More with Professor Adam Clark
Jubilee – Professor Adam Clark
Peter Block On Ambition, Authenticity, And Community [The Amiel Show]
Making Space for Community
Peter Block on the Abundant Community: An MWS Podcast
Barry Daniel of The Middle Way Society speaks with Peter Block in this podcast using the broad themes of Peter’s books to base the discussion. The Middle Way Society’s aim is to encourage a universal approach to living a more integrated, ethical life, avoiding dogma or any appeal to authority.
Source: www.middlewaysociety.org
An Other Kingdom: The Background
Coauthors of An Other Kingdom, Walter Brueggemann, John McKnight, and Peter Block, talked with Peter Pula and Michelle Strutzenberger (Axiom News) about the new book. They describe how the three of them came together and why the religion of consumerism needs serious rethinking.
Credit: TalkShoe
Good Morning, Beautiful Business
Adelita’s Gift: The Value of Asking the Right Questions
Jubilee Forum 2 – Reverend Rob Rhodes
Jubilee Forum 2, September 3, 2015
Reverend Rob Rhodes of Christ Church Cathedral speaks of the Kingdom of God in contrast to the Kingdom of Pharaoh, and the presence of Jubilee in the New Testament. The idea of Jubilee has existed at times, now is the time of remembering it, living the Gospel, bringing it into our community, embracing an alternative economy, as the center of Christianity.
Alternative Journalism with Sarah van Gelder of Yes! Magazine
Is Now the Time to Bring Alive Centuries-old Jubilee Concept?
From Charity to Empowerment
Jubilee Forum 1 – Rev. Damon Lynch III
Reverend Damon Lynch III welcomes us to New Prospect Baptist Church as the Village Well. He connects the biblical idea of Jubilee to our modern cultural struggles. He quotes extensively from the Randall Robinson book: The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks and narrates the story of a black male over the generations. He explores what this means for us today.
Change the Conversation, Change the Culture
Jubilee Forum 1 – Walter Brueggemann
Jubilee Forum 1, August 13, 2015
Walter Brueggemann, retired (supposedly) Old Testament Scholar and author, speaks to our relationship with money. He speaks to the exodus story and the wilderness from the Old Testament and the Pharaoh economy. It is about our passion for austerity and the possibility of creating an alternative.
Jubilee Forum 1 – Tim Kraus
Jubilee Forum 1, August 13, 2015
This begins with Tim Kraus giving the context for the Economics of Compassion Initiative Jubilee Forum Series.
An Other Kingdom
The Hometown of Your Dreams
Jeff Yost
Jeff Yost talks to John McKnight and Peter Block about the Nebraska Community Foundation: a way to educate, train and initiate conversation between community members. He discusses how philanthropy can create jobs and help sustain community for generations to come, rather than only for the current generation.
For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work. All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.
The Hometown of Your Dreams:
Conversation with Jeff Yost
January 14, 2015
John McKnight: Welcome everybody. We are going to have a real treat today because I want to share with you a discovery I made and some of you may have made it too. A couple of years ago, I found out that in one of our states, and in over 250 small towns, mostly in smaller cities, there had developed organizations of people whose insight was that there was a lot of wealth and that wealth could be identified and invested in ways that would shape the future and define the communities possibilities. It is a movement that has spread so far that I could hardly believe it.
So, today we are joined by Jeff Yost who is one of the people at the center of getting this initiative started. So, Jeff, welcome and I wonder if you could let us know a little bit of what the antecedent was to your focusing on local wealth. I know there was a study that got you started. Could you tell us about it?
Jeff Yost: Absolutely. First of all, John and Peter, thank you for having me and thank you for inviting the Nebraska Community Foundation to be part of this conversation. We are certainly honored to be here alongside Asset-Based Community Development and all the terrific work that is explored within your book The Abundant Community –– these have been the undergirding principles of our work for the last 20 years or so. It is just an honor to be here. Thanks.
The Nebraska Community Foundation got started 20 years ago and we are just celebrating our 20th anniversary with the whole idea that in so many ways communities had changed and really didn’t have the same type of discretion that they had previously. Certainly, within the context of Nebraska we needed to find different ways to have a more positive narrative about the future. We wanted to have a more positive conversation between parents and their kids over the kitchen table and between adults and youth in communities, and also to try and attract that next generation in wanting to be a part of all of this work.
So, much of the underpinning for this work started with the tremendous outmigration that we have seen over the decades and through many rural places over Nebraska and throughout the northern Great Plains. How do you help in creating even greater pride in place? How do you help people to craft a narrative where they are talking in positive and opportunistic terms about the future of their place? This has been a work in progress over time, but one of pieces we started with is that in many places around the country, community foundations have gotten started and we are certainly interested in the whole idea of how to use local charitable giving as one more tool within that community development puzzle. I think we have found that it is even more powerful than we thought it might be.
To start, I want to talk about how we define the Nebraska Community Foundation. We always talk about the Nebraska Community Foundation as being a community development institution that uses philanthropy as a tool. We are not a charity. We are not in the business of doing things for people. We are in the business of figuring out how we can be a value-added partner to community leaders to help them build the community of their dreams.
A few years into this work there was study done at Boston College called “Millionaires and the Millennium” in which Paul Schervish and John Havens explored the whole inter-generational transfer of wealth and the magnitude of that. If you are in a place like Nebraska, a lot of the next generation had in fact migrated to someplace else. Not only was the population of many of these places shrinking, but also the demographics of these places was aging because the people that were leaving were, of course, younger people and people early in their careers. So, it is not a very long walk to figure out if there is this massive transfer of wealth that is happening between generations and if the next generation doesn’t, in fact, inhabit that same place, then not only are you losing all that human resource capacity, if the next generation doesn’t return to that community and live and work there, you also are going to potentially to lose much of the extraordinary financial wealth that has been built up, especially since World War II.
So, over the years we have done few of these transfers of wealth studies. We always knew the transfer of wealth was huge. I am an economist by training, and I honestly didn’t have any clue that it was going to be of this magnitude. Nebraska is about 1.8 million people. It is a very large geography. There are actually 532 communities within the state . It is about 500 miles from end to end if you go from northwest to southeast. For those 1.8 million people in that reasonably large geographical area, our estimate, and we think it is reasonably conservative, is that some 600 billion dollars will transfer from one generation to the next in the next 50 years. Those are staggering sums.
A longtime colleague of mine, a gentleman who is the co-director of the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, is Don Mackey. Don and I are the primary authors of the original study. Don has gone on to do this type of analysis in many, many other places around the country. In the context of Nebraska, we have used it not only in understanding the large macro-economic opportunity, but for the 93 counties in Nebraska, we actually figured out a methodology for creating an estimate for each and every one of those counties. We even break it down proportionately to help community leaders to begin to think of endowment building within the context of that transfer of wealth.
So, let’s say there is a particular county where the transfer of wealth over the next 50 years is estimated to be one billion dollars. Part of what we will talk with community leaders about –– and help them go through a vision and action planning process and ultimately a goal setting exercise associated with endowment building for their place –– is, what if just 5% of that transfer of wealth were given back to the place where it was made and accumulated? So, 5% of one billion dollars is 50 million dollars. If that is endowed, and you assume that you are going to get a 4 or 4½% rate of return or a payout from that particular endowment, 50 times .045 is over two million dollars annually that would be a perpetual income stream to benefit that place.
We all know the money is important, but at the end of the day communities are made up by people and people being in relationship with one another. People really trusting one another and having an opportunistic vision of what they can build together. So, if you can connect those sorts of relationships with that vision and with that capital and especially if that capital is unrestricted in nature, there is a lot you can get done.
Suppose you think about that philanthropy within the context of how does that philanthropy really serve as a margin of excellence for the future of our place, and assume that much of what we already do we will continue doing –– that is, to help people in need and to provide government services and these sorts of things. If you think about it that way, that endowment being put into place for the future of that particular geography, and then that endowment payout being used to do something above and beyond what we are already doing, it becomes a pretty exciting thing to be a part of. What could we use that on? How could we use that for youth engagement, business development, entrepreneurship, leadership development, and intergenerational conversations?
All these sorts of things we know help to build the social fabric in our place and we are using philanthropy to try to build a whole series of economic opportunities as well. As John mentioned, we are now networking in about 250 communities around the state. The network looks different in every one of those places. It has been a really fun journey so far.
John: Take us to one community and give us a little snapshot of what you might have done to trigger the local folks who became engaged in identifying and collecting this wealth. How do you start that?
Jeff: The first part I start with is that communities can only be built and sustained by the people who live, work, and sleep there. So, this is a very decentralized system. We are interested in being somebody’s value-added partner. So, one of the premises here is that this has to be community driven and everything has to be on a willing partner platform. So, to start with, we are interested in working with people who are interested in working with us.
The first thing that would happen is somebody wanted to create an affiliated fund within the context of the Nebraska Community Foundation. Let’s take my little hometown of Red Cloud. Those of you that are fans of American literature know that it is the home of Willa Cather. So, you have an extraordinary cultural asset in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and Red Cloud has about 1,000 people. It’s about 60 miles off the Interstate. So, it’s a rural agrarian place and a fair way away from the traditional economic corridor that goes across the state.
Red Cloudvstarted an affiliated fund and those community leaders decided that they wanted that affiliated fund to just concentrate on Red Cloud and the trade area associated with it. So, in other places community leaders may decide they want a community-based affiliated fund to cover a county or a community-based affiliated fund that is going to cover all of the communities within their school district. Within our system, all of those are locally governed issues and things that can always morph and evolve over time.
In the case of Red Cloud they started their affiliated fund. They raised some money for various projects over time. At one point, a resident who had grown up there, and was also serving as a member of the Nebraska Community Foundation statewide board of directors, made a challenge grant to help those community leaders to begin to build an unrestricted endowment for the future for that community. It was a $100,000 challenge grant that the community needed to match one to one. So, that got started.
About six years ago we helped them go through a really intensive process of vision, mission, and values identification and to begin to think through what are the strategic opportunities within this particular community. Of course, in this case you have the incredible cultural asset. So, how would you use heritage tourism as one of the primary drivers for that? This action-driving process ultimately led the advisory committee and community leaders to determine they really wanted to concentrate on heritage tourism as an economic development strategy, with early childhood education and childcare as their two primary pieces. Those community leaders have made tremendous progress. There are donors that have stepped up in reasonably significant ways to help some of this come true from a programming standpoint and a facilities standpoint.
All the while what we are always interested in is how to engage more and more people within your community. Not only in being engaged in that conversation, but ultimately investing their time, talent, and treasure within the context of that fund in that community to help continue the building of all that future.
That’s a quick story and we’ve got dozens of those. It’s really fun to see all the amazing work that is happening.
Peter Block: Your discoveries of the existence of this wealth are quite amazing. How is it different from most every city that has a community foundation? What would you say is unique about your thinking or your approach to what you are doing?
Jeff: I think it is always important to talk about all of this stuff. None of this is ever a good or bad. It is what we have discerned as making the most sense here, in our place and our circumstance with our people.
Peter: What is the essence of that?
Jeff: Community foundations are incredible community development tools. I’ve got wonderful colleagues all over the country that are helping to run and build community foundations and they all look different. Within the context of Nebraska, I would say there are three things that are very different about the Nebraska Community Foundation.
First, the Nebraska Community Foundation in itself is not a grantmaker. All our grantmaking actually happens in the context of affiliated funds. That is very intentional because, ultimately, we want communities’ leaders to be very honest with us about what the opportunities are, what the needs are, and what all the things we need to work on are as we partner with these communities to help themselves. So, the Nebraska Community Foundation is not a grant maker. We are primarily an educator, a trainer, a facilitator, and in some respect a connecting tissue.
John: You also manage the money, don’t you?
Jeff: We do. When you talk about the Nebraska Community Foundation, there is just one corporation, and there are about 225 affiliated funds within that one corporation. There are probably 850 or 900 sub-funds within those 225 affiliated funds. There is a very substantial financial and investment management infrastructure. So, part of the management is understanding that for a community leader, especially within the context of a small town or neighborhood, how we have all been to those organizing meetings where we want to get something done. The critical question is, who wants to be treasurer? We are trying to help to take some of that burden off local leaders so they can really focus on mission fulfillment and not just all of the administrative machinations associated with having a non-profit organization.
John: So, you basically are the investment manager. Then on an annual basis the local group gets its proportionate share of whatever the growth is.
Jeff: Yes, sort of like that. It’s all segregated by fund and by donor intent. Then it’s helping those community leaders to really pursue not only having resources, but also connecting those resources with a vision and engaging members of their community. What do they want to do next for the future of that place?
Peter: There are some large cities in Nebraska or concentrated populations. Have you seen where an affiliated fund would be actually organized around a neighborhood?
Jeff: We have had a few neighborhood associations with affiliated funds over time, but historically most our work is within regional trade centers and small communities around the state, plus we do a fair number of efforts that are either regional or state-wide. So, there is a Lincoln Community Foundation. There is an Omaha Community Foundation. Great people doing great work. They are certainly not organized in the same way as the Nebraska Community Foundation is, but there are lots of opportunities to work together and to support one another in our work.
If I might, I want to circle back around to that prior question for just a moment in terms of what’s the other thing that differentiates the Nebraska Community Foundation. John, this is something that you have witnessed a couple of years in a row. We are really invested in peer learning. In helping adults to have experiential learning, but also having those community leaders really be in conversation with one another. I am absolutely of the opinion that people hear something differently from a peer than they do from someone who is professionalized about their approach to it or being paid for doing that work.
A tremendous amount of our training and education is actually done within the context of peer learning and peer mentoring. From one affiliated leader from one community helping affiliated leaders from a community down the road to understand their story, but also to help them work on what is next in their community. In Nebraska there is this game called “Six Degrees of Separation of Kevin Bacon.” Have you heard of that before?
John/Peter: Yes.
Jeff: In the context of Nebraska, we are only separated by two degrees. If you don’t know somebody, you know somebody that knows somebody.
A big part of our work is being connected and being in relationship with lots and lots of different people. The interesting thing about using philanthropy as a community development tool is that you can’t make anybody do anything. All we can do is motivate and inspire people, but who ultimately is in the best position to do that are the people who are already in relationship with one another.
So, that is much of what we are trying to do: to help community leaders to become comfortable and confident to be able to talk to their friends, neighbors, and people that they have deep trusting relationships with about what a difference that the person they are talking with could make in the future of their place. That conversation obviously ranges all over the place. Sometimes, it is about making a charitable gift. Sometimes, it’s about becoming a leader of that fund. Sometimes, it’s about volunteering their time and talent to help to get something done. John, you have been so articulate over the years about how important invitation is as part of community building. We really try to help community leaders to understand just how important and profound that invitation is within the community building process.
John: Give us an example of how the fund is manifested by the activity of how many people ––4, 5, 6, 20, 50? And how are those people identified and coalesced?
Jeff: You are absolutely right in that we have affiliated funds that have leadership groups. We call them advisory committees. Those funded advisory committees might range between five community leaders and maybe twenty. In some funds they will have a really active and robust sub-committee structure. So, the membership of those sub-committees might then total up to maybe forty or fifty people, just depending on the context of the place. Then you might have other things happening where literally hundreds of people are part of helping to build and manifest that. Those groups are in fact self-perpetuating groups.
Some might say that’s not the way to do it. What I would say to any of that is that within the context of Nebraska, we found that is the structure that works best for community building here. People who are already in relationship with one another and looking around the table and then asking who else they need to connect with or what other opportunities are there. So, in some communities they have entirely local leadership. In some community-based affiliated funds there are alumni and expatriates that participate as a part of that.
We are interested in educating, training, and sharing effective practices, but ultimately we are not interested in telling people that they have to do it one way or another. A longtime colleague has a little quip: Community building isn’t like rocket science, we actually know how to put a man on the moon. We are constantly learning and evolving what we are doing here. One of the things we know is that communities that are doing really well in this work are communities that are figuring out how they are engaging dozens and hundreds of their neighbors in conversations about the future of their place and inviting them to be a part of that.
So, again, it’s much of what you have written about and theorized about and practiced over the years in terms of how important that active invitation is.
John: You also have observed the difference between the kind of present-day function of an elected body like the city council, the village board, and the affiliated fund. Could you say a few words about that distinction?
How you could think about local place and needing people collectively to get things done. The city council is often thought of as a group to get things done, but the affiliated fund is a different group of people getting things done. What’s the difference?
Jeff: I think the difference is a couple of things. One is the fact that in using philanthropy as one of the primary community development tools you can’t make anybody do anything. So, that in and of itself fundamentally differentiates government because we are not assessing taxes or fees from anyone. It’s all willing partners and people willing to be engaged. The second one is, and this is a generalization, but I think to a large extent that governments primarily focus on now and the very near term. I would hope that our affiliated funds, especially those that are building endowments for the future of the place, are really more focused on the future. Or more focused on what sort of place do we want to have 10 and 20 years from now as opposed to 3 to 5 years from now.
Again, that is a generalization because government does do work that has generational impact, through infrastructure, technology, and other things. Still, I think that one of he key differentiating factors is that government is primarily focused on now and the short-term.
The Nebraska Community Foundation is an organization that isn’t really focused on relief. We are an institution that is focused on development. So, sometimes you will have a tragic circumstance happen in a place and the people in that place need relief. We have got lots of incredible partners out there that are really good at that work. So, we’ve decided that is not our work. Our work is to help people focus on the future and what things help to build and ultimately magnetize this community so that people say, That’s where I want to live and work. That’s where I want to raise my family. That’s where I want to have my business.
So, the Nebraska Community Foundation and its affiliated funds is not all things to all people. I think we have done a nice job of helping lots of community leaders focus on the future in ways that they hadn’t previously.
John: You also in some of these places find that the local people engage a significant number of the local citizens in discussions that would result in their joint dialogue and thinking together about the future rather than four or five or ten people that are on the affiliated fund itself.
Jeff: Absolutely. A big part of what we are trying to do is to help people to not only envision but also to plan for the future, and a big part of that entire process is figuring out how we can have a community-wide conversation about that future and what all of us collectively desire. In many cases we will have a community wide envisioning session. Or we might have several of those. In the community of Norfolk, we helped to facilitate six of those for constituencies like middle school students, high school students, the Chamber of Commerce, non-profit executives, elders, and people that were already investors in that affiliated fund. A variety of different constituencies.
We help start the conversation and then figure out how to connect some of those conversations because many times –– and we’ve all seen this many times –– people accidentally end up talking past one another as opposed to talking with one another. Sometimes within these sessions we are just helping people to make those connections to make more competent assumptions than they had previously.
Peter: I have one question. There is a lot of conversation about poverty and wealth inequality. I am sure that Nebraska is hit by that. How do you think about that? Have you seen affiliated groups, for example, actually capitalize or start small businesses? I know that there are a lot regional efforts, like you mentioned about your town becoming a heritage tour destination to get more tourists that way. Talk about that.
Jeff: There are a couple of pieces. Let’s start with the individual piece, in particular. One of the things we have always tried to look at, within the context of Nebraska and especially the outmigration of young people, is what things can you do to create greater economic opportunity as well as greater opportunism and optimism about the future? A part of that might be helping to build a collective economic development infrastructure. We have helped to do that in some of the communities and counties that we have worked in. For example, amalgamate federal, state, local, and government dollars along with philanthropy dollars to have economic development professionals. Then how do those economic development professionals really focus on the things we can do to not only increase economic opportunity in this place, but also to change the conversation with young people about where they want to live and work as adults.
Much of our work is around supporting both an entrepreneurship curriculum as well as entrepreneurs. Connecting that with leadership development and skills associated with group dynamics. Having that conversation in as many ways possible with young people about where they want to be and what they want to be a part of. Then ultimately the philanthropy ends up being the glue that helps hold all that together over time in comparison to grantmaking. We have all been through the process where you apply for a state or federal grant, you start doing some of that work, but the grant period is three years. Well, what happens in the fourth? Many times, those people end up spending their time just trying to sustain the small institution they started as opposed to really getting to concentrate on their mission.
The other one that I will list is what we refer to as non-traditional scholarships. In some of our community-based affiliated funds they have identified one of the most effective ways of helping people that are currently working part-time service sector jobs is to help them return to school and maybe get an associate degree or an additional certificate or whatever the case may be. So, these scholarships are for things like helping an LPN return to school and become a registered nurse. Helping a high school educated mechanic to become a certified diesel mechanic. Helping a paraprofessional within the school system become a certified teacher. All this transforms part-time service sector working people into people who are clearly members of the middle-class.
We have seen a lot of terrific work happen with that approach and I think it has also changed the conversation around scholarships in general. If you are going to invest these community resources, then how do you invest them so the community and the individual both benefit?
John: Because a lot of scholarships invested in getting people to go to the university are really an investment in their leaving town.
Jeff: Yes, and we are certainly not in the business of saying we shouldn’t be sending people off to college. We know that in this economy we need everybody to have more than a high school degree. That doesn’t mean you have to cut off your nose to spite your face. Certainly, we can set up scholarships and we have done dozens of these, whereby preference is given to students who say they are interested in returning to that community or their region after they complete school.
Most important, it is not about holding somebody to some rules around this; it is the opportunity to have a conversation about what they want and how what they want, in fact, coincides with what is best for the community and that it isn’t different from that. How do you begin and sustain that conversation with people: that you are a member of our community and we want you to continue to be a member of our community?
Peter: Some people are writing in the chat. I don’t know if you can see it.
Jeff, are you able to see the chat happening?
Jeff: Yes, I’m looking through them now.
Maggie Rogers: Okay, great. It sounds like you have already answered one of the questions or even a couple of the questions. We also have a caller.
Debbie (caller): I’m from Austin, Texas, and a lot of people in Austin have been talking about the Nebraska effort, which prompted me to dial in. I thank Jeff for giving us more context, information, and background about your study and what it has meant to you because here we have a new head to our community foundation who is trying some new and innovative things. So, potentially we will be following in your footsteps.
Peter: Thanks, Debbie. Anyone else in line, Maggie?
Michelle Strutzenberger (caller): I am calling in from Peterborough, Ontario. Thanks, Peter and John, for hosting this conversation with Jeff. I‘ve seen that the Democracy Collaborative in Ohio recently released a report on Innovative Community Foundations. They shared the stories of 29 United States and 1 Canadian foundation. One element they mentioned is a growing exploration of something called impact investing by these foundations. So, you mentioned that the Nebraska Community Foundation in itself is not a grantmaker, but its 225 affiliated funds are. What possibilities do you see for these funds engaging in this sort of impact investing or social finance type work?
Jeff: By impact investing are you connecting it to things like mission related investment and program related investments?
Michelle: There is an expectation of both a financial and a social return. So, there is that sort of blended idea.
Jeff: Well, certainly the point of having any of these resources is to be able to help people create community impact in their place. I am a big believer that when you have seen one community then you have seen one community. Making generalizations around what is a good investment and what is not can be a really dicey proposition. That’s part of why we try to focus on how you connect the grantmaking with the process of engaging lots and lots of people in building that collective vision through a planning process. Creating priorities because we know we are not going to have enough resources or enough leadership or enough time to be able to do all these things at once.
Part of what I think you are working on within that process of engaging people and continuing to funnel down toward moving from lots and lots of things being important to a few things being priorities is the opportunity to see something change. The connecting piece to that –– and I am hopeful that many of you are familiar with it –– is the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy. Over time I have become a big believer that a community has a self-fulfilling prophecy just like an individual does. All these process things that we are discussing today are about how you help that community to identify where they are at as it relates to their self-concept and their self-fulfilling prophecy. How do you help them to continue to discern how to make that better and how to make that more optimistic? Grantmaking can certainly be a key tool within the context of that.
The final thing I will say on this question is that sometimes within the concept of when we have an intersection between community and philanthropy, we end up putting too much emphasis on philanthropy and not enough emphasis on community. I’ve become very comfortable saying over time that money is an important tool, but it is only one of many tools required to do good community building.
At the end of the day, and the transfer of wealth studies were all intended to help make this point, the limiting resource here isn’t money. We are an extraordinarily wealthy country. We’re an extraordinarily wealthy society. We can pretty much choose to do what we choose to do. So, the question is, how do you choose to focus on community building, creating opportunities, and creating more just outcomes for more people? To me this is more a function of leadership and more a function of vision and more a function of engagement than it is a function of capital. They are all important, but within the context of community building I’m convinced that money is not the limiting resource to getting things done. It’s going to be lots of other pieces. The vision and the leadership and the engagement are in place. I’ve now got years and years of evidence that we can figure out how to access the money to help get that done.
Peter: I think the question is whether you feel that a lot of people like venture capitalists and people like that were turning things upside down in alignment with what you are talking about. Saying we are going to invest, but the question of return is secondary or third. Where we want to invest is in new ventures that have a social justice component or social impact. The impact investment in something called SoCal. It’s just not the community foundations’ philanthropy, it’s also local people with all the same goals that you have of keeping it here and building a place and changing the criteria of what constitutes a good investment. Your thinking about that is in aligned with that very much.
Jeff: There are a couple of notes here on the questions that people have asked that I think might be interesting to connect to. Is that okay?
Peter: Sure, we’ve got about five minutes.
Jeff: There is one saying that a good related resource for trust oriented grassroots relational organizing is The Network Weaver Handbook. I think that is absolutely correct. A woman named June Holley from Athens, Ohio, created Network Weaving, and I find it to be extraordinarily useful work. She has been working on this for a couple of decades and doing a terrific job. I’m actually having a series of conversations with John, Tom Mosgaller, and others around how to connect network weaving and asset mapping within the context of a particular place, helping them not only to fully articulate their vision and move that from plan to opportunity, but also how to use this to be an even greater connection with all of these people that care and are willing to step up and lead and support. So, that’s another piece of building up this ecosystem.
John: Any other questions in the chat that you want to respond to?
Jeff: I like the last one and I would be interested in the two of you talking about this a little bit: Local people are being witnessed by you as they assumed dominion over their inner and external resources. It’s a huge discovery of personal power.
That’s a really important statement within the context of this work over time. It’s never about the money and it’s always about the people. Helping people to have confidence and knowing that their work is important and honorable and that they are difference makers.
Peter: I think that part of the work that you are doing, Jeff, is helping people come to terms with wealth. You could call it the right use of wealth in this consumerist society, surplus society, and accumulation society. Most of us are out of relationship with one another, whether you are poor or whether you are rich. I think that you are trying to bring us into a right relationship with wealth and recognizing it as useful, but that it is not the point. Most people say that, especially at the end of their lives, but I think that you really embody that with the work that you are doing and thinking. What you bring is quite amazing.
Jeff: That is really gracious of you to say that and thank you very much. All that credit goes to all of these amazing people in Nebraska. Eighteen hundred volunteers serving as affiliated fund leaders for these various community-based efforts. It has become a very sizeable movement in terms of the number of people and the number of moving parts.
John: Jeff, if people want to follow up on this discussion how could they connect with you?
Jeff: You can just Google Nebraska Community Foundation and that will take you to our homepage. I am certainly happy to have offline conversations with those of you that are interested in following up on some of this, whether it be on how to use the transfer of wealth or how we have tried to figure out this varied decentralized system. It is a work in progress. The fun is that every day we are building something and helping to be a partner in creating an opportunity or solving a problem or whatever the case might be. It feels good to have the opportunity to wake up to this every morning.
Peter: Also, you call them volunteers, but what you are really doing is creating citizens. You are co-producing something because most volunteers are for someone else’s stake. It’s a co-production and co-creation in the way you talk about it. It’s what citizenship is about. So, thank you for that. We are pretty near the end oof our time today. Any final words that you have?
John: It makes me think over and over again that when you think about money as wealth what we are learning here is that if you are really concerned about community, it isn’t about grants: Money is the bait, not the fish. What’s going on here is a wonderful recognition that always keeping the relational aspect of community at the forefront is critical. How do we use money in such a way that it is a precipitant of wisdom and more intentional community life? We all know that there are places, often low-income places, that have become grant economies. There, in the philanthropy and government world, you can lead people to think you can’t do anything without a grant. So, grants go two ways. They can either be wonderfully concipient or they can be disabling in the long run. What we are hearing here is the way to think about wealth as a real community builder. It’s a wonderful thing that you have done, Jeff.
Jeff: Like I said, it’s hundreds and hundreds of people focusing on this and it’s an honor to be a part of it. So, thank you, John. John has been a wonderful inspiration and an additional content provider for us here in Nebraska for the last couple of years. I just want to thank you for doing all that.
John: It’s great to learn from you.
Putting Technology to Work in Building Community
Ed Everett
Ed Everett, former city manager and now city strategist at nextdoor.com, talks about how technology and social media can bring neighbors closer together and strengthen community ties.
Working in the Gap to Enhance Productivity
Tom Mosgaller
Tom Mosgaller talks about the necessity of having “gappers” aka people who work in the space between citizens and institutions.
The Economics of Compassion: Can This City Wipe Out Debt by 2019?
An Adventure into Generative Journalism & the New Narrative Arts
Health is a Neighborhood Issue
Jackie Reed
Quick Summary:
Jackie Reed embodies the community embedded in efforts such as Every Block a Village and Westside Health Authority. She explains how health has become “a focus on problems” rather than on the people having them, and how she has helped create a new kind of health that offers fulfillment.
For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work. All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.
Health Is a Neighborhood Issue:
Conversation with Jackie Reed
September 9, 2014
John McKnight: Welcome everybody. Today, we are joined by Jackie Reed. I’ve known Jackie for thirty or forty years and she is one of the great inventors in Chicago. Jackie, welcome and we are glad that you could be here.
I wonder if we could begin by having you give us a little background on your history and what led you to focus on the issue of health.
Jackie Reed: I grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, during a time when Natchez was segregated. I went to segregated schools and I lived in a segregated community, but we never felt poor. We had a sense of pride and dignity. Education was very important to our families. My mother had 11 years of education and my father couldn’t read or write, but they had a lot of hope and they had dreams for their children. So, we grew up with a strong sense of family and a strong sense of community. We grew up with a sense of dignity about our community and believing that we could do anything.
I am 64 years old now and so I am a child of the 50’s and 60’s. I came to Chicago when I was 18 because there weren’t many jobs down South. I was looking for a job to work that summer so I could save up money to go back to school. I was going to Alcorn State University, and it wasn’t a state school; it was a private college at the time. Then I met my husband, got married, and stayed here in Chicago. It was quite a big difference here because the people had more. The people had more, but they didn’t have a sense of sacrificing and demanding more out of themselves. It seemed to me that people were into living in the moment and having a good time. Now don’t get me wrong because I liked it. All of sudden I didn’t have to worry about school and sacrifices. I could go partying on Saturday nights and work and get paid. The guys had more money and cars. So, we could have a good time. I had a sense of freedom, but there was always something in me that said I had to prepare for my future. I had to help somebody.
In growing up in the South, we had always seen people helping each other. If somebody had chickens, then everybody had eggs. People had gardens and people could eat out of each other’s gardens. I remember my Daddy raised hogs in the country and when he would bring a hog back, we would cut that hog up and take some to our neighbors. We would take a leg to this neighbor or a shoulder to that neighbor. By the time we finished giving that hog away we only had a little bit of that hog for ourselves.
This was the way people lived and we came to understand that what people thought about us was very important. We had hope and we had a community and we had a future. They did the usual things and got into each other’s business and so forth, but people really cared about each other.
These are the values that I grew up with and the values that I came to Chicago with. This was at the time when they actually did outreach to find people who wanted to get on welfare So, people in the neighborhood would say that you could go down to the Welfare Office and tell them that you are not married and you can get a welfare check and so forth.A lot of people did that. They were working and they got dressed and went out on Friday nights and they spent money. They used bad language on the streets and they didn’t care if children were there or not.
So, I saw a breakdown of the values and the morals of the people grew up with. I know that these people had grown up with families from Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas just as I had, but somehow they did not have the same sense of identity and purpose and drive for that community that we had. I think that part of it was we had a clear sense of what we had to do for ourselves because the community, the white community, the power structures in the South, were so organized against the Civil Rights Movement and in Chicago it was very different. You really couldn’t tell because the Aldermen were Black and the Mayor was Mr. Daley. There was a sense that he was going to take care of you in some kind of way. There was a different level of awareness about the political structures and what was possible.
I liked Chicago and moved to the West Side. I started to work in factories, I went to school, and I paid my own tuition. I didn’t know anything about getting money to help pay tuition. I was told that I wouldn’t do well in school because I had gone to segregated schools but I didn’t find the University of Illinois to be particularly challenging. It was fine, but I didn’t feel threatened or somehow inferior there, and I did real well. I finished my degree in sociology and then I went to the University of Chicago, later on. Just basically having babies along the way (I have four children), struggling, paying bills, and trying to feel, What is my purpose, what is my sense and what can I contribute?
John: Somehow you got into the health field. Can you tell us about that?
Jackie: I started out of my church at Bethel. They were looking for a director. I had worked in practically every area of social work and I was now in the church. I had become pretty famous in the church for my social work; I had been working with children needing adoptive homes and ended up placing more children in adoptive homes than any other social worker in the state. I was finding Black families for Black children.
So, Bethel wanted me to consider being the director and so I became director of a holistic health center. John, when I was director of the health center, I was also a social worker for the pastoral counseling ministry. Many of the people who came into the health center really didn’t come with a lot of health problems. They came in with a lot of community and social problems. Like the woman who had a son who was staying at home; he was on drugs and he was stealing all the baby’s formula and selling it, or the mother whose girl is pregnant by her mother’s boyfriend. We saw a breakdown in families. The intervention was more social than medical.
So, we thought to ourselves, What is health? How do we go about creating health in this community? That was one of the things that plagued me. I went to the universities to try to get them to partner with us. One of the universities came out and they would look at what I would call the flavor of the month, such as all these girls having babies and that is one of the reasons that you have family problems, too many teenagers having babies. So, what we need to do is have more clinics in the schools that can dispense birth control.
So, when you go back to the neighborhood the neighborhood people say that is not going to work. They would say that this is giving girls permission to have sex and this is basically legitimizing their behavior and not teaching them to restrain their behavior. Not teaching young men to restrain their behavior. Where are the values and the morals? We want to teach our young people rather than just giving them a pill.
Then you have the problem of another flavor of the month, of course, which was infant mortality. We have high infant mortality –– more babies are dying in Chicago than in Costa Rica. What are we going to do about that? We will do outreach to get that young mother into the clinics. If we can get that mother into the clinics during the first trimester of her pregnancy, the babies won’t die. Then it didn’t become about the mother; it became about her womb. How can we get this womb to the doctor’s office? It was not a focus on people; it became a focus on the problems. They were going to find a quick fix for the problems, but people are more complex than a womb or they are more complex than their sexuality.
Anytime we would do something the politicians would not necessarily listen to us, because if you had a problem with drugs and drug abuse in a neighborhood, the people say we need to have more drug treatments and have something for these young men to do. Politicians would say, We are going to lock them up. So, you lock up the people on drugs. You take the womb to the hospitals so that they can be taken care of. Everything is about a problem and something that we can quick fix it with the next flavor of the month.
I just got fed up with it because people began to look for this outside quick fix to come in here and dope us up or lock us up or something. People lost their sense of what we can do for ourselves. Because the quick fix was something that was based on research, and because it was something that was more legitimate than my little idea, people lost their confidence and their ability to make a difference in their own community. They would go in there and they would listen to what a researcher had to say. The researcher would give them some incentive for coming: You come to this thing and you’re pregnant, we are going to give you some Pampers or we are going to give you a baby bed. Things like that.
That way is not really respecting people. People need respect. People need to maintain a sense of dignity and a sense that they themselves have the solution. So, I left that organization after about four years and I said, The hell with this. Every time we tried to get some program going, people would say that’s not what we need. So, let’s go hear what the people say and then, based on what the people say, we are going to put a strategy around that and work on what the people say.
That is how we started the Westside Health Authority. We say we are going to use the ideas of the people here and we are going to use their capacity to make a difference in their community. We are not going to get wrapped up in organizational interests because then you have to worry about big money and interests. We want to be an organization that people would use. We wanted to be able to get people’s ideas traversed from one point to the next point. We want to build their capacity up to care for work in their community and to make change in their own community. That’s how we really got started with the Westside Health Authority.
John: I was just wondering about the name Westside Health Authority. When they hear something called an authority, most people would think governmental. You didn’t call it the Westside Health Organization. Can you tell us why you chose the word “authority”?
Jackie: We believe that the people really are the authority on what needs to happen.
I mean, look at all the professionals and all the dollars that have been spent on the west side of Chicago, just to give you an example, in health care. The program that was supposed to reduce infant mortality, I think, had somewhere near 30 million dollars spent over a period of ten years. Then you have all the hospitals; you have five hospitals alone that probably had spent somewhere around quarter of billion dollars a year in health care and all people are doing is getting sicker and sicker.
So, we believe that the people themselves really are the authority on what needs to happen in the community. We believe that if we listen to the people and follow what they and give them an opportunity to use their ideas and to use their capacities, we would create health in a community.
Peter Block: Jackie, what you are saying is mesmerizing and thank you. What I’m interested in is what did the people say?
Jackie: We went out and knocked on doors. We got a grant from the MacArthur Foundation; they took a chance on us. I actually had gone to the MacArthur Foundation and asked them for some money to hire some people from the community so they could go out into the neighborhood. We asked people, What is health and what is working in the community? We wanted to build on that rather than on what’s not working. The MacArthur Foundation said that we had to go the university and get somebody from the university to help us.
I went to the university and I told them that we are the “authority” –– we are the boss, and if they were willing to work for us then we would give them part of our grant. They were willing. I had graduated from the university and had some friends there. We hired a woman from the university to come and work with us. She started to work with us around 1990 and she just retired, actually about six months ago; she ended up quitting the university and working for us.
So, we asked the questions in the community. We trained about 15 people from the neighborhood to go out and ask their neighbors, What did they think would work in the community? What is health and how can we make the neighborhood healthier? The people said, Well, I really don’t know anything about health, but I wish that we could do something about those gunshots behind my garage on Saturday nights. So, we asked them, What can we do about the gunshots? And they said, You can’t do anything about the gunshots unless you do something about jobs. These young people are not like us when we were kids and nobody had money. We were satisfied to go outside with no money and be ok, and now you see television and everything is about money. The kids don’t feel like they are worth anything if they don’t have any money and so we have to create some jobs for them.
Then somebody else would say, Well, you can’t create jobs unless you have some businesses. So, we need more businesses right here in our neighborhood. We have to go to Oak Park for everything we buy or to some other neighborhood. We don’t have our own economy right here in our neighborhood. Then somebody else would say, Well, you just can’t build a community and have a healthy community just because you have kids or you have a few jobs. Because if you don’t teach morals and values, if you don’t have that as your foundation, the jobs will leave and the businesses will dry up.
So, we are just listening to what people are saying. We looked at what we had and what we had was four hospitals in that neighborhood. These four hospitals were also around the table with us because they had their own organizational interest. They were competing for patients. We had the community’s ear and voice they wanted to make sure that they were plugged into us. So, we used that leverage with those hospitals, and we worked with five schools and those hospitals to help to get 291 young people into internships. Now, the hospitals will provide a precept for young people to go there, and they will learn and work in the pharmacy and they will work in food service and they will work in the gift shop and in the library and they would work going around visiting patients and taking books and they worked in the accounting office. So, they learned all kinds of skills.
These young people saw themselves differently. They began to have hope and their grades improved. The families began to brag about what their sons were doing. They weren’t gangbanging and not hanging out as much. They were paid to do this because many of these young people have the experience that their mamas or their aunties taking care of them are on kidney dialysis and then the phone service would be shut off, but they had to have a phone because that is their lifeline connection. So, the money that we were able to raise for them through the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development, which is a right way for the mayor to spend the money, was a good thing for Chicago to do. We were able to get them stipends and they could actually go to work. We got the community college to come in and train them on various kinds of skills so that they could actually learn, not only from precepts, but they could also have some formal training from Malcolm X Community College, Wright Junior College, and other colleges that came in.
Our mission was to go out of business. We were always looking at ways that we could make a difference in terms of public policies and getting this thing implemented citywide. So, in three or four years, we had gotten 291 young people into paid internships and they ended up in Walgreens to train them in pharmacy and we built partnerships for them. The city of Chicago liked the project, and the public school hired our staff and took over the project which they called the Schools to Work Project. Our staff is still working there.
The people said, Schools and businesses. How do you build businesses in these neighborhoods? We have been trying to do that forever, and we were able to get these same hospitals to tell us who supplies their lights and who presses their sheets and who provides the catfish for the trays. Then we were able to get businesses in neighborhoods to supply those things. The real beauty of our work is the entrepreneur and we got ma and pa paint companies out of basements to paint the kitchen for Loretto Hospital and we got MK Cleaners to do the cubicle curtains for West Suburban Hospital. We were able to help these companies to get 3 million dollars over a period of three and half, four years. This became a model for the Empowerment Zone when the Empowerment Zone legislation was passed, and we worked with the city to put more together and do more of that.
Then the third thing, the big thing and the real foundation of our work, is called Every Block a Village. You can get businesses created when you have a lot of people who want business and you can help them clean up their portfolios and introduce them to the procurement offices at the hospitals. But how do you get people to change their values and morals? How do you get people willing to commit themselves to helping their neighbors on things they will not get paid for? Maybe what we can do is to find a citizen leader on every block and then try to turn every block into its own village. Maybe, on this one little block we could get the neighbors connected to each other and understand each other’s needs, and then maybe we could turn this block around. Maybe, they would know who their kids are and then tie that block into another block.
So, we organized blocks, and we called the effort Every Block a Village. We brought people together on these blocks every month. They began to talk about their blocks, and they began to talk about their children and about their vision. They remembered the way it was when they were in Mississippi and Alabama. We built relationships with these folks. Then we began to ritualize these relationships. They would take each other soup. They would take each other to the store. They would go to the pharmacy for a sick neighbor. We began to ritualize; we would bring them together for Thanksgiving; we would give potlucks and everybody would bring a pot. They were smiling and grinning with each other and their children would be smiling and grinning. So, when you saw the children on the street acting up, you could say, You shouldn’t be doing that, and you are not afraid of that kid anymore. When you saw some kids hanging out in front of your house, you are not calling the police saying that they are drug dealers; you know those kids in front of your house. They just don’t have anyplace to go. You can ask, What are you doing out here?
So, you are building relationships with your neighbors. You are establishing rituals and patterns for celebrating each other. You are feeling good. People would say, I was sick before this; I had this terrible disease and I didn’t feel like coming out to this meeting, but I sure feel better now. They feel a sense of satisfaction and a fulfillment from giving their gifts, and that is what I call health.
Health is a satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment because you have a purpose for living and that purpose propels you to do something, to give to somebody, and that makes you want to do more. The more money you get the more you want to share. The better you feel the more you go out there and not only work in your garden but go over to your neighbor’s yard and cut their grass. So, it’s a sense of being fulfilled and I think that when people are on the dependency end of it, they lose their sense of purpose and they lose their sense of their destiny. The biggest health problem we have in our neighborhood, particularly among our youth, and it is hopelessness.
I will stop there and I’m sorry, I just get going.
John: Jackie, one other thing. I know that when I was attending meetings of the citizen leaders of Every Block a Village, you always started with a prayer. Various citizen leaders would lead a prayer to begin and also to end the meeting. Then one time I remember that you and I went and interviewed some of those citizen leaders in their homes. One of the things that became very clear there was that they saw the base of what they were doing as an expression of their faith. Over and over again, that’s what we heard. I was wondering if you could talk about the historic church and the question of faith and how that gets manifested at the block level and the organization.
Jackie: When we first started Every Block a Village, we had people in the neighborhood who were Muslims and people who were Christians. Also, we had staff who were Jews and staff who were Muslims and staff who had no faith, but we had to be who we were. We do not discriminate. They are all very lovely people and they have all made tremendous contributions.
The idea here is that you have to believe that God is in charge and that God is with you when you are trying to help other people. This notion is about the spirit and you know the spirit is about loving other people. You can’t have love unless you are in relationship with other people. I mean to have the spirit and not be in a relationship with other people is like having eyes, but keeping them closed. It is the beauty of the spirit to be shared and to share your life with someone else and that makes you better and makes them better.
I think that everybody knew that. Most of the people are Christians. They don’t go to the same church. Most of them go to different churches, but they express their love for God by how they love their neighbors. That is very Christian, and I think very Islamic, too, that you love God by loving people. You exhibit your love for God by the way you help other people. We always emphasize the fact that people had to give of themselves, and it is in the giving of yourselves that you really do benefit the most. The person who gives benefits the most. Of course, that is also scripture. Jesus says that it is more blessed to give than to receive. By the giving you receive. It is when you keep yourself and when you hold on to your stuff that your life drains away and you become fearful, and you become hopeless. When you give yourself to other people, even if they are unlovable, you are doing it because of God. You give people a chance because you love God. It is a spiritual thing. It is a spiritual principle.
Peter: I have one more question. Tell me how you launched the block leaders and what they did in their early days?
Jackie: In order to really connect somebody with someone else, and to call them a citizen leader, we had to give them the name. The name went on before they were actually providing leadership.
We had some clear expectations for them. The expectations included them getting to know who was on their block. They also had to come to regular meetings and they had to bring somebody to the meetings with them. They had to represent their block at the meeting and, f example, someone would say, My name is Arlene Huntley from the 5400 block of West Haddon. She would give a block report. When something would happen, or there was some project going on, let’s say, October is coming up –– every October we would have Oktoberfest. We didn’t want to get into people’s ideas about Halloween so we would have Oktoberfest and the people would come and they would bring gifts for the children. They would have apple-bobbing and activities like that in the park. They would supervise it all. They would basically plan what they were going to do at Oktoberfest. They would get flyers out on their block about Oktoberfest.
If we needed to have people teaching, for example, about what health was in the neighborhood, we trained some of the citizen leaders to actually go down to Cook County and talk to the doctors. All of this was building their capacity as a leader, not only among their neighbors, but also with professionals because professionals are a part of the community, too. Of course, if they went down to County and provided training and then County had to pay them consultant fees for coming down there. They learned the language of the medical profession:, primary care, ambulatory care, and whatever else. They were also responsible for knowing who was sick on their block. They would make sure that a card got out and they would bring a card to an Every Block a Village meeting and 50 people would sign the card so that people felt connected to each other, even people who were not necessarily on people’s blocks.
Maggie Rogers: We have a question in the chat from Mac Johnson, one of our friends in Cincinnati. He asks, Can you share what works to help nonprofits’ staff to shift to ABCD’s approach of citizen versus client.
Jackie: That was one of the hardest jobs that I had to do. We had actually gotten funding to do the ABCD model, but all the people we hired wanted to be helpers. They wanted to go out and help people. It was difficult to get them to understand their job was to go out and organize helpers from the community. It takes a certain kind of organizer. I just got very, very fortunate to get somebody who was from Mississippi who had organized in the Civil Rights Movement, and they knew how to go out and find people to organize. They didn’t go out to do the helping; they were actually successful in doing the organizing. He has been with me, no matter where I go, he has been with me for about 30 years. He was very instrumental and knew how to go out and mobilize people.
What we try to do is to get people to go out to the community. They have to, first, not to go out and see who has needs, and see who is sick or to see who needs more food. They have to go out and bring people into the meetings. They have to let people know how much they wan these folks to come to this meeting. They have to build a relationship first. A lot of times you knock on somebody’s door and they will ask you, Why aren’t you guys doing more about these drugs in the neighborhood and why aren’t you doing something about schools in the neighborhood? I’ve got a mama here that’s sick and she can’t get her medical card, and why can’t you help me get her medical card?
So, you have to listen to all of that and you have have real authentic concern for people and show it, but you also have to keep your vision ahead of you and then you have to have a place to come back to and to debrief about your visit. So, when you come back you have to say to people, What did you learn? Then they talk about the needs and then I will start saying things like, Ok, that’s fine, but what are the assets? Sometimes people would say that we need to be doing more to help these people. Then you say, How are we going to help them?
So, you have to listen, and it is a process by which they get transformed. It doesn’t happen overnight because people have been trained in this dependency role to need help. It is very difficult to get people to see themselves as the help. That is why you have these meetings, and you have to get one or two people who are the strong leaders to have a voice that keeps repeating it.
I would like to share a story with you about one of the things that happened that blew my mind. We had a lady by the name of Diane Scott. We had organized people in the neighborhood to be on a community health board for Cook County Clinic when they came into the neighborhood. These ladies would go to the meetings, and they would come back and say the Clinic’s space is too small and we need to have another clinic built. So, one lady, Ms. Scott, says, I think we ought to build a clinic. Our children, every day, went to schools where they don’t have books and teachers who are not there to really teach them. They have to listen to the gang talk and walk through gang territory and be threatened.
In the meantime, we are in our comfort zone and we need to build a facility here; they need to see something. She organized a group of the citizen leaders on the different blocks. The women got together for catfish dinners. The County says, If you build a building will you rent it? They said yes, and County didn’t have any real clue that we were actually going to build it, and I didn’t either. We had never done it before. These ladies started selling catfish dinners. The men would come in too. I men didn’t fry fish, but they took orders and they would take catfish dinners downtown to different office buildings every Friday. They got fish donated from the fish markets in the neighborhood and they got cornmeal from Jim’s Grocery Store on the corner. They ended up raising about $60,000 from catfish dinners.
So, it was serious then. They had made a believer out of me, and they had made believers out of themselves. I said to the foundation that we had $60,000 and County said that if we built them a building they would rent it to us. So, was the foundation going to help? They said yes, and how much is it going to cost? We said, Well, we have this consultant pro bono who says it is going to cost somewhere around 4.5 million dollars. They said, If you raise the four million, we will give you $500,000. Then we went to another foundation and said that Foundation X is going to give us $500,000; what are you going to do?They said we will give you $300,000.
So, it went on and on and then the Empowerment Zone money became available, and we went down to the Empowerment Zone Board. All the ladies went there in the morning and asked for 3.5 million dollars. You have to go before a group of people and the people have to decide. The audience was packed and the audience could be for you or against you. So, the whole neighborhood went down there and there wasn’t any room for anybody else. When they started voting on what to do with the money, we ended up with 2.5 million dollars.
Then the state said if we were raising that kind of money then they were going to give us a million dollars. Thay’s the way we raised the money to build this building. County signed the contract to rent the space. Then we had to actually build a building. We didn’t know anything about contracts and bidding out and all of that. We hired a guy to help us. The neighborhood people said to us, We sold catfish dinners. We do not want to see all these other folks coming into our neighborhood doing this work. This has to be our work and our young people have to do this work. So, we are going to make this a Black project from the community.
We had a young guy who had a trucking company. He got so excited about this project that he got the boys who were out on the corner training bulldogs on Sunday mornings to come work for him. He put hard hats on them. He put them on crane machines and had them working on digging a hole. He had about fifteen of them. More than he needed, but he was giving them an opportunity. Of course, they didn’t have union cards, so the union came out and said they were going to stop us from working.Then the community came out and said, You will not do that. The union said, Pay for one of the guys and you can continue to work. So, we were able to have our people learning and feeling good about this work. After that we had R.S. Scott, a black concrete guy, come in and lay the foundation and he brought his workers with him. People who didn’t have an opportunity to bid on the big contracts could bid on our contracts and they could actually get the contracts.
We ended up contracting out 87% of the contracts to local people. Because we had to finish the project, and some of these people had various levels of skills, we ended up with 55% of the contractors being able to finish this job. I learned that there are a lot of reasons that people don’t make it and all they need is a little help. Sometimes all they need is a little encouragement and for somebody to keep at it and to provide that opportunity for them. When that job was being built, the neighborhood would come up to the site and just look in and see all these Black boys down in that hole. I would get so many phone calls from people saying, I can’t believe that we are really doing this. There was a renewal of hope that we can do things in our own neighborhood. We can raise money. We can put people back to work. We can improve our schools.
So, that is the real lesson that we learned about when we do things for ourselves, when we mobilize our own assets. We could not have done that if those women had not sold catfish dinners. It was better to start with what they had and build on that than to start with money given to us by a grant. It’s that for most of what we do and the little bit that we have, the people have to sow that. The Bible says that God gives seed to the sower and so whoever sows that seed gets more seed. Your skills and gifts are built by you using them. If you don’t use them and you are waiting for someone else, you are the most frustrated and unhealthy person in the world.
So, we have to use our gifts. We have to use our capacities because we build capacity by using our capacity. That is what people on the block have to begin to learn. Unfortunately, the media, the stereotypes that everybody communicates to us in our community, is that we are deficient and that we are weak. We don’t know and we need to have more education. People have common sense, and these are the same people who built this city and who built this country. People didn’t have education. They were ordinary people with ordinary gifts and mobilizing those gifts because they had a vision.
John: Great, great.
Bob (caller): Hello, Jackie and hello everybody. I’ve enjoyed your talk. I’m just curious about something, Jackie. Did you find that people in the South had a greater willingness amongst them to help their neighbors than you find in Chicago or is it about the same?
Jackie: I think at the time it was a greater willingness to help because you had a focused enemy, if you will. There was the Ku Klux Klan as the target enemy that mobilized people. In Chicago, there was no target enemy. There were good people and there were bad people. There were good people and bad people in the South, always, as well. People were much more open about their feelings about Black folks at that time. Here it was not as clear. People felt that they had more, and they didn’t have to mobilize as much as down there.
It’s no different now. In the South now, and in Chicago now, I think that you have the breakdown of community across the board. I mean the breakdown of families in Chicago and in Mississippi. You have crime everywhere. People are afraid. In Chicago people are afraid and down South people are afraid. So, this fear is actually, I think, the very root of violence in our community. People always just say violence is a result of not having money or these kids are trying to make money here or through gang activities, that sort of thing. Really and truly, I have learned that kids that are carrying guns because they are afraid that they are going to be shot up by other kids. The gangs would leave drugs, but they would have to have protection.
We were not afraid, even with the Ku Klux Klan in the South, because we had family and we had community and we had hope and we had church and we had a future presented to us. We had a destiny to fulfill. We were all made to feel very important to changing this community. We were very important to changing racism in America. We were change agents. Now, with the dependency kind of attitude you are waiting for change to happen to you or for you. When I was a child we had many Black leaders. Even as a grown-up, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, you had a lot of black leaders. Now, you look for the Black leadership and you don’t see them. You see preachers every once in a while, but people are so bogged down with their own organizational interests that you have to ask, Where is the community and where is the heart of the community? We were seeing that there was a real breakdown in community because people have embraced the whole dependency model, the professional model and needing service model, and it is killing us, actually.
Peter: I have a question. How does the economic or local business-owned landscape look now in the neighborhood? The story about having raised the money and 80% local to build the building. Describe the economic landscape some 20 plus years later?
Jackie: I would say it’s dire. I think that it has continued to bottom out. Unfortunately, it started probably in the 80’s with the loss of 145,000 manufacturing jobs in the Austin community alone. Austin was a heavy manufacturing area. With manufacturing leaving and businesses like restaurants and dry cleaners and other businesses that support manufacturing leaving the community, it has been piecemeal all the way. You have a few retail stores that have opened up. Of course, Walgreens is there and CVS and some fast-food restaurants. Those jobs are there and those kinds of businesses are there. You still have the liquor stores, but by and large, unfortunately, not a lot going on in terms of business.
Peter: Have you tried things to launch and support and fund locally owned businesses? What you are describing is everywhere. Outside-owned and money leaving the neighborhood.
Jackie: I talked about the business that we organized. We organized businesses to have contracts with people and so there were a lot of businesses coming in with various levels of capacity. That was one of the areas that sort of got spun out. I think that not for profit organizations try to do a good job –– and this is going to sound hypercritical –– but I didn’t think we should last more than five years. I wanted us to go out of business because you have to get into organizational interests if you are going to stay in business. As long as we could work in the community’s interest then I thought we could stay. At some point you have to try to figure out how you are going to survive and how you are going to pay your bills and the organization has to get bigger. It was something I didn’t want to get into.
So, the business network was spun out and another group began to do business networking. They organized a big roundtable with meetings with politicians about business development. The politicians brought various businesses to the neighborhood, but it didn’t really improve the neighborhood situation. It really has to be, I think, looking at to what degree you can create sustainable kinds of income in that neighborhood where it can turn over and over. So, you have Walgreens in there but the grocery stores are not there. A grocery store is a business that perhaps could have other kinds of links to improvement in the neighborhood. It has just not worked out. It is a difficult job to do. It takes almost full focus to do that.
We were working on Every Block a Village and working on building our health facility. We tried to stay in health because when you have an organization in a neighborhood people will take you down if you try to get into schools because your area is health. They say, We work in the schools. You have other organizations doing work in schools, and you don’t want to get into that fight because it is distracting and wearing on you.
Peter: Tough. It is amazing to listen to you, Jackie. We are so grateful. There is a realism mixed with hope. I think the way to create a local economy, perhaps, is with co-operatives and it’s a tough nut to crack. To bring outside businesses in doesn’t really solve the problem.
John, any questions or thoughts?
John: Well, one thing I know that is currently going on with the Authority is the housing development process. That is key to providing local jobs.
Jackie: Two years ago, we started to look at ways that we could take some of the houses in the neighborhood that had been abandoned as a result of foreclosure. People on these blocks were having a difficult time holding on to their equity in their houses. The abandoned houses were being neglected terribly by the banks. They were being broken into. We came up with the notion that we would do 100 men and 100 homes. These homes would be renovated by people in the neighborhood and by local businesses. These homes then would be sold to local people.
That is one of the things we started doing, as well as fundraising. So far, we have done about 17 homes and at least 15 have been sold. If they haven’t been sold, they have been leased. It is really wonderful because schoolteachers from the neighborhood now live in the neighborhood. They were able to go on that block and help stabilize those blocks. We were able to start Every Block a Village on some of those blocks.
We are having an Every Block a Village meeting tonight and we bring people out to give them a bigger vision. Just trying to bring people who have resources back to the community and give them a good place to live and at a cost that they could afford. They would be able to get a great house that they would not be able to buy in some suburb. Then you have people who have values, people that have education and people who can contribute not only in terms of paying for their house and paying taxes on their house, but also serve as advocates with the politician for better schools and for more opportunities in the neighborhoods. You have better streets and people who pick up the garbage and pick up the trees, who make sure that the alleys are clean and there are activities in the park district.
Some of the things that they have been going on in Every Block a Village lately have been the demand that the fees be lowered at the park districts because kids can’t come because they cannot afford the fees. If they don’t pay the fee, they can’t participate in the park district. Also they are insisting that they have better bus transportation because if we have to leave the community to go get a job, we must insist that buses not just run in the daytime but also at night as some people work the 11 pm shifts.
These are some of the policy kinds of things these people are able to espouse. Then it has been a wonderful thing, and we have also raised money towards supporting that. I think we have raised somewhere around $400,000 and all of this money has been spent in neighborhoods and on neighborhood contracts and neighborhood folks working. People who were once in jail and coming out of jail have to come to these meetings so they will be a part of the community. It’s not just a job, but also a part of the community. It is part of what we require from them.
John: One of the things that strikes me as especially significant about everything that you are saying about the Westside Health Authority and the EBV is that you are bringing people together to perform two functions. One, to be advocates for better transportation, for instance. Also, to be involved in neighboring in ways that brings new life to people and the young people in the community. So, you have a double vision. So many organizations just have a view of advocacy, but you have been able to combine advocacy and community building in the same organization and that has always impressed me as being especially important. A lot of other organizations could learn a lot from you about how you make both those things happen.
Peter: We are nearing the end of the hour and we are so grateful to have you on this call. Jackie, any final things that you would like to say?.
Jackie: I am very grateful for John’s work and I have to say that it came to life for me when someone asked that question about how you get people to stop seeing themselves as someone who goes out to help someone with needs instead of going out to organize the help. So, that has been in the back of my mind all along. I’m just very grateful for the work that John has done and you, as well, Peter. It really began to help me think this way. I think that we have to help other people to think this way.
It is hard because as a Black woman so many times you don’t want to get caught in a conservative mind and say that these folks are victims, and they are going to be victims and leave them alone and so forth. It was not always the case. I had a young man who went out and did some outreach on the blocks. He’s about 30, and has been in jail about four times. I put him out there and he had been mentored by me. So, we paid him to go out and do some surveys, and he came back and said that the people who are 55 to 65 years old are the people on the block that are picking up paper. They are still trying to help their neighbors. They are really hopeful, and they are really helpful. The people between the ages of 45 to 55, he said, they are hopeful, but they are less helpful. He said those that are 30 are selfish. He said they think of themselves, and they are buying their cars and their jewelry and they are competitive with their neighbors. Those under 30 are not hopeful; they are hopeless and they are fearful. He said, I don’t know how we are going to change that. And he is 30. He is somebody in the church now. He is somebody who never went to church and now he is bringing his folks to church.
The change that we have to have is not change that can come from the outside, and it is not even outside of our people. It is the inside, and we have to change the heart. That is the only change that is sustainable. That is the change to help us all to grow because when you have a passion for something, even though your leg hurts and you have arthritis, you still get up and move because you have a passion for doing that. When you do it you feel better. You feel healthier and feel more satisfied. That is health and that is being healthy. That is satisfaction and fulfillment from giving your gifts to contribute to society. When you cannot do that, then we are not in a healthy society.
Innovative Funding for Citizen-Initiated Change
Janis Foster Richardson
Janis Foster Richardson explains the program Grassroots Grantmakers, which is a ‘network’ of people that are willing to provide funding to initiatives that create community. She looks at what motivates people to bond together, and reveals perhaps surprising results of what has and has not gotten desired results.
Heart Surgeon Leads the Way
Quick Summary:
Doctors Paul Uhlig and Ellen Raboin talk about the flaws in our current healthcare system: mainly how the practice of medicine does not do enough to build community for patients in hospitals. They talk about Relational Infrastructure.
For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work. All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.
Full Transcript:
Heart Surgeon Leads the Way Toward Collaborative Health Care
Conversation with Paul Uhlig, MD, and W. Ellen Raboin
February 11, 2014
Peter Block: Here’s the context of why I am excited about what Paul and Ellen are doing. There is great conversation in this world about health care reform and if you look at most of it, it is really about better disease management, better health care management. Mostly about how to automate the process, how to lower the costs, increase speed, and make it more convenient. And to me that’s not really reform, and I thought it was until I met Paul several years ago.
What Paul represents is to me the real reform. which is to change my relationship with my own health and with the health care professional. What’s exciting about what Paul and Ellen have done is that they have invited us to change the relationship we have with our own health and the people around us and treat health as social phenomenon, not a medical problem to be solved.
So, I’m excited, Paul, and I don’t quite know how you would like to begin. You both have written a book. Maybe you could give us a little introduction about what’s exciting to you now about what you are in the process of writing about and creating.
Paul Uhlig: Let me begin by thanking you and John and Maggie and Leslie and the listening audience for the privilege of having the two of us with you today. I’ve long been an admirer of your work. The audience may or may not know, but you and I had an opportunity to cross paths in Cincinnati several years ago, and we worked side by side a little in health care. It was a tremendous experience and I’m so grateful for continued friendship. Ellen and I bring complementary perspectives and maybe I will let her begin from this point. Ellen, I could I pass on to you?
Ellen Raboin: Yes, and again thank you for having us here.
I met Paul in a cultural workshop after he had done some wonderful things in a hospital I’m in where the culture had chewed him up and spit him out. What he was talking about was building community in the hospital and what that means. I like the way Peter put it that this as a social phenomenon that was going on. That was ten years ago and we never stopped talking and thinking about how we build a healing environment where people can relate in new ways. It turns out that relating in new ways is the way that you create new ways of relating. It’s been an adventure. Paul?
Paul: The work that we are focusing on is in hospitals and I say right from the very beginning that the interaction in a hospital is only a very small part of where health is created as we live and work together. That’s true for health in general and it is also true for the way that we respond and recover and heal from an episode of illness. Yet, an entire lifetime can be lived in those few days of a hospital stay for someone who is seriously ill and for their families and the people who are working together to care for them.
What’s very interesting to me and, framing a little bit of our book, is a transformation that’s occurring that is not limited only to health care. It’s a much deeper transformation in society. I certainly have been a party to that in the years of my career in health care. We all know every day that conversations are happening in our country about health reform, and I don’t really have a lot of deep passion about that one way or another. Whether we are Democrat or Republican or what we think of health care reform, legislation is smaller on my list of concerns.
Just step back a little and look at some very broad changes that are happening in health care. I’m a physician and I’m trained very well to do the things that I do, so it’s interesting to step back and look at that training and the work that the physicians, the nurses, social workers, pharmacists, and all the health professions do and how we are trained.
There’s basically a model that we work under that tends to abstract the person away, to focus on the disease, to focus on the scientific treatment of that; that’s wonderful and I don’t want to take anything away from that. But along the way as that model has been applied, for decades now, some things, some really important things have become off-center or lost. It’s interesting to just to reflect about some of the trajectory of this way of working in health care.
When we step back and look at health care we see a huge part of our society, with some of the very finest people that society has, who are very well trained, who are very responsible and working very hard every day across the country and the world. Yet, when we step back and see the results of that in terms of costs that are growing at an unsustainable rate, quality that is surprisingly uneven and not what we would wish it to be, people that really cannot open doors to heath care in a way that all of us wish that we could. The experiences of giving and receiving care is something that should be one of the most extraordinary of human interactions yet they are often leaving people feeling alienated, exhausted, discouraged, scared instead of restored anew.
So, my journey began by trying to understand how can it be that such good people work so hard and produce such less than optimum results for society? As I began to understand this, it was really fascinating to learn the history of these models that we work in. They have a birth date in the late 1800’s and a place of birth: John Hopkins Medical School, which was founded in 1893, and where there was a small core faculty of radical and revolutionary pioneers who became together at that time and basically broached this model of care.
There was another powerful event in history, which occurred in 1910, when Abraham Flexner, who studied the state of education and practice in the United States in health care wrote a scathing report in which he said there is so much that needs to be done, but there is this model, this Hopkins model, that prevents us from doing it.
It was a crystallization, not only in the United States, but also across the entire world, around these ways of working. The ways the hospitals are organized. The way the practitioners do their work. The underlying thought processes used, and the resources that are used, in trying to help people in times of need. We had 50 or 75 years of amazing benefits from that and my specialty is one of those, cardiothoracic surgery, which did not exist at that time, and there are so many things that can be done for people. Yet, increasingly those ways of working are no longer bringing us benefits and we have outgrown these methods. We have extended capabilities and have begun to fractalize what we do so much that the human core process is often lost and with that tremendous opportunities have arisen for trying to do things right.
So, our work is really about pathways to a new future. I’m increasingly certain that we are at a fascinating time in health care. A once in a hundred or a hundred-and twenty-year moment where a paradigm is being completely rewritten. One of those early pioneers, so long ago, was a very revered figure in health care and his name is William Osler. He gave a commencement address in about 1916 to a medical school class. It was called to my attention by a person I admire very much, a man named Brent James, who is a real pioneer in transforming health care practice in the Salt Lake City area. He found this talk and it is incredible.
Osler begins by saying, Congratulations. This is such a milestone in your life. You are about to go into your practice and you are going to do extraordinary things and you are going to have wonderful lives. And then he paused and said, But you know I actually feel sorry for you because you will never be able to experience the unbelievable thrills, the highs, the lows of creating a new way of working in health care as we did. And this transformation had nearly finished by the time that he gave this talk. And it was so poignant because for decades after that he would have had to give that same talk, but not today. Today he would probably be there with his bright eyes and say it’s come back again. It falls to your generation to create this new world of health care.
And that’s what I really feel at this moment. Now, like all true innovations, what this future is going to be is something we do not fully see yet. It’s pathways that we can see. Now what I was going to say is these pathways are true collaborative practices and active engagements of patients and physicians.
Peter: Could you make it more concrete for us and give us some examples of the transformation?
Paul: Let’s think about my friend Mary. Mary is a nursing educator and she is a maternal child nurse. About 13 years ago her mother and father were in a terrible car accident. They were going out to dinner with another couple and another driver collided with them head on. The two friends of the family were killed at the scene. Mary’s mother was very seriously injured with a head injury. Her father, who was the least healthy, she said, was the least injured. Over the next 30 days, Mary and her family helped care for her mother in what proved to be the last month of her mother’s life. The challenges that she encountered began when she first came to the hospital. Her parents’ pastor notified her that an accident had happened and she was there at the emergency room as a nurse and as a daughter and could not be allowed into the room to see her mother because they had not positively identified her mother even though Mary said, That is my mother. It took a phone call to the sheriff to release the names to even allow her to go in.
Over the next month her mother was transferred five different times. Mary spoke to multiple people who were trying very hard, working very well, trying to care for her mother, and yet, she said with each transfer a little a bit of her mother’s history was lost. She said if she had not been there, the ability to communicate and to connect between what one group thought and what another group thought, or even from one shift to another shift, was completely missing. Eventually her mother died. Probably her mother would have died anyway, but Mary was just grieving over the fractalized care that she had experienced and the way the entire thing took place.
Mary also talked about her father. She said her father was an older man in a wheelchair and a niece brought him 50 miles each day to spend time with her mother. When health care practitioners would come in they would ignore him, and they wouldn’t speak with him and she said the language went up a notch, because she was a nurse. She said Please, don’t ever forget that this person is here.
These are often, sadly, the realities that people experience in health care in hospitals. There is wonderful intent and so many people working so well and yet often there is this disconnectedness. Sometimes people say, Don’t you people talk to each other? So, we set out to figure out how we could do better. How could we do an even better job of doing this? And it turned out to be the simplest things. Simply trying to bring people together and to use ordinary language and to sit down and try to change these traditional hierarchies so that the strengths of the patients and families are woven into the care that we are giving.
As we began working in these ways, things started to change. Outcomes started to improve. Patient satisfaction started to change. Our sense of meaning and fulfillment started to change. Also, the context that we were creating became sort of alien in the hospital system and that created interesting challenges as well. Eventually several of these various successful models that we created did not survive in their organizational context. And so, what Ellen and I have been working on for the last ten years is an explication of what is really happening. We call them “Implantation Field Guides” for people who wish to follow on this journey and make their own contributions.
There are some concepts that we have been able to develop and apply that I think might have some meaning outside of health care as well. I’m concerned that I’m talking too much so I’m just going to be quiet and listen here for a minute.
Peter: Thanks, for making it concrete. Ellen, would you like to add something that would help us get more of the texture, like what it looks like?
Ellen: I think these pathways are a good way to think about that. That we are not specific to health care, but we are as a universe moving from the ideas of having experts to the ideas of doing things in a collective and collaborative ways.
The health care environment itself has been organized around individual providers and so that accounts for the power and respect we give to that way of organizing the work. It’s moving now to involving the patient and the family, and this is not a new discourse in our society. We want that for our family, we want that to organize around them, and furthermore to organize around what we are focusing on, which is organizing around meaning. When you start doing that and you start putting people in the same room together, and you ask each other what matters to you, you have a whole different context.
So, what we are talking about here is building what we are calling the social field that is full and rich with resources that enables us to do things that you can’t do when you are organized in a different way. So you can ask each other, How can we get this guy to his sister’s wedding? We know he is going to die and he is going to be dead in a month, but what he wants is to get to his sister’s wedding before that happens. So how can we do that? That way of thinking about what care is, and what health is, puts you on a different agenda as you are together.
So, what we are looking at is reflectiveness between the patterns of interaction that don’t naturally happen in a hospital, and we can build that intentionally. For those of you on the call, we have to figure out who you are. You know that the meetings happen by professionals or not at all. What would happen if we put different people in a room together?
Peter: What would I see?
Ellen: Right now, some possibilities are that when you walk in you see a conference room down at the end of the hall where a group of people are talking about the patient. You take that group of people and put them in the patient’s room with the family, where they are talking with the patient and with the family. Furthermore, you say, What can you tell us about what is important to your father? What can you tell us about what his life is like when he gets home? And can we all get clear about what that means here, today? So, there is that group standing in the hospital room seeing what we can do to change how the care happens and it opens up and makes it possible for us to say things to each other that we didn’t before.
Peter: I would see people standing in a circle in a hospital room, the patient’s room?
Ellen: Yes.
Peter: Who would be in that circle?
Ellen: All the disciplines would be there, because remember the driving question was, Don’t you guys talk to each other?
If you’ve had the experience of being in the bed in a hospital, the nurse comes by and the doctor comes by, and probably the pharmacist never comes by. And the residents come by, so you get a little bit of the story from each one, but who is integrating that? Now, the first thing that happens is for everybody to be there. But the thing that really happens is the emergence of something that wasn’t there before, because of what you can create with all of that context in the room, and all that feeling. It becomes sort of a magical circle. People look at each other and the patient says, All of you care about me, I had no idea that all of these people were caring about me.
There is a fondness that shows up between the patient and the family and then it becomes a healing circle. It’s not about the medicine anymore and it’s not about disease. The shift from the traditional care model, which Paul has pointed out has great benefits. “We have heart in Bed 2” ––patients are talked about that way. And now we can say, We have Mr. James and his wife over here; let’s go visit together and see what we need to do today. It’s about the promises that we made and the promises that we kept to each other. It’s a whole different language that comes with that way of caring for each other.
Paul: One of the interesting things, Peter, is our marker for whether this is working or not is whether there is laughter. It’s spontaneous and it’s kind of leveling, the idea that we are just people together. There’s an interesting term called “Patient Centered Care,” and we began to notice that really the patient wasn’t in the center of the circle, but the patient was a part of the circle. The patient, the family, and all of us are just contributing whatever expertise we can. The patient is contributing their sense of what they really want, the family is contributing, we are contributing different things, and somehow we are providing for each other’s care. And there is this very beautiful thing that takes place. It’s amazing.
Peter: John, do you have thoughts or questions that you might have for the conversation?
John McKnight: One thing I was wondering was whether both of you had examples. Here we are trying to get engaged in the process of the patient and the family and relatives. Can you give us some examples of what their participation and the context of their participation has meant in terms of your ability to do your job. You are listening to people who usually aren’t listened to, and you are a person of some expertise in diagnosis and treatment. What do you learn that you never learned before because they are in the discussion?
Paul: You learn the things that matter. The shift comes toward meaning. One of the patients that I remember is one who said all he wanted to do was to get home to his mule. He had one horse and one mule and that was more important to him than any of my medicine. “Just get me home” is what mattered to this person. Another gentleman raised Black Diamond watermelons and I’d never known what a Black Diamond watermelon was. Another man was an airline pilot and he was interpreting everything that was happening to him through the lens of “am I still going to be able to fly?”
So there is what matters to us in our lives and there is the inconvenience of all this, like this heart attack. And there are probably many different ways to respond, but if you were to create a polarity, one way is to respond to the heart attack and assume that our job is to fix the heart attack and then they can go on about their lives. That is what health care is often like. A different way is to say. What are our true goals here? What is this person finding meaning in and how can we weave the care that we are incorporating together in such a way that it supports the richness of those goals? It’s very different.
Ellen: You are talking about the hearts being broken, but there are also broken hearts. I hear lots of stories from Paul. One recent case was two brothers whose mother was very sick and wasn’t going to make it. The brothers hadn’t spoken in years, and it was broken family. And here you were at this moment, and they knew that it was better for their mother for them to stand together by her bedside and be together. Paul was able to facilitate that as a human being with these brothers who really wanted to relate at the bedside with the mother.
As a society we can ask ourselves why we are dying in the hospital in the first place. There are whole other sets of conversations we could be having today. Why is it still happening and why we are still handing that ritual over to the hospitals? Providers are in that place of really important moments in our social lives when our parents are dying. To be able to be human with each other is a resource we can build together. We say, This makes sense and we can do that here; we should do that and we ought to do that with each other. That’s what we are looking for when we go in. That’s what people think we ought to be doing here with each other. Should we just give them their medicine and leave or is there something else?
Paul: If I could add one other dimension, just as a member of a care team. We have spent a lot of time on the call so far talking about the process of rounds itself and the interactions and the purposes. What we found is when we tried to simply enact rounds in a collaborative way, it almost always did not sustain in the care environment. When we went back to the places where it did work, what we saw, in addition to the rounds, was that in some way another element had arisen in that environment, which was a weekly meeting of the care team, ideally with patient and family present as well, but not for the purpose of caring for the individual patients, but to just simply give us an opportunity to reflect how they were doing together as a team.
A whole lot of our book deals with the importance of creating what we called Relational Infrastructure, and it connects with the idea of action and reflection being coupled together. In health care there is tons of action and there are almost no opportunities for the intact collective team to reflect together about their work as a team and how they can do an even better job. Our implantation model actually centers on creating opportunities for people to simply meet, reflect, and converse.
What we found is that model builds a social field and a capacity that is increasingly rich with what we call resources, contextual resources, that arise in that. We have done this together before and we can draw on that the next time we do it. We remember this family and that way we can respond even more empathetically and wisely with this family. These become resources that we draw upon, but the model is enabled by a particular infrastructure and in health care those things usually don’t exist. So, the implantation model really focuses on how things are created in conversation.
Peter: What’s the argument against it?
Ellen: Part of the relational infrastructure is saying things like we need to schedule the way that we work so that we can all be together. That’s not the way we tend to be organized. Very often, the physicians are not even employed by the hospitals. How can we ever come together? It’s really hard.
Paul: And that’s nice, but we are too busy for that. That would be great.
Ellen: That’s impossible. In a way we ask, Why would we do that? A real surgeon would be in the OR. I mean, why are you out here, on the floor with the family? The nurses do that part. So, we have a divide-and-conquering way of scheduling and organizing and paying and all of the other, and we call this OD 101. The idea is shockingly simple, but hard to implement.
Here’s a really great example. We were just at a teaching hospital where the residents are at the bedside and what they are doing with those rounds is that they are teaching. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s not that they are not giving good care to the patient, but what they are actually doing is teaching. So, when you ask them to move to this way of talking so that the conversation is divided among the people who are in the room, the attending physician says, Now wait a minute; how am I supposed to grade the residents on their knowledge and their ability to report if they are not doing that, if they are not reporting on the bedside? That’s a different accomplishment. It’s a different priority.
So, it’s a very real question. How do you stay in the institutions that are built around creating these magnificent professions that keep us alive more and more? And we want that. We want that society, and we want them to save us, but how do we do that and create these human environments at the same time?
Peter: One more question. What about when they leave the hospital? Any thoughts about what would sustain the healing environment afterward?
Ellen: Yes, I had a wonderful man come to the door the other day selling magazines who has had a really rough life and he is trying to get back on his feet. He learned that I worked with the Ronald McDonald House, which is about putting families at the bedside. He said, Can I bring my son who is five and show him? I want to show him how to take care of people, because he had been in that situation. He knew that his family did not know how to take care of him. He was left with these providers who could not care for him. His mother is on drugs and he does not know how to help her and I want him to learn.
I thought, Oh my gosh, where do we teach our children how to care for each other?
So, I think there are some answers on many different levels. Peter, there is a help desk coming in to help connect to community-based organizations that are standing there wanting to help all of our institutions –– when people come out of prisons, when they come out of hospitals, when they come out of college now. How do we help these people make these transitions? This was so touching to me about this man wanting to teach his son to take care of his mother.
Maggie: The comments in the chat were early in Paul’s discussion. One question was: Is this true for geriatrics community, too? The other one is about how human core is lost. And we do have one caller in the queue.
Peter: I think we may have responded to some of that. There is another comment that says, My client has a group of facilities for senior living, independent, assisted, skilled nursing, and dementia units. What would it be like? Maybe we should take the call and then we can lump these together with Ellen and Paul responding.
Dr. Art Sutherland (caller): I am a retired cardiologist and have been working in population health issues for the last ten years. I understand all about hospitals, but what I want to point out is that basically that’s really extreme care, end of life, extreme trauma, extreme diseases. What you are doing is fantastic in that setting. What I was thinking and hoping to hear, if you are talking about The Abundant Community, is that we really need to focus on the community, because medicine only counts for about 10 to 20 percent of the wellness of the whole country. And if we do the upstream approach in eliminating the social determinism of health and make it better so they are not all negative, then you would do a much better job at prevention and you will keep people from reaching these terrible end stages prematurely.
Paul: Thank you. Did you want start, Ellen, and I will add a few comments.
Ellen: This goes back to what we teach our children. This movement is not, as you say, about the hospital and only about the hospital. In fact, we hope it becomes less so. It is about how we help each other before we get there and after we leave there. So, I’m with you. I think that it was Herb Shephard who said light many fires and get all the people involved and continue who should be in this conversation.
Paul: This is really a poignant and important question that Dr. Sutherland asks. There is a fascinating literature on the so-called Social Determents of Health that shows that what is done in acute health care is a tiny fraction of the determinants of the health of the population. This was actually said about five years ago and it was almost a crisis of faith for me. I’ve been spending my entire life trying to make health care better in a hospital setting and it became increasingly clear to me that where our health is really, truly created, and where the work needs to happen, is in the community. So, it’s like, what am I doing and why am I doing this?
Then it gradually became clear to me that what I had in the hospital setting was an extraordinary laboratory for understanding how to achieve things that could apply in many different settings. The way that we view what we are doing now is that we are basically in that hospital care unit, which we now imagine could be a workplace or a school or any community setting. We were actually creating what we would call an “intentional alternative social field” and we were developing methodologies to generate this richness of resources in this intentionally generated social field that would allow people to almost effortlessly do things that if we tried to do it by individual coordination or hard effort were almost impossible.
So, the simple idea is that there is this thing that is called social field, that is like this living memory bubble of things that people have done together. There are these resources, which are shared experiences, memories, and previous interactions, and these are actually made or socially constructed by people doing things together. If you don’t have a way to meet, connect, and interact, then these things cannot form, and by intentionally creating those things, simply in our case a weekly meeting of the inter-professional team with patients, families that have been cared for before are present so that voice is there as well. There are opportunities for actions and reflections so that you are always moving into action and back to reflection and then back to action and then back to reflection, and that grows and populates the social field with these amazing capabilities.
Peter: One of the questions: Are there any places doing intentional alternative social fields? I want to mention that Edgar Cahn and the TimeBanking idea that has created a structure to build a social field of people exchanging and engaging in an economy of generosity. So, I think there are some structures out there. Edgar’s is called TimeBanking. So, there are some things happening.
Paul: Edgar’s comments and concepts are very exciting. The idea of giving that structure so that things that people want to give and take put great meaning into giving and the idea that people wish to receive and interact and connect. It’s very exciting to me.
Ellen: Someone asked about what the building blocks are, and I would say connection is the word you are hearing over and over here. Structure opportunities where people can connect. Give them that opportunity to pay attention to each other in ways that they have not had before. You know, we are walking through life right now and we can change our pathways so that we are walking in a way that’s more connected and give us moments to stop and reflect. hat can happen in the community and that might be easier than in the hospital. That would be awesome.
John: I might add that there is a neighborhood organizing movement that is increasingly focused on how to weave people together around what they have or what they have to contribute rather than what they want to fix or change. When you see what begins to emerge in those neighborhoods, what you find is a bridge to the kind of in-institution experiment that you have.
Supposing that you knew from a neighborhood around the hospital that there were 16 people who indicated that they would like to do this with people who were older or they would like to provide the following kinds of interactions with people who love horses. So, as we move towards a culture of a contributing, productive, and giving community, it provides the information that people who are in institutions would need and use. This sort of answers Peter’s question: When somebody leaves here, where does this continue and what do you build on? So, connecting that kind of organizing that you are doing has great potential.
Ellen: Who does that connecting? Who is responsible for that? The gap that we saw here in the San Francisco Bay area is that when you get discharged you notice who is standing there. When the doctor that this child is hungry, or thinks I would like to work with the disease, but this child has lead in their apartment. There are community-based organizations that can do something about that, but who makes the connection between the need of the family and the organizations and the people? As you say, the individuals who are standing there and say, I would like to help. Organizing around that is not robust, yet, and we are working on that in different ways.
Peter: Here’s a question that somebody wrote in: Why don’t doctors leave the place, the clinic or hospital, and join the social context of the patient?
Paul: So, it’s a serious question and so ask it again and let me think about it for a minute.
Peter: Why don’t doctors leave the clinic or the hospital and join the social context of the patient?
Ellen: I will tell stories about Paul where he has done that and he has been scorned by his hospital system for doing it. Legally you can’t go to that guy’s house and see how’s he doing.
Paul: Well, you can, but I was discouraged from doing that in several cases, but I do it and I love that. Yes, it increasingly is that way of working that works. It is going to be harder at first to get doctors to do that, but there are other wonderful other health professionals who live in those worlds and gradually the more that physicians are able to experience that, the better. And that brings up the whole domain of health professional education. It is extraordinary how transforming that is and it is a wonderful question. The more that we can do those things the better we get.
Ellen: Why don’t we stop relying on doctors? Maybe there are other people out there or other professions out there. Why does it only have to be the doctor? We just said we need a whole team here and we need a whole village. So, if we stop asking for a doctor to come and instead ask a different question. How can we create a healing circle that is funded differently or resourced differently? How can we expect the doctors that are in the system to do that? I don’t know if that is the right answer. Maybe we do need them, but I’m just saying that there is more than one way to think about what is happening there.
John: That is how the hospice movement really began before it became medicalized. It was exactly what you are talking about.
Charlie Hathorne (caller): I’m the one that brought the question about senior living. In terms of the strategic work my client is doing, it’s like a culture shift from moving from going to a place to die to going to a place to live. To me that’s a major turning things upside down shift, and it has implications for, in Peter’s word, hospitality, in terms of coming to a place to live.
As I listen to you, it’s the idea now about how we can think about creating senior living places that are a place of community. When I first heard Paul and Ellen talk about ithat n terms of the hospital setting, it is reintroducing existential issues of the community that helps us address, like denial of death and what choices do I have, and meaning and isolation, and all of those things I hear going around the hospital bed or in a hospital room. It seems to be the reintroduction of a human element that maybe we could think about for senior living facilities. It’s just a thought I have, and I would love to hear your reactions to that.
Ellen: I would take “a human element” and say “human spirit.” One of the questions that we ask is, Is the thing that we are suggesting doing here helping the human spirit or hurting the human spirit? I think that is possible no matter where you are standing. I love that expression “building a place of living,” and I can see the possibilities for the connectedness there when it’s alive like that, when that’s what you are feeling.
Peter: We are running near the end. Any final thoughts, Paul or Ellen, you would like to share with us about this call or how it has gone for you?
Ellen: Thank you for being here and we hope we can connect.
Paul: From my perspective, what I know is that I have been changed by these interactions at the bedside of patients in these ways. I know that my colleagues have, and I know that my patients and families have been changed, as well.
About your question, Peter, how does this carry forth from the hospital to the community? I think that at least one way is that it carries forth is that we leave these conversations with a different heart. We see things in new ways. We see possibilities that we didn’t see before. We have a kind of confidence that we actually can participate in our own care. That we can work in different ways and that care doesn’t have to be produced and consumed, but that it can be co-created together. That it is just not about whether an illness is treated, but whether a life, purpose, and wholeness is recognized and shared with others.
So, I think it is that change that takes place as we participate in these things is the thing that carries forward. I am glad for this chance to have yet another conversation. That has been the thing that has been so fascinating for me as a doctor: to see the power of simply talking and a safe place for that to take place. So those would be my reflections right now.
Peter: A great point, Paul. Thank you, Paul and Ellen. Thank you very much and it is nice to hear your voice in what we are doing here. John, any final thought you might have and then we will give it back to Maggie.
John: It does strike me that something that Paul and Ellen are moving toward is that they are redefining what it is to be a professional. I think for many professions across the health and human services world is that we are always cautioned to not become involved with your patient. In Illinois more medical people have lost their licenses for something called “becoming personally involved” with their patient than any other cause. But it is being personal that seems to me is at the heart of what we are hearing here and that contradicts one idea of what a profession is about, and it threatens the idea of the objectivity of the person who is removed from us. So, it is courageous, this redefinition of bringing into the world the personal as a critical factor in healing. It is a wonderful thing that you are doing.
Peter: Also, another thought that I like, Paul, is the way you keep saying that the science and the skill of the physician are very critical. There is nothing in what you are saying that undermines that or wants to substitute for that. I think it is important that these two things, this kind of social field that you are talking about and the immense technical knowledge and skill that you have as a thoracic surgeon, can live together. It’s not having to choose and it’s not a movement from one to other, but trying to deepen and enrich that so we can appreciate. Every time I hear you, Paul, you start by saying what we have done is miraculous from a science and technical point of view, and so thank you for that.
The Abundant Communities Initiative
Howard Lawrence describes how he has drawn inspiration from The Abundant Community for Community League: a group designed to “initiate a momentum of household connections.” He explains who “Block Connectors” are, and how these citizens create boundaries, have conversations, and pull people with similar interests together, all in the same neighborhood.
For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work. All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.
The Abundant Community Initiative:
Conversation with Howard Lawrence
October 22, 2013
Peter Block: Howard, thank you so much for being our guest. This is the first initiative I’ve seen that actually uses the words Abundant Community. Could you give us a little background and talk about the choice of that language and how that fits into the context of the city?
Howard Lawrence: Thank you. John and Peter, it is just awesome to be with you. Our colleagues here in Edmonton are very excited about how we have come to this place piloting the Abundant Community Initiative in our city. I think it goes a long way back to Building Communities from the Inside Out. John and Jody’s book has been helpful in Edmonton to so many of our neighborhoods and I think many of us have tracked Asset Based Community Development through the years. The Careless Society was, of course, the shake-up book for many of us and we have appreciated it so much. Then Peter your book Community: The Structure of Belonging is one many of us followed. Then out of somewhere came your book The Abundant Community, which again in its simplicity was just so profound.
The first half of the book just resonated with what was on many of our hearts and then in the later chapters of that book you begin to outline how we might be able to make this practical. For me, in an already great neighborhood and in a city that has been divided up into really manageable and human scale neighborhoods through a Community League System as it is called, it just seemed like this would fit us perfectly. So the question became, how then do we take what was in the book, The Abundant Community, and experiment with it and apply some practices of our own to fit it for our own city and our own neighborhoods, beginning with the neighborhood that I lived in?
Peter: Describe the practices a little bit so people get a sense of what you are doing.
Howard: I think the first practice, which was basically handed to us by the city, was to define our boundaries. The city has for a century now divided the city up into what we call Community Leagues and these were really a grassroots form of government in particular neighborhoods with a long history and also a variety of other things, from sports to caring for the social well-being of individuals. So, it’s already divided. There’s already an elected government in each place and they pay attention to the concerns of the neighborhood. The neighborhood, my neighborhood in particular, and this wouldn’t be too unusual, is a neighborhood of a thousand homes with quite a natural boundary around it. You can see the map of my neighborhood, in fact, on The Abundant Community’s website. So that’s the first practice defining the neighborhood, which was again a gift for us.
John McKnight: May I ask if the neighborhoods that you have now begun to work with are defined the same as the Community League Foundation?
Howard: They are. Some are very well defined and they certainly have an active Community League.
John: So, you already had that structure in place, where the neighborhood was defined by this structure, it had been there for a long time, and it had some leadership.
Peter: What do you say is the goal or the purpose of your initiative?
Howard: It is to initiate a momentum of household connections within each block and the neighborhood. Shape the neighborhood life according to the residents’ vision of their neighborhood, to facilitate relationships through the formation of associations within the neighborhood, to connect the gifts, skills, and abilities of residents to neighbors and the neighborhood, and finally to connect block neighbors together through relationships with a block connecter. Those are the things we lay out.
John: That’s a wonderful statement if somebody wanted to find that definition of structure. Is it written someplace?
Howard: It’s on the article that we have called “Gluing A Place Together One Neighborhood at a Time”; in that article you can see we lay out those five points.
John: What is the process you have gone through?
Howard: We have naturally defined boundaries, which has been very helpful in local form of government. And then that local form of government works together and will work together with me to actually hire, with community funds –– which could be regional funds or the neighborhood funds –– to hire a Connecter Coordinator. That is a pretty big job, the Connecter Coordinator, which I will basically lay out now.
The history in Asset Based Community Development is that Roy Thompson was hired and we riffed on his experience here, but in any event the Connector Coordinator enlists, identifies, and organizes the Block Connecters. So, somebody on every block –– every block is approximately 20 homes –– identifies, enlists, and organizes that Block Connecter and then that Block Connecter’s job is facilitated and encouraged by the interview process. The Block Connecter would interview the 20 homes and then finally the information from that interview is collated or grouped together in data on behalf of the neighborhood and the Community League.
Peter: What has been the response of people to this idea? Do some of these neighborhoods think that they are already connected?
Howard: I will take it down to the block level and give you an example. A couple of weeks ago I identified a Block Connecter –– and it is amazing how keen they are –– and this person said to me that her block was already well connected. So, I said that is fantastic; please tell me about that. She told me that the block is connected because they wave at each other. They might not know everybody’s name, but they certainly have positive effect in the neighborhood and on the block. So, I asked whether they knew each others’ email addresses, each others’ interests, each others’ vision for the neighborhood, and so forth. I could see that she’s thinking, We need to do this on our block to get that additional information, even the email addresses. For example I know many places do this where one person on the block has all the emails so that if a garage door is left open they can message and make sure that the garage door is looked after. So, I would say it has been a positive response, overwhelming.
John: You are starting out by hiring someone to find Block Connecters. What kind of a person do you think tends to have that kind of ability? And when you are looking for a Block Connecter, is there any way of defining the kinds of people who tend to be responding or good at that? What do you look for?
Howard: Because of the early days of the pilot, I’m the first official Connecter Coordinator for our neighborhood; in my work here over the years, this gave me quite a bit of confidence to move ahead with this. I worked with other individuals who were able to excel at connecting people. They had a passion for their neighborhood. Karen Wilkin of the Laurier neighborhood has just been fantastic at pulling people together. Also Stu Carson in the Lendrum neighborhood. I think it is similar to what you lay out in your book: Somebody who cares about engagement in the neighborhood and who is engaged in the neighborhood, a positive person. Certainly, a person who is quite daring relationally and willing to initiate conversations with strangers. That would be the profile, I think.
John: You have also mentioned that you may find somebody who has a lot of those attributes, but the courage to begin to go knocking on the doors on a block is often a step most people haven’t taken. Have you learned something about how to get people to begin to take that kind of adventure?
Howard: One way is how I did some of that initially. As you know Edmonton is quite a snowy city in the wintertime. People are shoveling their walks and the block might be lined with individuals who have got their snow shovels out working. As a Connecter Coordinator looking for a Block Connecter, I can go talk to those people who are only too happy to take a moment to chat with me. I ask who a real connecter person is, a go-to person on your block, and inevitably they might tell me who that person is and I can follow that up. That would be one strategy. I think that I’ve learned to identify the kind of house that might have a Block Connecter behind it, and I have had good success in that.
John: Then if you are trying to get a Block Connecter, somebody from the block that you found to go do these interviews, what do you do to get them over the threshold? To get them over the fear that a lot of people have of doing that?
Howard: First, I do an interview with them and describe it as an experiment in interviewing, so that they get to actually participate. They can also ask me questions as we go along. What happens and how does this work? Another thing that has been very important for many is for me to actually do the first number of interviews with them. I would actually go along with them to their block and do a couple of interviews.
John: I know that if people are looking at the screen, they can see what you call a “Neighbour Conversation Guide.” We also have people joining us who are not looking at the screen. Could you describe what questions you are asking in the interviews? I know that you have a couple of parts and different kinds of questions. What are you asking them?
Howard: I will describe how I instruct and invite the Block Connecters to use this guide.
One thing about it is that it is quite simple. So, I say you can read this and that gives them a level of comfort; they can basically knock on the door and say, Hi, my name is John McKnight, I live just down the street just two doors down and I’ve seen you a number of times. And I’ll say, I’m here on the behalf of the Community League just to find out what you’re interested in. That immediately brings a great level of comfort for people. I think we have this high expectation of privacy, but when we get there, people are inviting you in. One time I was doing an interview and the person said, I would love to do this, but I’m cooking supper right now. So, I said, You keep cooking supper, and I will sit at your table and do the interview; she thought that was a great idea. So, people welcome you into their homes. There are lots of examples where people have had coffee, a glass of wine, and some of these interviews can take quite a while.
In the average scenario, though, the Block Connecter would just read the Guide and say that the purpose of these conversations is to make our blocks and our neighborhoods even better places to live. We are doing this by finding out and sharing amongst us each household’s vision for our neighborhood, the activities and interests which occupy us, and the gifts, abilities, and experiences we possess. And we say, Do you understand that? And they say, Yeah, that sounds good. Then we say, reading again, this form is intended to be a helpful guide to a brief conversation, which will hopefully be a part of an enduring conversation and connection.
And then we carry on and say, I’m here on the block so we will keep this conversation going and again we read from the Guide. This is not a confidential conversation or document. Our Community League’s hope is that the information from this conversation will be shared and used to build the fabric of our neighborhood through local groups and connections. And then we go on with the interview.
Peter: You know, it strikes me that you legitimize the role in the fact that you are there by saying, I’m here on behalf of the Community League, which means you are not a nosy neighbor. Some of the things I’ve been involved in, there is always the question of what you are doing there.
Howard: Yes, that’s very important, Peter, and I know that our Block Connecters find a lot of comfort in the fact that this is legitimized on a number of levels.
John: What would you do if you didn’t have a Community League, but you had this idea that you wanted to begin to implement? What would you do in the case of a lot of neighborhoods where people are listening, if you couldn’t say you were from the Community League?
Howard: I have spoken to a lot of different cities and neighborhoods where their neighborhoods don’t have a formal structure. I think it is a must that some kind of identifiable group be initiated. I just don’t know how you can move forward without that. If there was a resident association that could be morphed into something like this, or just a group of neighbors that could do the groundwork to say that we want to represent the neighborhood or we would like some representation in the neighborhood. I do think at this point that is important.
And the first question that we ask in Part One of the interview is the vision for the neighborhood. So, we ask, What do you value in a neighborhood? We say of all the places that you have traveled in the world or of all the neighborhoods that you have seen, what do you really love about neighborhoods? And they will say, We love safety and we love friendliness and we love walkability. They will give us a number of answers to that.
Then we ask a very specific question: What do you think the ideal Highlands neighborhood would look like? And they give us ideas around what they think the ideal neighborhood would look like. And I guess from an Asset Based Community Development approach, this is a last question often, but we put it up front as a way of people imagining the future together.
Now because we ask those questions, where does the answer to those questions go if we don’t have some kind of little group of leaders that are legitimized in the neighborhood?
Peter: Do you put all this together as a kind of summary report? What is being produced by this process?
Howard: We have put together a simple database. That data on the vision for the neighborhood goes to the Community League, and the Community League would then see that having an arts center would be nice, or having a steam room at the East Glen swimming pool. One person said more affordable housing, slower traffic on 112th, a senior’s condo in the neighborhood. Those are just some of the raw data from the interviews. This is collated and goes to the Community League leadership.
Then there are other questions that we put together that have different ends and those next questions are really pretty exciting. So again, to understand the extension that The Abundant Community book helped us to see was that rather than just settling with the associations that are within the neighborhoods presently, we actually had a thrust to identify and create more associational life. So, we asked the question, What activities or groups that you participate in or would like to participate in would you join in with neighbors? Then we would give a list of examples that they might choose. For instance, in my neighborhood, dog walking. So many people already walk their dogs, but they would like to walk their dogs together and have dog socialization groups. There was no way to put all the dog walkers together, but now because many people say the activity that I would like to do is dog walking, we can print a report that gives us all the dog walkers.
Then we can ask a question –– and John we owe this to you –– about other topics or activities that people are familiar enough with to perhaps lead in or teach to a group of neighbors. So, say Andrea has said, Yes, I am both a dog person and I would love to bring dog walkers together to lead them in walks. She now has the emails or the phone numbers of all those individuals. She can invite them to a couple of dog walking events per week that she will be on and lead.
Then we also ask more questions around interests.
Peter: Do the neighbors see the summary report of the data?
Howard: They can see some of it. The vision is given to the Community League leadership and that could be used as the leadership would like. They will post that ideally; they will see what’s posted and what the dreams are of the neighborhood. So once the dog walking group or the hockey team has been formed by people who said they want to play hockey or walk the dog, then that can go into our website or onto our little handout newsletter that we have in our neighborhood so that other people can join, but they are joining something that is ongoing.
John: Does the local Block Connecter initiate directly some connections based on the information gathered from the interviews?
Howard: We call that person an interviewer, but really they are a connecter and so we have seen examples of people just pulling people together. And when they hear the needs come out, they are not asking about needs, but they are identifying needs, they identify interests, and they pull people together. The neighbor would say to the Block Connecter, I would love it if we did a block party. So, throughout the interview process, the Connector feels like the neighbors are really seeing them as the leader of the block, the point person. So, they act as the point person for that block because, in fact, that is what they are.
On the interview form there is a section where we ask about gifts, abilities, and experiences to share. In the interview process, people are asked, What’s your gift or ability or an experience you might share for the benefit of neighbors? That’s been lovely, too. And that again is a list that goes to the Community League executive; for example, we will have people who are willing to shovel snow. We have people who are willing to help seniors with their pensions. We have people who are willing to babysit, and they get on a list of babysitters. So, they offer their gift to the neighborhood and that again goes to the Community League to post. Then, if a person needs a babysitter, they can phone an appointed individual who can say, Yes I have some babysitters; tell ,e who you are, where you live, and I will have that babysitter be in touch with you.
John: Can people do it on the Internet as well as calling?
Howard: We haven’t done that. That can probably be done through email; we are working on that. And this is another conversation, but a bit of a social media platform just for neighbors is really exciting, but that is another conversation for sure. Yes, it will be done in a variety of methods and the Internet will be one of them.
Peter: Have there been disappointments or frustrations that you felt inventing and guiding this process?
Howard: I think certainly some of the Block Connecters struggle, so I think identifying Block Connecters needs to be done very carefully and prudently. But at the same time, I just as I reviewed The Abundant Community again in preparation for this call, you said something that I can read it to you: This is an organic thing. This is something that, as you mentioned it in Community: The Structure of Belonging, is a slow process. It’s real. People are people. They are not paid so they move at their own pace and I’m very conscious of that in not goading the Block Connecters, but I always offer to go with them.
The number one phrase that I think I’m probably known for with the Block Connecters is, Can I go and meet some of your neighbors with you? Let me do that with you. So, to answer your question, Peter, the pace of connections being made might be something that I had expectations that they would get them done in a certain amount of time and in a quicker fashion.
Peter: That is a wonderful way of thinking about it. To be supportive and be with them and not to hold them accountable and not to have that kind of mindset. This is almost a kind of ministry for you, isn’t it? Are you connected with a church or a ministry in that neighborhood or area?
Howard: No, I’ve consulted with churches and I’m participant with consulting groups for churches where I would communicate with them around neighborhoods and the dynamics that would take place in neighborhoods. Many churches are asking how to serve neighborhoods and it has been a real struggle to find a good answer for that in this context. So, I help them with that.
John: Could you give us some background that led you to this?
Howard: Certainly, as a follower of Christ, as a Christian person, the great commandment is to love God and love your neighbor. For a while I have put a slash behind love your neighbor and said neighborhood. So how do we effectually love our neighborhoods? When I saw in The Abundant Community that we are valuing and recognizing and esteeming and understanding peoples’ giftedness –– which is of course to say that people are gifted –– then forming associations and liberating their gifts into groups is fantastic as well. Then extending your welcome to the margins and extending hospitality. Those things are just fantastic. They are rooted in things that are very similar to my faith orientation.
Maggie Rogers: We have a couple of questions on the chat. One question is what values or virtues are treasured most? Not needs, but qualities of being in human interactions.
Howard: That is a hard one to start with. Let me try. I think friendship, which has been a surprise for me in some respects because in the competent community and the qualities of a competent community, which we reviewed and appreciated in The Abundant Community, the initiative really highlighted friendship. Accepting people for who they are with their weaknesses and their strengths. Just being known for who you are is a quality of friendship, the kind of friendship that is leisurely around the neighborhood. I think that many people have really valued that. So, the virtue of being friendly and being transparent, which the neighborhood really helps to encourage, is a most treasured one.
Peter: Very nice. Do you have another one, Maggie?
Maggie: Here’s one. Outside of the Community League and official boundaries, have you been successful with multiple dwellings? For example, apartments or condo neighborhoods.
Howard: One of the next neighborhoods we are moving into has a higher density and of course there will be walk-ups there and apartment towers. In my own neighborhood, there are four-story walk-ups, and we also have a seniors’ home, which is three floors with about 12 residents on each floor. We have spoken with the manager who just had a meeting with their board to see if they would ok this. They have said yes and so we are planning to go in and find a senior who is a Floor Connecter –– it won’t be a Block Connecter –– and that senior will do the connecting and do the interviews on that floor. There are some walk-ups in my neighborhood. Meeting with the management of the four-story walk-up and having them onsite up to this point they have been fine, at least, in getting permission to go in. I think it will be challenging, but I know of another organization that helps to build relationships, social capital in apartment life, and so I believe that we can do that as well.
Peter: I think the way you thought through what kind of institutional support is very special about what you are doing in whatever neighborhood you moved to. For example, your way of asking the League or the manager about who is in this neighborhood that we can go to and, in a sense, feel invited, rather than going in as a stranger and to get people connected or find a Block Connecter. It is quite a structure to have a connecter or coordinator and I guess as you expand across the city you will add more people; that must be a key function. Do they bring together the Block Connecters? How does that work?
Howard: They really look after their Block Connecters. In our neighborhood, we have some lovely croissants at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, and we invite the Connecters to come and tell their stories. We have learned from your book and from other sources that the Block Connecters have a whole skill set that we are liberating and so that when we get together, we just tell stories that are wonderful. To inspire stories, we may pick a topic like knocking on the door or how to answer or how to draw people’s gifts out, which is tricky stuff. How to draw people’s interests out? Through the course of a conversation people will realize they have more gifts and interests than they did than when they first began. So, we meet together to eat croissants and share stories.
John: You have dealt with the city. Could you tell us a little about how you connected with the city? What their response has been? What kind of support, if any, they have provided? What their role is?
Howard: I have to tip my hat to the city. They have been very supportive and understanding and certainly they have a background in your work, John. They know that there is a special kind of relationship between the neighborhood and the city bureaucracy, but they also recognize that the timing of this is right in today’s culture and the culture of neighborhoods. One individual, Harry Oswin, is a very well respected director in the city and he had, as he said to me, some history in door-to-door work many years ago in Toronto. He saw the value in just connecting with neighbors. So, he is the person who saw the potential in this, and it’s been wonderful to champion this in the neighborhood; it’s been lovely to work with him.
I think there have been other materials out there that are wonderful. A conference done by Tamarack where they brought people together and asked the questions that seemed to be looming: Why are our neighborhoods back on the agenda? Why is asset-based thinking so critical? How do we decentralize city services? Can neighborhoods be the center of community life? Can neighborhoods be places of belonging? Can neighborhoods be places of caring? Then, can we formalize the role of neighborhoods and deliver services there? Can we formalize the role of social capital and how to build it? Finally, there are local and state policies that advance the neighborhood agenda.
Our city leadership has been sharp to see the possibilities in this and go slow, hence a pilot and then the second phase of a pilot. So, they have been very supportive and understanding. I will be on a contract with them; I won’t be a part of their staff as I’m not a staff person. I’m kind of a bridge between the neighborhood or the Connecter, the Community League, and the city leadership.
Maggie: We have a couple of calls coming in.
Anna (caller): I’m from Okotoks, Alberta. I was wondering if you could tell me how long the whole process was for you, from the moment you started working on it till you got something going in your neighborhood?
Howard: Thank you, Anna, and I’ve been in touch with Okotoks. Well, certainly reading the book, pondering it, and thinking how it might unfold in our neighborhood took a great deal of time. I would say months of pondering, but once the city decided to run a pilot –– it was probably November ––we thought that this would give us time to prepare because the spring is the time when people are inclined to be neighborly because the snow is melting, the birds are singing, the sun is coming up.
We really prepared for that, and we would work with the seasons. We did our groundwork with the Community League during January and February. We understood what the role of the Connecter Coordinator would be and that person was going to be me, and so I was already in the game. Then we began in those late winter months to recruit the Block Connecters.
So, it’s been a process. One of the things that we would have done at the front is that I would have had data collection more streamlined at the beginning, so that we could have more excitement around the groups that were being formed earlier. It’s exciting to be interviewed and to feel like your voice is being heard and the possibilities of groups being formed, but there is nothing like actually forming groups to create a buzz and excitement in the neighborhood. I think we could have gone more quickly if we had had our database in place earlier.
I think what this is doing, Anna, is it launches us with a new way of being in the neighborhood. It’s a new framework for interaction. So, people would ask the question, When is my interview coming? I had a note from a lady that I will read to you: “I really like the idea of this project. It certainly promotes the feeling of community. I hope that 64th Street can be done.” She doesn’t have a Block Connecter on her street yet. She goes on, “Personally I wish we had a place where locals could drop in for coffee, say one morning a week or every other week. Also, a knitter’s group would be good. I drive to Park Allen every week, but a local group would be good.” I still have to find a Block Connecter for that block; there are a few blocks that don’t have one yet and we are at nine months in, but once that Block Connecter is found we will do this work and they are not going to be sensitive to the fact that this was a one-year pilot. They are going to continue on. I continue on as a Block Connecter and a Connecter Coordinator.
I think it is a real change of framework that will linger for a long time. And certainly, groups coming together –– anytime you put a group of residents together, whether it is the dog walking group or the knitter’s group, the model train group, you can’t stop those –– they just keep going and going and going.
Maggie: We have another caller.
Caller: Hello, this is Incourage Community Foundation in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. Could you explain more about the Community League structure? What it looks like? How it got started? How is it connected with the other parts of the area?
Howard: I can give a try at that. I know that our community structure is about a hundred years old, and it was a city councilor who came from the New England states to Edmonton and had some sense of that. He instituted the beginning of the Community League; it was about caring for people who were struggling in those early days at the turn of the century and making sure nobody was forgotten in terms of food and a house over their head.
It began that way. It was more formalized over time through our City Council; they saw this as a good thing and formalized the role. In the 60’s it took on the role of, oftentimes, sports and recreation. Our sports and recreation in the city was very localized to neighborhoods. I think the kids had leather jackets with the name of their neighborhood on them and their hockey team and baseball team. Then through the 80’s and into the 90’s those sports and activities were regionalized. Community halls, which many Community Leagues built at the time, started hosting dances and whatnot and serving the neighborhood proper. Then over time that function regionalized to the wedding halls and the sports are regionalized.
So, the Community League has had to readjust in each era for the future. Now they are formalized. They receive funding through a variety of sources, from provincial and municipal sources, for the work that they do in the neighborhoods and that has changed and varied over time. They continue to exist in various levels of strengths in every neighborhood. They usually have a little newsletter. The city supplies a person from community service to coach and help each Community League so they do that in a regional way. The city really values the Community Leagues and it’s demonstrated through funding and these individuals who go and coach alongside the Community League structure.
John: Is there an electoral process? How is the leadership chosen?
Howard: Saying it’s an electoral process might be a bit of an overstatement, but it is certainly is that. People run for president, secretary, and vice-president so it has a legitimate board structure. They are formally constituted. There are bylaws for this small form of government. There is a bit of an election. It is a wonderful process. In the election last year for my neighborhood there were probably 50 people who came out; we elected a person who was the secretary and became the president. My son became the Civic Affairs person; he is a 20-year-old so this is his first crack at an office in government.
They meet together; a group of probably five or six are chosen, they have a budget, and they work on everything from making sure that the ice rink is flooded to initiating funding through the city for a new playground in the neighborhood. They take on issues, civic affairs issues, like traffic concerns that might be present in the neighborhood; they can be the voice to the neighborhood and the voice of the neighborhood to the city. It’s community consultation processes and oftentimes the city will look to the Community League for this. It’s pretty cool.
John: That’s wonderful.
Peter: We’ve got just a couple of minutes left. The Edmonton initiative is an amazing story. What I’m getting from this is that with the structures and the job titles you have created, you have organized this in a quite wonderful and useful way to legitimize it and to take some of the risks out of neighbors going to neighbors without an organizational context.
This is a wonderful description of what you are creating in the world. Anything else you would like to share with us, Howard?
Howard: Thank you. I would dare say that we just ever so slightly modified and extended what is already in The Abundant Community. While many people won’t know what’s in the book, The Abundant Community, the practices here embody or express what’s in the first chapters of that book. This movement from a consumer-centric way of being in the world, or from a systems way, to a citizen way or a community way is wonderful to see.
So, we are starting in the back of the book and moving our way to the front. I think that it is transformational. Our neighborhood is already being transformed. I see the brightness in people’s eyes when they hear this. When I talk about this with individuals, they get it. They would say, This is so simple, why have we not being doing this? So, thank you gentlemen for all the hard work to get us to that concise and simple book, The Abundant Community.
Approaches to Gifts, Welcoming and Hope
Bruce Anderson talks with Peter Block and John McKnight about how people are unified by the desire to feel welcomed in a community, how everyone has felt unwelcome at some point regardless of class or caste. He also discusses his initiative, WelcomeVashon, which is about finding a group of people who all share the desire to make their community more welcoming. He further speaks about the differences he sees in “community organizing” versus the idea of welcoming.