It was the morning after Rich Harwood, a national leader in helping communities learn to solve their own complicated local problems, had spoken to about 100 Oak Parkers, mainly older, nearly all white, in the Veterans Room of the main library. Now there were 20 local people — more diverse, younger — gathered for the follow-up conversation with Harwood.
Right off the bat, several in the group noted that only two or three people of color were present the night before. That prompted Cate Readling, an activist and Park District of Oak Park staff member, to ask, “Who is at the table in Oak Park?”
Maryanne Mohanraj, a local author and library board member, asked the question in a different way: “How do we reach out to people who are not engaged?”
That led Jackie Moore, president of the District 200 high school board, to say she appreciated Harwood’s bottom up emphasis but asked, “How do we know what people think if they are not at the table?” She wondered if people of color even knew about the meeting.
Harwood suggested that the Veterans Room at the library might not be where many people of color feel at home and sometimes you have to go where the people are.
Moore raised the issue of race and complained that nobody in Oak Park seems to want to talk about the issue in a meaningful, honest way. Harwood acknowledged that, in his experience, “Most people are afraid of race.”
The morning-after conversation continued with these younger leaders questioning whether Oak Park is avoiding more profound, underlying problems in the community by resting on its 1970s-era laurels, i.e. by repeating the narrative over and over about how Oak Park became racially integrated.
Some in the group suggested it was time for leaders who had successfully brought the town through that period of history to step away from the table a bit and allow younger voices more attuned to the new realities in the village to take their places.
Valerie Lester agreed in principle but urged that the old guard “step aside in a constructive way, instead of being excluded.”
Harwood said he thinks tension in a group is needed and there can be strength in having a variety of voices at the table.
Carmenzo Millan, a library board member, wondered if Oak Park was “stuck in diversity?” Her question seemed to suggest Oak Park suffers from a sort of multicultural political correctness that inhibits the expression of genuinely diverse identities.
Harwood said communities can avoid dealing with authentic diversity by using sugar-coated and/or professionalized language. He added, “It takes courage to hear anger.”
Head of the 30-year-old Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, he was invited to Oak Park by David Seleb, library director. In an enthusiastic introduction, Seleb said he reluctantly attended a Harwood conference six years ago and said it had profoundly changed his professional life and was actively shifting how Oak Park’s libraries engage with all segments of the community.
Seleb has since sent 18 library staff members to Harwood Public Innovators’ Lab, either in person or online. “All my professional work for the past six years has been grounded in what I have learned about the Harwood practice from Rich and his team of associates. All we do at the Oak Park Library is grounded in it, too.”
For instance, he said, “Outreach used to mean that the library would create a program and then go out into the community to market the program. Now we go out into the community, listen to what people in the community want and need and, on the basis of that input, design our programs.”
Seleb added, “In the nearly six years of listening we have done since first engaging with the Harwood practice, we have acted in some very intentional ways to break down barriers to service, to advance some important community objectives, and to advance equity.”
One result of that listening has been the hiring of a professional social worker as the director of Social Services and Safety who with his team has “fundamentally changed our engagement with vulnerable, at-risk, and marginalized people in the community, people such as those experiencing homelessness, those with mental illness, the unemployed, those who lack financial and other resources, and at-risk youth.”
Harwood provided Oak Parkers with a diagnostic tool for understanding the village regarding community building as well as a motivational pitch to not rest on their laurels.
“What I’m interested in,” he said in an interview the next day, “is how do we build a more hopeful society where people believe they have opportunities to fulfill their God-given potential, regardless of race, creed, where they’re from, what their native language is, or how much money they have.”
He also laid out his five Harwood Stages of Community Life:
Stage One: The Waiting Place. Residents in a community have a deep sense that something is wrong but can’t name or define it. When Harwood works with a community at this stage, his task is to “crystallize this felt unknown and name it.”
Stage Two: Impasse. The community can tell you what’s wrong. They can name it, but there is little agreement regarding what to do about it. It’s a time in the life of a community which is highly emotional and often with a lot of anger. “If you ask people about their aspirations for their lives and for their community, what they say will come from their gut,” he said.
There’s a noticeable sense of urgency in this stage but a lack of political will and/or capacity to move forward.
Stage Three: Catalytic. People and organizations emerge to take risks and experiment in ways that challenge existing norms of how the community works. In addition, people within their community begin to discover that they share common aspirations for their community and that they can, in small ways, start to make a difference.
The key in this stage, says Harwood, is not the magnitude of what is accomplished in these actions but that they “produce some semblance of results that give people a sense of faith and hope that progress is possible and that the community indeed has the capacity to act.” The challenge at this stage is that the “pockets of change” which have emerged in the community are not connected but function in their own silos.
Stage Four: Growth. “A sense of common purpose and direction take root” in the community, people see clear evidence that they are moving forward, and leadership arises which takes the community further along a hopeful trajectory. People feel a different spirit in the community and they talk about it. The community has generated a new story about itself.
“This is where Oak Park might be,” Harwood said in his large group talk. “The challenge is that there are usually underlying systemic challenges that haven’t been fully addressed.”
Stage Five: Sustain and Renew. New centers of strength and a new cadre of leaders appear. “Without them the community will stagnate and decline.”
Challenges include addressing those systemic issues not addressed in the Growth Stage and realizing that the world has changed, that the narrative told about the successes of the past may no longer be adequate by itself to move the community into its next chapter.
“By now,” he says, “new challenges are on the horizon that need attention. People within the community may have been left behind. A new emphasis on growing networks and links throughout the entire community is needed, especially into poorer or disconnected or surrounding regional areas.”
If a community rests on its laurels and fails to address deeper systemic issues which have been avoided and changes in its context, Harwood warned, the community may find itself slipping back into the waiting or impasse stages.
