What People Get Wrong About the Village

Lately, I've been hearing a phrase that seems to surface everywhere.

"Everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to contribute to the village."

I understand why people say it. At first glance, it seems to explain why so many of us feel lonely despite being more connected than ever before. We long for neighbors who check in, friends who bring meals after surgery, grandparents who help with childcare, and communities that notice when we're struggling. Yet when someone asks for volunteers or reaches out for help, it can appear as though everyone has disappeared.

But I don't think that's the whole story.

I don't believe we've become less compassionate. I think we've drained our capacity.

For most of human history, villages weren't built because everyone had time and energy to give. They existed because life itself required people to depend on one another. Childcare wasn't the responsibility of one or two exhausted parents. Meals weren't prepared in isolation. Elders shared wisdom while younger generations carried out physical work. Responsibilities were spread across an entire community, allowing each person to contribute according to their season of life and ability.

Today's women are often trying to do the work of an entire village by themselves.

Many are balancing careers while managing households, raising children, caring for aging parents, maintaining relationships, coordinating schedules, answering work emails after hours, and somehow finding time to care for themselves. This has been described as the invisible mental load - the constant planning, remembering, anticipating, and organizing that keeps families functioning. Long before our bodies become exhausted, our minds have already been working overtime.

So when we look at the women around us through that lens, the question begins to change. Instead of asking why people aren't contributing more to their communities, perhaps we should ask whether they have anything left to give.

Because capacity is not the same as compassion.

Most women I know want to help. Yet many spend so much of their lives responding to immediate responsibilities that they rarely have enough emotional margin left to invest deeply in a community.

I think we've misunderstood what a healthy village looks like.

A village isn't made up of people who are all giving at the same time. It is made up of people moving through different seasons, each carrying what they can while trusting someone else will carry them when they cannot.

Here’s what I’ve noticed in the MDW Community over the years. Each person is “entering” the village (I call our village the MDW Bubble) with different capacities. They could be ready to help, but they are most likely exhausted and searching for something like relief, support, a light, low pressure event to gauge whether or not the people in the main community fit their person vibe.

Here’s a good example of how a person enters the MDW Village/Bubble and how their capacity grows to be a contributing member of our community.

The Observer

Near the edge is someone who hasn't fully stepped in yet.

She may have heard about the village through a friend or stumbled across it while searching for something. She watches the conversations, listens more than she comments, and asks herself whether this place is safe enough to belong.

Perhaps she's been hurt by another community, or she's simply exhausted. Either way, she isn't ready to participate, and that's okay.

Every village needs space for people to arrive at their own pace. Capturing the feeling of belonging often begins long before participation.

The One Who Arrives Needing Care

Eventually, she takes a few more steps inside.

She doesn't arrive carrying a casserole or asking how she can volunteer. Instead, she arrives carrying grief, burnout, caregiving responsibilities, financial stress, loneliness, a new baby, a divorce, or years of trying to hold everything together without enough support.

The village doesn't greet her by asking what she can contribute. It asks what she needs.

Someone offers a meal. Another community member remembers her children's names. A person sits beside her without trying to solve every problem.

Receiving care isn't taking from the village; it’s one of the reasons the village exists.

The Contributor

Over time, something begins to change. Her circumstances may not be perfect, but she notices she has a little more room to breathe than she did before. The constant feeling of survival begins to lighten, and with that relief comes something unexpected.

She starts looking outward again.

She notices another newcomer sitting quietly by herself and decides to introduce herself, because she understands. She stays a few extra minutes after a gathering to help clean up. She sends a message to someone having a difficult week because she remembers how much those small gestures once meant to her.

She isn't contributing because she feels she owes the village something.

She's contributing because being cared for has slowly restored her capacity to care for someone else.

The Active Contributor

As the months and years pass, many women discover they have entered an entirely different season. Now they're organizing meal trains, mentoring younger women, volunteering at events, sharing their professional expertise, or creating opportunities that strengthen the community around them.

From the outside, these women often appear endlessly generous. What people don't always see is that many of them once arrived needing exactly the same care they now offer so freely.

The village invested in them before they ever invested in the village.

The strength of a village has never depended on everyone contributing the same amount. It has depended on everyone contributing according to their capacity, trusting that when life inevitably changes, and it always does, the roles will change too.

The woman who arrived completely depleted may someday become the mentor welcoming others through the door. The volunteer coordinating community events may eventually find herself needing meals after surgery. The wisdom keeper may one day experience a loss that reminds her she still needs the comfort of friends.

And no one remains in the same role forever.

We have to remember that this is not a weakness of the village, it’s strength. We need to shift the question from

“Why are people not doing more for their respective villages?”

and turn to the reflection of whether we're creating communities where people have enough safety, support, and time to eventually become the kind of villager they long to be.

In my experience, when people are given the opportunity to rest, heal, and breathe again, they rarely ask, "What can I keep for myself?" More often, they begin looking around and asking, "Who can I help?"

The Village Is Still There. We Just Have to Make Room for It.

As I thought more about why villages feel so difficult to build today, I realized something.

The village didn't disappear overnight. Little by little, our attention did.

Every generation has faced hardship, but today's distractions are unlike anything humanity has experienced before. We wake up to phones that immediately ask for our attention. Before breakfast, we've checked the weather, answered work emails, scrolled through headlines, responded to text messages, paid a bill online, and learned about tragedies happening across the world. Throughout the day, we're interrupted by notifications, school apps, social media, calendars, streaming services, podcasts, breaking news, and an endless stream of information that convinces us every issue deserves our immediate concern. Just writing these sentences has me exhausted.

Sure, none of these things is inherently bad. Many of them enrich our lives, connect us with people we love, and expose us to perspectives we may never have encountered otherwise.

The problem is that our attention is finite.

Every commitment, every notification, every volunteer opportunity, every online community, every cause we care about, and every obligation takes a small piece of us. Individually, those pieces seem insignificant. Together, they leave many women feeling emotionally scattered before they've even had a chance to invest in the people living closest to them.

Perhaps this is why so many of us long for a village while simultaneously feeling as though we have nothing left to offer one.

We aren't choosing between being selfish and being generous. More often, we're choosing between one hundred good things that all compete for the same limited time and energy.

The village loses, not because we stopped valuing it, but because it rarely shouts as loudly as everything else.

The village doesn't send push notifications.

Instead, it waits patiently for us to knock on a neighbor's door, linger after a support group, invite someone over for coffee, or answer the phone when a friend calls.

That kind of community asks for something our modern world rarely encourages.

Presence.

If we want to rebuild villages, we don't need to add one more thing to our calendars. We need to begin asking a different question altogether.

What can I release so I have more room for the village?

Maybe it means saying no to one more committee that leaves you depleted and yes to dinner with a neighbor you've been meaning to get to know. Or, spending less time consuming other people's lives online and more time becoming part of the lives unfolding around you.

It could mean choosing one organization, one support group, one place of worship, or one local community where you can invest consistently instead of trying to spread yourself across dozens of places.

The irony is that creating more margin not only benefits the people around us, but it heals us, too.

Our nervous systems weren't designed to live in a constant state of interruption. They heal through rhythm, conversation, shared meals, meaningful work, laughter, nature, creativity, and relationships that remind us we don't have to carry life alone.

And that’s what the village has always offered - a slower, steadier way of living that allows us to remember we were never meant to carry the responsibilities of an entire village by ourselves.

Instead, we were meant to become part of one.

Rebuilding that village doesn't begin with asking,

"How can I do more?" but, "What can I let go of so I have the capacity to truly belong?"

Why Consistency Matters More Than Events

I've spent the last 12 years building The Modern Domestic Woman, and in the beginning, I thought community would be built through big events. I imagined the workshops, speakers, and special events would be the glue that held people together. Those moments certainly have their place, and I still believe deeply in creating experiences that inspire people or introduce them to something new.

But along the way, I’ve realized that those weren't the moments people kept talking about.

As I gathered feedback, women remembered sitting across from someone who had shared they were struggling too. They remembered laughing over coffee, exchanging phone numbers, or discovering that another woman in the room had walked through something remarkably similar.

It wasn't the event they remembered. It was the conversations and relationships that began because of it.

A village isn't sustained by extraordinary moments. It is sustained by ordinary ones that happen often enough for people to begin weaving themselves into one another's lives. Trust doesn't grow because we attended one incredible workshop together. It grows because we continue showing up in the same place, with the same people, month after month, until strangers slowly become familiar faces and familiar faces eventually become friends.

When I think about our Moms Support Group, I don't immediately think about the conversations we've had, although many of them have been deeply meaningful. I think about the fact that, for nearly four years, those chairs have been arranged in a circle every month, waiting for whoever needed them that day. Some women have come for years.

Others came for a season and returned when life became difficult again. New mothers have watched their babies become toddlers. Women who once cried through their introductions now find themselves comforting someone who has just walked through the door for the very first time.

No one announced that transformation. It simply happened because people kept returning.

The same thing happened with our morning coffee gatherings. Before the pandemic, they became one of my favorite parts of the month because they reminded me of how little people actually need to feel connected. There was no agenda, no presentation, and no expectation that anyone would leave with their life transformed. There was simply coffee, conversation, and enough unhurried time for people to be curious about one another.

When I decided to bring Saturday Morning Coffee back, I wondered if they would feel the same. Somehow it feels even better.

Perhaps that is because, after years of isolation and busyness, we have become more aware of how rare it is to spend an hour with people who aren't asking anything from us except our presence. We sit, we talk, we laugh, and before long, someone is saying,

"I'll see you next Saturday."

There is something deeply comforting about those words. Not because every conversation is extraordinary, but because they remind us that the village will still be there next week.

And that feeling of consistency has shaped everything I’m creating now.

When we decided to begin a bi-monthly perimenopause group, it wasn't because we needed another event on the calendar. It was because women deserve a place where they don't have to explain what they're experiencing every single time they walk into the room. They deserve to be surrounded by people who remember the conversation from two weeks ago and ask, 

"How have you been feeling since we last met?"

The same is true of our monthly Makers Circle. On the surface, it may look like a group of women gathering to paint, embroider, or make something beautiful with their hands. But I suspect that isn't what they'll remember years from now. They'll remember who was sitting beside them. They'll remember the conversation that unfolded while everyone's hands stayed busy. They'll remember the woman who noticed they seemed quieter than usual and gently asked if everything was okay.

Those are the moments that become the architecture of a village.

I've also come to appreciate something that often feels countercultural in a world obsessed with growth. I no longer believe the goal is to gather the biggest crowd possible.

Some of the most meaningful moments I've witnessed have happened in rooms with three or four women sitting around a table. In those spaces, no one disappears into the crowd. I have the privilege of learning everyone's name, introducing people I think would enjoy knowing one another, remembering the story someone shared a month earlier, or noticing when a familiar face hasn't been around for a while.

While large gatherings can certainly inspire us, small gatherings allow us to know one another.

And knowing one another is where villages begin.

It is built because someone unlocks the door every gathering, sets up the beverages or craft, arranges the chairs, and trusts that whether one woman arrives or twenty, the gathering is still worth having.

As I think about the kind of community I want to build, I find myself caring less about how many people walk through the door and more about whether they leave believing they've found a place they can return to.

Because that's what I think we've been searching for all along. A place where life can unfold alongside people who are willing to celebrate with us when things are going well, sit beside us when they aren't, and trust that our roles will change as the seasons of our lives do.

Some days we'll arrive needing to be cared for, and others we'll be the ones extending a hand to someone else.

And that’s how villages endure and thrive.

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About the Author:

Elizabeth Rago is the founder of The Modern Domestic Woman (MDW) and Executive Director of MDW Cares, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to mental health resources, education, and meaningful community for women.

Professionally, she helps brands, businesses, and nonprofit organizations build trust, strengthen relationships, and foster community through strategic communications and an editorial approach to content that values storytelling over marketing. She believes the most meaningful connections are created when people feel seen, understood, and inspired rather than sold to.

Through MDW, she brings that same philosophy to local support groups, educational programs, a quarterly magazine, and community initiatives designed to help women feel less alone. Elizabeth lives in the far West Suburbs of Illinois with her husband and three children.