I write, we’ve spent a year talking with people who have put relationship building at the center of their lives. Building a community, like building a relationship, is a slow, complex process. It’s a lot of things coming together, like Jane Jacobs’s ballet. I’d like to walk you through the stages of community creation, which are a bit like the stages of intimacy, but on a larger scale and with more moving pieces.
THE ONES WHO STICK
Community renewal begins, as you can imagine, with a commitment. Somebody decides to put community over self. For example, Asiaha Butler grew up in Englewood, one of the poorer and most violent neighborhoods in Chicago. Asiaha (pronounced Eye-sha) was robbed there. Gangs controlled the block, and there were killings outside her door from time to time. One night a bullet flew through her front window. There was no decent local school where she and her husband could send their nine-year-old daughter. Eventually they’d had enough. They decided to move to Atlanta, where the streets were safer.
They threw a farewell barbecue for their friends and began packing up their things. It was a Sunday, and Asiaha happened to be looking out her front window at the vacant lot across the street. There are roughly five thousand vacant lots in the neighborhood. In this one some little girls were playing, throwing rocks and broken bottles and playing with abandoned tires in the mud. She turned to her husband and said, “We can’t leave that.”
Her husband was incredulous. “Oh? Really, Asiaha?”
“If we move, it will be like everyone else who moves. We’re not going to be here to show an example of what it’s like to have jobs, to raise a family.” Asiaha won the argument. They decided to stay. To commit to the neighborhood.
Asiaha didn’t know where to start. She didn’t know her neighbors. So she Googled “Volunteer in Englewood” and found some neighborhood groups. One of them put her on its education committee. Another local group arranged parties for teens, but adult organizers were in their fifties and sixties and had no idea how to keep teenagers entertained. Asiaha spiced things up with hip-hop and spoken word. Then she realized that she could get neighbors talking if she prompted them with movies, so she set up “Docs and Dialogues.” She invited people to get together to watch short documentaries and then have discussions afterward. Within two years, hundreds of people were involved.
Englewood was divided into six wards and had no organization that covered the whole area, so Asiaha created Resident Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE). RAGE holds job fairs and candidate forums at election time. It organizes “cash bombs,” where local people gather to shop at locally owned stores. People came out of the woodwork for RAGE—graphic designers, executives, people who can bake and bring cookies. None of this work is heroic or even unusual. Now people know one another. Local shops sell WE ARE ENGLEWOOD and DAUGHTER OF ENGLEWOOD T-shirts. “I love small victories,” Asiaha says. It starts with that decision to commit.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD IS THE UNIT OF CHANGE
The next stage of community building is understanding that you have to fix the neighborhood as a whole. It’s not sufficient to focus on individuals one by one.
You’ve probably heard the starfish story. There’s a boy on the beach who finds thousands of starfish washed ashore, dying. He picks one up and throws it back into the ocean. A passerby asks him why he bothered. All these thousands of other starfish are still going to die. “Well,” the boy responds, “I saved that one.”
Many of our social programs are based on that theory of social change. We try to save people one at a time. We pick a promising kid in a neighborhood and give her a scholarship so she can go to an Ivy League school. Social programs and philanthropic efforts skim cream in a thousand ways. They assume that the individual is the most important unit of social change.
Obviously, it’s possible to do some good on an individual basis. But with this approach you’re not really changing the moral ecologies, or the structures and systems that shape lives.
Maybe the pool story is a better metaphor than the starfish story. As a friend of mine puts it, you can’t clean only the part of the pool you are swimming in. You can’t just polish one molecule of water and throw it back in the dirty pool.
Rebuilding community involves seeing that the neighborhood, not the individual,