Small acts, big connections: Six steps toward finding your people and building community

As we approach the holidays, I've thought a lot about people who are lonely. Peeling back the layers of what it takes to build community might just be the antidote to loneliness.

So, let's work backwards:

If the epidemic of loneliness is the outside layer, building community would be its undoing, which begs the question: How does one build community?

Doing so is not a "just add water" sort of equation. Community grows in layers, from the inside out. It’s a tangled web of genuine relationships — and it’s messy.

As therapist Amanda E. White points out, community is not frictionless — and I love that phrasing. White is executive director of Therapy for Women in Philadelphia. She says that being in a community sometimes means getting annoyed because that one friend sends too many texts, or