Changing the View

This morning, we had our first session of the Independent Study portion of the Chicago program, and we had a guest speaker named Jody Kretzmann who seriously changed my views on the way in which communities and people who are not valued by our society should be viewed and treated.  He was there to introduced Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) which focuses on what a community already has instead of what it is lacking.

While the problems which exist in a community are important to examine and attempt to change, according to Mr. Kretzmann the way to do it isn't by showing a community what is wrong but building up the beneficial parts of the community to tackle fixable problems first. The part of the presentation that killed me (in the best way possible) was when he was describing a meeting that he had with a community member from the South Bronx, long considered one of the "toughest" neighborhoods in our country.  When he had asked her what had happened to her neighborhood to make it so tough, and hard to live in - she said that the worst thing that had happened was that people put her neighborhood in a prison.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the outside world had constructed walls around the South Bronx, but that her neighborhood was being constantly judged by outsiders who did not understand the world that she lived in.  Most of these people wanted to help, but themselves had never visited the neighborhood that they wanted to help.

While the people were trying to do something good by helping her neighborhood, they had no idea what the community members within the South Bronx saw as the largest problems, or the way that the community members would want to improve their community.  The prison in her mind were the ideas and conclusions that people came to when they thought of her neighborhood.

So, today I am going to work on figuring out the times when I have wanted to help someone, but instead put them in a box (or even worse, in a prison).