Time Is On Our Side

One side effect of an intense summit like this is that it sparks a lot of intense thinking.  How arduous!  The field trip and free time that we had this weekend gave me a chance to ponder what we've been learning about community development, and I think I've come up with more questions than I have answers.  Bear with me while I try to reason through them here, and feel free to comment with your own thoughts.

I mentioned in my last post that ABCD (asset-based community development) is all about building upon existing strengths instead of aiming to come up with a fix to the community's worst problems.  My immediate reaction was, well, the problems (like high crime rates, dropout rates, etc) will still be a problem no matter how many block parties you have, so don't you have to focus on the problem at some point?  ABCD seemed a little too happy-go-lucky to work on the ground.  But, after our visits to the highly successful community development projects on the West Side of Chicago (Bethel New Life, pictured below, and The Resurrection Project), it became clear that although both groups focus their efforts in community strengths instead of resources, both projects are far from naive about their community's problems.  The ABCD approach emphasizes process instead of quick-fixes: it uses thorough assessments of a community to discover the residents' highest priorities, from which the development organization picks areas of focus based on available tools [assets].  ABCD does not ignore problems; instead, it lets the community voice its own perspective on what needs to be done instead of an "outsider organization" (we talk a lot about being outsiders) prescribing solutions to statistics-based problems.  

This approach, I am realizing more and more, makes a lot of sense.  It takes patience.  Most importantly, it requires being an insider or knowing how to locate the insiders.  And it produces a lot of amazing stories.  Mary from Bethel New Life talked about one of her innovations to make her neighborhood safer.  One day, she and her friends set up a lemonade stand on a corner where drug deals were known to take place.  There was so much traffic on that one corner that, in a single day, their stand raised over $300 in profits.  If you consider that each cup of lemonade cost 25 cents, over 1200 cups of lemonade were consumed--how many of those people were coming to buy or sell drugs?  Before you set out to do the same thing in your neighborhood, you have to wonder: do you know where drug deals take place in your town?  How long would you have to live in a community to know that fact?  I've lived in Moscow, Idaho nearly my whole life, I'm among an age group that stereotypically uses a lot of drugs, and even I don't know where to buy drugs (cue my parent's sighs of relief).  But I know who I could ask, and I can probably anticipate their answer: the dealers in Moscow don't work on street corners, they work out of apartments or college dorms or their basements.  So the lemonade stand idea wouldn't work in my community.  This tells me a couple of things: first, there's no cookie-cutter solution to any problem, so you have to know your community well to make a real difference; second, no one person is an expert, so you have to access a network of community members to get the whole picture.

You can now imagine my trepidation about our seven week time limit in each of our communities.  In such a short amount of time, is it possible to insert myself in a new language, a new culture, a new community, and become expert enough to pinpoint a single opportunity for the most change?  However, the lovely folks at GESI have anticipated my worry and come up with an answer: think of Time as an asset, not as a barrier.  We have Time to make a difference, and that's a blessing in itself.

Realistically, though, the best we can probably do is plant a seed for future development and hope that our new partners in La Plata will see it through.  When I think of doing similar work at a college where we have, at most, four years to do the same work, I realize that we should focus more on planting seeds than we should at checking off something of our list of "things to fix about Wellesley before we leave." (Wellesley readers, you know what I'm talking about)  I have to stop worrying about my personal legacy and start thinking about long-term change. We have to trust that students after us will have the capacity to sustain our projects--if not, either the there was something wrong with the project idea or we didn't put enough legwork into capacity-building.  If I want to stay connected to a project, I would have to make the commitment to stick around.  Bethel New Life took ten years to build a home for seniors.  The Resurrection Project took 15 years to see their homicide rate decrease significantly.  A project may take time you and I don't have, but some passionate person has that time--so make sure to reach out to those people!

I wrote that last sentence more as a reminder to myself, but maybe you will find it helpful in your quest for sustainable solutions.  Most of the tools that we now have under our belts are applicable to every occupation imaginable.  Ha ha! to all those people who scoff at community organizing as some left-wing conspiracy to take over (we prefer the word "save") the world.

Tonight, I am lucky enough to have some Time left to finish the copious amount of reading required for tomorrow.  See how optimistic this ABCD approach is making me?!  I do have some stories to share about my adventures around Chicago this weekend--pictures included--but you will have to wait until a later post.  Patience, I have come to accept, is one of our greatest Assets.