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More of… Less of…

August 18th, 2010 By Tom Kohler View Comments

This is a really simple way to think about focusing on and creating good change for a person whose label of disability has hidden their role as a contributing local citizen. Don’t confuse simple with easy. Be prepared to work hard toward real change.

     

  1. Spend some time thinking about what makes for “a good life” and make as long of a list as you can in 10 minutes. Don’t over think it. Use plain language. The word “friends” says more than “peer relationships.”
  2. Go back over the list and highlight a few points that you feel are the most important.
  3. Describe your life in each of these areas. Using friends as an example, spend some time thinking about your friendship life.
  4. Describe the life of the person you are an advocate on behalf of. What does your protégé’s friendship life look like?
  5. Do this process with each part of your “good life” list.
  6. Begin comparing what you notice about your life with what you notice about your protégé’s life. You might notice,“I have dozens and dozens of people listed. My protégé has 3 people.”
  7. Step back and simply say, “What would I want to see more of/ less of in my protégé’s life?” Make a list of 3 key ideas.
  8. Ask yourself, “What are my first steps to begin to create more ____ and less ____ in my protégé’s life.
  9. Do the same for yourself.
  10. Invite someone you both know and trust to meet with both of you once a month for a year. At this meeting ask, “What have we done to see more of what we want and less of want we don’t? What can we do next month to work in this direction?”
  11. Keep track of what you are doing. Who are you involving? What questions are you asking? What are you learning? Notice good things that you had not expected - surprising positives.
  12. Celebrate good change and honor real effort even if it does not create the change you had hoped for.
  13. Keep focusing on what you want to see more of/less of and try another way to get there.

Learning and Action for Inclusion…

July 21st, 2010 By Tom Kohler View Comments

I was pleased to attend and be on the faculty of the Toronto Summer Inclusion Institute this month. The Institute is sponsored by Inclusion Press, the publishers of Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community, a Savannah story that Susan Earl and I wrote several years ago. One hundred and fifty people from the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, England, Ireland and New Zealand converged for five days of deep learning.

 

The Institute uses an active learning model. You don’t sit down much, and when you do it’s to have conversations with another person or a small group of people. You spend a lot of time listening and talking with other people. You are guided to co-create ideas with other people. You get your head, heart and hands moving.

 

As always, I brought back more than I can share. Here are just few assorted take aways…

 

I attended a parent group meeting with about 10 families of adults with disabilities who live in Toronto. Families were told to assume that money and assistance from the government would be diminishing in both the short and long terms and to begin to think about forming support circles around themselves and their loved ones. I sat next to a couple who had moved to Toronto from Columbia, South America. He is a cancer surgeon and she is an international inclusion activist. Their son is in his early 20s, has Down Syndrome and has learned his new language - English- well enough to hold a job and to get around Toronto on street cars and subways. He also goes to English as Second Language classes at night at a local community college. Encouraging for sure.

 

A couple of people who have physical disabilities and who are active in self advocacy in Canada and New Zealand attended my session which featured stories of people here in Savannah who are involved in citizen advocacy relationships. Both stayed afterward to say that they appreciated the “balance and respect” they saw and heard between the people who knew each other. Especially encouraging from these particularly thoughtful folks.

 

Anne Mitchell from Indianapolis and I read the Waddie Welcome story twice in Toronto. Anne is organizing a Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community Worldwide Reading Project to coincide with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2011. We now have people in 5 countries and 3 continents working on building a “Worldwide Beloved Learning Community.” The goal is to have 5,000 readings of the Waddie Welcome story by small groups of people over kitchen, coffee, dinner, diner, pub and conference tables between September 1 and January 17, 2011. More details on this exciting project will follow soon.

 

Here are several books and tapes that came back with me. Please give me a call at 236-5798 if you are interested in borrowing any of these items:

 

Gentle Heart Fearless Mind – Discovering Confidence, Compassion and Well Being through the Practice of Mindfulness. DVD by Alan Sloan. Alan is a friend and ally. He has been practicing and teaching mindfulness for more than 40 years He will spend the month of March or April 2011 with us in Savannah. He helps people find ways to be more resilient. This is an important trait for anyone who is an advocate.

 

Power and Love- A theory and practice of Social Change. Book by Adam Kahane. This book helps us see the interplay between power and love in our own lives and in the lives of organizations and communities. “This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.” — Nelson Mandela

 

The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods. Book by John McKnight and Peter Block. John McKnight first came to Savannah 25 years ago. He met a man named Sam Benjamin who was at the center of an effort involving citizen advocate Clete Bergan who rallied 300 Savannahians in the building of a house for Sam and his family. McKnight never forget being out at Coffee Bluff hearing the story and seeing the effort. David Young, then Executive Director of the Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce, heard John speak at a Leadership Savannah meeting that was organized by Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy. He was spellbound and later held a living room meeting for McKnight to meet Savannah’s business and civic leaders. Peter Block heard me tell the Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community story in Cincinnati a few years ago. He just dropped by as a favor to the organizers of the event, but halfway into the story, he called his office, canceled his appointments for the rest of the day and stayed with us.

 

Person Centered Ways to Build Community: The PATH and MAPS Handbook. Workbook by John O’Brien, Jack Pearpoint and Lynda Kahn. This remarkable workbook offers ways to help people ask and answer this simple question “How can this person show up in community life as a valued friend and a contributing citizen?”  This question challenges the rational, form and nature of almost all human service efforts.

 

Let me know if you would like to borrow one or more of these resources. Or you can order your own copies from Inclusion Press at http://www.inclusion.com.

What We Do…

June 25th, 2010 By Tom Kohler View Comments
  • What we do is not flashy.
  • What we do is not “solving a community problem” unless you consider indifference to injustice in another person’s life a community problem.
  • What we do is based on possibility, not prescription.
  • What we do is as strong as people, and as weak as people.
  • What we do demands and deepens character.
  • What we do is both humble and audacious.
  • What we do can speak to people of good heart who have little else in common.
  • What we do is to do this as best we can, which is different than the best it can be done. We aspire, given our limitations as individual people, as a group of people and as an organization to do this the best it can be done.
  • What we do fans the flame of personalism rather than professionalism.
  • What we do is part of the very current and hip DIY movement.
  • What we do has roots in each of the major faith stories of the world.
  • What we do ties back to the underground railroad, the sheltering of Jews, to other movements and individual acts of courage that focus on saving individual people from harm at the hands of a power structure.

A powerful way to be together in Savannah…

May 18th, 2010 By Tom Kohler View Comments

“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.

From programmatic to poetic…

April 9th, 2010 By Tom Kohler View Comments

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.