Today is Valentines Day and love is in the air. But how much love, exactly? To figure this out, I created a simple tool that helps me evaluate how much I love different parts of my life. I call it the Definitive Community Love Evaluation (Copilot tried to call it “The DCLE for short” and I no longer fear robots).

First, let’s agree on what is meant by “community”, which I think is a group of people who share something in common, like a location, an interest, or a goal. My contention is that we are striving to make our communities healthier and sustainable for the long term. Another contention of mine is that love is critical for communities to thrive (and definitely to be healthy).

The Definitive Community Love Evaluation formula is based on six questions that help me assess how connected and fulfilled I feel in any given situation. They are:

• Do I feel safe?
• Are my boundaries and youniqueness respected?
• Am I making friends and/or building healthy relationships?
• Am I learning and growing?
• Am I improving and/or helping the world?
• Am I having fun?

Before we can learn and grow we need safety and, probably, healthy relationships. And we need all these things before we can genuinely have fun (its hard to work with joy when we are scare of our boss and don’t like our teammates). We need some combination of these things to love our community.

These questions are not meant to be answered with a yes or no, but rather with a rating from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest. The higher the score, the more love I feel. For example, my neighbourhood score is probably a 53/60 because of its proximity to nature, its composition of cool and pretty diverse neighbours, and its distance (not too far, not too close) to everything we need.

My best advice is for you to bring this formula to your family and at least two of these other places: your neighbourhood, your classroom (or your kids’ school), and work.

Be safe and have fun with it. Love is both risky and joyous.