The Role of Appreciation in Community Development

The Bravo cable television network--originally created to broadcast cultural programs to that small segment of the television audience that enjoys ballet, opera, live theater, and art--learned quickly that small niche markets are not the stuff of cable success; the network quickly evolved into a more popular form of entertainment to find its path to fame: showing rich, self-consumed people snipe at everyone around them. And find it they did.

One recent Saturday, while I sat at the kitchen table most of the day trying to edit a particularly frustrating document, the TV was stuck on Bravo, with family members coming in and out of the adjacent living room to watch one show or another. My background music for four hours was the endless chatter from The Real Housewives of Washington, D.C. followed by the Real Housewives of Atlanta, two episodes of Flipped Out and two of The Rachel Zoe Project.

I recounted the interactions I had half-heard over the time period. Most involved at least one person who was having an emotional breakdown over another person's (a) fashion choices, (b) attitude, or (c) existence. I realized that the conversations I had overheard throughout the past four hours was ongoing, endless conflict, usually about incredibly trivial and unimportant matters.

Perhaps I had just caught a particularly nasty four hour stretch of Bravo programming. I decided to watch at least one episode of as many of the Bravo shows as I could stomach to check my hypothesis. To be fair, there are other shows on the network, including an endless parade of artistic competition shows, where chefs, artists, designers, or hairstylists try to out-talent one another. But even these programs are filled with jealousy, petty arguments, and self-absorption. Suffice it to say that for at least some segment of our culture, vicarious narcissism and negativity holds sway.

There's a bigger problem for most communities than a few self-absorbed individuals who love to establish their authority by putting others down. My sour reaction to a day of Bravo programming had more to do with the overall frame of reference seen in each of the shows. There was always something wrong, and the "real" people in each reality show saw themselves as valiant soldiers who fought through the muck and mire to overcome the banality or incompetence or unfabulousness of the poor wrecks around them.

Unfortunately, I see the same frame often in community prevention. I wish I had a nickel for every time I saw a community prevention specialist slam the community in which he or she lives and attempt to "fix" all of its problems by proclaiming them loudly. Many of those "problems" are actually people who disagree with a philosophy or approach, or who may just have lost their way. Kenneth Burke called it the "tragic frame" where we construct a world of "victims and villains," moral wrongs that can only be righted through some form of mortification.

In my experience, though, the tragic frame has never proven effective in improving communities or building effective partnerships. Finding fault with others who share your community (artistic or otherwise) seems to only yield division. It's difficult to find synchronicity or synergy (much less consensus or collaboration) if everyone is trying to establish superiority by punishing the weaknesses of everyone else.

One of my favorite organizational philosophies is appreciative inquiry, where a community or organization focuses on its existing potential to create an improved environment. This is much more than a group of people thinking good thoughts about each other. This is about a community focusing on the very best aspects of itself in order to see the path toward even more success. Funny how hard it is to0 find a solution when you're so deeply focused on the problem.

In A Positive Revolution in Change: Appreciative Inquiry, authors David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney write, "In AI the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream, and design."

In community-based prevention work, this means--at least for me--that rather than focusing on the villains who make and sell dangerous substances, promote or exploit unsafe practices, or create barriers to change, we focus on the many parts of the community that operate in ways that are safe, productive, and enjoyable, identifying what enables these practices and finding ways to extend that environment. It means focusing on the normative majority, which is often much more aligned with the outcomes of prevention than the small percentage who seem to own culture. Most importantly, though, it means appreciating a perspective that is different than your own, and finding value in that different perspective long enough to see how it might be joined with your own.

It's difficult to bridge perspectives with any segment of the community if I see nothing but the worst in that perspective. Perhaps it is greed that motivates the bar owner to sell alcohol to obviously intoxicated patrons, but usually, there are other reasons, including a lack of skill in refusing a sale or a mistaken belief that refusing sale always results in a customer who never will return, which, if done often enough, might just pull the plug on all revenue. Appreciating the perspective is the only way we can start a dialogue that leads to an improved environment that we both can live within.

Alright, it even means finding the positive aspects of Bravo network, since the rest of the family seems rather enamored by it, and it's bound to be on in my home for some time to come. I'll start here: the stuff they make on Top Chef sure looks delicious. And I certainly do appreciate the talent of many of the competitors in each of the shows. If only they could let everyone around them be as brilliant as they are, recognizing that there's enough unlimited brilliance for everyone. Now, that would be fabulous.

Touching Home Base, or What I Learned at My High School Reunion

Some say that life happens in passages, and each passage – like chapters in a book of short stories – have their own unique plot lines. My life has certainly had distinct segments, each one occurring with its own unique cast of characters, locations, even careers.
So when I went back for my 30th high school reunion this past summer, I was truly walking back into another time and another place, and one that was many, many segments detached from the current chapter of my life. Nothing in my current life is the same as it was in 1978 except for the existence of my sisters, and even their involvement is limited – neither went to high school at the time that I did.

High school was a great segment of my life, and I threw myself into many activities – band, choir, theatre, the school newspaper – I even wrote for and edited the literary journal. But life didn’t end at high school graduation; it just changed. College was an entirely different set of experiences, and from there, each decade brought with it several major changes along with the new mailing addresses.

The reunion was actually for the entire decade of the seventies (making it my 32nd reunion, for those who are counting) and the committee had asked all of us who had performed in musicals throughout the decade to perform individually and as a choir. Not only was I walking into a room full of people I hadn’t seen in thirty-two years, but I had to sing “If I Were a Rich Man” from when I played Tevye in 1977. Would I be as good as I was then? Was I good then? I can’t remember. I mean, they clapped then for that 17 year-old pretending to be a Jewish man. But that could have been some anti-drug “support our youth” kind of thing.

I arrived back at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois – a northwest suburb of Chicago – an entirely different person. I was significantly older, greyer, heavier (unfortunately) -- I even had a new last name, which is another story for another time (though it was great fun telling people that I had a run in with the law in Reno). I had nothing to hang my head over in this homecoming – I had amassed a Ph.D., a great family, an amazing career, and plenty to prove that I had made the most of my life. If this was a test of how well we'd done since 1978, I was ready to pass with flying colors.

Lincolnshire had changed as well since 1978, as the city of Chicago had invaded the miles of our cornfields and quaint towns and had turned them into crowded subdivisions, corporate campuses, and endless strip malls. Even the school was different, having been renovated to four times its size -- a single hallway was the only flash from the past. Even the front doors had been moved. So neither of us were reuniting with the assumption that time had stopped.

Perhaps, I conjectured, this weekend would be some kind of time-travel experience, similar to what I had witnessed when alumni return to college homecoming games and act like 19-year-old idiots again (with 50-year-old livers). We'd all be transformed back to seventeen and have three magical days without debt, screaming bosses, or retirement funds to fret over. Sounded good -- a break from reality without psychosis is always nice.

Walking into the theatre for rehearsal (not the original theatre, as I had hoped, but a nice one nonetheless), I didn’t experience that magic transportation back in time, and (luckily) there was no one around taking score. Instead, I found something much better. I found a set of comrades who, like in the years of 1974 to 1978, were there to compare notes in solving the mystery of what it means to grow up. I found that all along this long road, I've had a home base.

We visited and sang and joked and hugged, and we spent most of our time catching up with each other on the many chapters of each other’s lives: marriages, children, divorces, degrees, careers, lost jobs, new cities, and second mortgages. High school was a distant memory, and no one was there to relive anything – we were here to check in with each other – to use our history as a way to touch home base before heading back out into the fray of our lives.

It didn’t matter what had happened thirty years ago. We who knew each other in the most fundamental ways were all together again. And this was different that any of the conversations I've had about life with many acquaintances over the years. These folks were with me from the beginning, as it were (and are there ever relationships that are closer than from this vantage point? Does anyone ever know us better than this?), and we were all experiencing the same unexpected view of our lives from our rear view mirrors, all looking to each other to hear, "I know -- me too."

Touching home base. It is, perhaps, one of the most profound experiences of life, the only way in which we are able to ground ourselves. How had I disregarded its power all these years, stuck in the hindered view of those around me now, at this moment, without context to guide them?

I also spent most of the time that weekend realizing that my seemingly diverse life passages weren’t so special after all – they were actually pretty typical. We had all struggled with our bodies getting old, our relationships having ups and downs, our finances ever changing, and our joys simple.

Most tender for us all at the moment was the shared loss of parents – some had gone, some were ill, others now lived miles away. And these stories bonded us most – they were a current connection that reminded us that we shared more than history. We each were walking a similar road. And it was important that we shared it with each other – that we checked in with one another to ensure that this, too, was a normal next step in the road.

The weekend ended with a memorial service for all those friends and teachers that had gone. Reading the list of names from my class to the group gathered in the commons, I realized that the power of “coming home” has little to do with proving myself or my choices over the decades. It was about confirming them; turning back to the same people who marvelled together about parents and pimples, sex and love, fears and futures – the only people who could truly understand the road travelled now to age and decline, victories and failures, life and death.

As I drove back to the airport, I realized that I had two profound blessings – an amazing privileged start to life with a dear set of friends, fellow travellers, and mentors, and now, a connection back to them that allowed us to walk through the rest of what life would bring. I had found home base. Perhaps I will never be able to g to it again, to touch it's familiar comfort. But I will never forget that it is there.