I want to talk about why I'm so passionate about community.
You know, there's clearly a role for government, and we need to remind people of that these
days.
There's a role for nonprofit organizations, but I think there's absolutely no substitute
for community when it comes to the things we care most deeply about.
So I want to give a few illustrations about the power of community, and a few stories.
The one's from the Ballard neighborhood.
How many people here from Ballard?
All right, all right.
So the first unique power of community is the power to care for the earth.
You know, we can have all the – invent all the green technology we want, but if people
don't actually adopt it, it doesn't do much good.
And I think it's only when people connect with each other in community, when they feel
some connection to each other and the place that they share, that they become good stewards
of the environment.
And they recognize that collectively their actions are going to make a difference.
If you just think of yourself as one individual, what difference does it make if I don't recycle?
If I waste gas, I'm one person on this huge planet.
But it's in community that we take some responsibility.
So I wanted to share a story from Ballard.
Ballard at the time – this was 28 years ago when we started the Department of Neighborhoods
– was the neighborhood in Seattle that had the least number of street trees of any neighborhood
outside of downtown.
It also had the least number of parks of any neighborhood in Seattle.
There was a woman in Ballard named Dervilla Gowen who cared passionately about street
trees.
She wanted to see trees up and down the streets.
So she put notices in her church bulletin.
She put a notice in the corner grocery store.
She put a notice in the Ballard News Tribune advertising for other people who shared her
passion for trees.
And she tried to find somebody at every block in Ballard.
And if nobody came forward, she'd go to that block and knock on every door until she convinced
somebody that they shared her passion for street trees.
And then she got that person to sign a pledge form saying, I'll come do a training about
how to plant and take care of the trees, and I'll recruit my neighbors to do the same thing.
So she turned in all of her pledge forms with her matching fund application.
So one day, trucks pulled into our neighborhood with 1,080 trees.
Dropped them off at every block in Ballard.
Dervilla went and knocked on the door of the block captain and said, the trees are here.
And the block captain knocked on the neighbor's doors.
That day over 1,000 people came out and planted trees up and down the streets.
People felt incredibly empowered.
Beginning of the day, there's no street trees.
The end of the day, they had tree-lined streets.
They said, God, look what we can do when we work together as a community.
But they said, we still have the least number of parks of any neighborhood in Seattle.
So they walked around the neighborhood looking for potential park sites.
Had a hard time finding them because the neighborhood's pretty developed, pretty built out.
But they finally found this old rundown house.
Used to serve as a nursery right next to the Crown Hill Business District.
It became a problem property.
It was overgrown, derelict house.
And they convinced the city to buy it to turn it into a park.
The city had some open space bond money, so they used that money to buy the property.
But they had absolutely no money to design or build the park.
So the community did it themselves.
Local landscape architect volunteered her services and worked with the neighbors.
And together, they designed and built Baker Park.
This is the entryway into the park.
Some of the landscaping.
There were some beautiful old trees in this park because it used to be a nursery.
And one of them was one of those weird monkey puzzle trees with the strange limbs.
And it died.
They're trying to figure out how to remove it.
And then one of the neighbors who was Native American had a better idea.
They carved it in place as a totem.
And here's some of the detail.
We have a bear with a frog in his mouth, kind of a symbol of returning nature to the city.
Well this group went on.
The next year, they built a community garden.
This is now one of 85 organic community gardens we have in the city of Seattle with 7,000
urban gardeners collectively donating 10 tons of organic produce to our food banks every
year.
All built by the community themselves.
And this is their most recent park.
This is the site of a former house.
So to commemorate the house, they built all the furniture out of cement, including this
coffee table and lamp.
And at the dedication of this park, they unveiled a timeline that shows the 14 parks they've
built over the last 20 years.
Every one of them with volunteers.
They restored a salmon estuary.
They reforested a natural area.
They worked with the kids to build a skate park.
They built ball fields.
They built playgrounds.
Incredible.
They said, well this is fantastic, we've made our neighborhood a better place, but
we're concerned about what's happening to the planet.
We're concerned about climate change.
So they formed an all-volunteer group called Sustainable Ballard.
And the big thing they have each year, I think they just had their seventh one, saw you over
there, was they have music and they have food and they have booths to educate people about
what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint.
And the first booth you go to is the on-drivers license station, where you go and you check
all the ways you won't drive over the next month.
And when you do, you get a laminated on-drivers license.
It's pretty cool.
It looks just like my official Washington State driver's license.
Julia Fields is the one who's organized this.
So she says, I'm going to walk, I'm going to bike, I'm going to take transit, et cetera,
et cetera.
And when you get your on-drivers license, it entitles you to drive the shuffle bus.
This is a foot-powered mobile that's going down the street.
It's kind of a Fred Flintstone type mobile.
Gets everybody's attention.
Gets people thinking about, what could I do to get out of my car?
What could I do to reduce my carbon footprint?
This, of course, has created a movement.
There are now 67 of these organizations all over the Puget Sound area.
Every neighborhood in Seattle, the suburban communities have organized their own all-volunteer
sustainability groups.
Collectively, they call themselves Scallops, sustainable communities all over Puget Sound.
But it all started with DeVille County and the street trees 23 years ago.
There's incredible untapped potential in our communities.
Another unique power of community is the power to prevent crime.
We could have police officers on every street in our city.
And we certainly wouldn't feel as safe, and it certainly wouldn't be as appropriate as
neighbors watching out for each other.
This is a story from the Soto neighborhood, the warehouse, industrial area just south
of downtown.
And this is the corridor through which the buses and now the link light rail travel.
First view that commuters and tourists get of Seattle.
And it looked terrible because it was just the backs of warehouses covered with graffiti.
There was garbage all along the train tracks there.
Well, Mike Perringer here, who worked in one of the local industries, was sick about this
image of his neighborhood.
He had a great idea, and he says, why don't we see this as an urban art corridor?
Why don't we see the backs of these warehouses as potential canvases for murals?
But he had an even better idea, and he worked with our court system, and he asked the judges,
could you offer the kids who get busted for graffiti an alternative sentence where they
could come and help us to create the murals?
Wasn't an easy decision for the kids because they had to show up at work on time, they
had to dress appropriately, they got life skills training, but they got mentored by
professional artists.
And young people create every one of these murals.
And we found that as long as the kids were involved in this program, not one of them
reoffended.
The problem, of course, in Seattle is you can only paint outdoor murals three months
a year because it's raining the other nine months.
So Mike came up with another great idea, got a local warehouse to donate their space, and
in there they create murals in four by eight sheets of plywood, put those around construction
sites to beautify the construction sites.
The developers pay for those murals, keeps the program sustainable over time.
So now there have been over 1,500 murals created through this program, and over 5,000 young
people participated.
And you don't have to get busted to get into the program.
We didn't want to create negative incentives.
A third unique value of community is the power to care for one another.
I think that's probably been the silver lining of the economic crisis is people are rediscovering
how important community is.
The very time where people's needs are the greatest, our government, our nonprofits have
the fewest resources to respond.
People are realizing all they really have to fall back on is each other.
In many ways, we're learning about the power of community from our new immigrants and refugees.
They understand community like nobody else.
They come from places where all they have to count on is each other.
They have so much to teach us.
This is a story about the Eritrean community.
Came to Seattle fleeing war with very little, often working a couple jobs, low-wage jobs,
lacking a lot of tenants, working in restaurants, a couple jobs to make ends meet.
But they pool all their resources.
They form a mutual assistance association to support one another.
They were afraid they were losing their kids to the streets.
So they bought this old rundown house in Rainier Valley, just a block south of I-90, a couple
blocks west of Rainier.
And they went to fix up this house after work, after working a couple jobs.
They'd volunteer and they repaired the roof on this house.
They put in new electricity, new plumbing, new wall board, bought old sewing machines,
taught each other how to use them, bought old computers.
Kids taught their parents how to use the computer.
In the basement, they put in a commercial kitchen.
They cooked their traditional meals together.
They shared their dance, their music, their culture, their language.
In a turn, the young people were teaching their parents English.
They're incredibly effective.
They quickly outgrew that space and they came to me and said, Jim, can we get some matching
funds so we can build a new cultural center?
I said, yeah, but you need to come up with a match and at least a quarter of the match
needs to be from your community.
They came back to me one week later with $30,000.
300 member households, each putting in $100.
These are people who have nothing, for whom $100 is a fortune.
And I keep thinking if we all had that same commitment to our community and put that percentage
of our resources into our community, we could take it to a whole different level.
We have so much to learn.
And here's they're celebrating their new cultural center.
Well, here's some of the other ways in which I think communities uniquely qualified.
We've seen over and over again with emergencies, whether that was the earthquake in Christchurch
or the earthquakes in Japan or whether it was a hurricane in New Orleans.
Government can't get out there quickly enough.
In times of emergency, people really are dependent on each other, but oftentimes realizing when
it's too late.
Our very health and welfare is tied to our community.
There have been studies that show that about 10% of health outcomes can be attributed to
health care professionals.
Most of it has to do with our economics.
It has to do with our environment.
It has to do with our social relationships, with our behavior.
It's the kinds of things that can be affected by community.
Our happiness, our very democracy depends on community and, of course, social justice.
We've all seen no major social change ever happens from the top down.
It all happens bottom up, whether that was the civil rights movement, the women's rights
movement, the gay lesbian movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement.
It's all been bottom up.
So without strong communities, we can't have social justice.
The problem is at the very time we most need community, it's in its greatest state of crisis.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with Robert Putnam's work, a professor at
Harvard University, he wrote a book called Bowling Alone, tracking the incredible breakdown
of community life in North America over the past 50 years, how fewer and fewer people
belong to the traditional associations, fewer and fewer people voting, fewer families eating
together.
And he cites lots of reasons, and I've added to those with my list here, one of which is
we used to live, learn, work, and play all in the same village or in the same neighborhood.
And now we've created single purpose places where we have bedroom communities where people
just go to sleep, and where we have malls where people drive a half hour to shop, and
where people might commute an hour to work.
In many ways, we have many different communities, but in a sense, no community at all because
their lives are so disjointed, we don't bump into the same people over and over again.
Increased mobility, where it used to be generation after generation, our families would live
in the same village, the same town, and now most people have moved multiple times over
the course of their life.
And when we're always on the move, it's hard to build relationships.
And if we know we're just going to move again, why bother?
It's a lot of work.
Longer work days, and more women in the workforce.
Women have always been the leaders in our community efforts.
There's less time to devote to community.
Increasing consumerism, where people are chasing the material things rather than taking satisfaction
and looking for happiness in relationships.
Fear in many neighborhoods.
There have been studies that show in many neighborhoods that's the number one thing
breaking down community, where people are afraid to come out of their homes.
And when they're afraid to come out, they have even more reason to be afraid, because
they don't know their neighbors.
It's fear of the unknown.
Electronic screens, I just spoke at a health conference in Banff, and a researcher reported
that young people are spending an average of 10 to 12 hours a day in front of screens
of all types.
Less time to be involved in personal relationships.
Increasing globalization, decisions being made further and further from where we live.
Professionalization and specialization.
We have professionals doing what communities used to do for themselves.
Specialization, where everything's been divided into specialties.
So we separated the people with disabilities from the young people, from the old people.
Everybody's being organized the way agencies are organized.
It's hard for us to come together as a community when we're all in separate silos.
And probably a good illustration, again, is from Ballard.
There's, I think a lot of you know this story, a woman who lived in this house for over 50
years.
She lived in this house, developer owned the property on either side of her, wanted to
buy her house to put in a large mixed-use development.
She said, I'm not selling.
He said, but I'll give you a million dollars.
And her house is only worth about 150,000.
She said, I'm still not selling.
My community is worth more to me than a million dollars.
So the developer responded.
In many ways, this is a symbol to me of how so many people experience community these
days, where they feel powerless in their communities.
They feel that their community isn't being shaped by the people who live there, but by
outside money, by outside powers.
And how so many people, even places where there's a pretty strong sense of community,
there are so many individuals who feel cut off from community, who feel isolated, who
have no friendships.
Another related issue is the crisis in democracy, where people are feeling less and more and
more powerless, where people are starting to think of themselves as taxpayers rather
than as citizens, where we've got people organizing against their government and saying
government is the problem.
Every form of government has taxpayers, but only democracies have citizens.
In Fremont, they were so mad at one point that they erected a rocket on the side of
one of their businesses and announced that it was aimed at City Hall.
They declared themselves the Artist Republic of Fremont.
So now I've totally depressed everybody, right?
I talked about how important community and democracy are and how it's going down the
toilet.
So I want to talk about how do we rebuild that.
And that's why I think community organizing is so important.
I've heard a lot about organizing lately.
It's been promoted because of Barack Obama.
Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich have been some of the main people speaking about community
organizing, not always positively.
But community organizing is a process through which people who live in proximity to one
another come together in a democratic association to decide and act on their common interests.
And there's really two different forms of community organizing, two approaches.
One is organizing to hold outside institutions accountable for meeting community needs, and
the other is mobilizing the community's own capacity to address local needs and to realize
its vision.
So I'm going to briefly talk about both kinds of organizing.
First one is the one I came to Seattle to start in 1976.
I started as an Alinsky-style community organizer in Southeast Seattle.
And Alinsky basically taught – this is a really rough summary – but he basically
says there's two kinds of power in our society.
There's the power of money and there's the power of people.
And if you don't have a lot of money, you better have a lot of people because that's
how you make change.
So we organized.
When the city tried to put garbage incinerators in our neighborhood, we pushed for the model
recycling program.
When our utility bills were skyrocketing, we started up the light brigade and started
up the campaign, which eventually led to the city voting to get out of whoops and the shutdown
of the whoops nuclear power plants.
This is a demonstration to get the railroads in the city to agree to put in a new bridge
to replace the failing Lucille Street Bridge that was connecting Georgetown and Beacon
Hill.
All kinds of campaigns that we did.
And it was largely a faith-based network, bringing all the different religious organizations
in Rainier Valley together along with the neighborhood associations.
There's a similar effort like that today with the Sound Alliance.
I was – I spent a lot of time in London recently, and just incredible what they're
doing with their community organizing there.
There, they've got a group called Citizens UK that, again, came out of Olinsky's work,
but it's a coalition of faith-based organizations, both churches and mosques, that are working
together.
And they've been incredibly effective.
Together they're putting pressure on every employer they can think of, from universities
to hospitals to chain stores to demand that they pay living wages.
Huge effort.
They've got multiple contracts signed with the city of London, with all kinds of employers,
agreeing that if people are working hard, they're working eight hours a day in the
community, they should be able to live in their community.
They should be paid enough to actually live in their community.
So they've been incredibly effective.
So effective now that they were able to get a contract signed with the Olympics, which
are coming to London this year.
And everybody who works in the Olympics will be paid a living wage.
And this is how they have so much power.
This is one of their meetings.
And they were also successful in getting the Olympic Village, which is going to be turned
back to the community after the Olympics, to be a permanently affordable housing trust.
Incredibly effective organizations.
So I just believe very strongly that we'll never have social justice unless we have strong
community organizing and strong community organizations.
But community organizing tends to start with this map of our communities.
It tends to focus on what the problems are, what's missing in our community.
And what I'd like to suggest is that when we do that, we're only looking at half the
glass.
And frankly, we're looking at the part that's kind of the useless part of the glass, the
part that you can't do anything with, the half empty portion.
So what's really powerful is to also focus on the other half of the glass.
And it's the part we often neglect.
Because government, nonprofits tend to focus on what's missing in the community.
Because we often say that agencies need needs, right?
If we didn't have needs, there wouldn't be a role for government.
There wouldn't be a role for nonprofits.
Thank goodness we've got them.
Because we have great needs in our communities that can't be addressed adequately by the
community.
But if that becomes our only map of the community, we're missing out on these incredible resources,
untapped resources that are in absolutely every community.
So and starting with the strengths of communities, another approach to community organizing,
which we call asset-based community development.
And it's built on several ideas, one, or several different kinds of assets.
Government is recognizing absolutely every individual in our community has incredible
gifts to give.
Everybody without exception.
And we like to think about them as three kinds of gifts.
One are gifts of the heads, that person's knowledge.
Gifts of the heart, that person's passions.
And gifts of the hands, that person's skills.
Absolutely everybody's got these.
But unfortunately in our society, we're increasingly putting labels on huge sections of our population
that define people not by their gifts, but by their needs.
We use terms like homeless.
We think about homeless person, you think about a lot of gifts?
You think about what they're lacking.
A home.
I have a friend who's a minister in a church, New Prospect Baptist Church in Cincinnati,
Ohio.
His congregation has a soup kitchen in the basement for homeless men.
And finally somebody got the idea and said, why don't we interview these men, find out
what their gifts are.
Turns out a lot of these men like to cook.
They said, would you like to help cook the meals in the soup kitchen?
They were overjoyed.
Nobody ever thought to ask them that before.
So after a while, the homeless men and the members of the church are cooking and eating
together.
It was hard to tell who were the providers and who were the clients, because it wasn't
about services anymore.
It was about community.
It was about everybody supporting each other.
Sharing their gifts with each other.
Some of the other labels we use are unemployed, poor person, non-English speaking, single
parent, addict, offender, disabled.
That one really drives me crazy.
How many people in this room have no disability?
I see some eyeglasses.
My disability is my memory.
It gets worse every year.
But when I'm applying for a job, I don't say, I have this disability, but please hire me.
And yet there's a growing section of our population that we define solely in terms of their disability.
And when we do, we overlook their gifts.
And when we just focus on people's needs, they become clients in a service system.
When we focus on people's gifts, they become citizens in our community.
And everybody has both needs and gifts.
But somehow in our society, we've created two classes of people.
Those with the needs and those with the gifts.
And then we wonder why those labeled people aren't active in our communities.
They're invisible.
They're part of a service system.
They aren't part of our community.
So just an illustration from Limerick, Ireland, where I've done some work with my colleague
Cormac Russell.
And this is the neighborhood his family's from.
This is called Ballinacora Weston.
It's one of three social housing communities in Limerick.
And it's also our way towards Parrish.
These three housing communities have had incredible problems with gang activity.
Ballinacora Weston in particular.
Really scary gangs.
There have been several murders in that neighborhood.
Small neighborhood.
The government's solution was we're going to come in and buy out people's homes and
we're going to tear down this community and rebuild it.
They did that without consulting the residents.
But one at a time they started buying up these houses.
They became boarded up.
They became covered with graffiti.
There was garbage absolutely everywhere.
And then with the collapse of the economy in Ireland, there's absolutely no money to
carry through on the plan.
So people are worse off than ever.
People are living.
This is one of those neighborhoods where people are in fear for good reason.
And they're behind closed doors.
And you can't build community when people are behind closed doors.
But one of those label groups, the at-risk youth, we hardly ever talk about young people
anymore these days without that adjective at risk.
And yet who's got more creativity?
Who's got more energy?
Who's got more at stake in the future of our community than young people?
One of these at-risk young people organized for friends and on Christmas Eve they went
around house to house Christmas caroling.
Incredible bravery.
And it gave everybody else the confidence to start coming out of their homes.
And so they started painting out the graffiti in the neighborhood, cleaning up the streets.
And then a problem property where all the drug deals were going down that was neglected,
that was overgrown, they created a garden of hope.
And here they are working together again with young people taking the lead with support
from some of the adults in the community.
But one of the toughest neighborhoods and just the power, the power of taking those
labels off and releasing those gifts that everybody has to offer.
A second asset that every community has are voluntary associations.
These are those democratic organizations where people come together and do collectively what
the kid do individually.
We usually don't have staff, you know, no budget.
Like our neighborhood associations in Seattle.
When I'm meeting with neighborhood associations, working with voluntary associations, I emphasize
the importance of working with faith-based groups.
It's a key group that's often left out of our community work.
But when I'm in faith-based groups, I urge them to reach out beyond faith-based groups
to all the other kinds of ways people are organized in our communities.
So here's an example of what happened in Wodonga, Victoria, rural Victoria.
This church, there were some members of the church who wanted to start up a community
garden on this big piece of grass here.
So they're trying to figure out how do we build the raised beds?
So they turned to one of the voluntary associations, which is the Men's Shed.
They've got these Men's Sheds all over Australia where men come together, retired men, and
they have power tools, and they get together and they make things out of wood for the benefit
of the community.
They make children's toys, they renovate facilities.
But it's a great way for these men to support each other, to talk about health issues, to
get a little time away from their wives, to mentor young guys who are in trouble and helping
them learn how to do woodworking, but in the process, being life coaches to them as well.
Incredibly powerful.
Anyhow, these men built the raised beds for the garden.
And then they worked with mutual assistance association, the new immigrants and refugees
who had come into the community.
They got involved in the garden because they were eager to grow produce that they were
used to.
And there was an organization of elders in the community who got involved and figured
they could do things, even if it was just watering the garden.
And the crops started to grow.
Turned out the church had a commercial kitchen.
So they started harvesting this food and they recruited people to help prepare this food.
The local nutritionists offered her services and they started cooking gourmet meals.
But they again involved everybody.
They involved the high school club that got involved in this, another voluntary association.
And they involved an organization of people with intellectual disabilities.
They are so proud.
Here they are cooking the pasta.
So proud to be the cooks for the community, the chefs for the community, to be able to
contribute to the community, not just be seen as clients.
And here they are packaging the foods.
And they serve thousands and thousands of gourmet, nutritious foods to people who would
otherwise have no food at all.
And it's possible because they reached out and involved all the different ways people
organized in their community.
A third asset that every community has is the build environment.
This is a picture of Mountain View Presbyterian Church in White Center.
This is a church that has a small congregation.
The church was really falling apart.
But they used their facility to help support the community.
There's an elementary school across the street, so they started a before and after school
program.
But their facility was really having problems.
So some of the people were active from the community and said, we'd like to help you
rebuild your church.
And even though this was a very small congregation, they had so many connections in their community
and with their sister church, which is University Presbyterian, they used all those connections
to organize an extreme makeover of their church.
One thousand volunteers got involved.
And over three weekends, they totally rebuilt that church.
And they put in new facilities for the community.
It was a four and a half million dollar project they did for a million and a half because
all of the skills were volunteered by community members.
The local labor unions got involved.
They worked through all the different associations in the community.
Here they are tearing out the – this space was just terrible.
This is where the before and after school program was.
Here's what it looked like afterwards.
This is what their kitchen looked like before.
This is what it looked like afterwards.
And then they re-landscaped the area around the church.
A local artist contributed new stained glass windows throughout the church.
And a neighbor across the street took the old stained glass and created a cross for
that church.
Incredibly powerful.
And we take those underutilized assets in our community and mobilize them.
I know of other churches.
I know of one in Indianapolis in a really poor neighborhood where the church was surrounded
by boarded up houses, foreclosed houses.
And they started buying up these houses and members of the church worked to rehab these
houses both for church members to start moving back into the neighborhood and for other neighbors
to have a home ownership.
Incredible.
Underutilized assets in our communities.
The natural environment.
I was in Leaton, New South Wales in Australia.
And there the Uniting Church took the initiative and said, you know, we've got so much produce
that's just sitting in our fields and rotting because our supermarkets have standards where
the fruit has to be a particular color.
It has to be a particular firmness.
It has to be a particular size.
And so volunteers from the churches, from the congregations go out and glean the fields.
And they're sending thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds to the food banks
in Sydney every year.
Onions and watermelon, oranges.
And the local economy is another real strength of every neighborhood.
This is a church called Sacred Heart in Minneapolis.
They worked very hard.
They were part of an Alinsky-style organizing effort to get the police to be more responsive,
to help clean up the streets because most of the businesses were shut down.
They were boarded up because of high crime in that neighborhood.
But they said, this neighborhood is never going to get better unless we can revitalize
the economy.
So they did an asset inventory in their church and all Latino congregations and found people
who used to have businesses in Mexico.
People who still had businesses that were operating out of their basement or out of
their garage.
People wanted to start a business because they made really good tamales and they had
a good craft.
So they formed a co-op.
And you could join the co-op if you put in $1,000 and if you went through a business
training class, it was offered for free.
And they used their money to renovate this boarded up building as a Mercado Central.
And they create small incubator businesses inside.
Jose on the right-hand side was a dishwasher at the time.
But he was elected president of the board of the co-op.
But he made really good tamales.
So he started up a tamaling coffee shop and somebody else put in Mexican clothing.
And there were cafes and there's a grocery store and there's bakery and there's smoothies
and there's also a cultural center.
So when I was there, they're celebrating the Day of the Dead.
But it's been incredibly successful.
Jose now has, he has three tamaling coffee shops on Lake Street.
He's got 27 employees, $2 million a year in sales.
They're able to do joint accounting, joint marketing.
So they've been incredibly successful.
The small-eyed community heard about this and said, we want to start up our own businesses.
So they started up incubator businesses in an old bakery.
And then there was a Collins building, which is the former hospital.
And in there, they create small incubator businesses from absolutely all over the world
called the world market.
Because it's a very multicultural community.
So they're building on their strengths to rebuild their economy from the bottom up.
Rather than just giving tax incentives to major corporations, rather than bringing in
the big box retail, rather than bringing in chain stores.
It's about how do we build on the strengths of our community?
How do we get people to shop locally?
How do we get people to reinvest locally?
How do we build our economy from the bottom up?
Finally, every community has local agencies.
And agencies have incredible contributions they can make, whether it's nonprofits or
government.
If they're going to really partner with communities, they need to make a major paradigm shift in
the way they do their work.
Because in many ways, some of our agencies are contributing to the breakdown of our communities
in a top-down kind of way, in a siloed kind of way.
Because they just focus on needs and not also on the strengths of the community.
So if agencies are going to partner with communities, need to move away from discrete functions
to focusing on whole places, on whole communities, more holistic approaches, moving from needs
to strengths and from top-down to bottom-up.
So just one quick last story from Neighborhood House at High Point.
Neighborhood House got a grant to create a healthy community in High Point.
Had a hard time getting people interested.
It was the agency's agenda and not the community's.
So they said, what would you as a community be interested in?
They said, we just want to create an awesome High Point community.
So they said, OK, we'll pay for meals if everybody will help us cook the meals, because
we just have enough money for the food, not for the ingredients, not to cook it.
So all the members of the community created their own dishes.
And it was this incredible multicultural feast that could only be produced out of that community.
And then the community said, we can get people here to our event.
They wanted to have a big gathering to tap people's ideas, rather than just relying
on the agencies for all the solutions.
What would get people there?
They said, well, if we had some entertainment, it would get people there.
So there was a group in the community that volunteered to provide entertainment.
And it was the senior line dance group, where some of them actually showed up with walkers.
But they were so popular, the kids jumped up and joined them and said, could we do this
with you every month?
And then we had people sit around tables and create visions about what would an awesome
High Point community look like?
And then we told people, if you have an idea you're particularly passionate about, stand
up and champion it and see who joins you.
And so people stood up one at a time, this woman said, young woman said, Chinese woman
said, I want to start up a tea house.
So we have a gathering place in our community.
There were some Somali elders in the corner and said, we don't drink tea, we drink coffee.
So they got together and started talking about a tea and coffee shop.
This man said, I'll lead exercise classes if people help me organize those.
This young woman said, I want to start up a, I've always wanted to play soccer.
But because of my religion, we can't play outdoor soccer.
I want to start up an indoor soccer league.
So a group started organizing around that.
This woman said, we made this incredible multicultural feast tonight.
That's an incredible gift that we have that no other community could reproduce.
Let's start up a multi-ethnic catering company.
This young man, Solomon, was the most moving of all.
Solomon stood up and said, you know, all my friends in other neighborhoods have parks,
they have swing sets.
I want a swing set.
He just tugged at everybody's heartstrings.
He was the most articulate.
And there were some elders in the corner who said, you know, we walk, we do regular exercises.
We walk for exercise every morning.
And we get tired.
We, we like to have a bench.
How about if we create a park with a bench and swing sets?
This was last January.
A month ago, the neighbors came together to build that park.
Here's the bench.
And here's Solomon in his new swing set.
And I just keep hearing more stories.
There was a group of older women who came together in this low-income housing development
and said, we want to teach each other how to do craft work.
There's somebody there who did really good knitting and crocheting.
She called me the other day and said, we are so proud.
We're just shipping sweaters like crazy to Nicholsville for homeless people.
Always thinking about who's worse off than themselves.
That to me is community.
So I've got a lot more stuff that I'm going to stop so we can take some questions and
look forward to the dialogue.
And if people want to stick around later, I'll show you more pictures.
What do you think in Seattle today a faith-based replacement needs to do?
What could we do?
Well you're doing a lot already.
I'm actually working with Associated Ministries in Pierce County.
And we're pulling together an event in, when is that, I think it's next month.
And they're concerned about poverty.
And they've been, as a church, a lot of churches working and writing letters to congressmen
and doing kind of the traditional things.
But what we're going to do is organize a session, a workshop, and talk about asset-based approaches
to dealing with poverty.
And do open space, kind of like you did at High Point.
And have people just stand up and say, here's a project I want to work on.
You know, it might be about time sharing.
That's a huge effort right now about how can people get their needs met outside of the
formal economy.
Or it might be about working on a living wage campaign, whatever it is.
But really have the members themselves say, here's something we want to work on.
Here's how we can contribute our gifts.
And it's about, I think, Plymouth does a fantastic job of kind of supporting services in our
community.
But also, how do we start recognizing people as more than clients?
And how do we start bringing them into our community?
There's a great project in Ames, Iowa.
I figured you could relate to that.
And it's called Beyond Poverty.
And what they recognize is that absolutely everybody's got poverty in their lives.
For some people, it's a lack of money.
For some people, poverty is a lack of meaning and relationships.
And a lot of the people with the most money have the least meaning and relationships in
their lives.
So they bring people together across class to help each other with their poverty.
So it's about kind of thinking a new way, thinking about those untapped resources that
are in our community.
Because I think everybody's probably already giving as much as they can financially.
OK, next question.
How do you overcome the naysayers in the group that say, we're too old, we're too young,
we're too small?
Right.
Yeah.
I have a friend who's a fellow activist.
He used to be an organizer in the Philippines, and now he's an organizer in Calgary.
He says, Jim, you know, the problem getting people engaged in community is those GD activists.
And I said, what do you mean GD?
And he said, the grim and determined.
And it cracked me up because it describes so many people I know who are always so negative.
And they tend to be a lot of our communicators, and they drive everybody away.
They're just always complaining.
And there's a certain number of people who go with that negativity.
But most people go with hope.
So I think it's about how do you bring people together?
Sometimes that's why with the matching fund, we allow people to create their own groups
to do a project.
So you don't have to go through those gatekeepers that are such a pain sometimes.
But it's about using new kind of calls to people.
I have a friend who's a duck hunter.
He taught me that every duck will respond to a call.
Just there's a different call for every duck, right?
And he says, too often times, all we do is we sound the loon call, and we wonder why
only the loons come to our meetings, right?
And he says, that's the first problem is we start with the meetings.
I have a friend who says, why have a meeting when you can have a party?
Right?
Think about it.
The purpose isn't who can endure the most.
The purpose is to go suffering.
Right?
The purpose is to build relationships.
And you can do that a lot more through fun, through social activities.
So the more calls you have, if you have a social call, that's a very legitimate call.
Or the project call, because unlike with meetings, there's always a result.
There's a beginning and an end.
There's a role for everybody, for young people, for elders, people with disabilities.
The purpose is to build relationships.
And once people start to build relationships, then they're more likely to get involved in
meetings.
I think the other thing is people are feeling really powerless these days.
They feel like they've been involved a lot and nothing ever changes, nothing ever happens.
So one of the things Olensky really taught about is working on, immediately, issues that
are immediate, concrete, and realizable, or projects that are immediate, concrete, and
realizable, where people can see results.
Because if people just feel like it's, you know, so you probably don't want to start
with rural peace or climate change, because it's hard to see results.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't work on those issues.
But people are never going to work on those big issues if they don't think they can even
make change on their own block.
Right?
People need to get a sense that by working collectively, they can make change.
And then they'll be more ready to tackle the larger issues.
Well, I could talk about that one for a long time.
Sound Alliance is a, came out of the Industrial Areas Foundation, which was the organization
that was created by Olensky way back.
But it's, organizing's really changed over the last, you know, it's evolved.
Olensky died in 72.
And he really organized, he really focused on organizing people around their self-interest.
And now community organizing's much more about organizing around people's values.
It's about organizing around relationships, which are also great ways to get people engaged.
So what they do is bring in institutions, largely faith-based organizations, synagogues
and churches, and labor unions, you know, key organizations.
And they, and they start off by doing what they call a listening campaign within the
churches, just to get people to really build strong relationships with each other, to tell
their stories, find out what their gifts are, what their hopes and fears are for their community.
And then they bring people together to start identifying what are some common issues that
we have in common that we'd like to work on as a, as a, as a community.
So they're working on issues like foreclosure now.
They're working on issues like green jobs and training people within their congregations
about how to get those jobs.
So it's a very powerful organization.
It's been around probably five or six years.
But I'd really encourage you to check it out.
I wonder if you'd be willing to comment on community organizers and their value with
respect to what the city of Michigan says.
Yeah.
Well, it, his comments really seem strange to me in that, as I said before, and I believe
it, I think there's two kinds of power.
I think there's the power of money and there's the power of people.
And money tends to be organized as corporations and PACs.
And people are organized as communities.
So if you really believe in democracy, if you really believe in, you know, in strong
communities, you gotta believe in community organizing, right?
What's, what's funny to me is I don't think that community organizing, I don't know why
it's not a conservative value as well as progressive value.
In fact, I'm doing a lot of work with the UK.
I gave two talks in number 10 Downing Street over the last year.
They are hiring 5,000, they are training 5,000 community organizers across the country.
This is the Tories because they have no money.
Because government has less money and they say, we've got this great untapped strength
in our communities.
And they're replicating Seattle's matching fund program across the country with 120 million
pounds because they don't have money.
So I don't, I don't think, I hate to see this stuff get polarized because I think community,
I think that's one of the, you know, I have my own politics, but that's, I think that's
one of the strengths of community is I think that really is the potential to span across
those divides that we've created, the partisan divides, because community shouldn't be partisan.
Community is where it all comes together.
It should be something everybody believes in.
So it's really mysterious to me that people are mining community organizing and praising
the corporations.
Okay, so it occurs to me that, you know, like what you're doing is a little bit subversive.
And you know, you seem like it's, you know, like not a flaming radical or anything, but
it is kind of subversive in my opinion because, well, let me give you a couple examples, like
what happened to the Inuits in Canada, you know, is that, you know, they got television
in their, into their villages and within about four years, their whole community had disintegrated
and their kids were sniffing glue and everything.
And you know, and then I think of the movie network, you know, like, you know, how they,
you know, they, at one point the guy, you know, he says, go to your window, you know,
and go scream out there, you know, I'm fed up and I'm not going to take it anymore.
Right.
Mad as hell.
Yeah, I'm mad as hell.
I'm not going to take it anymore.
And it's like, you know, people don't know what to do.
Like, as if that would change anything if you went and screamed out the window or something,
you know.
And so I think that you were talking about how that there's two kinds of power, you know,
there's money power and there's community power.
And I think that the powers that be know this, you know.
So do you have any thoughts on this you want to elaborate on?
I don't know what I can elaborate on beyond what I've said.
I think, yeah, I think it's subversive.
I also, I also think that there are people who are in power who are recognizing that
there could be some advantages in partnering with communities that at a time where we have
fewer resources that there are, and also that there's a lot of things that institutions
don't do as well as communities.
The communities do best.
So it's, yeah, it's subversive, but it also could be a way for it to create more partnerships
between institutions and communities.
And another thing I was thinking about, you know, you're talking about agencies, you know,
how that they, you know, look at people by needs instead of, you know, assets, you know.
And so I'm sort of wondering, you know, over the years, if you've seen any change in how
that, say, for instance, the city council reacts to you and to the neighborhood groups,
you know, as to how that they might have reacted before.
Well, I don't know about the city council.
I think it has been a trend where we've got, you know, institutions have grown larger and
larger, larger government, larger, more and more nonprofit organizations.
And that has contributed to this trend of kind of focusing on needs, of siloing people.
And I'm not one of those people who thinks we need smaller government or we need fewer
nonprofits.
It's more, the message is more about how do we get government and nonprofits to focus
on what they do best?
Because there is clearly a need for government and nonprofit organizations.
There are things communities don't do so well that government and nonprofits need to step
up and do.
But how do they use the rest of their capacity to really help communities rebuild their own
capacity to do what communities do best?
And how do we create better partnerships between government and nonprofits and communities
by focusing on strengths, by doing work more bottom-up rather than agencies always driving
the agendas?
And how do we do it in a less siloed way, in a more holistic community-based kind of
way?
And I think there's a lot of opportunity to move in that direction.
It's really tough to move in that direction because all of our systems are set up the
other way.
Every one of our institutions is set up by silos from the university on up.
And our grants are all set up that way so that you can never get a grant by saying we
have a great community with lots of strengths.
You get grants by saying how terrible your community is and how many needs you have.
And with grants you often have to focus on what the objectives are before you've consulted
the community, which again is at least a top-down anti-community approach.
So all our systems are set up to be anti-community.
I think in terms of council, in terms of government, it's really interesting.
I think it sort of depends who's in office.
There are some governments now who are waking up and saying, hey, we've got to do our work
in a very different way because of the economic crisis, because we don't have the resources.
And they're recognizing how many resources the community can bring and how important
it is to kind of make democracy work again, that it's a crisis when people are thinking
of themselves as taxpayers rather than as citizens.
And so there are so many places around the world now, from Brazil that's doing participatory
budgeting processes to the effort to hire community organizers in the UK to bottom-up
planning in many places in Australia, where people are doing work in a new way because
of the economic crisis, and it's waking government officials up.
Unfortunately, there are also places like Seattle that are actually retrenching on our
community work and using the economic crisis as an excuse, saying we have to get back to
basics.
Now, because of the bad economy, we just have to do what's most important, and that's
paving our roads and taking care of our physical infrastructure and hiring more police.
And they've forgotten about community.
They think community is sort of this fluffy thing that we can do when times are good,
but we really can't afford it in tough times.
And there's absolutely nothing more important right now than community, because that's
where our untapped resources are.
And it's a huge mistake for government to just think of its function as taking care
of the physical infrastructure.
Government also needs to be responsible for taking care of the foundation of our democracy,
and there isn't enough attention to that.
But many places are waking up and starting to move in a different direction.
I'm afraid Seattle doesn't quite get it yet.
That's kind of funny, because we pride ourselves that we have such a progressive city council.
We've got people on the city council that ran with green endorsements and everything,
and that come from the environmental community, for instance.
But you would think that they would get that.
What's interesting to me is I don't think community is necessarily a progressive value
or a conservative value.
And it really frustrates me as progressive to see so many progressives trying to do things,
trying to push their own agendas, and not trusting democracy, not really trusting the
people, trying to figure out how do we get more density over on the people this time,
for example.
When we trusted people and did bottom-up planning, community groups all voted for more density
because they were able to shape density in a way that may work for them.
Whenever we try to impose solutions from the top down, no matter how progressive, it doesn't
work.
We've got to get back to democracy.
We've got to get back to more community-oriented kind of work.
This is an interesting point, because you hear conservatives always railing against
big government.
They think that, well, they are always talking about how we should get the church to provide
aid to people if they're starving or whatever, which is totally ludicrous.
But the thing is that they have a good point, because they understand that really community
is a big part of happiness.
I think both the conservatives and progressives have some good points and some terrible points
they're making.
For conservatives, the good point is, yes, people need to take some more responsibility.
I think that was part of Barack Obama's appeal when he ran for president, was that he said
people need to step up and take a lot more responsibility.
But at the same time, he said, we also need social justice, and that's what the conservatives
miss out on.
There's clearly a role for government and for progressives in ensuring that people's
basic needs get met, that nobody falls through the cracks.
But at the same time, we also need to think about how do we rebuild community and help
communities do what they do best.
So I get concerned that people take such ideological positions and miss out on the real potential
for change, which I think is in communities.
And another thing you touched on was the lack of democracy.
And a while back, I had a conversation with one of my friends, and we were talking about
on a local level, like here in Seattle, how we voted for the monorail two or three times,
we didn't get it, how that we voted against the tunnel two or three times, and they won,
how that everybody pretty much was against the stadium, but they crammed that down our
throats.
And it's like, I could see why people don't want to participate.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, I often argue that before government starts partnering with communities, it needs
to remove some of the obstacles and start doing no harm.
In many ways, a lot of the reasons we have had a breakdown in community is because people
have participated a lot and they haven't seen any results from their participation.
So they've learned through their participation with government not to be involved, right?
They've learned the wrong lessons.
And it's really tough to be involved with government because in the city of Seattle,
there's 32 different departments, and each department's focused on its own agenda, pushing
its own agenda.
And it's in community that things come together.
There are enough nights in the year to go to all those meetings, right?
And it's not how people experience community.
They don't experience them in silos.
They experience them where they all come together in their neighborhoods, in their community.
So government often complains about they just hear from the few people over and over.
They often talk about them as the usual suspects.
But in many ways, those usual suspects are created by government because the process
is to reinforce those few individuals.
And if government is really serious about creating a democracy, it needs to be much
more serious about empowering communities, about getting resources, about allowing more
bottom-up decision-making, and about using other tools and meetings to get people engaged.
You know, I sort of don't think government really is interested in creating democracy
very much these days.
It's not because of government itself.
It's just because of who runs the government and the power of money these days that basically
democracy is the last thing they want.
And it also ties into foreign policy.
I think that's true in general, although I think still at the local level, I think there's
some good people in government.
And I was surprised because I sort of took that attitude when I was a community organizer.
Maybe I sold out when I went to government.
But I recognize there are a lot of people there who really got into government because
they wanted communities to be successful, because they wanted to help communities.
They really did want to be public servants.
And I think over time, they just get worn down by the bureaucracy and by the processes.
And so I spend a lot of time just trying to help people think in a new way about, with
elected officials, giving them a new sense about what power is so they don't feel threatened
when people say we want more power in our communities.
To recognize that power isn't a finite resource, the more you hold onto it, the less you have.
Power is like love.
The more you give it away, the more you get, right?
There's all these untapped resources in the community.
And what kind of power do elected officials have if nobody identifies with their government?
If people are angry at their government, people feel alienated from their government, if fewer
and fewer people are voting?
That's no power.
The only way government's going to be powerful is if people actually identify with it.
If they start thinking of themselves as citizens again, if they're actually actively involved
in their communities and with their government on a regular basis, rather than just seeing
a democracy as something where you go out and vote every year or two, if that.
Do you feel like you've had any success in this endeavor as far as the government?
Oh, you know, I think it's been – there were a lot of successes in Seattle.
People all over the world are saying we want to be like Seattle.
They're talking about the Seattle model, where we did involve 30,000 people in the
development of 38 bottom-up plans, where tens of thousands of people have been involved
in creating over 5,000 community self-help projects.
That's the Seattle model that people are excited about.
Unfortunately, Seattle's walking away from that model some, but other places are really
stepping up and saying we want to be like Seattle, or as they think Seattle is.
So I see moves towards bottom-up planning, matching fund programs, participatory budgeting,
all kinds of models being used around the world.
You know, village assemblies in India, all kinds of models where people are getting engaged
and people are rediscovering both at the community level and in government the value of democracy
and the value of community.
That's what gives me hope.
You know, I do a lot of traveling everywhere I go.
I meet great people who are really working hard to make a difference.
A lot of people are feeling kind of frustrated because they're working really hard and wondering
what kind of difference am I making, but I think collectively we're making a huge difference
because it's not just this local effort, but these local efforts being replicated absolutely
everywhere I go in the world.
I particularly see, you know, with the Occupy movement, everywhere I go there's an Occupy
movement.
You know, one in London, I was one in Toronto, in Victoria, everywhere I go.
And to share those stories from around the world gives people a sense of hope.
We aren't in it alone.
This is part of a global struggle and if we're going to make change we've really got to
start at the grassroots.
All right.
Thanks.
Thank you.