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John McKnight

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15 Sep 2010
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Repairing Community

September 15, 2010

In my ancestors’ native Scotland, there were people who were exiled or outcast from their clan.  They were called “broken men.”  They faced a sad destiny wandering the mountains and moors without a community of support or the protection of law.

In our era there are also many “broken people” without an effective surrounding community of support.  They include millions of Americans who no longer live in a place surrounded by their relatives.  They have lost the daily support of the powerful circle of kinship.  Likewise, millions of Americans have left the church of their youth and are no longer surrounded by supportive communities of faith.  Now, many of these “broken people” live in neighborhoods where they are also disconnected from their surrounding neighbors. They are the genuinely “broken people” of the 21st century, people without communities of kin, faith or place.

To compensate for the loss of the necessities provided by a community of support, they seek alternatives.  The first of these is the local “market.”  They try to buy the support they need from shopping centers and professionalized services.

The second alternative is the government where they seek the money for “social security.”  This money provides access to the market where they hope to buy a senior life — some in places called “independent living centers.”

These broken people have become isolated dependencies of corporations, professionals and governments.  They have no local community of support, and their families have no functions other than consumption. This is why their families so predictably fall apart in a ritual called divorce — the final step toward total isolation.

The collapse of so many American families has not gone unnoticed by caring professionals. Indeed, family collapse is in itself a new market.  From family therapy to parenting classes, divorce counseling and “family centered” social services, paid intervention is the professional response to a family’s functionless isolation.  The professional seems to believe that the purchase of more services will restore personal capacity, family competence and community benefits.  Of course, what is being purchased is counterfeit, because it is more of the same consumer process that has resulted in the brokenness in the first place.

We see the result in “mall kids” and gangs — youth seeking supportive community because they find none in the broken adults who surround them.  These casualties of broken adults are mislabeled “the youth problem.”  The real problem is a “broken community” problem. And no amount of purchased services will put the pieces together again.

We are hard up against the fact that productive relationships among neighbors are the only real possibility to repair the brokenness.  As we create functions for families surrounded by supportive neighbors, the youth and divorce problems will recede.  The reason is that we will become civilized.  Every family and local neighborhood is a miniature civilization.  That civilization creates a culture — the way a people in a place have learned, through time, to live together.

It is that culture that allows neighbors to say:

“Together, we have created our way. Here is what our families do.

Here’s how we raise our kids.  Here’s what we do for one another that makes life easier and eases our hard times.

We are a real community, powerful, connected and caring for each other.

Nothing can break us apart.”

~ John ~

22 Aug 2010
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Are We Raising Care-less Children?

August 22, 2010

A powerful community depends upon its members’ willingness to step outside themselves and stand in the shoes of their neighbors.  A name for this ability is empathy. It is the essential bridge that changes the person next door from a resident into a neighbor.  Without empathy, we would have neither friends, neighbors nor a community.

The Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan recently completed a review of seventy-two studies of empathy among American college students.  Each study used the same standardized test.  The Institute found that in the last twenty years there has been a drop of forty percent in empathy among U.S. college students.

For many years I worked at a social science research center, and it is very rare to find that much attitude change over such a short period of time.  What happened from 1990 until present that could erode such a basic human quality as empathy?

The Institute’s researchers have three hypotheses that they are proceeding to test.  The first is that during the last twenty years, the twenty-four hour television news cycle developed, providing powerful visualizations of crime, disasters, wars, conflict, etc. This constant bombardment of dramatic visual human crisis may have desensitized a generation of young people to the suffering and fate of others.

Second, the college students are the first generation to have “friends” online.  That experience creates artificial relationships where people don’t have to respond to others unless they feel like it.  Every “cyber-friend” is a person who can be “shut down” at will.

Finally, the researchers, who are young people themselves, suggest “reality television” stimulates a hyper–competitive youth culture that results in a “me generation.”

All these hypotheses point to television or the Internet as the basic cause of our young peoples’ loss of empathy.  If the research measures are accurate, this loss foretells a major weakening of the power of our community life in the years ahead.

What is the antidote?  Some will say that we should develop a school curriculum that “teaches” students about empathy, reminiscent of the outsourcing from communities to schools of “values education” and “character development.”  The problem with schooled empathy, of course, is that empathy is a feeling for another person.  To gain that feeling, the other must be present in our lives and not an abstraction on electrical machines or classrooms.  The shoes we learn to walk in are real shoes and not shoes in pictures or words.

Another antidote is the culture of each of our families.  We can define the family time consumed by television, electronic games and the Internet; however, that often results in parents becoming unpopular censors.  And like most new responsibilities placed on family, parents find little support for their action unless they live in a neighborhood where neighbors are a “Village” organized to raise their children.  In this Village, neighbors create a community culture that supports individual families and provides young people with a way to escape the electronic village.

Creators of this community way recognize that the electronic village has electric games, canned music, scripted stories and typed friendships.  Each is a counterfeit for the real, empathy-building experience. So what is the real way of a neighborhood?  There are many possibilities.  Here are just a few.

One is to have neighborhood games that involve all the children.  In my childhood, evenings were spent on the street playing Kick-the-Can or Stickball.  No hand-held electric game could have ever lured us away.

Another possibility is real music made by neighbors — a block band of young and old, as well as community talent shows.

There are real, rather than scripted, stories to be told by every neighbor, and videos of our stories created by young people.

There are block celebrations that bring us together to enjoy birthdays, graduations, marriages and special recognitions for young people who have contributed to the community’s life

These are just a few initial possibilities.  You can think of many more experiences that engage you, your family and neighbors in the real life relationships that build empathy — the kind of experiences that will help us be a Village that doesn’t create children who grow up desensitized and care-less.

Write us about your experiences and ideas that can create a Village where children learn to walk in another’s shoes.

02 Aug 2010
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Breaking Barriers to Neighborliness

August 2, 2010

I have a friend who makes lists of barriers to neighborliness.  His list includes the new ranch houses that don’t have a front porch where neighbors can sit and talk and greet each other.

Air conditioning is also on his list.  He says it keeps people inside watching TV, when they could be outside drinking iced tea and talking with the people who live around them.

He has a very long list.  Lots of us have our own personal lists.  We say, “Well, I don’t really know many of my neighbors.”  Then, we produce our list of reasons that we’re not a real neighbor.  It often sounds like this:

 

“I don’t have any free time.”

“I’m not good at meeting new people.”

“I don’t want to intrude on the privacy of people on the block.”

“I’m actually afraid of some of those people.”

 

These are the lyrics of The Sad Song of the American Consumer.  It’s the lament of persons imprisoned in their own homes.  They have created a fortress and called it freedom.

Every block needs a Joshua, who can break down the walls of these fortresses.  There are many ways to break them.  On this website, the section titled “Getting Started” describes one way to begin.  When you’ve looked it over, tell us about any other ways you have used, or know about, where you or a neighbor brought the people on your block together to build community.

We’d like to share your approach to getting started with other community builders. Please write us at www.abundantcommunity.com

~ John ~

18 Jul 2010
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What Is a Neighbor?

July 18, 2010

I was born in 1931 during the Great Depression. We lived in a working class neighborhood in Cincinnati with many country people who had migrated from the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee. Lots of men in my neighborhood were out of work. Many hadn’t had a job in several years. In fact, the New Deal programs often didn’t reach us until four or five years after Roosevelt was elected.

Next door to us lived a jobless family with three kids. They were from the Cumberland Valley in Kentucky. My Irish Catholic mother felt uneasy about our neighbor, because the kids wore raggedy clothes, seemed dirty most of the time and were often what she viewed as “out-of-hand.” I’m sure she would have preferred that we lived in a neighborhood like the small Ohio town where she was raised, but we were lucky to be in Cincinnati because my Dad had a job.

Almost every evening, my mother prepared a dinner for ten people — enough for the five of us and the five neighbors next door. She continued doing this until our neighbor finally got a job.

We also had an old car. Most of our neighbors didn’t. When they needed to go somewhere important where you couldn’t walk or take the streetcar, they asked my Dad if he would drive them. He always made the time.

One day the father from next door told my Dad that the Tennessee Valley Authority was building a dam that would flood his hometown and make it into a lake. He wanted to see his birthplace one last time, so my Dad drove him down to the Cumberland Valley and took me along. I was about 8 yearsold, and this was my first long trip. The neighbor man sang country songs and told stories most of the way. That trip is still one of the most memorable events of my childhood — my Dad, our neighbor and me.

When I was in my thirties, and most Americans were doing pretty well, I asked my mother and father why they had made dinner and drove the car for the people next door. I thought they probably did it out of a sense of charity. I was wrong.  Instead, they said, “Well, everyone was helping each other back then.  We weren’t any different.  What would that family have done if we didn’t give a hand?  And besides, they were our neighbors.”

I’ve done some reading about the Great Depression.  There were millions of people out of work throughout the thirties.  But millions survived because of help from kinfolk and the support of their neighbors. My Dad, like lots of people back then, had a greeting, “Hi, neighbor.”  What he meant was, “We’re in this boat together.”  He expected neighbors to help him if he was down and out.

What do you think would happen among our neighbors if millions of unemployed people ran out of unemployment compensation?  Would we make dinner for them, drive them where they needed to go and help find them a job?

Across America, families are being decimated by foreclosures of their homes, and this usually happens because they have lost a job. Some of them live in our neighborhoods.

What do your neighbors do to support those families? Powerful neighbors in strong neighborhoods would say, “I don’t know what that family would do if we don’t give them a hand.  Of course, we have to do it, because they are our neighbors.”

Do you have a story of how some neighbors helped each other through unemployment and foreclosure? Tell us your story so we can share it with others.

~ John ~

07 Jul 2010
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Two Kinds of Community Organizing

July 7, 2010

Advocacy Organizing and Neighborhood Organizing

While President Obama was campaigning, he made the words “community organizing” famous as he told about his youthful days as an “organizer” in Chicago.  That experience in a low-income neighborhood taught him more, he said, than anything he had ever done.

I was one of those involved in his training.  He was a thoughtful, wise and balanced young man.  What he learned was a kind of neighborhood organizing that was developed by Saul Alinsky.  The method is described in Alinsky’s classic book, Reveille for Radicals.

Basically, the method involved an organizer like Barack getting to know what issues local people and their leaders were most concerned about — failure to pick up garbage, a bad school, job discrimination, things like that.  Based on that knowledge, the organizer would bring neighbors together in a new “power organization” that could deal with the issues.

The way the organizer taught local people to deal with the issues was by confronting the leaders of the responsible institutions, i.e. the garbage collection department, the school principal, the discriminating employer.  These confrontations were typically demonstrations, picketing, invading offices and holding large meetings to put the institutional leader on the spot.  The strength of the organization was measured by the power of the group to force their adversary to meet their demands.

I did some of this kind of organizing as a young man.  It is a very important method of dealing with all kinds of injustice.  It pulls people together around their mutual anger.  However, it has some important limits.

First, it’s hard for people to keep focused on anger over the long term.  The hot coals inevitably die down and the organization can become nearly dormant until a new issue emerges.

A second limit is more important. Usually unrecognized is the fact that these “power organizations” are basically consumer groups.  Their focus on outside institutional adversaries has as the goal the delivering of good and fair consumer services — regular garbage pickup, effective teaching, good employment.  In each case, the neighborhood is not a producer.

Instead, the group is an advocate pressuring an institution to produce what the neighbors want to consume.

This method is ineffective, however, if the neighborhood issue to be dealt with has to be produced by the neighbors themselves and not an outside institution. This is often the case when the “issue” is improving health, safety and the environment — and raising children.  For these and some other issues, there is no one to march on, no place to protest.  Instead, neighbors are necessarily the creators and the problem solvers.  If we don’t “produce” a solution or a social invention, there is no one who can do it for us.  We can’t buy good health, a safe clean neighborhood or a village to raise our children.  Instead we must use our gifts, skills and capacities to create the answers to these concerns.

The basic method for neighbors creating these answers is to connect themselves in new ways.  It is these ways that we describe in our book, The Abundant Community.  They are the ways of the other kind of organizing that is not based on anger.

Perhaps it would clarify the two ways of community organizing if we called the Alinsky way “advocacy organizing.”  The second ways is actually “neighborhood organizing” — often creating a neighborhood in a place where people lived in houses, isolated from each other.

At best, we should be locally organized to do both things — advocate and build a neighborhood.  The two ways are not in conflict because each addresses a different goal.  They are like two different tools.  Each is useful but neither can do the job of the other.  And the job of a neighborhood organizer is to connect rather than confront, to create rather than demonstrate.

Are you a neighborhood organizer?  Tell us the story of your work in the neighborhood.

Would you like to be a neighborhood organizer?  Let us know and we will put you in touch with people who are pioneering a neighborhood way.

~ John ~

28 Jun 2010
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It Takes a Village to Raise a Child

June 28, 2010

Everyone has heard of the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.” We find that not only is the saying universally known, it is universally agreed to with enthusiasm.

But when we ask most neighborhood people about the application of the saying, the responses follow a pattern:

“Do you believe that it takes a village to raise a child?”

“Absolutely!”

“If your neighborhood is like a village, what does it do to raise its children?  And to clarify, we don’t mean how do individual families raise their children, or how does the school teach them.  We’re asking how do you and your neighbors, working together like a village, help raise the local young people?”

Usually there is a long, thoughtful silence at this point and a response something like:

“Well, I never thought about it that way, but as neighbors, we really don’t raise our children together.”

“Well, then, let’s imagine that you and your neighbors did decide to work together to raise your children, what would you do?”

Usually there is another long silence.  Very few ideas.  So there is a great opportunity to organize neighbors to raise the local children – to become a village that raises the children.

We have two questions:

First, in your neighborhood, have you done things together to help raise local children?  Or, do you know of a neighborhood that does something to help raise their children?

Second, what do you think could you and your neighbors could do together to help raise the neighborhood youth?

Let us know your answers.

~ John ~

19 Jun 2010
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Gifts, Skills, Interests and Passions: The Glue That Holds Communities Together

June 19, 2010

Most of us belong to lots of different kinds of clubs, groups and associations.  Each is held together by a common gift, skill, interest or passion.  Choirs are associations that magnify the gifts of people who sing well.  Basketball teams collect people together with sports skills.  The American Legion joins together people with a common war experience.

Whatever the group, the “glue” that holds it together is whatever the members have in common — something important enough to lead them to join and actively participate.

When we consider your block or neighborhood, if it is organized it is because something in common leads people to want to come together. Where blocks are not organized, it is because neighbors don’t know what they share or have in common.  Just living on the same block is not enough to pull many people out of their homes to join with neighbors except for an annual block party.  One step up is the block club created to deal with crime, safety and security.  But that is a community drawn together by fear — creating a fortress mentality.

There are some neighborhoods, however, drawn together because they have discovered the gifts, skills, interests and passions of their fellow residents.  This knowledge is the catalyst for all kinds of new relationships.  The connections may be between two neighbors who discover a mutual interest in jazz.  Or it may be several neighbors with an interest in gardening. Or it may be all the neighbors who discover their common interest in being a village that raises a child.

Whenever a neighborhood comes together in powerful and satisfying ways, it is because two things have happened.  First, they have found out about each other’s gifts.  Second, they have made new connections based on these gifts.  It is the sum of these connections that “glues” a neighborhood together.

Let us know if you live in a neighborhood where neighbors have made some useful connections. Send us your story.  Or, share a connection story from another neighborhood. Contact us anytime to tell your story.

~ John ~

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John L McKnight

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