Dialogues for Change address critical questions that impact the future vitality of the Richmond region. Participants will learn to build collaborative strategies to take our region into the future by understanding historical events that have led to present realities. The retreat takes place Jan. 16-17, so sign up now!
Module 1 lecture by Rob and Susan Corcoran: Connecting Communities Fellowship Program 2005
Susan and I have just become empty nesters. We arrived here in Richmond 25 years ago with our eldest son who was 3 months old at the time. We’ve raised three boys here. For us it’s been an extraordinary learning experience, full of rich friendships and adventures with remarkable, courageous people; working together to build a new vision for this metropolitan community. We feel we’ve been privileged to be part of a unique experiment in community building. Is it possible that the former Capital of the Confederacy, a center of slave trade and massive resistance could actually be a pioneer in race relations for the rest of the country and give hope to people around the world?
Now, thanks to the generous willingness of our Hope in the Cities colleagues to shoulder more work, we have been given the great gift of a sabbatical. So for us this is a moment to stand back, and to reflect on the meaning of what we have been part of and continue to be part of. Over the past days I have been reading through journals dating back to 1980: it’s a fascinating record.
The Connecting Communities Fellowship Program is really a synthesis of the intensive hands-on experience of Hope in the Cities. And the approach to social change of Hope in the Cities itself is rooted in more than 70 years experience of a global network involving people of all races, religions and cultures. This network is known as Initiatives of Change, whose mission is to work for a “hate free, fear free, greed free world. “ We’ll talk more about this later. But you should know that the philosophy and methodologies at the heart of this program have been tried and tested in the toughest conflicts and bitterest divisions around the world.
What we would like to do this morning is to share with you the roots of this work; talk about some of the key “ingredients” that have gone into building this network; and outline some of the underlying principles that provide the foundation for this program.
Connecting communities:
When you think about community, what springs to mind? Who or what is your community? It could be your family or neighborhood, or your city, or your cultural group. Where are the “fault lines?” Our concept of community can be inclusive or exclusive. Who is “in,” who is “out?”
I guess all of us have been transfixed by the incredible images of the Tsunami on our television screens. Perhaps for a moment we caught a glimpse of the reality of a global community, and the fact that we are physically connected in ways that we don’t fully understand. The earthquake in the Indian Ocean actually lifted the earth’s surface one inch as far away as Ecuador. In a different way, the events of September 11, 2001 also highlighted our connectedness because it showed so dramatically that injustice, resentment and unhealed history anywhere can be a threat to peace everywhere.
The point is that in today’s world we can no longer live isolated lives. We’re all in this together. Everyone is needed: people of all races, ethnicities and faiths; all generations; liberals and conservatives; city dwellers and suburbanites. So the first point we want to make it this: Connecting communities means learning to live and work with people whose worldview is different from our own, whose culture and politics are different. People, who challenge our assumptions, people who irritate us. People whose very presence threatens our sense of comfort and security.
Harlon Dalton in his book, Racial Healing: confronting the fear between blacks and whites, says, “At this particular moment in American history, meaningful action at the societal level is virtually impossible. As a nation we lack a consensus concerning how to deal with the problems that bedevil us most. We seem unable to take sustained action for very long. And we don’t’ trust anyone enough to let them lead. We are, in short, politically paralyzed. The reasons for this paralysis are several but chief among them is our failure to engage each other openly and honestly around race.”
We have three key tasks as we head into the 21st century:
Just over a year ago hundreds of people gathered at the Tredegar Gun Foundry, on the banks of the James River, to mark the tenth anniversary of the public launching of Hope in the Cities at the Healing the Heart of America conference in 1993: the launch of a local and national campaign for an honest conversation on race, reconciliation and responsibility. It was an unforgettable experience that evening in the old gun foundry to see Richmonders of all generations and races coming together to celebrate the fact that after three hundred years this city is finally coming to terms with its racial divisions.
Michael Paul Williams is a native Richmonder, an African American, who writes a column for the Richmond Times- Dispatch. He opened the event with the comment that he had seen Richmond evolve from a place that “discretely oppressed its black citizens and where race was not discussed in polite company” to a place where serious talk takes place.” These conversations, he noted “have not always been calm or coherent, but they have seldom been trivial… We have struggled to move the discussion from power, spoils and misguided nostalgia towards empathy, healing and transformative change. We have witnessed our politicians move from stark division and open rancor towards honest attempts to reach consensus. We’ve tweaked our symbols to more completely reflect our city… taken an enlightening trip through the dark side of Richmond history…erected a monument to a native son on a boulevard previously off-limits in the harshest sense. And most recently, we paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in the former Capital of the Confederacy. Indeed, anything is possible.”
Those of you who read Michael Paul’s column regularly know that he does not engage in hyperbole. He is not naïve. He knows that we have big problems, horrendous problems: a homicide rate that is out of control; schools that are struggling; a transportation system that does not serve the people who need it most; housing that is unaffordable. Underlying it all is the continuing separation by race and class that is the legacy of our history.
But in some very important ways this city has changed, and is continuing to change. A movement has started which will not stop. People are in this for the long haul. Michael Paul identifies three things that are key to this movement that we call Hope in the Cities: conversation, history, and transformational change.
I am currently doing some research on the 1990s and I would say that we will look back on the nineties as a decade when two important movements emerged: a decade when dialogue became a significant tool in efforts to convene diverse groups of people in constructive problem solving; and a decade when many communities found ways to acknowledge, and to begin to heal, painful historic wounds. These are important grassroots movements occurring in communities throughout the US and in other parts of the world from Australia to South Africa and India. Hope in the Cities and this city have been at the cutting edge of this development. Much of what we will be doing together in this program is focused on building skills in these two areas.
Walking through history
Sometimes communities are so deeply divided, and so traumatized by their historical experiences, that there has to be some act of acknowledgment of that pain before real conversation can take place. In 1993 when we held the first walk through history, starting from this very spot, it was a landmark moment for the city. Nothing like it had ever happened before, when hundreds of people, including our political, business and religious leaders walked together to mark the dock where Africans were disembarked from slave ships, and the auction blocks where they were sold in the downtown area.
Our vision is that the place where greatest pain occurred could be the place where healing begins. And so today you have a growing momentum as people all across the region discover our shared history, not as a source of guilt or anger, but as a source of energy to for inclusion efforts and common action. What Richmond has demonstrated is the gift of historical imagination. At the heart of the Hope in the Cities approach to acknowledging history is learning what it means to stand in another person’s space, and even to experience the story from another person’s standpoint.
Communities across the USA are engaged in similar activities. It is becoming an important national movement. There are many ways of doing this, but the underlying principle of an effective “walk though history” is an accurate, respectful and inclusive public telling of the story, not in guilt or anger but by taking ownership together of our shared history.
Honest conversation
A survey in 1997 estimated that there were 181 interracial dialogue efforts going on in the US. Eighty-five could be said to be truly multiracial and actually engaged in dialogue. Out of 65 surveyed, over half had been formed between 1992 and 1997. My colleague David Campt was a dialogue expert with the President Clinton’s Initiative on Race, which helped to identify and highlight the best of these.
Someone once said that the four scariest words in the English language are “We’ve got to talk.” When we began Hope in the Cities, one of the things we realized right away was that for dialogue to be meaningful it had to include everyone. We had to move beyond the self-righteous position that others are the problem and we are the solution. Honest conversation means the purposeful engaging of the other side in ways that allows them to enter the discussion with dignity.
When we were first starting out, the Washington Post columnist William Raspberry said to some of us: “We have forgotten the difference between problems and enemies. This diverts time and energy from the search for solutions. A good question to ask is: If I defeat the enemy in the battle I have engaged, will my problem be nearer a solution or not? People respond more favorably to being approached as allies.”
When I first came to Richmond, as the son of a lifelong warrior in the labor movement, I found myself in the most conservative environment that I had ever encountered; surrounded by people whose worldview, politics, and set of priorities seemed the opposite of everything I had come to believe. Little by little I came to realize that it was not my job to judge anyone, or even to try to convert them to my way of thinking, and that I might even have something to learn from conservative, Republican business people. Today some of those very people whom I was so quick to judge are giving significant leadership in efforts for racial healing and justice in Richmond. The reason HIC is such a powerful voice in the community today is we are absolutely direct about the problem without casting blame or naming enemies. Everyone feels that they can find a home where they can make their best contribution. I’ve learned that we must firmly resist the temptation to try to label people and put them in boxes.
I every community in which we have helped to facilitate dialogue we have begun by asking: What is the underlying conversation that is not taking place, and who needs to be part of it? Here are some key points to think about:
Transformational change
This last bullet brings me to the main point we want to focus on today: what Michael Paul Williams described as “transformational change.” If you forget everything else we say today we hope you will remember this because it provides a context for all that we do in Hope in the Cities and Initiatives of Change.
Connecting Communities means a serious long-term commitment by people who are willing to work together over the long term, and to demonstrate in their own lives and relationships the kind of community transformation that they are advocating.
Following from this are two implications:
1) Responsibility for change starts with me not the other person.
2) We come to a true understanding of ourselves, and we become effective, as we work in the context of a team.
My neighbor, Collie Burton, who was a civil rights activist and community organizer, sums up his experience: “We worked to change the system and put new leaders in place but because we did not change the hearts of people we kept having to go back and do it all over again.” This is foundational to the whole program. There are many approaches to community change: education; coalition building; advocacy; dismantling racism; empowerment and so on. There is much that can be gained by all these approaches. But if we neglect these two ingredients of personal change and team building, the effect of our efforts will be transitory. I am not saying that personal transformation alone can change conditions. But without change in the human heart no systems change will work over the long haul. Indeed, the systems change we need is so radical, and requires such courage and persistence, that it can only be achieved by individuals who have the inner strength and integrity to inspire others and to hold a movement together.
Susan and I have been reading a book by Phillip Yancey called Soul Survivor. He recounts an exchange between Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and MLK in 1963, Wilkins was goading King that his methods had not achieved a single victory for integration: ”In fact Martin, if you have desegregated anything by your efforts, kindly enlighten me.” “Well,” King replied, “I guess about the only thing I’ve desegregated so far is a few human hearts.” He knew that the ultimate victory must be won there, writes Yancey. Laws could prevent white people from lynching blacks but no law could require races to love or forgive one another.
Last August I was invited to present a paper at a national forum hosted by the University of Denver on Intergroup Relations fifty years after Brown. A keynote speaker was jon powell, who is a great prophet voice for civil rights and racial and economic justice. One thing he said stuck in my mind: “People make choices based on what they think is possible.”
He went on to say that when systems are in crisis, “transactional solutions do not work, only transformation works. At that point individuals who are committed and well connected can play extraordinary important roles as change agents.” The purpose of this program is to build a network of change agents.
People need to see a demonstration of what is possible. They need to see this reality in diverse groups of committed people working together and demonstrating new relationships.
Everyone wants to see the world different but everyone is waiting for the other person to begin. If everyone lived the way I do, would the neighborhood, the city, or the world be a better or worse place?
The challenge that Mahatma Gandhi gives us is: “Be the change you want to see”. As catalysts for community change our lives must reflect the sort of community we want to create. For Rob and me it is about how we live our lives, the choices we make and the relationships we build. It has been the foundation of our marriage and has shaped the way we have raised our family. It is not part-time or short-term. Our frame of reference for this has had five key elements:
Listening
Modeling
Engaging
Responding
Risking
First of all: LISTENING.
Then there is MODELING. I bring to the community who I am. How do my ideals of community match my own reality? We need to have consistent values in our lives that don’t shift in different circumstance or with different groups of people. I can’t be one thing when I am in a diverse group and revert to someone else with my family and friends. Our youngest son has just graduated as part of a small white minority in the Richmond Public schools. Now he is part of a larger white majority at American University. He asked our thoughts recently about how to respond when his new friends use the “N” word. How does he continue to live consistent values? We need to radically apply these values to all aspects of our lives.
A good friend and mentor of ours, John Coleman, used to talk about taking an inventory of who we are and being willing to throw away what we don’t need. Then we need to be consistent in the big things and the little things. I can remember being with our three boys at the Baltimore aquarium when they suggested that two of them could get in for half price when they were in fact too old. It is expensive to go places with three kids and very tempting to save a few dollars but a consistent commitment to honesty has been an important family value. Most of the challenges of the wider community play out in our own lives, in our families and in the teams we work with. And if it is not working there it won’t work in the community.
ENGAGING. If we are going to build community, it can’t be done from the sidelines. It requires an investment of our lives. There are lots of books of theory but it is in putting our own lives on the line that we learn lessons of real value. For our family it meant breaking free of any personal desires for isolation or protection. We chose to live in the city. We chose to live in a racially diverse neighborhood where all would feel welcome. It meant consciously reaching out to people in all sectors of the metropolitan area. It meant opening our home and making it a place where all could come together to talk and know each other. It meant a decision to enroll our three sons in the Richmond Public Schools and invest time as a family to make the experience work not only for them but to contribute something to the whole school community. All three have now graduated. They were well prepared for the excellent colleges they have attended but perhaps more important their experience has prepared them well to live in a world of diversity.
So then the question is how do I RESPOND to all that I discover in community. There will be wonderful moments of joy and friendship. Building relationships is the most important aspect. When we truly know people we can break free of stereotypes. But in community we will also meet conflict, pain, hurt, and difficulty. What is my response when things are tough? What do I do with the temptation to run away? How do I relinquish my need to be in control? When there was an issue of rezoning at the elementary school our kids attended one white parent said at a PTA meeting “We want diversity, but not to much diversity!” Over the course of one summer the school experienced white flight and we were faced with a choice of joining a stampede or holding true to our values. We decided to stay. How do I deal with the roadblocks in me and in others? Henri Nouwen talks about forgiveness as” the cement of community life. Forgiveness holds us together through good and bad times, and allows us to grow in mutual love.” Am I willing to let go of the pain and allow crisis and conflict to take friendship to a deeper level? Healing history is not just about what happened 100 hundred years ago it is also about what happened yesterday and what I need to do to put things right in my relationships.
None of this happens without RISKING. By nature I am fearful. I fear rejection by others or of being misunderstood by my own group. I fear that I maybe getting out on a limb, or that I might be getting into more than I bargained for. That I may be starting a conversation I don’t know how to continue. Risking means going toward the thing I am most afraid of. It is often the difficult first step that makes something new possible. The day we moved into our house in Richmond there was a knock at the door and there stood Audrey Burton who had come to welcome us to the neighborhood. Perhaps not a huge risk but the unknown is always a little risky. Over the years we have learned a great deal about risk-taking and the courage to change from Collie and Audrey Burton and in the process we have been given a precious friendship.
Over these five modules you will be creating a TOOLBOX. This is different from a keepsake box where we place things that are curious, precious or distant memories. Perhaps we wish we could set our personal lives apart in some safe place. Perhaps this is where we like to keep our faith and our values, in the keepsake box. But in this program you are going to discover how to shape and sharpen these as tools and maintain their effectiveness so they can be used effectively in community building.
To get further perspective on this we are going to go back to the year 1908. Some of you will have read the story of Frank Buchman on page 5 of the Connecting Communities handbook. Here is a man with a passionate social conscience, who at a certain point feels his life’s work has been destroyed by unjust action by six colleagues and whose anger and bitterness make him physically ill. Then he has an experience, in small church in northwest England, where he is confronted with the reality of his own pride, and the revelation that his work has become his idol, and he sees that his resentment against these six men made him the seventh wrong man. And he goes out and writes letters of apology, which he says was like writing in his own blood. But it was a moment of liberation.
It was the start of an extraordinary adventure of inner transformation, reconciliation and social change that now involves thousands of people of every race, every faith, and every culture. All based on the simple experience that when people become different the world around them becomes different. This movement became known first as the Oxford Group, then Moral Re-Armament and now as Initiatives of Change. Hope in the Cities is just one of the many expressions of this movement which is at work on every continent.
Buchman’s work also provided the foundations of the AA movement. The 12 steps are based entirely on principles developed by the Oxford Group. Another fruit was the growth of a new form of citizen diplomacy. Buchman’s work played a key role in the reconciliation between France and Germany following World War II, providing the leading model for international conflict resolution. His work supported several countries in their achievement of independence without violence, and even helped end civil wars. It provided an alternative to class warfare in industrial disputes on many continents. The work today includes peace building work in the Great Lakes region of Africa; bridge building between Muslims and Hindus in cities of India; and it has inspired a code of ethics for international business. Buchman’s special contribution was to provide a link between theory and practice, and between personal change and change in the wider society.
All these fruits can be traced to one root: a simple, difficult personal choice. Because he was honest about himself, Buchman had a way of bringing out the best in each person he met.
In my paper at the Denver conference, I quoted Charles Piguet and Michel Sentis, in their book The World at the Turning. They describe their years of work with people of all faiths and backgrounds on every continent, and they come to the conclusion that “hope in not confined to any one temple.” The intimate experiences of the heart and spirit, they say are “a reality which can be communicated and which every other human being can respond to.” But that reality has to be “stripped of the intellectual and religious verbalizing we normally clothe it in. “ Words, they caution, can hide internal poverty: “We need to rediscover the one universal language – a life lived out.”
“The life lived out” is the work of Initiatives of Change. And it is at the heart of Hope in the Cities and this program. Connecting communities is not a technique to be taught, but a spirit that is caught. If we are contagious, others will catch it. If not, no amount of training sessions or seminars will achieve the goal.
In May, we will explore the building and maintaining of teams. Probably nothing has been more important in the development of Hope in the Cities in Richmond than the experience of building a network of trust, which involves people of all sectors – whether they are CEOs of major corporations, or school administrators, or leaders of non-profit organizations, or elected officials or grassroots leaders.
When Tee Turner and I were in Sydney Australia two years ago we saw these words of wisdom on a billboard: pearls are formed around points of irritation. There is an important truth here, because very often those we work with are not those that we ourselves would have chosen.
How many community efforts fail because the very people who should be working together come into conflict through hurt feelings, jealousy, or pride? What happens when things go wrong? Do we allow wounds to fester? For eight years I was in conflict with a colleague. He felt I had failed to support him on a particular issue and even undermined him; I felt wrongly judged. A wall grew up. Even although we had been friends for many years, it got to the point where we could barely have a conversation. So here I was leading this effort for community reconciliation and at the same time I was deeply divided from one of my closest friends. One morning I thought, “What you are feeling does not matter. What does matter is that this person feels you have wronged him.” That day I wrote a very short letter asking his forgiveness for things I had done that had hurt him or made it hard for him to trust me. Up until that point, he had found it difficult even to enter my house. But a few days later he very graciously and with some courage drove 200 miles to have lunch with me. We restored our relationship. I’m telling you this because these are the kind of things, which, if left unhealed, can destroy our effectiveness.
All of us can talk about our successes. It’s much harder to talk about our failures. But in my experience, people are much more interested in my struggles and my difficulties. How do we use our personal narratives in ways that invite other people to join us in the journey?
The program that we will experience together is based on some basic assumptions that we want to leave with you and which we will explore together:
So how do we accompany each other on the journey? How do we enable each other to become the fullest person that we are meant to be? How do we build a network of trust throughout our communities? How do we live so that our communities become places of hope and creativity where the contribution of each persona is valued? The key factor in any “initiative of change” is not the originality of the project, the brilliance of individuals, the technical skills or even the funding. It’s the quality of our life, and the teamwork that we bring to the task. This is the adventure that we are embarking on together over these next months.
Copyright © 2005 Robert and Susan Corcoran
At a time when many in the world are wondering whether friendly relations are possible between those of Muslim and Christian background, the... ...read more! Order the DVD and see the remarkable friendship and healing between The Imam & the Pastor
BECOME A TRUSTBUILDER!
Connecting Communities Program offers an integrated approach to constructive community change to help communities overcome divisions of race, culture, economics and politics by creating a network of change makers. Hope in the Cities is now accepting applications! Contact us for more information!