CommunityHealing@egroups.com

                                                Quality Living Solutions

                                                POB 4247

                                                Costa Mesa, CA  92628-4247

                                                in partnership with

                                                Housing Authority of the City of Hagerstown

                                                12 S. Walnut St.

                                                Hagerstown, MD  21740  and

                                                          The Caleb Group

                                                400 Humphrey St.

                                                Swampscott, MA  01907

 

                   THE BASKETMAKER:

HELPING PEOPLE

CREATE COMMUNITIES OF OPPORTUNITY

 

A guide for Services & Family Self-Sufficiency Coordinators, and leaders working to strengthen their communities

 

1

Special Edition


INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION

 

©2000 CommunityHealing.  Use for profit strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.  Use not for profit, for any Community Healing activity, by individuals, nonprofit organizations, Resident Services Coordinators, Family Self-Sufficiency Specialists, and any other interested person, is authorized and encouraged.  This guide may be duplicated for free or cost-of-printing distribution by anyone, and may be freely shared electronically, or posted to a Website. This is a "Partnership Product" which owes its existence to an informal association between Cedargrove/ CommunityHealing@egroups.com , Quality Living Solutions, the Caleb Group, and selected individuals: Jessica Short of the Hagerstown, MD Housing Authority; John Furman of Utica [NY] Community Action, Marcy Hudson of the Ithaca, NY Housing Authority; Ralph Cheyney and Bette Myerson of the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, Kathleen Arabasz and Marilyn Soper of the Maine State Housing Authority, Patricia Kohnke, to whom we express particular appreciation: Warren Sawyer, Ramon Ortiz, RSC, Dianne Clarke, RSC, and Holly Brauner, of the Caleb Foundation; Jeannie Dewey, RSC, and Sarena Neyman, Hope VI Fellow; Pam Mokler, RSC; Janice Monks, RSC, of AASC; Kim Pietrorazio, of Pietrorazio Consulting and Development, LLC, and some employees of Cell-Tech, Inc.  Appreciation is expressed also to Dr. Richard Wetherill, Empowerment Programs Division, Office of Community Development, US Department of Agriculture; Dave Matthews of the Department of Health and Human Services, Linda Chalifoux, RSC and Jean Bernstein, RSC, of Winn Management; Lionel Rigler; Tony Flaherty and John McPhee of the Tenant Assistance Program, Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency; Marcy Hudson of the Ithaca Housing Authority, Brenda J. Gagliardi, Karen Dean, RSC for SHP Management, Cassandra Fitzgerald‑Brown of Greater Hartford Realty Management, Lynn Ford, Yolanda Pérez, Magaly Mendez, Diann Pertillar, John Stanton, F. Denise Williams, Karen E. Lee, Rodell Burton, Yvette Briscoe, Veronica Wood, Deanna Beaudoin, Alice Gregal, Margaret Williams, Mercedes Castro, Eileen Morgan, Janice Jillson, Barbara Bickham, Henry Colonna, Israel X. Cordero‑Ojeda, Helen Haynes, Joy McCray, Donald Freeman, Jinnea Blakey, Leslie Ciski, Jacqueline Molinaro‑Thompson, Marc A. Harris, William C. Pollard, Jerold S. Nachison,  Kenneth Hannon, and Chris Greer.  The lead editor was Michael Patterson, with assistance from Janice E. Jillson.  Inspiration for this work came from the people cited above. Statements, conclusions, surveys, reports, and tools presented in this should generally be considered to be in draft form, working papers, and do not necessarily reflect the position or views of any agency or organization.  Information is advisory, and must be refined and developed, especially in conjunction with local conditions, before being implemented.  Surveys, reports and tools are included only as examples, rough models of a few representative surveys, reports, and tools.  This material is only a "piece of the pie" of a larger effort.  The U.S. Government does not endorse any contractor or product, or imply "sole source" status,  so no endorsement  or sole source status is implied or stated by anything in this.  Since each community is unique, this guide can only offer suggestions and ideas.

 

"To Help People Create Communities of Opportunity" is nice model mission statement.  No one organization can even hope to take on a project like that alone.  It can only be done through "partnerships" and networks of interested people and groups working towards common goals that benefit everyone.  This guide is intended to provide some basic ideas and resources to assist people and groups that want to help create communities of opportunity.  If you want more detailed information, please see the resource listings provided separately.  Community dynamics information is presented in the resource listings in Creating Community Anywhere, by Carolyn R. Shaffer, especially Chapters 6, 14, 15, 16, and 17, and The Quickening of America, by Lappe and DuBois, among other places.

 

It has been said that the best legal solutions are those where no-one is happy.  Is that any way to run a society?  Surely we can work together to do better than that.  Adversarial solutions don't solve very much.  The new "win-win", mutual interest paradigm[1] coming into being is a much more enjoyable way to solve problems.  We live in what Alvin Toffler calls the "Information Age".  We don't have the resources to solve problems wastefully, by throwing money at them, and demanding uniform content, any more.  Those methods are dying off with the "Industrial Age" that generated them.  We have no choice but to apply intelligence, and information, and tailor much cheaper, more proactive and long‑term approaches that work in individual communities.  We designed to concisely feed the needs of resident services coordinators and other resident leaders.  It is only as a stimulus to creativity, and certainly doesn't have the final word on anything.  You might only want to look at areas that particularly excite you.  That's fine.  Following your fascinations is good discipline.  If you want to go further, we list books of interest.  We recommend you go first to your Public Library, which is an extremely underused community development tool.  If they don't have the book on their shelf, they can usually "Inter-Library Loan" the book.  They might or might not charge you postage for this.  Do look through a book and be sure you like it before you buy it.  Books can be looked up alphabetically by title and author in Books in Print, in larger public libraries and bookstores.  You can then order them directly from the publisher, or from a bookstore.

            Practice random kindnesses and senseless acts of beauty.

                                                                           -Bumper sticker

 

 

                                                         TABLE OF CONTENTS

WHAT IS COMMUNITY?............................................................................................................   5

 

1. A COMMUNITY IS A LARGER SENSE OF SELF..............................................................   7

 

2. A COMMUNITY IS ITS STORIES..........................................................................................   9

 

3. A COMMUNITY IS ITS LEADERS....................................................................................... 11

            TIPS FOR LEADERS OF GROUPS........................................................................... 13

            QUALITIES OF LEADERS........................................................................................... 14

                        1. RAPPORT...................................................................................................... 14

                        2. DECISIVENESS AND ALIGNMENT........................................................... 14

                        3. ABILITY TO SEE POSSIBILITIES WHERE OTHERS DON'T.................. 14

                        4. PERSISTENCE............................................................................................. 14

                        5. ABILITY TO INSPIRE AND MOTIVATE OTHERS...................................... 17

 

4. A COMMUNITY IS WHAT IT EATS...................................................................................... 18

 

5. A COMMUNITY IS ITS VISION IN ACTION......................................................................... 22

              1. Finding and "mapping" Individual Strengths......................................................... 23

              2. Connecting Individuals, Organizations, and Institutions for Community Healing 24

              3. Form a mutual interest, "win-win" network for sharing information, and economic development....................................................................................................... 24

              4. The network forms a community vision and plan.................................................. 24

              5. Leveraging Outside Resources to Support Locally Driven Development......... 25

 

6. A COMMUNITY IS ITS COMMUNICATION AND NETWORKING ...................................  26

            A. FEEDING INTERESTS............................................................................................. 26

            B. SOME NETWORKING TIPS.................................................................................... 28

            C. COALITION HEALING/NETWORKS/PARTNERSHIPS....................................... 30

            D. "WIN-WIN" NEGOTIATION  .....................................................................................  31

                        1. Summary........................................................................................................ 31

                        2. General Principles in Negotiation............................................................... 31

                        3. A Negotiating Plan........................................................................................ 33

                        4. Setting the stage............................................................................................ 35

                        5. Opening Lines of Communication.............................................................. 37

                        6. How To Conduct Yourself............................................................................ 40

                        7. Negotiating from Inside a Bureaucracy..................................................... 42

                        8. What To Do When Negotiations Break Down........................................... 44

                        9. Conclusion..................................................................................................... 45

 

7. A COMMUNITY IS ITS CELEBRATIONS AND OTHER SOCIAL ACTIVITIES.............. 46

 

8. A COMMUNITY IS THE WAY IT HANDLES CONFLICT................................................... 48

 

9. A COMMUNITY IS UNIQUELY CREATIVE......................................................................... 51

 

10. A COMMUNITY IS ITS CHILDREN.................................................................................... 52

 

11. A COMMUNITY IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT TO BE............................................................. 56

            GETTING STARTED: Introduction................................................................................ 58

            GETTING STARTED..................................................................................................... 58

                        I.   PLAN YOUR STRATEGY  [out of an EXCITING VISION of the possible future].................................................................................................................. 59

                        II.  PLAN YOUR COMMUNICATIONS.............................................................. 59

                        III. GETTING INFORMATION............................................................................. 59

                        IV.  ASSEMBLING YOUR LEADERS.............................................................. 60

                        V.   THE GOAL................................................................................................... 60

                        VI.  EXPANDING CAPACITY........................................................................... 61

                        VII. IDEAS........................................................................................................... 61

 

APPENDIX 1 USEFUL BOOKS.............................................................................................. 67

 

APPENDIX 2 FUTURE PACING............................................................................................. 70

 

APPENDIX 3 ONE POSSIBLE SURVEY FORMAT............................................................. 77

 

APPENDIX 4 Community Healing Memorandum of Understanding.................................... 81

 Una semilla cae sobre un suelo húmedo y templado. Súbitamente, siente un extraño impulso en su interior. El impulso se hace más y más fuerte, y empuja por todo su ser, impulsándola a buscar ávidamente la luz desde la oscuridad. Con fe y confianza en un proceso superior a ella misma, empuja en las tinieblas hasta encontrar la luz. Luego crece y madura en el suelo en presencia de la luz, hasta que nota otro extraño impulso. De nuevo el impulso se hace cada vez más fuerte, hasta que surge a la luz una hermosa flor. Todas las grandes cosas comienzan con un sentimiento en el corazón de alguien que persistió en darle realidad. ¿Qué fuerzas impulsan tu propio ser?

 

A seed sat basking in the warm damp earth.  Suddenly, it felt a strange force moving through it.  The force became stronger and stronger, resonating throughout its body, causing it to excitedly wish to seek the light through the darkness.  With faith and confidence in a process greater than itself, it continued moving through the darkness, until it found the light.  Then it grew and matured in the light and the soil, until another strange force came.  The force grew stronger and stronger, and produced a beautiful flower.  All great things started out as a feeling in the heart of one person, who persisted at bringing it into form.  What forces move through your being?

WHAT IS COMMUNITY?

 

            Thirty spokes arrayed round a hole

            The wheel's center makes it whole

            Clay may hold most anything

            Using emptiness within

            A room must have its door and window

            So the life within can flow

            Profit comes from shaping form

            Meaning, though, from force is born

                                        -Lao Tsu, No. 11, Tao Te Ching

 

The basic purpose of this guide is to inspire people to recreate the healthy communities most humans once lived in.  We don't know what healthy communities are any more, we know only the pathology of the average.  Many of us have at least some idea of what a healthy community is- one where people take care of each other, one where problems are fixed when they're small, not big, kind of like the mythical small town of yesteryear.  Tamarack Song's book Journey to the Ancestral Self talks about healthy indigenous communities, and M. Scott Peck's books also deal with healthy community.  It starts with the basics: what is a community?  Some say community is just a place where people live, or work, just the "bricks and sticks".   In Chinese Tai Chi Chu’an, the exercise “form” is empty; the person doing it “fills” the form.    In Japanese Art, there's a term for the "space between"- the white space on this page, for example, the context for the text.  A real, healthy, vibrant community, like any other general system, or living organism, is much more than the sum of its visible parts.  You yourself are much more than the sum of your organs, bones, and so on.   Communities lack the clearly defined edges and hierarchies of corporations.  One must consider both the "hard" and "soft" parts.  It's easier to see their effects- as with all energies and forces, like wind, or magnetic force.  They are more nurturing. The best way to understand them is perhaps to be a part of one.  Consider the communities you are a part of- communities of place, interest, ethnic group, age, and so on.  Communities of place and interest are the most important.

 

            The map is not the territory

                -Alfred Korzybski

 

Albert Einstein noted that you can't solve a problem from the level it was created at, you must seek a new and higher level of order and alignment.  The movie Mindwalk noted that we are shifting from the reductionist Newtonian paradigm to a holistic paradigm.  This is as significant as the shift from the flat earth to the round earth paradigm.  Instead of separate objects, the world, and communities within it, consist of  "webs of relationships" - like the basket on the cover.   Relationships mean communicating- anything that improves communication automatically improves the health of the system. Communities, like the wind, mean more in what they do, not so much in what they are, because Action Creates Existence.

A community is an organic system.  You could read the definition of a system in a good book on general systems theory.  Those who study Chaos Theory recognize community immediately as a long-lived standing wave form with phase-locked feedback, or a soliton.  The ancient symbol for the soliton, or vortex, was the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, the thanksgiving basket.  A healthy community is a cornucopia, it seems to give out more energy than it gets, because it is at a higher level of order.  A healthy community solves most of its own problems, and offers benefits most outsiders can't see.  The following stories from the book Chicken Soup for the Soul, by Jack Canfield, are a great way to share the heart of community healing: One at a Time, The Royal Knights of Harlem, Everybody has a dream, Love: The One Creative Force, Follow your dream, Who you are makes a difference.

 

Consider a basket.  The individual elements aren't very strong.  However, when woven together, they form something much stronger.  An engineer might think of it as a "composite" of diverse elements, where the combination is much stronger than any individual element, or even the sum of the strengths of the individual elements.  Community making is metaphorically very much like basketweaving - of connecting diverse elements into a whole that is more than the sum of the strengths of the individual elements.  This book is dedicated to those persons involved in weaving their communities into something that is much more than the sum of its parts- into healthy forms.

 

A community is a system.  In a system, everything is connected.  The parts exist ONLY IN RELATING to the whole- cutting a person in half does not create 2 people.  Because of this, small changes can produce far-reaching results.  A simple thing like treating everyone with respect can have effects far beyond what you can imagine.  Causes and effects don’t have to be closely related in time and space, either… which means that a proposed cure, that doesn’t consider the entire system, and all the root causes of a problem, could be worse than the disease.  Everything you do throws concentric rings, and affects the entire community.  When you form a very clear vision of your desired future, you don’t just affect yourself, you affect the entire community.  Your work towards that goal also affects the entire community, as well.

 

Anyone can play musical notes.  Real mastery exists in the spaces between the notes.      -attributed to a German pianist of the last century

 

1. A COMMUNITY IS A LARGER SENSE OF SELF

 

            Healing is just remembering who you are

                   -Marilyn Gordon

 

Where does your sense of Self stop?  For a number of Americans, the sense of Self stops at the skin.  This is a very peculiar idea, one that many people in the world today would find very strange.  A community is a group of people who have extended their sense of self beyond their skin, where people communicate and work together on goals for their common good.  Community is for humans what the hive is for bees.  It might be people who share the same place in space or time, or people who share the same interests.

 

Strong community "organisms" form spontaneously under high stress.  Recall the bombing of the World Trade Center, where numbers of people became their brother's keeper, without a thought.  High stress is a good excuse for people to drop the pretenses of their false selves, and to feel their true selves.  When one person is completely aligned on a purpose, s/he experiences ecstasy.  When a group of people is completely aligned, or "woven together", the group experiences synergy, in just the same way.  The military term for “community” is unit cohesion.

 

This is part of our culture.  Think back to some war movies you've seen, and even movies like The Mighty Ducks, where a group of diverse, clashing individuals moved through the stages of community formation and suddenly "clicked" into something larger - something unbeatable, that could accomplish incredible things.  Outstanding sports teams always achieve this state.  We believe that outstanding communities at least come close to achieving this state, also.  A flock of sandpipers can turn as one unit.  How can they do that?  They just... do it.

 

            Take care of the little things, and the big things take care of themselves.  You know the big things aren't being taken care of when the little things aren't taken care of.

                      -U.S. Army maxim

 

Actually, the above statement is incorrect.  The little things ARE the big things- in families, in communities, in nations, and on the planet.

 

"Community" self is a web of the small, seemingly unimportant things- perhaps little courtesies, or favors, looking out for others, a smile or a wave to people on the street, and all the other things people used to do without thinking.  We can have healthy communities back again, and even make them better than they were.  In fact, we have no choice but to do so.  Community builders, RSC's, FSS coordinators, and others are in the business of sales - we sell win-win ideas.  This guide is intended to help you sell community healing in an elegant way.

 

Respect is the center of the circle of community.  Every major community problem can be traced back to a lack of respect, somewhere along the way.  Take violence.  It is a learned behavior.  You can't do it to others till it's been done to you.  A community without respect is like an engine with no oil- it will not work well for long.

 

Cooperation, especially feeding interest, is the lifeblood of the community.  A community that doesn't feed interest is a community asking for problems.  Grant applications don't come out and say this explicitly, but grants and outside funding can really only be "force multipliers" to local capacity to handle it.  A community that hasn't built up a cooperative network, with a record of positive achievements, cannot handle outside funding.

 

It can be particularly useful to see your community as a living organism, as in D'arcy Thomson's book On Growth and Form, or in Chinese Feng Shui theory.  Where is the intake cycle?  Is it the money that comes in?  Is the money circulated up to 7 times before it leaves, like lungs using oxygen efficiently, or does it come in and leave immediately, as with emphysemic lungs?

 

            "When you plant lettuce, if it doesn't grow well, you don't blame the lettuce.  You look into the reasons it isn't doing well.  It may need more fertilizer, water, or less sun.  You never blame the lettuce.  Yet if we have problems with our friends, or our family, we blame the other person.  If you know how to take care of them, they will grow well like a lettuce.  Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments.  That is my experience.  No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding.  If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.

 

            One day in Paris, I gave a lecture about not blaming the lettuce.  After the talk, I was walking and overheard an 8 year old girl telling her mother, "Mommy, remember to water me.  I'm your lettuce."  I was  so pleased that she had understood my point completely.  Then I heard her mother reply, "Yes, my daughter,and I am your lettuce also.  So please don't forget to water me, too."  Mother and daughter practicing together.  It was very beautiful."

                                                                       ‑Thich Nhat Hanh

2. A COMMUNITY IS ITS STORIES

 

Which teacher did you enjoy most in school, the teacher who could spit data out like a computer, or the teacher who told funny and interesting stories?  Whose information do you best remember?  Storytelling and asking new questions is the most powerful activity we can engage in to empower communities, because storytelling is how new ideas are shared.  Asking questions causes the subconscious to search out responses, and meaning, which come up often in the form of stories.  Storytelling is a force multiplier, a palette of a thousand colors, and can be applied in all other fields of human activity.  "War stories" are the most useful part of any training, because they animate the tools.  There is no better sales method than success stories.

 

We are our paradigms, we are our stories and myths, we live our stories in our lives.  Consider most Romance novels.  They have slight variations on the myth of Medea [tall dark handsome stranger from afar comes to take her away from it all... and dumps her, too, a story one hears as well].  Romance novels for guys have slight variations on the story, or myth, of Jason [a troublemaker who gets to go out in a vehicle with his drinking buddies, get into fights, maybe get some treasure, and who cares about tomorrow?].[2]  You can improve your community by improving its stories. 

 

Sometimes becoming aware of "stories" makes it much easier to change your behavior.  Conrad Salas, formerly a Texas State Legislator of Mexican descent, used to tell his "Mexican Crabs" story.  As a boy, he saw a shallow pan of live crabs in a shop.  He warned the owner, "Hey mister! Your crabs are going to get away!"  The owner replied, "No they're not, they're Mexican crabs.  Anytime one tries to climb out, the others all drag him back down."  I told that story years ago in a factory I worked in.  Workers started calling each other "Mexican crabs" when they did those kinds of things, and they did those things less.[3]  A better metaphor is the starfish story.  A man on a beach saw another picking up washed-up starfish and throwing them back into the sea.  He said, "You can't possibly make a difference!  Look at the thousands of starfish on this beach!"  The other man threw a starfish into the sea, and said, "Well, it made a difference to that one." 

 

M. Scott Peck evokes Community with the story of the rabbi's gift.  A monastery had fallen on hard times.  The brothers fought over how to solve their problems.  Finally, they decided to ask a nearby rabbi how to solve the problems.  The rabbi said, "The Messiah is among you", meaning that as Christians, they had the presence of the Messiah among them.  The brothers misunderstood him to mean that one of them was the Messiah.  They didn't know which one, though, so they treated each other highly respectfully, as if each one was the Messiah.  The brothers treated each other much better, the monastery's whole energy changed, and soon it became renowned for its piety and faith.  New candidates flocked to join, and its problems solved themselves.

 

Art forms like stories long outlast the cultures that generated them, just like shark's teeth long outlast the shark that made them.  Art forms are the "teeth" a culture uses to "chew up" experience, into bite-sized chunks of meaning.  If you take out a quarter, and look at the back, you will notice a Roman imperial eagle.  Where did the Roman empire exist?  In the minds of Romans, as stories.  When Rome died out in the minds of Romans, it died out.  Yet we still use Roman art forms.  They are convenient.  Listen to the speeches of motivators as diverse as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini- you will notice master storytellers, who invoke well-known stories to explain current events.  Tom Peters has said the most valuable people in the country will soon be those who can most quickly get ideas across to other people.

 

Nothing works better or faster to get new ideas across, or entertains more, than storytelling.  I suggested to the big boss at work that training was sharpening the saw, from Steven Covey's retelling of the story of the man too busy sawing to sharpen his tools... and got my point across instantly.

 

Stories drive behavior.  One common bumper sticker in this country is "He who dies with the most toys wins".  It must reflect a fairly common belief system, to be so common.  We can find a very different kind of belief system in another American culture.  The Navajo [Dineh Nation] have a word - "Hoo" - which means beauty, harmony, joy, happiness, healing, and dozens of other such words rolled up into one.  One could define about 1/100 of its meaning as sparkling, harmonious, joyful, healing beauty.  For the Navajo, the purpose of life is the creation of Hoo.  This very different core belief system leads to a very different kind of culture.  How would American communities change if that were a common belief system?

 

The Dream drives the Action.  What are the dreams of people in your community?  All positive accomplishments are borne of dreams.  Where there is no vision, the people perish.  Scripture is many things to many people, and it's almost always, in any religion, stories.  A good RSC, FSS coordinator, or Community Organizer almost has to live a "Mythic Life", as if their life was the life of a hero, or an angel, or some other inspiring image.  Be very aware of your stories, they drive everything you do.  NSA, the national storytelling association, POB 309, Jonesboro, TN 37659-0309 offers trainings in many parts of the country.  Storytelling is a great way to "find your voice".  Just try not to have too much fun at it.  Books include Just Enough to Make a Story [N. Schimmel.  Berkeley, CA: Sister's Choice Press, 1982] and The Family Storytelling Manual Handbook  [Riverside, NJ: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1987].

3. A COMMUNITY IS ITS LEADERS

 

            Just do what you can where you are

                   -Mother Theresa

 

          Bloom where you are

                           -Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King

 

Everything starts with good leadership!  One starts by being a leader of self.  Leadership starts with the first choice to be a leader. The easiest way to learn leadership is to practice being a leader.  We hope that everyone who reads this guide will choose to be a leader.  A lot of things don't get done because "somebody else" ought to be doing them.  Leaders are the "somebody else" who get those things done.  If those tasks aren't being done in your community, it's because there's a shortage of leadership.  Finding that leader might be as easy as looking in the mirror.  It might also be as easy as realizing that while you can't solve the world's problems by yourself, you can do something, however small.  Remember the end of the movie Schindler's List, where Schindler gets the ring with the verse saying if you save one person, you save the world?  Leaders take on that one small task, then another, and another.

 

Good things happen in communities because leaders working with people make them happen.  Developing leaders, and leaders of leaders, is the most important task in the field of community development.  Getting something done is easy: Choose a goal, and take action.  It is easy to become a leader.  Decide that's what you want to be.  Then pretend to be one.  Put on an act.  FAKE IT till you make it.