One of the questions I keep coming back to in my work is: what really holds a community together? Not the big, flashy ideals, but the everyday stuff or what we might call the nitty-gritty. The washing-kids’-bums, negotiating-how-to-share-a-space, holding-a-meeting-with-too-much-cake kind of stuff. That’s where I think community is made—in the messy work of care.
In my recent piece for Azimuth: Critical Care, I dive into what I’ve learned from two community-based projects in Aotearoa New Zealand:
Te Hiko Centre for Community Innovation in Porirua, and
Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS) in post-earthquake Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Both are examples of what I call communities of care—where people aren’t drawn together by identity or ideology, but by the shared work of caring for something in common. Like many researchers into this area, I’ve been calling that kind of work commoning.
Care Is Not (Just) a Feeling
We often talk about care like it’s a soft feeling—but care is also labour. It’s exhausting, it’s beautiful, and it’s sometimes thankless, but it’s labour. In Te Hiko, that looked like local people working together to support financial wellbeing—asking, how do we plug the drain that’s sucking resources from our community? For LiVS, it looked like artists and organisers breathing life into vacant lots with murals, performances, and small everyday interventions that helped Christchurch slowly heal.
Both projects navigated two big tensions:
- Who’s in and who’s out? Communities that care have to negotiate boundaries. Open enough to welcome new energy, but with some shape so the work can actually happen.
- Care as a ‘practice’ that’s both affect and labour. There’s the heart-side of care—emotional connection, beauty, grief, joy. And there’s the sweat—coordinating projects, holding meetings, applying for funding. They’re both essential, and often unequally valued.
The Commons Is in the Doing
What binds these projects together is not ownership, identity, or even a shared vision—it’s the doing. The repeated, practical, awkward, loving, sometimes fraught ongoing practice of caring together.
That kind of commons-care is never perfect. It’s never resolved. It’s always in negotiation—who shows up, who does the dishes, who gets heard, who’s exhausted, who’s thriving.
But it’s precisely in that nitty-gritty negotiation that community is made and remade.
Why It Matters
In a world that feels increasingly fragmented, it’s tempting to look for clean answers: clear boundaries, easy fixes, grand theories. But maybe what we need is to get better at sitting in the mess, and at holding complexity. We need to get better at making space for real care—care that’s not just soft and fuzzy, but material, tiring, healing, and profoundly political.
I wrote this piece to offer a grounded, hopeful, and realistic account of what communities of care look like in practice. Not perfect. But very much possible. I hope you enjoy it!
When it comes down to it, the ‘nitty-gritty’ of care is rarely idyllic, and involves difficult collaborations and relationships with others. Whether it is washing a child, developing a constitution for a community group, or restoring a wetland, the practical details of caring are never completely straight-
forward. Yet it is exactly this nitty-gritty negotiation of the details of caring for shared resources, spaces or matters of concern that holds communities together, rather than boundaries or shared identity. Dombroski, 2024, p27
This is a plain language summary for Communities of Care: The Nitty-Gritty of Commons-Work. The original article is available from https://www.communityeconomies.org/publications/articles/communities-care-nitty-gritty-commons-work. Suggested citation: Dombroski, K. (2024). Communities of care in the nitty-gritty of commons work. Azimuth Journal of Philosophy, XII (24), 27-47.
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