Community: [ kuh-myoo-ni-tee ] noun, plural com·mu·ni·ties.

  • a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
  • a locality inhabited by such a group.
  • a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists:

“What is a community?” Is a question that I’ve been exploring in the past months.  To be honest, I’ve been exploring this question deeply for a decade because at MAC6, our purpose is “Building Better Communities Where People and Businesses Thrive,” but, especially deeply in the last six months as things have changed so much due to the Virus.

“Community” has always been a bit amorphous and not totally subject to the boundaries of each of the four walls that define our buildings, but it has been a main-focus.  The community that grow their companies in our spaces are how MAC6 provides value for monetary exchange, and still that doesn’t begin to encompass the entirety of the community we aim to provide value to.  We are also constantly striving to be a strong business stakeholder of the City of Tempe, the Tempe Chamber of Commerce, more broadly, Arizona, the Arizona Commerce Authority, Conscious Capitalism AZc, and even more globally Conscious Capitalism, Inc.  There are many other communities (organizations) that we are proudly affiliated with and support including (and in no particular order):

What about the community of husbands and wives and parents and kids and friends… that are supported by the work that is done in each of these organizations every day?  What about your neighbors and their neighbors and theirs and so on?  What about every human being on earth?

With the proliferation of virtual platforms and opportunity to connectedness, boundaries on what a community can be and are less and less opaque.  Less and Less is the company stakeholder model looking like a center out diagram of how each community member is connected to one entity, but rather 10’s or 100’s or ? concentric circles, connected in a common good to provide value to people’s lives in the world.  Instead of a sun with rays extending out from one circle, it is a neural network of connectedness.

With this lens of “community” to look through, each of your actions aren’t just impacting one person, but are impacting many.  Why not see the world in this light?  We are not divided by barriers, physical or mental, but rather connected in our humanity.  So, what is a community?  Its all of us, simply trying to make the world a little bit better than the day before.  Connected, in this experience of being alive during this time in history.  That’s what we mean by Community at MAC6.

We will continue pushing to build connectedness between people and businesses and between communities.  We will continue to build communities where people and businesses for everyone can thrive.  If we can provide some space to you along the way, great, come and join our Community of businesses inside of MAC6.  But either way, know that we are connected and that we work every day to serve you regardless of your geographic location, your role as an employee, CEO, Mom, neighbor, etc… and, regardless of any boundaries that seem to be so readily placed upon us.  You are a part of our MAC6 Community of Communities.

What do you think about Community?  I’d love to continue this conversation and hear about ways that you are connected and if I can ever help, please come be a part of my community any time.

Kyle