The word, community conjures up the images of people gathering and fighting for big social causes.  

Seeing the crowd with slogans of fighting for bigger wage increases, lack of affordable housing affecting many Torontonians, or another huge, seemingly impossible issue we know very well: Climate Change.

The biggest reason hindering us from considering the community, or its improvement is that the goals seem huge, difficult, even impossible. 

How can I possibly make a difference, let alone make improvements in a concept like community? Doesn’t the community involve hundreds or even thousands of people?  

The recent lunch gathering with four architect colleagues made me ponder the idea of community and also its improvement.

After many changes to our meeting dates/times, we finally met for lunch one day. Even though all of us are trained as architects, our work settings differ. One person works for the government, another one as an employee for an architecture office, and the remaining two (including yours truly) as entrepreneurs running architecture businesses.

During lunch, one person’s comment about the architecture profession being difficult with everything (education, licensure, being an employee or even business owner), and sharing his experience kickstarted the rest of us sharing our difficulties.

Sharing my views on the lack of information (especially the business kinds) in the profession was met with nodding heads from everyone at the table.  

Throughout the conversation, it occurred to me that we formed a “community”…although the membership numbers is low at four!  

Consisting of four people (instead of 100’s and 1000’s), and having lunch at a cozy restaurant ( instead of demonstrating in cold winter days), we were a community bound by our profession, architecture.

Sharing my professional stories with my architecture colleagues and learning about their experiences gave me the insights and encouragement I did not anticipate planning the lunch meeting.

As all of us were leaving the restaurant and promising each other the next get-together “soon”, we knew we formed the ‘four persons community”.

Setting up another community meeting (aka lunch get-together) should not take another year:-)