writes about the Other Side Academy in Salt Lake City. The organization takes hardened criminals and gives them a chance to get out of jail and turn their lives around by living in a group home and working for a moving company. The whole group meets at sessions—called “games”—where the men and women call one another out for even the slightest moral infraction. Connection happens at the nexus of truth and love, the founders say. Truth without love is harshness. Love without truth is sentimentality. But if you can be completely honest with somebody in the context of loving support, then you have a trusting relationship. Norms are enforced as people hold one another accountable for violating them. Community is woven through love-drenched accountability.
The weavers talk a lot about how important it is to act and not just talk about things. They often describe themselves as GSD types—Get Shit Done. They publish the books of their lives with their actions. But they also put tremendous emphasis on listening and conversation. A lot of what they do is to create spaces where deep conversations can happen. One day at Stephanie Hruzek’s after-school program in Houston, FamilyPoint, a ten-year-old-boy came up to her with a note he claimed he had found on the floor. It was an obscenity-laced tirade. Words like “bitch,” “asshole,” and “fuck you” leapt out from the page. Stephanie asked him who had written such an angry note. He said he didn’t know.
That night, the staff watched the security tapes and discovered that the boy who brought up the note was also the one who’d actually written it. The next day they confronted him with the evidence. He denied it at first, and their natural impulse would have been to punish him for the hate-filled document. But instead of acting quickly they sat with him for a while and talked. Eventually he began to cry and said, “I wrote that note to a man who hurt me.”
It turned out that two men with guns had recently broken into his house and had threatened to kill him. His neighbors heeded frantic calls from his mother and interrupted the break-in, pounding on the door until the police arrived and interrupted it, but the boy and his mother were both traumatized. The note was just a disorganized attempt to deal with what he was feeling. Stephanie wonders what would have happened if they had just gone ahead and punished him—punished him for in effect crying for help. What lesson would he have learned and what trajectory would that have set him off on? The lesson is that you have to stay in the conversation long enough; you have to listen patiently enough.
Community builders believe in radical mutuality. They utterly reject the notion that some people have everything in order, and others are screwups. In their view, we are all stumblers. As W. H. Auden put it, the task in life is to “love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.”
“Charity” is the ultimate dirty word. We are all equal, and we all need one another. Sarah Hemminger even banned the word “mentor” from her organization because it implies the adults are higher and ministering down to the young. It always comes back to the dignity of the person in front of you.
The single phrase I heard most often from their lips was “the whole person.” Over the past few decades, our institutions have tended to divide human beings into slices. Schools treat children as brains on a stick and pump information into them. Hospitals treat patients as a collection of organs to be repaired; doctors don’t really know the people they are operating on. But community builders talk about the need to take a whole-person approach. When a child enters school, she doesn’t leave behind her healthcare issues, her safety issues, her emotional traumas, her nutritional needs, her need for purpose and meaning. Whatever sector one is working in, you have to be aware and connect to the whole person all at once.
And over it all is the spirit of loving-kindness. Speaking with the weavers, I was often reminded of a quote somebody passed to me from John E. Biersdorf’s book Healing of Purpose:
Compassion is expressed in gentleness. When I think of persons I know who model for me the depths of spiritual life, I am struck by their gentleness. Their eyes communicate the residue of solitary battles with angels, the costs of caring for others, the deaths