Visionary Organizing in Detroit

By Grace Lee Boggs

Jan. 14-21, 2012

Last Saturday’s celebration of Dr. King’s birthday at the Church of the Messiah in Detroit was an instructive example of visionary organizing by members and friends of the Boggs Center.

In planning the program we recognized that finding a job is now the main concern of Detroit’s young people. Also that for most of them Dr. King and the civil rights struggle are nearly as remote as Frederick Douglass and the struggle against slavery in the 19th century.

Our program began with a video montage of small groups growing their own food and building community in Detroit. This was followed by a power point presentation of excerpts from King’s speeches,. I especially welcomed this excerpt from his 1967 anti= Vietnam war speech;

‘”We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”

Our main speaker was philosopher and community catalyst Frithjof Bergmann. Bergmann said that one of the main reasons why we are a thing-oriented rather than a person-oriented society is that most jobs in our industrial society manacle us to machines.

So we try to compensate for our dehumanization on the job by struggling for higher wages that enable us to buy bigger cars and fancier clothes. In other words, we become consumers and materialists, more concerned with our possessions than with community or our relationships with each other.

However, this job system is only a few hundred years old and it is rapidly being made obsolete by HI-Tech which eliminates jobs but also makes it possible for local groups to produce most of our real needs ( e.g. for clothing, housing and transportation) with the same ease with which it has made possible independent book and film production.

Therefore since we can now practice the system of self-reliant local production of most of our real needs, we should not be trying to bring back a job system which is not only dehumanizing but has jeopardized all life on our planet by poisoning our air and our waters.

Instead of organizing marches and demonstrations demanding jobs, as many radical and community organizations have been doing, we need to use Hi Tech to make our commiuities more self-reliant.

Church of the Messiah Pastor Berry talked aout how much his congregation has grown since his church created a. neighborhood housing program and self- help work programs for young people.

We broke up into small groups to share our thoughts, activities and questions.

In my closing remarks I suggested that participants go to the Bogggs Center website boggdscenter.org to learn more about New Work and Bergmann’s ideas.

I also recommended The Third Wave, the best selling book by Alvin Toffler which was published in the 1980s, in paperback is readily available in second hand bookstores.

Foundations of public good

By Shea Howell

January 3, 2012

The Occupy Wall Street movement has opened up the conversation about the control the 1% have over public policy. While we all know that much of this control comes through good old-fashioned campaign contributions and high priced lobbyists, the role of foundations in directing policy has been less understood. But more and more, journalists are exploring the murky world of foundation decision making and the outsized influence these foundations have on public policy.

Nowhere is this influence clearer than in the city of Detroit. In spite of the turmoil over a looming financial collapse, Mayor Bing chose to emphasize the return of the Detroit Works Project. This foundation led initiative to redesign the city was widely considered a failure. It succeeded only in increasing tensions, decreasing public trust, and enraging many citizens who believe that downsizing Detroit means moving people out of their homes and neighborhoods.

The return of Toni Griffin to the leadership of the project demonstrates just how little the mayor and the foundations paying her salary understand about their flawed process. Rather than acknowledging to the public that the whole idea has been badly handled, the re-launched Detroit Works Project seems to think it has a public relations problem. Its emphasis now is convincing citizens to agree with its decisions. Charles Cross, the co-director of community engagement, stresses the openness of the group to answer questions. He explains that the new location in Eastern Market gives a place where “people can walk off the street and talk to somebody. Not somebody who takes their name and passes along a message, but somebody who is right there and is knowledgeable about the project.”

This physical location is augmented by street teams, posters, bus ride-alongs and the use of social media, all designed to “answer questions.”

What neither the organizers, the mayor nor the foundations seem to understand is that democracy is more than asking questions. It is certainly more than officials giving vague answers. Democracy includes the right to say no.

Democracy requires the ability to make real decisions about our own future. It does not mean creating public relations campaigns to get people to agree to things they know are not in their own interest. It means the ability to direct resources for the common good.

Democracy is being subverted by foundations whose interests seem less about the common good and more about imposing their particular vision of progress on the rest of us.

Whether it is Gates Foundation efforts to convince us that charter schools will save education or Kresge, Skillman and company telling us that some neighborhoods are better than others, we the other 99% need to challenge the role these foundations are playing in public life.

In a recent article by David Morris on foundation giving, he says:

“Foundations account for about 13% of all charitable giving, about $40 billion a year. Foundations may help the needy but they rarely advocate for them. “At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent,” opined Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation recently told the New York Times. “We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities.”

He concludes, “While most Foundations do not engage in campaigns to expand policies that extend a helping hand to our neighbors, a growing number are engaging in campaigns whose result may be the opposite.”

The old ways of decision-making, whether influenced by corporate donations or foundation dollars, will not create a new city. That challenge requires us to create new, meaningful ways to engage with one another to determine our future.

Celebrating Dr. King’s birthday in 2012

By Grace Lee Boggs

Jan. 7-14, 2012

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Born on January 15, 1929, he was only 39 years old.

 To honor King’ life Detroit Congressman John Conyers and Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke promptly introduced a bill in Congress to make his birthday a national holiday. In 1981 Stevie Wonder popularized the campaign with his “Happy Birthday” song, and in1983 President Reagan signed a bill, proposed by Representative Katie Hall of Indiana, creating a federal holiday to honor King.

It was an important victory. But like most victories, it presented us with a new and more challenging question. How do we celebrate King’s birthday in a way that makes his life meaningful to future generations? How do we keep him from being coopted, canonized, or commercialized as Jesus Christ (Christmas and Black Friday) and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (Presidents weekend) have been?

The King holiday was observed for the first time on January 20, 1986. Since then I’ve tried to come up with answers.

In 2002, I was in a “Rehearsal for the Future” workshop led by my good friend UM Professor Bunyan Bryant who challenged us each to write a 21st century story about the King holiday. Inspired by the way Detroit Summer youth were rebuilding, redefining and respiriting Detroit from the ground up, I wrote “Detroit 2032,” a fable about how Detroit youth mobilized themselves to clear the streets after a huge blizzard so that people could get to a MLK celebration at Cobo Hall.

In 2003 as the keynote speaker at the UM celebration, I emphasized that “We must be the change.” Both Gandhi and MLK, I said, had recognized the need to Transform both ourselves and our institutions. That two-sided transformation is the essence of an American Revolution.

Four years later I keynoted the MLK holiday celebration at Eastern Michigan University (whose students are mainly from Michigan cities like Detroit). I said that we need to “Recapture MLK’s Radical Revolutionary Spirit and Create Cities and Communities of Hope.”

It was what we were struggling to do in Detroit.

Through these experiences I’ve learned that History is not mainly about the past. It is, as historian E.H.Carr has helped us understand, a dialogue between the past and the present.

In other words, one way to celebrate dead heroes is by examining them in the light of our present problems and deciding what they can or cannot contribute to the solution of these problems and therefore what we have to contribute based upon where we are now on the clock of the world.

That is how we plan to celebrate MLK’s birthday this year.

On Saturday, January 14,from 2-5 p.m. at the Church of the Messiah on Detroit’s east side, in a city which is becoming increasingly dangerous because people can’t find jobs, we will celebrate Dr, King’s birthday by explaining and demonstrating how HiTech is making it necessary and possible for us to Re-Imagine Work.

Frithjof Bergman will explain, and local activists will demonstrate that although HiTech has eliminated millions of Jobs, it also now makes it possible for small groups in local communities to produce their own necessities (housing, clothing and transportation) just as it has made it possible for writers and artists to produce and distribute their own books, films,etc

So there is useful Work for everyone!!!! …..we celebrated Dr, King’s birthday by explaining and demonstrating how HiTech is making it necessary and possible for us to Re-Imagine Work.

Lessons from Marathon?

By Shea Howell

The refusal of the corporate elite and foundations to acknowledge the failure of Detroit Works is reaching laughable proportions. Last week, Stephen Henderson of the Detroit Free Press and American Black Journal on PBS hosted a show touting the Marathon Petroleum Company’s effort to buy out homeowners in Oakwood Heights as a possible model for Mayor Bing’s efforts at “neighborhood consolidation.” This show followed an editorial by Mr. Henderson echoing the same theme. Mr. Henderson wrote:

“Marathon’s effort might best be described as Detroit Works writ small, a laboratory to see how some of your biggest ideas about creating density and emptying out dying neighborhoods might actually play out. There should be lots to learn.”

The most important lesson Mr. Henderson is looking for is how to move people from one place to another, as though we are pawns on a chessboard. He says, “In a city of more than 700,000, with 139 square miles and perhaps tens of thousands of people who need to be moved to create a more rational population footprint, a successful Detroit Works program could reach harrowing figures pretty quickly. There has been no talk about who would pay that bill.”

Mr. Henderson persists in repeating the tired argument that “tens of thousands” “need to be moved” because this would save the city money on services. He says the mayor “should pay attention to the impact on city services from the Marathon program.” He asks, “At what point does it become possible to stop doing things like removing fallen trees or fixing infrastructure? What does it mean for schools, police and fire service, bus routes?”

Neither of Mr. Henderson’s guests on American Black Journal went along with his enthusiastic endorsement of the Marathon efforts. Robin Boyle, the head of urban planning and geography at Wayne State University pointed out that if only 5% of the current homeowners slated for “relocation” were offered the same deal; it would cost the city $600 million. Moreover Mr. Boyle rejected the idea that such a move would have much of an impact on city services, as most are tied to physical structures requiring on going maintenance to reach the whole city.

John Gallagher whose book Re-imagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City showcases the innovative community-building work happening in the city posed two visions for the future of the city. On the one hand, he said, there are those who back the Detroit Works Project and see some kind of quick, large scale reconfiguration of the city, often involving some combination of massive land use projects such as the reforestation proposal of Hantz farm. On the other hand, there is the image of a much more organic emergence of re-purposing land by people in the community. This sometimes means expanding the size of lots, and turning open land to green space, parks or gardens. These small-scale, community driven efforts that he documents so well, are virtually unseen by Mr. Henderson and those who back Detroit Works. Yet this is the only approach that will sustain the evolution of a new city that serves its people and protects its resources.

At the end the show, Mr. Henderson mused that perhaps the reason Marathon can achieve success is because it is a private company, unencumbered by the political issues facing elected officials.- Such thinking is at the heart of the misguided Detroit Works initiative. People engaged in discussion and disagreement are seen as problems to be managed. The idea that such conversations could produce new solutions to our common concerns is unimaginable. Yet this is precisely what Mr. Gallagher describes so well. It is our best hope for a re-imagined democracy as well as a re-imagined Detroit.

Technology and the shrinking job market could liberate us from meaningless work and allow us to do things we care deeply about.

An interview with Frithjof Bergmann, by Sarah van Gelder


According to philosopher and community catalyst Frithjof Bergmann, we are less free than we think, surrounded as we are by endless trivial choices. We will only really be free when we have the option of doing things with our lives that we care deeply about.

The current job crisis, in which thousands find themselves unable to work in their fields, is forcing many people to reconsider what they want to do with their lives. Frithjof Bergmann started New Work to encourage that exploration at the deepest levels and to teach the skills that will enable people to make their dreams a reality. If many people were empowered to make these kinds of choices, the ripple effects would be felt throughout the culture.

Frithjof Bergmann has worked with individuals and communities in the US, Canada, and Germany on developing positive strategies for dealing with the changing nature of work. He is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, author of On Being Free (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) and founder of the Center for New Work., 2200 Fuller Road, Suite 1204B, Ann Arbor, MI 48105.   



Sarah: Can you tell me how the idea of New Work got started?

Frithjof: General Motors had announced that they would automate in an extraordinarily thorough fashion the plant in Flint. We opened the Center for New Work there in 1984, and the first major proposal we advanced was that, instead of splitting Flint – half of it becoming unemployed and the other half of it working overtime – why not let everyone work six months in the factories? During the other six months, make it possible for the workers to do something that they passionately wanted to do. 

This was our first opportunity to work with unions and management to see if the idea of New Work could be turned into practice. While we weren’t able to do all we had hoped to do, we did speak to thousands of people individually to help them discover what they seriously wanted to do. In the end, some started small business, some went back to school, some decided they wanted more time with their children. In one case, a woman came to realize how much she enjoyed working with wood and went on to become a carpenter.

Sarah: How do you define New Work? 

Frithjof: There are two answers: New Work represents the effort to redirect the use of technology so that it isn’t used simply to speed up the work and in the process ruin the world – turning rivers into sewers and rain into acid. 

The purpose of technology should be to reduce the oppressive, spirit-breaking, dementing power of work – to use machines to do the work that is boring and repetitive. Then human beings can do the creative, imaginative, uplifting work. 

So New Work is simply the attempt to allow people, for at least some of their time, to do something they passionately want to do, something they deeply believe in.

The other definition comes from the editorial page of The New York Times: “The way Americans work has to be rethought from the ground up.” We need a wholesale, integrated, organic, new construction of work, with new instruments to make up for the shortage of jobs and to assist in the redistribution of wealth. 

Sarah: That’s a pretty tall order!

Frithjof: Most people assume that the job system we have today has existed since the Stone Age, and that it is therefore unthinkable that we could suddenly run out of jobs. But our job system is actually only 200 years old! 

The current job system is based on the idea that jobs redistribute wealth: capitalists made profits, the profit was distributed when workers got paid, and the workers again helped the capitalists to amass wealth. So it was like rain: the profits rose to the top, but then they came down like rain in the form of wages. 

This is now no longer the case in the same way as it was before. It is very possible now for people to make very large sums of money without employing anybody, either by buying whole companies in leveraged buy-outs and piecing them out like a butchered cow, or by having factories that employ very, very few people. 

One of the really frightful aspects of this situation is that we have something like a third of the population working at an utterly insane pace, and on the other side, close to half of the population is obviously underemployed. It’s crazy. 

Sarah: What you’re talking about goes way beyond the traditional progressive goals of “full employment.” You’re talking about making work itself a wonderful meaningful experience.

Frithjof: Not only should wonderful things occur in work, but maybe I would even put it more provocatively and say that the very best things occur only in work! As examples, I’d start with people like Toni Morrison or Martha Graham or Einstein of course, or Stravinsky, or any number of other people, who, at 90 were still wonderfully vital and intense and clearly performing their work with an astounding capacity.

When one is working in a similar way to these people, it’s quite common to feel that people neglect even their intimate relationships and their children precisely because their work is so fascinating, so absorbing, so consuming, and so exciting; now this is what work can be at its best.

Sarah: The examples you mentioned are of people who have excelled at the very top of their fields, and in many cases these are very creative fields. Can work be as exciting for people who have more ordinary types of jobs?

Frithjof: My example of course is elitist, and intentionally so, almost to the point of wanting to irritate people so that one can then ask, “How does work become like that for everybody?” 

In the great floods in Iowa this fall, there were descriptions of people who worked with an amazing intensity all night long, lugging sandbags, in order to stop the Mississippi and protect this or that village. This shows that a very repetitive task, a very humble task, namely lugging sandbags around, can become work that people do with the same enthusiasm with which Kepler worked on his Laws – if the context is right.

Sarah: What is it that creates that level of enthusiasm?

Frithjof: Purpose is the decisive criteria. If you feel that the work you do serves some powerful, interesting, and inspiring purpose, then it becomes quite easy to do. 

For many car workers, for example, what makes their work a kind of affliction is precisely that they experience it as so utterly pointless, or even worse, as doing something that is adding to a disease. The cars they are making are not of first-rate quality, the exhaust will poison the air, and there is a sense that people don’t really need the cars – all of that has much more to do with making work painful than the sheer monotony of it. 

One of the most exhilarating experiences of my life was to come to the realization that if you persist in asking people what they really want, and if you create real alternatives, people choose to do work that helps other people, that makes a contribution. 

The fact that people, when given a choice, want to do work with a purpose represents a source of social energy that is the equivalent of the steam engine. You can rethink the economy and much else about our culture if that turns out to be true.

Sarah: What changes will be needed to get us to the point where people could do the work they feel passionate about?

Frithjof: First, I prefer to think in evolutionary terms. Although automation and the elimination of labor have taken on epidemic proportions, I don’t think that jobs will end. Instead, the present job structure will slowly contract as a new structure and a new culture will gradually emerge. 

Given that, the first major step toward a New Work culture is for people to become what we call intelligently self-providing. This approach harks back to the sense of independence and self-reliance that was typical of farmers, but with important differences. 

The old way of being self-providing involved back-breaking work. Actually, the idea of high-tech self-providing grew out of my own experience growing all of my own food and living virtually without cash. I realized that was not what I wanted, although sometimes I think if I had had a chain saw, I would never have gone back to teaching.

An example of the idea of high-tech self-providing is that you participate in the building of your apartment house. 

There are quite a good number of projects that I am associated with, particularly in Detroit, in which welfare mothers, inner-city African-Americans, and any number of people contribute their labor to upgrading and maintaining the apartment houses in which they live. There are different arrangements, but the upshot is that people put a certain amount of sweat equity into the houses and in return they get part ownership.

Along those lines, one of the ideas I’ve made into a kind of a symbol is roof gardens. There is no excuse whatever for not having each roof in a large city be a gorgeous, sumptuous garden with trees and flowers and berries and fruit. The air would improve, and food would be more immediately available. 

Sarah: What else is different about the self-providing you’re describing compared with what we normally think of as self-reliance?

Frithjof: We are teaching the skills people need to function in modern society – for example, how to do your shopping in a high-tech, intelligent way. 

We envision a counseling environment in which people would be asked to stop and think about their buying habits. Do you really want this? Are you just buying that because you’ve been hypnotized into wanting that, or are you buying it out of frustration? 

My experience working 10 years with auto workers is that they get so frustrated in their jobs that once every four months, in a rage, they go off to the nearest mall and fill up their pick-up truck with anything they can find.

For the things people really do want to buy, we want to offer an opportunity for someone sitting at a computer with minimal computer skills to be able to answer questions about where one can buy cheaper split peas, or a couch, or a tricycle. 

And, we are working on ways of transporting people to those cheap sources of goods. 

Sarah: You’re working on alternative modes of transportation as well?

Frithjof: Yes. I participated in an endeavor in Kassel, Germany, in which a group of people together used a fleet of very diverse vehicles from trucks to small electric cars to motorcycles. When someone wanted to use a vehicle, he or she would schedule it via electronic mail. 

I’m also very interested in automobiles with alternative energy sources. What many people aren’t aware of is that electric cars could be an example of self-providing. One could make one’s own electricity on one’s rooftop. 

That helps to spell out what we are thinking of as intelligent self-providing: technology, properly used, could make people extraordinarily independent. 

Sarah: So if someone is that independent, then when they work, they work out of choice.

Frithjof: That’s part of it. It makes all the difference in the world to feel that one is not chained to the money economy. Many people get ulcers, even if they have a reasonably good income, because they feel perpetually threatened. The only way not to feel threatened is to feel that, if need be, you can make it on your own. 

Sarah: What would it take for New Work to become a reality?

Frithjof: There are several parts to this. One thing we’re actively working on is to make the connection between the talent and the information that’s available in universities and the need to expand entrepreneurship in a city context. We want to get away from bake-sale entrepreneurship. Instead, we want to get people who have ideas to put those ideas into the service of new city-based businesses that could then be cutting edge and world class. 

Second, foundations could be more accessible, more dispersed and local, so there’s one every few blocks where people could present their ideas and get funded. 

We now have very expensive programs that try to address the extremes of human misery: from welfare programs to job training programs. We could do much better simply by making it possible for people who urgently and often quite desperately want to do something for their own communities, to do it! We could get the jobs that need doing done much cheaper and on a scale that we so far haven’t even imagined. 

A third area is to help people individually to discover what it is that they really want to do and then to help them to get their project financed. Many people need support for that because they often don’t know what they want to do. 

Restructuring institutions is not enough. The wonderful thing that technology could do for us is to liberate enough human energy so that we could work with each other on an individual basis and not just an institutional basis. 

Sarah: Where would the money come from for all this?

Frithjof: One source is to insist that, when layoffs occur, money be provided by the union and by the company cooperatively to make New Work possible for those who lose their jobs. The money could be used to help workers to start up businesses, for stipends, fellowships, training, all manner of things. 

As it is, the money is a kind of war chest; it’s blown on the battle between the workers who want to hang on to their jobs and the company who wants to get rid of them. 

The other way to pay for this type of New Work is through a gradual movement towards a more equitable system of pay in which people are paid in accordance with their contribution. 

Sarah: Why have you chosen to do so much work with young people?

Frithjof: It was a conscious decision, growing out of my work with the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a plant closed. I came to realize that car workers with 20 years seniority, even if they are laid off, are in incomparably better positions than 18-year-olds who have never done any work and for whom no work is available. 

We have now reached a point where a whole generation will grow up and find the door shut in their faces. I feel a horrible sense of anguish and rage about that. 

My sense of it is that we face the prospect of a rapid increase in violence and terrorism – of which we already have plenty – that could easily escalate toward permanent guerrilla warfare or even toward some sort of apocalyptic war between rich and poor.

Sarah: What can New Work offer to these young people?

Frithjof: I feel that it is urgent for young people to recognize that there is an alternative to unemployment; that we needn’t be victims of a malfunctioning job system; that we can create together an alternative work construction.

Sarah: You’ve mentioned a number of areas in which your approach and your concerns overlap those of environmentalists. But I gather there are also some areas of difference.

Frithjof: I feel that the environmental movement is in retreat, in part because there is frequently an impasse between the desire to, for example, save certain trees and the need people have for the work of cutting them down. 

You have to come to terms with the fact that jobs have become precious to the point where people will fight for them. If you’re a serious environmentalist, you’ve got to do something about work. 

I’ve worked with lumberjacks, and usually it turns out that there are things that they would rather do than cut down trees. Once one has discovered that – and it takes patience and it takes time – then one can make efforts to find those alternative sorts of work and to make them pay.

If New Work becomes a reality, the engine that drives us into the destruction of nature could finally be throttled and made to stop. Otherwise, as the job crisis intensifies, the animosity towards ecological thinking will increase. We think that all other efforts short of the complete re-construction of work are, frankly, futile. 

Sarah: Your work implies a broad cultural shift, not only a change in work. Can you describe the changes you see emerging in a New Work culture?

Frithjof: A far greater number of people would be working at more creative, more inventive, more autonomous work in every respect. We would bring in technology wherever it’s intelligent, economical, and sustainable in order to free up people to do more inventive work. 

This would, we think, result in abundance. We are close to abundance now, but keep fighting it because abundance threatens the job system. If we weren’t worried about jobs, we could automate all sorts of production and all sorts of services; goods could become phenomenally inexpensive. 

The consumer frenzy would pale and lose its force and its addictive power, and some kind of calm and dignity would return. If you have a chance to do something you really want to do, that already has some effect. But if you have learned to decide what you really want, then you don’t get onto this treadmill where you work at something you hate in order to buy something you loathe! 

Right now, so much social energy is tied up in an unnecessary way. If all that energy were freed, we could address the mega-social and ecological problems, from poverty to AIDS to education to race and gender. 

There’s an African proverb that says, “It takes a whole tribe to educate a single child.” We could have a situation in which, from the time you are five weeks old until you died, you could be accompanied by a hive of mentors, by people who understand you, and people who talk to you. The result would be a culture that is more humane, vastly more intelligent, more cheerful, more sensuous, and more flamboyant.


What’s Happening With New Work?

Frithjof Bergmann’s New Work approach is being tried in towns and cities ranging from the former East German town of Muehlhausen to inner-city Detroit, to Vancouver, British Columbia.

At the moment, Detroit is a major center of activity for advocates of New Work. From January 17th through 31st, WTVS, the Detroit public television station, is airing a series of documentaries and forums on work options. Frithjof was a chief consultant for the series and appears in a number of the segments.

Next, WTVS, in conjunction with Frithjof and other New Work advocates, will produce a video-print curriculum to be distributed in high schools throughout Michigan. The curriculum is aimed at helping young people prepare for the work crisis by developing resourcefulness, entrepreneurship, self-providing skills, and a capacity to look for their own calling. The curriculum – including video segments – should be completed by spring.

Other plans call for the creation of a center for New Work at a Detroit inner-city high school. The nuts and bolts of New Work and self-providing will be taught in a dome, which the students will help to build.

The group is also linking up with Detroit churches and community groups to give the kids a role in helping their community while further developing their skills.

In British Columbia, meanwhile, a group called New Work Associates has been giving workshops on New Work for some years. The group has developed a study guide based on Frithjof’s approach and is working on translating the concepts into comic book form.

For more information on the Detroit projects and the videos contact Fritz Williams at RD1 Box 920, Shermans Dale, PA 17090 or WTVS 7441 2nd Blvd., Detroit, MI 48202. Contact Anne Ironside of the New Work Associates at RR 1 U-30, Bowen Island, British Columbia, Canada, V0N IG0, for more information on their study guide, workshops, or comic book.

- Sarah van Gelder

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Foundations of public good

By Shea Howell

January 3, 2012

The Occupy Wall Street movement has opened up the conversation about the control the 1% have over public policy. While we all know that much of this control comes through good old-fashioned campaign contributions and high priced lobbyists, the role of foundations in directing policy has been less understood. But more and more, journalists are exploring the murky world of foundation decision making and the outsized influence these foundations have on public policy.

Nowhere is this influence clearer than in the city of Detroit. In spite of the turmoil over a looming financial collapse, Mayor Bing chose to emphasize the return of the Detroit Works Project. This foundation led initiative to redesign the city was widely considered a failure. It succeeded only in increasing tensions, decreasing public trust, and enraging many citizens who believe that downsizing Detroit means moving people out of their homes and neighborhoods.

The return of Toni Griffin to the leadership of the project demonstrates just how little the mayor and the foundations paying her salary understand about their flawed process. Rather than acknowledging to the public that the whole idea has been badly handled, the re-launched Detroit Works Project seems to think it has a public relations problem. Its emphasis now is convincing citizens to agree with its decisions. Charles Cross, the co-director of community engagement, stresses the openness of the group to answer questions. He explains that the new location in Eastern Market gives a place where “people can walk off the street and talk to somebody. Not somebody who takes their name and passes along a message, but somebody who is right there and is knowledgeable about the project.”

This physical location is augmented by street teams, posters, bus ride-alongs and the use of social media, all designed to “answer questions.”

What neither the organizers, the mayor nor the foundations seem to understand is that democracy is more than asking questions. It is certainly more than officials giving vague answers. Democracy includes the right to say no.

Democracy requires the ability to make real decisions about our own future. It does not mean creating public relations campaigns to get people to agree to things they know are not in their own interest. It means the ability to direct resources for the common good.

Democracy is being subverted by foundations whose interests seem less about the common good and more about imposing their particular vision of progress on the rest of us.

Whether it is Gates Foundation efforts to convince us that charter schools will save education or Kresge, Skillman and company telling us that some neighborhoods are better than others, we the other 99% need to challenge the role these foundations are playing in public life.

In a recent article by David Morris on foundation giving, he says:

“Foundations account for about 13% of all charitable giving, about $40 billion a year. Foundations may help the needy but they rarely advocate for them. “At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent,” opined Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation recently told the New York Times. “We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities.”

He concludes, “While most Foundations do not engage in campaigns to expand policies that extend a helping hand to our neighbors, a growing number are engaging in campaigns whose result may be the opposite.”

The old ways of decision-making, whether influenced by corporate donations or foundation dollars, will not create a new city. That challenge requires us to create new, meaningful ways to engage with one another to determine our future.

2011 – A YEAR TO REMEMBER

By Grace Lee Boggs

12-31-2011 – January 7, 2012

2011 opened with the Arab Spring when the people of North Africa decolonized themselves, thrilling the world with their nonviolent gatherings, ousting the dictators the United States has supported to secure its access to Mideast oil.

The world’s eyes next focused on the struggle to defend the collective bargaining rights of Wisconsin public workers against the right-wing attacks coordinated by Governor Scott Walker. The growing mobilization swelled to tens of thousands of union members, their families, and supporters.

By the fall of the year hundreds of thousands had participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement and its offshoots throughout the nation and across the globe., We./they were righteously and rightfully protesting corporate domination of our culture and the suffering that it is producing.,

“We/They were also taking back our government, taking back our humanity, ”

as Danny Glover put it at the Oakland Mall, on October 15.

The ongoing struggles of 2011, from the Arab Spring to Wisconsin and the Occupy/Decolonize movement and our current crises, were rooted in the decline of the empire which made possible the middle-class standard of living and the welfare state with its thousands of public employees to take care of tasks for which we, the people , must become increasingly responsible.

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of Rights. We have entered the epoch of Responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

Now is the time for us to Re-imagine Work and Re-imagine Life. The new paradigms we must establish are about creating systems that bring out the best in each of us, instead of trying to harness the greed and selfishness of which we are capable. They are about a new balance of individual, family, community, work, and play that makes us better human beings.

This means that we need to practice visionary organizing. Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society and in ourselves. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.

Revolutionaries, Evolutionaries, and Solutionaries

In the spring of 2011 the first edition of The Next American Revolution, my new book with Scott Kurashige , was released. Since then it has been a true joy to see so many diverse people turn to this little book for help in understanding how and why another world is necessary, possible, and already in the process of being created.

We have met hundreds of people at book release events, where we have shared the stage with good friends and fellow visionaries like Ruby Dee, Danny Glover, Amy Goodman, Michael Hardt, and Lisa Lee. And we’ve continued the conversation through radio interviews with figures like Michael Eric Dyson, Celeste Headlee, Krista Tippett, Tavis Smiley, and Cornel West

Many readers have bought multiple copies of TNAR to share with family and friends. Teachers have begun assigning it to their classes. Faculty, students, and staff at several small colleges are reading it together. Activists have started study groups around the book. And because so many others in faraway places want to talk about The Next American Revolution, I have become a regular user of Skype.

Why is this book having such a deep resonance?

Maybe it’s because it is giving Americans in all walks of life a more people-friendly view of revolution as empowerment rather than struggle for political power.

Maybe it helps us view Revolutionaries as Solutionaries, working together to solve very practical problems of daily life, growing our souls by growing our own food and bringing the neighbor back into the ‘hood,

Maybe it’s giving us the new, more positive view of ourselves that we’ve been hungry for.

Maybe it helps us envision ourselves as Revolutionaries, moving away from the wrong side of the world revolution where we have seemed stuck since the Vietnam War.

Maybe it also helps us see ourselves as Evolutionaries, making the radical revolution of values that Dr. King called for during that war, transformimg ourselves from materialists, militarists, and individualists into a people who can be proud of how we are advancing humankind to a new stage of consciousness, creativity, and social and political responsiblility.

Sacred Sacrifices

By Shea Howell

December 19, 2011

This is a sacred season. Ancient traditions celebrate the turning of the earth and the darkest of nights. For others it is the festival of lights, the beginning of the Christian year, and the celebration of African wisdom. For all of us, this is the first time in nearly a decade when the U.S. will no longer be officially at war in Iraq. Under cover of darkness, the last combat troops convoyed out of Iraq, bringing to an end one of the most deadly and destructive military efforts ever mounted by the U.S.

Over the next few weeks, people will debate the reasons for this war, its costs and its benefits. Already people are arguing about the role President Obama did or did not play in bringing this tragedy to a close. If history is any guide, within a very short time, news of Iraq will slip from the headlines and from our hearts, driven out by the increasingly complex struggles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and our own concerns about elections and life.

In a brief message announcing that the last of our troops had left, President Obama asked that we “honor and reflect on the sacrifices that millions of men and women made for this war.” This call for reflection is an important one. The sacrifices are almost incomprehensible. The Center for American Progress puts the death toll at between 110,663 and 119,380. Of that total, between 103,674 and 113,265 Iraqi civilians were killed. No one actually bothered to officially count these deaths. Iraqi Security Forces count 10,125 deaths. The U.S. reported 4,484 deaths and suffered nearly 94% of all coalition deaths. An additional 32,200 U.S. troops were wounded. Nearly 3 million people were displaced or turned into refugees.

The economic costs are equally staggering. Over the last nine years we have spent $806 billion on Operation Iraqi Freedom. The projected cost simply for veterans’ health care is $422 to $717 billion.

More than 2 million people have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the effects of Post Traumatic Stress are ricocheting through our society in the ugly forms of domestic violence, divorce, unemployment, and suicide.

The sheer destruction of lives and hopes, combined with the folly of the invasion itself and the ever-changing rationales for it, can dominate how we reflect on this war. So much was wrong. So much destroyed. So many lives thrown away. So little achieved.

But in this sacred moment, we have the time to ask ourselves some deeper questions. We have a responsibility to think beyond the most obvious costs of lives and money.

The end of the war in Iraq raises the troubling question of what kind of people we have become? It is easier to count bodies and money than to calculate the coarse brutality that is now a part of us. In the early days of this war Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, was appalled when the Iraqi military showed the faces of captured American soldiers. But within a few short months, the U.S. displayed the bodies of Hussein’s sons like trophy animals. Reminiscent of lynchings of old, we engaged in national celebrations of deaths.

The truth is that the U.S. efforts to maintain and extend our empire through force have failed. We have not achieved a political goal through military force since the end of WWII. All we have demonstrated is that we have the capacity to destroy.

This season is an opportunity for us to reflect on the horrors of war and the costs of empire. It is a time to turn our hearts and imaginations toward the creation of real peace. That might make the “sacrifices of millions” more easy to bear.

By Adrienne Maree Brown

Over the December 9-10 weekend we hosted ReImagining Organizing, Movements, and Leadership gatherings in Detroit.

We had been planning the weekend ever once we heard that Margaret Wheatley author and organizational development consultant, was going to be in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and wanted to come to Detroit.

Wheatley’s best-selling book Leadership in the New Science:: Discovering Order in a Chaotiic World was written 20 years ago, the same year Detroit Summer was founded.

When Wheatley came down with pneumonia, we were disappointed, but we adapted.

On Friday evening, we had an intimate dinner with leaders from various networks across Detroit. Saturday afternoon we held a large public event at the Cass Corridor Commons, followed by a youth-focused evening at the Furniture Factory.

Some of the key ideas uplifted throughout the series of events were:

- How do we transition beyond a “Newtonian” way of understanding the world, which suggests that things happen in a linear way and that organizing is all about getting masses, or as many people as possible , to do one thing? How do we transition to a quantum, or a more complex, way of understanding things? A complex way of viewing things shows that lots of small, seemingly disconnected actions can spark, or emerge, a transformation.

- Critical connections, deep, trusting connections between points in a system, might be more crucial to social change than critical mass. Mass can grow and disperse quickly if the relationships within that large body are not deep, accountable and trusting.

- Thinking of change in the sense of fractals. Fractals show us that the same patterns existing on the smallest scale exist on the largest scale. In terms of the social changes we are working for, how can we even try to create massive systems which we do not have an experience at a small scale? Patterns at the largest level can only be what exist at the smallest level. If we are chaotic within ourselves, our society will be chaotic. If we are fearful, gossiping, punitive, angry, dysfunctional, and wounded at the small scale, then that is the society we will inhabit. This is a scientific impetus to transform ourselves in order to transform the world.

- Emergence and feedback loops. For years, I have raged against plans, because it feels like we spend a lot of time making plans that don’t adapt for, or account for, the constantly changing landscape. Emergence is the process in nature that explains the beautiful movements of flocks of birds and schools of fish – it’s an adaptive process by which order emerges in apparent chaos. Feedback loops are the small ways in which new information informs the adaptations.

Adaptation is Life. Life is Adaptation

When we got the news that Wheatley wasn’t going to make it, we had to take a moment to reflect. Just a month ago, the Boggs Center had organized another event where a special guest, Vandana Shiva,, had also gotten ill just before the gathering, and was unable to come. In both instances we had to look inward to our community and realize we have all we need to hold these conversations in Detroit already.

The planning team, which included Invincible, Jenny Lee, Richard Feldman, Grace Lee Boggs and myself, was inspired by the insights that emerged from all the weekend’s participants. Reimagining Organizing, Movements, and Leadership uplifted the life wisdom of experience that Detroiters, of all ages, races, genders and backgrounds, and proved that if you open up the space, everyone can be a teacher, and everyone can transform.

to be continued….

ReImagining Organizing, Movements, and Leadership – 2

We started on Friday night with an initial intimate dinner, cooked by People’s Kitchen, for members of various networks in Detroit to come into contact with each other and see what questions they share. The questions that emerged from the group focused on: transitions of leadership; how to face urgency with integrity; how we heal (moving from fragmentation to wholeness) in the process of doing the work; bridging the gaps (real or perceived) between new and old paradigms. How do we make grassroots movements a “path of least resistance” exciting ecosystem, literally the most natural thing a community can do?

Saturday afternoon we hosted a large public event at the Cass Corridor Commons. It opened with Beth James , an indigenous and African-American professor and healer from Detroit., blessing the space. She shared with participants the information that she recently received a kidney transplant and was excited to be alive and in our presence.

Grace Lee Boggs and Invincible then grounded us in ideas inspired by Margaret Wheatley’s book “Leadership and The New Science”, of emergence, fractals, shifting from Newtonian to Quantum and complex thinking (see part 1),. We showed an excerpt from Margaret Wheatley’s video “Perseverance”. Then we hosted intergenerational fishbowl conversations with Detroit-based organizers discussing the relevance of these ideas for our work here.

Organizer Michelle Martinez shared the experience of having a really hard organizing day, and coming home to see flocks of birds in the trees calling to each other to migrate. Being able to reflect on a process of self-organization in nature helped remind her of the kind of movement she wants to build.

After these conversations we jumped into an assessment process where folks looked at the organizations and networks they are part of, and then at their own personal lives, to see how visionary they are now, and what the next step in transformation might be. We asked people to look at how much they share leadership, how they handle conflict, how much they are driven by crisis and urgency, how financial decisions are made, and so forth.

The assessment process yielded powerful conversations in small groups and pairs. It is always beautiful to watch folks open up, listen deeply, come into self-awareness and see the possibility of their lives and their work.

Next, at the youth gathering, hosted by Detroit Future Youth, we started with an exercise where the youth got to feel what it was like to be in a flock of starlings, also known as a murmuration. Then, young people working in networks across Detroit, spoke to their visions for leadership, communication, and accountability, discussing how their work in movement could be focused on building each other up, rather than tearing each other down.

Then there was a series of performances. Invincible shared work from her multi-media album project Complex Movements, which included Diana Nucera on cello, DJ Sicari on the turntables, Wesley Taylor and Juan Martinez on set and stage, Tunde Olaniran as performance advisor, and myself as back-up singer and a live projection screen thanks to the costuming skills of Christine Thomlinson.

Finally, there was a closed mic featuring youth from Detroit Future Youth partner organizations, with a lighthearted competition between the youth and adult allies. Watching young people in Detroit burst with love and excitement about the community they are in, watching them build confidence on the stage, seeing the incredible life in them – it is restorative in and of itself.

With all of the adaptation and emergence in creating a wholeness out of Wheatley’s absence, there were definitely moments where we had to release expectations and be present to a new situation. The beauty was in how open people were about the fact that we all have limitations, as well as infinite potential.

We kept coming back to a quote from the late Jimmy Boggs – “You’re nobody unless you are in relationship with a bunch of somebodies.”

Ultimately, that’s what we were doing – modeling critical connections, relational intelligence, creating safe space, and all doing our best.

It was leaderful, and it was beautiful.

Thinking for ourselves

Doing different things

By Shea Howell

December 17-24- 2011

Something new is emerging in Detroit. In quiet, patient, persistent ways people in our city are developing a culture of strength and compassion. Far from the media glare and the often cynical notions of elected officials, Detroiters are probing deep questions of our humanity and how we will live together.

Last week the Coalition Against Police Brutality held its annual holiday party at the international institute. About 60 people came together to celebrate with one another and to draw support from a deepening sense of community. At first glance, this was a gathering like many at holiday times. There was music, people danced the hustle, told stories, and played with children. There was wonderful food, and warm, festive decorations. But this was a gathering of people who had experienced almost unimaginable loss. Children taken from life by thoughtless moments, or lost to us in the course of senseless anger. Opening to the pain of parents was central the gathering.

Cora Rena Mitchell spoke about the loss of her son, Robert Tazzy Mitchell, 16, in the spring of 2009. He died after being tased by a Warren police officer. Ms. Mitchell said that when she lost her son she faced a choice about what to do. Instead of blaming everyone, she decided to work with the Coalition to reach out to the people of Warren and in her own neighborhood in Detroit. She turned her grief toward creating a safer community, so that no one else would have to lose a child in such a way. She is committed to creating Peace Zones for Life, helping neighbors find ways to resolve conflicts with peace and respect.

Ron Scott talked about the journey of the Coalition form protesting police brutality to restoring peace in neighborhoods. For more than 16 years the Coalition has been responding to the excessive force and violence that people in the community often suffer at the hands of police. The Coalition noticed that often these situations began when police were called to deal with domestic violence, arguments among friends and neighbors, or when drugs or alcohol were involved. Mr. Scott talked passionately about how we have the ability and responsibility to stop this kind of violence. We can call upon one another to resolve conflicts, to find solutions, to de-escalate violence and to solve our problems with respect.

People not only shared stories of loss. They also spoke about the kind of community we are able to create together. At one point a small group of young men who were part of a comedy performance near by stopped in to pay their respects to the Coalition. One young man offered to talk a bit, replacing the tears of sorrow with laughter, remembering a time when his greatest fear was missing the last boat home from Bob-lo.

It is in the course of these kinds of gatherings that Detroiters are making new communities.

Margaret Wheatley, whose work on new science and social change formed the heart of the Reimagining Organizing, Movements and Leadership gathering a few days later, talks about the transformative power of grief. In her latest book, Perseverance, she quotes a Zen Teacher: “If we are able to give ourselves to the loss, to move toward it—rather than recoil in an effort to escape, deny, distract, or obscure—our wounded hearts become full, and out of that fullness we will do things differently, and we will do different things. Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can wake us up to love and to loving action.” New, loving actions are emerging every day as people chose to “do things differently” and to do “different things.”