This paper examines the role of community in education. It focuses on the relation between vulnerability and resilience and how this dialectic is fundamental to the workings of community. Community without vulnerability is impoverished since it offers no chance to build resilience. However, vulnerabilities may be perceived as flaws that could be attended to as dangers, imperiling the well-being of community. To explore these ideas, communities at a public urban college, a private Catholic elementary school, an all-girls private Catholic high school, and a restructured public middle school were studied. In each site, community emerged as an important construct for the participants, though its meanings and practices differed. Each group was able to create four conditions (group identity, accounting for internal diversity, ways to learn how to become competent, and celebrations) that are recognized as community. Each site constructed its group identity in a different way, and the success of learning the norms of community varied. Three of the groups built resilient communities, whereas a fourth group could not find a satisfactory resolution in dealing with internal differences. A community's robustness or fragility may be measured by its ability to tolerate fractures while maintaining collective strengths. (Contains 31 references, 6 tables and 5 figures.) (RJM)