blame? It’s, What assets can we deploy to make our neighborhood one in which everybody looks out for one another? What gifts can we contribute that we might not yet even see in ourselves yet? In Denver, for example, Nepalese immigrants have trouble integrating into the public school system. Kate Garvin, a local community weaver, realized that village elders were an underutilized source of galvanizing, guiding, and convening power. So she integrated the elders into the school system and liberated an untapped source of community wealth. In Washington, D.C., Sharon Murphy takes in refugees and others who are at some of the lowest points of their lives, yet, she says, “You come to Mary House to become stronger at what you’re already doing well.” This is possibility thinking. If you want to shift the culture, you’ve got to have a conversation you haven’t had before, one that is about long-term possibilities. What can this place be like in 2049?
THE INVENTION OF TRADITION
When a community begins to build together, they don’t just create new stuff; they create new norms. They make a contribution to the community, and over time that contribution becomes the thing everybody is expected to do. For example, my friend Rod Dreher had a sister named Ruthie who lived in a small town in Louisiana. Ruthie was a teacher, one of those people who radiate an inner light. Tragically, she died of cancer at forty. More than one thousand people came to her funeral. Ruthie loved to go barefoot, so the pallbearers, from the local fire department, where her husband worked, carried her casket to the grave barefoot.
Ruthie always thought the dead of her town should be remembered on Christmas, so she created a tradition. Every Christmas Eve she would go to the town cemetery to put a lit candle on each gravestone. Ruthie happened to die just before Christmas, and as the family was sitting around on that Christmas Eve, Rod asked his mother if she would like to do what Ruthie used to do—to light a candle on each gravestone. His mother replied that maybe in other years that would be good, but this year it was just too tough.
That evening Rod’s parents attended mass and drove home, early evening, by the cemetery. They looked over and gasped. There were hundreds of lights. Somebody else had put a candle on every gravestone. That’s how community works. Somebody starts something. A new tradition is established. Other people step in and carry it on.
A NEW CIVIC ARCHITECTURE
The really difficult community projects don’t just require a new organization or new norms. They require an entirely new civic architecture. Not long ago, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, I visited the offices of something called the Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM). The walls were lined with charts measuring such things as kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading scores, and postsecondary enrollment.
Around the table was just about anybody in Spartanburg who might touch a child’s life. There were school superintendents and principals, but there were also the heads of the chamber of commerce and the local United Way, the police chief, a former mayor and the newspaper editor, someone from the healthcare sector, and a bunch of statisticians. This coalition was like nothing I’d seen before. It was private sector and public sector, church and business. It was representatives from nearly every sector in the community, and they were all staring at the same charts.
The people at SAM track everything they can measure about Spartanburg’s young people from cradle to career. They gather everybody who might have any influence upon this data—parents, churches, doctors, nutrition experts, and the like. And then together, as a community-wide system, they ask questions: Where are children falling off track? Why? What assets do we have in our system that can be applied to this problem? How can we work together to apply those assets?
This was very different from the way I was used to seeing communities try to achieve their possibilities. In most cases, you have a bunch of organizations who want to do good. They apply to a local foundation or government agencies and compete for grants. A few get chosen, and they go off and do their thing. One donor, one organization, one problem, one program. Then, after a few years, somebody does a study to see if that program had any measurable effect, which most of the time it hasn’t. You wind up with a community in which a random spray of programs are competing