Early in August, while many of us were still savoring the last bits of summer, an email from Grant Hightower, the Assistant Head for Student Life, introduced Concord Academy’s 2025-26 community theme: “Building the We: Responsibility, Connection, and Growth.”
Hightower’s email introduced “The Sanctity of Trains” from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delight to ground the community in our new theme. This was later followed up when the reading was reintroduced and read by English teacher Nick Hiebert and students Averie Lee ’26, Caroline Espinosa ’26, and Annie Washko ’28.
I couldn’t help but think back to two years ago, when piles and piles of The Other Wes Moore were distributed among our community. Despite the aim to engage with the themes of the book, discussions were few and far between, if occurring at all. As the school year drew to a close, many copies of the book littered the boarding house drop-boxes and lost and founds around the school. At the end of the year, we, as a community, probably succeeded more in sending books to waste than in promoting any real change or reflection.
Though our reading and discussion of The Other Wes Moore was not under an explicit community theme, the aim of community engagement remains the same, starting from a shared reading not unlike our previous one. This year, I hope that our ongoing conversations surrounding our community theme will not fall as flat as they did two years ago. So far, it seems to have been starting to gain some ground, at least.
Still, the question I’ve heard most often is: “What does ‘Building the We’ even mean?” I share this uncertainty to some extent. Despite the multiple grounding exercises we’ve had, the theme itself has not yet been explicitly defined, especially as to how it specifically applies to CA. This has made it difficult to understand how to immediately engage with this community theme in our day-to-day lives.
I recognize that it is difficult, and perhaps even harmful, to reduce the community, and likewise, the CA community, to a simple definition. It strips us of our unique context and all the different ways in which we can act for the common good. While we do not have to come to a clear-cut definition of our community theme, I believe it would be helpful to begin to craft our definition together. In this way, we could be putting our theme into practice, starting from its definition. I hope that as we head further into the school year, we will not only work towards forming a community theme, but do so while accounting for both each individual and the whole.
Looking again at “The Sanctity of Trains,” I realize that the foundation of common trust is not only acts of kindness and respect, but also the act of noticing them, which Gay does beautifully. In this way, the delight that Gay describes in his essay is a product of conscious actions by both the giver and the receiver. This applies to anything that occurs within a community, beyond just the trains or coffee shops or common trust in Gay’s essay. As we begin to internalize “Building the We,” I implore us all not only to act for the sake of the community, but also to notice and appreciate when others are doing the same.
Our community is not perfect or complete, nor should we act as if it is. It will take a lot of work to truly grow, learn, and change together, but perhaps we could see this imperfection and incompleteness as an invitation to begin this process now, and as an opportunity to build both our theme and community the way we want to, not from the top down, but from the bottom up.