Abstract
What makes some neighborhoods places to live in than other neighborhoods? Is it more jobs, less crime, wider varieties of recreation options, or higher property values? Those things are all great traits. But the real marks of distinction lie deeper. The best places to live are where residents trust each other, care about each other, and invest their time and effort to make their community a thriving one. That at least has been the experience of Jerry Millhon, executive director of the Whidbey Institute at Chinook, Washington (http://www.whidbeyinstitute.org), an institute that hosts discussions, workshops, and seminars year-round on community activism and social change.
On February 2 to 4, 2012, Whidbey hosted a first-ever Thriving Communities Conference (http://www.thrivingcommunities.org/wiki/TC2012), which showcased the role local food systems play in creating thriving communities. Attendees from across the Pacific Northwest watched video presentations of eight local organizations on Whidbey Island that launched successful new approaches to relieving poverty and hunger within their communities. The conference gave all attendees ample time to speak in-person with the presenters and each other. Everyone left with tangible new ideas for programs that they could start up themselves within their own neighborhoods.
The Whidbey Institute hosted a second Thriving Communities Conference on March 21 to 23, 2013 (http://www.whidbeyinstitute.org/conversation/id/17b578), this time taking up a broader discussion of the full range of tools, food-related and otherwise, that a community’s residents can deploy to boost their shared quality of life. Many of these tools do not even need to be invented—Millhon and his colleagues find that forward-thinking individuals have come up with them already and are putting them to work within their own communities to impressive effect. Like the first conference, this one also featured film documentaries of success stories and gave audiences opportunities to learn enough to try importing them into their own home towns.
Millhon recently talked about his work promoting thriving-communities practices in the following interview with Rick Docksai, World Future Review’s associate editor.
The February 2012 conference focused on food, and spotlighted communities that are already using innovative means to create vibrant and diverse local food supplies. In these cases, the solutions to the problem do exist; these communities have them, and the challenge is just to get more communities to learn these solutions and adopt them. Now flash forward to this year’s conference and its focus on “thriving communities.” I heard one interviewee say that she would like to think that the true ideal of a “thriving community” does not exist yet, that it is better than anything we can presently imagine. So, how comparable is this “thriving communities” challenge? That is to say, do the solutions already exist, or do we still need to invent them?
There are so many aspects of what a community that is thriving and resilient is all about, and basically we’ve been asking, when we’re looking at a thriving community, what are the elements that make it thrive? And there were two or three things that really jumped into my mind during the food conference: There is a sense of dignity, a sense of respect, and a sense of belonging for the people who live in that community.
I brought a group of people together to play with the idea of what is going on in this community [South Whidbey]. I didn’t even use the word “thriving,” initially. I just looked into what makes this community come together.
First of all, we started with a place—South Whidbey—because it is real. There were things happening on the island that made a difference. These were the elements that we wanted to play with.
There are a number of things that make a difference. One thing we addressed last year was the way we distribute food. We looked at food as not only part of the process, but how it brings people together. Food can be a catalyst for forming a community, especially the local food bank, no matter what level people are at, no matter what socioeconomic group they are in. There was a sense of belonging, a sense of being respected, a sense of dignity. When you had to go in and ask for food, you’d be going to a place where you knew you would be treated with dignity and respect, and where you were being supported in a healthy way.
The food bank has in front of it a community garden and all kinds of people come and help grow this every year. They’re all working together to grow food for the community. In the store, there is a way they price the food on points that give it more of a nutritional component.
The food bank, you wouldn’t know who’s going there, there is no sense of judgment. I can’t tell you who is in need and who is helping. When people go through the line to check out there is certainly a sense of need there, but it feels very community-oriented and feels very low-key in terms of discrimination. And at Thanksgiving, people come to a dinner. Everyone is treated as an individual. It’s a whole different kind of feeling that spreads throughout the community.
So it’s a food bank that anyone in the community can access. You don’t have to meet certain income criteria.
Exactly. No one is asking questions. And maybe someone is just off for a couple of weeks—They might be a labor person who is just out of work for a couple of weeks. That’s not an issue.
When we begin to gather and talk about the process, those are the words we used: “respect,” “dignity,” “sense of belonging.” After the videos, there was this deep appreciation not that this was any kind of unique community, but that this was a living laboratory of what can happen. There was a sense of sharing and connection, and that is the thing that has really inspired me more than anything else, that other communities have a hunger to learn, to grow, and to be part of this process. There just is something happening, and I’m absolutely amazed and astounded by the kinds of examples that we did in our videos within these communities that provide a sense of hope that they can take charge.
Often they are doing things that are considered quite different, because this year’s topic is local economy and so many new things that are being done in a local economy: new ways of local lending, of joining small businesses together, ways in which economic development has happened in a community because they changed the rules. People walked away from the conference saying, “That was inspiring. We can do this.” What happens in this process is it’s more than just a nice gathering. It’s the beginning of a movement—communities seeing ways to grow and thrive in the coming years in spite of what is happening in the world.
We’ve done four communities this year—Portland, Port Townshend, South Whidbey, and Bellingham. Those are the video communities this year. These are the videos that we’ll be using to show living laboratories in this bio-region.
In every one of these, the ideas that came up were inspired because this community felt that they could do it and felt that they could make it work. In each of these communities, they each have their own DNA. They’re just like you and me. They have different constitutions, population makeup, and a series of other facets that make a community what it is. What takes off in one community might not land in another, but in a third community it might land beautifully.
We do know that people are beginning to connect and learning to take on responsibilities that they once had left to others, and being part of that is inspiring. What we’re trying to build is a community of sharing, communities of positive action, communities that have a deeper dimension to them in terms of how and where we are living today in light of the fragile state that we are in.
And we look for stories that have some kind of sustaining nature—stories that have been around for two or three years, so that people can look at them and ask, “How did you make it work?” One of the stories we’ll present is a businessman in Portland. His business is called Beeline, and that company has these tricycles that have big containers on the back that move product around Portland. And he’s developed a business strategy enabling him to do that. That totally reduces pollution in the city, and it’s a business that is making money. He has, I think, ten employees, and they are moving product—he’s moving other companies’ products—he’s able to pick up foods from various places like Whole Foods and food that cannot be sold and distribute it to various agencies that do distribute food, as part of his process. So in his deliveries, he is able to schedule these pickups for organizations that need that food.
So now you have this unbelievable business that is producing very little pollution, if any. You have less congestion. You have a unique process. It’s profitable. It’s socially responsible. It’s a business that is thriving. That’s a story, and that story could be replicable in any small town, but you have to build up to how you’re going to make that work. And he thought about that for a couple of years before he made it work, he grew it from three employees to ten, and that’s a powerful story.
Besides showing videos, we also provide opportunities for people to share with each other. They talk about how they’ve done things. We’re creating toolboxes for people searching for what they can take back to their own communities.
It sounds like there may eventually be some general agreement among the conference’s participants about what the “thriving community” ideal will entail. But to what degree might the ideal vary from one community to another? After all, wouldn’t different communities have different ideas about what they want to become? On the other hand, what common characteristics might hold true throughout all communities that become “thriving?”
I think you’re right on, in that the ideal from one community to another will change, that it will be different, and we should celebrate that. But there are certain basic elements that we’re beginning to see. One is that there has to be a certain level of trust in the community. It takes a certain level of trust within a community to make things happen, so that someone can take up an action, and there can be support to make it happen.
In Bellingham, there is a group called Sustainable Connections, and that to me is an example of a group of for-profit companies and not-for-profit NGOs who have grown together over the last eight or nine years to create a community of change and action in Bellingham. And when they first started, they were just a group trying to bring people together to enact change. This is a wonderful diverse set of people who are working together to improve Bellingham as a city, and what they’ve been able to do over the last few years is develop a sense of trust and an ability to see things beyond their own views. They’re working together now on a Zero-Waste program. And I believe that in the next few years, all businesses and homes in the community will be able to cut their waste by 50 percent or more.
Every community has a capacity to find new ways of connecting and supporting each other, and that’s what we’re beginning to see. It’s only in its beginning stages. We don’t know how many years we’re going to go, but it’s really a process where we’re just learning so much and trying to share everything that we’re learning, and trying to connect communities together in a way that allows people to know what’s happening in other communities and share it with each other.
It sounds like the path toward “thriving” is one that each community takes up on its own. It is a locally based, locally run initiative. In that case, what role might outside authorities—regional, state, or even national government leaders—play in helping communities to become more thriving? Or is it better if these outside authorities just keep out?
You’ve asked a really powerful question, one that I mulled over when we first started this work. In the beginning, I contacted ten to fifteen mayors in different communities that I thought might really enjoy being a part of this gathering. In truth, nobody came forward from those positions. Now I’m going to switch and say to you that when I presented the Port Townshend video, two people from Port Townshend said, “I think we ought to invite our county council representative to come here.” And I think that’s now been done. I’m at that point where I have a bias right now, and it’s that the energy and outcome and involvement that I’ve seen in the people so far is so overwhelmingly focused on opportunities for people to connect on the ground. It’s not in an office. We’re doing this kind of work, and it’s fairly entrepreneurial.
When you see the food bank example, it’s working with the community in a very powerful energetic way, that if you took that energy and put it into building a product and manufacturing it, you would be quite successful. There’s a sense that it’s not a force coming from above; it’s a force coming from on the ground. When I talked to a city official on our island, a guy I like a lot, he sent a set of names to me to contact, they were all officials. I wrote him back and said, “Are these the individuals that you think will really understand and appreciate what’s going on here?” And he wrote back and he said, “I understand where you’re coming from. It might not be the most helpful approach.”
I think a time is coming when there will be much more receptivity to what is happning in these communities, to a degree that the mayor and officials will be invited into this process so that they can be part of it rather than trying to manage it. I think you’re going to find that that’s the next level of opportunity for this work, that from an elected official’s standpoint it would be in my mind very beneficial for that elected official to understand more and more what’s going on, so that they could—at the right time and the right place—be a part of the process, but not want to manage it from the beginning or try and control it.
In Bellingham, that opportunity is now here. There are officials in the city that are a part of this process. Are they controlling it? Not on your life! Are they contributing to it? Absolutely. There are opportunities for elected officials to be woven into the process in a natural way.
You described a role for local officials just now, but not state officials. What could a state official do if he or she really likes this thriving-communities concept and wants to encourage more communities throughout the state to take it up?
This is a real bottoms–up approach. I think a state representative trying to show this to other state representatives would be laughed at, even if that representative is a real advocate for the ideas.
Many of these ideas are in the realm of “that’s too simple.” Many of our examples are quite simple and are profound in how they have been implemented and have grown, and it takes a different mentality to see that.
In Port Townshend, they wanted to revisit how economic development works, and Port Townshend residents said, “Can we take economic development moneys and support our community with local businesses?” That’s a major shift, and they’ve done that. They said “Big-box companies are fine, but that’s not what we’re using our economic development money for. We’re going to use it to develop our own businesses in our own town.” A state representative might actually not be in favor of that. That representative might favor the Wal-Marts and the big box companies. He or she wouldn’t see how a small community could manage that. And yet we’re seeing it right in front of us.
The various descriptions of a “thriving community” hearken back, in some respects, to the ideal that many people have of suburban life in America in the early or mid-twentieth century: active civic associations, neighbors who knew each other and socialized with each other all the time, strong shared community spirit, and so on. Maybe one could say that a thriving community brings back the best parts of that bygone era—without, of course, the outdated social norms and prejudices that were common then. . . What do you think?
I think you’re right. I grew up in Illinois in a farming community in that era you’re speaking of. People helped each other; they knew each other. I think there are elements of that here. I think what is essential is that people really enjoy the idea of connecting with other people, connecting to support one another, but also to get together for parties and social activities. I think there is a deeper opportunity for social connection in the work that we are doing.
In Langley, Washington (a town on Whidbey Island), there is a gathering every Tuesday and Thursday at this church. It started about six years ago, when a lady at the church said, “Shouldn’t there be a place where anyone of any station can come and enjoy a good meal, and it is all offered for a donation or for free?” And it has become a gathering place where farmers, people in need, and people of means, they all join together every Tuesday and Thursday.
There are two people who are chefs, and food is brought in from a variety of sources, and there is music; it’s a delightful gathering of people. And I thought this is very Rotary. There is this wonderful gathering that wasn’t too dissimilar from the Rotary Associations. When I talk to people from these groups, there is a sense that something is missing today, that there is something that is not as prevalent as it was years ago. And I see this kind of thing happening in these communities that is really powerful in these gatherings, something joyful. There is a value component; there is something bigger in their being there that is a part of the process there. I sense that these communities are building something together that they are proud of.
How close are Portland and Port Townshend to being “thriving communities”—or is the thriving-communities concept more like an ideal that they will always be pursuing? Looking around the country, or outside the country, what would be a few other cities or towns that you would consider to be good examples of “thriving communities?”
I don’t know if, when we talk about an ideal thriving community, I don’t know if we know how to nail that down. I think you have to look into what makes things work, see that there is an ethos in the community, that there are people around the community who are present to support that effort. You have to see if is there a sense in the community that there is this potential for growth within that community. And that’s what we’re looking for.
There are communities around the United States that are thriving, and my hope is that, over time, we’re going to connect with them. I hope that there will be methodologies and toolboxes, so that communities that are on the way toward being thriving communities and want to do so can move forward and find supporting partners.
Do you know of the Compassionate Action Network? It’s an international group working with a variety of processes to encourage community growth. There are things emerging that are bigger than the two of us having this conversation. There are communities ready to move forward. I sense that these can be connected in a larger network of communities being connected and thriving. It does create a movement. It does create a sense of “we can do this, and we can do this together.” I have enough data to tell me that there is a process going on there that is very encouraging.
[Note: For information about the Compassionate Action Network, see http://www.compassionateactionnetwork.com/home.asp]