There’s a reason dictators around the world and through time have viewed associations as conspiracies. John reflects on associational life as the most powerful force neighborhoods have to produce positive change and build community.
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John tells a story to show the difference between the world of facts, data, systematic information and the community’s way of knowing: the story. And the most important thing in strong communities is having true stories, stories that match our experience.
Dear All:
I’m abject about not joining you but I’m just now up to looking at the computer — which isn’t very far up!
I thought I might send a few words to the group to recognize their commitment. Peter would call this “A thought”:
I think you are gathering to consider the nature of a sensible life. A sensible life is one where all our senses are engaged — taste, smell, touch, seeing and hearing. A convivial life. An abundant life.
One way of understanding our current dilemma is that we have created an artificial environment that is an assault on the use of our senses. The result is that many of us are living senseless lives.
How did we become so unsensible? We were seduced by the siren call of “progress” — a progress that embraces technology, management and competition as the tools for a better life. And yet, each is a way to deprive us of our senses. Technology has created a tool-ruled rather than a relationship guided world.
Management has emerged as the method by which tool-ruled life is controlled. Managers create systems that are power pyramids designed for a few to control many. Competition ensures that control. Competition is a word that means “for me to win, you must lose.” It demands radical individualism that prohibits personal collective relationships that could threaten the pyramid and its technology.
The enemy of the senseless life is the world of the personal. It is the world where we see each other and the magnificent natural world around us. Instead of glass screens creating images that we consume. It is the world where we can hear one another’s stories and songs. Instead of electrically marketed noise.
It is the world where we can smell the good earth, coffee, puppy’s breath and death. Instead of the deodorizers and disinfectants that send lies to our noses.
It is the world where we can taste the memorable home-made food that is chronicled in time-worn, stained recipes on index cards. An encyclopedia of tastefulness. Instead of the salt, sugar and cholesterol cocktails created by the technology of the taste managers.
It is the touch of the baby’s hand, the feel of a hammer and saw in the basement workshop, the caress of love, the touch of care. Instead of feel of false power created by touching a steering wheel or a gun.
~ John ~
John reminds us that progress is not all that it seems.
For decades, mentoring has been a respected and valued approach to assisting youth — usually those thought to be problematic. The typical nature of the activity is a relationship between a volunteer adult and a young person, most frequently a teenager. The adult takes on a counseling and role modeling function that is primarily designed to improve youth behavior by establishing a supportive adult relationship. While this kind of relationship is valuable, it does not usually involve two assets that could be present in the relationship.
First, the adult is usually a person with many relationships in the adult world. These may include friends and neighbors, clubs and associations, businesses, not for profits and government people. This array of relationships represents doorways into a productive future for the young person if the mentor undertakes a process of connecting the young person to any of the array. Often, a significant problem of so-called “problem youth” is that their only connections are with other youth. However, if the mentor understood his/her function as including introduction to the productive adult world, they would often be opening a pathway to opportunity and change that usually cannot even be created by the school the youth attends.
Young people have gifts, skills, interests and special knowledge that are often unrecognized because the focus has been upon their deficits or problems.
Second, the young person has gifts, skills, interests and special knowledge that are often unrecognized because the focus has been upon his/her deficits or problems. Therefore, an important additional function that mentoring can include is the identification of these capacities of the young person. This very process, in and of itself, builds self-respect. And when these capacities become visible because the mentor has identified them, there are many possibilities for connecting the young person to productive activities that are a contribution to the community and positive identity building experiences for the youth.
A basic problem for many young people who are judged as problematic is that they have no significant connections to productive adults nor a means to express their own constructive capacities. Instead, they are often reminded by “youth-at-risk” programs, every day, in every way, that they are a problem.
Modern mentoring becomes a much more valuable activity when it involves connecting young people to productive life rather than just providing counseling. Showing young people the path out of the youth culture into a productive role based on their own gifts can be one of the most important means for changing both youth and the adult society.
A powerful neighborhood is hospitable; it welcomes strangers, people we don’t know. John explains the fullness of what that means and how hospitality enriches our lives.
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Jane Jacobs — author, activist and icon of the importance of a vital neighborhood — wrote years ago that a safe street is produced by eyes on the street.* It is produced by people walking around, sitting outside, knowing neighbors and being part of a social fabric. No number of gates or professional security people on patrol can make us safe. They can increase arrests, but basically safety is in the hands of citizens. Citizens outside the house, interacting with others, being familiar with the comings and goings of neighbors.
Every chief of police in our major cities now has a standard speech explaining the limits of local law enforcement as a tool to keep a neighborhood safe. They all advocate some form of local community organization that connects neighbors in a mutual alliance for security. Some police departments even send officers into the neighborhoods to organize block clubs as the principal means of protecting their security.
This is an interesting paradox. We pay police to make us safe, and then they spend some of our money to send us police officers who tell us that the strength of our own community ties is essential for our safety!
This police message is confirmed by all kinds of social science research. One of the best is a Chicago study by Robert Sampson and colleagues that found that two factors often predicted whether a neighborhood was crime prone**:
* Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; reprint with new foreword by author, New York: Modern Library, 1993). See also Dark Age Ahead (New York: Random House, 2004) and “Books and Articles By and About Jane Jacobs” at Jane’s Walk http://www.janeswalk.net/about/jane_jacobs/articles/.
** See Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Government is not the biggest threat to community life, as it was thought to be when the First Amendment to the Constitution was drafted. John and Peter reflect on how today’s “imperial institutions” of the not-for-profit world and corporate world have taken control of government, and all the talk that government is the problem actually deflects our attention from the privatization that now runs our culture.
View a video of this discussion on Abundant Community
About every six weeks for the last five years, John and Peter have hosted online / dial-up conversations with community-building pioneers as their guests. These conversations originally appeared on John and Peter’s Abundant Community site.
One way of thinking about how communities get built is by seeing that the principal resource people have for the task is their gifts, skills, talents, capacities. So when we ask, “How could this neighborhood be built?” the answer is not about bringing in institutions to label people with their deficiencies and provide programs that enable their dependency. Building strong neighborhoods becomes a matter of everybody contributing as many of their gifts as they can to each other and to the whole.
Institutional systems can command many behaviors but they cannot command care. Care is the commitment of one person to another, from the heart. It is the domain of people who come together in community.
Chicago’s Westside Health Authority started a quarter century ago when faced with declining government investment in healthcare neighbors asked, “What can WE do, and do it our way?” Created from the idea that citizens are the best authority on their own mental, physical and spiritual health, the Westside Health Authority is dedicated to using the capacity of area residents to improve the well-being of the community.
Pat Worth had been labeled retarded as a child and was living on a park bench when he decided to organize people who shared his experience. The organization he formed is now known as People First.
In this video post, John tells the story of traveling across Canada with Pat, organizing local People First chapters, and talks about the unforgettable lesson he learned from something Pat said on that trip: We don’t need services; we need community.
Pat died in 2004. Learn more from him in three articles he wrote, posted at Inclusion Press.
The “institutional assumption” — for example, thinking in terms of medical care, clinics, insurance, outreach instead of health — is the most consistent failure in our thinking about change. If we start by looking at the condition we’re interested in, we almost always recognize community life as the true source of the outcome we seek.
Abundant communities start with making visible the gifts of everyone in the neighborhood—the families, the young people, the old people, the vulnerable people, the troublesome people. Everyone. We do this not out of altruism, but to create the elements of a satisfying life.
View a transcription of this discussion on Abundant Community
Excerpt adapted from “Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods,” Chapter 6 in The Abundant Community, pp 119-126.
About every six weeks for the last five years, John and Peter have hosted online / dial-up conversations with community-building pioneers as their guests. These conversations originally appeared on John and Peter’s Abundant Community site.
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How would you organize a gathering of citizens to keep them from copping out?
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Video by Peter Block
The capacities of an abundant community are the core elements that need to be visible and manifest to create functional families and neighborhoods. One of the capacities of an abundant community is the ability to accept people’s fallibility.
A conspicuous capacity of abundant communities is their tolerance, their acceptance of human limitations. In community space, people’s limitations are intertwined with their gifts. When a neurotic person comes into the room, they create space for all others who are neurotic or anxious or angry. In the system space, there is no room for what is wrong with us—except in the privacy of the annual performance review. It is secret, it goes in your file, you sign off on it, and it affects your pay. Other than that, it’s “Keep your sunny side up.”
Community is about accepting people’s fallibility. It requires the willingness to live with people’s imperfections, more than being willing to live with their transgressions, which call for forgiveness, or not. Human shortcomings have more of an afterlife than their sins.
Fallibility is part of the human condition, and therefore a reality of the relational world. This is a key distinction we make here. Institutions are not good at surcease and sorrow, the whole tragic and sad part of life. They do not know what to do, because institutions are designed to last forever. They act as if they are immortal, which they are not. So failure, sorrow, and frailty threaten their mythology of eternal life.
Communities recognize and accept fallibility, and do not try to change it. When we view fallibility as a condition of being human, we see it is within the capacity of the family and neighborhood to deal with the condition and even see the gift in it.
Communities recognize and accept fallibility, and do not try to change it. So we will pray for you, we will do rituals. We have cultural ways of dealing with fallibilities and tragedies. The system way is to try to fix it; the community way is to memorialize it.
This relates to the distinction we make between a condition and a problem. As soon as we call something a problem, it begs for a solution and we start shopping. When we view fallibility as a condition of being human, we see it is within the capacity of the family and neighborhood to deal with the condition and even see the gift in it.
This is the gift to us of the developmentally disabled. Their condition is a fact of life; it does not diminish them. Nor do our failures diminish us. Our frailties are not who we are. In fact, they show that we are whole. That we are human. We can be whole in community life, but in systems life we can only be half. The other half is the stuff we leave off of our resume.
To elaborate on this, a distinction has evolved in the social service world between how to approach people who are developmentally disabled and how to approach people who are mentally ill. Our society has tended to be more supportive of the developmentally disabled than of the mentally ill. This is because everybody believes that a developmentally disabled person’s disability is something they can do nothing about. A mentally ill person, on the other hand, is still viewed within a medical model. It is a disease. It is curable. If only we had the right drugs, if only she would take her meds, the challenge would disappear. Systems still dominate the world of the mentally ill. The developmentally disabled world is moving away from systems back into the community.
An example of how abundant communities can show acceptance of human fallibility comes from Vancouver, British Columbia. The mayor advocated for and ran on a platform of dealing with the city’s drug problem by using a policy of “harm reduction” rather than correction or cure. Imagine that. He won.
The premise was that drug users are people who are half full and half empty. The half-empty part we call addiction. We have tried to deal with the half-emptiness in two ways. The first is to correct them—put them in jail. The other way is to cure them; we put them in treatment centers. The research shows that neither approach works very well. But because of our judgment about addiction, drug users become criminalized or medicalized. Both strategies are expensive and have produced large industries of professional services and buildings to house them. None of it has achieved much success in reducing addiction, reducing trouble in the community, or improving the lives of addicts.
The mayor advocated a third way, harm reduction. His essential message was, “Most people who are drug addicts are going to die of it, no matter what we do. If we want to do something about them, we can do more of what doesn’t work—cure or correct—and it still won’t work. Or we can take them where they are and ask, How can we get them in a life that will damage us the least, and them the least?”
There now exists the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. It is a community development group. These people, who became free of being cured or corrected, say, “Our lives have been surrounded by people who always saw us as empty. How we can actually contribute something.”
The woman who was the chair of the group, after hearing how impressed we were by what she was working on, said, “Now don’t get romantic about this. Every person in that room is going to die of drugs. And we are all going to die a lot quicker than you are. But the one thing this harm reduction does is not harm reduction. It allows us, for the rest of our lives, to contribute something. That is what you see. Our hidden gifts revealed.”
How better to spend your final days than to be free to give your gifts?
The American Academy of Pediatrics recently released a report urging that children under age two not be allowed to watch any shows on television, or on iPads, smartphones or computers. Among other reasons, the report notes that the noise and colors distract children from interacting with others and can lead to developmental delays. Some other studies have found that twelve-month-old children in the U.S. spend between one and two hours daily in front of a screen and that 60% of American households keep the television on all day. As a result, the study finds this “secondhand TV” prevents children from engaging with adults or concentrating fully on their own play.
It may be that most of us are not alarmed by “tube-nurtured” children because we think that what is happening is entertainment — innocent and pleasurable. Therefore, we don’t recognize the fact that the tube is replacing play and genuine entertainment created by children, families and communities. In fact, the word “entertainment” is derived from the Old French which meant “hold together.” Its essence is about relationships between people rather than people and “tubes.”
There is an interesting monograph first printed in 1928 titled “Baraboo 1850’s to 1860’s Pioneer Festivities.” It describes how people entertained themselves in the decade of the 1850’s in the small Wisconsin town of Baraboo. The monograph documents entertainments produced by the residents including:
This is a history of entertainment, festivity and play that was produced by everyday people in so many ways that most days had at least one entertainment. People knew how to create activities that would be fun, inspiring, social and informative. In that sense they were capable of creating a community’s enjoyment.
In a “tube-focused” community, many people have lost the capacity to produce an enjoyable life. Instead they are consumers of commercial “entertainment.” And because so many of them have never engaged in creating and participating in entertainment, there’s no need for us to develop our talents. We pay to watch people with talent on a tube. And everyone knows that “tubing” has nothing to do with a festive life. Instead it is a sad retreat from the joy of using our abilities to celebrate each other by coming together in a thousand exciting, happy, supportive, friend-making, talent-displaying ways.
So, supposing your 2012 New Year’s resolutions included personal leadership in creating an enjoyable neighborhood. We can begin by recognizing that we still know how to celebrate weddings, birthdays, graduations and holidays with our relatives. The people of Baraboo in the 1850’s have created a community celebration menu for us to build upon. We can join together with our neighbors to have gardening, tea, quilting and book parties. We can open our houses of worship to all kinds of neighborhood celebrations. We can create opportunities to dance together, sing together, make music together and raise money together. We can join in enjoying the talents of our children and debates of public issues.
In all these ways, we can become a real community where we know everyone by name and experience their unique talents. Best of all, we can become real neighbors celebrating life together rather than living isolated lives in houses where electric tubes create a counterfeit life for us and our families.
~ John ~
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