John Plodinec

Community Resilience and the Three American Tribes

February 6th, 2012 - John Plodinec  

I just ordered a copy of what may end up being a seminal study of America’s evolution – Coming Apart – by Charles Murray. I was alerted to this by an excellent editorial (America’s Two Tribes) in the New York Times by David Brooks that summarized Murray’s work.

First, a word of background. The growing divide between rich and poor has been a burr under my saddle for a while. My more liberal colleagues see something inherently evil in it. I don’t, particularly when the remedies proposed essentially amount to confiscation in the name of “Fairness.” However, I sensed that there was something unhealthy lurking behind the statistics. I had finally concluded that it wasn’t the disparity in incomes but rather the separation within the community that the disparity produced that was unhealthy. It wasn’t that the rich are evil and the poor the modern version of “Noble Savages,” but rather that the two were no longer communicating. And a community that is not communicating within itself is asking for nasty surprises – and is not very resilient.

Enter Murray. He portrays an America with a vast divide between the richer 20% and the poorer 30%. The richer typically live lives straight out of the ‘50’s (yes, kiddies, I remember the ‘50’s). Almost everyone in the 30-49 year old cohort works. Illegitimacy is rare (7%). Parents work too hard – at everything, including parenting.

The poorer live lives that are increasingly disconnected from the community. More and more are leaving the workforce, even in good times. Almost half of their children are illegitimate. To quote Brooks, they are “less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.”

The one thing they both share is that they are unlikely to come into meaningful contact with each other. The richer live in quiet, clean, safe neighborhoods that reflect their essentially conservative values. The poorer live in noisy neighborhoods, where the trash may not be picked up, and they may not venture outside their doors too often out of fear. It is hard to become involved in community, or even personally productive, in these circumstances.

Brooks goes on to show how Murray’s work contradicts the myths of both the left and the right. I won’t go into that, but recommend it to you iconoclasts in this political season.

You may have noticed that I referred to three tribes in the title, not two. The reason, of course, is that both Murray and Brooks ignore the Third Tribe – the vast middle. Fearing a fall into the poorer, but dreaming of joining the richer, this tribe is the essential glue that must hold the other two together. But even here, we find disturbing trends. A recent study found that the rate of upward mobility is slowing down, and the number who go from the middle to the very rich is dwindling. Our educational systems are downplaying and in some cases eliminating the national and community mythologies that can bind a community together. As a nation, we are engaging in more “anti-social” – anti-community – behavior – too many activities that don’t involve direct interactions with others. And many of the Great Middle are turning inward because of unemployment or underemployment or wages that are lower than a decade ago, another toxic residue of the Great Recession.

Ultimately, money is neither the cause nor the solution to this splintering of communities; it merely facilitates the process. But how do we reverse the process?

I’m afraid there are no easy answers. However, I think we do know what victory looks like. It is a community in which even the poor feel a stake in its future. It is a community where everyone sees the entire community, the same community, both the good and the not so good. It is not a Community Triumphant smug in its righteousness, nor a Community Suffering with no confidence in its future, but rather a Community Militant that employs its strengths to shore up its weaknesses and to create a better future for all.

With that vision, there are several paths to take. Breaking down the barriers that retard social mobility are important. As the poor rise, they can bring the memories of what they’re escaping with them. As the rich fall, they can bring their work ethic and sense of community with them. Developing common myths – stories about the community that reinforce its uniqueness and its unity – are important. Fostering activities that all of the tribes will participate in is important. Encouraging the poorer to get involved in their neighborhoods, encouraging the richer to get outside their enclaves and to see the world through others’ eyes are important.

This splintering of America threatens to unravel the fabric of our communities. Murray (and Brooks) have performed a valuable service by holding up a mirror for us to see what we’re becoming. It is up to us to act on what we’ve seen.

John Plodinec

Adversity: the primer for resilience

January 30th, 2012 - John Plodinec  

Walt Disney said:

All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

Nietzsche wrote (and Jethro Gibbs repeated), Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

One of my favorites among the many definitions of resilience is – Positive adaptation to perceived adversity (slightly altered from Adger). But what Disney and Nietzsche (and Gibbs) are pointing out is that resilience is learned behavior whether at the individual, the community or the national level. We learn to cope by coping; we learn to adapt by adapting to those things we cannot change. But that begs the questions: How much adversity is enough? How much is too much?

I recently read a summary of some interesting work by Dr. Mark Seery at the University of Buffalo which sheds an interesting light on this. He looked at those who had faced much adversity throughout their lives, those who had faced some adversity, and those who had faced little to no adversity. He found that those who had experienced a great deal of adversity and those who had faced little adversity were both much worse at coping than those who had experienced only some adversity. And it didn’t appear to matter what the adversity was.

There are a few interesting parallels at the community level. The strengths Charleston developed during and after Hurricane Hugo undoubtedly helped it to successfully cope with the subsequent naval base closure. Without the adversity of Katrina and the levee breaks, would New Orleans have been able to withstand the Great Recession and the BP Oil Spill as well as it has (Next week, I’ll be writing a blog about some surprising – at least to me – lessons from New Orleans recovery.)?

Too often, we (especially our politicians!) seem to act as if we can’t allow anything bad to happen to anyone. But does trying to prevent bad things from happening to people, communities, or our nation actually mean that we are actually preventing people, communities and our nation from becoming more resilient? And, ultimately, such efforts are doomed to failure, anyway. Bad things will happen. The more little “bads” we’re able to prevent, the more severe the big “bads” will be, because we will have been deprived of the opportunity to learn to cope – to become more resilient.

As Helen Keller wrote:

Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature
Nor do the children of men
As a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer
In the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure
Or it is nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and
Behave like free spirits
In the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

John Plodinec

Demographic Trends and Community Resilience

January 10th, 2012 - John Plodinec  

Two weeks ago, the Brookings Institution released an interesting report on Five Things the Census Revealed about America in 2011. The authors were focused on America as a whole, but in the following, I’d like to look to look a little deeper at what their findings may mean for American communities.

Minorities are driving growth, and replenishing America’s youth. In the 1950’s, about one-fourth of our population growth was due to minorities (non-whites). On the 2000’s, almost all (92%) of our population growth was due to minorities, mainly Hispanics and Asians.

While non-whites in particular are driving population growth, the overall rate of growth is slowing. The nation’s population increased by about 10% from 2000 to 2010, the lowest rate of increase since the 1930’s. This reflected less immigration because of a poorer economy, and a lower birth rate because of an aging population. It’s as if everyone in Quebec, Ontario and the rest of the eastern half of Canada (about three-fourths of their population) moved to the US in just ten years. We clearly are continuing the process of becoming a “majority minority” country, just a bit more slowly than we have been.

The rate of growth of the population 45 and over is eighteen times that of those 45 and under. As one important result, only one in five households consist of a married couple with a child under 18.

The rate of migration continues its slow decrease. About 20% of us moved our homes in the ’50s and ’60s; in the last five years that dropped to just over 10%. Simply put, more and more Americans are staying home – with one major exception. We are seeing a “Reverse Migration” of the Black population to the South, as well.

The median household income declined the past decade for the first time on record, by about 9%. There was a concomitant increase in the poverty rate, to 15%. As we’ve seen so pointedly for New Orleans after Katrina, poverty is spreading from inner cities to the suburbs as is ethnic diversity.

Clearly, each of these trends will impact our communities, and each in a different way, depending on the community. However, there are a few generalizations worth noting.

• Communities’ responses to the diversification process will be telling indicators of their resilience. Some communities will not cope well; others will find strength in their increased diversity. Fortunately, there are models that are working (e.g., Anaheim) that others can emulate.

• Perhaps the greatest danger inherent in this diversification is that the community’s sense of itself may be dampened or destroyed. Without positive action, there is a real danger that a community may splinter based on race, language, age, or economic condition. If these become barriers to communication in a community, groups will tend to isolate themselves, and their members may have greater allegiance to their group than to the community as a whole. As a result, community resilience will suffer. It will be important for communities to develop inclusive “community mythologies” to prevent these barriers from forming. The reduced rate of migration may be a trend that counters this in many communities.

• Concentrated poverty is an extreme example of this isolation and an important one because poverty has a tremendous impact beyond just the poor. We’ve seen what happens in many big cities (e.g., Detroit) when poverty is concentrated in a neighborhood like plaque on a blood vessel. Crime and other anti-community activity increases. Those who can, leave – creating a potential death spiral for the neighborhood and a resource-sucking “Black Hole” for the larger community.

• While there will be greater diversity (based on ethnicity, age…) within communities, at the same time we are likely to see greater diversity among our communities in terms of their makeup, the specific challenges they face, and the resources they have available to deal with them. This implies that one-size-fits-all solutions from the federal government will be even less likely to work. Given the inertia in the federal system, this also means that communities are going to have to cope with their demographic changes largely on their own.

• As communities aim toward the future, they will have to consider whether the present mix of community services matches future needs. If the immigrant population in the community is growing, that may imply a need for more youth services, and for provision for those with little or no English. If the community is “graying,” this likely will mean the need for more services aimed toward the elderly. In areas of high unemployment, homelessness will impact not only those agencies that serve the poor, but education, and others as well. More resilient communities will meet these changing needs with solutions that include private business, non-profits and other essential service providers, as well as local governments.

• At the same time, local governments and other service providers will have to look at their services in a regional context. As we’ve seen so pointedly in metropolitan New Orleans, poverty has spread to the suburbs. For many communities, this means that they will have to look at themselves in a regional context more than ever before. Through effective coordination of service delivery among different organizations and jurisdictions, there is the potential for greater efficiency and greater resilience as well.

Many of our communities are already being impacted by these trends. These trends indicate many more will be. A community’s anticipation of what these trends portend for it, and its actions to positively respond, will perhaps be the best indicator of that community’s resilience.

John Plodinec

Resilience — One Movement, Many Voices

December 19th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Earlier this fall, I attended the annual meeting of the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH). For those of you who aren’t familiar with FLASH (see www.flash.org), they are doing an amazing job in raising consciousness about strengthening homes to severe weather conditions. I was struck by the applicability of their motto – quoted above – to resilience.

For resilience has become a movement; and like all movements it has developed branches as diverse as the roots from whence it came. Transition Towns and Resilience Circles, Asset-Based Community Development communities and many others are all fluorishing branches of a movement aimed at strengthening communities so that they can withstand adversity.

The Transition Towns approach to community resilience is ultimately based on a philosophy of despair (as is that of its close cousin – Resilience Circles). The British founders of this approach see Peak Oil, Global Warming, and the Great Recession as working together to fundamentally change the nature of society. They foresee a rapidly approaching end to the Age of the Automobile, and a concomitant possibility of severely disrupted supplies of food and other necessities. Some of their writings seem almost apocalyptic in their forecasts, including the collapse of civilization. Their answer is to make communities as self-sufficient as possible. Hence, an emphasis on growing food locally, and a more communal lifestyle in general. While there is an anti-technology Luddite element to this, one cannot deny that participants have found much satisfaction – and even joy – in the renewed sense of community in Transition Towns.

The Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach has a very different philosophical basis. Developed by John McKnight and co-workers at Northwestern, the ABCD approach seeks to discover and develop community competence by helping neighborhoods, for example, to recognize the assets and capabilities they contain within themselves. While ABCD shares with Transition Towns a general distrust of the ability of external bureaucracies to address local problems, it ultimately celebrates the capacity of the commons working together to solve local problems. David Gershon’s work in Philadelphia and New York, while not explicitly based on ABCD, shares much in common with it.

There are many other branches that deserve recognition – FLASH’s work to make homes more robust, TISP’s efforts to develop a more resilient infrastructure, the Department of Health and Human Services’ inclusion of resilience as a core element of their strategic and operational planning, the Army’s work to enhance the resilience of soldiers and their families, and especially FEMA’s Whole Community approach to emergency management spring to mind. Where then does CARRI’s approach fit in?

Back in July, I wrote a blog about resilience and the problem of scale (Community Resilience and the Problem of Scale or There are Horses for Courses). CARRI’s approach focuses on the community, and particularly on the challenges that communities face. While some of these challenges are universal (economic distress), most of them reflect the specific conditions and setting of the community itself. Applying Brian Walker’s insight from ecology, this means that CARRI must help communities consider these challenges from both the individual-family-neighborhood and regional perspectives, if the community is to successfully meet them. As William James said, “The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.” And sometimes the community must call on resources beyond its own, if the impulse is to lead to positive action. CARRI is thus centered on the community, and its role is thus to energize and empower the individual to influence the community to take action to meet the challenges it faces.

John Plodinec

Resilience for Dummies 2: Effective Community Leadership

December 13th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Not too long ago, an interviewer asked me what were the keys to community resilience. I answered “Leadership, leadership, leadership. And, oh yes, connections and resources.” We talked a bit more about that, and the whole conversation was then pushed to the back of my mind’s garage. It was recently brought back to me when I read a blog from Bill Hooke (Living on the Real World) on leadership, which led me to a column by the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins on Tim Tebow, which led me to some very interesting work by Robert Hogan.

First, let me define what I mean – and don’t mean – when I talk about a leader. In terms of community action, an effective leader is someone who
• Mobilizes at least part of the community, and its resources, to achieve common goals.
• Works effectively as part of a team to achieve those goals.
• Is committed to improving the community.

Hogan provides some valuable insights into the qualities that make an effective leader (see the figure that I’ve adapted).

First, he notes that being a leader implies having followers – and that it is both the leader’s innate personality and the followers’ perceptions of that personality obtained from the leader’s behavior and actions that make the leader effective. Hogan then identifies the key personality traits of an effective leader:
• Integrity. If followers believe the leader has integrity, it creates trust that the leader will carry out promised actions.
• Vision. People are more likely to follow if they believe that the leader has a vision for what the future should be that is aligned with their own.
• Clarity. People are more likely to follow if the leader can clearly communicate a vision, the goals that must be achieved to attain the vision, and a plan to achieve them.
• Decisiveness. People are unlikely to follow the wishy-washy. Decisiveness indicates a confidence in one’s own direction.
• Competence. To be effective, a leader must be able to use the tools available to move the community forward. Playing the blame game to explain lack of forward motion eventually is seen as a sign of incompetence. While the first four traits can boost a person into a position of leadership, incompetence will eventually unseat them. However, to be competent, a community leader should have experience in working on problems that involve a large part of the community.

An effective community leader does not have to be an elected official; he or she can come from any sector. Hugh McColl, a banker, was not an elected official, and yet he spearheaded the transformation of Charlotte, NC, from a declining textile town into the nation’s second largest financial center.

An effective community leader is not necessarily a manager. Managers are made responsible for the motion of their subordinates in some pre-defined direction based on their positions, through command. Leaders take responsibility for achieving a vision and move others to follow them, through conviction.  However, more often than not, effective community leaders have experience working at the community level. They almost have to, if they are to be able to convince people throughout the community that following them will lead to positive results for all. This is probably why we so often look to elected officials for community leadership. They generally have experience at the right scale of action.

It may be instructive to look at the election of President Obama in 2008. Certainly, there were few apparent differences in the integrity of the two candidates. Mr. Obama laid out a vision for America that was more generally appealing than that offered by Senator McCain, though there was little clarity in either’s vision. Mr. Obama’s confidence during the campaign inspired confidence (or at least hope) that he would be a competent president, while Senator McCain’s choice of Governor Palin led many to question his potential competence as president. Neither candidate had an apparent edge in decisiveness. Thus, the electorate’s view of Mr. Obama as a better potential leader certainly increased his electability.

It is interesting to note that the President’s “leadership quotient” among the electorate has distinctly fallen. He has not demonstrated the ability to get things done, and is continuing to play the blame game after three years on the job. Whether this will hurt him in the upcoming election is questionable, though, and will depend on the personality of his opponent, and the voting public’s perception of his opponent’s leadership potential.

In the next post in this series, I’ll continue looking at community leadership, particularly communications. The ability to communicate is probably the most important single skill a leader must have.

John Plodinec

Resilience and the Hole in the Rock Expedition

December 5th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Jenae Holtzhafer in the Emmaus (PA) Patch posed this question in a posting this summer.

“What if our circumstances on this Earth suddenly changed? Would we be able to endure the extreme physical and mental challenges faced by our ancestors to push through the hardships and survive with nothing more than basic necessities?”

She pointed to the Hole in the Rock expedition of 1879 as an example of the resilience of our forebears. For those who don’t know the story, in late 1879, 236 Mormons set out on a missionary expedition to southeastern Utah. They had selected the shortest path to their destination – they expected it to take only six weeks, but one that was largely unexplored. Trapped by snow behind them two weeks after they started, they were forced to go forward. Perhaps their most difficult feat was building a wagon road through the hole in the rock – a narrow cut in the cliffs surrounding the Colorado River gorge – and crossing the river. It took them about 8 weeks to build the road and get all of their supplies across, and another 10 to reach the site they choose to establish their “colony.” Amazingly, no one died on the five-month trek, and 238 arrived at the new settlement – two babies were born en route.

Holtzhafer’s gut answer were “No, we are not as resilient – we have lost the skills to survive these hardships.” A closer reading of history, though, makes her conclusion less compelling. The intrepid party – even though they set out as winter neared – was reasonably well-prepared. Eighty wagons, over 1,000 head of cattle, tools, dynamite and other necessary supplies – they were ready to confront what they faced. They had taken full advantage of the technology available to them. In similar circumstances today, most of us we would do the same. While we may have lost some of the skills those hardy Mormons possessed, we have other skills and technologies they did not have.

However, the expedition has an important lesson to teach us – being ready for surprises. The missionaries expected to be gone about 40 days; instead, they were on the road for 100 more. They didn’t expect to have to build a bridge across the Colorado, but they did.

Most communities try to prepare for specific threats – hurricanes, earthquakes, human-induced crises. But look at some of the events the Gulf Coast has experienced in the last decade – a recession in 2001-2; Hurricane Katrina and the levee break; the BP oil spill; the Great Recession…what’s next?

The pessimist looks at this list and says “Why bother to prepare? The next event may well be different. We’ll just adapt to it when it comes.”

The optimist says, “We’re strong, we will weather whatever comes; let’s prepare for what we know.

But the resilient realist says, “Prepare for the known threats, but be sure to include in your preparations those things that will help you survive and thrive in the face of any threat. Most importantly, make sure your people know each other and will help each other, no matter what threat they face.”

A simple thought, but with some profound implications. First, it means we shouldn’t rely on institutions to pull us through a crisis, but on ourselves. Second, we can’t count on getting resources from outside in a crisis – we can only count on what we have in our homes and our neighborhood. Most importantly, the one thing “Government” in general is not doing but could do to prepare us is to hammer these messages home.

Yesterday, I was speaking to a victim of one of the many floods that have hit the St. Louis area. Her house up to the top of the first story was flooded – she had to live in the upper floors. She “commuted” to wherever she had to go in her neighbors’ boats. She pointed out that it took 45 days before the floodwaters had receded enough for safe vehicular traffic to her home. By the time she and her family were ready to begin recovering, the news cameras had moved on; her story was old news; most of the government assistance was gone. With good grace and a sense of humor, she is coming back more or less on her own, with the help of her friends and neighbors.

Her experience shows that some of us, at least, are as resilient as any who came before. Her experience also testifies to the wisdom of the resilient realist: people are the best preparation for surprises.