The conference occurs "once a
Business & Civic Council of Oak Park Church Lesbian Community Cancer Project Religion Communicators Council Southside Help Center Persons with Mental Health Disabilities | A catholic cultural and environmental overview in three sections Public testimony of Resources Unlimited Foundation The Foundation teaches and trains organizations in the Why’s and How’s of shared leadership in a pluralist culture of increasing complexity and global interdependence. Through community development education and training services, we help nonprofits, civic entities, and other community building organizations to grow their strategic capacity for improved advocacy, communications, and policy shaping and making. Six education programs and a range of ad hoc consultation service projects teach and train in methods of democratic decision making. The programs and projects of mutual learning and discovery enable institutions and individuals to: (1) Improve capacity to generate and sustain environments of parity, (2) develop boundary crossing strategic partnerships, and (3) engage creative forms of social entrepreneurship that facilitate change. Programs and projects capitalize on the connections between thought and action, theory and practice. Services address a spectrum of quality-of-life needs and issues in community development, well-being, and health. The institute works in transparent acknowledgement that citizens in an increasingly pluralistic, interdependent, and global culture are living in a stressful period of growing challenge and complexity, which perplexity produces great turmoil and change. In these worst of times and best of times, new awareness is crucial. The Foundation emphasizes ways that religious and humanistic and social valuing elevates and stimulates improvements in systems and institutions and individuals. The values improve and humanize organization structures, for example, in social welfare, health maintenance and education, social justice advocacy, and lifelong learning in urban environments. In awareness of complexity, of interdependence, the Foundation engages what it calls Deep Democracy: Programs and projects serve people of all callings and identities, of different backgrounds and religions and ages and economic classifications, and of varied historical, sexual, political, and social indicators. Preaching to the choir is very important. Preaching to those perhaps outside of and excluded from the choir is equally, if not more, important. Over the years I’ve preached proudly, yet in deep gratitude and humility, to groups and populations both excluded and included. I am a 57-year-old queer American. At 23 I earned a Master’s with distinction, in education and communications systems. For the most part since then, my traditional compass of professional orientation has been education outside the classroom—though rarely to the exclusion of education’s value and promise inside the classroom. From 25 years of marriage I parented children who are now launched into their post-college careers. I am in a partnered domestic and professional relationship for 13 years with Rickey Sain, Sr., sitting here with me at the microphone as the next testimonialist. His children from his marriage of 15 years are working in their post-college careers. Because six of the adult children are women, local maven Isabel Carter Stewart, formerly executive director of Chicago Foundation for Women, once cleverly dubbed us Honorary Lesbians: We were the only invited males in a roomful of 30 female civic philanthropists, both straight and lesbian, at a private home to hear her as the featured speaker. Mr. Sain serves as the organization’s executive director. At 47, he was born at the tail-end of the baby boom. We are enjoying our life together as empty-nesters, not only at home in Oak Park—an urban-fringe village of 53,000 residents, contiguous to Chicago’s west border at Austin Boulevard—but also in the Foundation's social justice work in metro Chicago. Getting up and going to work everyday is a joy. The wonders of new creation: In decisive recession are the memories of us two having to endure hassles from the painful and bedeviling cacophony of raising raucous teenagers. Now we have entered into what we poetically call vital symphonies of work in advocacy and community development education. As an example, this cultural and environmental overview itself indicates some of the catholic political and moral forces—whether symphonic or cacophonic—having an impact on present and future roles of elders in a democratic society. Visionary and pragmatic work that is integrated, as distinct from merged or blended, is exceedingly challenging, often exciting. The work uplifts. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to education and greater social justice are symphonic, in the sense that the approaches use a plenitude of flexible yet disciplined and fine-tuned methods of achieving greater harmony through greater understanding. This work requires a certain dexterity within a robust spirit of compromise and reconciliation. Respecting differences as different, the work is an answer to a regrettable mentality of indifferentism, which can misguidedly imply that differences don’t make a difference. In fact they do, as everyday life indicates. The work brings together—to honor—the legitimate claims of distinct constituencies across interdisciplinary fields of knowledge, all in the name of decency and well being. In a manner of speaking, in the Mansion are many rooms. The work is American because, while clearly pluralistic and multi-dimensioned, it also has rich practical impacts based in that common sense which is typical of a messy democracy. New freedoms now allows us two as principals—and the Foundation by extension—to incorporate our more than 50 years of frontline, administrative, and policy development experience, among, for, and with populations at risk. These experiences have been deployed in service to creating frameworks of community education in social justice, social welfare, and community health and well being. Trustees, staff, participants, members, and a network of partners variously work at the difficult, controversial socio-cultural and psycho-dynamic intersections of sexuality, spirituality, and racial reconciliation. (Please see the list of network partners in the column to the left.) Standing alone by themselves, as if that were possible, each of the three hot-button issues is blowing strong winds of contention in a society that, some believe, has lost its way in the thick dust kicked up by the winds. The environments of equity—or fairness—produced by this system and structure of engaged discourse can draw into the same space people who would otherwise never meet or talk to each other. Participants at different levels of policy making and policy shaping surface the prevailing issues of personal and societal concern. The goal always is truth that leads to moderation, to a certain relaxation of social and civil strife. Democratic forms of community development education create opportunities for all involved to articulate the concerns. This happens in styles of communication that reconcile by their openness, styles ranging from assertive self-confidence to defeat and despair, from debate and contentious argument to disabuse of the sense of failure, and from angry outbursts proposing or opposing change through forms of inquiry, dialogue, conversation, and poignant story telling. These are expressions of communication that engage, some less than others. All the outlets of expression happen within creative community education assemblies of equity. Congregations of citizens most often find outlets for the expressions in organized communications formats: convocations, conferences, seminars, symposia, facilitated consultations, practical workshops, and special task force projects. Altogether the assemblies are opportunities to develop, among other results, a new sense of empathetic realism, reciprocal goodwill, and greater kindness and understanding toward others and self. Not unusually in these settings for example, story-telling can and does energize both forceful resistance to, and strong embracement of, new and compelling ideas for self and group empowerment. So I appreciate the careful organizing effort leading to this thoughtful congregation of activists, here assembled to help effect new policies concerning elders. As an elder myself—and as a lot of other things as well—I say many thanks for the opportunity to tell my fairly ordinary story of a life which has had a few extraordinary, five-minutes-of-fame moments. My mostly modest story now becomes an addition to an amazing grouping of elder stories heard here this morning. Ultimately stories of compelling realism will inform and define the four-day proceedings from the December 11-14, 2005, White House Conference on Aging. The stories become a part of our thriving democracy, even if democracy is widely viewed presently as awash in social and moral strife and political division. My own story, particularly as the institute’s founder in 1980 (Year 2005 celebrates 25 years of service.) is that the community education programs and projects have been and still are designed by and for—and with—participants from all backgrounds, callings and ages, including LGBTQ seniors, a group serving today pointedly as both the subject and the object of this Midwest gathering of change agents. Together here, we have been exploring a local and national theme of significance—ways to honor and advance the voices of The Elders. In response to the theme, my special story tells of the inventive, often innovative, ways the Foundation gives thanks corporately with a grateful heart for the abundant principle and practical example of Radical Inclusion in its consultation service programs and education projects. In part, the gay ethos played a role nurturing in me that principle and practice over time, in spite of personal and societal inconsistencies when I tried, within reason, to use the everyday principle wherever possible. The principle now takes its place alongside other Foundation principles and ideas of good moral order, meaning principles of active affirmation of three significant welcoming practices: friendship, hospitality, goodwill. Two examples of radical inclusion: (1) Among our board’s 13 trustees, seven are seniors—elders from 50 to 85—of whom three are openly gay or lesbian. Four in that age group have been, and still are, lifelong and distinguished public allies of persons who call themselves LGBTQ. Trustees were catalysts and friends of the early Gay Liberation Movement, long before political and social fashion made it less forbidding and more acceptable to befriend a population oppressed. This is a population weighed down by the risks involved—the harm to body and soul—in being other than exclusively heterosexual. Social critic and poet Andrienne Rich uses the two-word descriptor compulsory heterosexuality to characterize the assumption that men and women are innately attracted to each other sexually and emotionally. To the trustees' credit they have kept to the tasks of support and friendship over many years. They have done so in the face of ever-shifting ideologies over time of what constitutes “good moral order.” To get a sense of why I bracket good moral order as a phrase, look to the nearly 50/50 split in the popular vote of the national presidential elections in November of 2004. The two major political campaigns took a narrow view. Each campaign seemed to use the other side as a scapegoat for social and moral ills, by inciting those massed at extremes of the political spectrum. In the polling booth, voters in effect had to choose between two evils. The major campaigns abandoned a broader democratic practice of leadership: Asking the voices of moderation to participate in creating new understandings of ways good government should lead in meeting its obligation to encourage, secure, and sustain the common good. (2) The second example of radical inclusion. Among our members and program and project participants in Year 2005—roughly a total of 350 people receiving education and consultation services—some 40 percent (140 participants) were in one stage or another of open LGBTQ-ness. About half of that grouping (70 participants) is at least 55 years of age. And a fairer share of those older participants are in their mid-to-late 70s, some older. I am here not to marshal facts or statistics in health and welfare, or to cite the data from social and medical studies on LGBTQ elders. That effort is left to other kinds of specialists, experts. The information they are sharing in this gathering will undoubtedly produce good effects in winning a better understanding of the connections between elder problems and needs. I myself enjoy fact-based education posed in large overarching and synthetic contexts of broad meaning and longer-term impacts, cultural and environmental. Thank you for the new information. Rather I am with you as an educator and policy development specialist, in the role today of advocate. I am advocating for new caring policies that account for, and adapt to, the difficult necessities and unique hopes of an aging population of baby boomers. They are my sisters and brothers all.
To meet the commitment, the conference intends to work, first, from perspectives academic and practical; then second, from the dynamic interaction of the theoretical and actual. The work is to build partnerships and authentic collaborations able to redress and address senior concerns in wellness, social services, and empowerment. As one result, the conference should encourage and support more research and best-practices programs, by creating and advancing strategies that are capable of influencing and shaping new policies of realism. The policies ought truly to reflect clearly the inherent human complexities in Americans elder. One primary purpose of the White House Conference on Aging is to help seniors continue to fight the good fight. The business of the people is to learn about and find doable solutions to the persistence of social and wellness problems, brought on in part by the contending forces of enormous contradictions, seemingly everywhere in these tumultuous times. One result of the contradictions, sadly, is denying elders the dignity to which they are entitled. Though not always, generally seniors are wiser, more settled because older, and from experience they are smart and know a great deal more than juniors. The elders are willing and able to use their knowledge to help. They continue to be an exciting resource for good—a resource to themselves and to their sometimes more energetic juniors. The account books report that we elders have spent 55 or more years in learning and discovering. We have sorted out and managed family joys and sorrows, community burdens and pleasures. We have experienced work challenges and opportunities in an era of brutal violence and inhumanity, a period made more inhumane by the tortured tensions of loss and grief from clashes of war and strivings for peace. In different ways we have lived during a half-century, or more, of negative and positive configurations combined, of attitudes and experiences commingled. We have absorbed and been absorbed by the configurations. Serving as an elder epithet, the final line of William Faulkner’s fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), hints at the sense of having put up with much that was unexpected: “They endured.” Like the main characters, we are still standing after having been chastened and emboldened by chance misfortune. The configurations of our celebrations and traumas, joys and sufferings, have become part of who we are. They describe how we have endured. Justifiably we are also proud of dealing, both earlier and now, with the vicissitudes of attaining some of the expected rewards for our spiritual and material labors. The extraordinary worldwide peace demonstrations of February 15 of 2003 was an unprecedented, colossal example of citizens in agreement and cooperation with each other to prevent the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Significantly the actions of leadership that led to war thus happened without citizen agreement and cooperation. The amazing marvels of CNN 24-hour news made breathtakingly clear this unprecedented happening: For the first time in the history of the world, the whole world knew together at the same time that the whole world did not want war. In city after city after city, the dramatic images of hundreds of thousands, upon thousands, of anti-war protesters and peace demonstrators—totaling in the millions and millions—appeared in print and on TV and computer screens everywhere. The reflexive impacts of that massive phenomenon have yet to be studied and analyzed in historical perspective. The impacts also need analysis from other perspectives: e.g., moral, political, civic. Clearly one perspective ought to explore the new awareness and understandings of things that happen at the direction of duty-bound leaders but, significantly, without the consent of citizens equally duty-bound to influence the thinking and actions of political and moral leadership. While elders gave witness to this spectacular global occurrence, it is but one example, momentous yes, of how they and others directly engage the pressing complexities of community and political life. Engagements happen amid a fast-growing, still-accelerating, always-changing world, incessantly on the move to make a life and a living, swiftly yet anxiously traveling an arduous pilgrimage, and yet continuing the journey with an ominous sense—based on experience and knowledge—that elders might lose their footing. Or worse, they might forget themselves and get lost along a twisting, rocky, unstable path. Given the spiritual, social, educational, and economic wherewithal used for sustenance and growth along the way of the jarring journey, some here today have claimed that we already are in possession of a lot to work with, that in fact much good has been born out of the struggles for justice and peace. Others here have demanded that crooked paths be made straight, that much more must happen before arrival at a final destination along the journey. Thank you for saying those compelling things. Each judgment is right, each serving as reminders that all God's children are in this together, and that destruction, scarcity, and greed ought not to win out over creation, plenty, and generosity. So here we are assembled now—a portentous if meager five years into the new Millennium—as Americans living in and observing a culture growing marvelously, devilishly pluralistic. We don’t yet understand that growth's puzzling, exciting implications, say, over the next 25 years. The stories told here have hazarded a guesstimate or two. Just ten years ago, for example, nobody but nobody heard the call to adapt and change in the genius, because controversial, American expression: marriage equality. Today responses, including resistance, to the call for change are clearly mindful of the phrase. The impact of its meaning is everywhere, sometimes manipulated, often debated ad infinitum, occasionally in one-dimensional and stern Who-shot-John? arguments. The arguments are in serious contention, often at the extremes of absolute praise or denigration, and of false credit or false blame. Absolutist arguments at polar opposites end up canceling each other out. John is dead. Yet still he’s alive for vociferous and doctrinaire ideologists, some of whom perilously summon their faulty collective memories in order to validate the unforgiving moral absolutism of their social claims and political doctrines. The elders present today include those LGBTQ: Whether privately or publicly, they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, and finally Q standing in for either queer or questioning. Older people, similar to and sometimes more skillfully than younger people, know how to question some of the assumptions by which they live. At the same time, again like other citizens, elders also identify in perhaps dozens of other ways. We identify as having one or another trait of perception or intelligence, or as having a certain synthesis of social and political and ethical characteristics. We identify as having unduplicated configurations of education, experience, and knowledge. Even in the deployment of our best human traits and characteristics to bring good things to life, life has still been a series of mixed blessings, of dark and light conjoined. Life is heartbreaks and satisfactions, failures, and successes. Daily do we labor within the American art and science of sustaining our lives at home and on the job. We do the best we can to live out a fundamental sense of decency, care, and service, while at the same time we work off and on to build stronger responsive structures of enablement. The structures improve well-being in families, communities, and at work. From the beginnings America has absorbed a striving, driving, adventurous people who found, and still find, great meaning in accommodating, adapting to, a thriving number of cultural and social expressions. Adaptation and compromise seem to happen episodically, here and there, within a reasonably resolute entrepreneurial spirit of national goodwill. The goal is safety and security. Goodwill has an extraordinary capacity: The ability to diminish the negative effects of older and competitive conflict-driven tribalisms. At the same time, goodwill has capacity to increase the constructive loyalties inherent in new tribalisms of caring purpose. We are a nation of more than a quarter of a billion souls, having a total population of at least 288-million, based on 2005 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. The caring purpose, and positive effects, of new tribalisms are resources, allowing nearly unlimited possibilities for revitalizing a foundation of renewal in a still-growing U.S. population, one always on the move, always on the proverbial pilgrimage to the biblical promised land. Needed are new and realistic dedications to accomplish well being and the public safety. Of course, all just depends. That frequently uttered and heard refrain does not mean everything is relative. Because one size hardly fits all, we know there have to be adjustments that fix the problems in front of our eyes. In one way or another, it is right to acknowledge that one set of compelling circumstances may be at odds with another set of compelling circumstances. The great enterprise of critical thinkers and engaged activists is working to understand and judge the similarities and differences in each particular set of circumstances. The intended end result? Finding resolution at the cross-sections, whether tomorrow or today. Common sense says that making sound judgments is good, desirable in fact. Yet both impertinent judgmentalism and sound judgment come, ultimately, out of energetic sources of both clarity and confusion from within mind and heart. All depends on where individuals are positioned and how they, in everyday engagement, are able to call upon internal reserves of purpose to guide their thinking and their doing. The preference here is in favor of thoughtful discernments flowing like a river from sound judgment. To live out the simple promises of finding deeper meaning and even joy in adversity, or in compromise, is a reasonable proposition. Leisure activities release, relax, recreate. The pause typical of the freedom and enrichment from activities of leisure and amusement leads to regeneration. From new life comes a deeper sense of greater responsiveness to others at home and elsewhere. Vacationing, getting away on retreat, taking a mental health holiday from work, walking in the park, flexing the muscles, dancing, enjoying music, taking deep breaths, having a coffee visit with an isolated neighbor down the street, singing in the shower, enjoying a delicious meal, seeing a movie, attending an exhibition opening. Forms of recreation can delightedly produce more refreshing thoughtfulness. Slowing down the pace, by pulling back for a while to enjoy quiet, can restore streams of energy in our private and civic lives. New energies recharge and rejuvenate the commitment to doing what we need to do in order to get things done. Deep Democracy is, in essentials, an urgent call to realism, an appeal to living out the complexities of radical inclusion as both idea and practice. Yet renewed discernments of that appeal often come more easily when we take the time to take the time. From quieter spaces we sometimes can figure out what next has to happen to ameliorate things at home, in community, at school. Civic justice policy development work, for example, can find renewal when it creates flexible structures of formal and informal education in order to keep things moving and avoid dogmatic rigidity. Americans enjoy being on the move. Winston Churchill understood the tension between knowing and not knowing what to do. He once quipped that we Americans always fail first at trying everything else. He said that paradoxically we always do the right thing in the end. I believe citizens know, somehow intuitively, what the right, fair thing to do looks like. Sometimes when all is said, all is done. Public intellectual and political theoretician Jean Bethke Elshtain, of the University of Chicago divinity school, says, “Democracy’s enduring promise is that we can come to know a good in common that we cannot know alone.”
With sound judgment, let's try to avoid impertinent judgmentalism, instead moving beyond the basic facts of life in order to use our gifts to benefit the common good. How do we dare to put our own gifts to use? When we do engage the challenges and opportunities, what will we lose or gain? What are the risks? Loosely to paraphrase social activist extraordinaire and religious mystic Mother Teresa: Creation doesn’t so much call us to be successful but, rather, to be faithful to life and living. Clearly elders are of all economic backgrounds, social practices, and religious beliefs. They are of all levels of intelligence combined with varying levels of occasional unsurprising dimwittedness, even perhaps showing out a certain dullness akin to the light from a 25-watt bulb. Each elder has different or pressing needs. Some needs are perhaps intermittent or more urgently pressing than others. Always there is the need for sensitive and caring policies that address social, health, and community problems and concerns. If in fact one size doesn’t fit all, then elders certainly deserve realistic responses of care. The responses ought to be consistent with our abiding American style of honoring—eventually—the demands of evenhandedness. We are a fair-minded country, steeped in traditions of equity. At the same time, we obsess over how to meet pluralism's demands, especially demands for toleration and accommodation and respect. What's more, the nation demonstrates an extraordinary range of religious beliefs and practices. All of them, variously, shape our social and ethical attitudes and actions, both for ill and for good, and in manifestly non-monolithic ways. My mother of blessed memory, now dead 31 years, used to sport a very wide smile when she said, "The only time the divine God laughs outloud is when we humans are planning." We assume, of course, a certain persistence in working hard through some of these obstacles and opportunities. We also assume some hoped-for patience and luck. Elders clearly have earned the right to real responses of concern regarding their needs. A sense of realism means, then, support for many kinds of workable and effective approaches and programs—approaches reasonably adapted to a range of different circumstances. The White House Conference on Aging will hear, will know, the things people in this room today have to say. Our local stories will go out, then gradually combine and integrate with other local stories reported, thus bringing into view a fuller than average, much richer, less stereotypical and biased, and therefore more integrated and less monolithic picture of what a complex of collective needs and concerns looks like in the United States, locally and across regions.
Conference success, however, likely depends too on an open, frank acknowledgment of the nation’s iniquitous record of inequity, resulting in neglect of our elders. It is a dismal documented record of mistreating them, of seeing them as pushovers, as Less Than: Tearing them apart as worn-out, useless, stupid, senior citizens destined for society’s junk heap. To its detriment (and ours), elder wisdom has been denied the nation’s respect, has been denied the honor and respect bestowed as a matter of course upon elder wisdom in more cooperative, nurturing cultures than our own. Less Than who? Critical reflection and judgment should ask: “Where and how in America is that dishonorable discharge of beliefs and practices toward elders and elder wisdom coming from?” From sound judgment? From impertinent judgmentalism? From something else? The answers call for critical judgment. A narcissistic and existentialist culture like ours seems hell-bent on imbibing the beguiling, tempting wonders of youthful distractions and excess. Our culture’s materialist underpinnings—both its constructive and deconstructive expressions—helped produce that post-modern state of the body politic, whether right or wrong. Be that as it may. Put aside temporarily the nation's great distractions and its flaws of character. They'll still be there tomorrow. Based on history and experience then, in a democracy it’s a sensible bet that the population likely will pick up again on why and how we citizens continue to be at great risk, off and on, of devolving into immoderate pathologies of habits unhealthy and preoccupations small-minded. Thus basic information about the risks is now out in front here. So our attention at the White Conference on Aging ought to turn to America’s need to hear and learn how elders contribute to enriching their own lives and those of their families and others—in their workplaces, in their neighborhoods. The stories surely tell of purpose, of compassion, of achievement. America needs to be enterprising in helping—thereby honoring—seniors in whatever way possible. They merit no less of a raising up. And in the name of the nation’s elders—our elders—the juniors sometimes know seniors deserve no less than what they have coming to them by virtue of their gifts of wisdom and other extraordinary contributions. That a grateful nation gives back is right. What does justice look like? Justice is right relationship in action.
Section 2 Back to Contents My name is Rickey Sain Sr. In particular I begin here by telling the White House Conference on Aging about discoveries from Resources Unlimited Foundation research, in areas of shared leadership in policy making and shaping. Called The Shared Leadership Project, results of a ten-year longitudinal study of attitudes and actions of democratic leadership in the nonprofit and civic sectors, have been disseminated broadly since Year 2000. The dissemination of results and the actions based on results, in fact, continues in Year 2005 and beyond. The research focus was civic engagement, volunteerism, and community development education. One major research component, for example, included rating values of right relationship in nonprofits. The values have capacity, traditionally, for leading to improvements in human development and community relations. Values at the heart of policy development include goodwill, civility, tolerance, inclusion, mutual respect. A second major component of the research, for another example, was new learning about teamwork, and creating new policies and structures to teach and train in what's been learned. Results of that entire process have enabled ways to team up the theoretical with the practical. That marriage binds the visionary to the pragmatist, the senior executive to the senior administrator, the policy maker to the policy shaper, the thinker to the implementer. That kind of bond, that pairing, may sound like the characterization of a fantasy relationship taken from a work of fiction, a provocative novel of extraordinary and exquisite social manners. Nonetheless the very real functional pairings are in mutual service to each member of the team. The service has capacity for bridging thought and action, for making the constitutive connections between the actual words used by the two members of the team and the meaning of the words taken to heart in advancing the team project. Deliberately executed, the team concept is more than helpful. It is enduring. It furthers organizational growth in unison, better to help ensure the future in these tough times of shifting ideologies and changing environments. Instabilities can force executives and administrators of the same organization to struggle alone, without a clear sense of how together they enact solutions that address the perceived and real tensions between resources of scarcity and plenty—resources financial and human. A personified team of two is, in a sense, abundance embodied for all to see and learn from. It is a caring and focused partnership. More important, let it be known without delay that a partnership of two is capable of creative expansion into model organization partnerships of more than two. Team work manifests a fuller sense of vision and action united. A team of two can serve as a fresh and surprising reference point of stability, a reference point needed now amid economic and social shifts in political priorities and in funding availabilities. It is true that one professional, operating alone, might achieve a lot. Research shows it to be more true that two professionals—operating together (co-operating) as a team of two—are a formidable force to help their organization achieve measurable success. That kind of cooperation is inherent in the word team, no matter the definition of measurable, as long as a cooperative spirit occurs in ways consonant with mission and programs.
Thus the research results of the two major components of The Shared Leadership Project—(1) revalidation of right relationship and (2) integration of concept and praxis—have been incorporated wholesale into the Foundation’s inspirational teaching projects and practical training programs, small and large, including those advocating (and generating) untried and untested public/private partnerships. Since dedication to real project success is unquestioned, what is there to lose? I’ll use an example of team dedication from the Intergenerational Mentors Program. It brings together elders from 55 to 75 who are straight and/or LGBTQ, with juveniles from 14 to 20 who are also straight and/or LGBTQ. In the program the presumptive norms of the learning curve might suggest that the senior is the thinker and planner (the executive) and that the junior is the organizer and doer (the implementer). Whatever the actual case, the two work to build a community development education project together, perhaps taking the uncomfortable risks involved when reversing or interchanging the two normative roles of listener and learner. [Here as a related aside, the shared leadership project confirmed that the same relationship of equity in risk-taking is still reasonably true when applied to any dedicated team of two middle-aged adult professionals, female or male, working interchangeably in phases of planning and executing. Put another way, in human terms the power of the relationship comes from integrating the activities of theoretician with the activities of practitioner. In conceptual terms, the power comes from the creative ways theory and practice connect as reasonable co-equals.] Within the always-necessary limits and parameters, the mentors program itself is made up of self-defined and disciplined projects of mutual learning and discovery. The team of two—respectively, juvenile and elder—works out a unique-to-them method of operation, based on mutual investment in securing individual and reciprocal interests. The elders are of intriguing backgrounds and callings. They occasionally are people of note or acknowledged leaders. Their professional and occupational fields of interest include, for example, politics, law, education, or science, or religion, or philanthropy, or still other fields. In general, elders are regarded as grounded citizens. They seek to engage young people with an open dedication to hearing and learning from them the many levels of enthusiasm and interest. And vice versa. Other civic engagement projects of mutual learning and discovery, which have developed organically from the Foundation's six major programs, all involve seniors as well. Why not, for they have more than much to contribute. The project’s team of two operate together—nominally the executive or policy maker with the administrator or policy shaper. They discern new ways to learn from and integrate their respective levels of skills, intelligence, and experiences. The arrangement helps each better understand and address the nuanced, controversial, and seemingly deconstructive decisions community builders make concerning complex issues centered around, for example, moral and ethical controversies like poverty or war, or both. For another example, multi-dimensional issues often fit within, and have indirect and direct impacts upon, a number of intersecting concerns. These include, for example, economics and politics, or religion and community development, or senior housing (a.k.a., elder habitats, domiciles, settlement houses) and education, or foreign policy and human rights. All depends. Over the course of several facilitated encounters, a team of two members is able to work out what its own specific project will look like across a number of these areas of concern. They also have to ask and answer such questions as: How much time to invest sensibly? and What results to anticipate? The Agreement Contract they sign pretty much takes the form of a binding, non-bureaucratic handshake. Technology too produces an unsorted cascade of perplexing social and political demands. These pile up, keeping us from—deafening us to—hearing each other’s need for human connection. As mentioned earlier, any and all Foundation programs or projects involve elders. The concept of a team of two is meant to support each member openly. To hear and to assist each other leads to better, more realistic amelioration of the stresses and impairments of social upheaval and change. In our culture in general, the urgent cascade of social and political demands also seems somewhat disingenuous. It is a paradox perhaps that the demands of urgent political or moral action, for example, routinely call at the same time for expansive, deeper expressions of empathy and compassion in the ways we manage the routine stresses and circumstances of human engagement. Embodied team work, and the external relationships growing out of it, just simply takes more time. Everybody pretty much says we don’t have any more time left to get anything more done. Servant leadership as as an idea and practice tells us, You can get an awful lot done if you don’t worry about who gets the credit. Nonetheless it needs to be said at this point that there's a surfeit of desperate busy-ness in our cynical time of going it alone. Busy-ness gives the lie to the value of team work because busy-ness is a deadening excuse sometimes for not engaging. Busy-ness can be a bogus, because fleeting, analgesic to the pain that is basic both to lack of restraint and to deepest kinds of dark despair. Cynicism that castigates others without self accountability is the worst pain perhaps. When the pain reliever wears off, still there comes back the terror of unremitting uncertainty and anxiety. You simply don’t know, really, what’s coming at you next.
The Foundation's Supper & Conversation program surfaces any number of practical ways, for example, to live in—meaning, to address and reconcile—social and political contradictions within and among us. Participants from all callings gather in the evening at a deliberately democratic table to offer their own written-out and subsequently vocalized remarks. The comments fix on a selected problem to get solved once participants leave and next go back to work. The out loud remarks, which participants prepare ahead of time on a pre-selected subject or issue, are for the consideration of all involved in the conversation. The presentations are done usually in no pre-determined arrangement. In this instance a certain ordering is important to some and not to others. An alternative order can be stipulated, if it is wanted, to engage the evening discussion. Sometimes the deliberately organic approach works well and things grow from that; at other times the let-it-happen organic method has weaknesses of organization that necessarily stand as manifest givens. The declared point of the evening is for participants to offer a uniquely precise answer to an open-ended question—e.g., What does civic engagement look like? The structure of discourse allows and encourages open risk taking in a setting of equity. The overall experience is similar to our exploration here today, in which we are each responding openly to a theme calling for the hearing of elder stories. Similarly the format of Supper & Conversation is another opportunity for a kind of public testimony. If only at one evening’s table gathering, risk taking is a catalyst, a jump start. It also can plant new seeds of trust in deeper, more fertile soil. Risk taking has potential for enlarging, for taking us beyond the false comfort of thinking that stability comes from possessions and the mere materiality of things. We have so much of what we think we need to make us more whole. Yet we live in the confusion that is fear. Including seniors, participants in other programs and projects also have the honor of their say. They know ahead of time that the Foundation will disseminate their helpful and insightful ideas into an outside-the-classroom product of education and communications. In gratitude I report that the product inevitably finds its way into inside settings—from within the classroom to the board room. The technique is another way to share information about bright solutions. The sharing parties come from within a network of interested organizations and groups, notably those in education, religion, social justice, politics, business, etc., or those squarely at the intersections. Thus participants take time to consider what they want, and need, to say on ways to work toward solutions, solutions generated both collectively and individually. In nearly all programs and projects the moderating function of the facilitation role is to guide a little, and to listen a lot. Participants empower dynamics unique to each group. They themselves do the vast majority of the critical listening and the talking. The father of Taoism, Lao Tzu, said, “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him....But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, 'We did it ourselves.'” The demands dictate getting a grip on managing the stresses inevitable in an always asymmetrical, shifting, push-and-pull scheme, a system driven by two distinct constrictions: Hurry Up…and…Wait. For instance, in an anxiously urgent or conflicted environment as was just described, it is true that seniors, among others, have a presence of mind that is able to ask crucial questions, including: How to know what expectations are reasonable? And whatever the situation, how to take warranted action with a clear head? To use another example, this one from the Faces of Community program, we gaze first hand at the tensed-up human faces of unrelieved dis-ease. Some faces, but still too many, reflect the tyranny suffered from a barrage of high-tech devices of social communications. The worst devices are ersatz substitutes for genuine human contact. The faces expose the confusion and exhaustion from a scheme of constant psychic and social batterings. Listen in and hear from program participants their resistance. For instance, a typical TV commercial lasts 30 seconds, during which an average of 67 separate images explode and flash before the eyes. For another example, who really can get a good fix on the dizzying experience of viewing 14 or more bird’s-eye commercial logos, positioned conspicuously on a screaming promotional flyer or on a circumscribed web page? Is this a kind of brand-naming, of logo-izing, that is sold to the most cheap, grace-less, most tawdry and least thoughtful bidder? Less are these accusations. More are they questions that probe for answers, which answers should in fact lead to more questions. One question asked by a program participant goes like this: Why would anyone who doesn't read bulk mail, who simply and routinely discards it without looking at it, propose a bulk mail campaign for his organization? A challenging question on many levels. What do standards of good visual communication and good verbal education look like? When theoretician and practitioner join together—as pragmatic visionaries?—they ask and answer these and similar difficult questions of each other in a presumably safe space. The exchange reciprocally teaches each the thinking of the other on troubling questions. The exchange certainly surfaces points of difference or similarity. More important perhaps are the points of enrichment, of new understandings that can lead to change and renewal. The practice of inquiry through scrutiny or, conversely, the practice of scrutiny through inquiry are two examples. Each practice has potential for new provocative answers to old provocative questions: What’s working? What ain’t working? What can and will work? Why or why not? To ask and answer those and similar questions takes time. Faces of Community learns from, is shaped by, the elders. Their knowledge flows, sometimes surges, from years of recurring experiences gleaned from the intended and unintended consequences of their actions, occurring in response to their experiences. These are the actions deemed, variously, either regrettable or worthy of note or celebration. Let’s listen in and hear the elders' recounting of their observations. One of the things learned through experience, for instance, is that the prevailing worries and fears about the future often can come from, and certainly lead to, a pathological cultural condition of deliberate dys-communication and mis-education. The elders ask: How does one stop to evaluate those kinds of dark realities of dysfunction? The elders question if those conditions are relentlessly damaging? If so, how so? Are the conditions in danger of becoming a permanent part of what, proverbially and amorphously, we label The System? Do things have to stay like this? What to do to change things? Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary, once asked: “Who the hell set things up this way?” Listen in carefully to the discussion of things less than sanguine. For example, there are subliminal messages everywhere, part of a detestably intrusive social order of communications. Some involve a sense of active and reactive violence directed at the other, including violence coming from the realms of commerce and politics. Seems there's no escaping assaultive forms of give-and-take. In routine situations everywhere—including, shockingly, in churches and temples and in other sacred and secular spaces of peace and goodwill—the conversations and discussions are happening in the insidiously war-like language of battle. The ominous rhetoric bespeaks emotional and physical clashing of civilizations: e.g., smash, obliterate, destroy, wipe out, attack. These are less-than-subtle vocal expressions of social and emotional assaults—from us and to us, from them to us, from us to them. So we're never really sure what type of hard blow is coming at us next. Such configurations of stasis (meaning, opponents always poised for war) tend to confound, to frighten. Bitterness and fright work to empower the negative social actions inherent in destruction and disempowerment. What to do or undo to disempower fear and fear of the other? In response, among top choices would stand the virtues of compassion and courage in the face of gratuitous negation, which is the opposite of intentional affirmation. Section 3 Back to Contents Nuanced and not so subtle assaults to the person can have distressing emotional impacts. The distress isn't going away anytime soon. The impacts result in—devolve into—disincentives to basic courtesy and respect. Being abrupt or spiteful in manner is popular. Aggression in the form of rudeness is flagrant in its magnitude and multiplication, in the home, at work, in social settings. When that transgression happens, to apologize and ask for forbearance is an act of decency. We see and perceive different forms of meanness in the slouching, obscure ways oppression weighs us down physically and mentally. Meanness slowly creeps undetected, without permission, into family living rooms. Both obvious and subliminal messages of indifference to the everyday proliferate in expressions of discourtesy, along with all-too-unnecessary sex and violence on TV, the Internet, in print materials, and in other communications vehicles. Far worse perhaps is the unbecoming wrangling among family members. Jim Wallis, director and editor of Sojourners magazine, laments in a runaway bestseller, God’s Politics: Why the Right Is Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, that parenting is now a “countercultural activity." The assertion is pointedly reflective of a pervasive cultural cynicism regarding the social benefits of family health and well being.
In listening in on the elder discussions, you will hear such questions as: Are these portrayals damning us as engaged people unable to "civilize" each other? Is it possible that abusive forms of image-making and communication are alluring, even desirable? Are things changing that radically? Incongruously the examples and resulting questions point to more frustration, and cause more befuddlement about whether or not bold corrective action can lead us anymore to more tranquil yet rippling pools of harmony. Well to remember we Americans enjoy traditions of robust discourse, including being assertive and bold. Burnham boldly declared: “Make no little small plans. They have no magic to strike man's blood and probably will themselves not be realized.” The inversion I am about to make here—if indeed it fits as true—is odd, probably presumptive and, whether true or false, it foretells an unfortunate circumstance. That inversion is to ask this question: Have we collective heads turned upside down in smug, self-centered indifference? Is this a kind of willful ignorance of prevailing social and political conditions? Is this feigned or, worse, intentional unawareness of the polity’s prevailing plight something desirable, even somehow inexplicably alluring? For example, is the temptation to cold pettiness, or the action of dishonorable insensitivity to the sufferings of others, ever really worth celebrating with intensely concentrated attentions of small-mindedness? Or with expressions of false politeness? Or with virtual concern? There is nothing virtual about anguish, about anger, about misery, or pain, about separation and isolation. Can attention and time be put to better, enhanced use? Is there a range of non-bureaucratic environmental alternatives? How to repair some of the dysfunctional conditions and distressed circumstances of bungled affairs, whether they stem from personal neglect, or whether they unconsciously diminish the meaning of the true and purposeful? How to reinforce, to buttress, with sturdy moral, social, and political architecture? What more is there to be done? Who cares to take time to hear of the enterprising virtues that help fix and heal? Who wants to listen to and hear about robust ethical choices that affirm and build up, that enlarge? When and how can there be more common-good use of the collected wisdom of the elders in ways that serve as expansive alternatives to making little plans? Putting aside for the time being these troubling questions about misguided purpose, then separately and together seniors and juniors need to ask the White House Conference on Aging to think big, with imagination. And certainly to ask the conference to think big, when possible, even beyond our borders. In South Africa during his presidential inaugural address 11 years ago in 1994, Nelson Mandela asked his country and an expectant world, including the United States, a major ally: How to reduce some of the darkness by bringing forth, showing out, more of our fabulous light? Is the light from, say, our 1,000-watt bulb too much to risk? Because it also reveals the shadows of mixed motives? Will brightest light show out the all-too-fearful schemes of social enterprise used to get us through the dark day? Will it reveal to the naked eye our less than ideal actions coming to the surface from individual and institutional weakness, and from political confusion? There are national and otherwise global answers surely, that somehow say yes to building stronger ethical infrastructures and more responsive moral systems of decency, including a neighborly regard for the elders and others within our communities. Bread for the World is widely considered among splendid humanitarian organizations as an exemplar of bountiful and unstinting regard for others...and regard for each person's distinctive gifts. Even so, our responses will remain necessarily incomplete because of the flawed nature of the human condition. Still, we must do what we can. The actions of listening honor both the one being listened to and the one doing the listening. Listening is an invitation to engage more deeply. To honor more genuinely by listening deeply is not easy because of a lack of "time," as if time were a commodity only. The seemingly overwhelming tasks in front of our eyes can keep us more preoccupied with the thing itself—any thing. Who was it that said this: Don't just stand there; do something. What are the person-to-person ways to hear and learn from the accumulated knowledge and wisdom, from what ought to be, in an untidy democracy, an ever-renewing sense of pluralism's promise? Who was it originally that asked these two questions: Just exactly how does it "take a village?" And, What does "village" actually mean to you as you go through the day? In fabulous brighter light then, ought we not to ask the White House Conference on Aging to hear and honor the larger, transcendent truths realized by listening to each of the distinguished members of the policy and advisory committees, seasoned and internationally-minded committees, with the capacity and power to listen to what is said around that symbolic conference table in Washington, DC? That's a mighty question, asking for a mighty answer grounded in the inherent dignity of personhood. At its attentive best, a setting of actualized government service draws its public life deeply from the citizenry and gives that life back again. That is an example of what reciprocity looks like. Service is more important than a shot-gun marriage of convenience. Service achieves enormous good in the name of well-being, on behalf of the body politic.
The bright power to vocalize something important, out loud, is always there in our high-energy, assertive, bouncy, can-do culture. The power can then be transformed into something even more commanding. When power is vocalized in concert with the volume of friends and colleagues and experts, it becomes a mutually supportive network of thought and sound in action. This enlivening sense of robust mutuality has a symphonic richness characteristic of clearly integrated purpose. Presently our purpose should be to do what we can to say decisively at the conference table: Listen up! Please hear the real stories. They teach good lessons. They help find solutions-based answers. Altogether the stories are part of the ongoing history of doing—in hope—what we can to make things better, trying always to find genuine ways to legitimate both individual and group claims on our attention. I want to come back to earth now and get grounded in the pragmatic beauty of the particular, doing so by using an example from the small, growing Intergenerational Mentors Program. Right now it involves a total of 22 participants of 11 elders and 11 young people. The summary data gathered thus far is interesting, if incomplete, concerning the promising state of youthhood and, more to the point here, the promising state of seniorhood. Each is potentially a powerful force for achieving a goodly measure of common goods. Let's see how the thinking behind that program evolves into broader frameworks of partnership between theorists and practitioners. Almost all of my testimony this morning comes, in fact, from the teachings harvested from organizing and cultivating the mentors program—its humanizing system and structure of growth through parity. It comes also from multidisciplinary understandings gleaned primarily over the last decade (really, a professional lifetime) from creating and facilitating the policy advocacy as well as the community education development curriculum used in three other programs mentioned earlier: Supper & Conversation, Faces of Community, and Dialogues in Democracy. The action of listening in to the elders may reveal some of their practical teachings and responses. Their teachings tend to confirm the critical importance of living life more deeply engaged in the American realisms of contradiction and ambiguity, more deeply engaged in Deep Democracy. Having to live in contradiction—because we are participants in its creation—has a certain irony in its own right. Perhaps there is comfort, some reassurance, in knowing that irony is regarded as a force not only for disempowerment but also for empowerment. The energy source comes out of a similar spirit of heart and mind co-operating...or not co-operating. In fact, a better understanding of the ubiquitous reality of paradox and irony is at the heart of the religious and moral leadership of two pioneering American theologians and ethical voices of the last century—Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1928-1968). They knew and appreciated each other's work as well as the work in mysticism and activism of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972). All three taught the nuanced truths of irony as natural to the human condition. Niebuhr and King urged us to be strong when we engage that certain omnipresence wherein we expect one thing and yet too frequently we get quite another. It was Heschel who taught ways of seeing the joy of God in human irony. He said that irony generates the capacity to embrace the wonder of the world's Creation in the day to day. It is time now to conclude this testimony. Allow me first to respond generously to the circumstances of confusion and irony and contradiction and ambiguity. Famed psychiatrist Karl Menninger (1893-1990) was an inveterate author and teacher, having spent a professional lifetime asking Americans not to expect more than a few truly fulfilling answers. Mostly there are pregnant questions, he said. He believed that the inevitability of the American circumstance of irony and ambiguity should naturally give birth in us to responsible attitudes and actions. He said that the essence of responsibility, which he characterized pointedly and repeatedly, was to bring forth even more questions. Naturally in a practical way I'm delighted to reaffirm from our programs and projects that the service of inquiry—asking critical questions—is a most-bright hallmark of elder wisdom. Thus attached to this testimony is an executive summary of the mentors program. It here serves as one yet-unfinished example of what creative thought joined to actualized action looks like as a work in progress. The example describes the Mechanisms and Personalisms which foster equitable environments of openness and intelligence, and which lead to the wonder of new public actions of empowerment and uplift. The goal here? Enlargement of thought joined to enlargement of practice.
Sound collective judgment may be, proverbially if cleverly, more powerful than a speeding silver bullet. Judgment, not judgmentalism, will be the biggest help in coming to save the day. Of course, all bets are off about whether collective coming-to-the-rescue efforts will fail or succeed. On the other hand it may happen that we will achieve a little of failure and success both, achieving this no matter whether we crazily and excitedly believe any of us is just wonderful, terrific, just super—man or woman. The revealing Churchill quip from earlier comes to mind again, concerning doing the right thing...eventually. All largely depends in our day and in the nation on the thoughtful integration of different and similar understandings of what failing and succeeding look like. To get around, finally, to doing the right thing is one indicator of a kind of success. Conference proceedings will naturally learn from our stories here. In turn, we will learn from the proceedings. That opportunity, like other kinds of ennobling opportunities in social justice and health, is clearly an auspicious assemblage of learning—of telling stories that are telling, stories revealing the complex of pressing needs. And lest I forget, the conference is yet another way to gather together in the name of E Pluribus Unum, the nation's motto. As each of us knows best, we’ll work together to try getting it right the first time around. However, under the whole of the circumstances in democratic cultures, there can be no individual guarantee. Mutual learning and discovery. There’s simply no replacement for genuine back-and-forthing. Traditionally it is that very doable form of give-and-take which works reasonably well in everyday encounters. Above all, following the conference in the weeks and months ahead, there's really no alternative to keeping on keeping on. To engage the implications and reverberations in that but one stabilizing antidote to cultural cynicism is to offer an answer to harbingers of impending gloom and doom. So good luck to you in the persistence of your insistence. Please wish the Foundation some luck too in working with you through darkness and into brighter light—the critically preferred alternative. So then, let’s move forward in hope toward this challenging opportunity, telling the White House Conference on Aging our uniquely American stories. In these seemingly stressed-out times of diminishments—of deficits of care and hope—there is something important to remember. Working for the common good of The Elders, and of course The Others, has imaginative capacity for enlarging the American panoply of theories and practices that call out real solutions-based answers. The call affirms that radical inclusion is confirmation of the nation's compelling purpose and history. E Pluribus Unum means from many come one, and equally it means from one come many. In the seductively sing-song words of lyrical poet e.e. cummings (1894-1962) concerning the distractions and challenges of God’s human offspring: “Children are so apt to forget to remember, with up so floating many bells down.” Try not to forget to remember at least one thing: Whether ordinary or extraordinary, but always in the haunting reality of honesty and wholeness, story telling should ring out loud and clear. Respectfully submitted, Resources Unlimited Foundation Addendum Back to Contents Important Considerations of the program The program Intergenerational Mentors is dedicated to mutual learning and discovery among both the older set and the younger set fairly equally. A major program component is creating opportunities for adults to learn from youth, with both groups having a chance to engage authentically. One goal is that both get to know each another better. A second is for participants to learn new ways of expanding their network of relationships through rich, meaningful conversations. A third goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of this model of collaborative learning beyond a school’s walls, testing it as a means of expansion in urban and urban-fringe environments outside an institutional school setting.
Program requirements call for mutual adjustment to the specific circumstances of setting and schedule. Sit-down engagements may sometimes occur in the adults’ homes, or just as easily in offices or boardrooms or restaurants or other private/public gathering spaces. The get-togethers are called Supper & Conversation, or Breakfast Break, or Dinner Downtown, or Lunch in the Loop. There also are other similar names that typify being together at table. Simply put, the project goal and name depend on what works best. The initiative provides youth 14 thru 20 with access to highly skilled and motivated metro-area leaders and community activists, from 55 to 75 and older. Some live locally, some beyond our immediate borders. Each works or has worked within a major urban area. They are business executives, publishers, medical professionals, CEOs, award-winning writers, accomplished social scientists, ministers and clergy and others from the healing professions. Generally the leaders are remarkably resourceful, working in partnership routinely with other organizations. They work in many fields of knowledge: community and economic development, law, finance, medicine, racial and social justice, politics, human rights, public service, and so forth. Some of the adult participants have been—and still are—in the public eye. A high school superintendent in a visible and highly vocal community, recently said, “Youth need to know what is expected of leaders, the political and social pressures they are under. And leaders need to hear what young people think of the results of that leadership. Leadership happens upfront or intentionally behind the scenes.” In most cases leaders in the program are thinkers and implementers and doers. They are capable of astutely integrating different approaches, and communicating a clear rationale for the integration. In times of ever increasing complexity demanding some hard choices—here, think new awareness of global/local interdependence and a globalized economy—the leaders seek for a mix of personal and professional reasons to expand their network of relationships with young people outside the classroom.
The program teaches young people, once back in a school setting, how to share information and to prepare experience-based updates, presentations, papers, exchanges, dialogues, updates, and oral reports. They share what they themselves have learned from their outside-the-classroom conversations and encounters with the leaders and community activists. It'll also happen that the youth will develop a dynamic relationship with the activist in ways that allow that activist to come into rich and useful connection with the youth’s peers at school itself, and with the youth’s family members at home. In these settings there will and should be open discussion of hard choices often made under difficult circumstances. To create and facilitate the structures and opportunities for those kinds of powerful connections is a significant part of the Foundation’s mission. The Foundation works thoughtfully with systems in which youth are genuinely affirmed, in which youth are able to build self-confidence. The program teaches young people ways of asking questions about their own perceived contradictions and ambiguities in their lives at school and home—meaning those inevitable paradoxes and realities of life in a pluralist and vibrant community. At the same time the Foundation works with the leaders. It helps them know what to expect generally from youth. It asks them to be flexible, and frequently prepares them ahead of time not to pander to young people. It helps prepare adults to engage youth in back-and-forth discussion and argument about issues of interest and concern. Frequently the get-togethers involve substantive exchanges on present day social, political, economic, ethical, and moral challenges, as the challenges are put out to the adult leaders by the youth. Both of them work together to understand the challenges, and in equitable ways that empower each other. All depends. The program encourages adults and youth to do extra reading from books, magazines, newspapers, and Internet research, all in order to be better prepared to get the most out of the scheduled conversations. When necessary the Foundation also facilitates some of the follow-up work that grows naturally out of the conversations between youth and adult. It also helps evaluate program progress as well as the results from a project undertaken. In general, the subject matter of the exchanges is the very lives the individuals are living in their immediate circumstances. Often the focus is on ways adults and young people do or don’t (or, can or can’t) turn obstacles into opportunities.
The program helps young people and adults both to see the rich complexity in each other and their worlds, often in new and unanticipated ways. There are plenty of youth desirous of going deeper in building relationships of trust and reciprocity with adults, relationships beyond home and school and work. Equally, there are plenty of adult leaders who are deeply emboldened and enriched by getting to know youth outside an institutional and corporate environment. _________________________________________________ Resources Unlimited Foundation gives thanks with a grateful and humble heart to colleagues, friends, and institutions listed in the left column. During the last decade their engaging ideas and frameworks of fairness, equity, inclusion, and mutual respect helped incalculably to develop this testimony. |
