As it turns out, the author missed a very simple fix and general good practice that you should always initialize your object before you try to set a property. The very simple fix for this is simply to add a new StdClass;
call right before the error with the variable it is trying to access.
$items[$i] = new StdClass;
$items[$i]->title = $crs_post_title;
That first line will fix the warning from showing up.
This would also fix the problem in /components/com_community/models/activities.php on line 387
with the following fix.
$commentsResult[$comment->type . '-' . $comment->contentid] = new StdClass;
$commentsResult[$comment->type . '-' . $comment->contentid]->_comment_count = 0;