This is why a community is so important

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Family, sports club, study group: As social beings, we live in communities. These communities can bring you a lot of joy, success and health if you actively build and maintain them. In this article, we’ll show you why it pays to be part of communities.

What is a community?

“Community” or “fellowship” refers to a group that has something in common, be it shared interests, goals, values, or activities. A community can be large, such as a political party, or smaller, such as the residents of an apartment building – as is the case in our Staytoo community.

The most important effects of communities

The following effects offer you communities, whether in the private, professional or university sector:

#1 Make friends

Not everyone in a community becomes a boyfriend or girlfriend. But it’s the perfect social place to meet people you’re on the same wavelength with. Here you can exchange ideas in peace and give a friendship the time it needs to develop.

#2 Achieve better learning effects

Learning in a community has an extremely positive effect on our learning behavior. Fixed learning group appointments ensure the necessary discipline to consistently internalize the learning material, and the joint exchange about the learning content ensures that it is stored particularly well in the brain. This is especially true for the communicative learner type.

Article Tips: Discover successful learning methods and find out your learning type.

#3 Gain new perspectives and experiences

Life is colorful and diverse, and so are communities with their different characters, all of whom have grown up and been shaped differently.

When you talk to people in your community, you’ll hear all kinds of stories and experiences from which you can learn a lot for your own life. You’ll also find that there are always multiple perspectives on challenges and problems, which is also an asset of communities.

#4 Living sustainability

Sharing space and equipment promotes overall sustainability. An example of this is a community gym: without a gym, each individual would have to buy the equipment – an enormous financial outlay that is not sustainable on top of everything else.

With a community gym, members can make the most of all the equipment by arrangement and time availability. The same applies to community spaces such as lounges or parks in public areas.

#5 Acquire and train social skills

Regular interaction with others develops your social skills. You’re always adjusting to the people you’re talking to.

You learn these social skills in communities:

Listening
Empathy
Rhetoric
Ability to work in a team
Persuasiveness
Self-confidence
Determination
Assertiveness

All these skills are extremely important in academic and professional life. Communities are real boosters in this respect; they promote your social skills considerably. The prerequisite for this is your own initiative. The more intensively you get involved in a community, the faster you will develop your social skills.

#6 Start joint projects

Together we achieve more. This has to do with the so-called synergy effects that result from joining forces. In a well-functioning community, the strengths of the members come to bear, while the weaknesses are compensated for.

Motivation, goal focus and a lot of fun are the effects here. This creates the ideal breeding ground for joint projects, be it the planning of an adventure trip, a social initiative or group work for the university.

Good examples of such groups at the university are, for example, student council members who take care of introductory events for freshmen or information events for students in a particular department.

Volunteering also often takes place in communities; for example, you can become active in self-help groups, as a mentor at the university or at the campus radio station. In this way, you can make a meaningful contribution to one or more projects.

#7 Promote cohesion & stability in difficult times

Ever since Corona, we’ve known that social interaction is incredibly important for each and everyone of us. A strong community helps you deal better with personal and social crises.

In a community, you learn together how to deal creatively with problems and challenges. It also feels incredibly good to be able to talk to each other, whether in personal meetings or phone calls with individual members, or in the group itself. Trust is the most important value in such a community – if this value is given, the group can support you emotionally, but also concretely in everyday life, for example by helping you with shopping, visits to the authorities, etc. – with everything that is difficult or impossible in a private crisis.

During social crises like the Corona pandemic with lockdowns, online communities have proven to be an enormous support for many people. The feeling of connectedness, both online and offline, gives people the strength and confidence to overcome a difficult time together.

#8 Satisfy important basic need to belong

Humans have a deeply anchored primal need to belong. It is therefore important for our satisfaction to feel that we belong to one or more groups with which we can identify. Communities fulfill this need perfectly.