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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.

Mouth of the South and Hammering Hank…

February 15th, 2010 By Tom Kohler View Comments

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.

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.

Story-Making and Story-Telling…

January 11th, 2010 By Tom Kohler View Comments

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.”

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.