Time to Retire the Word Community?
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- Sep 26
- 4 min read
The word community is everywhere, in policy, aid, and cultural initiatives, but has it lost its edge? This article explores how the overuse of community can dull innovation, why we should think instead in terms of social actors and localisation, and how initiatives like Ukraine’s Alliance UA CSO show what genuine locally-led action looks like.
Time to Retire the Word ‘Community’?
Few words are used with as much ease and as little reflection as community. Politicians pledge to “empower communities,” academics study “community resilience,” NGOs speak of “community-led development,” and journalists report on “divided communities.” The word is everywhere. Yet its ubiquity risks meaning very little or worse, obscuring the complex realities of the people it claims to describe.
Born into a Community or Choosing One?
As Bishop observed in 2017:
“It used to be that people were born as part of a community and had to find their place as individuals. Now people are born as individuals and have to find their community.”
That single sentence marks a seismic shift. Belonging is no longer inherited; it is chosen. Identities are negotiated, not fixed. Community is no longer the starting point, it is the destination.
This shift is not abstract. It means that ‘community’ can no longer be assumed. It must be built, maintained, and often contested. What we call a community is rarely unified. More often, it is a fragile arrangement of individuals with overlapping needs, aspirations, or concerns. To speak of “the community” as if it were a single entity risks misrepresentation and exclusion.
The Slippery Word
Scholars have long noted the slipperiness of the term. Barrett (2015) described it as being used “in a bewildering variety of ways.” Titz et al. (2018) found it to be the default label for “working with the people” at the grassroots, often without defining who those people are. UNHCR (2008) warned that what looks like a community from the outside might be fractured by class, clan, religion, or language. A community can be inclusive and protective; it can just as easily be controlling or silencing.
From Communities to Social Actors
A sharper lens is to think in terms of social actors rather than communities.
A social actor can be an individual, group, organisation, or even a system that has agency, influence, and the ability to shape outcomes. Unlike the vague catch-all of community, social actors are:
Active: they make decisions, act, and respond.
Influential: they shape policy, alliances, and outcomes.
Representative: they carry particular values, needs, or ideologies.
Dynamic: their role and power shift over time.
This approach forces us to ask: Who is acting? Whose interests are being represented? Who holds power, and who doesn’t?
Localisation and the SDGs
The UN’s localisation agenda offers another reframing. Instead of treating “communities” as fixed entities, SDG
localisation calls for adapting global goals into local strategies, rooted in subsidiarity, inclusion, partnership, and multi-level governance. It insists on placing local actors, not just communities in the abstract, at the centre of development and humanitarian action.
Localisation, when taken seriously, means shifting leadership and decision-making closer to those directly affected, ensuring capacity, financing, and data are available at the local level. It pushes us to see not a singular community, but overlapping systems of actors with different roles, interests, and influence.
A Ukrainian Example
A striking example of this shift is Alliance UA CSO, an initiative group and think tank working to ensure local leadership in responding to humanitarian crises and setting the foundation for recovery processes in Ukraine.
Alliance UA CSO brings together 26 Ukrainian civil society organisations representing diverse areas, from humanitarian aid to capacity building and long-term development. What unites them is not a romanticised notion of community, but a clear set of values:
Inclusive Transparency: commitment to openness and accessibility, ensuring information is easily understood by all elements of Ukrainian society, including vulnerable groups.
Local Empowerment: a gradual transition from international support to locally-led responses, strengthening Ukrainian capacity to manage crises and recovery.
Future-Focused Vision: long-term planning that considers multiple scenarios while staying rooted in immediate needs and tangible goals.
Here, resilience is not about “the community” in the abstract. It is about networks of actors, built on trust, transparency, and agency, working together to lead recovery from the ground up.
Scotland’s Creative Toolkit
Scotland offers a parallel lesson. On 2 October 2025, Community Enterprise, in partnership with Creative Scotland and Bold Studio, launched the Community Wealth Building (CWB) Toolkit for the Arts, Culture, and Creative Industries.
This interactive toolkit empowers organisations and individuals in the creative sector to align with CWB principles, inclusive ownership, fair work practices, local procurement, and sustainable use of land and finance. Neil McInroy, Global Lead for Community Wealth Building at The Democracy Collaborative, described it as “a springboard, not just for learning, but for leadership,” highlighting its potential to reshape economic structures while strengthening social networks.
The arts and creative industries contribute over £5.7 billion annually to Scotland’s economy and employ more than 115,000 people, yet they are often overlooked in local economic planning. The CWB Toolkit demonstrates how creative organisations can be drivers of resilient, inclusive local economies, showing that what matters is not community as a catch-all category, but the specific actors and networks of trust and purpose that actually deliver change.
A Way Forward
Too often, policymakers, NGOs, and even academics hide behind the soft glow of community. It is a word that soothes, but it rarely interrogates. If we keep using it uncritically, we risk designing policies and programmes for an abstraction that doesn’t exist.
The challenge is simple but uncomfortable: stop invoking community as a proxy, and start naming the actors, networks, and relationships that actually drive change. Only then can empowerment, localisation, and resilience be more than rhetoric.
It may be time to retire ‘community’ or at least to handle it with far more care. Our policies, funding, and language should reflect the fluid, diverse, and chosen ways people actually connect. That is how societies will be prepared, adaptable, and resilient in the decades to come.
Written by Frazer Macdonald Hay
