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Breakthrough Community Change

But we know for sure that these are days when the improbable can become the inevitable.

—JIM DWYER, NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 25, 2014

I SENSE THAT YOU ARE READING this book because you want more for your community. Like me, you realize that even though there is so much amazing work being done, by such amazing and dedicated people, “the problems” just seem to be getting worse. You hope that we might solve the issues that are causing people to suffer. You want real change.

You are looking for a breakthrough!

Breakthrough community change is recognizing that we can do more together when we unite our community than any of us can do individually. By working toward a common agenda and with a common approach, we bring the unique skills and assets of each individual into the process of change. When we become an interconnected force, large-scale breakthrough community change is possible.

I came to community work because I wanted to help people. My instinct is to just jump in and help. I help as a caring citizen, whether it is holding open a door, cooking at a soup kitchen, organizing my neighborhood’s parties, or supporting a friend going through a health crisis. I help people as a professional counselor, job trainer, administrator, community organizer, and small-business coach.

I want to share a favorite childhood story of mine that describes my earliest motivation for helping others:

The shore was littered with thousands of starfish that had washed up. A young boy was standing near the water, throwing them back into the ocean. A passerby approached the boy and asked, “Why are you throwing the starfish back into the sea? Do you not realize that this is futile?” The boy reached down and picked up another starfish, threw it into the water, and said, “At least I helped this one.”

I was inspired by the resilience of that little boy. I identified with him. His answers motivated me to keep working to help people despite the seemingly overwhelming problems that were rarely resolved. I did not question the boy’s answer about helping just one.

I will never lose my instinct to help even just one person. I have, though, come to realize that to truly help people in need we must create the conditions to address the root problem they face.

My mentor and thesis advisor, Joe Schaeffer, shared his wisdom with me when I told him of my desire to end poverty in my community. He said, “If you want to end poverty you should ask those who care, and possibly those who do not, these questions: ‘How might we create a community in which poverty could not exist? How then would we live within and with each other?’”

His response had a profound effect on me. It solidified my thinking, changed my understanding, and fueled my desire to address the root cause of poverty. My focus shifted from wanting to alleviate poverty to ending poverty—in other words, to shift the work from simply helping the poor live better lives to creating systems that would end poverty.

Today, if I were that boy standing on the beach confronting this overwhelming problem, the first thing I would do is run to the nearest village and organize the villagers to join me in working together to save as many starfish as we could. Once everyone was well organized and committed to saving the starfish that had washed up on the shore, I would host community conversations that would consider why all these starfish were stranded. I would seek the wisdom of the helpers. We would form an action team, climb into a boat, paddle out to sea, and try to find the source of the problem. Once we better understood what was going on, we would develop a plan to save the starfish. Then we would mobilize the community to enact the plan. With this united agenda, we would work together to achieve a collective impact, mobilizing the whole community and saving as many starfish as possible.

My Breakthrough

I have always trusted community. As a young boy, I grew up in a community of refugees who survived the terrible traumas of war and famine in their homeland of Ukraine. Both of my grandfathers had been executed during the purge of Stalin. As a family and a community of refugees, we survived and then thrived through what I like to call “a hive mind,” where we worked and learned together. We made sense of the world together through our collective intelligence. Almost no one was unemployed in our community. If you lost your job, it was our community that helped make connections for you to find a new one. When we wanted to expand our farms, we talked to our neighbors. One neighbor learned how to grow raspberries, and soon we all grew them. Visiting after church services was as much a peer-to-peer business conversation as it was a social one. It was common to hear conversations where advice was readily shared. One neighbor would ask, “How did you say you prepared the raspberries for winter?” and others would chime in with their ideas. We were an interconnected community. We worked together utilizing this hive mind to improve outcomes. These early experiences shaped my approach to community change.

Many years later, I was standing at the lectern nervously shuffling my papers and waiting for the applause to subside. Nicholas You, then senior policy and planning advisor at UN-Habitat, had arrived in Waterloo, Canada, from Nairobi. He was here to give the Community Opportunities Development Association (CODA) a United Nations Habitat for Best Practice (Top 40) award for our work with poverty reduction in the Waterloo Region of Canada. As executive director of CODA, I was accepting the award. I should have felt proud, but instead I felt conflicted. There were hundreds of people in the room waiting to be inspired by my remarks. All I could think was, Do we deserve this recognition?

My remarks began with the standard thank-yous to the dignitaries in the room, the staff and volunteers who had worked so hard, and the partner organizations that had supported our success. I went on to share about the remarkable team that supported more than five thousand individuals and families to improve their economic security and raise themselves out of poverty. Our team supported people getting back to work, starting small businesses, and finding work after being displaced because of numerous factory closures. We helped thousands of families with children living in poverty by providing books for birthdays and hosting an annual Christmas party.

Our results were outstanding. Nearly 82 percent of the business start-ups we supported were still active after five years. The plant closure team successfully placed more than 90 percent of all the workers who had been displaced into new jobs. We had created a total community response to the problem of unemployment. United Nations Habitat wanted to spread the word about our work by giving us the award.

I had opened my speech the way most had expected, but then I paused. Through an uncomfortable silence, I looked up from my notes and surveyed our supporters in the audience. I closed my notepad, drank some water, and slowly began to speak.

“I find it interesting that we are being honored today,” I said. “Of course, I am proud of the work we have done and the successes I have shared with you, but I am also perplexed, or maybe a better word is confused. You see, I get it that our outcomes are remarkable when compared to everyone else doing similar work in our community and beyond. I also understand that we have created a unique approach to helping unemployed people, and this should be recognized. But here is my dilemma. Even after all the success we accomplished over the past ten years, poverty has increased by nearly 5 percent in our community. That means things are getting worse for unemployed people. Things have gotten worse in our community and not better. I sense that when poverty increases in a community it is like a business losing shareholder wealth. When you lose significant shareholder wealth you get fired, not recognized. So, you see, I do not think we should accept this award today.”

As you can imagine, these comments did not go over so well with the audience. Nicholas You got up after me and shared with the audience that we were being recognized not only for our remarkable work but also for creating what he called a “human problem-solving machine.” He went on to say that the broader outcomes, such as our unemployment rate, were subject to so many outside influences that are beyond our control. The audience agreed with him, and despite my “moment of confusion,” we received our award.

My struggle with accepting the award was well founded. Mark Cabaj, a promising student at the time, had approached me to host an internship for him. I was immediately taken by his sharp mind and discontent with the current state of communities in Canada. He had just returned from working in Europe, where he supported businesses and social development and witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mark had grown up on a small farm in rural Alberta. He has become one of the foremost experts in the field of development evaluation and is called on around the world for his knowledge of community change.

Mark convinced me that CODA should do a cost-benefit analysis and consider the opportunity costs of the work we were doing to determine where we should invest our energy and money to achieve the greatest impact. We brought together some of the best and brightest people and community leaders to form an advisory council. Members of the advisory council included Mike Lewis of the New Economy Development Group, Robin Murray from the London School of Economics, and other local community leaders. The goal of the advisory council was to provide feedback on the work of our organization and give insight into our work going forward. They concluded that even though CODA ran exceptional programs, its real benefit was that it had created new ways of working together as a community. They emphasized that we created a systems change approach to our work.

The advisory council highlighted that all of CODA’s services addressed the needs of individuals through transactional engagements and simultaneously sought to address a larger community problem by drawing on the existing assets of the community. The advisory council felt we had a remarkable ability to turn everything we did into a campaign. We organized a whole community response by uniting people in collective action toward a common outcome. We went beyond helping people to live better lives; we wanted to solve the systemic problems they were facing. The answer to almost every problem we faced was mobilizing our community. This was a powerful insight into our cost-benefit as an organization.

The advisory council helped us to identify and understand that we were working in a new way, even if we had not done so intentionally. This understanding and the United Nations award experience helped us to formulate an innovative understanding of not only the problem of poverty but the solutions required to end it. It was our breakthrough moment.

Within six months of the award ceremony, I had raised over $1 million from business leaders and private foundations. With Mark Cabaj, we launched Opportunities 2000, a four-year millennium campaign with the goal of reducing poverty in our community to the lowest level in Canada. It was a campaign that was to become our community’s gift to the world and our way of celebrating the new millennium.

Essentially, we had two complementary ideas. First, if we were going to significantly reduce poverty in our community, the whole community would need to change, just a little bit. We asked, “What would less poverty look like if we all just changed 10 percent?”

The second idea was that we would act as a United Way fundraising campaign on steroids. We would run our campaign for four years. United Way brought leaders in business, labor, community, and government together with everyday citizens to work in a united, nonpartisan way, and to raise money for needy agencies that were making their communities great places for everyone to live. We wanted to operate in a similar fashion, uniting all sectors, developing a plan to reduce poverty, and working together to make it happen.

We believed that if we were to end poverty, we would need to change our whole community’s approach to poverty reduction. This would require us to build new thinking systems, establish new relationships, and work together toward a collective impact—plus, hope for a few miracles along the way.

Our breakthrough community change began.