April 9th, 2010
I had the good fortune to be with new citizen advocate George Barrow the other day. He said, “The idea of citizen advocacy doesn’t read as well as it plays.” The definition and description on our written materials did not excite him – the hearing of real citizen advocacy stories did.
After I wrote the following for a funding opportunity, I noticed the same thing. The first two paragraphs are programmatic. From there on it becomes more poetic. See what you think…
Chatham Savannah Citizen Advocacy is a 32 year old grass roots advocacy organization devoted to providing protection and advocacy to people in Savannah and Chatham County who are being abused, neglected or having their lives otherwise diminished because of prejudice toward people with disabilities.
The organization recruits, orients and matches local citizens as advocates. Each advocate is paired with one person who has a developmental disability and is asked to work to “understand, respond to and represent the other person’s interests as if they were the advocates own.” In other words, we challenge and encourage people to be more responsive and responsible to one another and to learn from each other. Our driving questions are “What can people come to mean to one another?” and “What can people come to mean to the common good?”
You will find examples of people who got tired of taking their protégé back to the state institution after visiting with them and who have adopted that person, people who have questioned, challenged and changed state level Medicaid policy so they could get their protégé out of a nursing home and set up in his own home, people who have welcomed their protégé as a member of their family at Thanksgiving and Christmas, people who have called their high school buddies who own businesses to find their protégé a job. There are hundreds of stories of hundreds of local people voluntarily engaging in the life of one other person and working to help that person have a better life.
The citizen advocacy program is not a place. It is an idea. The idea is that someone (Tom Kohler in this case) asks people to sit down and think about something important. The important thing they think about is who they are as a human being and what they can do to help someone have a better life. The program starts there. From there people from all walks of life step into personal relationships with individual people who are pushed to the bottom and edge of life in Savannah and are asked to question and change that. It’s not a facility or a therapy. It’s a growing pattern of responsible individual personal relationships among people.
We gather as a group once each year in the Springtime. We have “the biggest and best covered dish supper in Chatham County.” Three hundred people bring food and drink and flowers and stories and one another. We see one another. We see possibility. We see what we can be.
March 9th, 2010
A few months ago we started wondering if we might be able to spark relationship building and solidarity by mailing the following letter to good solid Savannah people. One letter per week, 52 weeks a year. Play that out by 10 years, then 100 years…
Dear Michelle,
I hope this finds you well. I am sending this letter to one person per week for 52 weeks. You are the seventh.
A. Please locate and obligate yourself to someone who lives on thin ice in Savannah. Find ways be appreciate each other. Find ways to question the status quo. Imagine growing old together. Seek Solidarity. Learn as you go, then …
B. Please think of three people you know in Savannah and ask them to do A and B as well.
C. Hold onto this letter until you do A and B. When done, send the letter back to me. No hurry, just sometime in 2010.
I won’t bore you with details, but you are welcome to call me at 912-236-5798, or email me at tomkohler@bellsouth.net or find me on Facebook or at the Sentient Bean for coffee.
Tom Kohler
After sending about a dozen of these, we had a couple of phone calls. Not from people to whom we had sent letters, but from people we know and who know our work. One was from Rev. Liam Collins. He had met a man with a who was living a hard life on an SSI check of few hundred bucks a month and asked if we might help the two of them think about some possibilities.Yep, we can do that.
The second call was from Clete Bergen, an attorney we know. He asked us to lunch and brought someone with him who “was being a citizen advocate without knowing it.” I listened to her story and helped her think about how to engage other people in the story. We can help her in some other ways as well.
The letter and the two stories are part of a culture of caring that we promote. A culture of people caring about and for one another. A culture of caring about who is left out, and who we need to be a little extra intentional about inviting in.
February 15th, 2010
Ted Turner and Henry Aaron took center stage at the Georgia Historical Society Annual Dinner this weekend. These men are Georgians. They are friends. They are men who spent the first part of their lives accomplishing impressive personal goals.
Now, with the benefit of age and experience, both have come to see service to others as their highest call. Billionaire Turner’s heroes have shifted from the warrior Genghis Kahn to peace makers Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Baseball legend Aaron cares more about the number of kids his Foundation has helped with college scholarships, than his home run record.
One might walk away with the idea that the first 50 years of one’s life is to be solely devoted to making one’s personal climb to the top. Once there, the luxury of service to others avails itself. This reading of the evening’s message would be unfortunate for all concerned.
Here are a few questions that we might ask ourselves after hearing Turner’s and Aaron’s message:
- How much of the service I offer within the community is personal vs. professional?
- How much of the service I offer within the community guides me outside of my corporate comfort zone?
- How much of the service I offer within the community draws me closer to people who live lives different than mine?
- How much of the service I offer within the community is freely given rather than quid pro?
- How much of the service I offer within the community encourages an egalitarian community rather than elitist community?
- How much of the service I offer within the community involves my hands and my heart more than my wallet?
- How much of the service I offer within the community is transforming me?
If we are to accept the insight Hank Aaron and Ted Turner offered on Saturday evening, we should all begin to invest ourselves personally and directly in the lives of people whose climb is tougher than ours. Don’t wait.
A personal note of thanks to Don and Kaye Kole for the invitation and hospitality during the evening.
February 8th, 2010
I recently attended the Florida Winter Pastor’s School at Stetson University in Deland, Florida to hear farmer and author Wendell Berry. My friend the Reverend Enoch Hendry of Trinity United Methodist Church in Savannah invited me to attend, reminding me that I introduced him to Berry’s writing more than 25 years ago. There were about 200 pastors in attendance from 18 states and Canada. Ages ranged from 30 to more than 75 years old, with the majority looking to be within 10 years of my 58 years. The time was useful for several reasons…
Wendell Berry’s presentation about economics – home economics- is built on more fundamental understandings of the long cycles of life than anything I read in The New York Times, or Commentary or The Wall Street Journal. This long view puts the day’s headlines in perspective.
In Berry’s view, local is essential. Local food growing and consumption, local banking with investor, banker and customer being seen as part of the same weave of community and local responsibility, including people trying to care about and for one another.
Berry believes and articulates the notion that affection for a particular place and people creates community and that community is, in the long arc of things, the fundamental building block of a culture capable of sustaining itself and its people.
Two questions we ask in citizen advocacy – What can people come to mean to one another? What can people come to mean to the greater good?- are questions that freshen and strengthen the soil of community. Berry’s deep understanding of the connection good land use, what is now called sustainability, and good community life builds a wide and strong bridge between our work and the great young people of Savannah who consider sustainability an important issue. Berry’s world view link pulls us up under a big good umbrella.
January 11th, 2010
Stories change the world. We love telling stories here at Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy. In preparing to tell the Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community story for the January 5th event at the Sentient Bean, I started to think about the difference in storymaking and storytelling.
Storymaking is a mixture of moments of clarity surrounded by times of confusion and uncertainty. Citizen advocacy stories, stories that show what happens when people choose to look for ways to become important in one another’s lives, feels more like “stumbling forward together” than “marching down a clear and wide road.” There is a lot of flailing and failing mixed in with some good news.
Storytelling is different. In storytelling, a storyteller has to find the path and bring the listener down the path. The storyteller’s task is to frame and focus a big complicated story in a way that it can be heard, understood and taken to heart by the listener or reader.
A well-told story can be instructional and inspirational. It can also be a little daunting and lead to an “I couldn’t do that!” sort of reaction.
So as you listen to citizen advocacy stories, please don’t think that the storymaking felt the way the story-telling feels.
Storymakers feel more like people stumbling forward together for many years…
Storymakers are people who are just trying, as advocate Chuck Jones says, “to do the next right thing.”
