Why the build your community challenge?

Have you ever gone to another country and seen how people seem to know each other? They know when you’re new to the community and they immediately ask ‘Who are you?’ because you’re the new person!

You see the people around you in that country and they all seem way happier than people in the United States and they all seem to find ways to help each other, even the ones in the poorest of circumstances. They just have a way of living that feels content, life feels slower, and people seem to find ways to get along instead of fighting all the time.

Some anthropologists are now calling the US culture strange compared to the rest of the world. We parent strangely, we teach weirdly, we don’t know our neighbors, we aren’t faithful to our friends in their time of need, and we quit each other over the simplest of disagreements or beliefs. It’s a recipe for destruction, really.

It’s a perfect disaster to kill a country from the inside out.

But what if we changed that narrative? What if we knew our neighbors? What if we re-learned how to parent? What if we had five very close friends within five miles of our home who we could depend on when times are tough (because tough times are coming for all of us)? What if having a community healed us instead of dividing us and we all used the weight of our friendship to turn this country around and become a beacon of hope for the world?

The Build Your Community Challenge is here to turn around our lonely, divided ways and unite us.

We’re starting out by reading The Kindness Challenge by Shaunti Feldhahn. It will have us working on throwing a lot of kindness to one person for 30 days and you should see that relationship improve by 70% at the end of it. Go ahead and grab the book now because it begins June 1st! (This book does have religious undertones, but the author has so much great research behind her methods…that it’s easy to gloss over the religion and see the beauty of the challenge.)

Then in July we’re reading a book called Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff. It’s a fantastic book written by an American woman who doesn’t know how to parent her crazy toddler and she goes and lives with three different cultures in other countries to figure out parenting. While she’s doing that she learns a lot about living in a community, having better relationships with people, and why the parenting methods used in this country don’t work. She comes back to California and sets out to find her community and parent well - which she does.

In August we’re reading our last book called Find Your People by Jennie Allen. This book is also written by an American woman who realized she needs to live in community. After four years of lots of trial and error (which are many) she finally finds five close friends within five miles of her home….and is much happier. This book also has a lot of religion in it, but if you can get past that and just see her as another American learning to live in community, there is a lot to learn from her book.

In the above two books you’ll hear about gathering around a fire. So after you’ve finished these books we’ll expect you to have some kind of a fire pit…even if you live in an apartment and just get a giant candle you can light on your dining room table. Humans have been gathering around fires since the beginning, so we should bring it back and go for it again!

While we’re doing this all summer we’ll have twice a month video chats to check in on each other and see how we’re doing! Then we’ll end this with a family camping weekend in the fall as we begin to build our communities!!!

The people involved with starting Florida Freedom Family have all lived in other countries or are married to someone from overseas and we’re going to be here with you every step of the way as we build up our community into something that’s beautiful, decentralized, and full of hope for the future.

We can’t wait to see you around the fire pit!