The key ingredients for building meaningful feminist community

How running an online support group taught me what real community looks like.

We all long for community, yet few of us feel like we really have it.

I’ve spent most of my life wondering why authentic community is so difficult. I never fit in at school, and have found the parent cultures I’m ostensibly part of to be mostly alienating and confusing. Even in groups of friends, it can feel difficult to connect, especially when bringing multiple friend groups together. As I’ve built an online presence, though, I’ve learned that I’m not unique. Most of us struggle with finding community—and the more radical our politics become, the more alienating traditional communities can feel.

So two years ago, I tried an experiment. I started the Liberating Motherhood community, which is a private Facebook discussion group for paid Substack and Patreon subscribers. I didn’t put a lot of thought into it at first, but I did establish some rules to keep the community safe.

Something glorious happened: People from all imaginable demographics came together to offer love and support. Two years later, we send cards for birthdays and holidays, have helped multiple members leave abusive relationships, and have planned group meetups across the globe. Members tell me this is the safest place they’ve ever been, the only place they feel like they belong, the reason they’re still pushing forward.

Hearing this from community members is the greatest gift I could ever receive, because it means I have finally built the community I longed for—and given it to others who also longed for it.

In the two years it has taken to build this community, I have learned that community is work. The universe doesn’t just gift it to you because you want it, or because you’re a nice person. You get what you give in a community.

So how has this community been so successful? Here’s what I’ve learned about community-building.

Community cannot allow oppression

Communities built around oppression—right wing religions, cults, all-white organizations—are inherently antisocial, and inevitably devolve into chaos. They’re also anathema to feminism. A community must be safe for all of its members, which means that if you want a diverse community (and a community without diversity is not really a community at all) you must ban oppression.

I am very swift with intervening when I see even a whiff of oppressive behavior. This is a new experience for some community members, especially those who are white, middle or upper class, and new to feminism. And to them, this can feel unfair. Like silencing. Because, of course, equity often feels like oppression to members of the dominant class.

In life, though, we have to make choices. There’s no such thing as actually being a people pleaser or easy to get along with. We all make choices about whom we want to please and whom we want to get along with. In an oppressive society, being nice to one group necessarily will mean offending some other group.

Community leaders must be ok with this. We must align ourselves with the most vulnerable group members, always, and ask that those with comparative privilege stand behind those decisions.

In my group, I ban ableism, fatphobia, harmful gender determinism, and spiritual abuse as well as racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of violence. When I see things trend toward these oppressive tendencies—a rare occurrence, because my group works hard to keep them out—I intervene swiftly.

I will not allow my community to be a place where people get hurt. And I will especially not allow it to become an additional site of pain for people who face oppression in every other area of life.

Unwritten rules are what really drive community. But formal rules help build community culture.

With a strong community culture, you don’t have to constantly refer to formal rules. People understand generally how to behave, and they expect others to behave in this way, too. Community members enforce written and unwritten rules by gently addressing problems before they occur. It’s a beautiful thing to behold. And over time, it has meant that members of my group can disagree without being cruel, over meaningful emotional support across distance, and almost never need my intervention to maintain a healthy community culture.

None of this would have happened without clear, specific rules outlining community expectations. My group rules govern behavior and conflict, ban oppressive behavior, and make it easy for people to contact me when there’s a problem. Because I actually enforce these rules, members know that they are important, which means a commitment to the community ethos—rather than a formally written rule—has become the ultimate community guideline.

Community requires some type of buy-in

Community is built around mutual investment. That’s why community tends naturally to spring up around shared interests, and in neighborhoods and school systems; people naturally are already invested in these systems. Over time, people demonstrate this investment with mutual support and care. But online communities are easy for bad actors to infiltrate.

That’s why I keep my community closed and private, except to paid Substack subscribers. I also offer scholarships to people who affirm that they truly cannot afford the membership fee. It’s not a perfect system, but it requires people to give something small in return for access to the community. People who want to destroy communities are rarely willing to give anything at all; it’s too much effort. And the small investment makes the community feel valuable, like something worth preserving and protecting.

Community always requires giving something up

It’s no coincidence that in our hyper-individualistic society, people feel an intense and desperate lack of community. Healthy communities have room for each individual, embrace diversity, and encourage dissent. But they cannot be an individualistic free-for-all.

Becoming part of a community necessarily requires following that community’s rules and norms. This seems obvious, but it’s actually quite challenging for people raised in a hyper-individualistic society to grasp.

My community has rules centering around kindness, avoiding oppressive behavior, speaking clearly and directly, supporting claims with evidence, and gentle communication. These are norms almost everyone would endorse.

Yet every time there’s an issue with a community member, they insist they should be able to violate these norms. Every person I have ever removed from the community has insisted that I am violating their speech rights, that imposing rules on them is oppressing, and that being a feminist requires that I be tolerant of every viewpoint.

Much like the sexist men I write about, these problematic community members all seem to be reading from the same playbook. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. People who are unwilling to learn and follow group norms, and to make small sacrifices, are a poor fit for a true community—any community.

Community requires that the individual sacrifice some of their individual autonomy—their right, for example, to say whatever they want without judgment. In a hyper-individualistic society, to some people that feels like oppression.

But it’s not. Good communities prioritize the needs and well-being of the group. I’ve learned not to give into tantrums about “free speech” and “echo chambers,” and I’ve never regretted it.

The good of the community must trump the good of the individual

This is the aspect of community that people raised in hyper-individualistic societies have the most difficulty with. It remains true: to build real community, you must prioritize the good of the community over the wants and needs of the individual.

This means, for example, that if an individual poses a threat to the community (by ignoring its rules or sharing community secrets) they must be banned from the community.

This is a challenging rule to enforce, and a difficult need to balance.

After all, destructive communities—far-right Christian sects, New Age cults—prioritize the community, too, and use this to control and harm individuals.

The difference between these communities and healthy communities is that healthy communities structure themselves to benefit individual members. They don’t try to constrain freedom or life choices—only to build safe places. Some signs a community is healthy include:

• The rules are clear, reasonable, and enforced equitably.

• People can ask questions and push back on community norms (though this doesn’t necessarily mean those norms will change).

• Community norms do not constrain individual freedom or prevent individual members from leading full lives.

• Community membership is not contingent upon making a very narrow range of life choices.

Leaders arise naturally, and based on their community contributions

Lots of communities—nonprofits, online forums, volunteer organization—try to form fair leadership structures. Too often, these end up being little more than in-groups. When there’s an in-group and out-group, people aren’t treated fairly. People attempt to curry favor with the in-group, often by mistreating the out-group.

Elections, too, don’t make a lot of sense when you’re trying to form a close-knit community, because then you end up with a group of popular people-pleasers who lack the ability to understand and enforce group norms.

Anarcho-syndicalist that I am, I decided not to form any particular leadership structure, and to see what happened.

Leaders emerged naturally. We now have a group of community “elders” who, without ever being asked, welcome new members, enforce and explain community norms, continuously set the group tone, give exceptional advice, and quickly earn the respect of other group members.

True leadership is an act of service, empathy, and adherence to community norms. Which means that a healthy egalitarian group slowly and subtly picks its own leaders.

People who do harm have to leave

Years ago, in a large local group of activist mothers, I got into an argument with a popular member. She escalated the argument to laugh-reacting comments about the death of my daughter and mocking me for my emotions about her death.

I’m still mad about it.

I’m also still angry that the leaders of the group did nothing to intervene, and that I had to leave to seek safety from her abuse.

People make mistakes. But that sort of behavior was deliberate and malicious. People who behave maliciously cannot be a part of a functional community. Leaders must act quickly and decisively to remove them. Hemming and hawing suggests that leaders think the behavior is ok, or that victims deserve abuse. And when you send that message to the group, you destroy its integrity.

Leadership is often about knowing who is making a mistake they will fix, who is making a mistake they will refuse to fix, and who is being deliberately cruel. Group moderators have a sacred duty to protect group members.

You have to have discretion to balance community expectations and member needs

While members who hurt others have to leave, there also has to be some grace for people who make mistakes but who desperately need the community. This requires a willingness to prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable, and to continuously evaluate membership decisions.

A group member who is in the process of leaving a violent relationship may communicate less effectively, or think less clearly about her words and actions. I’ve given wiggle room to passive-aggression or inadvertent harmful words (such as talking about dieting or appearance) when I knew someone was struggling. I always check in with group members when they behave in a way that seems out of character, and I encourage people to be upfront if they’re struggling to keep it together.

Group rules are important, but a legalistic interpretation of those rules cannot interfere with justice, and with the fundamental and core goal of helping people.

Discussions happen in good faith, and we don’t pretend passive-aggression is anything other than the abuse it is

Directness is kindness. When we are clear and direct in our words, we’re vulnerable. This allows others to get to know us. It also allows brings conflict into the open, where it becomes manageable and fixable.

Passive-aggression conceals conflict under a thin veil of contempt. It’s ableist, since neurodivergence can make it difficult for people to understand passive-aggression.

Everyone knows when someone is being passive-aggressive. In my community, we don’t pretend otherwise, or pretend this behavior is anything other than destructive. This allows us to have conflicts out in the open, and to build bridges across our differences.

We don’t have to be the same, or to agree on everything, and real community is built on the knowledge that our differences matter. But this can only happen when conflict is a part of community life.

Women are socialized to avoid conflict. Many of us have gone our entire lives without ever witnessing healthy conflict. So when someone directly and clearly disagrees with us, it can feel scary; in my group, we work through these fears, never wavering from a commitment to treating each other with respect.

I think this is steadily teaching people what healthy conflict looks like, empowering them to demand it elsewhere.

And I guess that’s the most important lesson I’ve learned about community as part of this experiment: It makes the world a better place.

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