Common Good Collective

Invitation, Reader, Structure Of Belonging, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

Breonna Taylor’s Beautiful Life

This month’s stunning issue of Vanity Fair was guest edited by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. In this interview with Breonna Taylor’s mother, she recalls what it was like to be heard, to be remembered, not to be swept under the rug. “My God,” she says, “they heard me. I feel like… I finally caught my breath.”

Breonna Taylor’s Mother, Tamika Palmer, and Sister, Juniyah Palmer, Standing at the Banister Where Breonna Once Stood, Near the Front Steps of Her Apartment on Springfield Drive in Louisville, Kentucky.Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier.

Tamika Palmer is Breonna Taylor’s mother. What follows is her attempt to illuminate the life that was taken. To grapple with the nature of strangers. To fill in the blanks.

Kenny calls me in the middle of the night. He says, Somebody kicked in the door and shot Breonna. I am dead asleep. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I jump up. I get ready, and I rush over to her house. When I get there, the street’s just flooded with police—it’s a million of them. And there’s an officer at the end of the road, and I tell her who I am and that I need to get through there because something had happened to my daughter. She tells me I need to go to the hospital because there was two ambulances that came through, and the first took the officer and the second took whoever else was hurt. Of course I go down to the hospital, and I tell them why I am there. The lady looks up Breonna and doesn’t see her and says, Well, I don’t think she’s here yet. I wait for about almost two hours. The lady says, Well, ma’am, we don’t have any recollection of this person being on the way.

So I go back to the apartment. And I am able to get through the street a little more. And when I get up to the apartment, it’s still taped off and roped up around. So I tell the officer there that I need to get in the apartment, that something is going on with my daughter. He tells me to hang tight. He tells me hang tight, he’ll get a detective over there to talk to me. It takes a little while for him to come. He introduces himself. I don’t remember what his name actually is, but he kind of just goes on to ask me if I knew anybody who would want to hurt Breonna, or Kenny, or if I thought they were involved in anything. And I go, Absolutely not. Both of them got jobs. They go to work. They hang out with each other. That’s about it. I ask where Kenny is, and the detective tells me, Hold on. I’ll be back.

But it’s about another hour or so before he comes back. He asks me if Breonna and Kenny had been having any problems or anything. I say, Absolutely not. Kenny would never do anything to Breonna. And then I say, Where’s Kenny. I need to talk to Kenny. He says, Well, Kenny’s at one of our offices. He’s trying to help us piece together what happened here tonight. We are out there for a number of hours afterward. It’s kind of chilly. I leave. I get coffee and come back. I’m still standing out there waiting. It’s about 11 in the morning when the officer comes over and says that they are about done and they are wrapping up, and we will be able to get in there once they are finished. I say, Where’s Breonna, why won’t anybody say where Breonna is? He says, Well, ma’am, she’s still in the apartment. And I know what that means.

Trauma-Informed Care Transforms Small Town

An abundant community makes space for those who have not always found welcome. By using trauma-informed approaches, Walla Walla, Washington changes the course of their town.

A few months into her freshman year at Lincoln Alternative High School, Kelsey Sisavath got into a fight with a girl outside of class. She was sent to the principal’s office and arrived still fuming. There was a time at Lincoln, a school once known as a last resort for those who were expelled from the area’s other high schools, when fights often ended in out-of-school suspensions or arrests. But Principal Jim Sporleder didn’t immediately scold her. Instead, he asked how she was doing, then left her alone in the office with a granola bar, a water bottle, and some tissues to dry her tears. When he returned half an hour later, Sisavath was feeling calm enough to talk.

“If he would have asked me the details and talked about punishment right away, it probably would have just pushed me even more off of the edge,” she reflected.

At the time, her personal life was riddled with pain. For years, Sisavath had bounced back and forth between her mother, who was addicted to opiates, and her emotionally distant father. Just two years earlier, she had been sexually assaulted by a stranger. All of these experiences left her feeling emotionally and physically neglected. In the eighth grade, she started hanging out with kids in gangs and skipping class to smoke marijuana.

That kind of behavior followed her to high school, where she could have faltered. But Sisavath’s experience at Lincoln was different. Sporleder and the staff created an environment built on empathy and redemption through a framework called trauma-informed care, which acknowledges the presence of childhood trauma in addressing behavioral issues. The practices vary depending on the environment, but they begin with the understanding that childhood trauma can cause adulthood struggles like lack of focus, alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide. Read more

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Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Reader, Significance Of Place, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

Building A New World In Uncertain Times

While the world falls apart, Katina Parker builds. Really, she cooks, and from her own living space has created hospitality for thousands in Durham, NC. Parker is also a terrific writer, and here tells an engrossing story about the work she is doing building community in her neighborhood.

Eyes dancing, skin effervescent. Marcus Bass blessed me with that compliment as he snuck a love offering into my hand and then skip-ran into the house, hugging to his chest two hefty aluminum pans filled with smoked chicken, savory brown beans and herb rice, roasted cherry tomatoes, broiled citrus carrots, braised eggplant, buttered garlic corn, sesame green beans, charred broccoli, smashed yams, and grilled beets tropi-cal (pronounced trop-ee-cal, long on the “callllllll” like Callllll-ee-for-nyuh). Oh. Cabbage. Smoked cabbage and caramelized onions too.

It was a Sunday night. I’d just dropped plates off for a family in need, Natalie Bullock Brown’s son (who loves my cooking so much he’s now my honorary nephew), and Bree Newsome/her partner Marcus. Everybody told me to stay home and rest but I was happy tired and wanted to get the food to my folks fresh.

That last day, the day we create the Gratitude Plates, that’s my favorite day. The five consecutive days cooking in a temperature I call “heat set on hell,” the focused vigilance on keeping all our fridges cool and our volunteers safe and well, providing 1,500 with multiple cooked meals, it all culminates on the day we deck out these aluminum half-pans with the bounty we crafted together. We send these “Gratitude Plates” out to individual families in need; my neighbors who tolerate all the noise, the cars, the savory-smelling smoke; volunteers who show up sunny and eager and over-stay their shifts; donors and beloveds who welcome the bright hope that is our culinary magic.

Common Good Reader 8/20/2020

The push for a new economy in a society that values every neighbor requires living in the midst of contrast – on the one hand, the courage to imagine new forms of being, and on the other, the insistence to protest the way things are. To move into a life of abundance, we’ll need to both remember where we have been, and to dream, as Peter Block says, “of a future distinct from the past.” From our favorite pieces of the past week, we offer reflections of those divergent streams – grief and creation, memory and reverie.

Greg Jarrell

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Eliminating economic isolation, Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Reader, The Abundant Community Permalink

Breaking the Cycle of Economic Isolation Through Rent Equity

Margery Spinney and Carol Smith saw one issue in their Cincinnati neighborhood clearly. Renters lived with the greatest precarity, yet by renting had the least opportunity to build the kind of equity that could see them through a crisis. Using imagination, know-how, and a willingness to break the rules, they created a model of building equity for renters that is paying dividends for their neighbors.

When COVID-19 hit and Louise Williamston worried she might lose her job, she took comfort in the fact she had a unique safety net: equity credits accrued over the past five years through her apartment lease. It’s a unique residential model in her neighborhood of Avondale, Cincinnati, in which Williamston rents but also participates in monthly tenant meetings and helps maintain the property she lives in. In exchange, she’s guaranteed permanently affordable rent as well as financial credits she can exchange for cash when the lease is up.

“It decreases the worries,” she says of the agreement. “I recommend the model because it’s just simple.”

It does sound simple enough: Residents fulfill commitments in their lease agreement, like paying rent on time and helping to maintain the property, and in doing so, earn financial credits they can exchange for cash after five years. But the model, known as rental equity or dividend housing, has been slow to get off the ground and scale, despite interest from other cities. In spite of challenges, it continues to forge ahead in Cincinnati.

“Owning doesn’t work for everybody and renting doesn’t work for everybody,” says Margery Spinney, who pioneered the dividend housing model with Carol Smith under the organization Renting Partnerships. “This is a third way. But we’re sort of running a business with the control [of the buildings] upside down. Not everyone sees the value.” Read more

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