May 3, 2026

The following is part one of a (possibly) two part series about community and the ways in which different groups of people engage (or do not engage) with it.

Part one: Talking with, not about

I want to introduce a hypothetical.

Imagine a quiet, suburban neighborhood. It’s very residential, consisting mostly of one or two story detached homes, each with a yard or garden. Car traffic is minimal in the neighborhood, allowing kids to play freely in the streets. Naturally, this environment attracts a lot of new families and retired folks, the type of people who are looking to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. The area is tranquil and has historically low levels of crime. It’s a pretty ideal space, and those that live there are all appreciative of what they have.

Let’s say there’s a woman (we’ll call her Marissa because why not) who lives in the neighborhood. Marissa owns a small but beloved coffee shop that sits right in the middle of the neighborhood. The shop is frequented by many locals, and after ten years in business, it has been wholeheartedly acknowledged as an essential staple of the community. Marissa is very happy with her life.

One Saturday morning, Marissa arrives at her shop to find empty beer cans and cigarette butts littered all around the shop’s entryway. Marissa is understandably upset, but knowing that there’s little she can do about it now, she cleans up the mess and goes on with her day.

A week later, Marissa again comes to her shop to find a similar mess of beer cans and cigarette butts. To make matters worse, it seems like the group had been skateboarding on the bench outside her shop. She built and painted the bench herself last month, but now it’s all scratched up and much of the paint is stripped off.

Frustrated, Marissa brings the issue up at the next community town hall. It is her first time attending a meeting, so she is unsure of how she will be received, but to her surprise, the community quickly rallies together in support of her and her shop. They gather the funds for new paint for the bench and for metal studs that she can install on it to prevent further skating.

Marissa, happy to have the support of the community, repaints the bench and installs the studs.

A couple weeks pass without issue.

One morning, Marissa arrives at her shop to find the wall of the shop has been spray painted with graffiti.

Infuriated, Marissa returns to the community town hall with the news. Again the community gathers funds in support of the shop, this time for the installation of a motion detection camera outside the shop. Marissa is incredibly grateful for the support.

A few nights after installing the camera, Marissa gets a motion detection alert. She checks the camera’s live feed, which shows a group of teenagers loitering outside her shop, drinking.

Marissa knows she has a choice to make. She could call the police, but they might charge the teenagers with a crime. Marissa knows how sticky criminal records can be, and she doesn’t want to negatively impact the futures of these kids. That said, she is genuinely angry about how her shop has been treated, and she doesn’t want her silence to encourage this kind of behaviour to continue. After all, the teens are trespassing, and are likely drinking underage. Then again, she doesn’t want to invite someone with a gun to confront these kids who are seemingly just hanging out. It feels too extreme for her. And how would the kids react to having the police called on them? What if it only invites more trouble for her later?

Marissa begins to second guess herself. Maybe this is a totally different group of kids. They don’t have skateboards after all. Who’s to say they were the ones who graffitied her place?

Marissa considers some alternative options. She lives alone, and doesn’t have the phone number of any of her neighbours. She doesn’t feel comfortable knocking on her neighbour’s door this late for help. She could go to talk to the kids by herself, but admittedly, the idea scares her. She doesn’t have a car, and it’s a twenty minute walk in the dark to the shop. She wants to resolve the scenario amicably, but she doesn’t know what these drunk teens are capable of.

Marissa is in a tough spot.

I could go on but I don’t want to get too hung up on this fictional scenario so I’m going to end the hypothetical there.

I want to consider two things here:

The first is an aside about our lack of support options for non-violent conflict resolution.

For a lot of people, calling the police is almost an instinctual thing to do. It’s one of those basic things that’s ingrained in all of us. Is there someone strange outside your house? Call the police. Are the neighbours having a violent shouting match? Call the police. Are the teens next door throwing a party at 2 AM on a weekday night? Call the police. While having a single point of contact for all these problems is undoubtedly convenient, it can lead to scenarios where calling the police feels like an unnecessary escalation of conflict that can result in unpredictable outcomes.

Marissa knows that the police officer she could call to deal with these kids is the same one that would respond if someone with a gun was breaking into her house, and the kids likely know this too. While Marissa might hope that the officer will come into the scenario with a level head and a goal of non-violent de-escalation, the uncertainty in both the response of the officer as well as the response of the kids to the presence of said officer can make calling the police a very uncomfortable thing to do.

If Marissa had a stronger community network, things might be different. If she felt comfortable asking someone nearby to go with her to talk to the kids, maybe she would feel safe enough to deal with the problem without having to resort to the police.

That’s still a lot to ask of Marissa, and if she still felt uncomfortable going to the shop, even with the support of her neighbours, then we’re back at the original problem. Do you call the police or do you do nothing? This highlights to me a flaw in our systems of social support. It feels like you’re stuck between two extremes.

But what if there was another option? Imagine that when you called 911, you could request the aid of an unarmed community outreach worker trained in non-violent conflict resolution. This would give Marissa the option to rely on a peaceful third party and potentially allow her to remain anonymous, all without needing to add a gun to the mix.

I want to dig more into this idea but to avoid getting too side tracked I’ll save that for a future blog post.

Coming back to the original scenario, the second thing that I want to consider is how we got here in the first place.

It’s clear that a struggle has been gradually building between the kids and the rest of the community (though the kids might not even be aware of the conflict’s existence). The teens are continuing to disrupt a community space, and so in response, the community is investing into more and more preventative measures to protect that space from harm.

But this is just a bandaid solution that doesn’t address the root cause of the conflict. It’s confronting the “what” without addressing the “why”. After all, if these kids are pushed out of this spot, what’s stopping them from simply moving elsewhere? When does it stop? With their arrest?

To me, the underlying issue is that these kids and their needs are being left out of the conversation entirely. The community is talking about the kids, instead of talking with them. They are treating the kids not as people, but as a problem to solve, and this dehumanization has some pretty significant implications.

By never making an attempt to communicate with the kids or to find out what their needs are, it’s not only the actions of the kids being condoned by the community, it’s the kids themselves. By failing to communicate with the kids, the community is expressing, whether intentionally or not, that the needs of the kids are not important enough to matter to the community.

Even though the kids live in the neighborhood, they aren’t being counted as members of its community. The kids themselves are the “problem”. They can either fix themselves, or get out. But that kind of perspective does nothing to address or even acknowledge the reasons behind the behaviour of the teens, and so does nothing to provide a peaceful solution to the matter. It’s conflict resolution by escalation, and that sucks.

So let’s take a different approach.

Imagine that, instead of treating these kids as a problem, the community chose to hold a town hall where any kid could come discuss their thoughts on how the community has and hasn’t been providing for them. Imagine that the community was able to speak with these teenagers (via their parents) and managed to convince them to come to the event.

What do you think those kids would say? If I were to guess, not much. Knowing teens, they’d probably just shrug and say they were bored.

And yeah, they probably are.

When I was a kid, there wasn’t really anything for me to do on weekend nights. During the week we played video games or watched movies, but on weekends I often wanted an escape from that. I was too young to go to the bar (not that I would have gone anyways), and everything except the 7/11 was closed, so we’d always end up going to a party or drinking in the park. It wasn’t really an active decision, there just truly wasn’t anything better for us to do.

And yeah, we were loud, and crude, and messy, but we were kids. We were frustrated. The world didn’t seem to care about us, and yet wanted everything from us. We were feeling all the big feelings, but were given no outlet to express them in, so we wandered out and claimed our own spaces.

By employing a little empathy, we can quickly start seeing the teens outside Marissa’s shop as more than just a problem to solve. They’re fully fledged people, each with their own hopes, fears, and desires.

In all likelihood, Marissa’s shop wasn’t the target of some premeditated, malicious action. If these kids were anything like me, the shop was just a safe place they could go to goof around and blow off some steam, judgement free.

We could look at the actions of the teens and see a bunch of rotten trouble makers up to no good, or we could see a group of frustrated kids, left alone to express themselves in a community that isn’t supporting them.

So how do we change that? What can the community do to better support these kids?

Let’s take a step back and first try to identify some qualities that might indicate a healthy relationship between a group and their community. Some broad categories for these indicators might be:

• Spaces: Places for people to gather together. Specifically “third spaces” i.e. places that are not work/school or the home.
• Events: Exciting occurrences that keep people engaged with the spaces available to them.
• Support: Networks and resources to help people when they’re struggling.

So if the community wants to better provide for their teens, they can find ways to fulfill some of these categories for their teens. Here are a few actionable ideas that the community could put into practice:

• Build a skate park. Let the local skate community be a part of the design process.
• Offer discount student passes to the bowling alley, movie theater, sports games…
• Keep malls (at least the food court) open later in the evenings
• Make more teen and YA books and comics available at libraries
• Hold weekly artist meetups at community centres
• Run an arts and crafts convention
• Host concerts featuring local young artists
• Run movie nights in the park
• Host summer night markets
• Run a teen night at the skating/roller rink
• Organize a bag charm making workshop
• Run a weekly book or board game at the community center
• Hold a video game tournament
• Have the community sponsor skateboard tournaments or beginner’s lessons
• Start a free, mental health support phone line
• Create a mentorship program pairing teens with young adults

I could go on.

Obviously everyone is different, so different things will resonate more with different people, but I know that I would have loved to have more options of things to do when I was younger.

And it’s not just teen boredom that the community would be solving. There are plenty of studies that have shown how introducing teen-friendly activities and spaces to a community can lead to a reduction in drug use and criminal activity.

Plus, by providing alternative activities to the teens, there’s a chance that the community would be solving Marissa’s problem as well. After all, if the teens had other exciting things to do, then they probably wouldn’t feel a need to hang out around Marissa’s shop as much.

So now we have a solution where everyone can be happy. The teens get some new, healthy ways to engage with their community, and Marissa gets to have her peace, all achieved without needing to call in some guy with a gun.

Of course, this is a simplified example that I specifically curated to prove my point, but I hope that it illustrates the potential dangers of restricting our definition of community to only include those who engage with the world in the same way that we do.

Introducing barriers to community, whether done consciously or unconsciously, creates division, reduces communication, and fosters conflict, conflict that can quickly escalate when people don’t have access to non-violent methods of resolution.

By being empathetic to the people around us, we can begin to see them as complex individuals, each with their own unique needs, and motivations. We can see how a community that disregards a group of people can push that group away from engaging with their community, especially when those resources and spaces were not built with them in mind. And we can take steps to counteract that disconnect by choosing to bring those groups back into the conversation. This act of humanization makes it easier to engage with each other on a deeper, personal level, and is the type of connection that fosters a more collaborative community. A more connected community is a more supportive one, and when people have more avenues of support, they are more likely to escape unhealthy patterns and to find non-violent ways to resolve conflict, all of which further fosters a stronger, more interconnected community. A positive feedback loop of community solidarity.

So are we done here? Well, no. Not even close.

We may have succeeded in inviting more people into the conversation, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to agree on the solution.

What do we say to the person who doesn’t want a skatepark added to their neighborhood?

In the next post I’m going to talk about the forces that give us that impulsive urge to push back against change, and the ways that community solidarity can help us to embrace it.

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