Rekindling Democracy: A Professional’s Guide to Working in Citizen Space

Introduction

And I believe that we’re in a unique moment in history. Maybe you’re seeing the same thing. I’m feeling it as I’m traveling not just around D.C. but around the country. But people really want to get involved. They really want to. They’re looking for a way to turn their frustration, excitement, anxiety into action.

—Michelle Obama

Allow me to tell you a story about a community of hatchers and catchers. One day several years ago, Carin stepped out of her travel trailer and walked a few minutes into the community she would soon fall in love with: the Voorstad-Oost neighborhood in the Dutch city of Deventer. Although still hurting from a difficult divorce, her natural curiosity about the people and place where she found herself meant it did not take long for her to hear the rumors that the old neighborhood school was being sold off. Within days of hearing this news, she found herself working with her new friend Lotte and a band of other residents getting organized to save their school. City developers had looked at this old building and seen an apartment block, but the Voorstad-Oost locals saw past the husk of its red bricks and grey mortar, and its financial potential, to envision their own community center.

And so began the adventure. It turned out that saving the building was the easy part. Having succeeded in gaining a permit from the municipality to turn the old school into a community center, they then had to figure out how to transform this forlorn structure, with its empty classrooms and echoing corridors, into a vibrant community center, and to do it without external funding.

Carin and Lotte, like the other members of the group, appreciate the power of openly asking for what they want. With a directness typical of the region, Carin and Lotte turned to each of their neighbors and asked, What would you like to do to help create our community center? We have no money right now, so whatever you do will be a gift to your community. They discovered that people were just waiting to be asked. Over time, as money came in, they paid local craftspeople whenever and whatever they could, ensuring investment in the local economy. But in those early days it was down to what the people in the neighborhood were prepared to contribute.

Carin, Lotte, and their neighbors might not have used the term but they were operating within a gift economy—so much so that today most locals can walk by that former school building and say, I helped to transform that into the beautiful community center you see there. The sense that my neighbors and I made this is of incredible consequence: the sustainability of such an endeavor can be measured by the number of local fingerprints found on the walls and the furniture of the place. The more fingerprints, the more collective ownership; the more shared ownership, the more investment in sustaining it and, more importantly, in creating the future expressions of the community’s gathering place. Indeed, most people do not simply walk by the building; they walk in and contribute.

Besides having a powerful origin story, the Voorstad-Oost community center is distinct from many other centers I’ve seen around the world. First, it is completely managed and run by local people. Second, although it provides services such as childcare, they do not feel like services. The ethos that pervades the center is one of family, not factory; of covenant, not contract. While there, you see the children mixing freely with the adults from the community; the playground is reminiscent of a village square, with young and old playing, talking, and laughing together. It is a far cry from the fortresslike environments of many modern childcare facilities, where the rooms are softened and child-centered but the steel railings around the perimeter send a clear message to the community: stay away, these youngsters are the private property of their parents, who have paid us to care for them. The message to children in those facilities is clarion also: the people who care for you are your family and the people they pay; your neighbors are strangers, and potentially dangerous.

Voorstad-Oost and similar stories stand in stark contrast to how most modern Westerners experience their childhoods. People who are more than fifty years old can perhaps still remember the care of the village, growing up under the watchful eyes of neighbors, but those under thirty-five will have mainly experienced the care of parents or extended family and the professionally run kindergarten and school. In Voorstad-Oost they still believe it takes a village to raise a child and they are doing something about it. Here people hatch and catch their neighbors and, in a beautifully reciprocal motion, are themselves opening up to life’s possibilities and flourishing from inside out.

Strange but True

Another story is being played out in Grand Ledge, Michigan, where Brenda Hydon teaches eighteen students, ages five to twelve, in a one-room schoolhouse. There you see one teacher and a teacher’s aide demonstrating the possibilities of a learning site built on a community rather than a corporate model. If not new, it is utterly unusual. And it’s working.

The Strange School, as it is known—it gets its name from a local highway—has operated in its current building since 1879, but its history and longevity are not the story here. What’s important is that the teacher teaches the older kids, the older kids teach the younger, and the youngest ones learn at their own pace by listening in. What’s more, the art of community is learned by in-school experience; the kids learn to be the productive keepers of a public place and are distanced from the huge diversion from learning that is competitive sports.

Voorstad-Oost and Strange, Michigan, are just two images of what’s in store should we get serious about rekindling democracy: we see a future where local citizens rely on one another to cope with the limits of the industrial model for everything, including the classroom and the community center.

In this book, you will read dozens of such stories, most of which have little to do with schools or clinics or other such institutions. Instead they are centered on what happens when people collectivize around a shared vision that they have created themselves. If it were possible to view these disaggregated, local, highly particular creative efforts in the aggregate, what you would see is democracy, in all its glory.

Democracy Redefined: Shifting from

Institution-Centered to Citizen-Centered

In a democracy, effective central and local governments and not-for-profit institutions function as an extension of civic life and serve to protect it. When institutions begin to replace civic life—doing things to or for citizens that they can do themselves or with each other—a shift from a democratic to a technocratic way of life takes hold. Technocratic governing relegates citizens to second place; it turns them into clients and consumers of government services and positions experts and officials as superior to the people they serve. Over time, five unintended consequences of this arrangement become evident:

People who need support due to economic isolation or fragility become defined as problems to be fixed, not as people to be valued and connected, people who possess the assets and resources that are critical to addressing their challenges.

A significant portion of the money intended to support those who are economically marginalized goes to paid service providers, not to the economically marginalized people themselves.

Active citizenship begins to retreat in the face of ever-growing professionalism and expertise. People not credentialed by a professional guild become increasingly more dependent on institutional services to do what previously was done by participating in community life.

Economically marginalized communities begin to internalize a map—a map drawn by outside experts—that defines them as helpless people populating hopeless places. Not surprisingly, the people who live in communities that have been defined by others as backwaters of pain and suffering come to believe that things will get better only when someone with the right resources and expertise comes in from outside to make them better.

Citizens begin to believe that a good life is not to be found in interdependent relationships at the center of community life, alongside near neighbors, but in services and programs at the edge of their communities, provided by salaried strangers. Many of those who are surrounded by a wide range of such services have been exiled from community life into serviceland, the environment within which services and programs dominate. They are no longer known as a sister, brother, son, daughter, friend, or neighbor; they have been redefined as a service user, a patient, someone endlessly waiting to be fixed. The many services coalesce to form a new environment around the person that transposes their role from citizen to client.

In most parts of the world these consequences are combining to erode the social and political foundation of everyday life. This adds up to a creeping crisis that may be thought of as a rip in the social fabric of our collective lives, evident in ever-increasing disconnection—and loneliness.

In Canada, for example, one in four people is estimated to be lonely (Desjardins, 2018). A study by researchers at Brigham Young University found the ill effects of loneliness are as bad as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day (Holt-Lunstad, 2015). The study looked at more than three million participants and found increased social connection is linked to a 50 percent reduced risk of premature death. The United Kingdom is so concerned about the issue they appointed a minister for loneliness to tackle social isolation (Prime Minister’s Office, 2018). Throughout Europe, North America, and Australia more than 20 percent of the people consulting their doctors are not bio-medically ill—they are lonely (Edwards et al., 2010).

What is the solution? Community.

Professor emeritus Myrra Vernooij-Dassen of Radboud University, The Netherlands, tells us in no uncertain terms that if we want to address loneliness the evidence is clear on what not to do: treat loneliness as yet another condition (Vernooij-Dassen and Jeon, 2016). People living with loneliness do not want to be associated with the stigmatizing term loneliness. To address loneliness and other symptoms of the unraveling of our social fabric we must reconnect people into reciprocal relationships based on their capacities, not their deficits or labels.

Searching for Songlines

Chronic loneliness and a sense of being inadequate to the task of social and political change were once experienced by only a few; now it seems they are the inheritance of many. But this situation need not be inevitable. After all, things are not getting worse, they are getting clearer, and with clarity comes a whispering call to civic action and a move toward the restoration of commons. This book aims to amplify that call by seeking out what some may think of as an ordinance for civic renewal. I like to think of this book as a search for songlines, the pursuit of useful pointers in the same way indigenous Australians did in times past.

Songlines are cues from the landscape, and sometimes the skies, that enable us to remember important cultural insights, values, and practices; they open up pathways toward re-membering, effecting cultural renewal in the collective sense. Indigenous Australians have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on earth. For them, as for many indigenous communities who use other cultural invocations, songlines are a powerful means of preserving and sharing their history and cultural heritage. They function as a cultural memory code, through nuanced stories, dance, song, and art, wisdom about the creation of the world. Through songlines more modern concerns and social laws are also remembered and shared. The information that is passed on and passed down is not all metaphysical or esoteric in nature either; in fact, most of it is practical. By rooting these cultural codes in the natural environment, across the generations, indigenous people have cultivated an immense memory of thousands of the flora and fauna across the continent. The knowledge and wisdom contained in their songlines could well rival Wikipedia, and in terms of functionality could be thought of as forerunner of the World Wide Web—no less sophisticated, but a great degree more sensible, which is to say rooted, embedded, experience-based, and life-giving.

Today, the most pressing challenge facing people and their governments in Australia and the rest of the Western world, and indeed in those countries that are rapidly becoming Westernized, is to reverse the developments of the last fifty years that have turned active citizens into satisfied or dissatisfied clients and passive consumers. Reversing the trend is about showing up more in our own and other people’s lives as active citizens, as the primary producers of a more satisfying shared future. I consider this to be at the heart of the democratic challenge. While it is a perennial endeavor, the urgency of rekindling our communities and rebooting democracy could not be greater than it is today. We will never reclaim the community spirit of times past, yet we certainly can find and connect the current cultural ties that enable us to bind collectively in the world as it is, in order to re-create the world as we wish it to be.

Challenging the Institutional Assumption

Getting to that world is not about reforming our systems; it is about re-functioning our families and neighborhoods and our human service institutions, so that they can reorientate themselves toward their primary function: to support citizenship and community building. The current assumption that services and programs will be sufficient to address our biggest challenges is as ubiquitous as it is misguided. Placing the provision of services and programs in a more proportionate role alongside support for citizenship and community building is critical to the future of local democracy. The evidence clearly shows that it is not services and programs but our community assets that primarily determine our well-being—that is, the extent to which we are well and how quickly we recover when unwell. Of course, institutions have a role to play in supporting our well-being, but it is a supplementary one.

Epidemiology (the scientific study of what determines human well-being) is clear that the five determinants of well-being are

personal capacity;

associational life;

economic status;

environmental conditions; and

access to health and allied services.

The World Health Organization has significantly evolved their thinking on health from 1948, when health was simply understood as the absence of disease. Today we operate with new definitions of positive health defined by the presence of well-being. From the work of Machteld Huber (2011), Barbara Fredrickson (2013), and Jan Walburg (Walburg et al., 2006), we can conclude that health and well-being are determined overall by six more specific drivers:

A meaningful life/goal in your life/purpose.

Positive emotions—Fredrickson, for example, shows a positive life is equivalent to ten additional healthy years of life.

Meaningful relations with other people, being connected—associational life. This driver reduces the risk of premature death in the following year by 50 percent. Robert Waldinger’s (2016) now-famous Harvard study on longevity offers compelling evidence around the importance of associational life.

Enjoying small things, living an attentive life, mindfulness of principles like sufficiency.

Doing something for someone else, sharing gifts/talents.

Living in a healthy way: attending to movement/exercise, food, alcohol, smoking, and other lifestyle decisions.

The evidence (which will be presented in later chapters) in other domains of our lives also shows that institutions are not the primary producers of our wisdom, prosperity, justice, or democracy. Communities are.

Over the last five decades, however, in the areas of health and well-being, education, local economics, environment, justice, and public safety, the role of community assets has been relegated to second place, treated as irrelevant to the primary concerns of social, political, and economic change. Institutions have replaced citizens as the primary inventors of the solutions to social and political problems. At the same time, institutional leaders have forgotten that their institutions were hatched from associational nests, and yet their institutional machinery often acts as the instigator of so many of the so-called problems they were established to resolve, and regularly, albeit unintentionally, causes such conditions to prevail or worsen. Accordingly, health—which is primarily a social and political matter—has come to be thought of as a medical one, and technocratic solutions have come to be considered more desirable and trustworthy in all instances than the tacit knowledge of citizens and communities. No longer is the home the place where we are born and die, where we learn and work. Institutions are widely considered to be benign, and the notion that institutions may sometimes be counterproductive is often viewed as a fringe position, propagated by troublemakers and crackpots.

Indeed, across a wide range of issues, from gang crime to dementia, the dominant assumption is that where a social problem exists, generating a solution is the primary responsibility of one institution or another (and more recently, a cluster of institutions working in concert in pursuit of collective impact). Yet the evidence clearly shows that this approach is not only counter to what science tells us, it is also counterproductive when it comes to rekindling democracy. Instead of precipitating collective citizenship and neighbor-to-neighbor interdependence, this process increases dependency on institutions and decreases interdependency in community life. Ultimately, it defines democracy as institution-centric instead of citizen-centered.

Rebooting Democracy

It is time to reboot democracy. This book cheers on and stands shoulder to shoulder with savvy civic and institutional leaders as it seeks to resource, support, and gently challenge them as they work to ensure an authentic and effective shift from institution-centric, top-down approaches to more citizen-centered, bottom-up approaches.

In the final analysis, institutions are not benign; their gravitational pull will draw them back time and again to doing things to the people, for the people—and only on occasion with the people. Time and again they will do things that belong in the domain of citizen-to-citizen work done by the people. Clearly there are things best done by families and communities; in such instances, government does well to create a dome of protection around them and ensure adequate space for them to blossom.

There are also things that are best done with citizens in the lead but with support from outside agencies or the marketplace. Here government does well to ensure those partnerships are well governed and benefit communities most. Communities at the same time must ensure that such social contracts are collaborative and democratic—and dissent when they are not.

And finally, there are things that governments and people with specialized expertise are best placed to do; in such instances government does well to support those specialists to do that work collaboratively, affectively as well as effectively, and transparently.

This book shows how we may catalyze the reboot that’s needed for all of us to live more satisfying lives while walking lightly on the planet. It also sets out some of the primary steps for taking this approach from concept to enduring and authentic action. It is the second in a series dedicated to this aim. The first, Asset-Based Community Development: Looking Back to Look Forward—in Conversation with John McKnight, explored the intellectual influences of the cofounder of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute in framing the ABCD approach. Some of that background is summarized in this book, especially in chapter 1.

The consistent thread is the asset-based community development perspective. It is through this lens that I look out at this cross-pressured world of ours and consider how best to vitalize our communities and rekindle democracy. I say rekindle for two reasons. First, because the embers have not gone out: we have what we need to build community and reimagine democracy, if we connect what we have. Second, the word lends itself to playful interpretations—for example, it contains other words, such as kin, kind, elder, and so on—and it also reminds me of the German word Kinder (child), which immediately brings to mind the adage that it takes a village to raise one. Given that the asset-based community development approach provides the Archimedean point and Rosetta stone from which I explore a wide interdependent vista, from raising children to reimagining democracy, the next chapter explores what this approach actually means and offers an outline of what it might offer the world we all inhabit.

Part One: Rekindling Society

Communities are all around us, close at hand, awaiting the community building that will make the invisible assets within them visible in all their abundance.

Chapter 1

Discoverables, Not Deliverables

The World of Asset-Based Community Development

The world is full of magic things, patiently

waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

—W. B. Yeats

Asset-based community development (ABCD) is about people living in local places and taking responsibility for each other and their local resources. It is a description, not a model, of how local residents grow collective efficacy (Sampson et al., 1999) and what they use to do so (McKnight, 2009). The work of ABCD involves paying attention to what is already present in a local place, not what we think should be there, or what isn’t there. What can be found in a local place are called its assets; they include

the gifts, skills, knowledge, and passions of local residents;

the power of local social networks/associations;

the resources of public, private, and nonprofit institutions;

the physical resources of the place;

the economic resources of the place; and

the stories of its residents’ shared lives.

Setting aside our preconceived maps and genuinely coming alongside a given local community (assuming that there is an invitation to do so) demands an act of radical humility on the part of helping agencies. It’s the opposite of diagnosing, fixing, or prescribing. It means our attention shifts from deliverables to discoverables.

The logic of shifting the focus from deliverables to discoverables is grounded in four simple but inalienable truths:

People can’t know what they need until they first know what they have.

An outside agency’s map of the community will never be the same as the territory.

If you don’t know the territory, you can’t support the community and you run the risk of causing harm.

Communities do not work in silos or in tune with institutional targets or their predefined outcomes. Take health as a case in point: most of the activity that is health-producing is done by people who do not think or realize that what they are doing is health-producing.

The majority of sociopolitical challenges are three dimensional: they are personal, environmental/social, and institutional. The challenge that democratic societies face is in trying to address three-dimensional socioeconomic and political issues using a two-dimensional framework consisting of:

institutional interventions (services, programs, policies, legislation); and

individual behavior change.

In the pursuit of more sustainable and enduring change that is ecologically and socially sound we need to attend more to the third dimension: environmental/social. Environmental and social change is not the result of behavioral change, nor does it come about as a consequence of institutional reform. It happens as a consequence of effective grassroots community building at the neighborhood level (Monbiot, 2016).

Doing community building this way calls on all of us as citizens to start seeing our neighborhoods as the primary unit of change. Making the neighborhood the primary unit of change enables the discovery, connection, and mobilization of individuals, associations, and cultural, environmental, and economic assets. The magic is in the connections between all these domains, not in any particular technique, model, or siloed approach. This is why working within small places is so pivotal to more citizen-led action and ultimately to deeper democracy and environmental sustainability.

ABCD Principles and Practices

Identifying, connecting, and mobilizing a neighborhood’s assets is a messy and complex endeavor, one that does not come with an instruction booklet. The ABCD approach does, however, come with a set of principles and practices that act like a compass in community-building work. Those principles and practices fall into five categories:

Citizen-led

Relationship-oriented

Asset-based

Place-based

Inclusion-focused

Citizen-led

There are certain things that only citizens, in association with one another, do best. ABCD is focused on this domain of change. From this perspective, sociopolitical, cultural, environmental, and economic change efforts are viewed through the lens of the following questions:

What is it that residents in communities are best placed to do together?

What is it that residents can best do with some outside help?

What is it that communities need outside institutions to do for them?

Relationship-oriented

ABCD goes beyond individuals and their capacities to tap into relational power. Sadly, the power of relationships tends to be undervalued in industrialized societies. Notwithstanding, relational power, outside of hierarchical structures such as the workplace, presents a powerful and often untapped force for good. It enables consensual grouping behaviors to amplify and multiply the capacities of individuals, ensuring the societal whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts. Relational power, also referred to as associational life, is a key determinant of individual well-being, public safety, response to natural disasters, and vocational opportunities.

Asset-based

The starting point for ABCD is what’s strong, not what’s wrong. Some misunderstand this catchphrase as an attempt to minimize life’s challenges or normalize injustices; nothing could be further from the truth. ABCD is the process by which relational power is mobilized to produce sustainable and satisfying change. With that in mind, it starts with what’s strong and enables local people to get organized to address what’s wrong and make what’s strong even stronger. It also asks searching questions of those who seek to define certain neighborhoods by the sum of their deficits.

Place-based

Small local places are the stage on which a good, sustainable, and satisfying life unfolds. Seeing the neighborhood as the primary unit of change is a powerful strategy for addressing some of our most intractable sociopolitical challenges. It is, however, a strategy that is countercultural, in that it seems to contradict the vast majority of helping strategies, which see individuals or institutions as the most legitimate domains for change. While personal transformation and institutional interventions have their place, we have seen that by intentionally organizing relational power at the neighborhood level, local residents can connect local human, associational, environmental, economic, and cultural resources and, by aggregating them at a hyper-local level, come up with solutions that escape