Democracy, Homelessness, & Moving From Theory to Practice
Special edition with three things to check out
Impatient to begin grappling with the next thing I don’t yet understand, I forgot to include a couple important links in last week’s newsletter. Note that the first one is time sensitive.
The Civic Forum Webinar Series
I am really excited about a webinar this Thursday on Race, Black History, and the MAGA Movement by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a scholar, author, and activist focused on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019. Sign up at the first link above.
This is the second of The Civic Forum weekly webinar featuring talks on democracy, authoritarianism, and activism by leading scholars and practitioners and hosted by Rory Truex, Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Professor Truex kicked off the series last week with a talk about how and why democracies die. It includes some hopefulness about prospects in this country — I recommend watching it as well.
There will be at least 8 more sessions after this week with some pretty amazing speakers, including Erica Chenoweth, co-author of the Harvard Kennedy School white paper on resisting autocracy in the U.S. that I’ve referenced several times over the last few months.
Who Can Catch You When Things Fall Apart?
A talk by Marc Dones at the recent National Alliance to End Homelessness conference offers a fascinating application of resilience thinking.
Dones notes that “pathways into homelessness for people of color are often characterized by an absence of economic safety nets in their family and social networks. It’s not that Black communities lack supportive relationships … but rather that the economic capital those ties can generate is stretched thin across many people in need.”
The obvious conclusion is that we need to look beyond the individual in addressing social problems and invest in both them and their communities. As Dones powerfully expresses it, “A person experiencing homelessness is a symptom of a broader weakness in the network that surrounds them.” We must resource both the individual and the network in order to reduce the likelihood that that individual or another in the same network experiences a new episode of homelessness.
The further conclusion that Dones draws is that “[w]hen people come together, it’s not just their resources that pool, their advantages; it’s also their vulnerabilities,” making the entire network collectively vulnerable to negative outcomes.
I’m not entirely sold on the concept of “pooled vulnerability” and I dislike the article’s war framing, but there are several important ideas worth engaging here. I am grateful to Elliot Patterson, an MPH student at UNC Chapel Hill, for alerting me to it.
Translating Meanderings into Methods
As part of preparing a grant proposal last month, I needed to begin translating the ideas I’ve been writing about here into an argument for improved approaches to investing in change in communities and a glimpse into what a practical program might look like.
That resulted in a white paper: A Resilient Ecosystems Approach to Investing in Community Impact. It attempts to summarize some of the insights that have emerged from the last half-dozen or so articles here and then outlines opportunities to create resources and tools for organizations and communities to use to create a more resilient, equitable, and vibrant region.
The paper is very much a first iteration. I would welcome your thoughts on it, particularly if you are part of an organization that might be able to apply the ideas.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.