In community you must do the work of learning who other people are and how they see things differently and honoring that so you in turn will have your views honored. I know what they expect from me and I from them, they share my concerns. The more a community's culture supports individual destiny and creativity the more likely it is to be able to hold a healthy tension between its collective mission and personal freedom and therefore the more likely it is to actually enable the individual's work for social change. There is a good deal of social commentary being generated these days about the state of community.
Conservatives often speak of the erosion of community values and community standards.
Progressive observers on the other hand see community as purposeful association based on connection, commitment and mutual responsibility. That is, meaningful community is seen as collection of people who recognize their common cause and who contribute in some way to the common well being. The emergence in the West of a hegemonic discourse centered on individualism and a culture of selfishness would suggest that the answer is no, that the ideas of tolerance, cooperation, mutual understanding, mutual assistance and social justice are anachronistic idealisms that must inevitably give way, indeed have already given way, to the forces of individualism, materialism and competition. The eruption of myriad ethnic conflicts around the world in concert with the energetic pursuit of capitalism in the formerly socialist world would seem to support the aforementioned conclusion. We undertook an investigation of the fate of different kinds of communities around the globe in order to ascertain what is required to build meaningful and effective communities to meet the challenges that current global events are throwing at us.