Your trauma does not justify your abuse.

Community building in decentralized communities is hands down some of the hardest work I’ve ever done. Doing it during times of accelerated societal transition is next level.

If your community is open, diverse, driven by impact and woven together through decentralized networking and sovereign intentions, you must build the container to hold these humans with strategic care, unbiased compassion and fierce protection. Your leaders must have strongly cultivated internal tool kits that are grounded in justice, awareness and discernment. And those choosing to hold that space AND move the mission of the community forward to create impact must do so with empathy and strength.

The work is grounded in duality and discernment. A community leader must have the strength of intuition to listen to their nervous system when it is triggered and have the discernment to analyze a threat actor and possible scenarios of harm or deescalation.

• Is this person targeting vulnerable people in the community?

• Is this person lashing out in a way that can be diffused with compassion, or is this person escalating with agenda and aggression to fulfill some aching void in their life?

• Is this person’s unprocessed trauma an actual threat to me?

• Is this person a physical threat to myself and my community?

• Am I over reacting and risking my connection to this community by repeatedly raising the alarms because the aggression is metastasizing in a method that will consume the essence of the community itself?

What is the cost of silence in a movement that is “leaderless” and who will bear that cost?

Large, regenerative communities need layers of conscious leadership steeped in years of collective experience dipping into multiple pools of wisdom to fortify their resiliency. These spaces are sacred, co-generational and co-gendered.

We need men to stand up and hold the space. We need wise women to deploy their voices in a way that is sacred, necessary and safe. We need people who will step into the void and say to the collective, “No, this will not stand”. We need to name abuse as it’s happening and understand that preventing the abuse before it occurs breaks the pattern of the abuser.

We must understand that the patriarchal powers of yesterday will destroy the hope of tomorrow if we stay silent.

And we need to ensure that those who do speak out and hold the space can pass the torch to another when they’ve held it long enough. Vulnerability is of equal necessity to unweilding fortitude in conflict resolution.

People join our communities because they believe in our mission. It falls upon the community builders, professional or volunteer, to hold the line on aggression and protect those who trust us with their time, attention and passion.

We are now navigating uncharted territory for every single community builder in crypto, in technology, in DAOs, in cooperatives and in general. We are in the midst of the biggest upheaval we’ve ever navigated as a society in living memory. The global world order is shifting and people are turning to local communities for connection, support and survival. People who have not dealt with their trauma or who engage exploitation in open communities are now emboldened to do so at scale.

Again, your trauma does not justify your harm.

It falls upon us to be hypervigilant in our community containers. We must hold the duality of protection and space. Vigilant when a threat infiltrates the container to remove it with care, but discerning enough to gauge normal friction as something that helps a community strengthen and grow.

All community builders need a council of mentors and elders. You should have them on speed dial and they should vary dramatically in their age, experience and resolution techniques. If you’re at the heart of an organization, especially an open one that has IRL elements, have protocols of protection in place for everyone-- moderators, participants and external mediators when needed.

One of our weakest elements as a collective is separation, and threat actors infiltrate communities to sow discord or violence to create a chasm that can lead to chaos and collapse. Generational wisdom and holding the space, that’s how we navigate this time and prevent harm in our beloved communities.