Governing Like an Ecosystem
Expanding our understanding of politics and governance
Food Connection’s Marisha MacMorran describes the first few days after Helene as a time when they were scrambling to do everything they could to feed people while expecting experts from FEMA and the Red Cross to show up soon to take over operations.
That never happened. In fact, it was the other way around. FEMA reached out to them to learn what was needed where. It was the local organizations that had the relationships required to figure out where the needs were and later to coordinate the work of local and national organizations so as to avoid duplicated effort.1
The East End neighborhood didn’t wait for anyone to tell them what to do. They used the neighborhood association structures they already had in place to quickly swing into action. Within days they had flush brigades working streets on a schedule, organized food and supply distributions, and even published and distributed a daily newsletter with the latest updates and helpful information.2
There were hundreds of such stories after the hurricane. But large-scale disasters aren’t the only times people organize to deal with community challenges.
Janet Jones froze to death on the streets of Asheville on the first cold night of October 2016, one more victim of homelessness. In a 2018 conversation I had with Amy Cantrell, co-director of Beloved Asheville, I learned what happened after.3 The community had come together to mourn and also to express their anger. As Amy put it, “there was plenty of blame to go around.”
But when it came to talk of action, they realized that they had a unique contribution to make toward a solution. The people they were talking about were, in fact, their own community; they knew better than anyone who was on the street and what they might need. They ended up forming the homeless/formerly homeless street medic team to do regular street outreach, providing basic first aid and sharing health and wellness supplies and education.
A couple years later I happened to participate in a planning process with a roomful of public health and medical professionals facilitated by the Culture of Results team at the NC Center for Health and Wellness. One of the activities that evening was to list everything in our community that was already working to improve public health. The Beloved street medic team was resoundingly identified as one of the most significant ones. Since then this kind of peer-support community health model has become a nationally recognized best practice.
The Emma neighborhood straddling the Asheville municipal border offers one more example.
A distinctive characteristic of the Emma community is the high percentage of people who live in mobile homes. Much of the discussion about affordable housing bypasses the needs of these folks. Mobile homes are a way for people to access affordable housing, but they also leave them in an unstable situation: they own their homes but not the land they stand on. They face displacement, but with different dynamics than in other neighborhoods.
In early 2018 a grassroots group, Poder Emma, organized to come to grips with the issue. With training and support from Popular Education Consultants, a liberatory education organization grounded in the work of Paulo Freire, they carried out a community-led research project to better understand community members’ “shared realities, worries and ideas” around gentrification and displacement, then worked with the community to develop strategies to address them.4
Since that time, representatives of Poder Emma have not only been working to build up their own community, they have taken on significant roles in affordable housing and anti-displacement planning conversations in Buncombe County. The organization also played a critical role in distributing resources in the aftermath of the hurricane.
These stories are heartwarming and inspiring, of course. But they are much more than that. They teach us something vitally important about governing.
I wrote last time about the ways we learn as an ecosystem, as a community. But the point of knowing and learning is to be able to act: to decide what we will do, muster resources for it, then carry it out.
In other words, the point of knowledge and learning in a community is to support its politics and governing. Politics is how we collectively decide what to do and how to resource it. Governing is the way we coordinate that process and execute its decisions, as well as how we hold each other accountable throughout.
We tend to think of politics and governing as something done by politicians and government bureaucrats, by some vague “them” apart from us and our neighbors.
But the point of the stories above is that politics and governing happen all around us, often by us and by our neighbors. They teach us that we have far more power and scope for action than we tend to think. Certainly we can individually participate through voting and personal activism, but we can achieve even greater impact through organized efforts, everything from grassroots campaigns and organizations to clubs, business associations, nonprofits, media, and more. Even politicians and government bureaucrats have their part to play.
In other words, governing is a function of an ecosystem, not just of a handful of institutional players and people in special roles.
After the 2024 election I wrote about a Harvard Kennedy School white paper on resisting autocracy in the United States. One of the strategies it recommended was to “build community power through alternative institutions,” like “economic cooperatives, fresh food and public health provision, mutual aid, community safety, strike funds, and other forms of cooperation.”
The stated goal was resistance to the authoritarian state. But resilience science teaches us that it is also just a way to restore the health of a threatened ecosystem by building redundant systems and connections and increasing diversity.
The ways that we organize as communities has been a theme running through almost everything I’ve written since that November article. It is how we realize Gandhi’s “constructive program” and King’s “radical revolution of values,” a third way to respond to our present democratic crisis and to begin building a society in which everyone gets to thrive.
What our exploration of ecological resilience and network health over the last couple months shows us is that it not only builds on decades of organizing experience all over the world, it also happens to be grounded in a systematic understanding of what makes for a healthy, resilient community and environment.
Links & Thoughts
Interview with Amy Cantrell. My friend Dave Rayburn just posted an interview with Amy Cantrell on his podcast, Practicing Gospel, which features conversations of interest to the Christian Left. You’ll hear about Amy’s journey and also about several more recent examples of the ways Beloved Asheville has participated in governance in our community.
Why building inspiring alternatives is necessary to counter authoritarianism. Constructive efforts like those documented above are vital to helping us all understand what we can say yes to while saying no to the threat of authoritarianism. This article offers a global sampling to help us imagine shifting away from tweaking broken systems toward creating new, more just ones.
The Future of Innovation is Collective. An article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review discussing why only a collective approach to social innovation can address the simultaneous economic, technological, geopolitical, environmental, and social changes we face.
Anti-Domination and Administration. K. Sabeel Rahman argues for a framework that centers anti-domination for thinking about the role and functioning of the administrative state (i.e., most of government). Part of what I find interesting is the explicit embrace of the idea that government is not and should not be neutral, but should positively promote particular values. Recall that healthy networks require “mutually beneficial relationships and common-cause values”.
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.
Food Connection has also been one of the organizations that has helped me see how impact plays out in ecosystems, as I discussed here last August. My thanks to them for the work they do and for the time they’ve generously given to our conversations.
A few weeks after the storm I was walking through the East End neighborhood and saw a group sorting supplies by a church. I approached them to chat about their efforts since the Bridging the Gaps effort I was involved with had been one of their suppliers early on. One of them walked me down to her house to get me a copy of the newsletter and excitedly told me all about how they’d organized after the storm.
I think I was interviewing Amy for an internal City of Asheville newsletter I wrote, but I quickly threw away my questions and just enjoyed the conversation. See the Links & Thoughts section for a fascinating recent podcast conversation with Amy.
Poder Emma has created a one-pager summarizing the process. There is also a full report available on Poder Emma’s resources page - it is worth taking the time to read about both the process and the results.