Showing Respect for Your Community

To make sure that the country, society, office, neighborhood, and family are civil and respectful, you must start at home with yourself. As a family, we want to make sure we are positive role models for our children, and that we do the right thing, not just the easy thing. The best way to showcase respect for others to our children is by role-modeling respect in our own lives.

What is a community? We are all connected to various communities. These can include schools, churches, families, friend groups, work, and neighborhoods. As a parent, it’s important to role model and showcase respect for these communities so that our children grow up, not only feeling accepting, but also understanding the importance of giving back to our communities and respecting the people involved. These behaviors are nurturing and help a community to improve and grow together.

What are some ways we can respect our communities?

Gratitude

A great way to start is to express gratitude for the other people in the group. Remember to thank people for their hard work, thoughtful exchanges, and participation. Gratitude is the root of learning how to both give and receive. Respect should be a symbiotic exchange between parties. So, feeling gratitude is the beginning and finding ways to express it is the goal.

Giving Back

A healthy community needs participation. If everyone just sits back with the expectation of receiving, then no one is doing the giving. There are a variety of ways to give back to our community, and they aren’t all monetary. Spending time with people, holding space, working on communal projects, serving on committees, and making sure everyone is okay are all great ways to give back and respect one’s community.

Create a Brave Space

For years, we have been creating and nurturing safe spaces. The idea being that in a communal space no one need fear judgment or repercussion for their own identify or personal experience. The goal was to create a safe space for people to come together and learn without picking each other a part.

An environment that encourages dialogue is brave. A brave space is about taking responsibility for acknowledging differences and holding each other accountable to share experiences and come to new understandings – an often difficult and uncomfortable task.

Coming together as a community can be hard. While we want our spaces to be safe, often things are overlooked or unknown that can be harmful to the group because someone does not feel it’s safe to share problems. Therefore, we have to do the difficult, but important, work of creating spaces where people feel brave enough to be themselves and to share so everyone can learn and grow together.

Respecting people in our lives as we grow up teaches us how to treat others with respect. Having respect for someone means accepting their differences or disagreeing with them without judging them. You can build trust, safety, and wellbeing in your relationships by respecting them. This skill is desperately needed in the world today and can begin in our personal communities.

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