By Kayla Mar, 2026 CLA Intern
It appeared I preached the importance of community without knowing what exactly I meant. Nervous laughter and first day exuberance saturated the room as we stood before a big sheet of paper, “COMMUNITY” sprawled across the top in hot pink marker. Tasked with defining the term, three of my peers and I threw around words we thought it encapsulated.
“A group of people!”
“Reciprocity…”
“Mutual aid?”
“Togetherness!”
“They have to know they’re actually in a community, right?”
We crafted a confident definition and continued with our Day 1 activities. But throughout the first week of CLA, the boundaries of community never quite left my mind. How does one define such an abstractly used word?
Community appeared in my textbooks. Through my academic endeavors and extracurricular activities, community has remained at the forefront as a necessary source of power. It’s where ideas proliferate, where movements take root, where power lies. Even in spaces I occupy that I label as community, I held an abstract, less confident understanding of the exact term. I questioned when the term was used too broadly, too narrowly, too often, not often enough.
Community appeared in API history. As we learned about API history in this first week, we identified our motivations, values, and family histories. Situating our personal histories within those of our forefathers who stood at the helm of change, progress, and visibility, I quickly realized that the API networks and groups whose existence I grew up assuming as natural are in fact direct products of deliberate, consistent connections across time and geography — and, whose existences have only appeared in history far too close in time to myself.
Community appeared in the state capitol. Traveling to Sacramento with my eleven other CLA cohort-mates on the third day of knowing each other felt daunting at first, but my anxieties were immediately relieved by everyone’s benevolent amicability. Walking the antique halls of immense power, shaking hands with staffers and legislators whose words and actions directly impact our lives, and peering over glass panes with wide eyes onto the Assembly floor to see exceptional racial and ethnic diversity amongst our policymakers forced my reflection upon how far racial minorities have come in such a short amount of time.
It was within my grandparents’ lifetimes that an API legislator was exceptional. It was within my parents’ lifetimes that an API network was established across the state. It is within my lifetime that I was born into an epoch where there is an API network that allows us unprecedented access to decisionmaking spaces. Watching the interactions between CAUSE staff and Sacramento folks that could only be achieved by sustained and intentional relationships opened my understanding of how community manifests and what is required to fight against the systemic barriers facing our communities.
Community appeared in lunchtime conversations. Getting increasingly closer to my CLA cohort exponentially excited me for not only the duration of summer, but for the rest of my career.
So, what exactly is community? After one full week of CLA, I still have a hard time claiming one exact definition. Perhaps you can’t precisely formulate it into words. Perhaps it’s a moment of excited glances at your cohort-mate. Perhaps it's a 10 p.m. ice cream run in the state capitol. Perhaps it’s a tender exchange of words after a whirlwind of a week. Perhaps it’s the long term connections you make along the way. Perhaps it's the legacy of an identity group that fought for a seat at the decisionmaking table. Perhaps it’s people advocating for you when you least expect it.
Perhaps, even, it is something you continue to define throughout your life. However it manifests in the future, I am prepared to work for it.