Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy

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A Culture of Caring…

March 9th, 2010 By Tom Kohler View Comments

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.

Pastors and Possibilities…

February 8th, 2010 By Tom Kohler View Comments

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.

Would you be willing to knock at the door???

December 17th, 2009 By Tom Kohler View Comments

“Men and women have shaved heads and are lying on the floor. It’s just like the pictures you see of the institutions in the 1950s.”

 

Ashley and I spent a Thursday and Friday in Athens with citizen advocacy coordinators from around Georgia. We all get together four or five times a year for what we call “Think and Drink.” Both are useful.

 

One citizen advocacy coordinator talked about being blocked from recruiting an advocate for a woman who is living in a personal care. This is done through the perverse use of confidentially regulations, mixed with intimidation of the people who live there. She said, “Men and women have shaved heads and are lying on the floor. It’s just like the pictures you see of the institutions in the 1950s.”

 

We talked about ways for her to get a citizen advocate inside the personal care home or the day program run by the same organization. She had already tried each suggestion. We circled back to our core assumptions, and looked for ideas there.

 

We have one tool, one thing we can offer a person with a disability who is being abused, neglected or deprived of opportunity in our community. We can offer an interested citizen who voluntarily takes up the person’s cause as an advocate.

 

Could she recruit a citizen advocate and ask them simply, “Go knock at the door and ask for entrance?”

 

If the citizen was denied entrance as she was denied, the citizen advocate could decide what to do next:

  • The citizen advocate might go back the next day and ask for entrance again.
  • The citizen advocate might send a letter asking to see the regulations that bar them from entrance.
  • The citizen advocate might contact the appropriate oversight agency.
  • The citizen advocate might contact the appropriate State Department that monitors the oversight agency.
  • The citizen advocate might contact their State Representative or Senator and ask them to inquire about policy and oversight.
  • The citizen advocate might discover that the personal care home company has good political connections and that nothing is going to be done through any official channels.
  • The citizen advocate might stand outside the house all day with a “Free These People” protest sign.
  • The citizen advocate might take another person with another protest sign. And then another. And then another.
  • The citizen advocate might hope the personal care home operators call the police.
  • The citizen advocate might ask the police to go inside the house and see the men and women with shaved heads lying on the floor.
  • The citizen advocate might hope that one of the police officers has a son or a daughter or brother or sister with a disability and would be outraged by what’s going on.
  • The citizen advocate might go back again with the “Free These People” sign and know that bearing witness and calling attention to injustice is part and parcel of being a Southerner of conscious.

 

The citizen advocacy coordinators who work Atlanta, Augusta, Athens, Gainesville, Milledgeville, Macon and Savannah have one tool - we invite citizens to take up the cause of one person whose life is being diminished because of prejudice toward disability.

 

We invite people to knock at the door.

Public Relations and Reality…

October 28th, 2009 By Tom Kohler View Comments

I was visiting a website the other day and began thinking about the difference between public relations and reality.

 

Public relations is the business of managing information to create a set of ideas in the minds of other people. It can be done in many ways. Television, YouTube, newspapers, newsletters, blogs, Facebook and Twitter are all media-based public relations tools. Arranging for “the right person to talk to the right person” is public relations. Arranging for “the right people to be in the room” is a form of public relations.

 

Public relations is the business of finding ways to have other people see things as you think they should. Public relations is creating an intentional image of perceived reality by people who benefit when a person thinks a certain way.

 

Reality is another matter. Finding out what is real comes from:

  • Being willing to be where people are and looking and listening,
  • Being willing to talk with and learn from people who don’t see things the same way you do,
  • Finding ways to get beyond the aura of public relations that surround an organization or a person or an idea.

 

A friend of ours named John McKnight drew a little picture on a big piece of chart paper for us about 25 years ago. The picture starts with a large triangle. At the top of the triangle he put the words “Board of Directors and CEO” and then he drew a series of little boxes connected by dotted and solid lines and wrote “ Levels of Bureaucratic Management.” Down at the very inside bottom of the triangle he drew a picture of several people and wrote “Hands-On Staff” and then he drew pictures of lots and lots of people under the triangle and he wrote “Clients/Consumers/Customers.”

 

John said, “The purpose of middle of the triangle is to manipulate information as it goes up the triangle. The higher up information goes, the harder it is to know if it’s true. Every time you arrange, through citizen advocacy, to have someone with social power come into real relationship with someone who is pushed to the bottom of the social structure, you are challenging the perceived reality that is created by bureaucratic management and public relations.”

 

If you are a citizen advocate, you know what I am talking about here. I welcome your thoughts.

 

It might be interesting to google John McKnight from Northwestern University and begin to see some of the other ideas John has offered over the past 40 years.

Light of the Lamp

October 8th, 2009 By Tom Kohler View Comments

The light of the lamp is going out in all directions dispelling the darkness, and yet it is has no knowledge of what it is doing. A magnet does not act from volition; yet it continually draws objects unto itself. These are but illustrations of how we are continually exerting an influence upon those about us even though we may be altogether unconscious of it.
—Elder William Crouse, 1918

 

Al Chassereau, a citizen advocate for more than 20 years, sent this quote our way after our Annual Covered Dish Supper and Meeting. It captures one of the most subtle yet powerful aspects of citizen advocacy - the power of positive role models within a culture and a community. Some of the learning from these role models is conscious; some is more at the level of the unconscious. Both are powerful.

 

When we started our work 31 years ago, we hoped that local people would become citizen advocates for people whose lives were being diminished because of prejudice toward disability. We hoped that local citizens could use their influence to change what was and was not happening in another person’s life. We have hundreds and hundreds of stories about this.

 

As we listened to advocates talk about their involvement over the years, we realized that advocates were being deeply influenced by the person they had gotten to know. The person that we call the protégé had in fact become an unexpected teacher. This was a form of influence we had not expected.

 

There is also another kind of influence that we see in Technicolor at our Annual Covered Dish Supper. That is the influence that advocates and protégés and their personal stories have on other people.

     

  • When 400 people look around the room and see people from very different walks of life together in solidarity, they notice.
  • When 400 people see and hear a young woman talk about deciding to connect with a 4 year-old boy and help him have a good future, they notice.
  • When 400 people see and hear two men talk about knowing and helping one another for more than 20, years they notice.
  • When 400 people hear a man stand up and talk about how his life has been changed because of meeting a man that other people run away from, they notice.
  • When 400 people hear about a man whose life was saved because another man said, “Yes, I will,” instead of ,“Oh, I am too busy,” they notice.

 

We have known that an advocate and a protégé influence one another and one another’s lives and circumstances in many ways. We are beginning to get a glimmer of how hundreds of people being more present and responsible in one another’s lives can influence the way people who live in Savannah think about their role in the lives of other people.

 

We learn from each other. Four hundred people learned some useful and life-giving lessons from their fellow citizens at the Covered Dish Supper. Those 400 people spread the word to their friends. Year after year, we tell stories of people being more present and responsible in one another’s lives. Thousands of people see and hear the stories. Gradually our picture of what people can come to mean to one another becomes THE picture of what people can come to mean to one another in our community.

 

When the accepted expectation of how we treat one another begins to change, we call that social change. It’s our 50 year vision. To create a change in what people mean to one another in Savannah - less focus on creating and highlighting differences and more focus on dedication to each other through heartfelt personal relationships.

 

These are but illustrations of how we are continually exerting an influence upon those about us even though we may be altogether unconscious of it.

 

Hope to see you at next year’s meeting.