Al Etmanski and John McKnight at Community: Programs and Policies

I was born in 1931. Nobody else in this room must have been born that long ago. That was the Depression on full scale at that time. I lived in a sort of lower-income neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, a working-class neighborhood. It was also a neighborhood where a lot of people began to come from the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky. We would say today Appalachians; back then they would say hillbillies. My mother was an Irish American. Maybe in the early '30s, an Appalachian family came in and moved into the house next door to us. I know that really worried my mother. They didn't have clothes that she thought were clean and seemed to be healthy correctly, so she sort of warned us against associating with them. Then Mr. Paul, the husband of the family next door, lost his job. Immediately, my mother went next door and said to Mrs. Paul, 'I'll make dinner for you until he gets a job each night.' It was four years before he got a job. So every evening there were five—I had one brother and sister, there were three children and two adults in my family, and then there were four in theirs. For four years, my mother took dinner to them because my father had a job when paying jobs were scarce. We had a car, a good car still to move. And Mr. Paul, when he had to really go someplace, would come next door to us and ask my father to drive him. Some other people in the neighborhood, now what we know historically, is that my mother is not acting as an individual. She was doing what people did. At least in the United States, we know that the New Deal reforms didn't even reach neighborhoods until about 1935. So there were a third of the people unemployed for five years of peace before relief came, and nobody started industries because people took care of each other. When I was about 30, I was reflecting on this whole experience and I said to my mother, 'You know, why did you take dinner all those years over to the Pauls, because you don't like hillbillies?' And she said to me, 'Well, they were my neighbors.' And that was the answer. So she was saying, 'I lived in a culture that said in a place, the people here support each other, and it would be unheard of and exceptional if you didn't do what you did.' So I think if they were here today, they would wonder how many people in how many neighborhoods, when people are unemployed or their houses are going into foreclosure, would step forward and say... So I think the great adventure ahead of the people in this room is how can we care for each other, and not by saying just hello or having a block party.

I was in a department at Northwestern University, as a grad student, which was called Public Address and Group Communication, and had a major focus on communication in small groups, a developing field. But more important was that there was a faculty of seven in that department. When we were new students, all our members sat up on the stage and the head of the department stood up and said, 'We are here to try to aid you in developing the skills of being good citizens.' I wonder how many universities do that today. I know the one I came from is now the technocratic trade institute. I think so much of what we call education has drifted into a celebration of a life within the culture of technology, and it gets expressed in one way in universities with a heavy focus on methodology, whereas we had a heavy focus on community, on the meaning of associational life, on the value of discourse.

In Chicago, I've lived almost all my old life. I got to know a man named Sargent Shriver, who was the brother-in-law of Bobby and Jack, and he was head of the Catholic Interracial Council in Chicago. I was involved in interracial relations. So when Jack was elected, he chose people to come into the government. He was a transition director. John Kennedy signed an executive order requiring all government contractors to engage in a now-famous phrase: affirmative action. Nobody in the government knew anything about what affirmative action might be. It meant more than stop discriminating; you're going to have to do something affirmative to credit the past. So they recruited some people to come in and form a team to establish affirmative action, and I got individual Sarge as one of those people. It was a huge learning for me about government. We were able in three years to change what was going on in terms of employment of African American people in the United States more in three years than it happened in all of history, because of the power of the government to begin to affirmatively say, 'We in no way will support discrimination by anybody that gets our money, and we will remind you to do more than that.' So I've always had this deep respect for the power of government to do certain kinds of things, and not respect for its ability to do other kinds of things. But this was a huge, wonderful liberation movement that just swept through American industry within three years. Now I learned another thing maybe 20 years later. It occurred to me that Hitler probably had a bureau in his government which he used for the exact reverse purposes of the group I was in: to promote discrimination and to have affirmative action to eliminate people of Jewish heritage. So what that says to me is governments are amoral. They're not moral; they're able. So the real question is how do we keep them moral? I think we'll never do it internally. What we mean by democracy is the possibility that in combination, citizens might keep the government, which is amoral, on the moral side of the equation. But citizens, I think, start locally. If locally people don't have the experience of working together to make their society more livable, and they are individuals who are just consumers, democracy is on the way out. Democracy is the land where citizens have power to have a vision for the future and the capacity to be the principal producers of that future. Those are the powers from which the democratic experience and the possibility of the bigger systems grows.

That's right. I linked very strongly in my mind that every question of strengthening community is about strengthening the base of democracy. They are the same phenomena. A citizen is not a consumer. If you are an individual living in a neighborhood who says hello to three or four people and that's your collective experience as a neighbor, and you basically buy your life from professionals and corporations, that's got nothing to do with democracy. It's the opposite of community. So the basic experiential base for democracy is our knowing what a neighbor means. Then we can speak to the people in power to say, 'You reflect what we do. You support what we create.'

Legally, legally. And what you're arguing is, in a real sense, to yank it back, take it back, bring it back where it belongs, strengthen it, nurture it, grow it, and that will in turn strengthen the state as a manifestation of democracy instead of... but...

To enhance democracy and community. Those two things, but they are the flip side, same point. Community is tied up with care and with neighborliness, but equipped with the capacity to come together to make our lives better, not to buy our lives but to create a life that's better.

Well, I started out my professional life as a neighborhood organizer. The godfather of neighborhood organizing at that time, and still for a lot of people, was a guy named Saul Alinsky. His basic guide is called 'Reveille for Radicals' or 'Rules for Radicals.' That certainly was a major influence on me. In fact, I read that book when I was in high school and decided that's what I wanted to do. Then I went to college in Chicago, and there was Alinsky, so it was a big influence on me. The other person is Ivan Illich. He wrote a whole series of books, any of which I could commend. Go to the library or the internet and you could see all the books he wrote. The one that I think might have been the most influential was one of his earlier books called 'Deschooling Society.' It is a profound critique of institutional production of something called education. Illich once said to me early on, 'John, how did you ever get this touching idea that the way you would know something is by going to a school?' It's like somebody might say, 'How did you ever come to believe that you put a leech on your body and it sucked the blood out and you'd be better?' He had a huge influence on me because he gave me words for what I knew. He wrote another book called 'Medical Nemesis' for people who believe that the profession of medicine has much to do with health. This book will help you understand that's a curious belief and it's misleading. I've picked those two early in my life. And David Cayley, who you've worked with as Paul mentioned earlier, has two books I believe out. One is in conversation with Ivan Illich, and the other is 'Rivers North of the Future,' which I also commend to you, which is a treatise on religious thought. So both Canadian perspectives on Illich's thinking. One of the things that Illich helped me so much with is that he never started with the institutional assumption. If you're concerned about health, never start by saying, 'What can we do about medicine?' If you're concerned about knowledge and wisdom, never start by saying, 'How can we have a better school?' You're right across the institutional spectrum. Start with the condition you're interested in and say, 'How can our neighborhood be a place that is the basic source of healthfulness?' So for anybody in policy work, it seems to me that a lot of policy work—and I worked at a research institute, a policy research institute at a university—is trying to figure out how an institution can finally work by having to do more of what has been done. That won't work. Then we reserve at the far end of what an institution can do for our well-being. In fact, we may be at that place where if you can see the limits of institutions as the source of well-being, but we obviously are not well, where do you turn? That's what this gathering is about.

Well, I'm maybe clearer about that than I used to be. What I see if I'm in a discussion, the place that I'm coming from, what I see is that there is in every neighborhood a huge invisible set of possibilities that aren't identified or discovered. The capacities, resources, assets, and possibilities of neighborhoods tend to be invisible, whereas what institutions do is always visible, accounted, advertised, proclaimed. But if health has more to do with the relationship of you and your neighbors—there's all kinds of research that shows that—where is that invisible? Who pays attention to that? But policy might in some way support that. So at this point in my life, I am most interested in the processes that make visible the invisible capacities that exist in local people's own abilities and the associations that they create. A lot of our work today is how do you do that. I'll have a couple workshops, so I'm going to explore that in more detail.

That's it. For people here from Canada who are interested, years ago I had some opportunity to be with some people in Prince George. They became aware that they didn't know what the associational base was. So a small amount of people called themselves Project Friendship, worked with the local junior college, and they created a community directory of associations. There were, probably 10 years ago, 1,230 associations there. You could get that from Project Friendship in Prince George, I think on the internet. You could get this directory. Nothing I could commend more to enhance the visibility of the possibilities of the community. For us everywhere to begin to say, 'Look at this rich associational base.' We've just completed a study in a small town in which we try to identify all the associations and the public benefits they provide. It's just incredible when you see what is coming in terms of welfare unseen and unrecognized by the associational vocabulary. So I'm glad you mentioned Prince George.

I've thought a lot about that because I work proportionately more in Canada than in the U.S. So why spend so much time in my life here? From my perspective, I think there are several reasons. The first is at a local level, it's pretty clear to me that there is a culture of cooperation that is much stronger at the local level in the U.S. I think it grew out of a different kind of history. It wasn't a history that glorified the frontier. That whole idea is something sort of a joke about Canada, but it's just a gift to me. That is a kind of egalitarian humility. I just feel there's a lack of arrogance here. That's a great gift. The worst thing in the world is in the United States we have this huge military which allows us to always think that the way you solve a problem is with a gun. But if you don't have that, it allows you to be a real problem solver because you never solve a problem with a gun. In that sense, I think the lack of arrogance grown from not having the imperial impulse is just one of the things I feel here. The other thing has to do with scale. There are 10 times more people in the United States than there are in Canada. One of the things that really strikes me because I'm with small groups in neighborhoods in the U.S. and I'm with small groups in neighborhoods in Canada, there's a difference. Generally speaking, in Canada, to my amazement, I can hear a group of people in the United States talking in the neighborhood about what could be done and then concluding they can't do it because everything is too big. But because of scale, I think here I just constantly am amazed. I've been in a group of 10 people and they're talking about something that might be done and they get it done. You know why? They believe they can do it. They believe that they can make their vision come true. That belief is the threshold to all local change. If I don't believe, I have a vision but I don't believe I can make it come true, then slowly but surely I become... The scale, there's something wonderful here I see over and over again: people doing what community and democracy are all about, sitting down, coming to a common vision, and then saying, 'We can do it.' I've learned so much in Canada. It seems to me that there is more of what my mother would call 'being neighborly' than I would see in most places in the U.S., for the reasons I just indicated. So that's why I always learn when I come here, because I'm seeing something I desire more than I can usually see it in the U.S. However, I think in the larger sense, both Canada and the United States and all industrialized societies have this major force pushing toward professionalism, technology, big systems as the way to make a better life. So resisting that and having an alternative is the future of community and democracy, I believe. There is nothing—having great institutions, improving, reforming our institutions—has nothing to do with democracy. When I was a kid, the greatest institutions were in place called Germany. If you were sick and had a lot of money, you went to Germany to be cured because their medical system, doctors were better than ours. So the 20th century gave us two great lessons about this force: once called Nazi Germany, great institutions, no freedom of expression, versus... and then we tried another way, and it's called Soviet communism, great institutions, no democracy, no freedom to give your gift, no power to have an association. So what we're talking about here, maintaining and reviving, is what makes a democracy. All our investment in being better professionals and making our institutions better will never come to anything in the long run if we don't have people whose gifts are shared locally and who in their associations together envision and carry out and produce a place that is healthful and just. So we are in a struggle. But the wonderful thing is that every one of us lives in a place that is or can be a community. So the great possibility is where you live, and to discover what people know and can do that is a major force in the redefinition of what's the center of society. If communities are the center of society, then what's there is a rich set of gifts and capacities and a powerful set of associations. They are invisible. They are what makes democracy. In our associational life, we take the three powers that make a democracy: the power to decide what needs to be done, the power to decide how it will be done, and the power to do it. To the degree that we give those three powers to institutions, we have lost the only power that makes a difference in the long run.

I think in almost all professional fields, there's a wing that has developed in the last 20 or 30 years of people who recognize the dilemma of how do we interface with local people at a local place in ways that are not imperial, that are not replacing their past. So I think that's changed. You can see it in public health, you can see it in police departments, you can see it in education, you can see it even in corporations. So there's an increasing body of people—I call them a wing of each institution—who are much more aware than they were of this kind of dilemma. I think that's the positive thing. I'll bet that's who's in this room, a lot of the people who are in this room. That's why I work with the university. So that's good. Now if we have that consciousness, what do we do? How do we act? One possibility is we say, 'Well, I'm here on the wing, and what I'm trying to do is influence the whole institution to have this kind of orientation and consciousness.' That's one direction people are taking. Another question says, 'Well, I'm on this wing, and what I can do is engage the institution in a way that it is not imperial and replacing community production, and maybe even enhancing it.' One is an internal use of our position, the other is an external use of our position. So I see people doing both of those. A lot of institutions have somebody that they designate as having community relations functions. One of our ABCD faculty members in Wisconsin gathered a meeting of people who work for all kinds of institutions—from corporations to hospitals, universities, police departments—who had this responsibility for the institution's relationship with the local community. There were 40 of them who came together, and it was the most joyous experience. Did anybody here have that function or responsibility? Raise your hand. They loved each other because in the institution they were doing something that nobody else did, and in the community they were known as institutional people accepted. So they were alone, and they came together and they called themselves 'gappers'—we work in the gap between the institution and the community. So that's emerging more and more, people who see themselves as the bridge. That's a very important kind of role and function.