Participation Itself Becomes A Kind Of Teacher
Recently, I re-read Lifehouse: Taking care of ourselves in a world on fire by Adam Greenfield (I'm re-reading a lot these days). It's a book that shares an interest in learning about how we might better live together through collective action. It came out in Summer 2024, and it's a book that continues to be extremely relevant.
In the book, Greenfield traces a series of moments and movements that offer compelling examples of mutual aid and community-based response. Readers familiar with this subject will recognize many of the cases he examines: the Black Panther Party's survival programs, Occupy Sandy's disaster response, the autonomous governance experiments in Rojava. These aren't obscure histories. The contribution of Lifehouse isn't in uncovering a forgotten organization or offering a new interpretation of any single movement. Instead, its contribution is in thinking with and across these examples—placing them in conversation to surface patterns.
Greenfield invites us to ask ourselves what these different efforts might teach us about building "lifehouses": institutions, practices, and social forms oriented toward care rather than extraction, solidarity rather than competition. Lifehouses aren't journey maps for utopias or scalable fixes. They're provisional, situated, and often fragile responses. Yet they point toward ways of organizing collective life that refuse the assumption that care must be deferred, privatized, or subordinated.
What I appreciate most about Lifehouse is how Greenfield grounds these reflections in his own experience. The book begins with his involvement in Occupy Sandy, and that situated perspective matters. There’s a difference between writing about mutual aid and community response as an object of analysis and writing from within the messy, exhausting conditions of doing the work. He's attentive to contradictions and limits, but he also never loses sight of the felt experiences of collective action.
I really value critical and reflective accounts of past efforts. For instance, Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell is a fantastic book and covers similar ground as Greenfield's Lifehouse. Read them both! But there's something especially compelling and motivating about an account that emerges from participation. When someone writes from inside the work, we don't just learn about mutual aid and community response—we see how learning happens through doing. We watch people figure things out as they go, make mistakes, adapt, and keep going anyway. That makes the work feel less like a distant ideal and more like something we can actually take part in. It reminds us that these efforts aren't powered by special expertise or heroic individuals, but by people showing up and learning together.
In a sense, participation itself becomes a kind of teacher.