleties like context, identities, and privileges within the movements are not blindsided but acknowledged and leveraged toward a major overhaul in society. Smaller intentional communities of young people are playing an integral part in advancing the idea. 

"It's a first step towards the process of healing, it seems, I never thought I could serve because of what remained broken within, but the hope of a community that listens and notices is truly changing that," says a participant, in one of my programs hosted by Youth Alliance, that focuses on building youth community but also centered on values like service, collective leadership, healing. In the past ten years, with over 700+ individuals placed across the country, Youth Alliance is attempting to create a community where social experiments and safe political dialogues can take place. "Invitation is a key method in these spaces, nobody is forced yet subtler invitations are offered to dig, to listen, to know, which truly create an atmosphere of agency, to begin with," says one of the team members at Youth Alliance. 

They say the movement of a seagull can bring a storm, and the flapping of a butterfly can bring tornados - a single moment of kindness or cruelty is often enough to change a life - and a life enough to change the course of the world. Yet all of it takes place under certain conditions, that are mostly untraceable, but sometimes, only sometimes intentional. Youth Alliance honours that intention, that invitation that promises to bring small fireflies together to either glimmer as stars or match their frequencies to become the sun. Change is inevitable, they say, but it may very well be intentional and collective as well.