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John McKnight

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How to Teach Children to Lose by Winning

In his brilliant book No Contest: The Case against Competition, author Alfie Kohn defines competition as the process by which for me to win, you must lose.

Our children’s lives are filled with the competitive experience. Most of their activities called “sports” are pedagogies in competition.  Although we teach them that a real sports person is a “good loser,” we all know that the truth was revealed by the great football coach, Vince Lombardi, who said, “Winning isn’t everything;it’s the only thing.”

Our children’s video games are all about winning—war to car racing.

In schools where our children are graded on curves or continuums, the message is, “I’m not good enough unless I get an A.  Then I am a winner and I can see all the others behind me—the losers.” In fact in order to get an A, others must perform poorly.

When our young people move on to college, the competitive culture is reinforced as they learn that the real hero of higher education is the “winningest coach”—people like Joe Paterno.

The college classroom is a daily pressure cooker where an A is the winning recipe. All lower grades need an explanation on your resume.

Finally, having been immersed in the competitive idea for 21 years, our young people matriculate into the working world as bona fide members of the competitive culture. They understand that livelihood is all about competition. In their work, advancement is winning. Staying in place is losing, even if the work might be very satisfying.

And after work their recreation is usually their enjoyment of winners beating losers. Whether playing or watching sports, the name of the game is the same: who wins?

For entertainment, they are treated to normal non-competitive activities converted into exercises in winning or losing. Cooking becomes a competition between chefs. Making clothing becomes a competition among designers. Dancing becomes a competition among non-professional dancers. Even losing weight becomes a competition among the obese. In many of these competitive “entertainments,” the loser is publicly humiliated and removed from the “fun.”

Expanding the domestic competitive culture is the growing perception that the nation’s future depends on winning the race against China.

The result of our win/lose society is a deep belief in the myth that competition is the proven method for achieving efficiency and excellence. The truth of the matter is the opposite. Alfie Kohn’s No Contest is the primary text that provides the empirical evidence that cooperation “beats” competition in most of the important areas of our lives. His data clearly shows that people who collaborate are more productive, learn more, enjoy playing more, and have better character and interpersonal relationships.

Cooperation is the context for each of us to value doing well for ourselves and others.

Kohn explains the failure of competition as the inability to recognize that trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Cooperation is the context for each of us to value doing well for ourselves and others. Competition is the context for each of us who believes that doing well results from beating others.

There is a ready-made, accessible context for reintroducing ourselves and our children to a life of cooperation. It is our own neighborhood.  There, the possibilities for a good life depend upon cooperation rather than competition. A neighbor is not someone you beat. The word signifies a friend with whom we share a local community. And community is not a place where we gather together to beat each other and create lots of losers and one winner. The neighborly way is described in our book, The Abundant Community.

So when we admit that most of us don’t really know our neighbors, we are revealing that the primary site for genuine cooperation is absent from our lives. And, perhaps the reason for this unusual lack of relationships is that the only way many of us know how to act is in a world that creates one winner and lots and lots of losers.

~ John ~

How to Reduce the National Debt by 30 Trillion Dollars

Anthropologists remind us that the manifestations of a community’s culture are its food, language, arts, and faith. These are the ways that have interwoven through time so that a community knows how to survive in its place.

Because cultural ways are historic and vital, they are very hard to change. Consider how difficult it is to change the food that people eat. This is why the efforts to deal with obesity are so challenging.

A recent article in the New York Times points out the consequence of the way many people eat. The article says that a 20% increase in the price of sugary drinks nationally could result in about a 20% decrease in consumption. This decrease could prevent about 1,500,000 Americans from becoming obese and forestall 4,000,000 cases of diabetes. This would save about 30 trillion dollars – much of which would have to be paid through some form of public insurance.

What are we to do about this 30 trillion dollar dilemma?

So what are we, the public, to do about this 30 trillion dollar dilemma? Obviously, this is a matter of public concern and we hear many ideas about new laws to change what we eat. The New York Times article is headlined “Bad Food? Tax It…” An opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association quotes Dr. David Ludwig of the Children’s Hospital inBoston as saying that, “Putting children with severe obesity in foster care would act in the best interest of the child.” He goes on to say, “In instances of severe childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable from a legal standpoint because of imminent health risks and the parents’ chronic failure to address medical problems.”

Historic communities learned how to use the food they grew to nourish and sustain their lives without eating themselves to death. We know about the “Mediterranean Diet”—a manifestation of a culture that allowed a people to survive. The Inuit people of the north had a culture that guided them to live and prosper on a diet largely comprised of fish and meat.

The “obesity problem” isn’t really about overeating. It is about people who abandoned their historic culture and entered a culture of market-directed consumption. Their lives are surrounded with counterfeit nourishment. They have no cultural direction that tells them how to survive with the food that could grow all around them.

Is it possible that we could turn away from the market and turn towards our neighbors?

So what will happen with this 30 trillion dollar food problem? Will we try to tax away the bad food, and remove obese children from bad parents because our community cultures are ineffective? Or, is it possible that we could turn away from the market and turn towards our neighbors? We could discover, together, how we can eat, cook, and celebrate what we grow locally in this place where we live. Otherwise we will have an ever-growing demand for new laws to change behavior that is created by the counterfeit culture of marketers. It is quite predictable that this effort will fail. Conservatives will defend the market counterfeiters and the liberals will support laws that can neither change nor create a culture.

We are up against a wonderful truth:  Communities are the source of life-supporting cultures. And, within communities are the abundant capacities of productive citizens to grow a new future. We can see it sprouting all around us in the local food and slow food movements. Eat local, eat what your neighbors grow, eat slowly, eat what your grandmother prepared, and walk where you once drove.

If you want to be part of the growing new community food culture, here are some sites to get you started:

Local Food Online Resources

 

The Community Food Security Coalition Website has compiled a long list of local food system resources and websites. http://www.foodsecurity.org/links.html

Civil Eats also has a long list of links of different networks and organizations in the local food movement nationwide (“We Support” on the right-hand side). www.civileats.com

Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food: USDA-sponsored initiative on supporting local and regional food systems: http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/knowyourfarmer?navid=KNOWYOURFARMER

Ways to Connect

International → Local Level 

 

You’ll not only have fun and be healthy, you’ll greatly lower your taxes by not having to pay off a 30 trillion dollar debt! It’s win-win all the way.

~ John ~

Lifting the Burdens of Parenting

For many people, “parenting” is a word describing a burden. Usually, they’re correct because they’re carrying an unprecedented load, heaped on their backs throughout the twentieth century.

First, many modern married couples were slowly detached from supporting relationships. They live long distances from their relatives. They no longer attend a religious organization. They live in a neighborhood where they know only a few people well enough to even say hello. They’re isolated and have no one to turn to who will share the raising of their children.

As a consequence, many seek relief by paying people to take on most of the child-raising functions. This process requires them to produce more money and enter the world of consumerhood.

With no time to raise their children and no village to help, parents must now be “child managers.” 

The trade-off is no time to raise their children and no village to help raise the child. However, a new function becomes necessary. Parents must now organize, manage, and transport children. The result is probably positive because as a “child manager,” they are modeling for their children how to be managed as well as how to manage. In an institutionalized society, this managed childhood is good preparation for those who aspire to reach the top of managed systems.

For many Americans, it is difficult to imagine what “unmanaged” children would be like. Who would program and protect them? If they weren’t managed, wouldn’t they grow up wild?

Anyone interested in what an unmanaged childhood is like could talk to his or her grandparents. Most lived at a time when parents didn’t manage their children’s lives. So ask your grandparents how they played when there were no recreational programs, childproof playgrounds, or Little League? How did they overcome the boredom when no one guided them in their play?

Who were the adults they spent time with if the adults around them weren’t paid to be there? Did the neighbors on the block know them? Teach them? Discipline them? Or did they run wild?

How did they go anywhere if their parents weren’t driving them? Did they have to walk? Wasn’t that unsafe?

What did they eat if there was no supermarket or McDonald’s? Wasn’t it unhealthy? What about gardens? Did people have them?

We are surrounded by elders who know how children played, learned, moved, and ate before they were managed. So, why not check out our senior wisdom. It is one way to begin to unburden ourselves of the worst of parenting. Most seniors know that in their own childhoods they were neither managed nor wild. In fact, they may well observe that compared to their unmanaged youth, children today seem pretty wild. And that may be because today’s children know that they live mainly among adults who are paid to service them, no villagers who really care enough to join in raising them, and parents too busy and too tired to enjoy them.

~ John ~

Why Families Fall Apart

One day, when my mother was in her 70’s, she told me a story about how things had changed in her small town since she was a girl. She said,

When I was a girl, things were very different. When we were feeling ill, my grandmother knew what would cure almost anything and all of us turned to her for healing advice.

When there was a dispute or trouble between family members, we turned to Uncle Charlie who listened, understood, and counseled us. He would remind us that our family’s sticking together was the most important thing we had.

Most important things I learned were from our neighbors and family. School helped, but the way I really came to understand the world was from the folks around me.

Whenever the family gathered, each of the kids was expected to display some talent for the group – singing, reciting a poem, doing acrobatics, playing a musical instrument. We didn’t think of it as entertainment. It was the enjoyment of sharing our gifts.

Everyone had backyard gardens and we had wonderful get-togethers when we picked and canned the food that got us through the winter.

My dad and brother built our house.

Today, that seems to have all faded away. Now, people use only doctors when they are ill and grandmothers are ignored.

People go to lawyers and psychologists when there are problems and Uncle Charlie is ignored.

Now, people think schools raise a child so children ignore their neighbors and their family.

Now, people enjoy television and movies and they ignore the gifts and talents of the people around them.

Food comes from the supermarket and McDonald’s and the backyard is for grass. There are no wonderful canning parties anymore.

Houses are built by architects and contractors who never make a house that really fits a family like the one my dad and brother built.

I think my mother was reminding me that her community was a productive place.

I think my mother was reminding me that her community was the producer of much of its health, problem solving, education, talent, food and housing. It was a productive place. Now, she observes a community made up of consumers who believe that health is in a hospital, problems are the domain of lawyers and therapists, education is produced by schools, enjoyment is produced by electronic media, food is provided by supermarkets and a home is built by professionals.

Hidden within my mother’s observations is the fact that she is describing the loss of basic functions belonging to families and neighborhoods. Most have become incompetent in terms of doing the work of families and neighborhoods. The cost of this incompetence is families and neighborhoods that have no real function.

No group persists when it has no reason to be together. Therefore, if families perform no functions we can predict that they will fall apart.

We delude ourselves if we think our high divorce rates are caused by interpersonal problems and disagreements. It’s not that people are not getting along, it is that they don’t need each other because they have no functions. They are just isolated, unproductive, dependent consumers who happen to live in the same house.

~ John ~

It Takes A Village to Educate a Child

Throughout the United States, local school districts are cutting back on teachers and curriculum while increasing class size.  With our current economy, it doesn’t appear that this trend will soon be reversed.

This grim prospect depends upon whether we have the novel belief that it takes a school to educate a child. Historically, the primary source of education was the knowledge and wisdom of the villagers. However, as the power of schooling grew, the neighborhood knowledge got devalued and unused. And so it is that local people often feel cornered as schooling recedes.

Supposing, on the other hand, that we looked again at the neighborhood knowledge. What would we find? 

In one African-American, working-class neighborhood in Chicago, they’re finding out what their neighbors believe they know well enough to teach the local young people. When they interviewed 19 adults living on 3 blocks, they found that they were prepared to teach 37 different topics. Here they are:

 

Mathematics | Black history | World history | Geography | Etiquette | Gardening

Cooking  | Painting | Parenting | How to have faith | Sheet metal work

Plumbing | Carpentry | Skating | Real estate/business | Reading comprehension

Sewing | Typing | Reading | Knitting | Computer technology | Real estate

Good neighboring | First aid | Self-esteem | Life styles for youth | Marketing

Strategic planning | Physical fitness | Basic accounting | Reading a credit report

Banking | Diction | Grammar | English | Public speaking | Journalism for beginners

 

It appears that 19 neighbors may be able to teach more topics than the local school. So it is clear that the neighborhood, like the village of old, has much of what is needed to educate the children when the school reduces its role.

The work ahead is to revive our neighborhood capacity to be responsible to, and for, our young people. The initial steps are simple. Find out what your neighbors are willing to teach. See which of these topics the local young people would like to learn. And then, make the connection.

Together, these new connections are the beginning of creating a village that raises a child, and a community that really cares about its young people.

If you would like to begin a neighborhood initiative like this, email me at JLMABCD@aol.com. I’ll send you a set of tools that have been used in neighborhoods to create a powerful community that uses its own talents to prepare its own children for the demands of the 21st century.

~ John ~

Enterprising Economy

The community is the natural nest for hatching new enterprise — it is the birthplace and home of small business, which provides the largest growth in employment. Friends and family often provide the capital and sweat equity to start a business.

The culture of a local community is a key factor in nurturing entrepreneurial spirit. A community where local people feel they are a center of enterprise creates the vision and support. The culture encourages people to initiate enterprises, members use their buying power to support local enterprises, and they put their savings to work in community credit unions and banks. Their dollars circulate, providing the economic support that parallels and strengthens local social support. Some communities even have a local currency to incentivize support of local economy. A related economic power of a connected community is access to jobs. One quarter of job seekers get information from relatives, friends, and neighbors.

Without strong community connections the economy becomes
co-opted by systems.

Strong community connections spawn new enterprises, sustain them, and provide primary access to employment. Without these functions, the economy becomes a land of large-scale institutions unable to sustain a local workforce (and so large they’re destined to fail to serve any interests but their own).

In the consumer ecology, care is co-opted by systems: businesses, agencies and governments. Insurance agencies send letters to tell us they care about us. Charities ask us to give money to pay for the care of people. Government pays hospitals and medical professionals for their service. In each case, they are providing a paid service — not care. Systems offer services for pay.

Genuine care can’t be paid for — it is given, free of charge. You can pay for services for your mother in a nursing home, but she may lose the care of family, friends, neighbors, faith, and service groups. They become visitors to a service system; she becomes a client.

The place to look for care is in the dense relationships of neighbors and community groups. We have a competent community if we care about each other, and about the neighborhood. Together, our care manifests a vision, culture, and commitment that can uniquely assure our sense of well-being and happiness. This source of satisfaction is complete in and of itself — not dependent on the next purchase.

No business, agency, or government can fulfill basic community functions. If we don’t know our neighbors, aren’t active in local community life, pay others to raise our children and service our elders, and try to buy our way into a good life, we pay a big price. We produce a weak family, a careless community and a nation that tries hopelessly to revive itself from the top down. Reversing this situation is difficult because of the power of systems to make consumers out of citizens.

By seeing the consumer ecology for what it is, we can shift our thinking and become producers of our own future.

By seeing the consumer ecology for what it is, we can become citizens again. We can shift our thinking and decide who we take ourselves to be: producers of our own future, or purchasers of what others have in mind for us. Consumer society begins when what was once the province or function of the family and community migrates to the marketplace. It begins with the decision to purchase what might have been homemade or produced locally. This is how citizens yield their power to the lure of consumption.

Consumption is like an addictive drug. The market promises what it knows won’t be fulfilling. This defines its counterfeit nature — trying to make something appear to be gratifying or satisfying when it is not. The fact that dissatisfaction persists after achieving the good life means the good life is not satisfying. Unfunctional families and incompetent communities signal that we’ve reached the limits of consumer satisfaction.

For example, we talk of the child as a product of the School System, starting early the migration of the child from citizen to consumer, from family and community life into system life. We count on the School System to perform many family functions—to feed them, discipline them, and provide custodial care.

The same dependency goes for other family functions — like health, entertainment, nutrition, employment, mental well-being, elder care, and environmental stewardship — all have been outsourced to professionals. All are organized in systems designed to deliver these functions in efficient, low-cost, consistent ways.

We made the leap from being citizens to being consumers in a culture that sells the idea that a satisfied life is determined first by defining and promoting needs and then figuring out how to fulfill them. We create a larger market by determining that families and communities are filled with needs that are best serviced by systems and professions.

Consumerism offers purchased solutions to being human, providing a substitute for what could come naturally to families and communities.

This is the more profound cost of the consumer promise, the denuding of community capacity. The institutional counterfeit of compassion and support is a two-part package: first, the spin of optimism backed up by a purchase; and, second, the denial when it does not happen.

For example, in advertising we are promised immortality, eternal youth and happiness. This promise is elegant, moving, entertaining. At the end, ways the product could hurt us are described in small print or spoken rapidly — accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. We call this “spin.” Responses of spin and denial are designed to keep organizations on course. Systems can’t allow sorrow to become personal. When systems lift the veil of denial and spin to apologize or express sorrow, it is either because they’re forced to by law, or it is long after any consequences.

The effort to find a fix for our humanity only forces us into counterfeit promises and unsatisfying results. Often we believe that if we do more of what does not work, it will finally work. This is the dilemma of the consumer economy: it leads to a place where when we reach a limit and still are unsatisfied, we think, if only we had more we would be successful or satisfied — more police, physicians, teachers, services, stuff.

This is not a solution — it’s an addiction. Consumerism is not simply an economic system — it can be considered an ecology. It impacts how we relate to each other; it shapes our relationship with food, work, music, ritual, religion — all elements of culture.

And for this ecological system to work, we have to participate in the effort to purchase what matters and persist at it, despite the lack of results. This consumptive ecological system produces hollowness in our lives, even for those who are winning at the game.

 

This post appeared in the January 2011 issue of Leadership Excellence.

Home page photo: Natalie Maynor

Support Community-Building Clergy

A convivial friend, Dan Grego, says that the future of our country depends upon whether we can learn how to help each other, outside of the market.

One of the most significant reasons that we don’t help each other in our neighborhoods is because we believe that we have to pay for real help. And because we imagine we can buy our help in the marketplace, our neighbors’ help becomes devalued or valueless.

So it is that when we are in distress, the constant advice is, “You should get professional help.”  This non-neighborly help has many names: psychologist, psychiatrist, marriage counselor, family therapist, child psychologist, grief counselor and on and on.  Sadly, we are often reduced to being guided through life by paid professionals, many of whom have never endured the problem, dilemma or crisis we face. Nevertheless, they do have a certificate on their wall.  Our neighbors don’t.

In reality, people who have had experience with the dilemma we face live all around us, and many have successfully dealt with our problem. It is this knowledge of neighbors who have successfully struggled through crisis and misery that was traditionally the source of community wisdom.  Many were respected elders.

When we respect certificates, community wisdom goes wanting.

At their best, local religious communities are a source of community wisdom. However there are clergy who threaten their communities. Having been trained in professional therapeutic techniques, these clergy act like psychiatrists. They absorb all the fears, fallibilities, crises and failings of the parishioners.

At the same time, many parishioners know from experience more about handling these personal dilemmas than does the cleric.  Instead of connecting the troubled parishioner with peers who know the way through crisis, the cleric ignores their wisdom while substituting the wares of a therapist. As a result, he strips his own religious community of its most precious gift — the members’ ability to help each other.

Fortunately, there is a healthy counter-movement.  Reverend Philip Amerson, Dean of Garret Evangelical Theological Seminary, reports that, “There is a growing awareness of this problem in the circles of those who teach pastoral care.  A movement within pastoral care circles is pushing back and encouraging pastors to look to local networks of support.”

Reverend James Conn, retired Director of New Ministries for the United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, notes that faith communities have fostered the small-group movement.  He says, “I am amazed by the degree of mutual support that faith communities are fostering these days.  Many are offering mutually led or lay-facilitated groups focused on grief, divorce or substance abuse.”

Finally, Reverend Damon Lynch, pastor of the New Prospect Baptist Church in Cincinnati, speaks to this question as a front-line pastor.  He says,

A true pastor/clergy person should not threaten the community of wisdom but should facilitate its activity.  I stopped doing serious counseling years ago when it became clear to me that the complexity of the issues people dealt with needed more than a scriptural pat on and back and a prayer.  Issues of extreme depression, rape, incest, child abuse, spousal abuse, debilitating illness, and more come across my desk on a weekly basis, and when you top those off with unemployment, homelessness and hunger, it will cause even the strongest in faith to break down.  But what keeps the community surviving are the testimonies of the survivors.  In the black church testimonies are just as powerful and meaningful as any counseling session.  In testimonies, you often hear someone just like you speak about a troubling period in their life that through the help of God and others, they made it through.  You no longer feel alone and isolated, you realize you are part of a community of hurting people who are all overcoming something.

The next thing that keeps the community surviving are the formal and informal networks.  The church is one large network made up of many smaller networks.  All churches have multiple organizations, clubs and ministries through which people live out their service to God.  There are also informal networks, the ‘meeting after the meeting crowd.’

The informal networks are where solid friendships are born and true support in time of need can be found.

I recently preached a sermon to honor Dr. King that was a sermon he preached first in 1956 and again here in Cincinnati in 1967 entitled ‘A Knock at Midnight.’  In Dr. King’s message he talked about it being midnight in the moral, social and psychological orders of our world.  In my message, I talked about how important it is to have someone you can call upon in the midnight of your life.  The church must be there; the community must be there when people face their midnights!

 

Reverend Lynch’s practice is a valuable example of the work of a community-building rather than a community-busting clergy. Let us hope that more and more seminaries will teach his approach to their students so that faith communities will be at the center of community renewal.

~ John ~

5 Questions to Awaken Your Functional Family

The path to restoring function to the family in a citizen society, not a consumer society, is quite simple. It begins with five questions.

 

1. What functions can we put back into the hands of young people? 

Whether they are our kids or a neighbor’s, how do we help them be useful? Can we have them teach the Internet to seniors? Can we hold gatherings where they learn about music, painting, or poetry from artistic neighbors? Which neighbors can help them learn about carpentry, wallpapering, cooking, auto and small engine repair, house painting, making videos, pruning trees, talking to the elderly, sewing?

 

2. What does each person do to support the household economy? 

Reduce or stop certain purchases? Part-time jobs? Could we grow our own food? Support clothing exchanges? Contact merchants and neighbors to find local sources of income? Start a home-based business? What would it take for all members to be financially literate, know what a budget is, comparison shop, monitor income and expenses? How could we reinstitute savings as an economic good and debt as something to be reduced to zero?

 

3. How does this family care for those who are vulnerable? 

Who is good at listening? Are there people in the neighborhood who are lonely and can be introduced to one another? What do people on the margin in the neighborhood like to do? How do we find this out? Who in our family struggles, and what support do they need from all of us?

 

4. How can we begin to entertain ourselves?

Which black boxes are sucking the life out of the family? How do we spend our evenings? Is there anything we do together on a regular basis? What can we do that could replace the electronic boxes? Anyone for slow food?

 

5. What do we do to protect the environment and our health? 

What is our commitment to eliminating waste? What food can we eat that is local and consciously grown? How do we reduce packaging when we buy things? Can we walk or bike instead of drive? How do we eat healthy food and track our own health? Who around us has traditional wisdom about health?

 

These are a few samples of ways to begin developing a new family narrative that offers the satisfaction of usefulness. Taken to heart, these questions build neighborhood competence and give us tools that cannot be purchased from professional service providers. This restoration of the power of citizens living in concert might also be good for the soul and for our democracy, but those are another story.

 

Re-posted with permission from the December 22, 2010 issue of YES! magazine  http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/what-happy-families-know/5-questions-to-awaken-your-functional-family

The Good Life? It’s Close to Home

When family members do not work or live well together we sometimes call the family dysfunctional. We prescribe professional help for the family or advocate for social policies that would support it—child care, parental leave, extended unemployment insurance, debt forgiveness.

But the real challenge to the family is that it has lost its job. The functions of the family have been outsourced. The problem is not dysfunction—that’s just a side effect. The problem is non-function, and this has much to do with the growth of the consumer society.

 

The End of the Functional Family

Consumer society has put an end to the functional family. We normally think of consumerism as buying stuff we want but don’t need, but it runs deeper than that. The essential promise of consumerism is that all of what is fulfilling or needed in life can be purchased—from happiness to healing, from love to laughter, from raising a child to caring for someone at the end of life. What was once the task of the family and the neighborhood is now outsourced. Aunt Martha is forgetful? Little Arthur is restless? Get them a diagnosis and a prescription. In this simple act, we stop being citizens—we become consumers.

Creating a more community-based way to live and find satisfaction, even when surrounded by a consumer culture, requires only that we act as if each of us has what we need.

The cost of our transformation into consumers is that the family has lost its capacity to manage the necessities it traditionally provided. We expect the school, coaches, agencies, social workers, probation officers, sitters and day care to raise our children. The family, while romanticized and held as a cultural ideal, has lost its function as the primary place to raise children, sustain health, care for the vulnerable, and ensure economic security.

 

The Rise of Neighborhood Incompetence

The neighborhood has also lost its function. Our neighborhoods and communities are no longer able to support the family in its efforts. In most cases, we are disconnected from our neighbors and isolated from our communities. The community and neighborhood are no longer competent.

A competent community provides a safety net for the care of a child, attention and care for the vulnerable, the means for economic survival for the household, and many of the social tools that sustain health. The community, particularly the neighborhood, has the potential to provide the extended support system to help the family in all these key functions. The usefulness that used to reside in the neighborhood is now provided by the marketplace.

 

Outsiders Raising Children

“It takes a village to raise a child” is an African saying repeated as a matter of faith by American leaders of all persuasions. Yet most of our children are not raised by a village. Instead, they are raised by teachers and counselors in school, youth workers and coaches out of school, juvenile therapists and corrections officials if they are deviant, television and computers and cell phones if they have spare time, and McDonald’s if they are hungry. What this means is that the space that the family and neighborhood once filled has been sold and is now filled with paid professionals, electronic toys, and marketing.

Until the 20th century, the basic idea in rearing children was that they become effective grownups by connecting with productive adults and learning from them the community’s skills, traditions, and customs. Youth learned from the community and had jobs to do: caring for the elderly and young, doing errands for the household, working on machines, helping with food. When they became adults, they were equipped to care both for the next generation and for those who had cared for them.

What we now know is that the most effective local communities are those where neighborhoods and citizens have reclaimed their traditional roles. The research on this point is decisive. Where there are “thick” community connections, there is positive child development. Health improves, the environment is sustained, and people are safer and have a better local economy. The social fabric of neighborhood and family is decisive.

 

Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods

Creating a more community-based way to live and find satisfaction, even when surrounded by a consumer culture, requires only that we act as if each of us has what we need. We have the gifts, structures, and capacities to substitute for our habit of consumption. We can decide to shift our attention toward building the functions of our family and neighborhood. [See 5 Questions to Awaken Your Functional Family.]

Here is a story of how this works, drawn from the real-life experiences of families from neighborhoods around the world that we have worked with.

Naomi Alessio and Jackie Barton were walking through the neighborhood, talking about being overwhelmed with work, meals, lessons, school, and especially the kids. Except, Naomi noted, her son Theron had begun to turn around.

Last summer, when Theron looked through the open door of the metalworking shop Mr. Thompson had set up in his garage, the old man invited him in. Something clicked. Theron began to stop by every day, and he started bringing home metal pieces he’d learned to make.

Naomi could see Theron change. He was proud of what he made—Mr. Thompson even paid him to make a few things. Naomi said she’d finally stopped worrying about what Theron was doing after school. Jackie admitted that her son Alvin was in trouble, and she asked Naomi if there might be someone in the neighborhood whose skills would interest Alvin.

They knew that Gerald Lilly was into fishing, and that Sam Wheatley was a saxophonist, but that was about it. They decided to ask all the men in the neighborhood about their interests and skills. Mr. Thompson agreed to go with them. It took three weeks to visit all the men on the block. When they were done, they were amazed at what they had found: men who knew juggling, barbecuing, bookkeeping, hunting, haircutting, bowling, investigating crimes, writing poems, fixing cars, weightlifting, choral singing, teaching dogs tricks, mathematics, praying, and how to play trumpet, drums, and sax. They found enough talent for all the kids in the neighborhood to tap into. Three of the men they met—Charles Wilt, Mark Sutter, and Sonny Reed—joined Naomi, Jackie, and Mr. Thompson in finding out what the kids on the block were interested in learning.

When they got together after interviewing the kids, Mark talked about a boy he met who knew about computers. Why not ask all the kids what they knew about? Then they could match adults to the kids, just as they planned to match up the kids with the grown-ups. When they were done, they found they had 22 things the young people knew that might interest some adults on the block.

The six neighbors named themselves the Matchmakers and, as they got more experience, they began to connect neighbors who shared the same interests. The gardeners’ team shared growing tips and showed four families how to create gardens—even on a flat rooftop! Several people who were worried about the bad economy created a website where neighbors who knew about available work could post job openings. To give it some flair, they found people in the neighborhood to take photos for the site and gradually opened it up for all sorts of neighborhood uses.

Jolene Cass, for instance, posted one of her poems on the website and asked if there were other poets on the block. It turned out there were three. They began to have coffee, share their writing, and post their poems online.

Eleven adults and kids formed the Block Band, and neighborhood singers formed a choir led by Sarah Ensley, an 80-year-old woman who’d been singing all her life.

Charles Dawes, a police officer, formed a team of adults and young people to make the block a safe haven for everyone.

Libby Green had lived on the block for 74 years. The Matchmakers got two neighborhood teenagers, Lenore Manse and Jim Caldwell, to write down her stories about the neighborhood and post them on the website.

Then Lenore decided to write family histories for everyone on the block, and persuaded Jim and her best friend, Lannie Eaton, to help her record the histories and round up photos to go along with them.

Charles Wilt suggested a way for the Matchmakers to welcome newcomers to the neighborhood and begin to connect them with their neighbors: give them a copy of the block history and get information about the new family’s history, skills, and interests.

Three years later, at the annual block party, Jackie Barton summed up what the neighborhood had accomplished:

“What we have done is broken all the lines. We broke the lines between the men. We broke the lines between the women. Then the lines were broken between the men and the women. And best of all, the lines were broken between the adults and the children and between all of us and our seniors. All the lines are broken; we’re all connected.  We’re a real community now.”

Seeing the Abundance in the Neighborhood

The story has the elements of what we can call a competent neighborhood. Creating competence starts 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.

This thickens the social fabric. It makes the community’s gifts more widely available in support of the family. If we do it, even in small way, we find that much of what we once purchased is at hand: carpentry, Internet knowledge, listening, driving a truck, math, auto repair, organizing ability, gardening, haircutting, wallpapering, making videos, babysitting, house painting, accounting, soccer coaching, artistic abilities, cooking, fitness knowledge, sitting with the old or the ill, health remedies, sewing. And some of those things will come from the elderly, the young, the isolated, and the unemployed.

With the consciousness of our gifts and the ability to connect them and make them practical and usable, we experience the abundance of a community.

These local connections can give the modern family what the extended family once provided: A place with a strong culture of kin, friends, and neighbors. Together we raise our children, manage health, support local enterprise, and care for those on the margin.

When we become competent again and have families reclaim their functions, we see emerging from our community culture those essential qualities of a satisfying life: kindness, generosity, cooperation, forgiveness, and the ability to live with our common fallibilities. These will all be given a home and nurtured by families who have reclaimed their function.

~ John and Peter ~

Re-posted with permission from: December 22, 2010 issue YES! magazine

The Therapeutic Neighborhood

If you have a deeply troubling personal problem, where do you turn?  To a cleric? A psychologist? A counselor? A therapist? Each is a hired professional with different approaches to our dilemmas.

But suppose they didn’t exist. Where would you turn?

What about going to a group of your neighbors?  They might be more helpful than the professionals. 

We can learn how to use this neighborly wisdom from the Quakers.  In the 1660s, universities weren’t turning out certified personal problem solvers, and the Quakers had no clergy to turn to.  Nonetheless, their members often faced personal crises and suffering.  In response, the Quakers recognized that the local community had unusual powers to help its members through difficult times.  Relying on the wisdom of their community rather than paid professionals, they created “Clearness Committees.”

Parker Palmer, a wonderful guide toward community wisdom, has written about the Clearness Committees in his book A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey toward an Undivided Life.

The methods he describes are quite clear and simple.  So for those seeking to uncover the wisdom in their neighborhood, here is Palmer’s description of the “clearness” process:

The Clearness Committee: A Communal Approach to Discernment

Behind the Clearness Committee is a simple but crucial conviction: each of us has an inner teacher, a voice of truth, that offers the guidance and power we need to deal with our problems. But that inner voice is often garbled by various kinds of inward and outward interference. The function of the Clearness Committee is not to give advice or “fix” people from the outside in, but to help people remove the interference so that they can discover their own wisdom from the inside out.

If we do not believe in the reality of inner wisdom, the Clearness Committee can become an opportunity for manipulation. But if we respect the power of the inner teacher, the Clearness Committee can be a remarkable way to help someone name and claim his or her deepest truth.

The Clearness Committee’s work is guided by some simple but crucial rules and understandings. Among them, of course, is the rule that the process is confidential. When it is over, committee members will not speak with others about what was said and, equally important, they will not speak with the focus person about the problem unless he or she requests a conversation.

1. Normally, the person who seeks clearness (the “focus person”) chooses his or her committee, with a minimum of five and a maximum of six trusted people who embrace as much diversity among them as possible in age, background, gender, etc.

2. The focus person writes up his or her issue in 3–5 pages and sends this document to members of the committee in advance of the meeting. There are three sections to this write-up: a concise statement of the problem, a recounting of relevant background factors that may bear on the problem, and an exploration of any hunches the focus person may have about what’s on the horizon regarding the problem. Most people find that by writing a statement of this sort, they are taking their first step toward inner clarity.

3. The committee meets for three hours—with the understanding that there may be a need for a second and even third meeting at a later date. A clerk (facilitator) and a recording clerk (secretary) should be named, though taping the meeting is a good alternative to the latter. The clerk opens the meeting with a reminder of the rules, closes the meeting on time, and serves as a monitor all along the way, making sure that the rules are followed with care. The recording clerk gives his or her notes to the focus person when the meeting is over.

4. The meeting begins with the clerk calling for a time of centering silence and inviting the focus person to break the silence, when ready, with a brief summary of the issue at hand. Then the committee members may speak—but everything they say is governed by one rule, a simple rule and yet one that most people find difficult and demanding: members are forbidden to speak to the focus person in any way except to ask honest, open questions. This means absolutely no advice and no amateur psychoanalysis. It means no, “Why don’t you…?” It means no, “That happened to me one time, and here’s what I did…” It means no, “There’s a book/therapist/exercise/diet that would help you a lot.” Nothing is allowed except real questions, honest and open questions, questions that will help the focus person remove the blocks to his or her inner truth without becoming burdened by the personal agendas of committee members. I may think I know the answer to your problem, and on rare occasions I may be right. But my answer is of absolutely no value to you. The only answer that counts is one that arises from your own inner truth. The discipline of the Clearness Committee is to give you greater access to that truth—and to keep the rest of us from defiling or trying to define it.

5. What is an honest, open question? It is important to reflect on this, since we are so skilled at asking questions that are advice or analysis in disguise: “Have you ever thought that it might be your mother’s fault?” The best single mark of an honest, open question is that the questioner could not possibly know the answer to it: “Did you ever feel like this before?” There are other guidelines for good questioning. Ask questions aimed at helping the focus person rather than at satisfying your curiosity. Ask questions that are brief and to the point rather than larding them with background considerations and rationale—which make the question into a speech. Ask questions that go to the person as well as the problem—e.g., questions about feelings as well as about facts. Trust your intuition in asking questions, even if your instinct seems off the wall: “What color is your present job, and what color is the one you have been offered?”

6. Normally, the focus person responds to the questions as they are asked, in the presence of the group, and those responses generate more, and deeper, questions. Though the responses should be full, they should not be terribly long—resist the temptation to tell your life story in response to every question! It is important that there be time for more and more questions and responses, thus deepening the process for everyone. The more often a focus person is willing to answer aloud, the more material he or she, and the committee, will have to work with. But this should never happen at the expense of the focus person’s need to protect vulnerable feelings or to maintain privacy. It is vital that the focus person assume total power to set the limits of the process. So the second major rule of the Clearness Committee is this: it is always the focus person’s right not to answer a question. The unanswered question is not necessarily lost—indeed, it may be the question that is so important that it keeps working on the focus person long after the Clearness Committee has ended.

7. The Clearness Committee must not become a grilling, a cross-examination. The pace of the questioning is critical—it should be relaxed, gentle, humane. A machine-gun fire of questions makes reflection impossible and leaves the focus person feeling invaded rather than evoked. Do not be afraid of silence in the group—trust it and treasure it. When silence falls it does not mean that nothing is happening or that the process has broken down. It may well mean that the most important thing of all is happening: new insights are emerging from within people, from their deepest sources of guidance.

8. From beginning to end of the Clearness Committee, it is important that everyone work hard to remain totally attentive to the focus person and his or her needs. This means suspending the normal rules of social gathering—no chit-chat, no responding to  other people’s questions or to the focus person’s answers, no joking to break the tension, no noisy and nervous laughter to indicate that we “get it”. We are simply to surround the focus person with quiet, loving space, resisting even the temptation to comfort or reassure or encourage this person, but simply being present to him or her with our attention and our questions and our care. If a committee member damages this ambiance with advice, leading questions, or rapid-fire inquisition, other members, including the focus person, should remind the offender of the rules—and he or she is not at liberty to mount a defense or argue the point. The Clearness Committee is for the sake of focus person, and the rest of us need to tell our egos to recede.

9. The Clearness Committee should run for the full time allotted. Don’t end early for fear that the group has “run out of questions”—patient waiting will be rewarded with deeper questions than have yet been asked. About 20 minutes before the end of the meeting, the clerk should ask the focus person if he or she wants to suspend the “questions only” rule and invite committee members to mirror back what they have heard the focus person saying. If the focus person says no, the questions continue, but if he or she says yes, mirroring can begin, along with more questions. “Mirroring” does not provide an excuse to give advice or “fix” the person—that sort of invasiveness is still prohibited. Mirroring simply means reflecting back the focus person’s own language—and body language—to see if he or she recognizes the image, and with each mirroring the focus person should have a chance to say, “Yes, that’s me…”, or, “No, that’s not…”. In the final 5 minutes of the meeting, the clerk should invite members to celebrate and affirm the focus person and his or her strengths. This is an important time, since the focus person has just spent a couple of hours being very vulnerable. And there is always much to celebrate, for in the course of a Clearness Committee people reveal the gifts and graces that characterize human beings at their deepest and best.

10. Remember, the Clearness Committee is not intended to “fix” the focus person, so there should be no sense of let-down if the focus person does not have his or her problems “solved” when the process ends. A good clearness process does not end—it keeps working within the focus person long after the meeting is over. The rest of us need simply to keep holding that person in the light, trusting the wisdom of his or her inner teacher.

The Clearness Committee is not a cure-all. It is not for extremely fragile people or for extremely delicate problems. But for the right person, with the right issue, it is a powerful way to rally the strength of community around a struggling soul, to draw deeply from the wisdom within all of us. It teaches us to abandon the pretense that we know what is best for another person and instead to ask those honest and open questions that can help that person find his or her own answers. It teaches us to give up the arrogant assumption that we are obliged to “save” each other and learn, through simple listening, to create the conditions that allow a person to find his or her wholeness within. If the spiritual discipline behind the Clearness Committee is understood and practiced, the process can become a way to renew community in our individualistic times, a way to free people from their isolation without threatening their integrity, a way to counteract the excesses of technique in caring, a way to create sacred space for the Spirit to move among us with healing and with power.

“The Clearness Committee is not a cure-all,” says Parker Palmer in the excerpt from A Hidden Wholeness we posted recently in The Therapeutic Neighborhood. “But for the right person, with the right issue, it is a powerful way to rally the strength of community around a struggling soul, to draw deeply from the wisdom within all of us.”

My sister-in-law, Mary, was at Quaker study center Pendle Hill for months after an operation for a brain tumor. Here is her reflection on her experience with a Clearness Committee:

“Clearness Committees are made up of people called together to support individuals, couples, or groups in making decisions.

“I called a Clearness Committee to help me decide about my “next step” when I was at Pendle Hill, the Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation.

“I asked seven people to come together with me and offer support, raise questions, give suggestions, and feedback.  These were people in the Pendle Hill community who I felt could give me helpful input from their varying perspectives.

These people didn’t tell me what to do, but helped me to become clearer about my future direction.

“I did preparation for the meeting by answering some pre-clearness questions–such as about my personal history with relevance to the decision to be made, my commitments, sources of support, goals, and what was holding me back from various options.  I gave this background information to the committee members prior to our group meeting.

“They met with me for several hours one evening.  After they brainstormed my strengths, they asked questions, raised concerns, and offered me feedback.

“By the end of the evening I received important insights as to how to proceed, and greater clarity about my future, which at that time was to return to Pendle Hill for another three-month session.  Ultimately that decision led me to Ohio. . . .

“There were many other practical decisions that had to be made in the outside world to support my decision, but it was in the Clearness Committee that the direction for my future was made clear to me and supported.

“My reaction to the Clearness Committee?  It was an invaluable experience of the thoughtful pushing and caring of friends in community.

“What is unique?  In response to my desire for clarity, I reached out to my community for suggestions and feedback.

“What do they do that professional counselors can’t do?  As side-by-side members of the Pendle Hill Community, they knew me from various personal perspectives, and offered on-going caring support rather than being outsider professionals.  The dimension of sitting as a group in silence for guidance and discernment was a valuable part of the process.”

Clearly, for Mary, the “clearness” process was the work of a therapeutic community with profound meaning.

~ John ~

Adapted from Chapter VIII in A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey toward an Undivided Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). Used by permission of the author.

Parker J. Palmer is an author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. He is founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage & Renewal, a small non-profit organization that provides support for people in the serving professions. See the Center’s website for selections from his writing and speeches plus links, blogs and other material related to his work.

Escaping the World of Non-sense

We are slowly surrounding our lives with electrical “inputs” called Internet, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TV, etc.  As a result, many people have unwittingly entered a new land where there are no trees, chirping birds, sunsets, stickball, group singing, people praying, people playing, gardens growing or people knowing, each other, personally.  They have entered a new culture where the only reality is behind an electrically powered screen.  What they experience, of course, is not reality.  They are experiencing senselessness in this new land where they cannot touch, smell, taste, see or hear the old world.  They have forsaken their senses for a world of non-sense.

We know a person is dead when they cannot use their senses.  It is deadly to choose to not use your senses.  You become no-body, surrounded by senseless electrical friends.

There is, of course, a sanctuary where our senses can be alive.  It is called the neighborhood.

We lead a touching life as we hold hands in greeting and grief. We embrace each other in joy and bereavement.

We enjoy the smell of the meat from the charcoal grill next door and renew ourselves each year when we smell the first flowers of spring.

We savor the tastes from our kitchen that assure us we are home and share the joy of our children as they eat their ice cream cones.

We see the tears in our neighbor’s eyes and the lovely creations of our children’s chalk drawings on the sidewalk.

We hear the sirens rushing towards suffering and listen to the laughter of young children in the park.

Here, in the neighborhood, we can we live a sensible life, free of the deadly culture of electrical non-sense.

~ John ~

Our Abundant Communities

Walter Brueggemann explores themes of power and patriarchy; human fallibility and gifts; and accumulation and abundance in building and sustaining community in these uncut videos from his two days at Trinity University, San Antonio, for the 2011 Willson Lectures.

View a video of this discussion on Abundant Community

Related:

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.

How Much Harm Do Social Services Do?

A few weeks ago, I received this email from Dan Oliver of Cleveland, Ohio, asking my thoughts on the role of social service agencies in undercutting the power of families and neighborhoods to solve their own problems:

Dear Mr. McKnight,

I am currently reading your book The Careless Society.  While I find many of your ideas about the professional service industry to be insightful, I am also troubled to see in your writing what appears to be a reversal of often plainly evident cause-and-effect relationships regarding the consumption of social services.

I quote from your chapter “Do No Harm”:

“The community, a social space where citizens turn to solve problems, may be displaced by the intervention of human service professionals acting as an alternative method of problem-solving.  Human service professionals with special expertise, techniques, and technology push out the problem-solving knowledge and action of friend, neighbor, citizen, and association.” (p. 105-106)               

I believe I understand the rationale behind statements like these.  I concede that there are some instances where professional services encroach upon more appropriate familial and cultural tools and traditions for the resolution of conflicts.  Your example early in the book of a bereavement counselor offering a professional, esoteric body of knowledge and technique to a group with such cohesive and entrenched cultural practices as those of an American Indian people is a fine example.  But I do object to the notion that most (or even many) of our country’s most pressing social problems are the direct or indirect result of “specifically counterproductive” human service operations.

I work for a suicide and mental health crisis hotline in Cleveland, Ohio.  My experience has taught me the exact opposite of the idea summarized in the quotation above.  I find that those most in need of speaking to a stranger on the telephone about a crisis they are experiencing in their life are those without a network of social supports.  These individuals are not calling a community mental health agency because we, as human service providers, have usurped their family’s role as the principal source of sustaining support.  They are very often calling precisely because those supports have broken down — or were never there in the first place.  Rarely do I speak with someone on the phone who has a tightly knit family, a loving spouse, a close circle of good friends, or children who are emotionally and financially supportive as he or she comes of old age.

You may argue that these invaluable personal resources have been chased away by service providers in need of ever more extensive client markets, but you and I both know there are far too many families out there that have always been broken.  There are too many individuals who have grown up in poverty without the structure of a functional school system, without any real opportunity for meaningful change in their socioeconomic status, and without any real role models to help show them the way.  There are too many individuals beset with symptoms of serious mental illness which cut them off from community and family members.  It is not the case that human service professionals have divested communities of their sense of collective competency and meaningfulness.  Rather, human services largely attempt to address the already-present deterioration of community which, I would argue, has actually resulted from the vast increases in sheer geographical size of our cities, a loss of moral authority by our religious institutions, and an ever-worsening popular consumerist culture propagated by mass media.  When people struggle with practical problems such as chronic illness or financial hardship, they are too often struggling against such already troubling socio-cultural backdrops.

My question to you at this point is this: In the 15 years since the publication of The Careless Society, what further thoughts on these issues have you developed?  Do you find it was right for its time?  Do you believe its ideas still reflect our nation’s socio-political realities?  Have you come to reconsider any of your major arguments?

As a student of human needs and services, I thank you for your contributions to efforts aiming to empower people against social forces which would undermine their capability, autonomy, and humanity.  It is a mad, mad world we inhabit, and we need all the voices in favor of real solutions we can get.
Respectfully,
Dan Oliver
Cleveland, OH

 

In my email back to Dan to thank him for his very thoughtful critique, I had to say that my belief that the social services industry is part of the problem, not the solution, is stronger today than it was 15 years ago.

Perhaps I haven’t matured yet (I’m just 79) but I still have basically the same views, I said to Daniel. I appreciate the fact that failed communities and families require compensatory responses but finally the balance has tipped and the compensation becomes dominant over the norm. Everywhere in my neighborhood and with friends I hear “she needs professional help” as the natural and necessary response to every form of deviance, pain, misbehavior.

The result is that our communities are evermore homogenous and incompetent.

~ John ~

The Neighborhood Plague

A plague has descended on many of our neighborhoods.  It is a plague intensified by recession, corporate drive for profit and confusion about what government can do that is useful. People are out of work; homes are foreclosed. All the public debate about what to do keeps getting more and more ideological and thereby paralyzing. All the while families suffer worklessness and homelessness.

This suffering calls forth a sense of compassion and charity. However, this response can be dangerous if it is misplaced.

Going back to the 1960’s, the nation responded to the suffering caused by segregation, discrimination and poverty with the War on Poverty.  It was a national response to the harm experienced by people called “poor.”

Their basic problem was economic poverty. However, instead of relentlessly focusing on the problem of inadequate income, much of the money for the War came to local neighborhoods as an array of services, agencies and programs. These services usually focused on the individual harm and hurt caused by poverty and sought to treat the wounds.  Therapeutic professionals, expert ameliorators and expensive compensators focused on the result of poverty rather than the cause: lack of income.

Going back to the 1960’s, the nation responded to the suffering caused by segregation, discrimination and poverty with the War on Poverty.

When I was working at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, in 1986, we did a study of all the Federal, state and local government money specifically designated for low-income people that came to Cook County where Chicago is located.  We found that the total annual allocation was $4.85 billion dollars which, adjusted for inflation, would be $10.2 billion dollars today, or $13,031 per poor person in current dollars.  Sixty-five percent of all these dollars were used for services and commodities while only 35 percent went to low-income people in money.  In fact, if the total government dollars for low-income people in Cook County had been divided among them, no one would have been living below the poverty line.   Nonetheless, the majority of the money went to service providers and their programs. Low-income people had the leavings.

Twenty-five years later, as the new plague devastates many neighborhood people, we should resist responding by largely dedicating our efforts to treating the wounds of joblessness and homelessness.  The problem is not in the suffering people.  The problem is in a society that responds to people without income or homes by paying professionals to treat their misery while giving tax breaks to people who have huge incomes.

Our neighborhood crisis is economic, not therapeutic.

One country that understands the critical nature of income as the antidote to poverty is Brazil. While among industrialized nations we have the greatest concentration of wealth at the top of society and the widest disparity between the rich and the poor, Brazil has done something to deal with the inequities that continue to mire our country down. In a New York Times blog, Tina Rosenberg describes the Brazilian effort. It may not fit us exactly, but it demonstrates the basic principle for building a new economy. And for anyone who thinks such a program would be too costly, consider that it costs $1,200,000 a year to maintain each of our 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan.

~ John ~

Powering America

In a neighborhood, people are empowered by the work they do together.  Often, they use this power to confront institutions and advocate for the neighborhood’s self-interest.  In this kind of action, power is understood as our ability to get someone else to do something for us.  This is the consumer power of confrontation.

The other kind of neighborhood power results when we come together to create something for ourselves — from ourselves.  This is the power of citizens engaged in community building.

Many of us think of power in terms of the confrontation approach.  Power is about advocacy, demands, negotiation and control.  On the other hand, community-building is often described as “nice and cooperative,” but not powerful.

In our book, The Abundant Community, we point out that there are at least six community-building characteristics of a neighborhood that empowers its residents:  cooperation, hospitality, generosity, kindness, forgiveness and accepting fallibilities.

Each of these qualities is a power and creates powerful results.

Kindness is the power to care.  A careless society is a weak society. It finally descends to callous practices and brutal disregard for its members.

Hospitality is the power to welcome.  A fearful society is frightened of strangers and weakened by its exclusions of the talents of strangers inside and outside its community.

Generosity is the power to give.  Powerlessness is greatest when we are denied the right to contribute and express ourselves.  That is why prison is so terrible, even though food, clothing and shelter are provided. There is no stronger punishment than denying a person’s power to give.

Cooperation is the power to join with your neighbors to create a future.  Every totalitarian system knows that the greatest threat is people working together in groups, small or large.  In those societies, the power to associate is called a conspiracy.

Accepting fallibility creates the power to enjoy each other in spite of our failures, deficiencies and differences.  It creates the glue that holds us together in spite of our nature.

Finally, forgiveness is the power to forget. Many communities have been weakened for centuries because of an event that happened in the distant past.  Until a community or its members can overcome a pervasive sense of grievance, that community will atrophy in a spirit of retribution.

It is these qualities of community that are the basic source of a nation’s power:

  • power to care
  • power to give
  • power to welcome
  • power to join
  • power to enjoy
  • power to forget.

These powers are abundant and available in every community. When they are manifested, they are more powerful than business or government.  That is why America’s recovery as a powerful nation finally depends on what we do on our own block.

~ John ~

President Obama’s Speech Forgets the Primary Educators

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Obama once again urged parents to be active in supporting children to achieve in school. “Turn off the TV and do your homework,” he advised.

While this is a commendable recommendation, it doesn’t focus on the most important thing parents can contribute to their children’s education: their own knowledge.

We have come to believe so completely that the basic role of parents is to be a support for the teacher that we ignore the role of the child’s primary teacher, the parent. The “school-centric” belief that professional teachers and schools are the source of all valuable knowledge is so pervasive that most parents and neighborhoods have forsaken their own critical teaching roles.

The potential power of parents and villages as teachers is clearly demonstrated by the eye-opening research of Professor Luis Moll of the University of Arizona. He has studied the nature of the knowledge of Mexican-American parents in the Tucson area. He found those parents to have widespread knowledge in the fields of agriculture, mining, household management, business, construction, mechanics, medicine, healing and religion.

Just a few of the particular kinds of knowledge identified by Professor Moll include information about soil and irrigation systems, minerals, appraising, labor law, accounting, budgeting, carpentry, architectural design, airplane repair, anatomy, midwifery, herbal remedies and Bible studies.

Professor Moll calls this kind of information “Funds of Knowledge” of parents and local communitites.

So the next time President Obama speaks about education, he should urge local villages to organize themselves to share their “funds of knowledge” as they raise their neighborhood children.

Then, the schools can fill in the gaps.

~ John ~

Opening the Neighborhood Treasure Chest

Increasing numbers of Americans are neighborless. They are, in reality, little more than residents occupying a house in an anonymous place.  They often admit that they really don’t know the people who live around them — except to say hello. It is a regretful admission, but in their view of no more consequence than failing to wash the windows of their house.

Failure to see the costs of not having real neighborhood relationships is the primary cause of our weak local communities. And it is this weakness that is eroding our ability to lead productive, satisfying lives in the 21st century.

Neighborhoods must take on significant new functions if our lives are to improve. 

In this century, we have entered an era when neighborhoods must take on significant new functions if our lives are to improve.  These are the functions that our large institutions can no longer perform, because they have reached their limits.  The medical system no longer has major consequence for our health.  Most police leaders understand they have reached the limits of their ability to provide local security.  An improved environment will be shaped less by laws than our own local decisions about how we heat, light, transport ourselves, and the amount of waste we create.  The majority of our jobs are not going to be provided by large corporate systems.  Small business will be the major job source in the future of new enterprise.   Our mega-food systems provide high-cost, wastefully transported, chemically grown produce that is slowly being replaced by locally produced and healthful food.

Of even more importance is the obvious limit of trying to pay our institutions to raise our children. Even though we say, “It takes a village to raise a child,” we actually outsource most of our child raising.  They have become the children of schools, counselors, athletics, youth workers, therapists, McDonald’s, the electronic industries and the mall.  And we call these villageless children the “youth probem.”

For all these reasons, it is now clear that the good life in the 21st century will have to be grown in the local neighborhood.  Once we see the need for a strong, connected, productive local community, our basic building blocks are the skills, gifts, passions and knowledge of all our neighbors.  It is these neighborly capacities that are most often unknown to us.  It is making these capacities visible and connected that is the basic task of a functioning 21st century.

The good life in the 21st century will have to be grown in the local neighborhood.

There are many ways to uncover the productive capacities of a neighborhood.  One innovative approach is illustrative of the possibilities.

In a working-class African-American neighborhood in Chicago, the neighborhood organization has initiated discussions at the block level with local residents regarding their gifts, skills, passions and special knowledge. An example of the information they are making visible is what has been found, for instance, about six randomly interviewed residents on one block.

The six people reported sixteen “gifts,” including being good with kids, a good listener, effective organizer and skilled communicator.

Asked about their skills, the six reported fourteen, including knitting, light repairs, real estate law, computers and cooking.

The twenty “passions” the neighbors reported included skating, correcting building problems, decorating, jazz, gardening and photography.

Of special significance for a “village that raises a child” are the fifteen topics the six neighbors said they were willing to teach youngsters or interested adults.  They include reading comprehension, computer technology, sewing, first aid, mathematics, skating, cooking, real estate and self-esteem.

No one had ever asked them about their abilities or whether they would share them.

These six residents did not know of most of their neighbor’s capacities, though they have lived on the block for some time. And no one had ever asked them about their abilities or whether they would share them.

The neighborhood organization has made the capacities of the neighbors visible.  With 30 households on the block, imagine the rich treasures that will be revealed when these “gift” discussions are held with the neighbors in the other 24 households.

It is this hidden treasure chest that can be opened in any neighborhood in North America.  Using these treasures requires connecting the capacities of neighbors. And those local neighbors good at organizing are the perfect local connective tissue.

If you are a person who has discovered and connected the productive capacity of your neighbors, we would like to hear from you.  And if you are a neighbor interested in initiating the process of opening your neighborhood treasure chest, let us know, and we can share useful materials, and perhaps, connect you to other pioneering neighbors.

~ John ~

January 11, 2011

Jackie Kennedy’s Hidden Gift

The year that the new South Africa was created after the fall of apartheid, I attended an international meeting in Switzerland.  There was a lively South African delegation full of song and joy because of their new freedom.

One of the South Africans told me that a woman who was a part of their delegation would be appointed the Minister of Health for the new Mandela government.  That evening at dinner I was seated next to this soon-to-be Health Minister.  She introduced herself and asked me where I was from.  When I said I came from the United States, she smiled and said that she wanted to thank me because the United States was the cause of her impending appointment as Health Minister.

She then explained that she had been raised in a very small impoverished rural village.  No one from the village had ever held any position of note in the outside world and anyone who ever had a position in the village was always a man.

In those apartheid years, she said that for her and many of the other girls, their hero was Jackie Kennedy.  She was the “Queen of the World” — beautiful, intelligent, powerful and the partner of the great new handsome President.

Therefore, it was a great tragedy and most of the villagers mourned when President Kennedy was assassinated.  At the time of the assassination, the village got its first television set, and it was placed where everyone could see it.  The only program on the television was the constant live coverage of the events following the assassination.  The villagers all stood for hours and watched the tragic events unfold.

Periodically, the soon-to-be Health Minister told me that the television showed film clips of the Kennedy’s and their family at work and at play.  One clip showed the family swimming at a beach.  Mrs. Kennedy wore a bathing suit, and what the minister saw was the fact that Mrs. Kennedy, the “Queen-of-the-World,” had bowed legs!  My dinner companion stood up, pulled up her skirt and said, “Look, I have bowed legs, too.”  I was more than surprised!  She then explained that she always felt short, homely and very embarrassed by her bowed legs.  But, she said, at that moment when she saw the bow-legged Queen, she decided that she could be a Queen, too.  It changed her life, she said, and from that day on, she worked harder and harder, with the bow-legged Queen as her inspiration.

And so, she said, this is why I thank you for the United States, because your “Queen” opened the door that I am about to walk through.

And what is the moral of this dramatic story?  There are so many.

One is that all leaders are fallible and flawed, but sometimes their fallibility can inspire.  Remember Franklin Roosevelt, who couldn’t stand and walk on his own?  He inspired the creation of the March of Dimes.

Closer to home, we live in neighborhoods surrounded with fallible, flawed people.  We are each one of those people.  And yet, the power of a strong community grows from including all our neighbors — flaws, fallibilities and all.

And we do this, not because we are tolerant, but because we understand that these flaws and fallibilities are in our minds and not really in our neighbors’. Mrs. Kennedy may have spent her life keeping her bowed legs covered, but in the view of a young South African girl, she was a bow-legged hero — “just like me.”

Don’t Ask Your Doctor How to Live Longer; Ask Hispanic Families

A recent report by the National Center for Health Statistics found that, as of 2006, the life expectancy of U.S. Hispanics at birth is 80.6 years.  This is 2.5 years more than non-Hispanic whites and 8 years more than black people.  This finding is especially surprising because, compared to non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics have lower median family incomes, higher poverty rates and lower rates of advanced college education – all factors associated with better health.  So what explains this paradox?

The studies’ author, Elizabeth Arias, hypothesizes that the Hispanic longevity may have to do with cultural factors such as their close family and social networks.

This is a reasonable hypothesis based on related research.  It is clear that people’s general health and longevity is closely related to their associational life.

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s book on the functions of associational life, he presents abundant data demonstrating the importance of associations and communal life in determining our health status.

All of this data indicates that our community life is a critical determinant of how often we’ll be sick (morbidity) and how long we will live (mortality).  Nonetheless, our national policymakers continue to act as though access to medicine is the critical factor in our health status.  They appear to ignore those epidemiologists who find that medicine may be a critical factor in determining only 10 – 15 % of our health status. If policy-makers were seriously concerned about health, more of the focus would be on supporting and strengthening community life.

At least one of our policy-shapers seems to understand this fact.  First Lady Michelle Obama recently announced her support of a national initiative to tackle the obesity issue.  In her opening announcement, she said that the federal government can do a few limited things, but that the real change depended on local communities.

What can local communities do?  We already know about programs to reduce weight and encourage exercise. However they are of limited effectiveness, because they are outside institutional interventions rather than changes from within the community and the relationships there.

In reality, changing what people eat is a cultural issue that is an expression of community practice.  When we try to alter what and how people eat, we are at the heart of culture – food, how we speak, what we sing, how we pray and how we use our bodies.  The Mediterranean diet is one manifestation of a culture that has developed healthy ways of eating.  Those ways were not the product of policies or programs.  So we face an unusual challenge.  Can we grow healthful community cultures?  Perhaps we can begin by looking closely at Hispanic families and their social relationships and learn there how to recapture the health-giving power of our own communities.

~ John ~

Beware the Invasion of the Needs Surveyors

A friend whom professionals call “disabled” says, ”If you’re coming to help me, you’ve come to the wrong place.  I refuse to fill your need for needs.”  It’s his wry recognition that many people have jobs that depend on other people’s problems. They call these problems “needs” —­ the raw material of the service industries.

Like the glass half full of water, each of us is half full and half empty.  Our full half is our gifts, skills and capacities.  Our empty half represents our problems, deficiencies and needs.

The power of the empty half is that it creates a market for professionals whose income derives from fixing people.  To expand, this market needs more people to fix or more things to fix in people.

To expand their market the needs surveyors need more people to fix or more things to fix in people.

The search for “fixables” is called a “needs survey.”  It attempts to identify and quantify local brokenness, deficits and problems.  This search for needs is much like the work of mineral prospectors searching for the ore that powers many industries.  With a majority of all Americans working in the service industries, the search for needs is at the very heart of our economy.

Nonetheless, there is an alternative to the invasion of the needs surveyors.  This alternative is most obvious in functional neighborhoods. There, the community is powered by its full half — the abilities and skills of the residents that are connected and used in hundreds of ways.  While it is true that these neighbors all have deficits, they understand that their community’s future depends on using and connecting their gifts and skills.  They know that every effective neighborhood is built with the skills of neighbors who also have problems. However, if the invasion of the needs surveyors convinces the community of its brokenness, the neighborhood has no future.  It will become a place filled with people who believe that they are mainly empty and that powerful outsiders are their only hope.  This belief creates dependency and a colonized people.

It is a modern paradox that while strong neighborhoods are built by connecting the gifts and skills of neighbors, very few institutions have an interest in the full half of local people.  Universities flourish by studying neighborhood deficits. Philanthropies provide grants to those who can demonstrate local brokenness.  Governments provide funding based upon the quantification of local misery.  Newspaper and television stories focus on local problems and conflict, solidifying the popular image of needy local people. When the intellectual, philanthropic, governmental and media institutions all focus on neighborhood deficits, they are a powerful negative force.

Focusing on the empty half of people creates a culture of neediness.

The cumulative consequences of this institutional focus on the empty half of people and their neighborhood creates a “culture of neediness.”  This culture has many harmful effects:

  • Many residents come to believe that the most important thing about them and their neighborhood is that they are deficient, needy and a problem.
  • Because the people who describe them as “needy” are professionals,  they come to believe that it is help from these outside experts that determines their future.
  • This belief in outside experts erodes neighbors’ faith in and commitment to the support of the local community fabric of associations, organizations, churches and enterprises.
  • As a result, a new kind of local leadership emerges in the form of people  who are skilled at telling the helping institutions about how many problems there are in their neighborhood.  They are rewarded for their misery mongering with grants that convince local people that their leadership is valuable, because they are money magnets.
  • As grant finding becomes a dominant mode, local citizens come to believe that they can’t do anything without outside dollars.  They become colonized dependents of outside institutions.
  • Finally, within the institutional colony, people see that the outsiders have failed to make a real change in their neighborhood.  Cynicism grows and hopelessness pervades many of the neighbors.

In the end, this process has the net effect of replacing citizens and their capacities with clients and consumers who are dependencies of the “helping” institutions and professions.

So, neighbors, beware the needs surveyor!  What we really need is each other acting powerfully together to invest our skills, gifts and abilities in creating our own future.

~ John ~

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