Hanmin Liu and Jennifer Mei of Wildflowers Institute are on a mission to change the way we think about how communities regenerate. And it doesn't happen when well-intentioned outsiders offer up their money and expertise.
From years of careful observation, Hanmin and Jennifer believe that the only way to affect lasting change is to identify and then tap into a community’s “informal capital”— those assets, lying dormant or invisible, that have little or nothing to do with a community’s material wealth. These are the resources that, with skillful nurturing, can be deployed to support a community's vitality for the long-term. All those who care about the future of our communities must abandon the old practices that have proven not to work, and learn to perfect that nurturing art, say Hanmin and Jennifer.
In a just-released paper, “Sustaining Change in a Market Economy,” Hanmin asks nonprofits and governmental organizations to adopt new, “inside-out” strategies. The conventional outside-in approaches, he maintains, have never resulted in the changes we want to see because they fail to recognize that communities are living systems—each with their own unique social structures and relationships of trust, and cultural tradition. Take the time to understand a community’s own resources and assets and then find ways to strengthen them, he counsels nonprofits and governments, rather than assume the outside “experts” know best.
“Subject-area experts” and a community’s official hierarchy – it's elected leaders and paid heads of organizations—are certainly worth drawing on, Hanmin acknowledges. But he maintains, “It’s the street-level knowledge of what is going on in that place that is essential… a secondary web of relationships and power dynamics that is hard to detect from the outside.”
This challenge is that this secondary, informal web of capital and leadership is often hiding in plain site. “Unlike officially identified leaders who are the apparent spokespeople—those who gain attention by their titles, their prominence, or their aura—informal leaders are modest and humble in demeanor,” Hanmin says. But the discerning eye will spot them—they are the ones to whom people are naturally drawn at community meetings because of their quiet but effective organizing skills and their willingness to work collectively with others without the attachment of ego.
Informal leaders do not receive financial compensation for their work or seek attention for it. Instead they operate out of love for their community and a natural desire to sustain it.
Observing and documenting how these individuals and groups influence their community has become "the guiding light" of Wildflowers Institute. “Instead of entering a neighborhood with a mission, a direction, and a plan, we enter to observe and learn from local residents and to flow with the energy.” [See this moving New York Times feature about how Wildflowers Institute worked in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.]
“The challenge, for all of us, is to see the informal capital—to see what is actually working—and support it as the people in communities strive toward confronting their challenges and achieving their dream,” says Hanmin.
Our problem today, he says, is that we really don’t how to do this. The time to learn is now.
—Susan Arterian Chang
From years of careful observation, Hanmin and Jennifer believe that the only way to affect lasting change is to identify and then tap into a community’s “informal capital”— those assets, lying dormant or invisible, that have little or nothing to do with a community’s material wealth. These are the resources that, with skillful nurturing, can be deployed to support a community's vitality for the long-term. All those who care about the future of our communities must abandon the old practices that have proven not to work, and learn to perfect that nurturing art, say Hanmin and Jennifer.
In a just-released paper, “Sustaining Change in a Market Economy,” Hanmin asks nonprofits and governmental organizations to adopt new, “inside-out” strategies. The conventional outside-in approaches, he maintains, have never resulted in the changes we want to see because they fail to recognize that communities are living systems—each with their own unique social structures and relationships of trust, and cultural tradition. Take the time to understand a community’s own resources and assets and then find ways to strengthen them, he counsels nonprofits and governments, rather than assume the outside “experts” know best.
“Subject-area experts” and a community’s official hierarchy – it's elected leaders and paid heads of organizations—are certainly worth drawing on, Hanmin acknowledges. But he maintains, “It’s the street-level knowledge of what is going on in that place that is essential… a secondary web of relationships and power dynamics that is hard to detect from the outside.”
This challenge is that this secondary, informal web of capital and leadership is often hiding in plain site. “Unlike officially identified leaders who are the apparent spokespeople—those who gain attention by their titles, their prominence, or their aura—informal leaders are modest and humble in demeanor,” Hanmin says. But the discerning eye will spot them—they are the ones to whom people are naturally drawn at community meetings because of their quiet but effective organizing skills and their willingness to work collectively with others without the attachment of ego.
Informal leaders do not receive financial compensation for their work or seek attention for it. Instead they operate out of love for their community and a natural desire to sustain it.
Observing and documenting how these individuals and groups influence their community has become "the guiding light" of Wildflowers Institute. “Instead of entering a neighborhood with a mission, a direction, and a plan, we enter to observe and learn from local residents and to flow with the energy.” [See this moving New York Times feature about how Wildflowers Institute worked in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.]
“The challenge, for all of us, is to see the informal capital—to see what is actually working—and support it as the people in communities strive toward confronting their challenges and achieving their dream,” says Hanmin.
Our problem today, he says, is that we really don’t how to do this. The time to learn is now.
—Susan Arterian Chang
RSS Feed