“This is the best looking group of people I have ever seen.”
These were the words of Master of Ceremonies Wade Herring at the Annual Meeting and Covered Dish Supper as he looked out over the more than 300 people gathered to celebrate at the Savannah Station last Thursday night.
Wade is an attorney, partner and part of the management team with the largest law firm in Savannah. He chairs the Board of Directors at Savannah County Day School. He is used to being around “powerful people,” the “right people” as you hear said over and over and over in Savannah.
More than 20 years ago, Wade met a powerful person. His name was Earl Brooker and when the two men met, Mr. Brooker was tied down in a chair at Georgia Regional Hospital. Being a citizen advocate for Mr. Brooker turned out to be a powerful and sobering experience. Eventually the State of Georgia had its way, and sent Mr. Brooker deeper into its institutional system, and disconnected Mr. Brooker from his family forever, rather arranging for he and his family get useful help. This is something Wade reflects on to this day.
The power that Wade saw in the room on Thursday night is the power of people from many walks of life walking together. It’s the power of seeing people who wheel instead of walk being part of the common journey. It’s the power that comes when the word TOGETHER becomes skin and bones real in front of your very eyes.
It’s the power of realizing that as long as we have this notion about only having the “right people” in the room – that we will never get it right.
Let’s keep working to get the TOGETHER part right.
This the new way to be TOGETHER in Savannah.
Long time citizen advocate Linda Wittish wrote this several years ago. It continues to be provocative. See what you think. Your comments are welcome …
Every person matters. If we believe that, we have a responsibility – an obligation – to protect and encourage one another.
Every person has talents and gifts and contributions to make to other people and to our community. There are strong forces at work in our society that undermine that assumption. People can be trapped in roles that can overshadow their role as a citizen of our community. Sometimes a person is seen only as a problem or as a project. Individuality, the essence of the person, becomes hidden.
The world we live in chooses to segregate people viewed as different or less valuable away from the ordinary activities and opportunities that are part of being a citizen in our community. This must be questioned and challenged. Entering into a personal relationship and finding ways to help someone participate in community life can do this.
Being separated from community sets up barriers and devalues people’s perceived worth. This leads to more rejection and negative stereotypes being reinforced. This devaluation is dangerous and puts people in harm’s way and at greater risk of being hurt. Once a person is seen as part of a devalued group of people, a different set of rules begin to apply.
Coming into a reciprocal relationship with a person who has been devalued opens up powerful opportunities for people to learn. That learning process teaches us that a lot of what we thought or grew up believing isn’t true. It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion, the more you peel back the closer you get to the truth.
We are inviting people into relationships where there will be great joy and struggle. This is a rich and real journey. This is the journey we all face in our lives. We are asking people to go on this journey together.
We assume that people will choose to go on this journey and make a commitment to the well-being of another person. The relationship will be built on finding common interests and finding ways to create more commonality between one another.
Personal commitment is the most powerful form of action over time. This forms the foundation for action and encourages people to be bigger and better citizens.
There are many hidden and unexpected teachers among us. We hear about them from people we call advocates. This is the power of our idea.
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.
Great article by Rexanna Lester about our 2007 intern Chloe Stuber, who grew up with citizen advocacy click here to read
