Community

by Peter Block

  These steps contain many of the elements of community building. It is not so much the methodology that concerns us here, but rather the context and spirit that these movements offer us. They show that an alternative to retribution is possible and has worked in the world. This spirit of restoration promises a different future for our communities.

  Community as Conversation

  The idea of community restoration becomes concrete when we grasp the importance of language. When we do, we can see how our language, or conversation, is the action step that makes creating an alternative future possible. Stated simply, we can begin to think of our communities as nothing more or less than a conversation. If we can accept the idea that all real change is a shift in narrative—a new story as opposed to the received dominant story—then the function of citizenship, or leadership, is to invite a new narrative into existence. Narrative begins with a ride on the wave of conversation. For greatest effect, we need a new conversation with people we are not used to talking to.

  Every community has its buildings, leaders, schools, and landscape, but for the moment let us say that these are not what make a community unique or define its identity. Instead we decide to declare that the aspect of a community that gives it a new possibility is simply the conversation that citizens choose to have with themselves. Jane Jacobs, world expert on neighborhoods, understands this. When she was asked why she thought Portland, Oregon, has been so successful in creating a habitable community, she said that the only thing unique about Portland is that “Portlanders love Portland.” In our terms here, it was the conversation Portlanders had with each other about their town that made the difference.

  Thus if we speak of change or transformation in our city or town—in my case, Cincinnati—we are referring to the conversation that is occurring in that town. We highlight the conversation community members have with themselves not because it is the whole picture, but because it is the part of the picture that is most amenable to change.

  This means that the alternative future we speak of takes form when we realize that the only powerful place from which to take our identity may be the story we hold about ourselves and our collective way of being together. We begin the process of restoration when we understand that our well-being is defined simply by the nature and structure and power of our conversation.

  The future of a community then depends on a choice between a retributive conversation (a problem to be solved) and a restorative conversation (a possibility to be lived into). Restoration is a possibility brought into being by choosing that kind of conversation. And with that conversation, restoration becomes real and tangible, for once we have declared a possibility, and done so with a sense of belonging and in the presence of others, that possibility has been brought into the room and thus into the institution, into the community.

  The key phrase here is “in the presence of others.” When declared publicly, heard and witnessed by others with whom we have a common interest, at a moment when something is at stake, a possibility is a critical element of communal transformation. This public conversation creates a larger relatedness and transcends a simply individual transformation. In the faith world, this is similar to what has been called bearing witness. We are bringing that into secular practice. Conversations of possibility gone public are not all that restores, but without them, personal and private conversations of possibility have no political currency and therefore no communal power.

  The Shift

  To summarize the story line to this point, our conversations and gatherings have the power to shift the context from retributive community to restorative community. This occurs through questions and dialogue that move us in the following directions:

  • From conversations about problems to ones of possibility

  • From conversations about fear and fault to ones of gifts, generosity, and abundance

  • From a bet on law and oversight to a preference for building the social fabric and chosen accountability

  • From seeing the corporation and systems as central to change to seeing associational life as central

  • From a focus on leaders to a focus on citizens

  What these have in common is the movement from centrism and individualism to collectivism and interdependent communalism. This shift has important consequences for our communities. It offers to return politics to public service and restore our trust in leadership. It moves us from having faith in professionals and those in positions of authority to having faith in our neighbors. It takes us into a context of hospitality, wherein we welcome strangers rather than believing we need to protect ourselves from them. It changes our mind-set from valuing what is efficient to valuing belonging. It helps us leave behind our penchant for seeing our disconnectedness as an inevitable consequence of modern life and moves us toward accountability and citizenship.

  CHAPTER 5

  Taking Back Our Projections

  Citizens become powerful when they choose the context within which they operate. This choosing is difficult because we are seeking an alternative to the received wisdom of the culture. Choosing our own language of context, rather than aligning with the language of the dominant culture, puts the choice into our own hands. It acknowledges that our mind-set, even our worldview, is subjective and therefore amenable to change. There is a cost to this—namely, we are subject to doubt and at times loneliness. It is the path of a pioneer.

  To choose a context conducive to citizenship, we first need to understand the idea of communal projection. Projection is the act of attributing qualities to others that we deny within ourselves. It is expressed in the way we label others and then build diagnostic categories and whole professions around the labeling. The shift away from projection and labeling provides the basis for defining what we mean by authentic citizenship—which is to hold ourselves accountable for the well-being of the larger community and to choose to own and exercise collective power rather than defer or delegate it to others.

  • • •

  Here is a way of thinking about the shift in context from retribution to restoration. We begin with going deeper into what it means to choose to be accountable, not just for ourselves but for the world. The reason the retributive context cannot improve the conditions it tries to heal is that it talks a lot about accountability but does not embody it. The context of retribution itself is actually an ongoing argument against accountability. This happens each time I want to see a change in “those people.” Those people can be supervisors, top management, the mayor, immigrants, people living in poverty—the list is endless. When I develop prescriptions for “their” transformation, I am making them the cause of our troubles. I am expressing the belief that if “those people” were different, our organization, our community would be better.

  This is the attraction of the marketing of fear and fault and our love of leadership. It is a way of seeking control through the belief that something or someone else is the problem and that the someone else needs to do something different before anything can profoundly get better. And the clincher is that, as holders of the dominant narrative, we believe we know what that something different is. This is the colonial nature of most of our public conversations. On a large scale, it is what drives Great Britain out of the European Union. It is what wants to build a wall to keep the stranger out. It is why my mother was angry with her brother for forty years.

  To inquire more deeply into this shift in context, we need to focus on the distinction between culture and context. The common thinking holds that transformation requires a culture change. I am talking here about context, not culture. The reason I use the word context rather than culture is to construct our stance as a matter of choice. Culture is a set of shared values that emerges from the history of experience and the story that is produced out of that. It is the past that gives us our identity and corrals our behavior in order to preserve that identity. Context is the way we see the world. See the world, not remember the world.

  We conventionall
y think that our view of the world is based on history, events, and evidence, and this pattern is treated as fact and is decisive. It is called fact but is only a collective memory, which in the glare of the midday sun I would irreverently call fiction. If this thing we call context were fact, then it would not be amenable to transformation.

  If context were inevitable and purely based on fact, then we would be condemned to live in fear. We are constantly being sold the fear curriculum so that, in time, we begin to think the context of fear is for good cause and data based. In reality, fear rises and falls for more reasons than events would dictate. If we can entertain the thought that fear is the curriculum of the patriarchal element of our culture, then we can understand that the dominant fear conversation is as much a result of marketing and product promotion as it is a response to facts. In the domain of public safety, for instance, there is little relationship between the crime rate and people’s attitude about danger. There is evidence that many kinds of crime went down in many major cities in the late 1990s and have stayed down to this present moment. But while crime went down, the public’s fear of crime went up. Why? Because while crime was going down, the reporting of crime went up. So the determinant of our fear is partly the retributive agenda, which leads to reporting about how dangerous the world is and, more important, our choice to buy the story.

  Here is the point: in the retributive context, we act as though fear, fault, dependency on leaders, cynicism, and indifference to associational life are evidence based. If we are committed to a future distinct from the past, then we treat them as a matter of choice, and we call this way of thinking context, not culture.

  Projection and Labeling

  If the fear-retribution cycle is a matter of choice and not an inevitable result of culture, then we have to face the fact that the choice to inhale it must mean it offers us payoffs.

  One payoff for believing that problems and the suffering in our cities are the inevitable products of modern life and culture is that it lets us off the hook. The payoff begins the moment we believe that problems reside in others and that these others are the ones who need to change. We displace or assign to others certain qualities that in fact have more to do with us than with them. This is called projection, an idea most of us are quite familiar with. I discuss it here because if we do not take back our projection, a new context and conversation are simply not possible. The essence of our projection is that it places accountability for an alternative future on others. This is the payoff of stereotyping, prejudice, and a bunch of “isms” that we are all familiar with. This is what produces the “other.” The reward is that it takes the pressure off of us. It is a welcome escape from our freedom. We project onto leaders the qualities or disappointments that we find too much to carry ourselves. We project onto the stranger, the wounded, the enemy those aspects of ourselves that are too much to own.

  Projection denies the fact that my view of the “other” is my creation, and this is especially true with how we view our communities and the people in them. Most simply, how I view the other is an extension or template of how I view myself. This insight is the essence of being accountable. To be accountable is to act as an owner and creator of what exists in the world, including the light and dark corners of my own existence. It is the willingness to focus on what we can do in the face of whatever the world presents to us. Accountability does not project or deny; accountability is the willingness to see the whole picture that resides within, even what is not so pretty.

  “You pushed my buttons.” “I know, but I didn’t install them.”

  Author unknown

  We are generally familiar with these ideas from the psychology of projection for individuals, and the point here is that projection also works more broadly at the level of profession, institution, and community.

  Take poverty, for example. When we see low-income people, we focus on their needs and deficiencies, and that is all we see. We think their poverty is central to who they are, and that is all they are. We believe that the poor have created that condition for themselves. We view them with charity or pity and wring our hands at their plight. At this moment we are projecting our own vulnerability onto the poor. It is a defense against not only our own vulnerability but also our complicity in creating poverty.

  If we took back this projection, we would stop denying that each of us plays a role in creating poverty—by our way of living, by our indifference, by our labeling them “poor” as if that is who they are, by our choice not to have them as neighbors and get to know them. Part of the tax reduction debate is the belief that we are wasting money on “those people.” It is not that the people we project onto do not have some of the qualities we see; it is that the meaning we give to what we see—in this case, the label and categorization—is just projection. It’s the same with the unemployed, with broken homes and broken-down neighborhoods, youth on the street, and all the other symptoms we live with.

  In our philanthropy, this mind-set that the “other” is the problem means that we need to wait for them to change before the change we want in the world can come to pass. And until they change, we need to stay distant and contain them. This diverts us from the realization that we have the means, the tools, the thinking to create a world we want to inhabit, and to do it for all. If we saw others as another aspect of ourselves, we would welcome them into our midst. We would let them know that they belong, that they are neighbors, with all their complexity.

  • • •

  To continue, as a community, to focus on the needs and deficiencies of the most vulnerable is not an act of hospitality. It substitutes labeling for welcoming. It is isolating in that they become a special category of people, defined by what they cannot do. This isolates the most vulnerable. Despite our care for them, we do not welcome them into our midst; we service them. They become objects. This may be why it is easier to raise money for suffering in distant places or to celebrate the history of slavery’s end than it is to raise money for our neighbors on the margin who are six blocks away. Their proximity stands in the way of our compassion. An example: In Cincinnati we have spent $110 million to construct a magnificent Freedom Center to celebrate the end of slavery. Six blocks away we have citizens living in very difficult conditions—and there is great reluctance to see the relationship between the two. We are willing to acclaim the victories of the past; yet, caught in our projection onto the poor, we sustain a colonial attitude toward the suffering of people down the street.

  To be even more specific about projection, it shows up in communities through the conversations that focus on any of the needs, problems, and diagnostic categories through which we label others. For example, we limit our future when we frame conversations in the following ways:

  • Young people on the corner or out of school become “youth at risk.”

  • People who served their time in jail become “ex-offenders.”

  • People who live on the street become “homeless” or “vagrants.”

  • Those with physical or mental challenges become “handicapped” and “bipolar.”

  • Immigrants become “illegals.”

  And the list goes on based on the mood of the times.

  This labeling, along with the services that flow out of it, is the “commercialization of needs” that John McKnight has written about. It becomes the justification for the fear-and-fault conversation that in turn justifies the context of retribution. Which in turn drives all the programs, expertise, and policy that we thought were going to make the difference.

  Taking Back the Projection

  When we stay isolated, there is no way to take back the communal projection. No amount of inner work or healing as individuals will be powerful. Projection sustains itself in the absence of relatedness, in a life or workplace where we have no sense of belonging. It cannot be taken back by acting alone. It does not disappear no matter how much data is presented, no matter how much moral suasion or guilt we try to produce. “Why can’t we all j
ust get along?” was a poignant plea, but it had no power to join us together.

  Communal transformation, taking back our collective projections, occurs when people connect with those who were previously strangers, and when we invite people into conversations that ask them to act as creators or owners of community. It occurs when we become related in a new way to those we are intending to help. This means we stop labeling others for their deficiencies and focus on their gifts.

  Example: Elementz

  One example of a place where youth are valued rather than labeled is a center in Cincinnati named Elementz. A group of young people have created a hip-hop–oriented urban arts center where fourteen- to twenty-four-yearolds can spend three nights a week learning about writing, performing, disc jockeying, and producing hip-hop music. Their music. They also learn about graffiti as an art form and break dancing as a form of entertainment. Elementz takes the very things that bother many adults—the music, the dancing, the graffiti—and treats them as gifts. This is not a recreation center; it is a learning space where youth have to attend programs in order to be in the building.

  Elementz was conceived by young people, and young people run it, so that when kids from the street walk into the building, they see a reflection of themselves and know they are welcome. The staff of the place are not professionally trained “youth workers”; they are young people two steps further down the road who have made a commitment and sacrifice to care for those coming behind them.

  The goal of Elementz is not specifically to provide careers in these entertainment fields—that would be making a promise that is unreal. The goal is to give to young people an experience of what they can create, a sense of the value they have inside themselves. The ultimate goal is to offer them a new possibility for their lives. It also serves to overcome the isolation of urban youth. When they walk in the door for the first time, if you ask them how many adults in their life have their best interest at heart, their answer is one or two. If you ask them the same question after they have participated in Elementz for six months, the answer is four to five. This experience makes the difference. When they are less isolated, and have adults interested in their well-being, they have the will to retreat from the street culture and begin to construct a more productive life for themselves.