Found this article on a recent site visit to Abundant Community.
Stories: Discovering Others’ Gifts: Re-humanizing Our Communities 02-28-2012 – Abundant Community
Another interesting video from Communities First Association. It reminded me again that no committee of developers can ever create rich community life:
I didn’t want to get too personal. But this is the first of many blogs I’ll probably write about the interface between the self and community. This time it just happens to be about me.
I’m in Woodbury today. I’ve spent a couple weeks of being out of my comfort zone in my own community and becoming submerged in it. I’ve been meeting people who don’t look like me or speak my language, shopping at local businesses, walking up and down commercial streets, visiting community centers, chatting with organizational contacts, and emailing what feel like little messages in bottles from my desk at the Community Council. I’ve been driving my child to various appointments and daycare 15 minutes away. But the rest of the time, I haven’t left the Bluff. After receiving news that my daycare provider was ill today, I took an opportunity to escape.
I’d like to say I’ve been creating potentially lasting, mutually beneficial relationships. But this has been lonely. The only people who really know what I’m doing are my two bosses, and they’re incredibly busy. I never see my friends between my jobs, RollerGirls practice, rehabbing my torn leg muscle, and the aforementioned driving. I started painting my son’s room last week, and I’ve managed to finish one wall. By the time my spouse and I sit down together at night, all I want to do is escape to TV or a novel.
I’m wondering how to balance this kind of life. I’ve long known that anyone with a focus outside their household—especially in human services or community work—is apt to have imbalance. I certainly remember as a high school teacher and theatre director, I’d spend few hours at home, with stacks of paperwork in tow. Now that I’m back outside the home, piles of laundry again begin to look like cruel practical jokes when I’ve been scanning the horizons of a community I love.
I’ve been tempted to start claiming smaller territory, narrowing my horizons, or lowering my standards for success. Building a cross-cultural team to survey the community’s assets seems so far to be an exercise in meeting scores of organizational leaders, and then finding ways to earn their trust so that they’ll connect me with team-members. So far I have one person, and I met her on my own.
Every once in a while, I’ll find someone who not only understands my vision, but shares it. But more often than not, I find those who misunderstand what I’m trying to do; who like it but don’t have the time to help; who write me off as an idealist; or—in once recent humiliation—someone who makes inappropriate advances.
I’m starting with the leaders, rather than neighbors, because there was this grant I helped get last June. But the thing about grants is that they have timelines that usually last one year. So as I was blissfully building relationships and networks for 6 months or so, I didn’t really make a project plan to create a measureable outcome. So now I’m working my networks, and the ones that seem to be the low-hanging fruit are any leaders I can reach.
I’m beginning to wonder if that was a mistake, but in the world of the nonprofit, the grueling yearly cycle means that you can’t spend much of your time in messy stuff like walking around, exchanging favors and recipes, chatting with counter-help, becoming a regular at the local thrift store, and chatting about deep stuff. Because all that activity—what I consider weaving the fabric of community—isn’t what you can get paid for. It doesn’t yield measurable results in short order.
But—done en masse—it’s the only thing that will ever counter the isolation and segregation of our culture. I need more time walking around the community. I need to bandy about my vision with my neighbors. How do you turn in a timesheet for that?
Just this morning, I was handed a binder of the latest grant requirements for a few foundations. While I love the work the foundations wish to accomplish, I find I’m less and less interested in doing them myself.
I want to connect people to one another, mostly. But the more I live in this world of the nonprofit, the more my brain betrays me, connecting people to programs—in essence, turning them into clients. Nevertheless, if I want to map the assets of Dayton’s Bluff, I need capacity to do it. I need flyers and business cards and resources and researcher trainings and meeting spaces and childcare and inventory sheets and data analysis.
How long would it take me to find ordinary folks who could provide all that? Particularly unpaid volunteers?
I’m stuck in this moment with no one to talk to except the Internet. What an age we live in.
I’m in an incredibly blessed place.
For about the last three years, I’ve been delving deeper into the subject of community: what it is, how it’s formed, how to sustain it, and why it’s so rare in this culture. I tried to form community through charity and nonprofit formation at my old church, which largely failed. I joined with a small but intrepid group of de-churched Jesus-lovers to make a community here on the Bluff. That’s still growing. I studied neighborhood leadership at the Wilder Center for Communities, and its history at Minnesota History Center. I read loads of books on the psychology of community. And I fell in love with asset-mapping at an Asset-Based Community Development Institute retreat in Chicago.
So what the heck is asset mapping? It’s what I’ve been doing on my own for over a year now. I’ve been systematically listing all the assets–all the good things–our neighborhood has. Its places. Its associations. Its institutions. Its churches. And most daunting but important, the gifts of its people.
And lo, in the middle of my scattered slips of paper and to-do lists and Google maps, I was offered a job. Do your dream in 12 hours a week with the Dayton’s Bluff Community Council. Recruit a staff of researchers from underrepresented populations in the neighborhood. Train them. Listen to the community you love.
I keep gratefully asking myself, “Who gets to create their own dream job?”
I also keep following up with the question, “What if you fail at your dream job?”
How on earth does one break through decades of institutional racism and cultural isolation and Eastside melancholy to build hope again? Everyone around me says they “love the diversity” of this community, but then why is most everyone around me Caucasian, despite my efforts to broaden my network of friends and acquaintances?
So I keep contacting nonprofits and churches and friends and clubs, asking for references: Whom do you know in the community that loves this community and wants to see it grow? I get silence and gracious referrals and suggestions of where else to look. And I go deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
A Thread of Connection 