There’s one word I’ve written more than almost any other this past year as a reporter in Santa Barbara.
Community.
It appears so often in our pages that, at times, it begins to feel diluted — a catchall, a reflex. But lately, I’ve found myself wondering if the opposite is true. Maybe it shows up everywhere because, here, it actually means something.
I recently sat at a dinner party where the conversation drifted toward church — not doctrine, but what it provides — belonging. The adults at the table, all from the cusp between the Boomers and generation X, spoke about how church creates community. And I realized, listening to them, that Santa Barbara does this in a hundred different ways, with or without a cross.
I recently wrote a workout class roundup — a story that, on the surface, is about classes and places to sweat. But it was never really about that. It was about the people who show up, the words of encouragement, the friendships, the ritual of leaving the house and finding others doing the same.
I went to a hula lesson not long ago, held at a home on the Mesa. There were dancers there who had been practicing for 50 years — generations of them —moving around a front yard on a Tuesday evening. In the backyard of the same house, there was an opera fundraiser dinner. Two different worlds, separated by a side gate, somehow part of the same Santa Barbara tribe.
I’ve taught Zumba classes where people from all walks of life dance through the door. I don’t live near my parents, and yet, in those rooms, I’ve been wrapped in bear hugs from women my mom’s age — the kind that make you feel, if only for a moment, loved in only a way a mama can (shoutout Holly).
That’s the thing about Santa Barbara. I rarely feel alone. As I write this, I sit in one of the many coffee shops I frequent. I nod at the owner and he nods at me. I am at my own table but scanning the room I will still lock eyes with a multitude of different people, each probably with a coffee addiction similar to mine.
I’ve stood on the sand covering surf competitions where families gather at the shoreline, where little groms dart into the water and come back to cheers from parents and friends. I’ve been invited — repeatedly — by birding groups I have yet to join, though I see them often, moving in quiet clusters along the same trails I hike. There is an entire ceramics community that spills out of UCSB and into studios across the county, friends carpooling to Carpinteria to shape clay together.
There’s the service industry — its own ecosystem entirely. Bartenders, servers, hosts — they know each other, look out for each other — a nod, a discount, a shot of Fernet, a shared understanding. Another kind of community in plain sight.
There’s the run club — which, somehow, I stumbled onto because of something called a burrito run. Don’t ask. But what I found there was its own world: people who train together, race together, push each other through half marathons, marathons, ultras. I started recognizing faces across events, the same people reappearing across miles and my Strava feed, bound by something as simple as forward motion.
What I mean to say is this: Santa Barbara is not one community. It is many — layered and overlapping. And that, I think, is its real strength.
In the past year, writing about this place, I’ve come to understand that the word community is not filler nor meaningless.
It is, in fact, the most precise word we have.
Because what exists here is not just shared geography or interest. It is an openness — an invitation you didn’t know you had. For one of your many interests, there is likely a group out there who is practicing it together, ready to welcome you with open arms (maybe literally).
I’ve lived in Idaho. In Georgia. In Arizona. In Northern California. None of those places had quite this — this density of belonging, this ease of entry, this feeling of connectivity.
And I know, even now, that there are communities here I never touched, never fully saw, never had the time to understand.
As I prepare to leave, that is what I will carry with me — not just the stories I wrote, but the places they led me, the rooms I was welcomed into, the people who made space without asking for anything in return.
We use the word “community” a lot in this town.
Now I know why.
And in the end, I just mean to say that I love this community, and I will miss it when I leave.
Ella Heydenfeldt, an intern and a reporter for the Santa Barbara Independent over the past year, is off to continue her studies at the London School of Economics to earn a master’s in environmental policy.
