Community

by Peter Block

  • Associations are under constant pressure to be more corporate: to merge, become more efficient, submit to external oversight, measure harder, and submit to greater accountability. These are core values in the private sector. A natural outgrowth of this is the way many foundations, which exist for the sake of community service, treat corporations as their clients. In the philanthropic world, you also hear people talk about their “return on social investment.” We use the language of commerce when talking about the field of generosity.

  • The public benefit sector makes front-page news only when there is scandal. The head of a large agency who spends funds on limousines and high living is on the front page for days. When the same agency softens the landing for people in a tragedy or turns people’s lives around, the story is at best a footnote.

  • We marginalize compassion in the public conversation. Here’s an example: As an effort to build the image and well-being of the city, Go Cincinnati is about streetcars, housing development, and attracting new businesses. It sells hard the strengths of the city, including the arts, entertainment, and sports attractions. All good things to sell and essential to a city that works. What is missing in this conversation and sales pitch is the compassion of a city. Having a large number of social services in a neighborhood is seen as a weakness, not a selling point. The view is that if people need help, if they are vulnerable or in crisis, it is a communal liability. The generosity that serves these people goes unmentioned as an asset.

  Reinforcing Self-Interest and Isolation

  These dimensions of the way we talk about our community and the stories we repeatedly tell about our community work together to create an insular mentality. Under the siege of fear, fault, and the rest, people and institutions build a wall around themselves and are primarily concerned with their own interests and survival. This gives us a community in which each sector— business, education, government, social service, health care—is so focused on its own affairs that those who choose to commit to the well-being of the whole have a difficult time gaining a foothold.

  And what exists for our institutions is reinforced by citizens. Citizens mostly get engaged when something threatens their backyard. They show up in public settings when they are angry; they become activated only by local, next-door interests.

  To summarize, the context of retribution and the story that grows out of it cause our attempts to build community to be what actually keeps it unchanged. Our retributive approach to the symptoms of poverty, violence, homelessness, and cynicism does not create these symptoms, but does interfere with their changing. Retribution by its nature serves to fragment community and reduce social capital. The side effect is that each citizen’s accountability for the well-being of community is reduced. When the context is retributive, reduced accountability and diminished social capital are the direct outgrowths of our very efforts to improve community. And this mostly occurs as an unintended consequence, for no one holds a fragmented community as a goal.

  The Media

  As a key messenger of context in the stuck community, the media takes its cue from citizens and makes its living from the call for retribution. The public conversation most visible to us is the interaction between what we citizens want to hear and the narrative put forth by the media. But it is too easy to blame the media for valuing entertainment over news and for selling fear and problems over generosity and possibility. It is more useful to see that the media is a reflection of who we, as citizens, have become.

  The news is most usefully understood as the daily decisions about what is newsworthy. This is a power that goes way beyond simply informing us. The agenda in each story defines what is important, and in doing this, it promotes an identity for a community.

  The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and white.

  Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

  This means that the real importance of the media is not in the typical debate over the quality, balance, or even accuracy of what is reported. These vary with the channel, the network, the newspaper, the website. They vary depending on having the resources to get the whole story, the market segment the source is aiming at, and its editorial agenda. What is most important, and the power that is most defining, is the power of the media to decide what is worth talking about. As British newspaper pioneer Lord Northcliffe once said, “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.”

  The media’s power is the power to name the public debate. Or, in other words, the power to name “reality.” This is true for the mainstream as well as online media.

  Plus there are new players in the media landscape. The Internet, the social networks, the blogosphere have invaded the world we once called news. While the traditional media still define what the story is about, the texture and color come from every direction, and the most powerful players on social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook take retribution, blame, and accusation to the extreme. Technology is often held up as the answer to the future, but at this point it mostly just amplifies the dominant story.

  The point is this: citizens have the capacity to change the community story, to reclaim the power to name what is worth talking about, to bring a new context into being. Those of us who create the current dominant context for the community conversation drive the conditions that nurture a retributive context and a retributive community. If we do not choose to change this context and the strategies that follow from it, we will produce no new outcomes for our institutions, neighborhoods, and towns.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Restorative Community

  Restoration comes from the choice to value possibility and relatedness over problems, needs, self-interest, and the rest of the stuck community’s agenda. It hinges on the accountability chosen by citizens and their willingness to connect with each other around promises they make to each other.

  Restoration is created by the kinds of conversations we initiate with each other. These conversations are the leverage point for an alternative future. The core question that underlies each conversation is “What can we create together?” Shifting the context from retribution to restoration will occur through the use of language that moves in the following directions: from problems to possibility; from fear and fault to gifts, generosity, and abundance; from law and oversight to social capital and chosen accountability; from the dominance of corporation and systems to the centrality of associational life; and from leaders to citizens.

  • • •

  In contrast to the isolating effects of retribution, a restorative experience, relationship, or community produces new energy rather than holding us in place. Restoration is associated with the quality of aliveness and wholeness that Christopher Alexander talks about. This quality is not only in the artifacts, buildings, and spaces that he refers to but also in the gatherings and conversations we choose to create. The energy crisis we face is not so much about fossil fuels as it is about the calcified experience that is too often created by the way we hold conversations, both publicly and when we come together in more private settings.

  Restorative community is activated by language of connection and relatedness and belonging, spoken without embarrassment. It recognizes that taking responsibility for one’s own part in creating the present situation is the critical act of courage and engagement, which is the axis around which the future rotates. The essence of restorative community building is not economic prosperity or the political discourse or the capacity of leadership; it is citizens’ willingness to own up to their contribution or agency in the current conditions, to be humble, to choose accountability, and to have faith in their own capacity to make authentic promises to create the alternative future.

  This all matters because to achieve what we seek hinges on the question of accountability. Asking who will be accountable is about asking who will stand up to be counted. In whose hands does transformation rest? It is not by chance that in
the United States we have more people in jails and prisons than any other country in the world. We are dominated by the punitive mind-set of consequences, of setting examples, of assigning blame when suffering occurs. These are the practices of an imperial culture, which is nourished by fear. Retributive cultures claim to increase accountability, but they actually can’t deliver it. Accountability is always a choice, what someone does when no one else is looking. Handcuffs do not get the job done.

  This means that the essential aspect of the restoration of community is a context in which each citizen chooses to be accountable rather than entitled. This inverts the common use of the word accountability. It is most often used as a burden, a basis for future liability. Not necessarily so.

  Accountability is the willingness to care for the whole, and it flows out of the kind of conversations we have about the new story from which we want to take our identity. It means we have conversations about what we can do to create the future. Entitlement is a conversation about what others can or need to do to create the future for us.

  Restoration begins when we think of community as a possibility, a declaration of the future that we choose to live into. This idea of a communal possibility is distinct from what we commonly call an individual possibility. Community is something more than a collection of individual longings, desires, or possibilities. The communal possibility has its own landscape and its own dynamics, requirements, and points of leverage. In the individualistic world we live in, we can congregate a large collection of self-actualized people and still not hold the idea or experience of community.

  The communal possibility rotates on the question “What can we create together?” This emerges from the social space we create when we are together. It is shaped by the nature of the culture within which we operate but is not controlled by it. This question of what we can create together is at the intersection of possibility and accountability. Possibility without accountability results in wishful thinking. Accountability without possibility creates more of what we have now, which ultimately turns to despair, for even if we know we are creating the world we exist in, we cannot imagine its being any different from the past that got us here.

  Example: The Clermont Counseling Center

  Tricia Burke was the director of the Clermont Counseling Center. She completely understood the destructive power of labeling and categorizing human beings. Rare for one in a leadership position in a labeling industry. One of her programs was for women in abusive relationships who are survivors of domestic violence. She called this program Women of Worth. What’s in a name . . . everything.

  The counseling center also ran a mental health facility. The center exemplified most of the elements of freedom, choice, transforming language, and small group belonging discussed in this book. In the mental health program were clients labeled as paranoid schizophrenic, bipolar, and delusional, and people who had a history of state hospital stays. For the center to bill Medicaid for their services, the services must be “medically necessary.” This means that the center was required to certify each client’s illness and medicalize all of the center’s services in order to be reimbursed.

  In the eyes of Tricia and her staff, many of the most effective healing efforts come from actions that are not really medical interventions. What are often most healing are the ways that people in programs discover how to have fun in what they do and feel embraced and surrounded by the support of others like themselves. The sense of belonging that accrues is as healing as traditional treatment. This sort of thing is not a legitimate program activity in the eyes of Medicaid. To keep Medicaid funding, the center was required to name and place a disease on the head of each person.

  Despite this, Tricia and her staff decided to change the conversation at Clermont in dramatic ways. They gave up the Medicaid funding for their “partial hospital day treatment” program and put the clients in charge of the day program. Staff were reassigned to other programs. In doing this, Tricia changed the message to clients from one focusing on their liabilities to one focusing on their possibilities. The organizing questions to members—no longer patients—were “What do you like to do?” and “How do you want to fill your day?” The traditional hospital experiences were maintained, but these questions were the organizing principles that guided the healing process.

  The strategy then was to treat members as if they had the capacity to design and structure a good portion of their own time. Phoenix Place, the new name the members chose for this effort, became a member-controlled self-governing program. There was only one paid staff member—Kim Hensley, the director of the program—and many of the governance and program decisions were placed in the hands of members.

  In the first year, the members came up with ingenious answers to the question “What can we create together?” For example:

  • They formed and chose an executive committee for themselves.

  • They organized a wellness activity.

  • They volunteered their services to an animal shelter.

  • They wanted to travel, so they decided to open a snack shop to earn money.

  • When Phoenix Place received a grant to offer medication education for other mentally ill folk in five counties, the members provided it themselves.

  • When Ohio state legislators were invited to visit the facility, the members wanted time with them to make the point that people who have mental illness are not their illness; they are much more than their illness.

  • They were no longer afraid to talk about their lives; they came out of the closet.

  • The group started training police on the nature of mental illness— what it is like to hear voices, for example. They taught the police how to approach people having an incident and what language to use.

  • They started a journaling process, which they called WildSpirits, to give voice to what it feels like to be in the dark hole of despair and find your way out, and to express their healing by writing about hope, gratitude, and love.

  At the end of the first year of Phoenix Place, its members felt pride in what they had created; they had jobs to do and had regained some of the roles they had lost in the larger society. Most of all, they had begun once again to have hopes and dreams about their future.

  Eventually they outgrew the small house for Phoenix Place, so they set about raising money for a bigger one by working the concession stands at the Reds and Bengals games—and years later their dream came true. When it did, they wrote a grant proposal to make a video to tell their story.

  Of course, the story of Phoenix Place, and others like it, is not all about success and victory. Along the way, Tricia says, it took patience and encouragement to help Phoenix members shift their thinking to believing that they could run their own program. In the beginning, they were angry and felt they were being abandoned. They even picketed the center. Helping them break free of their dependency was difficult.

  Here is a part I especially like: As part of a program on positive psychology, one exercise was for individuals to complete a questionnaire about their strengths. The members noted that this was the first time in their lives they had ever taken a test and gotten good news from the results.

  The transition from patient to citizen is always difficult—for all of us, not just labeled people. And the trajectory is not always smooth. For example, the departure of the original director of Phoenix Place caused anxiety and worry. The member-led executive committee began to act superior, controlling, and judgmental, and some of the spirit of community waned. In other words, the committee started to function like most traditional executive committees. Eventually, this center and its radical values were absorbed into a more traditional institution of service. Which underscores the power of the dominant context.

  Nothing in Phoenix Place’s ending detracts from what it created or what it meant to the people it touched. What is important for each of us is what conclusions we draw from the example, which is the point of context: whatever we conclude is ours to manu
facture.

  Lessons from Restorative Justice

  Phoenix Place gives us a powerful model of what a restorative community can look like. When I say “restorative,” I am not talking about returning to a prior time, fixing up an old building, or seeking to recapture a culture that we think once existed. Restoration is about healing our woundedness—in community terms, healing our fragmentation and incivility. It is only out of this healing that something new can emerge.

  I have been attracted for some time by the way restorative is used in the criminal justice system, which I learned from Barry Stuart, Lee Rush, and others who have created the restorative justice movement. They have given a powerful structure to restoration, and they have done it in a most unlikely place. The intent of restoration in the criminal justice system is to provide a more reconciled path for both the offender and the victim of a crime. This becomes an option for the victim to choose and for the offender to agree to. It also gives a voice to the community, for the community is also wounded by a crime.

  There are several steps to restoration. They all occur in a meeting. The offender admits to the crime, the offender and the victim and their families talk of the cost and damage the crime has caused to all their lives, the offender apologizes for the offense, the offender promises not to do it again, and the offender agrees to some form of restitution for the damage caused.

  Finally, the victim and their family decide whether to forgive the offender and accept the restitution. If they decide to forgive, then the representatives of the community have a voice in deciding whether to allow the offender to go free and rejoin the community. If the victim and family decide not to forgive, then the offender goes through the regular criminal justice process. On a global scale, restorative justice is similar to the practices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.