A Commitment to Community — AMANDA CASSIDAY

I quit my job after many years of preparation—emotional preparation, financial preparation, physical preparation. And yet no amount of preparation could help me know with certainty what I was going to commit to as my life’s work. I yearned for that clarity, as I had been working a job for nearly a decade that felt void of my higher purpose, so much so that I felt like I lost my way. Spending 40+hrs a week inauthentically felt tethering—it only allowed me to go so far to explore my dreams and ambitions. All I had enough juice for was this: knowing the very next thing my heart was leading me towards.

For my heart, permaculture certification was the next right thing.

I had a desire to deepen my understanding and connection with the land, and had a knowing that nature is our wisest teacher. How can I draw on the principles of nature to inform my own life, and how might they provide a blueprint for businesses and communities, too?

The course at Sowing Solutions in Shelborne Falls, MA was prolific, not only in that in opened up a whole new world of tools, practices, and frameworks for regenerative living, it also introduced me to a cohort of exceptional humans from all walks of life who were fully and humbly accepting of one another and invested in our wellbeing. Immediately upon completing my course, not only did I have a knowing for the next right thing, it practically smacked me upside the head.

Community. Community. Community. It has been there all along, waiting for me. It was there in the West African village I lived and worked in; it was in Dakar, Senegal amongst the artists and small business owners I worked; it was even bubbling up in the teams I lead at Johnson & Johnson. It was also in my heart in the moments and places I felt its absence: in the suburban sprawl of a neighborhood I grew up in, where your wealth and your child’s GPA was more important than your human decency; or in the urban jungle of New York where you’re slotted into friend’s calendars like chickens on an industrial farm.

I have witnessed it, I have felt its absence, I’ve been one of the lucky few in the world to actually be a part of it, and yet I’m realizing that I haven’t been able to define it until recently. Community is so much more than a group of people occupying land. It is the connective tissue that exists between people. For me, that connective tissue is established and reinforced by supporting one another.

For most of human history, we have relied on relationships to survive—quite literally. It was through our relationships that our food would be harvested and cooked, our roofs would be built and repaired, our children would be watched after. What is now called the gift economy was once just the economy—the flow of resources throughout a village to address need. Fast forward back to the world we are in, and we are becoming wholly reliant on a financial market where even the simplest forms of care have been turned into a paid transaction, and it is getting increasingly difficult to get our needs met. And, we happen to be more sick, tired, lonely, and burnt out than we’ve ever been before.

I want to use the modern tools that we have at our finger tips to bring back this very old way of being. A way that allows each and every one of us to support one another and be supported. It feels relieving to have a system we can rely on that doesn’t have a financial burden attached to it; it feels empowering that my community members and I can support each other with the resources we have without needing another institution to own our care; and it feels like it furthers our feeling of belonging in a world that perpetuates “not enoughness.”

Engather was born in June 2022 with my co-founder Chris Woerhle, with the ambition to reweave the social fabric in our communities using the gift economy. Gifts are requested or offered, and made unconditionally—there is no direct bartering, rather a broader culture of reciprocity whereby we give when we can, and we trust that others will give to us when they can. No one is keeping score of how much you give or receive, and no money is transacted on the platform.

After 6 months of building out the first version, we are now running a beta test with 40 individuals in the Kingston, NY area and garnering feedback. We have been blown away by the excitement and attention this service has gotten with very little marketing. Over 60 people signed up to join our beta, and 40 are actually on the platform engaging. And some particularly big news….we are now the feature of a short documentary that filmmakers Cara Yeats and Sergio Maza offered to make for us!

So what started as the next right thing amongst many, many uncertainties has evolved into a wholly felt commitment to community. The uncertainties prevail, of course, but my heart is more comfortable leading the way, and with a direction more clearly in sight.