By Alexis Christensen
What happens when we become disillusioned with the work at hand? With the community we’ve cried for, lived in, believed in? How do we keep the picture of the beloved community from being stripped from our minds and hearts? What happens when hope seems like a far off dream?
As a community organizer, I stare straight into the eyes of these types of questions each day. Whether in the eyes of the people I work with or in the mirror reflecting my own hopelessness. I have seen tears, desperation, confusion, anger and angst in many people. Systems can feel too big, too difficult to maneuver and change, so how do we keep going? How do we live in a world with such great challenges?
For me, it is hope.
The Merriam-Webster definition of hope is “to expect with confidence.” I heard a sermon once where the pastor described hope as the confident expectation of good. I like that. When we face the difficulties of life and work in community, we cling to hope.
But the hope I’m talking about is more. This hope is a verb—it’s action. It’s seeing the endless challenges in life and saying yes again and again to the fight against injustice. It’s about my friends in the neighborhood who are often discounted, underutilized, and disrespected but still advocating for change together. It’s about showing up, speaking out, and holding fast. Hope is an element of good community organizing. In the process of listening, identifying leaders and topics of concerns, and gathering people together based on their self-interest, a thread of hope must be present if the effort is to be carried out effectively.
Hope motivates, inspires, and creates an environment of empowerment. I have seen parents lead initiatives in their schools, support their children and speak to power because of hope. I have seen churches and church members realize their capacity to impact their communities through their gifts and talents. I have seen neighborhood residents gather to create imaginative plans for change. The list is endless but the thread is the same, hope.
Hope follows me wherever I go when I remember that it is alive. At my office, in my car, on the streets, in the schools, it lingers. Author Barbara Kingsolver sums up this kind of hope in her book Animal Dreams: “Here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
So, Waco, let’s settle down and live under hope’s roof. And while we’re there, let’s turn that hope into action for transformation in our communities.
This week’s Act Locally Waco blog post was written by Alexis Christensen, a Community Organizer at Waco Community Development Corporation (Waco CDC). Would you be interested in writing for the Act Locally Waco blog? If so, contact [email protected].
by Caleb Reynolds, Baylor Student
“Did the faculty tell y’all not to talk to us?” are words that I will never forget.
When a homeless man named Cody asked if my “Christian” college told its students to avoid the poor I nearly broke down. Meeting this man opened my blind eyes. I saw a reality that I had not seen before, a reality where even though a person’s potential may be astoundingly high, he can be shut down because of his economic or social standing. I never would have seen this reality if it were not for a simple assignment in my English class. Our professor asked us to take a bus ride on Waco Transit to see what the surrounding community is like. Just a few streets over from my university I met a man who had a profound effect on me; he gave me a new perspective.
Cody is the type of man that would have been all too easy to pass by as I went to get snacks at the gas station across the street. As soon as I sat down to wait for the bus, he began to speak. He didn’t ask for money; he didn’t ask for food; he asked how I was. A common courtesy led to a deep conversation about both of us. Cody revealed his life to me. He was imprisoned until five years ago and started his path towards a better place three years ago. His reason to really change his life was the birth of his son. Because of his own experience growing up without a father, Cody was determined that history not repeat itself with his son. He explained his whole reason to try and be a better man stemmed from his relationship with Christ. Through Christ he was trying to fix his life, something he admitted was a struggle. He was dependent on his faith in God, and trying his best not to let worry in.
He said that he did not know much about Baylor other than that the students do not approach him. He said that he could tell from the second I began to talk with him that I had Christ in me. That is where his words hit me in the gut. This struggling child of God planted a question in me: Who was I and what was I doing?
I now find myself contacting Mission Waco, eager to see how I can help Cody and others like him. I find myself looking for time to help out those who are needier than I am. I see myself questioning things that I thought were set in stone. I used to look at my surroundings and say that Baylor was a bubble, but the real problem was that I was not looking closely enough. With a closer look, I realize I can see homeless people from my window. It is easier to walk to worship with the homeless people gathered on Sundays at the Church under the Bridge than to any of my classes.
After talking with Cody, I realize, whether I want to admit it or not, my bubble includes people in need. My bubble does include Baylor, a school that I love because of the Christian values we have in common. Meeting Cody, however, made me question whether I really stood for these values, or whether I just “talked the talk” because it helped me fit in. He made me realize that these values have implications on my life. I cannot just be the stereotypical college student. I can’t just ignore a suffering person; that person is a suffering child of God. Cody made me see that claiming to be a Christian and claiming to be going into full time vocational Ministry doesn’t make me what I say. The only way those things can be true is if I live them. I can claim that I am a fan of something, but if I never talked about it or identified myself with it, who would know what I cheered for?
On the surface it may look like my life is not too different than before I met Cody. I’m still at Baylor. I still live in Penland, and I still plan to major in communications. But my life has changed. Since meeting Cody I care for the people that are part of the city. I now care that this man is jobless and homeless, instead of just letting him pass through my life. I am a typical Baylor student that, because of a random project, talked to a random man, and now I am changed. This assignment had an effect on me, and for the better. It gave me a new outlook on my life. An outlook that now involves others.
This week’s Act Locally Waco blog post is by Caleb Reynolds. Caleb is a freshman communications major from Carrollton, Texas. He met Cody as part of an assignment in his “Writing in the Age of Digital Media” class ,fall 2013, at Baylor University. If you are interested in writing for the Act Locally Waco blog, please contact Ashley Thornton at [email protected].
By Ashley Bean Thornton
Like many White, middle-class Americans, I grew up understanding life as a competition, a footrace. The ones who run the fastest, and by that I mean work the hardest, win the prizes. I knew good, hardworking people – my parents for example – who were winning, and I expected to be a good, hardworking person who would also win. In fact, that is exactly how it has played out so far.
Of course… to feel good about winning, you have to believe the race is fair.
I don’t remember having “Black History Month” when I was in school, but we definitely studied slavery and the Civil War. We saw slides of the Little Rock Nine being escorted to class by the National Guard, and of White people turning dogs and fire hoses on Black people. We learned about Rosa Parks taking her seat on the bus in Montgomery, and we learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the “I have a Dream” speech.
Without even thinking about it, I interpreted all of this through my footrace metaphor, like so: (1) Slavery was an unthinkably horrible sin. (2) Even after slavery ended, the race was not fair. White people cheated – a lot. (3) Thanks to Dr. King, and the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, Black people were able to use the legal system to make the race fair. Conclusion: Things were terrible before, but they are OK now; we can quit worrying so much about the Black/White thing, and just concentrate on running as fast as we can.
I was fairly comfortable with this conclusion for a long time.
Recently I came across a 2013 Pew Research Center Report partially titled “King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal.” According to this report, Black Americans are nearly three times as likely as White Americans to have incomes below the poverty guideline. The median net worth (wealth) for White households is more than ten times that of Black households, and Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as White men. With these facts in mind, I have to ask myself an uncomfortable question: if the race is fair, why do we continue to see such huge disparities?
It seems blindingly obvious now, but it took me a long time to realize that if I wanted to begin to untangle the knot of reasons behind these differences I needed to tweak my footrace metaphor. In my mind the race for success had always been an individual event. If I win it is because of my hard work; if I lose it’s because I should have worked harder. If you lose…well … you get the picture. I still believe this is the truth; it’s just not the whole truth. Hard work matters, but it’s also important to realize that the race is not, and never has been, an individual event. It’s a relay.
Let’s say, for example, my White grandparents saved their money and bought a house in the suburbs back in the 40’s. That house increased in value and became part of the nest egg my parents used to get an even nicer house in an even better neighborhood. That meant I got to go to a really good high school, and from there to a good university, and from there to a good job. Meanwhile Black grandparents in the 40’s didn’t get to buy that house in the suburbs because of prejudicial deed restrictions (not to mention inhospitable neighbors). To make matters worse, no (White owned) bank would loan them the money to build a nice house in a Black neighborhood because it was “too high risk.” That meant no nest egg, no nicer house for their kids, and a not so great high school in a declining neighborhood for their grandkids – my peers. Multiply this scenario by thousands of Black and White grandparents and you begin to see one reason why there is such a huge disparity in wealth between Black and White households today.
Even if the leg of the relay I’m running now is reasonably fair (or at least fair-er), the previous legs of the race were seriously rigged in favor of White people. I was way, way ahead before I ever started to run.
I do not know exactly what we should do to even out the disparities that have come about as a result of the inequities of the past. Should we invest more in public schools? In rebuilding high poverty neighborhoods? Should we provide more support to Black-owned businesses? Should we take a hard look at our legal system? Maybe we should do all of these things; maybe none of them; maybe there are other creative solutions I can’t even imagine. I don’t know. I just know that there is a limit to how much time even a great athlete can make up in the last lap of a relay. If we care about reducing the Black/White disparities described above any time soon, we are going to have to do something more than just telling people to “run as fast as you can.”
This week’s Act Locally Waco blog post is by Ashley Bean Thornton, the Manager of the www.www.actlocallywaco.org website and the editor of the Friday Update newsletter. The Act Locally Waco blog publishes posts with a connection to these aspirations for Waco. If you are interested in writing for the Act Locally Waco Blog, please email [email protected] for more information.
By Kelsey Scherer
A couple months ago, I was driving through Austin on the way to a conference for work. I glanced at an overpass to see these words scrawled across the concrete wall:
“Collaboration is currency”
The phrase stunned me with its elegant simplicity.
Encouraging community collaboration, dialogue, and connection is a huge part of what I do as a Child Hunger Outreach Specialist at Texas Hunger Initiative’s Waco office. Still, I regularly struggle to clearly outline the role and value of collaboration in the work I do. I came into this position with well-intentioned ideas about the importance of collaboration, and yet have struggled to pursue earnest, engaged collaboration as much as I had hoped.
As I strain toward being a part of the renewal of this beautiful city with all of its untapped potential, perhaps it’s easier to begin with an honest reminder of what is not currency.
My privilege is not currency. My whiteness is not currency. My femininity is not currency. These are things which I admit, however uncomfortably, that I have used to my advantage for social or professional gain at various points in my journey. But collaboration – collaboration is a different story, and an entirely different currency, because it doesn’t belong to me. I can’t own it, steal it, or borrow it. Collaboration is currency which may be freely used, exchanged, and debated by all – which the reduced and exclusive currencies of culturally normative gender, race, wealth, or health status cannot. Regardless of my background and experience, genuine collaboration insists that my voice is not the one that matters, and that collectively we can achieve, learn, grow, and heal more together than we can apart.
While collaboration may seem like a sexy term – and we may be tempted to extol its virtues and slip it into conversation to further our agendas – collaboration lived out is anything but sexy. It’s messy, confusing, and hard to define. As soon as we find ourselves patting each other on the back for “collaboration well done,” we find another voice that has been excluded, another empty chair that should have been filled and pulled up to the table. Collaboration forces me to come to terms with what I lack. It reminds me that I do not know my neighbor, and if I don’t know my neighbor, I cannot possibly love my neighbor well.
Using collaboration as currency starts to chip away at the uneven playing field to which we arrive each day – a field which benefits me unfairly, to the detriment of others. Collaboration, however amorphous and hard to define, holds great promise for restoring dignity and humanity to people whose unique voices have been silenced for too long. Collaboration rightly understood is the only way out of the predicament in which we find ourselves. Trapped by isms, by poverty, by hunger, by finger-pointing and poor-blaming, collaboration is like a first awe-inspiring glance into the Grand Canyon. We may be impressed by its beauty and potential, but none of us are so foolish as to think it can be conquered or wrested away for our own purposes.
Kelsey Scherer joins the Act Locally Waco team to blog about Food Security and related issues. She is a Child Hunger Outreach Specialist at Texas Hunger Initiative’s Waco Regional Office. Kelsey is also a team member for the CHAMPS grant. The CHAMPS project aims to equip city leaders, anti-hunger groups, and the broader community to more effectively combat child hunger with the help of summer and afterschool meal programs.
by Megan Henderson, Executive Director, Waco Downtown Development Corporation
There are so many notions of what “good” means in relation to downtown. Some folks remember a time when the sidewalks were crowded and most of what a family needed could be – and was – purchased there. Young folks picture a place filled with hip spaces, where they and their friends would be delighted by high-end trends and nightlife. Plenty of us see small shops and restaurants beginning to multiply and Cross-fit enthusiasts running by in groups and feel pretty good about where we are right now.
I do think, though, that there is a real aspiration toward the next level – and I’d like to try to describe what that might be and look like, and what we’re all doing to help get there.
I think of the Downtown Development Corporation’s job as nurturing districts. There are several in Greater Downtown, and I love them all for different reasons, and we aspire to support and nurture all of them. But today I want to talk about the Central district, the one that’s mainly Austin Avenue with parts of Franklin and Washington. It’s the furthest along, but it’s not quite to the level when I think we will have “arrived” as a district.
In her recent visit, development consultant Michele Reeves discussed the notion of breaking through from an emerging into a transitional district in this way: when you’re a thriving transitional district, the district itself is the destination – not just a particular business.
Think of Lula Jane’s. It’s a destination business. Folks go there from all over the place. But could you name the five businesses closest to it? There’s a powerful sense of place on Elm Avenue, but there is not yet a business district that creates foot traffic from one business to another. Now think of the 600 – 700 blocks of Austin Avenue, beginning with Sergio’s and Jake’s and ending with the Palladium and the Hippodrome. You could probably name several businesses in those two blocks, and at least once or twice (if you’re like me, that is) you’ve been to eat at Jake’s and been lured into Melange by their sidewalk sale, or walked by on your way somewhere else and seen friends going into Klassy Glass. There’s beginning to be enough interesting stuff going on within a small enough space that it spills over.
The best time, however, is often on First Friday evenings, when many businesses have special events and promotions and stay open later. This is definitely a time when the Central district can truly be its own destination for many folks – when there is enough going on for a group of friends can plan to meet at one spot to park, then figure it out from there – maybe a little shopping, dinner, music – and have confidence that they’ll have fun without a plan.
This is our aspiration for all of our districts – a time when you can say “meet me downtown,” or “meet me on Elm,” or “meet me on Colcord” and figure it out from there.
Next steps for Central district? Franklin Place, Hippodrome, Stratton and Stratton Square are all in the pipeline within a 2-block radius offering a combination of entertainment, food, and other attractions including over 100 new residences and upwards of 200 residents. In the same 2-block radius Muddle – a new watering hole and live-music venue – and thInc Space – an entrepreneurship and innovation hub where creative types work and generate cross-pollination of ideas – are new to the area and adding more ingredients and flavors to this spicy local brew.
Local developers are making these great projects happen. The Greater Waco Chamber is driving thInc Space. The Downtown Development Corporation is facilitating the Stratton development. The TIF and PID (more on them later) are supporting all of this with strategic investments in the built environment and in enhanced services and public events.
What can you do? COME ON DOWN TO DOWNTOWN. Especially on First Fridays, but every time’s important. Spend some time and money. Watch how they make coffee at Dichotomy, shop for ties at Suit City – go somewhere you’ve never been before, and think to yourself…”I just like to head downtown, and figure it out from there.”
This week’s post was written by Megan Henderson, Executive Director of the Waco Downtown Development Corporation. You can get in touch with her at [email protected]. To keep up with what’s happening downtown, like the Waco Downtown Development Corporation Facebook Page.
by Josh Lawson, Mentoring Advocate and Director of Community Engagement at Antioch Community Church
There is an old adage that says, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Or as some pessimists would chide, “The HOLE is greater than the sum of its parts.” As we look around our city, we can see that there are some incredible things happening. One of the main things that we have also noticed is that many of those great things are not working in unison.
The reason is pretty simple: working in unison is messy and it takes time. And many of the people doing these great things are just like me: they are “get-it-done” type of people. They don’t want to talk about doing something; they simply want to do it.
But what happens all too often is that we begin “doing” and we duplicate services, or we take on ministries or events that we aren’t great at. We expend so much energy doing so many things and at the end of the day we are tired and wondering if it’s even working.
If I have learned anything while working in our city it is this simple truth: You have to focus on what you do great AND make the effort to work with others.
It is only when you combine these two that you really begin to see the power of Collective Impact happen.
Several years back during the World Cup hosted by South Africa, the power of Collective Impact took center stage. During each match you could hear a slight droning buzz. And then without warning that buzz would turn into a resounding, earth-shaking roar.
WAAHHHHH…WAAAHHHHH” It sounded like a million bees were swarming our living rooms. What was the culprit? A poor sound system? A mis-feed through the cable provider? Nope. It was the sound of tens of thousands of vuvuzelas being trumpeted in unison by tens of thousands of rabid fans.
One fan playing one vuvuzela made no impact. It’s doubtful it could be heard on the field much less across the globe on television. But tens of thousands of fans blowing their horns as loud as they could muster literally impacted the world.
They each picked up their own vuvuzela, and they joined together for a collective impact.
For our community here in Waco, there are great things happening. And I believe that if we want to see some even greater traction happen, the next step is for each of us to consider what we are great at and FOCUS on doing that with excellence AND join forces with others who are doing incredible work.
This week’s Act Locally Waco blog post is by Josh Lawson, Director of Community Engagement at Antioch Community Church. One of his passions is mentoring. If you would like to learn more about mentoring in Waco, please visit this website to learn how you can get involved: www.mentorwaco.com . If you would be interested in blogging for Act Locally Waco, please email [email protected] to express your interest.
by Phil York, Act Locally Waco Housing and Homelessness Policy blogger
The previous months welcomed the annual holiday season. Some of us spent time unwrapping gifts with high anticipation for what would be revealed underneath the glitter and flashy paper. In one of our previous posts we talked about the rise of homelessness among a few specific demographic groups. Today we will start to “unwrap” one of those groups as we learn a bit more about homelessness among children. The Charles A. Dana Center of The University of Texas reports that “over a course of a year, between 2.3 and 3.5 million people will experience homelessness in the United States, of which between 900,000 and 1.4 million will be children.”
Unfortunately, any conversation about homelessness must depend on ranges or estimates. As you might imagine, the very nature of homelessness makes it difficult to accurately count the people who are experiencing that situation. It is particularly challenging to get an accurate count of our homeless children and youth because the federal definition of “homelessness” as it applies to children is quite complex.
Children are considered homeless if they:
- Are abandoned in hospitals.
- Are awaiting foster-care placement.
- Are living in environments not intended for habitation such as cars, parks, motels, public spaces, train stations.
- Are living in substandard housing.
- Are living in transitional housing.
- Are sharing housing of others because of loss of housing, economic hardship.
- Are displaced by a natural disaster.
- Are fleeing a domestic abuse situation.
- Are living temporarily with a relative in another town because a parent is hospitalized for illness or surgery.
- Are immigrant students living in a homeless situation, without regard to whether they are in the US legally or illegally.
As you can see, child homelessness is more difficult to define than it might at first appear. This makes it even more difficult to observe. For example, a third grade student in WISD might technically have a roof over her head for the night, yet still suffer from inadequate housing. She would not be counted in a “point in time” count of those living on the street, but she is still considered homeless by the federal definition. Despite this complicated definition, thanks to the diligent work of the Homeless Outreach Services at WISD and the City of Waco we are able to estimate the number of homeless children in Waco ISD. That number, according to a May 2013 report by KXXV news is right around 1,500.
This definition of child homelessness is codified in a law called the McKinny-Vento Act. This law provides protections to youth that fall under the definition of homelessness and who are 21 and under (or until high school graduation in some states). Each school district is required by law to have a McKinny-Vento specialist available on staff to serve, protect and preserve the rights of homeless students. The specialist’s duties include:
- Identification of homeless children.
- Ensuring that homeless children enroll in and have a fair opportunity to succeed in school.
- Making referrals to health care, dental, mental health and other appropriate services.
- Informing parents and guardians of the educational and related opportunities available to their children and provide them with meaningful opportunities to participate in that education.
- Disseminating public notice of educational rights.
- Informing families and youth about transportation services and assisting them in accessing transportation.
The McKinny-Vento specialist for Waco ISD is Cheryl Pooler. She shared some insights about her work in a 2013 interview with KWBU. In the interview, Ms. Pooler described the difficulty of the first duty of her post: simply identifying students who may be eligible for programs.
National, state and local realities compel policy such as the McKinny-Vento Act which broadens the definition of homelessness among youth. This is important because homelessness is a complex issue that cannot be addressed without definitions and policies that are flexible enough to meet the complexity. But with complexity comes bureaucracy, including the documentation obstacles Ms. Pooler described in her interview.
The McKinny-Vento Act is not a simple piece of legislation. The definition of homelessness for children is not simple. Even the most basic task of figuring out how many homeless children we have in Waco is not simple. Perhaps we should let all of this legal complexity serve to remind us that life as a homeless child is certainly not simple. Consider for a moment how difficult it would be for a child experiencing any of the situations enumerated in the federal definition of homelessness to focus on school work.
“Unwrapping” the challenge of child homelessness is not a simple endeavor. Much more remains to be unwrapped. We will continue to unwrap homelessness, understand its scope and the policies around it in future posts.
Phil York, Coordinator of Grants and Contracts at Waco Habitat for Humanity is a self-described “policy nerd;” he is also the Act Locally Waco housing and homelessness policy blogger. You can direct questions to Phil to [email protected]. Would you be interested in blogging for Act Locally Waco? If so please email [email protected].
By Ashley Bean Thornton
In 2011 my husband and I participated in a fantastic program called a Church Swap. It was organized by Ramona Curtis and Mia Moody-Ramirez under the auspices of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, The Waco Foundation and the Waco Community Race Relations Coalition. The central element of the program was (as the name suggests) swapping churches for three months: White people going to African-American churches and African-American people going to White churches. In addition to that central experience, the funding for the project also paid for a group of us “church-swappers” to go together on a Civil Rights Tour. One of the stops on the tour was the National Civil Rights Museum which is housed in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. You may remember the Lorraine Motel as the site where the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
As you might imagine, touring that motel and seeing the exact spot where the assassination took place is an emotional experience. It was eerie, sad, angering, inspiring …the list of feelings goes on. It would be an understatement to say it gave me quite a bit to think about. In the midst of this reflection, I wrote my mom a letter telling her about our visit to the museum, sharing some of my feelings and asking her if she had any particular memories of what it was like during the time when the assassination happened. She surprised me by writing back, “You might not remember it, but we were living in Memphis on Tahiti Lane when MLK was killed.”
I didn’t remember that at all. I knew we had lived in Memphis for a couple of years when I was little, but I hadn’t worked out the dates to figure out that we were there when the assassination took place. It turns out I was six.
When I got home from the tour, I dug through some old pictures and found a picture of myself at that age. In the picture I’m standing with my Granny Mears. Up until that point I guess I had always thought of Dr. King as a “super hero,” larger than life, fundamentally different from me and people I know. Even though I knew intellectually that his assassination took place during my lifetime, it was never really “real” to me. I thought of it as something that happened a long time ago in a place very different from any place I had been – another time, another world. In other words, I had never thought of Dr. King as a regular person.
Seeing this picture of myself at the age I was when he was killed, and finding out that I was living in the same city where he was killed, at the time that he was killed, changed my way of thinking about him. I feel a more concrete human connection. He was a “regular person, ” a human being like me. I think it is important for me to remember that my heroes are human beings like me. They live in the same cities where I live. They eat the same food and drink the same water. They probably get pictures of themselves taken with their grannies. As a part of our honor and reverence for Dr. King and other personal heroes, it is important to remember they are not “super-heroes from another dimension.” They are not fundamentally different from the rest of us. They are fundamentally the same. Or perhaps more to the point, we are fundamentally the same as them. We share the same responsibility to do our part to make this world the place it should be. To forget or ignore that most basic of facts is a way of letting ourselves – myself – off the hook.
By Ashley Bean Thornton
One of the best things I did last year was to participate in the KWBU pledge drive for the first time. I love KWBU; I love the people who work at KWBU; and I love that Waco is the kind of community that supports a public radio station, so when they asked, I was glad to help. I only live about three miles from my work, however, and I do most of my radio listening in the car. This limits my exposure to some of the shows. As the time for the pledge drive drew closer, I felt the need to do a little extra NPR-loading in order to at least give the illusion of knowing what I was talking about during my “on-air” debut as a pledge-encourager. So it was that I listened to my first Ted Radio Hour, and so it was that I was exposed to a new idea that has profoundly deepened my thinking about building a community together.
This new idea was a gift from Chimamanda Adichie, a storyteller and writer from Nigeria. Her Ted Talk is entitled “What Are The Dangers Of A Single Story? It is a beautiful talk, made more delightful by hearing it in her own engaging voice. A story she tells toward the beginning of her speech captures the heart of her main idea for me, here it is:
“I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.
Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.”
Adichie goes on to tell how, when she came to America as a student, she experienced firsthand the negative effects of the single story. Most Americans she met had a single story about Africa – a story of deprivation and backwardness – and that lens distorted their view of her. She explains in the speech that this notion of a “single story” is inseparable from the idea of power. A profound kind of power is the power to tell a story about a person, or a people, and to have that story “stick” as the definitive or “true” story.
Near the end of the talk she offers this statement: “The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.”
Wow! I don’t know if I helped KWBU raise any money during their pledge drive, but I will be thankful for a long time for the gift of this idea.
Who among us wants to be defined by a single story, especially if that single story is the story of our weakest moment or the worst thing about us? How often have we done that to someone else? Have we taken bad advantage when we were in the position of power to make a story stick? How do we approach some of our local challenges differently when we make sure to let the stories of resilience, creativity, fun, faith, work and determination drive our work along with the stories of poverty, need, mistakes, prejudice and disappointment? What if we choose not to flatten and simplify our understanding of each other, but to enrich and complicate that understanding by gathering more stories? What if people take back the power and responsibility of telling their own stories? What kind of world – what kind of Waco – might we build if we remember together that there is always more than a single story?
by Josh Lawson, Director of Community Engagement, Antioch Community Church
Besides being one of the longest and most annoying children’s songs known to man, “There’s a Hole in My Bucket,” is actually a great representation of what community development feels like. If you haven’t heard the song before, it is a winding conversation between “Dear Liza” and “Dear Henry” where Henry is trying to fix the hole in his bucket, but his attempts to fix it only lead him to finding more problems. Eventually he is left back at the original problem: the hole in his bucket. We all know that there is a problem in our community, but all too often the solution to that problem only brings up more problems! The educational system is not any different.
We know that kids need a better education, but as we dig in deeper and try to come up with a solution, we begin to see a web of problems. Poverty, hunger, lack of parental involvement, homelessness and learning disabilities all come together to form a massive game of pick-up sticks.
All too often, the magnitude of the problem causes those who can create the greatest change to simply give up.
But, that is never the answer. You have to start somewhere. And, I believe that for our community, mentoring is a fantastic place to start.
Now, don’t let me fool you, mentoring is not a silver bullet. We will not bring an end to poverty by simply mentoring kids, BUT it is one of the key components to helping us build a better community.
Take a look at a few of these powerful stats:
- Youth with mentors are: 46% less likely to begin using illegal drugs, 25% less likely to begin using alcohol, 37% less likely to lie to a parent, and 32% less likely to hit someone.
- Those with a mentor have also shown that they have better attitudes about school, higher college enrollment rates, enhanced self-esteem, improved interpersonal skills and decreased drop-out rates.
- And those youth who graduate high school are less likely to be imprisoned, become a single mother or become unemployed.
Mentoring can make an incredible difference. January has been designated as National Mentoring Month, so it is the perfect time to set a goal to become a mentor for a youth this year. Even if you can’t be a mentor yourself, you can become an advocate for mentoring by encouraging others to get involved in the life of a young person. It matters and it is a small step in the right direction.
There is a hole in our bucket, but we can do something. We can be a mentor.
To find out more about being a mentor or to connect with a local mentoring agency, please feel free to email Josh Lawson at [email protected]. For a list of organizations in town with mentoring programs, click here: Mentoring Organizations in Waco.
This week’s Act Locally Waco blog post is by Josh Lawson, Director of Community Engagement at Antioch Community Church. If you would be interested in blogging for Act Locally Waco, please email [email protected] to express your interest.