Our Trespasses 
By Greg Jarrell

On a crisp November morning in the year 1960, Charlotte Redevelopment Authority Director Vernon Sawyer walked up the steps into Friendship Baptist Church. He was bringing a message to Friendship this morning, though he had not alerted them to his visit prior to his arrival. A deacon in black suit, crisp white shirt, and black tie greeted him at the door, transforming his surprise at seeing a white man coming to church at Friendship into a look of welcome. Sawyer found the pastor and asked for permission to occupy the pulpit for a special announcement.

Sawyer was not bringing good news. Friendship, one of Charlotte’s most prominent Black churches, was going to be torn down as part of an Urban Renewal project. That federal program was going to pay for the city’s efforts to raze 238 acres of the historic Brooklyn neighborhood, home to more than 1,000 families, hundreds of businesses, a dozen churches, and more memories and sacred moments that could be counted.

Sawyer broke the news, and then tried to frame the news in terms that sounded like a special mission: “The time is getting late to make plans to rebuild your church,” but, “I’d like to point out one thing. Somewhere in the span of endless time, it was you who were chosen to lead in solving this problem in this crucial hour…. The challenge is before you.”[1]

Only a few years later, and only a few blocks down the street, the all-White First Baptist Church of Charlotte was at the end of years of conflict over moving from their prominent, but small, site on Charlotte’s Main Street. The congregation had nearly fled for the suburbs a few years earlier, but in a contentious meeting that nearly split the church, they decided to remain downtown. By 1965, they had located the site they wanted – nine acres in the newly cleared Urban Renewal area, just a block over from where Friendship Baptist had intended to stay, prior to Vernon Sawyer’s visit. The city was auctioning off the land following the eviction and displacement of every family and institution that had made its home there, all of them Black.

In a united and happy meeting, First Baptist voted to approve their move into the Urban Renewal area. Following the vote, they closed their business agenda by singing a hymn: “Lead on, O King eternal, the day of march has come…. the crown awaits the conquest; lead on, O God of might.”[2]

Interestingly, though, the primary arguments for First Baptist moving within downtown, and not out to the suburbs like many of their peers, were grounded in the language of mission. The church belongs downtown, one key leader argued, among “drunks, unclean people, people without the right clothes.”[3] That language chafes, but I get the impulse – as a member of a Catholic Worker-adjacent community, I’ve heard myself say similar things. I’ve talked extensively about God’s preferential option for the poor, about the importance of living together in solidarity with the oppressed, about how the Church is found among those who strive for liberation from the margins of the Empire. The language and the ideas are a bit different, but I’m still unsettled as to how close I am to the same legacy. Hidden just below the surface of the missionary impulse is the politics of conquest. I inherited that legacy.

In our intentional community, sixty years later and only three miles away from those historic Charlotte institutions, we’ve tried to reckon with the legacy of the missionary impulse. Then, displacement of Black people came in the form of Urban Renewal; now it is happening through gentrification. Our community has made the fight against gentrification our central focus. It hasn’t worked. The trickle of displacement has become a gaping wound. There are no solutions in sight.

We’re left to wonder whether two decades of our efforts have only been cosmetic, an attempt to spare ourselves the x-ray image that might show us how little deep the cancer of White supremacy runs in us. Have our attempts at solidarity merely obscured in our own eyes the history of missionary conquest that courses through our veins?

We’ve struggled against it, done our best to justify ourselves and our presence, but we cannot avoid it: White supremacy comes attached to White people. My presence on sidewalks and porches is a sign of safety to the newest batch of conquerors as they ride through, looking for real estate deals. It is also a signifier of the coming damage to my Black neighbors, as yet another generation faces displacement from places they called ‘home.’ I’ve worked so hard against those impacts. I’ve tried not to be White. But nobody – my old neighbors, my new neighbors, “the market” – is fooled. White supremacy will use every one of us to grab title to every square inch of land on God’s good earth, our best efforts and intentions be damned. None of us racialized as White can be pure or exceptional. There is no escaping Whiteness, only abolishing it.

I think a lot about Vernon Sawyer’s cruel speech to Friendship Baptist now. Vicious politics still get framed as benevolent mission. The wrong pulpits get seized and the bulldozers run in the wrong places. A great reversal is upon us: the mission field of our moment is not the disinvested neighborhood, but the barren souls and frozen pews of those of us who think we are White.

The challenge is before all of us who have been taught we are White to get at the foundations, down deep into the stolen soil we inhabit.

[1] Charlotte Observer, 7 November 1960.
[2] Cited in FBC’s newsletter, The Church Voice, 25 Feb 1965.
[3] Charlotte Observer, 28 Oct 1963.

This essay was originally published by Geez Magazine.

Imagining Peace
By Pádraig Ó Tuama

A shift in community can benefit from shifts in individual consciousness, but it also requires a shift in the way that groups come together. and to produce a foundation by which the entire system can move, there needs to be a communal structure for belonging.

One unique task of leadership is to initiate a future that is distinct from the past. For this to occur, we need to recognize the power of the small group and see that real change is more dependent
on creating strong communities than on providing more clarity and better blueprints concerning that future. If all we want is to make tomorrow better, but not different from yesterday, then we don’t need good leadership. We need good management.

Leadership vs. management
Management provides structure and order to the world but does not create much that is new. The problem with most change efforts is that there is too much management. In this way, the term “change management” is at odds with itself.
The common belief that you can change a culture by implementing clearer goals, better controls, better measures, more training, and new incentives, is a comfortable illusion. This is why most change efforts end up as a combination of lip service and headcount reduction.

Even many of our ideas of good leadership are infected with a management mindset. We think leadership is about positive human traits, a well-articulated vision, and walking the talk. These are good things, but they miss the real point of leadership, which is the capacity to deal with the uncertainty of a new future by creating a sense of belonging and strong community.

The two best leaders I personally know are Rich Teerlink of Harley Davidson and Dennis Bakke of AES. Both of them bet their futures on the engagement and involvement of employees. Teerlink called himself a spiritual leader, and Bakke wrote a book about the importance of employees finding joy at work.
They knew how to get people connected to each other, which could be called “the capacity to convene.” In other words, they knew how to build community. This role of leadership is what is being defined here.

The small group
Communal transformation is best initiated during those times when we gather. This means that each gathering takes on a special importance as a leading indicator of the future. Every meeting or special event is that place where context can be shifted, relatedness can be built, and new conversations can
be introduced. When we gather, we are able to draw conclusions about the kind of community in which we live.

The capacity of leaders to build community is therefore dependent
on understanding the importance of small groups. The small group is that structure in which employees and citizens become intimately connected with each other and in which the business becomes personal.

It incorporates six or more people, sitting in a circle, with others with whom they are least familiar, talking about things that matter. Even if hundreds are in the room, when people are configured into small groups, real change is created.

Leadership means convening
Convening means we change the world one room at a time. The room becomes an example of the future we want to create, and in this way, there is no need to wait for the future. The way we structure the assembly of peers is as critical as the issue or new organizational possibility that we come together to address.

The mindset that we can program and engineer our way into the future does not take into account the importance of context and the linguistic, conversational nature of community.

If we want to see a change in our organizations and communities, we must let go of the conventional or received wisdom about how change occurs. In doing so, we reject, or at least seriously question, the beliefs that communal change occurs under these circumstances:

We count on an aggregation of individual changes. We have seen this in attempts by large organizations trying to transform their culture through large-scale training and change efforts.

Communities initiate large-scale dialogue programs and book clubs. And no matter how well-intentioned, these efforts largely fall short of their goals because while individual lives are touched, the organizational culture and the community are unmoved.

The missing element is that these efforts do not recognize that there is such a thing as a collective body. A shift in community can benefit from shifts in individual consciousness, but it also requires a shift in the way that groups come together. And to produce a foundation by which the entire system can move, there needs to be a communal structure for belonging.

We think in terms of scale and speed. As David Bornstein points out in his book, How to Change the World, large- scale shifts occur only after a long period of small steps, organized around small groups that are patient enough to learn and experiment, and learn again.

We focus on large systems and top leaders for implementation. We target senior leaders and large systems to execute better problem solving, clearer goals and vision, and enhanced control of the process. Large-system change is a useful way to think, but transforming action is always local, customized, unfolding, and emergent.

The role of leaders is not to be better role models or drive change. Their role is to create the structures and experiences that bring citizens and employees together to identify and solve their own issues.

Communal transformation occurs when we accept certain beliefs. There needs to be a focus on the structure of how we gather and the context in which our gatherings take place. Collective change occurs when individuals and small, diverse groups engage one another in the presence of many others doing the same. It comes from the knowledge that what is occurring in one space is similarly happening in other spaces, especially ones in which it is unclear what others are doing.

This is the value of a network, or even a network of networks, which is today’s version of a social movement. It holds that in larger events, structured in small circles, with the powerful questions that I will define later, our faith in reinvention is established.

All of this needs to be followed up with the usual actions and problem solving, but it is those moments when citizens engage one another, in communion and the witness of others, that something collective shifts.
The small group gains power and intimacy when we work hard on getting the questions right. This begins by realizing that the questions themselves are important, and are more important than the answers. The primary questions for community transformation are, “How do we choose to be together?” and “What do we want to create together?” These are different from the primary questions for individual transformation, which are, “Who am I?” and “What am I called to do in this world?” Depth should be chosen over speed, and relatedness over scale. The question, “What do we want to create together?” is deceptively complicated. It implies a long journey, crossing social, class, and institutional boundaries.

Depth takes time and willingness to engage. Belonging requires the courage to set aside our usual notions of action and of measuring success by the numbers affected. It also means that while we keep our own points of view, we leave our self-interest at the door and show up to learn rather than to advocate. These are the conditions where sustainable change can occur.

This thinking––that communal transformation is about the structure of gathering, letting the right questions evolve, and going slowly with fewer people than we would like––does require a special role for leadership. By this way of thinking, we hold leadership to three tasks:

1. Create a context that nurtures an alternative future—one based
on gifts, generosity, accountability, and commitment. Teerlink influenced Harley Davidson by creating a context of quality and involvement. Bakke’s context was one of fun, which to him meant maximum choice at lower levels. Both were more interested in gifts than deficiencies and more interested in local choice than in keeping control.
2. Initiate and convene conversations between employees and citizens. This should increase a sense of belonging, and it should shift people’s experience. This is produced through the way people are brought together—the small group. The tools to make these groups powerful are the questions that engage people and confront them with their freedom. This recognizes that all transformation is linguistic and that the questions embody the pathway to a new conversation.
3. Listen and pay attention. Retire PowerPoint decks, put blueprints back on the shelf, stop having the answer, and get used to saying “it’s a mystery to me.” This is not the kind of leadership most citizens and employees are looking for, and that is why it is useful.

These are the elements of convening. Every facilitator and trainer understands these, but most leaders do not. Facilitators and staff people provide services along these lines to leaders, but they do not train them in this way.

These are leadership functions, and they are too important to remain in the hands of specialists. Leaders need the skill and faith to help employees and citizens discover their own power to resolve something, or at least move the action forward. The small group, a good set of questions, and the willingness to stop being a hero or parent are the factors that make this forward action possible.

Great questions have to be personal, ambiguous, and risky. They need to carry the hook of accountability, which grows out of choice. For example, ask people why they chose to show up.

Ask them how they are contributing to the problems that they are reporting. Ask them about the gifts they have that are not fully being brought into the workplace or the community. These questions are hard to answer, but in the asking, they begin to influence us.

The cost of these kinds of questions is anxiety because they confront people with their sense of freedom. The benefit is that they are restorative—they produce energy rather than consume it. They are also the basis of intimacy and accountability—the underlying point of the conversation.

Listening may be the single most powerful action a leader can take. It needs to be elevated to being thought of as an action step. Leaders will always be under pressure to speak, but if building social fabric is important and sustained transformation is the goal, then listening offers the greater service.

We need to reach the point at which people can call for immediate action, and the answer will be, “I am taking immediate action, and I am busy listening.”
Finally, for those of us involved in leadership education, we need to keep moving from training to learn- ing, and from providing knowledge to helping people discover what they already know.

It is clear that relatedness, belonging, and community are keys to the future, and that real change takes time and creates uncertainty. We have just been seduced into believing that these are secondary to speed, having a great vision, and staying in charge. Educators need to put convening and small groups at the top of our agendas and use our educational dollars to support them.

Mandatory inclusionary housing should be applied to rich neighborhoods.

Although criminal justice issues have been front-and-center in the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, land-use policies, which often receive less popular attention, have also ingrained systemic racism. Research has found that higher-income, mostly-white communities have the most restrictive land regulations, which limit the size and type of housing that can be built. Constraining supply – that is, by limiting how much, if any, multifamily housing can be built – drives up prices, thereby heightening racial and income segregation.

This phenomenon is not new. In its 1926 decision upholding the validity of a Cleveland suburb’s zoning ordinance, the Supreme Court called apartments “mere parasite[s]” that, when built together, “destroyed” the character and desirability of a neighborhood. In the last three-plus decades, Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties have seen judicial rulings or substantial settlements in cases alleging racially exclusionary zoning practices.

While this problem is most associated with the suburbs, it would be a mistake to ignore it in cities. New York City is markedly more segregated than most other major cities in the country: The dissimilarity index, a common measure of residential segregation, finds that Black-White, Latino-White, and Asian-White segregation has remained constant in New York City since 1980, even as many other metropolitan areas across the country have seen modest desegregation since then. These statistics do not exist in a vacuum; they are partially a result of this city’s land-use choices, such as that by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to largely downzone majority-white communities in New York City.

Exclusionary zoning policies were never acceptable, and the Black Lives Matter era only highlights the obligation that Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council have to pursue equitable desegregation.

The most accessible tactic the city government has at its own disposal is to repurpose a tool to date only implemented in low-income communities of color – Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, or MIH – for use in wealthier, majority-white communities. Created by the New York City Department of City Planning under de Blasio, MIH requires developers in certain areas to set aside a certain percentage of floor area for affordable housing in exchange for bonuses such as increased allowable height or bulk in their development.

So far, New York City has rezoned East Harlem, Inwood, East New York, Bay Street, Jerome Avenue, and Far Rockaway for MIH, with failed attempts in Bushwick, Flushing, and Southern Boulevard, and an uncertain path forward in Gowanus. These neighborhoods are largely working-class Black and Latino communities. Whether upzoning a neighborhood with an included affordable housing mandate empirically helps or hurts the goal of slowing gentrification and displacement, is a topic of feverish debate. What can conclusively be said, however, is that applying MIH exclusively in such communities perpetuates segregation. To the extent the “affordable” units produced are even affordable to community members in the first place, which they often are not, they lock low- and moderate-income residents of color in the same neighborhood without providing the option to move into wealthier, majority-white neighborhoods.

By contrast, applying mandatory inclusionary housing in wealthy, majority-white neighborhoods facilitates reaping the benefits of integration, of which there are many. In New York City, majority-white communities have greater proximity to subways, leading to much shorter commute times relative to more bus-reliant Black, Latino, and Asian American New Yorkers. Research ranging from decades ago through the present day has found that, when low-income city residents, predominantly (but not exclusively) of color, move to wealthy, majority-white neighborhoods, they are more likely to complete high school and attend college. Their lifetime earnings increase substantially.

In order to render these benefits possible, the mayor and the City Council must also modify the existing community preference policy. The concept behind the policy sounds simple: residents of the community district – that is, the boundaries of the neighborhoods a given community board serves – get 50% of the affordable housing built within said community district. However, given the intense residential segregation between neighborhoods, this policy also codifies segregation, and it stacks the odds against a resident applying for affordable housing outside of their own neighborhood. Based on who lives there currently, if you give preference to residents from, say, NoHo or SoHo, you’ll most likely end up with the housing going mostly to wealthier residents, most of whom are white, who may not be in as big a need for housing.

There is fierce debate over what exactly to do with community preference, especially given the belief in communities of color that affordable housing should go overwhelmingly toward that community. A reasonable compromise can be found in substantially reducing the community preference in wealthy areas while keeping a higher percentage in place in lower-income areas, based on the median income of the community district. This compromise would have the additional benefit of avoiding the Supreme Court’s strong hostility toward racially explicit government policies.

So New York City should do in neighborhoods like NoHo and SoHo what it did in East New York: upzone to increase allowable density, and mandating affordable housing in new buildings that take advantage of the added height. The group Open New York has put forth a strong plan to do just that: their plan would adapt the existing neighborhood architectural context to add nearly 700 affordable units in one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. They also propose providing a preference for the neighborhood’s workers instead of its residents. This plan, which the city government should adopt, provides a template for doing the same in wealthy, majority-white neighborhoods elsewhere in the city.

To be sure, pursuing desegregation policies does not relieve the city government of its obligation to fully invest in communities of color, and the individual choices of New Yorkers of color to live in any neighborhood – including staying in communities that are predominantly of color – must be respected. But there is clearly real demand for genuine housing choice: a survey by the Anti-Discrimination Center found that a strong majority of Black and Latino New Yorkers would consider pursuing affordable housing opportunities in communities outside their own.

Elected officials are incrementally moving in this direction. A proposal from New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer would require inclusionary housing in all new developments, including in wealthy neighborhoods, throughout the city. And Councilmembers Brad Lander and Antonio Reynoso have endorsed comprehensive planning as a means toward advancing equitable land-use policies. The recognition that wealthy, majority-white neighborhoods must help in producing affordable housing for this city is growing – and historic cobblestones are not a replacement for this need, as one Manhattan Community Board 2 member suggested in opposing a SoHo rezoning.

While upzoning with mandatory affordable units in wealthier areas will not create enough affordable units to end New York City’s segregation on its own, it is a necessary component of advancing housing justice and racial justice. Implementing it is one way that the mayor and the City Council can show they really are serious about combating systemic racism.

Americans have a penchant for displaying their beliefs on bumper stickers. A few years ago, a friend gave me a bumper sticker that I display on my laptop: Treat the earth as if your life depends on it. The authority given for this command is Genesis 2:15, which says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”

This is my daily reminder that caring for the earth is integral to our human vocation. There is an inextricable connection between adam – literally, the “earth creature” – and adamah, the fertile soil from which God created him. Growing into our biblical job description in the midst of a throwaway culture requires an ecological conversion – an ongoing process of remembering that vocation to care for our common home. My own ecological conversion took place as I learned to reimagine missionary work from the “ground up” – that is, as an expression of discipleship, hospitality, and friendship, in a concrete place.

I don’t belong fully to any single culture: I was born and raised in the southern United States, have lived in Brazil, and now reside in Birmingham, England. Even in the historically conservative Bible Belt, I grew up as a moderate mainline Protestant, and while I was grateful for this nurturing Christian context, I knew there had to be more to following Jesus. It was some time before I connected treating the earth as if my life depends upon it with my decision to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.

One step of my journey took place in Brazil, where I met Claudio Oliver, a pastor and the elder of Casa da Videira, an intentional Christian community. Like an older brother, Claudio challenged me to reimagine what it means to be a missionary and sowed the seeds of my ecological conversion. During our first meeting, Claudio spoke enthusiastically of a Catholic priest and intellectual named Ivan Illich. I left that visit with a copy of Illich’s 1968 address, “To Hell with Good Intentions.” In it, Illich criticized missionary activity in which “do-gooders” impose their “good intentions” on others, rather than allowing themselves to be transformed by those they encounter. I was reading it as a US national serving as a missionary in Brazil; Illich’s talk was, to say the least, a jolt to my system. His message exposed the insular missionary bubble that had slowly formed around me.

I had not gone to Brazil out of a sense of heroic duty to help people; I had married a Brazilian, and in the spirit of Ruth and Naomi, her people became my people. But somewhere along the way, I became distracted by missionary ideals and good intentions. Illich’s proposal – to come, but not in the role of helper – challenged the temptation to see myself as a foreign problem-solver. Yet the more I read Illich, the more I also realized he was not letting me off the hook. He was advocating a different kind of presence – a more conscious, more subversive presence.

During my second encounter with Claudio, I caught a glimpse of mission beyond good intentions. I noticed him making short trips to the balcony of his fifth-floor apartment, and asked what he was doing. He showed me his colony of composting worms, called a wormery, and a vertical garden. Varieties of lettuce and root crops grew inside upcycled two-liter bottles filled with the compost. Instead of treating all of his food waste as garbage, Claudio explained, he fed it to his worms, which then turned it into rich soil.

Claudio’s little balcony garden was an experiment in treating creation as sacred. He wanted to offer signs of life in the midst of so much pollution and waste – twin symptoms of our throwaway culture. He explained that he was working his way back to the earth, back to the soil he longed to care for.

I mentioned that I, too, wanted to set up a wormery on my balcony, but instead of giving me a pep talk, he gave me a warning: “Of course, you can do a wormery from your balcony, and you should. But I have to warn you that if you do, it is the most subversive thing that you can do inside your home.” Claudio picked up a decomposing banana peel to make his point:

In the beginning, God created and said, “It is good.” This banana peel that I am holding is good. And if God says it is good, then by whose authority do we treat it like garbage? The truth is, we are not authorized to treat it that way. And if you begin to handle your own food discards – like this banana peel – as creation, instead of garbage, then it will never be garbage again. You will rethink what we are called to do with creation. So, man, it is subversive, because composting food waste is about learning to repent and rethink how we care for God’s good creation.

I had studied academic theology for years, and could recite the Christian doctrine of creation, yet my most profound understanding of it came through these words and deeds offered by a friend.

From 2008 to 2010, I was adopted by Casa da Videira. The wormery experiment led to a growing scheme in our apartment building, as well as an urban garden at a local nursery run by Catholic sisters. By becoming immersed in this network of humus and humans, I began to recognize two different ways of engaging in Christian mission: as a technical problem to be solved, or as a relational possibility to be shared.

When I arrived in Brazil, my missionary strategy was focused on problems and driven by ideals. But Casa da Videira worked successfully at the grassroots level by cultivating relationships from within the existing context, problems and all. I saw the community welcome conservatives and liberals, vegans and omnivores, eco-activists and reactionaries. Around the table at Casa da Videira, I was changed – not because people tried to change me, but because they were transparent about living out the change they envisioned. I had spent time with eco-warriors, but often left uninspired by their arguments and statistics. The people at Casa da Videira listened patiently to my good intentions, and then gave me the encouragement that I needed to bring forth a new missionary imagination. In their uniquely Brazilian, backhanded humor, they’d give me the compliment: “Sam, you are the best failure of an American missionary that we have ever met!”

The Portuguese edition of Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, intriguingly translates “throwaway culture” as a cultura do descarte, literally “culture of the discarded.” Rather than seeking to cultivate an idyllic community insulated from the wounds of a throwaway culture, the members of Casa da Videira ask, “What does good news look like in the midst of a cultura do descarte?”

While operating as a faith-based organization, Casa da Videira has become a leader in the use of urban agriculture, food production, and waste management as tools of social innovation, economic inclusion, and political transformation. But the community does not experiment with urban agriculture and food production as ends in themselves. Rather, inspired by the metaphor of Jesus as the vine (John 15:1–17), Casa da Videira – which means “House of the Vine” – has undertaken these endeavors in order to share the good news that comes through friendship with Jesus. A crucial part of this work is attending to the discarded parts of creation. As Claudio describes it:

We understand that what Jesus offers to us is this sensation of being alive, enjoying life, living abundantly. All this starts when we look to those pieces of life, sent to die as garbage, and reintroduce them into the cycle of life, respecting them as part of creation. It’s a process that begins in the soil and ends at our tables. We harvest our veggies from this cycle, we breed our animals inside of it. . . . Where the world sees garbage, we see nourishment; where the world sees death, we see life; in a world of loneliness, we discover community.

Laudato Si’ holds that ecological conversion is not reducible to “self-improvement on the part of individuals,” rather, it requires a “community conversion.” No doubt, we need to experience a personal change of heart, but that change is never a private affair. Ecological conversion takes place around dinner tables and through working together in garden plots. It requires not only a new “I,” but also a new “we.”

My ecological conversion continued in the United Kingdom, where I moved with my family to complete my doctoral work in practical theology. Along with another family, we committed to live intentionally in the neighborhood of Summerfield, in inner-city Birmingham, England. Inspired by Casa da Videira, I looked at our context and asked: What if we imagined the work of intercultural mission – of entering into another’s garden – not by planting another church, as I had done in Brazil, but by cultivating abundant community from the ground up?
In contemplating missionary work as gardening, I reflected on the biological phenomenon known as the “edge effect.” In ecological systems, an edge is the frontier between two habitats. For example, the shoreline is the edge between a pond (aquatic habitat) and a field (land habitat). Edges characteristically exhibit more biodiversity than single ecosystems. Good gardeners mimic this principle by designing and cultivating edges that will enhance biodiversity and beneficial interactions.

We can also observe the edge effect in the interactions between people and habitats. Especially in cities like Birmingham, cultural diversity is an everyday, sometimes intense, reality. The main street of Summerfield is lined with ethnic shops and restaurants, churches, and mosques. At our child’s primary school, forty-four languages are spoken! The second largest men’s prison in England is located in our neighborhood, and many prisoners are released to resettle in the local community. Whereas in biological systems, the edge effect naturally tends towards greater biodiversity and resilience, in human ecology, interactions at these edges may be beneficial or harmful, even violent.

To cultivate the edges in Summerfield, we founded a group called Companions for Hope, which brings together the “institutional church” habitat and the “neighborhood” habitat. Most participants in Companions worship regularly with local churches. Companions seeks to further ecumenical unity, so that different members of the neighborhood can meet and relate to one another as members of the same body of Christ. Practically, we are involved in a range of local initiatives: community gardens, prison ministry, community development, neighborhood meals and social events, “Places of Welcome,” discipleship groups, and prayer meetings.

Connecting with the food cycle has become a vital way of cultivating hope in our neighborhood, as engaging in the convivial practices of growing and sharing food is the best way we’ve found of sharing what we have received with others. In this way, our mission in Summerfield is more than a set of programs for “fixing” things; it is a relational possibility among friends and neighbors – as Laudato Si’ puts it, “attitudes which together foster a spirit of generous care, full of tenderness.” The people and places we encounter are not projects, and they are definitely not clients. They are our neighbors and friends, our parks and green spaces – and all in our common home.

The Brexit referendum, which happened soon after we relocated to Summerfield, catalyzed resentment towards immigrants and foreigners – two groups that Summerfield has in abundance. Foreigners ourselves, we began to share meals with neighbors and have conversations with local people about life in the neighborhood. We soon realized that fellow residents are not automatically neighbors in a place as diverse as Summerfield. It requires intentionality to shift from happening to live nearby to being true neighbors. So Companions for Hope launched monthly Neighbor Nights, which bring people together around food to get to know each other. We drew inspiration from Ephesians 2:14, which speaks of breaking “down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”

One of the key figures in these events has been a Polish woman named Ewa. We first met Ewa when our dog, Rio, spotted her foraging for blackberries. During a few minutes’ chat, we learned that she had lived locally for twelve years, was trained as a chef, and had been looking for a place to share her passion for cooking.

Ewa helped us kick off our first Neighbor Night as lead chef, and she has not missed one yet! Ewa has also recruited others from the local Polish community to join in. She has shown herself to be a skilled chef who has a real gift for bringing people together around food, and she has become a key character in the story of our neighborhood.

A neighborhood is like an ecology of relationships. Gardeners know that plants do not flourish in isolation from their environment; rather, they flourish because of it, dependent on the quality of the soil, light, and water. Gardeners will often design “companion planting” to create symbiotic exchanges between plants. The gifts of people like Ewa are like seeds: powerful, yet dormant, unless exposed to the right conditions. The friendships that spring up among neighbors are the soil, water, warmth, and light that allow these seeds to grow.

As we cultivate the edges of the urban margins, I keep returning both to Laudato Si’ and to the insights of Ivan Illich. Laudato Si’ articulates a spirituality for recovering care in a throwaway culture. In making an appeal for “a spirit of generous care, full of tenderness,” Pope Francis traces a clear path through our culture of the discarded. He writes, “Christian spirituality proposes an alternative understanding of the quality of life, and encourages a prophetic and contemplative lifestyle, one capable of deep enjoyment free of the obsession with consumption.” He reminds us that we are inherently social beings, created for the communion that care makes possible.

It is Illich who articulates why we must decouple “quality of life” and “life of consumption.” In Tools for Conviviality, he went so far as to say, “The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and care for each other.” This possibility, like the kingdom of God, is “at hand,” if we would only repent and enter it.

The Creator’s call to care for our common home has never been more urgent, and requires a range of faithful responses, from individual and grassroots efforts to major policy and legislative changes. Through gardening and food production, the church is offering demonstration plots of abundant life: sites where even in the margins, we tend the earth and one another. What is needed is the cultivation of community where ecological conversion is possible; and of communities where neighbors can work together and live abundantly.

Samuel E. Ewell, III is a co-director of EAT MAKE PLAY, a neighborhood-based community co-op focused on regenerating a circular economy that is citizen-led and place-based. He also works with Companions for Hope, where he combines prison and community engagement, urban permaculture, and theological facilitation as a way of cultivating abundant community at the edges of inner-city Birmingham (UK). He is also the author of Faith Seeking Conviviality (2020) and Building Up the Church: Live Experiments in Faith, Hope, and Love (2008).

(Originally published in Plough)

Policing in America has gone too far. It has now become the one-stop response to our communities’ public health and public aid problems. Police officers must enforce traffic laws and respond to domestic disputes. They must manage mental health crises and drug overdoses. They must deal with homelessness and school discipline. Police officers, of course, are neither trained nor equipped to be part of our social support systems, and so it’s unsurprising that they often make them worse.

Even when it comes to crimes of violence, it turns out that law enforcement often fails to protect people. Less than 4 percent of an officer’s time is spent investigating so-called violent crimes, and police don’t even do a particularly good job at that. In Chicago, for example, police typically solve only 4 out of 10 murders, and only 2 out of 10 when the victim is Black. Yet police are expensive, eating large amounts of municipal budgets. The City of Chicago spends approximately $4 million dollars per day on the Chicago Police Department, an amount equivalent to 5 months of mental health services, 18 months of substance abuse treatment, or 32 months of violence prevention programs.

As former Dallas Police Chief David Brown said, “We are asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it… Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops… that’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all these problems.”

Police should no longer occupy all of our vital support systems in our communities. Here are ten ways to make our communities safer for everyone. The following concrete steps present a way forward, one that would begin to reduce reliance on policing.

1. Mental health and social workers to respond to crises.

Instead of dispatching police to intervene in mental health crises, municipalities should hire mental health experts and social workers who are trained to de-escalate tense situations and work with vulnerable populations. Police officers are not trained for these sensitive interactions and use the only available tools at their disposal: arrest, jail, and, in some instances, violence. One study shows that 25 percent of people diagnosed with a mental illness have been arrested at some point during their lifetime, and, according to one conservative estimate, 1 in 4 deadly police encounters involve someone experiencing a mental health crisis. As a result, some are reluctant to call for help because they fear arrests and violence.

There are many examples of successful programs that reduce contact between law enforcement and individuals who require a therapeutic response. In Denver, Colorado, an innovative program launched earlier this month dispatches experienced, trained mental health medics in response to 911 calls made for help with people who are experiencing a mental health crisis. San Francisco just announced a similar program, and Los Angeles is considering one, that would replace police response with unarmed specialists for mental health and substance use-related calls.

The public supports such programs. Data for Progress and The Justice Collaborative Institute conducted a survey finding that 68 percent of voters support the creation of a new first responder agency to deal with issues related to substance use or mental illness that do not need police.

2. Violence interrupters to reduce gun violence.

Violence interruption programs reduce gun violence through targeted community interventions that interrupt ongoing conflict and prevent violence. Such programs focus on shifting community norms surrounding conflict resolution. The best of these programs include peer-based mentoring, job assistance, and other community support. When done well, they have been successful. In Baltimore, for example, a violence interruption program reduced serious violence by 69 percent. In New York City, one study found that gun violence rates declined significantly in two neighborhoods operating violence interruption programs.

Violence interrupters acknowledge that the victims and perpetrators of gun violence typically come from the same community. Law enforcement agencies often rely on the traditional responses of surveillance, stop-and-frisk, mass arrests, and prosecution. They fail time and time again to reduce violence. Researchers have shown how flooding communities with law enforcement sows distrust, renders the police even less effective, and can lead to spikes in violence.

There is public support, too. Data for Progress and The Justice Collaborative Institute found that 68 percent of likely voters support funding programs to train community leaders to de-escalate potentially violent situations.

3. Unarmed traffic patrols.

Every year, approximately 20 million drivers interact with the police. These police encounters often lead to unwarranted searches, tense confrontations, and, in some cases, deadly force. Consider, for example, the arrest of Sandra Bland, originally pulled over for failing to signal a lane change only to die just three days later in jail. Such policies disproportionately impact communities of color. Black drivers are 30 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers, and people of color are significantly more likely to have their cars searched and their cash seized than whites. Despite this, the roads aren’t any safer. The national death rate from traffic accidents has remained the same over the last decade, and there’s no evidence that police patrols decrease other types of dangerous driving or vehicle safety.

Unarmed traffic patrols can better respond to traffic accidents and direct traffic or conduct other calls for service. A proposal in Berkeley, California, for example, would replace police with a city department of transportation, staffed by unarmed public works officials, who would conduct parking enforcement and stop cars for violations such as running a stop sign or driving at night without headlights. Even more serious traffic incidents do not require armed police; for example, traffic patrol officers with substance abuse training could be trained to respond to violations of driving while intoxicated.

4. Civilian control of crime labs.

One of the oldest, and most problematic, links between faulty science and criminal justice is the state crime lab, which collects, stores, and processes evidence for use at trial. But crime labs are far from neutral; they were developed in parallel with police departments and maintain close ties to the same people in charge of arresting, interrogating, and investigating. As a result, incorrectly processed or stored forensic evidence is at the heart of many wrongful convictions. As a former Texas state senator wrote after the discovery of botched evidence by the Houston Police Department, “When crime labs are operating within a police department, examiner bias can undermine the integrity of scientific results.”

After years of study, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that, alongside other reforms, forensic science must function independently of law enforcement. According to best practices, law enforcement agencies should not collect and control the testing of evidence, and crime labs should be independent third party functionaries. They should not control the maintenance of evidence required for securing a conviction. Civilian scientists, with scientific training in the collection, maintenance, and testing of evidence, must instead be at the helm of independent labs in order to ensure the reliability of results.

5. Fund better and safer transit service.

In San Francisco, Boston, Portland, New York City, Chicago, and elsewhere, videos have captured transit police beating, assaulting, arresting, tasing, and even shooting riders. These, like most other well-documented cases of police shootings and assaults, disproportionately impact Black people.

Armed officers have no place and no special training to maintain safe and better transit communities. Moreover, we cannot afford armed officers in our transit spaces. In Los Angeles County, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has dedicated more than $650 million over five years to policing its transit network; in New York City, advocates are calling on the state transit authority, which faces massive cash shortfalls because of the pandemic, to reverse its plan to hire additional police officers. Even in smaller cities, divesting from unnecessary transit police can yield significant savings: Portland, Oregon, recently approved a $15 million cut to its police budget that includes disbanding patrol units in the city’s public transit system.

If cities want to ensure that food vendors in transit spaces are licensed, they should hire licensing agencies, much like the restaurant licensing process. If cities are concerned about safety on transit systems, they should hire a team trained to de-escalate encounters, particularly with those who are intoxicated or facing a mental health crisis. Moreover, instead of armed forces, transit systems could hire more transit staff to ride the trains and buses to support drivers and ensure adherence to train and bus rules. Our transit systems do not require armed officers to keep the peace.

6. School wellness centers.

For children growing up during the era of mass incarceration, seeing armed officers in their schools is commonplace. Federal grants have supported more and more cops in schools. Federal programs like the Community Oriented Policing Services (“COPS”) have provided millions of dollars to hire and train local police, including police in schools.

Police officers do not have specialized training in adolescent or childhood development. They are not mental health experts, social workers with licensed degrees, psychologists, or school counselors. They are not educators. To be clear, school resource officers are career law enforcement officers, with arresting authority, and a license to carry a weapon. Police officers patrol school hallways just like they do city streets. More than one and a half million students attend schools with an SRO, but no counselor.

There are better, safer, and cheaper alternatives. In 2016, Intermediate School District 287, a school west of the Twin Cities with a high concentration of students with special needs and mental health needs that can result in behavior issues, replaced their school resource officers with Student Safety Coaches. The Student Safety Coaches specialize in mental health, restorative justice, de-escalation, and building positive relationships with their students. Arrests decreased by 80 percent in the pilot school after implementation of the program.

7. Dispute resolution experts for neighborhood and domestic disputes.

Domestic and neighborhood disputes are among the most common calls for law enforcement. In some places, these calls are almost 50 percent of all calls received. The vast majority are not violent, however, and most end in no arrest. In some jurisdictions, mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence calls mean that arrests occur, but there is no evidence that they reduce domestic violence. In fact, the knowledge that police response means arrests, potential incarceration, and collateral consequences means that many victims don’t call law enforcement at all. The truth is that while federal, state, and local governments have thrown money at policing for interpersonal violence, little has changed.

There is a better response: mobile, crisis-response units employ first responders that are not police to respond to calls involving neighborhood disputes and domestic disturbance. Social workers and teams that work to de-escalate disputes cost less, and are likely to create opportunities to engage community members in conflict resolution. Instead of armed officers, crisis-response teams are trained to mediate conflict, and often know and live in the neighborhoods to which they’re responding. They cost a fraction of the money spent on policing initiatives that simply haven’t been proven to work. In the vast majority of situations, like calls for excessive noise or neighborhood disturbances, an unarmed response from a mediator who can negotiate between the disputing parties is all that is needed. In France, for example, trained mediators respond to the vast majority of calls involving interpersonal conflict. Instead of calling for police, communities can and should be trained to reach out to crisis management teams in their own neighborhoods to help resolve the majority of disputes.

8. Support, not police, for people experiencing homelessness.

People who experience homelessness are often the targets of police calls and unnecessary arrests that only make it harder for people to find stable housing. In Portland, for instance, the Oregonian reported that people experiencing homelessness accounted for 52 percent of arrests, despite being only 3 percent of the city’s population. The vast majority of those arrests—over 80 percent—were for nonviolent offenses, such as disorderly conduct, drug possession, or failure to appear for court. Studies have also shown that people experiencing chronic houselessness are often repeatedly arrested and booked, experiencing constant negative repercussions associated with jail and court involvement.

Specialized outreach units reduce these unnecessary and harmful police interactions. Organizations like Portland Street Response provide compassion and appropriate care by medics and trained, non-law enforcement community workers. Such groups are also better able to conduct affirmative outreach, by building community trust and leading the way for other, long-term solutions.

9. Integrated crisis centers.

For those suffering from an acute mental crisis, law enforcement typically responds by arresting individuals and transporting them to an emergency department, where wait time, care, and community support are likely unavailable. Police officers are then forced to spend countless hours waiting in emergency rooms, despite the fact that most people experiencing such crises do not require involuntary admission.

Instead of criminalizing those who require stabilization in the midst of a crisis, non-law enforcement integrated crisis drop off centers meet their needs. Integrated drop off centers are community-based mental health systems, with a “no rejection” policy, for individuals experiencing a mental health or addiction crisis. Such centers allow crisis management teams, or even trained law enforcement, to drop off individuals in the midst of crisis, reducing incarceration and police contact.

A survey of voters conducted by Data for Progress and The Justice Collaborative Institute found that 76 percent of respondents supported the use of an integrated drop-off center in lieu of arrests.

10. Trained civilians for property offenses.

The call to the police about a suspicious $20 bill ended in the murder of George Floyd. An investigation built around counterfeit money does not require the presence of armed officers. Likewise, armed police officers may not be the best suited to investigate property crimes. When police are called, there is no realistic expectation, for instance, that a stolen bike or iPhone will be returned or that the perpetrator of the crime will be prosecuted.

Instead of armed officers, unarmed, trained, citizen officers, trained in interviewing and de-escalation techniques, might be tasked with walking foot patrol beats and handling reports of counterfeit bills and other low-level property offenses.

Alex S. Vitale is a professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He is the author of “The End of Policing.”

(Originally published in The Appeal)

Dr. Cornel West

When belonging breaks down – or was never possible because of the unjust design of our systems – people rise up. We have seen that over the past week in the streets of cities in all 50 states. For decades, Cornel West has been calling Americans to a deeper sense of belonging, even to the point of reinventing our society. Here he makes a turn as a guest on (surprise!) a Fox News interview, calling for this society to remake itself into one of deeper belonging.

We’re seeing people of all colors coming together. It’s a beautiful thing, but we have a system that is unable to respond. Looting is wrong, but legalized looting is wrong too. Murder is wrong, but legalized murder is wrong too. I look at the wickedness in high places first, then keep track of the least of these.

This content may be disturbing to some viewers.

Beatriz Lopez

Here are some of the voices from the protests, which have included many people who say they’ve never protested before:

“In every city, there’s a George Floyd,” said Michael Sampson II, 30, of Jacksonville, Fla.

“It could be my father, my brother, my uncle, my cousin, my friend,” saidVictoria Sloan, 27, of Brooklyn. “It makes me angry.”

“I’m speaking for everybody, all my kinfolk, all my brothers and sisters who’ve gotten beaten up by police,” said Cory Thomas, 40, who said the police beat him when he was a teenager in Brooklyn. “I don’t condone the violence,” or the looting, he said, “but at the end of the day, no 14-year-old should be beat up by police.”

“There are people out there who are very negative,” D.J. Elliott, 30, a gym manager in Harlem said, in frustration about a small number of late-arriving, violent protesters. “And this is their golden opportunity.”

“If we don’t fight for change we’re not going to get it,” Douglas Golliday, a 65-year-old resident of a Minneapolis suburb, told The Star Tribune while waiting to be taken to jail along with his 44-year-old son, Robert, and other protesters.

“I took six rubber bullets, but do you know what didn’t happen to me?” Elizabeth Ferris, a 36-year-old Georgetown University student, told The Washington Post. “No one kneeled on my neck.”

Ashley Gary of Minneapolis said: “We’ve been through Jamar Clark, we’ve been through Philando Castile, and there was no justice whatsoever. We’re tired of it, we are very tired. My son, he’s 16 and six feet tall, and I don’t want him to be taken as somebody bad because he’s a bigger black man.”

“I came out peacefully to show my support, and the police are aiming right at me,” Mariana Solaris, a 20-year-old from San Bernardino, Calif., told The Los Angeles Times, after the police fired foam pellets at her. “I saw this on the news earlier tonight,” she said, “and I thought, ‘No way is it really like that out there with the police.’ So I came out to see. And, yeah, it’s really like that.”

(Originally published on NYTimes)

Jericho Brown

Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Jericho Brown, has an urgency to his poetry as he deftly names the forces — be it cop, disease, or addiction — that would have him dead while celebrating the beauty — a flower, a lover’s embrace, understanding — and all that helps him thrive in a burning world.

My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway toward her porch
Because she was a woman with land who showed as much by giving it color.
She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was an American.
But she’d say it was because she believed
In God. I am ashamed of America
And confounded by God. I thank God for my citizenship in spite
Of the timer set on my life to write
These words: I love my mother. I love black women
Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the blooms
Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them
Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie that we are lazy,
But I’d love to wake that bastard up
At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under God
Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk
Waiting to go work for whatever they want. A house? A boy
To keep the lawn cut? Some color in the yard? My God, we leave things green.

Reverend Robert Turner

In the span of about 24 hours between May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob descended on Greenwood, a successful black economic hub in Tulsa, Oklahoma then-known as “Black Wall Street,” and burned it to the ground. Some members of the mob had been deputized and armed by city officials.

In what is now known as the “Tulsa Race Massacre,” the mob destroyed 35 square blocks of Greenwood, burning down more than 1,200 black-owned houses, scores of businesses, a school, a hospital, a public library, and a dozen black churches. The American Red Cross, carrying out relief efforts at the time, said the death toll was around 300, but the exact number remains unknown. A search for mass graves, only undertaken in recent years, has been put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Those who survived lost their homes, businesses, and livelihoods. Property damage claims from the massacre alone amount to tens of millions in today’s dollars. The massacre’s devastating toll, in terms of lives lost and harms in various ways, can never be fully repaired.

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Following the massacre, government and city officials, as well as prominent business leaders, not only failed to invest and rebuild the once thriving Greenwood community, but actively blocked efforts to do so.

No one has ever been held responsible for these crimes, the impacts of which black Tulsans still feel today. Efforts to secure justice in the courts have failed due to the statute of limitations. Ongoing racial segregation, discriminatory policies, and structural racism have left black Tulsans, particularly those living in North Tulsa, with a lower quality of life and fewer opportunities.

On the 99th anniversary of the massacre, a movement is growing to urge state and local officials to do what should have been done a long time ago—act to repair the harm, including by providing reparations to the survivors and their descendants, and those feeling the impacts today.

Under international human rights law, governments have an obligation to provide effective remedies for violations of human rights. The fact that a government abdicated its responsibility nearly 100 years ago and continued to do so in subsequent years does not absolve it of that responsibility today—especially when failure to address the harm and related action and inaction results in further harm, as it has in Tulsa. Like so many other places across the United States marred by similar incidents of racial violence, these harms stem from the legacy of slavery.

There are practical limits to how long, or through how many generations, such claims should survive. However, Human Rights Watch supports the conclusion of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (recently renamed the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission)—a commission created by the Oklahoma state legislature in 1997 to study the massacre and make recommendations—that reparations should be made.

The Tulsa Race Massacre occurred in a broader context of racist violence and oppression stemming from slavery, which continues to impact black people in the United States today. Human Rights Watch has long been supportive of the development of broader reparations plans to account for the brutality of slavery and historic racist laws that set different rules for black and white people. Accordingly, Human Rights Watch supports US House Resolution 40 (H.R. 40), a federal bill to establish a commission to examine the impacts of the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent racial and economic discriminatory laws and practices. H.R. 40 has been circulating in Congress for 30 years but recently gained renewed momentum given a growing public understanding about the harms of slavery and its continuing impact today. The bill garnered nearly 100 new co-sponsors in the House just last year; a companion bill in the Senate, S. 1083, has 16 co-sponsors.

After decades of silence, an enormous amount has been written in recent years about the Tulsa massacre and its aftermath, including many books, and a comprehensive 200-page report, known as the “Tulsa Race Riot Report,” issued by the “Tulsa Race Riot Commission” in 2001. Yet the state and local governments involved have failed to take action.

In the run-up to the massacre’s centennial, the Tulsa and Oklahoma governments should finally take meaningful steps to repair these ongoing, devastating wrongs.

(Originally published on hrw.org)