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Article By Samantha Romero

This article first appeared in the Communicator Magazine, Spring 2026 Issue.  

When people talk about community engagement, it usually turns into a conversation regarding hosting more events, creating additional committees or sending more follow-­up emails. There’s this assumption that if you just do more, people will feel more connected.

That hasn’t been my experience. What I’ve seen is that engagement lives in the day-to-day. It’s about how homeowners are spoken to, whether they feel comfortable reaching out, and whether they think management is made up of actual people or just an email address that responds with policy language.

When I first stepped into my role, there was a pretty obvious disconnect between management and homeowners. Most communication to management came in hot, and you could feel the tension even in short emails. It was never meant to be mean; it was more that homeowners didn’t expect to be heard, so they led with frustration.

My te...

…because that sounds so much more official than mental illness.

By Wendy Benner Miller

"Mental health" is a somewhat ironic phrase because it is typically used when discussing the antithesis of a healthy mind and symbiotic emotions. While many may argue that the goal, when using this phrase, is to prioritize the need for society to focus on the importance of a person’s emotional health in the same manner as one’s physical health, this is rarely the case. All too often, when the term "mental health" is brought up in conversation on its own, it elicits a visible response in one’s body language, a shifting in a seat, or an actual bristle or uncomfortableness, which can sometimes conjure stereotypical assumptions, eye rolls, and slang references.

What might be the biggest irony of all is that for most of history, mental illness was not considered an illness at all, but a choice based on controllable feelings or "bad" attitudes. Historically, being unwell was hidden or met with drastic m...