Hi! Welcome to Verde Smoke

[More info on a campaign that Lawrence CommunityWorks is devising to empower citizens to get involved in local political campaigns and citizen journalism - they need help developing new media tools to support these efforts!]

YES WE WILL Lawrence draft vision statement

What is “Yes We Will Lawrence?”

In late 2008, over 70 Lawrencians, convened by Lawrence CommunityWorks, came together for set of remarkable conversations that began with a reflection on the “new politics” represented by the 2008 presidential campaign. The conversation moved to the question of how we can bring some of that spirit and momentum to what will be a VERY important election year for Lawrence. These conversations culminated in a powerful and resonant message: that in Lawrence in the year 2009 we all want to work for…
 
“A New Community.. Based on a New Politics … with a New Commitment.” 
 
What is the “New Politics” that people talked about ? Its a politics without negativity, personal attacks and divisions — but one that is committed to including everyone, getting good information into the hands of all Lawrencians, making sure everyone who can vote does vote, having positive and respectful discourse around ideas and keeping our leaders focused on a positive vision for the future of our great city and its people. 
 
This “New Politics” is best summed up by these 3 action words…. 
 
“RESPECT, EMPOWER, INCLUDE.”
 
Today, Yes we Will (YWW) is a non-partisan open forum for all who live and work in Lawrence and who support and are willing to promote a New Politics in Lawrence based on these 3 words.  The primary sponsor of Yes We Will is Lawrence CommunityWorks, a non-profit community based network of Lawrence residents.

What does YWW do?

YWW is working to ensure that the 2009 Election Season in Lawrence is the best, most inclusive process ever. YWW focuses on 4 areas that we want to have an impact on the quality of the political process. 

    * GOOD TALK – That the candidates, their campaigns, residents, media, will promote positive and respectful discourse on the issues and on the quality of leadership needed in public office
    * STOP THE GOSSIP – That candidates and their campaigns will stay focused on the important issues that impact the future of our city rather than on the past, personalities and gossip.
    * INFORMATION RICH – All residents have what they need to make positive and informed decisions about the candidates and the issues so that everyone can make their best decision at the voting booth
    * EVERYONE VOTES – That the political process is open and accessible to everyone, and all those who can vote, will vote on election day (how do we get all voters registered and to the polls on election day?)

Who can be part of YWW?

Anyone who lives or works in Lawrence can be a member. Membership is free and just requires a pledge to lend your voice to the movement. Candidates for public office and those that work for them or who have official roles in campaigns are can sign on as supporters of the movement, but cannot be members. This is so YWW can maintain its non-partisanship and not be perceived as supporting one candidate over another.
 
Does that mean that if I join YWW I can’t support a specific candidate?

No, you just can’t be a candidate, receive a paycheck from one, or hold a formal, legal position in the campaign (ie treasurer, finance chair, campaign chair etc.)  In fact it is fully understood that all members of YWW have made or will make personal preferences for candidates and on local issues. After all, that is what YWW is encouraging all residents of Lawrence to do. What binds us together when we are doing YWW work, is the commitment to a better, more respectful and accessible process, so that we all feel good about supporting the leaders that we need here in Lawrence 
 
What is the YWW Pledge?

YWW is an effort to bring out the very best in ourselves, our leaders and our community when it comes to our political process, and to hold ourselves accountable to each other and an idea. So part of being a member of YWW is ‘signing on ‘ to the idea the binds us together…The Pledge is..

“I support a political process in Lawrence that Respects, Empowers and Includes all of our residents. I will work to promote respectful dialogue, to stayed focus on issues not on gossip, to stay informed and make informed decisions on candidates and issues, to have my voice heard, and to vote on election day and get my family, friends and neighbors to vote too! “

Here’s some demographic background on Lawrence, MA:

A city in decline, Lawrence, MA, has had a decrease in population in recent years, after the slow leaking of a once historic industrialized legacy, and suffers some of the worst rates of foreclosure and high school drop out rates in the state (US Census Bureau 2007).  However, Lawrence has seen a 76.1 percent increase in the immigrant population since 1990, primarily Latinos from Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic, along with Asian groups as well (FAIR 2008).  With this migration, new questions arising around who is a “native” are only aggravated further by tensions around language barriers, local traditional culture, and religious and political differences (Waldman 2005).  New Latin immigrants often feel a cold shoulder from the entrenched Irish and Italian populations in Lawrence, especially in terms of rental properties. 

Links:

Danielle’s photo/audio project about human landscape of Lawrence for Anne Spirn’s class 2007
Union Crossing Interpretive History Project
MIT@Lawrence

News story on Shooting at Mayor’s Office

Commercial made by YouthBuild Lawrence youth about littering:

Predatory Tales – video about predatory lending in Lawrence:

[Week 10 04/09/08: WARNING: Excessive alarm clock metaphor to follow...]

I set the wake-up time on my campaign to a leisurely half-past Lawrence, because I made a conscious choice to ground my efforts in graduate school in a community where some people believe time stopped when all the mills closed. I lay my head on my pillow, full of hope that after the fall semester’s work, I’d be attune to the rhythm of change in that place. Then I sought out a stable/successful youth empowerment organization and a group of young constituents and leaders. I again thought I could easily step into the rhythm of their existing programs and add some capacity to take community change a step further than individual advancement. I set some personal milestones to complete a campaign, unknowingly trying to mimic the style of Gersick’s described as proactive, temporal pacing strategy.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. When that alarm of the first couple reflection papers went off, I rolled over and pressed the snooze button. I realized that I was still in the foundation phase of the campaign. Just showing up with questions about what they saw wrong with Lawrence were NOT effective strategic tactics. I had to interrupt the momentum of the weekly flow just to get a word in edgewise with the staff and to make the time to build relationships one-on-one with a few of the youth. But I also unknowingly ignored Chavez’s advice that non-violent change is based ACTION, not talking about action.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. This time, even though I was already wide-awake, thinking about the peak of my success with one-on-ones with the leadership team, I still pressed snooze again. Perhaps, we were edging toward a kickoff, because we had voted on a central issue to pursue and formed a collective story based on our shared values. But I had just started to ask for commitments (do your own one-on-ones, do some research on the local authorities, gather some local resources such as camera equipment). And they weren’t following through so maybe they need to think about action it a little while longer.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. Darn it. I had reset the alarm for the week before break, because I knew I’d be missing some time with them and I wanted to make sure they could continue the work without me. I hastily tried to incorporate some action planning and dispersed responsibilities, but they weren’t feeling the urgency of the looming end of my semester. I re-assigned some old commitments and vowed that action plans would be created the week I returned to get us closer to “THE” peak…

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. I woke up from my deep dream of spring break to the stark realization that my main staff contact and some of my leadership team were away on a trip. And true to Gersick’s prediction, it was at the halfway point when I had to re-orientate my targets, timing and tactics. The team had met when I was away, brainstormed areas to document trash-filled alleys and public spaces, and distributed cameras amongst themselves. But only one camera had returned, with the comment “There’s a LOT of trash out there” and an overall lack of motivation for the project. Suddenly I realized I had been riding the circular curve of the organization’s timing, instead of drawing the straight arrow of action.

So I stopped facilitating brainstorming session for ideas and instead offered several action options. I also stopped waiting for other organizations to call me back and showed up at the doorstep of Groundworks, only to find out they did a study three years ago on trash on alleyways and had a clean-up scheduled on April 24th. They offered to give us a platform to announce the start of a petition to the City to follow-up on past promises to clean up the alleys. I reset the alarm clock, aiming for “THE” peak on the 24th. In fact, I programmed weekly milestones for the next five weeks into my own clock, then worked with a few members of the leadership team today to create specific action plans to do a petition and create a commercial spot to air at several upcoming community Earth Day events. They complained that they didn’t know what to do and weren’t qualified, but I said we’re going to work with what we’ve got and go for it anyway.

So after too many weeks of talking, they made me write out and sign a vow that today would be the last day of planning and the next five weeks would be only action, with a little bit of reflection/evaluation along the way. We’re jumping into some plans of action and I’ve disconnected the snooze button. I only hope that I’ve built up enough sleep to make it to the resolution and the celebration.

[Week 4: 03/12/08] Why is my strategy like a Tootsie-Pop? My reflections this week will be both around my project’s strategy [candy shell] and my own “meta” strategy to work with these youth [chocolaty center]. Thus, I have two organizing statements: (1) On the surface, I’m organizing a leadership team of YouthBuild Lawrence youth to stop the pollution of community spaces but really I’m (2) starting with a small group of youth in Lawrence to raise their voices and call for change in their community.

I bring this up, because I’ve gotten more crystallized in the last week that I need to leverage the current reactive, direct service strategy of YouthBuild’s current programs into a more proactive and empowering ORGANIZING strategy. The organization draws on the resources of AmeriCorps and their staff to improve the individual situation of each of its participants, working against the challenges each of them has faced as drop-outs, teen-age parents, and/or court involved youth. With incredible fraternity, this program fosters the motivation youth have to change themselves as participants in this program to create change for others, by building affordable housing or doing typically one-time community service projects. But my goal now is to get them thinking about ways to change others, not just their selves, to create more sustainable change in the community. The example I used today in our leadership meeting was: “Yes, you could team up and go pick up all the discarded fridges every week. But what happens when you can’t anymore? Will that change people’s behavior or the circumstances and values that lead them to liter this way?”

We’ve just begun to think about our first strategy to act on this issue, but I’ve been employing a bit strategy to work on my amorphous meta-project, youth empowerment. The leadership team is trying to meet twice a week with me, for the last 1-2 hours of their work day – this will evolve next week when I’ll take more of a step back to go away break. I’ve employed some tactics to establish relationships and frame their roles as leaders and mine as just a resource. I also, unfortunately, benefited in my timing as I pushed to get more formalized in our meetings right around the time when the group was in personal crisis and looking for concrete ways to be productive. Finally, I’ve been targeting the discussion toward moving away from a topic [Lawrence is dirty] to a problem [pollution as evidenced by big liter in parks, parking lots, and the river], to an issue [the City doesn’t collect these items and people can’t afford (or are too lazy) to dispose of these items on their own].

Unfortunately, last Friday’s team meeting was pretty painful to live through, but I think it laid the way for the more productive meeting we had today. On Friday, because of some scheduling issues, I only was able to convene four of the eight members who had expressed interest in serving on the leadership team. My first mistake was to pack the agenda full of too many steps. The second mistake was to do all this before getting all their individual values and interests on the table. The final mistake was not creating a shared set of expectations about what the group hoped to do and prioritizing a discussion on how they want to make decisions as a group. We tried to break down the three issues that had surfaced in the big group discussions (pollution, police corruption, and discrimination in Section 8 housing) into the needs, values and interests behind them, but the discussion quickly polarized into interest groups and the group couldn’t even agree to vote.

So today, I changed gears and the whole group was in attendance. I asked them to take a step back and first decide as a group how they are going to decide on things as a group (silent vote was the consensus…how do you vote on how to vote?). The big breakthrough came when they agreed that when a vote was cast, that not only the proponents of an idea would move forward with it. One member’s analogy was “get on the bus or it’s leaving without you.” Then we created list of group expectations and we all signed it to seal the deal. Finally, we agreed to take a few minutes on our own, write out the top things we value, and share a few with the group. We created a diagram with many of our shared values (family, education, health) and posted it on the wall beside the expectations. Then we discussed the problems and honed it down to the real issues. I asked the two most outspoken members to facilitate and find ways to get others opinions. The group left on-time, agreeing to talk to at least one person outside of YouthBuild about the issue. The atmosphere was much more convivial because we actually accomplished our goals for the meeting…and the candy I brought didn’t hurt either.

[P.S. Yep, this is way too long and late, but Wednesday afternoons are when the action happens! An in response to last week’s comments – Of course I’m telling my story and sharing my values! For a good peak at my usual “spiel”, check out a blog entry from my second year of AmeriCorps VISTA.]

[Week 3 03/05/08]: He hesitated, then asked me why I was there. After thirty straight minutes of almost continuous talking about himself, in my last one-on-one of the day, this 22 year old lifelong Lawrence resident, father, and would be jack-of-all-trades, looked straight in my eyes and turned the tables on me completely.

I’d interacted with this particular youth several times in the larger group, mostly because my original relationship-building tactic focused on getting the youth’s attention through the staff of YouthBuild. I admired both the grand ambitions (take 20 rowdy school dropouts, usually court involved, and provide GED assistance and hands-on construction skills) and the team-work relational style of the organization. Regular group activities are their lifeblood, equally at meals and basketball games and in carpentry projects. Many of the staff, like my cohort Mike, are former members themselves and their commitment to both the program is evident in both the jokes and the reprimands. I assumed I could borrow a bit of Mike’s social capital with this group, to get their commitment to the idea that we could actually change something in Lawrence.

To their dismay (and my own at first), I decided to focus on doing some one-on-ones first this week as a new relationship building strategy. I was feeling a bit stuck by trying to fit into the staff’s schedule and manage learning everyone’s names and details in big overwhelming interactions. But now I realize I was leaning a bit on the crutch of my own familiar role as a group facilitator and youth instructor, at a comfortable distance and staying pretty shallow.

So Mike talked it over with the youth and identified nine of them as the most interested in working with me. I scheduled some times and he gave me a room. Six meetings full of listening and holding back my urges to crack jokes later, I’m speechless in front of this member.

This kid stuck out in the group meetings, because he had something to say for every topic. Yet, in the confines of our one-on-one, he changed. He still fully answered my probing and purposeful questions but did it all glancing out the window and down at the floor. Even when I put down my notebook and leaned forward, he was almost preaching about the state of himself and Lawrence, but it was as if we weren’t alone in the room together. I’d definitely grabbed his interest and attention and explored some topics around the state of the Lawrence community.

But when I moved to more of an exchange, and asked if he had any questions for me, the interaction got much deeper. He wanted to know why I didn’t choose to make money or do work that was more for myself. Although he self identified as a person that wanted to give back and help others, he said doing organizing and community development as a job was “way too hard.” He asked me what I did for myself and why I was there. And because I stumbled, not knowing how to answer, my vulnerability changed the relationship from teacher/student to comrades in the quest to figure out our place in the world. We committed to keep both thinking about this and one thing we can focus on to change the environment of Lawrence before the meeting on Friday.

And while our relationships are tender and new as this point, I’m energized by the one-on-one’s in a way I didn’t expect. My first instinct was to go straight to planning and milestones, but I was about to jump into the pool without any solid social connections to these youth to float upon.

[Week 2 02/27/08] People have asked me why I care so much and why I volunteer to lead so often. To answer, I can’t blame it all to the years of classic leadership trainings; even though now I can see where relying on just prescriptive and generalized “good” traits of a leader have sometimes failed me. I might attribute some of it to my misused “drum major instinct” energy or to the severe bonding of my personal identity with my organizing and work.

In the end, I think I keep doing this work to because I get so much out of facilitating OTHERS to be leaders. In the past week, I’ve had two concrete experiences of this circumstance, both in my work with YouthBuild Lawrence and also with a team of graduate students at MIT.

Despite the snow, I did get an hour and half of solid time with the full group of twenty YouthBuild young adult members. A big theme of our discussion revolved around their frustration with the authority of their local government and representatives, which revealed to me that these authorities lacked shared goals or meaningful relationships with this group of youth. So to begin to foster authentic, meaningful leaders from within this group, we first needed to come to some shared understandings of the issues at hand and attempt to narrow the focus. I tried to quickly learn the norms of the group around making decisions (“Should we vote?”) and decided to see what would come out of a little debate. We allowed the youth to self-select which group to create and what issue to argue for, but to pick one representative to speak. Two-thirds of the group clustered around the loudest males and chose police corruption. A smaller group formed around a more soft-spoken but very articulate member and chose pollution. And one lone, older male member stood alone and wrote his own treatise on Section 8 housing selection procedures. But none of the three succeeded in gaining a majority of the group, regardless of their volume, popularity, or dedication. The leadership of this group, which will be both self selected and recommended by staff, will have to work more on building relationships in order to energize both the immediate YouthBuild constituents as well as other youth in Lawrence. Yet, I think we launched this team well, according to Heifetz and Hackman advised, we didn’t start with a job description of a manager, but rather framed leadership as “adaptive work” activities we all could possibly share before assigning individuals or creating roles. Hopefully this process will create some team bonding around shared responsibilities and boundaries and combat the tendency for some of the group to say “I don’t care…I just want somebody to lead us.” So to rephrase Stan Lee, with great leadership power, comes great shared responsibility, like it or not.

[WARNING: Yes, I'm journaling for a class again. I'm not sure if these self reflective experiences find me or I find them. Nevertheless, I'm writing weekly reflection papers about a hands-on project I'm doing as part of Marshall Ganz's "Organizing: People, Power and Change" class at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. I've connected with a great AmeriCorps program in Lawrence, YouthBuild and we're working toward organizing young adults in Lawrence to have a stronger voice in their community. Sounds easy huh?]

Week 1 [02/20/08]:

As I stood in front of a room of strangers, a YouthBuild member asked me why I was there and it took me a second to answer. I came to MIT (and this class actually) on the advice of a good friend and confidant, Leo Burd. He and I shared a passion for not only making media and technology, but also empowering other people to use it to become more active in their community to enact social change. However, our shared values of individual voice, creativity, and authentic participation don’t always easily translate into a concrete (and explainable) interests.

Two factors led me to YouthBuild Lawrence. First, I’m rooted in Lawrence in my graduate studies because it is a site that holds both challenge and opportunity for my interests: economic inequality, established and new immigrant groups, and deep (but often spoken) narratives. Thus, I spent the last semester immersed in exploring the identities and interests of the key actors, such as public sector and community organization employees, youth workers, and youth themselves. Many of the accepted community leaders are concentrated on expanding business opportunities in the city, while the many of the citizens are working for their existence needs. But the youth, who I always seem to come back to, have the most fascinating interests. Many of them want their community to offer more opportunities for growth and empowerment but many of them just dream of “getting out.” They see corruption, poverty, and stagnancy in their parents, teacher, leaders, and peers and see their only mode of agency as escape, reflecting for me evidence of the third face of power.

So, what’s the second reason I’m at YouthBuild Lawrence? I think it’s rooted in my family’s value of service and that’s why I connected with the mechanisms of AmeriCorps, as a member and eventually a leader, without consciously realizing it. But I often struggled with a program that seems to benefit the participant more than the community he/she serves and doesn’t allow service to evolve in activism. YouthBuild Lawrence expressed an interest in moving toward their participants more towards activism, such a voter registration campaign. I wanted to start with an established group of youth who also valued service and individual empowerment, but want to take it a step further.

When I first arrived at YouthBuild, they threw me straight into the hot seat. Within twenty minutes, I was leading them in brainstorming session about the aspects they like and dislike about their community. Many of their frustrations with the political system bubbled to the surface, but I had to constantly ask them who the amorphous “they” many often complained about. The youth were frustrated with both the visible face and gatekeeper powers held by older adults in their community. But the youth group’s problem is one of collaboration because their common interest is not clear, and probably coupled with some education and technical needs as well. And thus my offer to help foster their voices and tools for activism was quickly accepted. I know why I’m there now; the next step is to demystify the abstractions such at the “they” who seem to hold the third type of power and narrow their frustration down to one issue with a tangible action to act.