Donald Trump’s election victory evoked disappointment and distress for millions across the country. Many people fear for the future of reproductive justice, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, tariffs, labor unions, the environment, and much more. Some feel so hopeless about the future that they want to give up. Others are fired up and ready to get more involved in local issues or politics, but they may have no idea how or where to start.

All of those reactions are valid. But if people are serious about improving our flawed democracy, they must participate — and not just by voting. Voting is an important aspect of civic life, but presidential elections happen only once every four years.

If we want to make a change beyond the ballot box and find meaning in these challenging times, we need to engage with the people around us. Look at the social movements of the past that created lasting impact, like the Civil Rights movement securing legislation to outlaw segregation and discrimination, or the labor movement establishing weekends and the 8-hour workday. Powering these campaigns were longstanding relationships between different people with different skills and roles, forged together into a collective by their shared values and a desire for a better world. They built communities that were able to create sustained public pressure for change outside of the presidential election cycle.

Despite the need for real community networks, our country’s social fabric has been fraying.

According to the US Surgeon General’s 2023 report on the “loneliness epidemic,” approximately half of US adults have reported feeling lonely. People are spending more time alone and less time with others. We’re more online than ever before, yet we feel more disconnected. We trust each other less.

Belonging to a community provides the interpersonal support human beings naturally need to survive and thrive. But building a real social network doesn’t happen overnight. It requires consistently showing up, being willing to give and take, and managing uncomfortable disagreements. “There is no Amazon one-click for community,” says Katherine Goldstein, a writer who covers care and a fellow for the Better Life Lab at New America.

Creating community takes time. It demands discipline. But it’s not impossible — and there are many other people out there looking for the same connections and sense of purpose.

The civic, health, and practical benefits of community

In 1970, American political scientist Robert Putnam was in Rome studying Italian politics when a unique research opportunity opened up. The Italian national government had relinquished some of its power and delegated a wide range of responsibilities to 20 new regional governments. These institutions were structured nearly identically, but each region had different economic, political, and cultural dynamics.

For Putnam, this was a perfect situation to study what makes successful (and unsuccessful) democratic institutions. He found that the governments that were able to effectively operate internally, propose relevant policy, and implement legislation all shared a deeply embedded sense of trust and cooperation among their citizens. “Some regions of Italy, we discover, are blessed with vibrant networks and norms of civic engagement,” he wrote in his 1993 book about his research, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, “while others were cursed with vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and isolation, and a culture of distrust.”

Does the latter environment sound a little familiar?

When Putnam came back to the US years later, he noticed a trend that disturbed him: American social life seemed to be disappearing. Membership in groups and clubs was declining. Across unions, religious groups, sports leagues, and political groups, people were reporting less time spent participating and being in these spaces. Putnam wrote the influential book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, in which he claimed that the social structures these groups provided were key to our physical and civic health. A 2023 documentary called Join or Die <presents Putnam’s research and perspective and confronts the audience with a challenge: If you care about democracy, join a club.

There were critiques of Putnam’s thesis. Some commentators pointed out that Putnam’s focus on a narrow band of clubs and volunteering left out spaces populated by women, people of color, and immigrants.

But he is right that strong networks of connection have immense benefits and that isolation can have adverse effects on our lives. Being socially isolated has the same impact on people’s mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to the Surgeon General, and loneliness and isolation make us more at risk for individual risks like heart disease, strokes, anxiety, and depression. These impacts can be measured across entire communities where social cohesion is breaking down, the Surgeon General found.

“We know that loneliness and not having connections is not good for us physically,” says Goldstein. “Part of that is very much related to our psychology, that as humans, we have adapted and are biologically and neurologically programmed to want to be together. That’s how we have survived for this long.”

Beyond the long-term health impacts, there are also practical benefits to prioritizing and being a part of a community. For example, if you’re going to a book club once a month, you’re practicing skills like public speaking and active listening. If you end up leading a book club meeting, you’ll learn how to facilitate a conversation among different people.

Having a strong community also creates support systems for times of need or crisis. Whether you need someone to watch your kid, drive you to your job, or get your groceries when you’re sick, having a collective of people to lean on isn’t just a convenience — it’s a comfort to know you’re not alone.

How we find community …

A community is a network of people with shared values or intentions. If you want to build or strengthen a community with others, you can ask yourself: What communities am I informally a part of or which do I feel close to? What values matter to me? In what ways am I seeking change in the world around me? Your answers can inform your search for local mutual aid organizations, tenant unions, labor rights organizations, union locals, or nearby advocacy groups. See what speaks to you.

If getting politically or civically involved feels overwhelming at first, you can also start with something low-stakes, like joining a hobby-based club. These still offer the opportunity to get close with a group of people with whom you share common interests. Want to get more exercise and play a team sport? Join a sports league. Are you a voracious reader? Try a book club. Feeling imaginative and want to escape reality for a few hours a week? A Dungeons and Dragons campaign may be your thing.

Depending on where you live, there’s a good chance these spaces already exist. Some of them have little to no cost; I highly recommend visiting your local library’s website and seeing what events and clubs they offer. You don’t have to create them from scratch.

Whatever it may be, you just need to show up consistently. How else do we get to know the people around us if we don’t make the effort to get together? Community-building is a long-term project and an investment that can be easy to neglect. But every interaction and every group meeting is an opportunity to get to know one another and create trust. If these community-building efforts are made a priority, it gives us real networks to activate and rely on during a crisis, and it makes tough discussions with each other much less intimidating.

… and withstand the challenges that can break it

There are some obstacles that can make it difficult to build and embed yourself into a long-term community. A big one is American individualism — the idea that we must be self-reliant and do everything ourselves. Pushing self-sufficiency too far robs us of the connections that we know are beneficial.

“Allowing some level of vulnerability about how you might need help, or things that you might need when appropriate, I think is really crucial for community building,” says Goldstein.

That self-awareness is particularly important when building community around a specific political issue because you need others to trust you and vice versa. Carla Blessing, a tenant union organizer at Quality Hill Towers in Kansas City, knows it isn’t always easy.

“It’s a thing that I still struggle with,” she said. “Learning that I can be vulnerable with [my neighbors] and let out some of the sadness and the frustration, the anger, and knowing that I’ve got a safe place to do that, where I won’t be judged and where people will not only listen but ask, ‘How can we support you?’”

“Like, I’ve got a neighbor who said, ‘If you’re having trouble knocking doors, I’ll go with you. We can do it together.’ And I’ve done that for other people too,” she added.

Blessing has struggled with anxiety and depression her entire life (something that nearly three in ten Americans can relate to). Social interactions, like cold-knocking on neighbors’ doors, can be scary or difficult. But person-to-person interactions are necessary for building community and trust, so she’s developed a strategy to help her.

“Imagine the things that you’re trying to project, the kind of person who is confident and relatable,” she said. “You focus on embodying that. Think back to your role models, to the people you’ve seen who did have these qualities, and you emulate them.”

The Quality Hill Towers tenants union is currently organizing the largest rent strike in decades. Blessing has only been with the union for two months, but she’s already learned a range of skills that help keep their movement running: facilitating meetings in their building, taking quality notes, moving through disagreements, making sure everyone gets a turn to speak. While these administrative duties may seem mundane, they’re the foundation for civic groups.

It can be easy in moments of crisis or need to feel energized and want to do something. The hard part is making your work sustainable when that urgency fades. It can take years for grassroots groups to create local or systemic change, and often there are painful losses along the way. Community groups rarely have enough power or money to do everything they want. There are ways to prevent burnout in community efforts: making sure responsibilities are split among everyone, figuring out sustainable ways of operating, and making time for moments of joy along the way. It’s important to accept that almost everyone feels burnout at some point, whether it’s because of community-building efforts or from other personal struggles that can impact each of our lives.

There are also bound to be some uncomfortable moments when taking the time to build community. It could be feeling anxious or too tired to go to an event or meeting, or having disagreements with fellow community members. These are all normal parts of deeper person-to-person interactions. However, when trying to get more involved in a certain space, you may discover more serious differences in values or goals than you originally anticipated.

“Conflict is also an opportunity to identify strategic differences and, in some cases, decide to go in different directions,” says Emily Dupree, the founder of Clean Air Club, which provides free air purifiers to artists and musicians in Chicago, Illinois. “That isn’t a failure of organizing. That is a success of interpersonal relations and an organizing success because now there are two strategies being implemented in the world rather than one.”

If you do find that your values, interests, or goals are similar enough to others in your group, then feeling some discomfort doesn’t mean you don’t fit in, nor is it an indicator that you should leave. Rather, facing that discomfort head-on helps build resilience within these communities. The more we practice these skills and embed them into our lives, the easier it will be to process and move through the tougher times.

For Blessing, the community she has built with her neighbors has helped immensely with her anxiety and depression. “Being part of a group that is making changes happen, it feels powerful, and it is an antidote for the powerlessness of that despair that can creep in when you look outside at everything that is happening in our country, in our world,” says Blessing. “You think, ‘What can I do about it?’ Well, this is something I can do.”

“It’s a reason to get up in the morning,” she added. “I needed that.”