I’m very glad I went to Vancouver last week!
Last week I journeyed across the continent to beautiful Vancouver in British Columbia, the westernmost province of Canada. The reason I went was to participate in the biennial conference of the International Federation of Settlements, a worldwide group of nonprofit organizations (typically called NGOs, or non-governmental organizations in countries outside the USA) that do similar work to the settlement houses and community centers of New York City that are members of the organization I lead, United Neighborhood Houses of NY. In other places – Canada and Europe for example – most typically these organizations are called neighbourhood houses or neighbourhood centres.
I have to confess that I hardly ever go to professional conferences, jaded New Yorker that I am, as they take up a lot of time, cost a lot of money and very rarely turn out to be worth these expenditures in terms of knowledge gained or professional relationships created. But I must say, I was glad I went to Vancouver!
Why? There was a powerful and consistent theme running throughout the three full days of this conference, and it brought me back, in some way, to the very roots of our settlement house “place-based” work. The theme – in short - was how important the authentic engagement of neighbors in the work of every community-based nonprofit organization truly is, and how much we’ve lost our way as many agencies have moved toward a “service delivery” model.
Too often we who run organizations that serve forget to genuinely involve neighbors, community residents, clients or do so as an afterthought. Too often we give lip service to the views of the people who use our services but then go our own way when it comes to program planning and proposal writing. Too often we say we engage in community-building activities but we forget the first principle of successful community organizing, to listen to and engage the members of the community. Too often we come to believe our own jargon: we say we use “strengths-based” or “assets-based” approaches but fail to see the potential contributions of society’s marginalized people, those with mental illness or dysfunctional families… or who are just poor.
In workshop after workshop in Vancouver I felt and heard the message that this must change and it really resonated with me. Without genuinely involving the people who are affected by our policies and programs we will ultimately fail or simply become passive arms of government. Conversely, when we work hard to involve community members in our work – and it is surely time-consuming, underfunded and just plain hard to do so – we ultimately will have agencies that better fulfill their missions and are more creative and innovative as well.
A
brilliant conference plenary speaker, John McKnight, Professor Emeritus
at Northwestern University, noted that the goal of organizations like
ours should be to try to “move people from clients to citizens” by
helping to uncover their capacities. To look at what can they teach us and what agendas they can help us set. McKnight asked: how can we “enable their power to give” vs. “serving” them? In essence, how can we who have defined ourselves as service providers “help ordinary people become extraordinary?” I just love that notion. And
I thank my colleagues from around the world who gathered in Vancouver
last week for reminding me of these basic and essential truths.