The community supposes an entity where the members develop themselves in their own individuality and stablish links and connections between the others. Among many others things, the community is based on the idea of sharing, having this activity as a tool, as a weapon of creating common spaces.
The sense of community is developed in activities, in common ideas. Whenever you have a common aim, a shared purpose, this sensation just shows up, and shapes the social group in a very special way. With ACARBIO, the association that kept us in Tramonti, we just discovered in many activities the huge amount of trash that is thrown every year to the village in many places and different situations. How do we solve that? My solution resides in the idea of community.
The public facilities tend to generate on people the perception of free supplies. “Why do I have to worry about a bin that belongs to the government and doesn’t actually belong to me? I don’t have to care about it, because I didn’t pay for it” Thanks to these facilities, people develop damaging behaviors, a general tendency to “vandalism”, which is portrayed in several catastrophes.
My solution seems easy, but it isn’t at all: developing a community is not a simple task, and it requires lots of different strategies and tools. One of the strategies which would be actually useful and very interesting is the idea of the social experiment. How do we make people aware of the damage they are causing to the environment by throwing a paper to the street? By using personal items, things that stablish relationships between people’s belongings and their acts. With this, we can develop a sense of belonging, directly creating a sense of community on people, and with this, making people avoid behaviors which can cause damage to the public facilities and the environment.
Reaching that point, that feeling of having a common target, would be the actual solution for almost every social issue, our “holy grail” of sociology. Let’s enhance our relationships by creating common activities and by sharing spaces, and, afterwards, the community will just show up! Let’s work on it, together. Facciamo una società di tutti e di ciascuno.
Hope I see you soon!!!
Kind regards
Guillermo López Calleja
