We Are Still Building...

On belonging, loneliness, and building community across border

by Anu, Dani and Olu — for SHÉLA Global CIC

In Recife, the sun rises at five. By six the city is already bright, fully awake, the light arriving all at once.

I was in a tank top, hair up, already warm. On my screen, London. I imagined them cold: grey sky, that particular English damp that isn’t dramatic, just permanent. I don’t know if that’s what it looked like for them. That’s the thing about building something across an ocean. You are always, to some degree, imagining the other person’s world.

We were imagining SHÉLA into existence.

Anu and Olu were on the other side of the world and we were trying to build something together: something capable of surviving beyond enthusiasm, something durable. I was listening hard. I was trying to understand exactly what they wanted. What the vision was. What the goal would look like once it had taken shape.

And then, slowly, in the way real things reveal themselves: not all at once, but in the middle of a sentence, in a pause, in something someone says without realising they have said it.  I understood that I was asking the wrong question.

I realised the process was not separate from the goal. The way we built this would determine what it became. As we spoke, I began to understand that SHÉLA was not beginning from strategy, but from longing. 

For a long time, Anu and Olu yearned for a space that felt connected, grounding and comfortable. Notice we do not immediately use the word “safe.” Safety means different things to different people, yet the word is often used carelessly, without the deeper work of understanding whether people actually feel seen, considered or held within a space.

SHÉLA emerged from conversations that were honest enough to make room for uncertainty.

Anu spoke about the struggles of childhood, trying to understand who they were, learning to feel comfortable in their own skin without constantly seeking validation from society, culture or religion. Olu reflected on being raised as the first child, taught to care for everyone except herself, and the long process of discovering who she was outside responsibility and expectation. A process of choosing herself, loving herself and becoming herself.

Despite coming from different backgrounds, they realised their stories were deeply intertwined. There were threads connecting their experiences: womanhood, identity, visibility, loneliness, survival and the search for belonging.

And from that understanding, SHÉLA was born. From the belief that our stories deserve to be told by us, in our own words, with our own voices at the centre.

I have been thinking about that morning ever since.

"To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do." - bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

We are living through a crisis of belonging that has finally been named. In 2023, the United States Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic: not a feeling, not a personal failing, but a structural emergency. By 2025, more than half of adults reported feeling isolated, left out, lacking companionship. Nearly seven in ten said they needed more emotional support than they received.

The research tells a surprisingly human story. Researchers have found that craving social connection activates the same regions of the brain as craving food. We are not lonely by weakness or circumstance. We are hungry. It is biological. It is old.

And yet we have never been more connected than we are now. More followed. More visible. More reachable at any hour of the day or night.

So what is going wrong?

I think about this often, and I think the answer is simpler and more uncomfortable than we want it to be.

We have mistaken the infrastructure of community for community itself.

A WhatsApp group is not a community. An Instagram account with ten thousand followers is not a community. An algorithm that learns your loneliness and feeds you the simulation of belonging: content that makes you feel seen without anyone actually seeing you. It can make people feel visible without making them accountable to one another. It is a very sophisticated mirror. And mirrors, no matter how flattering, cannot hold you.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has argued that culture does not make people: people make culture. Community-building demands the same reversal of logic. Luiza Trajano, the Brazilian businesswoman who built one of Latin America’s largest retail empires and then used that platform to create a movement of more than 100,000 women, understood this. She said companies need a purpose beyond profit. I would go further. Communities need a purpose beyond growth. The question is not how many people are in the room. The question is what happens to people when they enter it.

Across Denmark, Brazil and South Africa, different forms of collective living and mutual support continue to emerge through cultural tradition, economic necessity and deliberate choice. Women across the world are building cohousing arrangements, chosen families, intentional structures for growing old together: not because they failed to find something better, but because they decided that this was better. They are not waiting for belonging to happen to them. They are designing it. This is what SHÉLA is.

I used to think I knew what community was. I was certain of it. I had the definition ready, the framework, the checklist of what it required and what it produced.

I am more attached to my uncertainties now. I think they take me to better places. I think they make me part of greater projects.

Here is what I know for certain: when you remove someone from a circle, the whole circle has to find its ground again. It reorganises. It rebalances. There is grief in that, and also resilience, and also a kind of proof: that the circle was real, that it held something, that its shape mattered.

Building a team is the opposite motion.

You are bringing people in. You are imagining: with no guarantee, on no salary, across time zones and full-time jobs and dreams and bills and everything else that constitutes a real human life: the day when you will all be able to hold hands and lean back.

Sometimes it looks smaller than people imagine community-building looks. Meetings moved across time zones so nobody is excluded. Different accents in the same call. Women who have never met wishing someone happy birthday from another continent before the group moves on to discussing budgets, moderation, safeguarding and volunteer schedules. Spreadsheets and emotional care, in the same breath, from the same people.

You don’t know exactly what you are building. You won’t, not for a while, maybe not ever.

But you know how you want to build it.

That is enough to begin.

The call ended. I closed my laptop. The sun in Recife was fully up by then, indifferent to whether we had figured anything out. In London, I imagine, it was still raining.

We had not resolved the goal. We had not mapped the destination. We had done something more difficult and more useful: we had decided, together, what kind of people we wanted to be while we were building it.

SHÉLA is not finished. It may never be finished in the way that finished things are finished: static, complete, no longer becoming. Communities, real ones, are never finished. They are always in the process of finding their ground.

We are in that process. It is early and it is hard and it is worth it.

We are still on the call. We are still building...

SHÉLA  Global CIC is a women-centred, lesbian-led community organisation creating intentional spaces for women who love women through storytelling, connection, and visibility.

This piece emerges from ongoing conversations between Dani, Anu and Olu and Laila about community, belonging and what it means to build ethically across borders.