Community Is a Machine, and We’re All Cogs
Why volunteering, shared spaces, and knowing your neighbours may matter just as much as housing and urban design.
Strong communities don’t happen by accident. They’re built through volunteering, shared spaces, and small acts of connection.
Cara Stern talks with The Hub's Managing Editor and Scout leader Harrison Lowman about why modern life feels increasingly isolating, and how everything from scouting to neighbourhood pubs can help people rebuild trust, friendship, and a sense of belonging.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: We talk a lot on this program about the physical parts of a community —the housing, the zoning, the transit, the density. But you can build the most perfectly designed neighbourhood in the world and still end up with a bunch of strangers living next to each other. So the physical design matters, but something else has to be there too. And we have a guest today who’s been thinking hard about what that something else is and how we build it. Harrison Lowman is the managing editor of The Hub. He’s an enthusiastic scout leader and someone I was very lucky to work with for almost a decade at TVO. So I’m thrilled to have you here today.
Harrison Lowman: Thank you for having me on. I guess I’m a community expert, or a community organizer. Wasn’t Obama that?
Cara Stern: Yeah, you’re basically Obama.
Harrison Lowman: Okay. Thank you.
Cara Stern: Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve talked about Scouts, and how important Scouts is, and how everyone should be doing Scouts and putting their kids in Scouts. So let’s start there. Why?
Harrison Lowman: I don’t want to make this like an advertisement, but I think often when we’re focusing on extracurriculars for our kids, we’re interested in their individual development, their skills, and I’m interested in extracurriculars that are feeding the community.
For a neighbourhood to work, as you mentioned off the top, you want that amazing house and the beautiful neighbours that aren’t strangers, who know your name and unlock doors and everything. I think you have to actively feed it. So what I tell these Cubs, who are between the ages of seven and ten when they join, is like, yeah, we’re going to have fun and you’re going to learn skills around athletics and you’re going to be outdoors, etc., but you’re also going to do community service, so you’re going to give back.
A lot of this conversation can be very corny, Cara, because I tell them things like, if the neighbourhood’s a machine, then you guys are all little cogs in that machine, and we all get to be well oiled and we all go to be turning around with our teeth fitting into one another for this whole thing to work. So that’s why I say people should sort of join scouting is because they’re sort of giving back. I can get into examples of that later.
Cara Stern: I love that idea of community as a machine because it gives you this visual where we’re all taking part in it. It’s not a machine that works on its own. You need people to operate the machines or be the cogs, as you said, be a part of it.
Harrison Lowman: We keep talking about Canada being broken. And I feel like these metaphors work in terms of like, okay, how do we fix it? And I feel like this is part of the fixing.
Cara Stern: You and I both love Canada, but are both very frustrated with Canada because there’s a lot of things we both see as moving in the wrong direction. I obviously focus a lot on the housing side of it because I subscribe to the housing theory of everything. Fix that and everything comes together. And you’re focused a little bit more on, I guess it would be the international role of Canada and Canada’s identity in some ways.
Harrison Lowman: Yeah, the international. But again, I think you and I would agree it starts at the local level. It’s all bottom up. I think we’ve learned that top down doesn’t really work and people have to be invested. And where are they most invested?
We see this in municipal politics. The politicians that are getting the calls are the ones that are having folks angry about their garbage not being picked up or some sort of zoning bylaw being broken and something being built in the backyard. It starts local. That’s where people start to notice things and where they start to get frustrated and hopefully where they start to fix things.
Cara Stern: I think a lot of people talk about community as something that they think you find if you’re lucky. You move somewhere and you’re like, how is the community there? Is it good? I don’t know that people realize how much being part of a community is an active thing. And I was wondering why you think people don’t quite get that—the role that they have to play in the community?
Harrison Lowman: We have a culture now that is pretty self-centred. Our products, the movies and TV we consume, the apps on our phone—it’s all customizable around us. It’s very me, me, me and the whole self-help movement, etc. and I would just say that’s something there for sure. But I would often tell friends that the way to feel better about yourself is to give back and volunteer.
This is going to sound kind of corny, but when I feel overwhelmed at work or with my new baby and I feel like the world is imploding, helping out—with scouting, like making sandwiches for the homeless or delivering food to needy families or delivering garden care stuff to our neighbours so they could see our faces—that makes me feel better as a person. So I think it’s something we should be looking at.
Cara Stern: There are also studies to back that up. I was looking at some and there is some evidence that if you are volunteering, you will feel more connected, and therefore feeling more connected makes you feel less lonely and happier.
Harrison Lowman: Right. Over the last few years, Cara, there’s been, I think in the last five years or so, a 20% drop in volunteering in Canada. Obviously Covid played a big part in that. My message during Covid, obviously while still being safe, was: this is the time when people need to step up the most and help each other, and people really showing when it came to helping one another.
Cara Stern: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. During the pandemic, people were so isolated. It was like, “Stay home on your own, don’t see other people, don’t go outside of your bubble.” And then that made for an extremely isolating experience. So I guess if you have the community side of it, what did you do during it?
Harrison Lowman: Well, you mentioned bubbles, and it’s one of my catchphrases now. My fear is that we don’t just have bubbles during Covid, it’s that we now have them during regular life. You wake up in the morning, get in your bubble car, you go to work or in your bubble cubicle, then you get back in your car. People are now having lunch in their cars, I see on Instagram. It’s very weird.
Cara Stern: That’s very weird to us because when we were in our office, when we worked together, there were five of us who were like, “Let’s take turns making lunch for each other” because we thought, this brings people together, eating lunch together. So my mind is blown by the idea that someone would just want to eat in their car. Although I suppose there are more introverted people out there than us, so that’s fair.
Harrison Lowman: Those introverts!
I want a world free of bubbles, I want cross-pollination. I was very shy as a kid, Cara, as much as you think I was an extrovert. I was afraid to talk to strangers. You force yourself to talk to strangers when you’re a journalist; it’s just part of the job. But it is amazing now that I’m in a neighbourhood—and it’s the neighbourhood that I grew up in—that I just know the people around me will lend a helping hand if I need it.
If you have a high trust society, it means that people are willing to help those beyond their family members, and I find comfort in that.
A few months ago, I was here working from home and I had to finish a big piece, and I didn’t have a charger for my laptop. I mentioned on Facebook this happened, and then a random stranger in our neighbourhood, who then became a neighbour, let me borrow hers. I was welcomed into her home, she told me about her kids, I got to meet her dog. This is the zest of life, Cara.
Cara Stern: I think about how we designed so much of our cities in a way that it makes it kind of easy to avoid accidental encounters with neighbours. We don’t have a lot of neighbourhood pubs, for example. It’s not a thing anymore unless you’re in old parts of the city. You just can’t build them, you’re not allowed to build them. And if you look at our suburban neighbourhoods, there’s pretty much nowhere to walk to. So people are getting in their cars and going places; that’s just the way they’re designed.
How do you counteract that? Because that’s great if you can go out and be like, “hey, can I borrow a charger?” I would totally do that, just maybe knock on a neighbour’s door and ask for that. But a lot of people don’t want to do that. It takes a lot of effort to do that and a lot of pushing yourself if you’re a shy person.
Harrison Lowman: Yeah. For some, I would just say you got to do it, and then it’ll be uncomfortable at first but it’ll pay off in spades after the fact. We talk about third spaces. And I have one near here, thankfully due to the efforts of — I think she’s 85 0— Madeleine McDowell, an icon in this community, an amateur historian who basically saved a place called the Lambton House down by the Humber River. It’s an old coaching house hotel from the 1800s, and it’s got this storied history.
It’s not just a historical site. These places increasingly, as you said, there’s a need for a lot of activities. I can hear young kids taking instrument lessons from these places, people taking tours, there’s pub nights, there’s meet and greets for seniors in the community who feel isolated, and they just become neighborhood drinking holes, which I think we need more of. The church that we do scouting out of, that we’ve almost done for 100 years, they’ve lent the space to us for free. And we pay back in spades; the scouts do by, a few weeks ago, helping to organize their rummage sale, putting stuff away and taking it out. That place is used. It does AA meetings, it does Scottish country dancing, they record musical albums there. So yes, it also is used as a place of worship, but increasingly it’s more so used for other stuff. And I am happy that my son, if he ends up joining Scouts—which he’ll be, being biased, I will obviously force him into it.
Cara Stern: Yeah, I was like, “You’re giving him a choice?”
Harrison Lowman: Yeah, but he will be in this historic church and also have meetings and have fun and learn valuable lessons in the same space that I did when I was five years old.
Cara Stern: Man, if only people didn’t have to move out of their communities they grew up in. That’s a very lucky, privileged thing to be able to do.
Harrison Lowman: And that’s the other thing. I think those of us that do have these things should realize how fortunate we are, pay it forward, and also feed that community because we have to realize that we’re unique here and that not everyone has this. Some people are stuck. There are people that choose to live in the suburbs like you’re talking about, but then there are also people who are forced to. And I’m sure that obviously there’s community in the suburbs as well; people find community in various places.
Cara Stern: And in condos, you have to make an effort.
Harrison Lowman: Yeah. We introduce architectural barriers that make it more difficult. You don’t end up meeting that person because you don’t have a park or a parkette by your condo, and so you are just like passing ships in the night.
I used to live in a small loft in West Toronto. Did I know my neighbours’ first names? No, you just hear them through the walls. It’s kind of depressing in a way. I had no parts of their lives, I’d never be able to really understand who the heck they were, and they didn’t really care who I was.
Cara Stern: I knew a lot of my neighbours when I lived in high rises, but that was a choice where if I saw them, I would talk to them, and then I’d write down on my phone, like, remember who that person is so next time I see them, I’d remember their name. Because otherwise I’ll look at them and be like, “I know you, who are you?”
But it definitely takes a lot of effort. You have to counteract the built form that’s there in order to get there. Do you think that we have to live in a high trust society to have this kind of community you’re talking about?
Harrison Lowman: Well, it’s harder. It’s harder in urban areas, right? Like you hear all the time in rural areas, and increasingly, whether it’s people in mental crisis, using drugs, etc., it gets more difficult. People are obviously hesitant about trying to form some of these connections when they have their guard up.
I don’t think it will get to this level, but I described to you a situation where in my wife’s family’s community in Lakefield, Ontario, near Peterborough, we came out of a church service and everyone has their car doors unlocked, which I think is just nuts. But there was a pie on her father’s dash of his car; someone had just left that there as a thank you. And I was like, wow, this is like peak community—unasked-for pie that you’re greeted by when you come out of the church. Come on, man.
I do think you need that trust. It’s not just going to come, it can’t be manufactured or inorganic. It’s just about how do we build that trust? I don’t have all the answers.
Cara Stern: Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll ever get to pie levels of trust in cities, especially given the number of car thefts here — I don’t think anyone’s leaving their car unlocked. But you do have other forms of community in the cities at a different level.
But when people see any disorder in their community, they start feeling disconnected a little bit. They get a little more insular and they isolate themselves more, which then makes it a little bit of a vicious cycle, because you have to be open to connection in order to find connection. How do you break that loop?
Harrison Lowman: I don’t know, I really think, Cara, you just have to dive in. And it’s like dating; I tell people you have to put yourself in as many situations as possible where you’re rubbing up shoulders next to like-minded people as possible, where your Venn diagram overlaps with like-minded folks. So often that means being out of your comfort zone. If someone’s lonely, whether they’re on mat leave or moving into a new neighbourhood, they need to pick up the community newspaper, look at bulletins on poles around their house, or go online and try to see ways of interacting with others.
A friend of mine—which I think is amazing, I hear about expats—in this case, my friend is in Berlin. How did he get to know people there and how did he tick some of the boxes we’ve just been discussing? He moved to Berlin and he joined a litter-picking community of people, mostly from the UK, who go around Berlin and spend their Sundays picking up litter and beautifying the city that they’re so grateful to be able to live in. I think that’s amazing.
And in the process, they found friends and they have their own little community in some ways. And they call it the litter-picking community in Berlin. And does it get dicey sometimes? Are they picking up needles sometimes? Are they in rough areas? Yeah, but they’re in a group and they trust one another and they’re giving back and I think that’s great. That’s what I would encourage my friends to do.
Cara Stern: I guess they’re too old to join Scouts there.
Harrison Lowman: You could be a leader.
Cara Stern: If you’ve never taken part in Scouts, can you be a leader?
Harrison Lowman: Yeah, of course, it’s open to everyone. And again, it’s boys and girls.
One of my selling points is that I think it fills the gap when it comes to this crisis of young men we’re seeing who are desperate for role models, who are increasingly listless and angry and looking for places to direct their energy. I think Scouts is a great place for that. And again, it’s one of the few extracurriculars where you’re actually giving back.
Again, it sounds corny, but one of the mantras is to do a good turn for someone every day. It’s not that I always do that, but it’s in the back of my head, like I’m thinking that as a 34-year-old going about my day, I’m like, “did I do something for someone else?” And the kids will say, “Well, just doing the dishes or chores,” like no, no, no, that does not count. It’s a responsibility.
You need to go out of your way sometimes, out of your comfort zone, to help someone else. And again, it’ll feel really good. And if you foster that at a young age, those kids grow up in our community and they’re all giving back to one another. And then that cross-pollination starts to happen.
Cara Stern: It is also one of the most affordable things you can put your kids in. Is it super subsidized?
Harrison Lowman: We’re all volunteers, so we give our time. I often found, Cara, when I was doing it, I was like, do I really have time for this? I’m so stressed with work. And then I realized that when people are like, “Oh, I don’t have time for this,” you make time for the things you care about. If you’ve noticed something has dropped by the wayside, it’s because you don’t care about it.
If you really care about something, you will make time and you’ll come to the realization, like I did, that I can work on something longer and feed the employment side of things, or I can do this and—I’m not really religious—but you’re feeding your soul. You’re giving back. You see the smiles of all these young kids, you realize you’re having an impact on their lives, you’re trying to be a good role model and it feeds your soul in a different way. It distracts you from the bullcrap you’re dealing with elsewhere, and it’s just nice to have another track on your life for you to travel on.
Cara Stern: I think it would definitely pay off when you have kids. One of many things that drives me crazy when I talk to people who have kids is they are often shocked by how little community they have. You hear about how it takes a village to raise a child and a lot of people have a kid, and then they’re like, “where’s my village? I was promised a village.” And I think that people don’t understand that you have to be a villager to have a village. It’s something that I constantly remind people who say that. I see it a lot, like a lot of people online will talk about this. I find it in certain areas in my life also where I talk to other parents and they are saying how hard it is—and it is hard—but also how they have no support, and they thought they would have support.
There’s just something with this idea that you have to build community before you need the community because community is not just there for you to take things from; you have to build it beforehand. And I think that it’ll come back to you, it’ll pay off in spades, as you said. And that’s something that people should think about it.
Having a kid, you must be finding that you’re playing it a little bit on easier mode now that you have that sort of community and you’re lucky enough to live near where your parents are and where you grew up, right?
Harrison Lowman: My next-door neighbour said to me when he found out we were pregnant, he’s like, “Any time you need to, no questions asked, walk into my house and hand me a crying baby. I will say nothing to you and I will just look after him.” I haven’t played that card yet, but just the fact that he even said that, it’s lovely.
Cara Stern: You know the neighbour, right?
Harrison Lowman: Yeah, I know him pretty well. There are so many kids here, so to be able to have families on either side that are willing to help. It’s like you said, you build up your supply so that you have it when you have to use it. But again, I don’t care if they pay it back. It doesn’t have to be returned to me.
I was picturing like a glossy brochure, for housing construction, like “Come to Roncesvalles, trendy, hip communities just around the corner.” And again, it becomes this weird selling point when really it’s organic. It has to be fed. It’s not just this talking point for some developer to put on their brochure.
Cara Stern: Well, I think you can build something that encourages community, as you said, if you have the parkettes, if you have local retail or little cafes and things that you can walk to. I think you can build things that encourage it.
Harrison Lowman: Yeah.
Cara Stern: Yeah, it is organic in some ways, but it does take so much effort. And that’s something that I hope that if there’s anyone listening to this who’s feeling isolated takes that away from this—that it is out there, you just have to really make an effort and maybe volunteer, maybe join some sort of circles nearby that’ll get you there and be there for other people too.
Harrison Lowman: And for all the introverts out there you mentioned earlier, there are different roles, right? There are people who don’t want to be public-facing, and they can be the treasurer of some sort of community group. They don’t need to be the head leader, head honcho. We have various people that are more happy to sort of be in the background or deal with the numbers. And then there’s also extroverts like myself who want to be front row centre.
Every year we have a banquet, every year we’re kind of desperately encouraging parents to volunteer because with a lot of stuff, I often don’t know if a lot of people realize how many roles are volunteer roles, people doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, not with kids in the program sometimes. Their kids cycle through and get older and they’re still involved. It’s like a teacher, right? It’s amazing. If you’re a volunteer with young people, you’re leaving an impression on multiple generations of Torontonians. And I think that’s a lovely thing to think about.
Cara Stern: I’m picturing all these little minds shaped by Harrison Lowman out there, just mini Harrison Lowmans. That’s a little bit of a scary thought.
Harrison, thanks so much for being here. I love talking to you about this. I hope a lot of people can learn from your experience in community because you’ve figured it out.
Harrison Lowman: Far from figuring it out, but thank you so much for having me.
Cara Stern: Thanks to everyone for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman. And if you have any questions about being in Scouts, you can email us at [email protected], and I will forward it along to Harrison.
Harrison Lowman: Oh my God. Okay, I’m waiting for a deluge.
Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.
I like the emphasis on community building. I have been trying to balance my roles of scout leader and community association vice-president. You have inspired me to shamelessly promote community events to our group and encourage everyone to show up with their neckerchief.