is the essential unit of social change. If you’re trying to improve lives, you have to think about changing many elements of a single neighborhood all at once.
One of the signature facts of the Internet age is that distance is not dead. Place matters as much as ever, and much more than we ever knew. The average American lives eighteen miles from his or her mother. The typical college student enrolls in a college fifteen miles from home. A study of Facebook friends nationwide found that 63 percent of the people we friend live within one hundred miles. Americans move less these days, not more.
Within the reasonably small radius of our lives, behavior is highly contagious. Suicide, obesity, and social mobility happen in networks as people subtly shape one another’s behavior in ways that are beneath the level of consciousness. The work by economist Raj Chetty and others shows that children who grow up in one neighborhood are likely to have different life outcomes than people who grow up in demographically similar neighborhoods nearby. For example, on April 1, 2010, 44 percent of the low-income black men from the Watts neighborhood of central Los Angeles were incarcerated. On the other hand, just 6.2 percent of the men who grew up with similar incomes in the Compton neighborhood were incarcerated on that day. Compton is just 2.3 miles from Watts.
The work by sociologist Eric Klinenberg shows just how important neighborhood is in determining who will survive in a crisis. Klinenberg compared deaths in two Chicago neighborhoods during a heat wave in 1995. More than six times as many people died in North Lawndale as in South Lawndale, even though the two places are demographically comparable and separated by nothing more than a road.
Klinenberg discovered that the key ingredient was the thickness of community bonds. There were more places to meet in one neighborhood than the other, more places for people to establish relationships, and people who are in dense relationships check in on one another in times of crisis. You wouldn’t necessarily think that the presence of a neighborhood library would have a big effect on who dies in a heat wave, but it does.
Thinking in neighborhood terms requires a radical realignment in how you see power structures. Does the neighborhood control its own public services? Do neighbors have street fairs where they can get to know one another? Are there forums where the neighborhood can tell its collective story?
Thinking in neighborhood terms means a radical transformation in how change is done. It means you pick a geographic area and throw in everything and the kitchen sink all at once: school reforms, early childhood education, sports and arts programs, and so on. An infinity of positive influences subtly reinforce one another in infinitely complex ways. It means doing away with the way philanthropy is done now, in which one donor funds one program that tries to isolate one leverage point to have “impact.” Thinking in neighborhood terms brings home the reality that there is never a silver bullet.
A TECHNOLOGY FOR CONVENING
After you’ve realized that the neighborhood is the unit of change, it’s necessary to find some way to bring the neighborhood together—to replace distance with intimacy and connection.
The third stage of commitment to a community involves inventing a technology for gathering. It means coming up with some method to bring people together and nudge them toward intimacy and trust.
As Peter Block notes in his book Community, leaders initiate social change when they shift the context within which people gather. It means inviting new people into the circle, especially people you might have earlier identified as “the problem.” It means naming the conversation with powerful questions and then listening to the answers.
Power is created out of nothing when invitations are issued and new people gather and act in new ways. “The future is created one room at a time, one gathering at a time,” Block writes. “Each gathering needs to become an example of the future we want to create.” In these conversations, people who have been on the margins of society bear special gifts, an outsider’s sensitivity to the way things are, a greater awareness of others.
In 2016, Dottie Fromal visited Nelsonville, Ohio, to see some friends. She’d walk down the streets from her friend’s house and people would call out to her from their porches and want to tell her about their cat or something. “Some of these people don’t have anyone to talk to all day long,” she