For the record… and nothing else. This is to mark down some things I’ve been doing and seeing, but have not had the time to fully reflect on.

Syracuse, NY

I was able to go to Syracuse, NY and see some of the community building happening in this post-industrial city. I was impressed by the deep forms of community engagement and power building, the use of arts and culture as the catalyst for transformation. One example of what their doing is something called the Connective Corridor. You can learn more about it here: http://connectivecorridor.syr.edu/

This is How We Do It

There are communities around the world that have stopped waiting for the systems around them to change. They are engaged in alternative practices right now – in economics, safety, media and communications, politics and more. On April 20-22, I was able to attend the Foundry Dialogues “This is how we do it” event in New York city, which brought together many of the foremost innovators from around the globe – people who are redefining nothing less than how the world works. The conversation centered on the poetic and practical experiences of remaking the diverse places in which we live (a kind of ‘there-are-other-ways-to-do-things’ show & tell) – from the inside out.

The conversation was fantastic, with young and old leaders, local and global. Within all the conversations though there was one theme that rang loudly. We must be willing to re-imagine everything. We must be willing to hold traditional ways of organizing and working towards change lightly. The world we live in today is different than yesterday with new demographics, new environments, and new economies.

Frontline Solutions

While in New York for the Foundry dialogues, I had the opportunity to spend some time with my friend Marcus Littles, who is the founder of Frontline Solutions (http://www.frontlinesol.com/index.html) Frontline Solutions is a social change organization that invests in the pipeline of emerging social change leaders, provides consulting services to institutions in the nonprofit, government, and philanthropic sectors and develops knowledge, informs policy, and improves practice within three areas of expertise: Education, Social Innovation, and Males of Color. Over dinner our conversation spanned a variety of topics of interest to both of us. At the end of our time together, Marcus pushed me to think about how in my work I am building a platform for myself, while also building institution. What he meant by building institution was how am I working to build something that is bigger than just me, bigger than just one person, but works to build the foundation for something that survive past any one single person or leader. He also pushed me to think about how if by investing in ‘building institution’ as he called it I was in fact contributing to building a bigger platform for myself as an individual. His questions, and advice on how to do it, were thought provoking, and something that I need to continue thinking through.

Leadership, Action and Organizing – Leading Change

I continue to plug through this online course I am taking. So far it’s been great. The richest value has been through the variety of readings we are required to do and the reflection papers we write each week. The weakest part has been the lectures. Our professor, Marshall Ganz, has a ton of real and practical experience. But to be honest it can be quite frustrating to always hear about “the way things were done” versus helping us unleash possibilities for “how things can be done”. Does that make sense? There is only so much I can hear stories of strategies and tactics and challenges from 50-60 years ago and how they apply today. Now don’t get me wrong. I know they apply to today. There is a ton to learn from the past. But at the same time I think a job of a professor or class should push you to think more deeply about new possibilities in the work as well in your own community, experience, issues, etc. Not everything from the past is relevant to the present. Not every strategy that worked there and then will work here and now. So how do you help a group of students, not only learn from the past, but develop the skills to create and experiment with new strategies and practices contexualized to their own unique situations?

Quotes

Memorable things I’ve heard in the past month.

“You don’t fight with yourself”

A resident of Syracuse West Side who shared how they are first investing in their relationships as community so as to achieve better neighborhood outcomes.

“Imagination can be more important than education”

“Extremism in the name of justice is no crime. Moderation in the name of justice is no virtue”.

Grace Lee Boggs, 96 year old activist, storyteller and philosopher

“Make it fun. Nobody wants to come to a 4 hour training”.

Andrea Smith, longtime anti-violence and Native American activist and scholar

“I hope you don’t come back”

My son Ezra before leaving on a 3 day trip to New York

“Making our values walk can be inconvenient”.

Marcus Littles, President of Frontline Solutions while discussing ways to build stronger institutions.

“There is a confrontation waiting to happen. With so much injustice, captured power and inequity”

Mzwakhe Mdlalose, President of the South African Shackdwellers’ Movement

“We are in a moment where the old haven’t finished dying and the young haven’t finished being born.”

“Detroit Hustles Harder.”

Diana Nucera, Program Director at Allied Media Projects in Detroit

For the past 8 months I’ve been reading and studying on the role of social capital in building stronger, healthier communities. My proposal for the Bush Fellowship was premised on the idea that a community’s well being has a lot to do with the quality of relationships and the social cohesion that exists among its residents. By the end of it all (maybe) I am hoping to make the case that by investing in the connections and relationships between people (our social capital), you can better support neighborhoods and communities in realizing more equitable and sustainable revitalization.

So last week, Erin and I (and the boys) finished our first Early Childhood and Family Education (ECFE) class, hosted at the kids’ school, Brightwater Montessori. It was a nine-week class with 15 different families in attendance. As a group we were quite diverse. Some of the families I knew before beginning, but most were parents I simply waved or said hi to in passing in the school hallways.

In typical ECFE fashion each session started with us sharing a meal together as families, then separating with parents all together and kids all together. Some of my favorite parts of our discussions as parents is what I call the “me too’s”. It’s when somebody shares a story of something that happened with their child or in their family that they might be struggling with and somebody else in the room responds with “me too!”. Too often as parents I think we find ourselves feeling isolated as if we’re the only ones facing the challenges we face. But sitting around a room with a diverse and engaging set of parents helped me to see how I wasn’t as alone as I thought.

In our last session we spent time sharing our thoughts on the class. Here’s what I thought I heard parents express as the value of our time together:

1)    We learned specific skills that equip us to be better parents.

2)    We strengthened our relationships with other, increasing our sense of community.

3)    We felt better able to advocate individually and collectively on behalf of our children.

4)    Having a space to sit around and talk with a diverse group of parents.

I left our last class energized. Energized by the fact that I felt connected to a more diverse set of parents at my kids’ school. Energized by how people were talking about collectively advocating for the well being of our kids. Energized by how energized everyone else seemed!

Recently, I read a study where two psychologists asked people living in a public housing project in New York about their closest friend in the project; almost 90% of the friends lived in the same building, and half lived on the same floor. In general, people chose friends of similar age and race. But if the friend lived down the hall, both age and race became a lot less important. In the study, proximity overpowered similarity.

Another study, involving students at the University of Utah, found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else he’d say that it is because they share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the pair of students on their attitudes you’ll find out that this is an illusion, and that what friends really tend to have in common are activities. We’re friends with the people we do things with, not necessarily with the people we resemble.

We don’t seek out friends; we simply associate with the people who occupy the same physical places that we do. And for many of us the people who occupy the same physical space as we do are people just like us. We often end up associating with people just like us because of the ease in which we segregate ourselves, keeping distance from people who are different than us. We aren’t very good at creating mixed income or multicultural communities (or at least ones with interactions between groups), or communities where people of different generations can interact regularly. We sort ourselves by the neighborhoods we choose to live in, our religion, ethnicity and culture, our favorite news show and whatever else is most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. In real numbers, our communities are becoming more diverse, but our relationships are not.  Our closest friends still end being people who occupy the same world as we do, leaving many of us without a particularly diverse group of friends.

Today, the most connected people are often those who manage to move up and down and back and forth among all the different worlds and subcultures near their ‘worlds’. This in turns expands a person’s social network and social capital, which can be quite advantageous. I am sure we have all heard the saying that to get a job it’s not what you know it’s “who you know”. But it could be much more radical that that. The old idea was that people got ahead by being friends with rich and powerful people. Which is of course still true, but in maybe a more limiting way than we think. We tend to think that it is the quality of our relationships that matter in getting ahead, but only so many people can make their way into the old boy networks of the past. More and more it may not be the quality of the relationships you have, but the quantity. It may not be about how close you are to those you know, but paradoxically, what might matter even more is how many people you know whom you aren’t particularly close to.  This is what sociologist Mark Granovetter would call “the strength of weak ties”.

Granovetter argues that when it comes to finding out about say a new job – or, for that matter, gaining new information, or looking for new ideas – weak ties tend to be more important than strong ties. Your friends, after all, occupy the same world you do. They work with you, or live near you, and go to the same churches, schools or parties. How much, then, do you they know that you don’t know? Mere acquaintances, on the other hand, are much more likely to know something you don’t. The most important people are, in certain critical realms, the people who aren’t closest to you, and the more people you know who aren’t close to you the stronger your position (and your collective position) becomes. This is the strength of weak ties.

In my mind these weak ties matter in the context of community building and development. To me, relationships are beginnings, not endings. New relationships construct new interests and new resources making them what Robert Putnam calls “social capital” – a source of “power to” which simply didn’t exist before. This capacity or “social capital” explains why strongly “relational” communities are capable of collaborative action of all kinds. When we enter into a relationship with someone, we become a new link in their social network, as they do in ours. And since social networks are the threads from which society is woven, the social networks we choose to draw upon to make change can be the most critical strategic decision we make. We can choose to organize with and build with people “like us” (strong ties) or with people “not like us” (weak ties). Which brings us back to Granovetter and his insight that strong ties may actually inhibit our capacity to organize. He would argue this is because they quickly create a closed in, limited circle of people and resources. Lots of ‘weak ties’, on the other hand, may enhance our organizing capacity. This is because they open into broader networks of resources by opening the circle outward.

Of course we need strong ties too. When my parents moved here from India, they benefited from developing a close-knit circle of friends of people just like them from India. This provided all sorts of support for my parents as they journeyed together in America as new immigrants. There is value in having strong cultural ties, or religious ties or whatever. But I also think that if these networks become too bounded, they inhibit our ability to combine and mobilize resources to resist injustice or fight for what is best for the whole community. Communities with weak ties can find it easier to collaborate with each other and to find outside sources of support and resources. For some purposes, strong ties may be very important – especially purposes we share with people “like us”. But for purposes that are more inclusive that those suited to people “like us”, weak ties can be the key to success.

I am not arguing “strong” ties are bad and “weak” ties are good – just that they are very different and contribute to common efforts in different ways.

But the thing is we don’t like to invest in these types of relationships. If we want to improve education outcomes, we invest in more tutors. If we want to achieve safer streets, we invest in more cops. If we want to achieve better health, we offer more classes. So here I am sitting in this class, that some foundation gave a grant to support. Now I don’t know what they thought they were supporting, but if I had to guess I’m sure they put their money into the program because they felt like it was improving our parenting skills. Which it did. But more importantly the class gave us an opportunity to share a meal with a diverse group of families, have time to get to know each other better, to share stories of success and challenge, and simply put to build relationships with each other.

Now I am guessing that I will not become best friends with all of these parents, but I know that after journeying together for 9 weeks, I could turn to any one of these parents if I was struggling with something with my kids. I know that if one of them asked me for something I would respond. I know that when we say hi in passing in the hallways there will be a different sort of depth and connection to our hello.

And at the end of the day this type of relationship matters. To me, these relationships, added with others can make a difference, individually and collectively. To parents, to children, to our community.

 

 

Crime is a complex and varied phenomenon. In a book I recently read focused on social capital and it’s relationship to crime, researchers measured informal social capital in 343 neighborhoods in Chicago. They came up showing that something they deemed as collective efficacy had a negative impact on crime. What their research showed was that the association between concentrated disadvantage and violence was largely mediated by collective efficacy, as was the relationship between residential instability and violence. The researchers argue that collective efficacy acts to reduce crime not because it makes residents more likely to intervene directly in serious crime, but because it makes them more likely to intervene in its precursors. Basically saying that by investing in the bonds between people, across differences, there was an interior strength that results in the community effectively addressing the things that ‘cause’ crime, rather than just being focused on punishing the crime itself. Collective efficacy also worked to reduce crime by making the community more effective, I would say more powerful, at eliciting services, support and intervention from outside actors such as the city and state.

Here is what I thought the book lacked:  

1. Why people commit crime is varied. And I felt like the research quoted simplified this in a way that didn’t quite get to some of the root causes, both historically and systemically.
2. While they touched on the impact on crime in diverse neighborhoods, they could have done more to analyze this reality a bit more. The truth is that it is really hard to get to know your neighbors when you live in a diverse neighborhood where people are so different from each other.

The book also specially examined neighborhood watch groups, coming up with the conclusion that neighborhood watches don’t actually work. These strategies are often built on the premise that a stronger sense of community and informal control can reduce crime. This is why Neighborhood Watches have been developed all across the globe. But what their analysis showed was that these efforts often failed and that they were less likely to be initiated by residents in high crime areas and when they were effective this happened most often in affluent low crime areas.

Neighborhood Watches they said are thought to increase the reporting of crime, but their research showed this is not true. (They didn’t really back this up, so I’m not sure if this is true or not.) They also pointed out how often Neighborhood Watches are done in conjunction with other efforts such as target hardening (security systems, etc), and are therefore even more rarely successful as stand alone initiatives. So in essence, because of these other complimentary efforts, giving credit to the neighborhood watch itself as the reason crime was reduced can be difficult.

Third, they called Neighborhood Watches a pretty ‘thin form of community’. Although such strategies often have very dynamic and committed leaders, the ‘members’ often show a relatively limited level of commitment. Putting up a sign and occasionally looking out of your window to see if your neighbors car is still there isn’t what the same as what most people think of community. In 53 neighborhoods they studied in Cincinnati they showed that Neighborhood Watch strategies had no impact on crime.

What the research did show though is that pre-existing social capital tended to be a prerequisite for successful strategies. And the failure of so many of these efforts had to do with this type of social capital lacking at the beginning. What this fact shows is that in order to effectively reduce crime via the building of social capital, you don’t start with the Neighborhood Watch. You don’t build community and trust with a neighborhood watch. Instead, a Neighborhood Watch strategy (successful ones) begins with the formation and investment of building stronger community and the watch group acts as a response and secondary function of this group.

Too often though, the authors argue we stop at the formation of our very thin community, especially in diverse neighborhoods with lots of different people, culture and ideas. Where successes have been found, you see the occurrence of a much broader shift in the character of the community. These include improvements in social cohesion and in residents’ satisfaction with the area, improved community bonds through resident interaction, and better police-community relations.

In sum, it would seem that Neighborhood Watch strategies are a poor substitute for real, living communities, even in their own terms. If we believe that strong, self-confident communities where people take an active interest in the behavior that occurs outside their front doors can reduce crime, and there is some evidence to think they can, then we’ll need to look a little harder at what creates such communities and shared understandings.

All of this research just shows me that were you start is with community building, when that level of trust and connection is formed, efforts to reduce crime are stronger, more sustainable and ultimately successful. Using this approach you would be in a sense measuring success not by the absence of crime, but by the presence of community.

I am also wondering if by investing in and building the collective efficacy and strength of a community, you may also see all sorts of other positive gains on whatever other issues the community defines as being important to improving their vitality.

Also then it makes me wonder if another shift that comes about through our investments in community building is that it allows us to move away from being focused on problems and instead pushes us to be more focused on possibilities, thus unleashing a whole new set of creative ways to strengthen our neighborhoods.

What does traditional problem solving look like? Typically we specify a vision, the goals and then define a blueprint to achieve it. It’s called destination strategy for problem solving. Here are the strategic elements of traditional problem solving:

Identify a need. Find a problem, need or deficiency that we want to fix or improve. Study and analyze the need. Do research, assemble facts, survey people, and organize survey results and data to make compelling case for change.

Search for solutions. Brainstorm alternatives. Benchmark where others have solved this deficiency. Bring in experts, consultants, academics, former leaders, and ex public officials to provide good approaches.

Establish Goals.  Set realistic and achievable goals, based on the vision. Define outcomes, narrow the effort toward results to be achieved; the quicker and lower the cost the better. Search for low hanging fruit. Maybe initiate a pilot project to prove the visibility of the project. Laminate the vision, mission and goals to demonstrate the permanence of this intention.

Bring others on board. Sell to key leaders, meet with citizens to define the effort and name the playing field. Enlist organizations and individuals to create an alliance for change. Publicize the burning platform and stress the urgency and the need for quick results. Give wide distribution to the laminate.

Implement. Launch the program and drive it forward. Stay on message and measure at frequent intervals. Hold people accountable for results, fulfilling promises and showing outcomes. Declare to others how accountable we are.

Loop back. When the world intervenes and creates a bump in the road, begin the problem solving anew, identifying what went wrong and who was responsible, and initiating a clear oversight process so that this will not happen again. (1)

Does this look familiar?

The challenge for community building is this: While visions, plans and committed top leadership are important, even essential, no clear vision, nor detailed plan, nor committed group leaders have the power to bring this image of the future into existence without the continued engagement and involvement of citizens. If our goal is to build social capital and to change the way that we are engaged with each other, then we have also will have to shift our thinking about the role that traditional strategy and problem solving take. What can bring a fresh future into being are citizens who are willing to self-organize. An alternative future needs the investment of citizens – leaders not in top positions – who are willing to pay the social, economic and emotional price that creating something new requires. The real intent of community transformation is to shift the umbrella under which the traditional problem solving, investment, and social and community action now takes place. It is aimed at the restoration of the experience and vitality of community.

Therefore, the challenge for every community is not so much to have a vision of what it wants to become, or a plan, or specific timetables. The real challenge is to discover and create the means for engaging citizens that brings a new possibility into being . To state it more precisely, what gives power to communal possibility is the imagination and authorship of citizens led through a process of engagement. This is an organic and relational process.

 

(1) from Community by Peter Block

 

The first question an organizer asks is not “what is my issue” but “who are my people”?

When you look at any major revolutions across time and place, you recognize that the most impactful and sustainable change comes when those most impacted by the injustice are leaders in the revolt. Civil rights, the Arab Spring, Apartheid, etc. When we think about organizing people together for change in north Minneapolis, we should start by asking who are the people most affected, and how are they involved in defining the problems, suggesting the solutions and acting with others to bring about the change?

I have lived and worked in north Minneapolis for more than a decade. Most of my friends are white, but not all. Most of my friends are middle class, but not all. Sometimes we are together discussing the issues of the day in north Minneapolis, what’s the problem and what’s the solution. But for us, as a mostly homogenous group, to pretend that at the end of the day we can bring the type of change necessary to create equitable outcomes for all is quite silly. Or even to pretend that we understand the problems similarly as people more impacted by the injustice than us is also silly.

Getting people together across differences is ridiculously hard. I read a book a while ago called the Big Sort by Bill Bishop. In the book the author shows how that while America may be more diverse than ever coast-to-coast, the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote as we do. We sort ourselves by the neighborhoods we choose to live in, our religion, our favorite news show and whatever else is most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. He calls it a kind of “way of life” segregation or “communities of sameness”. Of which, the consequences in their worst form, are communities of people who find people different them to be intolerable and incomprehensible. I think we can all agree that this kind of isolation from people who are different than us contributes to a lot of negative attributes of our society (and politics!). So while we are growing more and more diverse, we are in many ways becoming more and more segregated. And the traditional argument against this sort of self-made isolation is the belief that “our differences make us stronger”. Which to be honest is a bit of a simplistic message for me. I mean I think it’s probably true, but actually getting to the point where we can actualize that potential of our differences is much more difficult.

First, there is the reality that diversity makes us uncomfortable, causes us to put our head back into our shells, and hunker down in our sameness.  And second, that while diversity makes us uncomfortable; this discomfort isn’t always a bad thing. Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches.

Social movements that work, tend to fight hard to form interpersonal relationships that link individuals and networks that are different from each other, be that by race, class or place (or any other multitude of differences). Commitment to a shared future and an understanding of the consequences of our past can transform relationships across differences. And because relationships are the beginning, not endings, they create opportunity for groups to grow, change and develop.

Traditional problem solving is our enemy. I will list three ways why I think this is true:

1. Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. And we love the big solution. Instead big problems are often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.
2. We don’t engage leadership from deep within our communities, or those most affected by the injustices. Too often we go to the leader in the front of the rom, rather than looking for the leader in the middle of the room, or someone not even in the room.
3. We create homogenous problem solving tables. As individuals we have incredible capacity to think differently. In problem solving, this diversity is powerful stuff, but too often we don’t do the hard work to harness its potential.

In north Minneapolis we should be working towards racial justice. Where racial justice is the creation and proactive reinforcement of policies, practices, attitudes, and actions that produce equitable power, access, treatment, opportunities and outcomes for all. Racial justice is not diversity (variety), not equality (sameness), it is equity (fairness, justice).

To do this, we should start by asking a series of questions for whatever group we are a part of or creative strategy we, or others, come up with.

1. Are the people most affected by the injustice involved in coming up and activating the solution?
2. Who sets the agenda?
3. Who makes the decisions?
4. Who benefits and who loses?

Our work will take some power with, meaning we’ll need to be organizing with each other, building relationships and creating power between us. (For example a cooperative daycare, or a community credit union or a volunteer service bank.)

But it will also take confronting the power over us, meaning sometimes others hold power over decisions or resources that we need in order to create the change in our community. In that case we have to organize our own power with others in order to make a claim on the resources or decisions that will fulfill our interests.