Community Building Institute | Cincinnati

At The Community Building Institute (CBI) we talk about “community” all the time. We talk about community engagement, community organizing, and community voice. All of that is good work, but “community” is something yet again. A community is something you are a part of. Not in an exclusive, cliquish sort of way, but in a come see what we are doing, and join us if you like, sort of way.

CBI went on a tour of that second kind of community this past Friday. We visited two wonderful and unique communities. We were at Hive13 on Spring Grove Avenue, a community of makers, engineers, and artists and, as one of their own described them, nerds. They have equipment to burn and cut and attach, disconnect, and spin and electrify to make anything the members of their community can imagine. It’s an amazing place that a group of people (a community) came together to create based on their own interests. It exists because they invest their time, passions, and themselves into it, they made it up and they like it.

We then visited a second kind of community; we had dinner at Moriah Pie. We got there early and got a table when only a few people were there. This is how I understood the deal: they make pizza from local ingredients and we pay what we can. I did not understand what was coming next. Within 20 minutes, the place started filling up. There were young people, families with kids, older people and the tables of diners kept forming and reforming with all kinds of mixes of people coming and going. Not everyone who came in sat to eat; some went straight to the back to help with the cooking and the serving. When Leslie Stevenson (a member of this community) came in she got a big round of applause from everyone in the place – she has just become the first African-American Norwood Councilwoman! It felt like a family dinner if your family was really big.

These communities are creating wonderful, amazing, interesting, tasty, supportive places because people have come together to collectively share their gifts and themselves with each other. In both places, if you are one of them, (and you will know if you are), they would welcome you to join, to become part of the community. To do that means you have to be present and willing to invest yourself in the place and the people that are your community.