Do miracles only happen in Finland?
Like most people working in the area of Education, I find myself constantly reminded of the shining beacon of success that is the Finnish education model. So I was eager to attend a recent conference by the Finnish Institute and the Embassy of Finland which claimed to explain “the Finish Miracle”.
An even mix of Finnish and English educationalists presented their views on the key features of the Finnish system compared to the English, exploring the measures that have led to success and why. It was an extremely enlightening day that I won’t attempt to summarise in full. The key observation that I took is that when searching for the differences between the Finnish system and our own, we need to look beyond specific measures to an underlying cultural ethos towards education.
Whilst it has been widely noted that the Finns have seen positive results from measures such as children starting school at age seven and no national inspection of schools or league tables, the event’s first speaker, Professor Auli Toom from the University of Helsinki, attributed Finland’s success to their educational approach. She highlighted the fact that Finnish culture regards education as a source of hope for a better society and life. This requires the same educational opportunities for every child, hence a completely comprehensive system. At the forefront of this are excellent quality teachers, who are trained to at least Masters Level, with only ten per cent of those that apply being accepted onto the teacher training program. Although teachers are not paid especially highly, prestige and status attracts the best candidates into the profession, who are then given the freedom and trust they deserve.
Next Professor Andrew Pollard, from the Institute of Education, stood up to give a markedly different story from the English perspective. Whilst he acknowledged that there are good and even excellent aspects of our education system, he queried why it is that we settle for one that is, overall, mediocre. Like Professor Toom, his answer referred to an entrenched cultural approach to teaching and learning, one that he regarded as characterised by a history of reform followed by compromise. He cited instances, including the English Civil War, the 1870 Education Act and the 1944 Education Act, as key milestones in our history where we fought for equality. However, our gains were quickly followed by some form of retreat. According to Professor Pollard, this lack of commitment to equality has resulted in an inconsistent education system, where some schools improve at the expense of others that flounder. It remains to be seen whether the National Curriculum Review will be another instance to add to his list, as it allows more freedom for teachers and schools to define the curriculum on the one hand, but places greater emphasis on core knowledge on the other.
Although Professor Pollard’s view is slightly pessimistic I do think we can learn a lot from Finland in terms of equality in education. What lies at the heart of their ethos is an understanding that schooling provides an opportunity for all children to gain not just knowledge but ways of thinking and the broader skills to contribute to an effective and inclusive society. Perhaps we are stuck in the past, with our traditional concepts of achievement that only allow a minority to succeed. But instead of looking back we need to join the Finns in looking forward and ensure that we prepare every child for life in an ever changing world and trust the people who know best, teachers, to get them there.
Why Stigma Has Had Its Day
In all honesty, I had never heard of The Society for Curious Thought until last week. It says it exists to foster curiosity and intellectual discovery in pursuit of a better future, which sounds good to me. On closer inspection, it turns out to host an eclectic and fascinating collection of articles and contributions covering arts, science, politics, personal experience, the environment and fiction.
As a result of my call-out last week to Fellows and others about mental health and employment, I was contacted by the Society’s Director, Simon Marriott FRSA, and asked to submit an article further exploring the issues I had written about. I was very pleased to be asked, and my piece, Why Stigma Has Had Its Day has just been published.
My article attempts to summarise an issue adjacent to those I raised last week in my two blog posts about mental health and employment – the problems associated with using ‘stigma’ as a conceptual framework for talking about the social exclusion of people with experience of mental illness.
Here’s a taster:
Discrimination and social exclusion are very real aspects of living with the experience of mental illness and the consequences can be grave: loss of opportunity in education, employment, housing and civic participation. Thirteen years ago, the disability rights campaigner, Liz Sayce did her best to change the way we deal with discrimination against people with experience of mental illness. She wrote an important article explaining why using the notion of ‘stigma’ to describe what is actually discrimination is in itself dangerously marginalising. Disappointingly, no one took very much notice, and these days, ‘stigma’ is still the primary conceptual apparatus used to describe what happens when people who have experienced mental illness are unfairly treated.
Sayce’s key point was that the notion of stigma is problematic because it locates the problem within the person with the mental illness. This has the effect of individualising what is really a social problem. It amounts to a kind of victim blaming. Stigma (literally, mark of shame) carries with it the implication of there being something inherently discreditable about the person being stigmatised. Sayce argues that the ‘mark of shame’ should not be attached to the person with the mental health problem, but rather with the person who is behaving unjustly towards them.
It might be tempting to cast aside such issues as being merely semantic trifles. You might think that anti-stigma campaigners are fighting a good fight, and we all know what we mean when we talk about the stigma of mental illness. In fact, the reasons why discrimination against people with mental health problems continues, may well be partly down to the persistence of a damaging conceptual framework. Conceptual models carry enormous power. The implicit assumptions about where responsibility lies, or whose is the problem, determine to a large degree how we approach the issue as a society.
Networking by numbers
RSA Connected Communities has started a new project with Nathan of the MIT Center for Civic Media to create a new, cost-effective way to measure the social impact of public services and civic interventions and to allow people to see their own personal networks. We’re designing a mobile and tablet app for recording real-life social networks: your friends, families and contacts. The open source software we build will also be useful to journalists, ethnographers and anyone trying to make sense of rapidly changing social phenomena. Here I illustrate how we are currently recording this data, and why I think it is important that we change the way that we do it.
What is data?
Data is a rushed researcher putting together a survey to capture the full extent of a human life on paper. The scales are based on someone else’s testing. The newly combined scales are then re-tested on new people. Any newly invented questions can change as a result of piloting; the old questions – based on someone else’s testing – must remain constant. These newly tested combined scales – with the odd bit of cut and paste – are then recalibrated and re-launched.
A community researcher goes door to door. “Hello! My name is… “ Door shuts. “Hi! I’m… Some version of a person’s social network and social world is transferred from local person, to community researcher’s ear, to RSA paper survey. Interesting anecdotes and unusual answers are scribbled in the margins, for few paper-based-surveys have the space to fully annotate human complexity.
Back at the RSA HQ a data entry scribe enters these reams upon reams of human data. Comment boxes are full of the annotated scribbles, although some anecdotes are lost to time, bad weather and even worse handwriting. Data entry becomes data book; data book becomes social network; social network might become a Guardian Society supplement.
And so what? Your social network, your human network, is a map of you. And maps need to be used in the now, not in a year’s time when the roads have changed and bridges have been broken. The social app I am working on with Nathan from the MIT Center for Civic Media might allow us to do just that. It will be a means of researching somebody’s human networks and then playing it back to them, in real time.
Here in the RSA Connected Communities team – when not dealing with 4000 peoples’ worth of social networks and wellbeing, community health networks and the innovation networks of various councils – we are trying to help social network analysis become a real life tool. For this to happen it needs to make sense to people.
We already know that people with more diverse networks are healthier and happier. Our human networks help us to find work, with those with more diverse networks tending to have higher status and better paid jobs. We have found that allowing people to see their own networks and understand them allows them to feel they can change them. Poor networks are a real form of poverty: lack of mainstream social capital slows you down and closes off options.
Through visualisation work to make network outputs more intelligible and the creation of network toolkits that hopefully make the subject more intuitive to people, we are trying to open up social network knowledge so it can be part of every individual’s personal toolkit. I really hope that the tool we are working on with Nathan will be a big part of this.
It will allow researcher and researched to really co-produce.You can paint me your social picture and I can ask “Does this look right, does this look like you?” before I join up the numbers. It will make the data better and it will do what the data protection act tried but failed to do: it will make you own your own data, because you can see, feel and change it.
This might become a way for people to check in on their own social networks every once in a while, or a tool that might measure your isolation and suggest a local reading group or walking club. I can imagine GPs using this kind of tool to help them socially prescribe local activities. Any organisation which acts with social networks – such as the NGO Tostan- could use this as a low-cost way of measuring the impact of their interventions.
Organisations which rely on interviewing broad sections of people to understand new social phenomena – such as Human Rights Watch or any news organisation worth its salt – could use the tool as a prompt in interviews, a means of recording data and a way on ensuring that they have actually managed to ask a diverse group of people and not just people who float in similar circles.
So over to you. These social networks are your human networks. And these human networks delimit that which is possible in your life. What does this tool need to do, if it is to be of real use?
The medical model of mental illness: we’re not convinced
A great systematic review has been published in this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry. It has the slightly less than tabloid-friendly title Biogenetic Explanations and Public Acceptance of Mental Illness: Systematic Review of Population Studies, but behind the dense title is a really useful and important piece of work.
Matthias Angermeyer and his colleagues examined 33 studies which looked at the public’s beliefs about the causes of mental illness, in order to find out whether there is a relationship between those beliefs and the degree of tolerance people show towards people with experience of mental illness. This is important, not least because the shape of anti-stigma education and campaigning is determined by the causal model on which it is based.
Historically, the dominant model for public anti-stigma campaigning has been built on the foundations of the biogenetic model of mental illness, in which it is assumed that mental illness comes about primarily as a result of biochemical or genetic deviations.
Anti-stigma efforts have led to simple messages being devised, which are designed to get people to leave their prejudices behind. Under the biogenetic model, the types of messages you end up with are ‘mental illness is an illness just like any other,’ and ‘mental illness is treated with medication’.
Angermeyer’s systematic review concludes that biogenetic explanations for mental illness are correlated with less tolerance of people with mental illness amongst the general public, and therefore, basing anti-stigma work on biogenetically based causal models is an inappropriate means of countering stigma.
This is not at all surprising to me, and you if stop and think about it, it’s no wonder that the public are unconvinced by messages like ‘mental illness is just like any other illness’. The reality is that mental illness(es) are not very much like physical illness(es). We need only to think about the way mental and physical illnesses are diagnosed to realise this.
In general medicine, diagnosis typically proceeds through the identification of signs which indicate the presence of disease. In the case of diabetes, for example, it is possible to determine whether the patient has the condition by measuring their blood glucose level. The patient may have been experiencing symptoms such as feeling thirsty and tired. These symptoms, although they do indicate the possible presence of the illness are not sufficient for a diagnosis of diabetes – the physician relies upon the results of a blood test (a sign) to make a confident diagnosis.
Psychiatric diagnosis does not work like this. Although it is assumed that there is a biological dimension to mental illness, there are no definitive physical indicators of mental illnesses which categorically and objectively confirm the presence or absence of a mental disorder. It isn’t possible to determine, say through measuring their serotonin level, whether a person is suffering from depression; nor is it possible to diagnose psychosis through carrying out a blood test or x-ray. Instead, psychiatric diagnoses are made by way of observation or reporting of ‘symptoms,’ which are nearly always subjective judgements about what people say and do.
The truth is that, whilst it seems there may be some biological and genetic factors in mental illness, the science is not sufficiently advanced to be able to be clear about what they are and how they act. Not only that, but, to a much greater extent than with physical illness, the social and political dimensions in the construction of mental illness are controversial.
Therefore, oversimplified, biogenetically based anti-stigma initiatives are destined to fail because they don’t acknowledge or attend to the true complexity of mental illness. They do little to engage with people’s genuine uncertainty about why mental illnesses come about, and their legitimate fears about the sometimes worrying ways in which mental illnesses affect people’s behaviour.
One of the reasons why anti-stigma work has so far tended to insist on keeping biogenetic explanations at its heart may be to do with psychiatry’s need to assert its scientific credentials in line with other medical specialisms. I particularly applaud Matthias Angermeyer and his colleagues for drawing attention to this possibility in their concluding remarks. In asking whether the insistence on neuroscientific emphases in public education about mental illness is really in the interests of patients, they show a refreshing humility, which should be welcomed by psychiatrists, scientists, and patients.
Hats off for Whitley Academy!
Britain’s biggest name in hat design, Milliner Stephen Jones RDI, spent a second day a Whitley Academy last Thursday, delivering an inspirational talk and workshop to a group of sixth form art & design students. Stephen – who has designed hats for the likes of Princess Diana, Beyonce Knowles and Gwen Stefani – is one of the celebrated RSA ‘Royal Designers for Industry’ (RDI). He has been committing his time to working with the Whitley Academy students as part of the RDI ‘75 Days’ initiative, where RDIs collectively share 75 days of their expertise with the RSA.
The brief Stephen Jones set for students was to design a hat that represented each student’s character and interests. This was an exercise in building self-confidence and self-esteem as well as developing design skills, and it was a huge success. A competitive edge has now been set as Stephen returns to Whitley Academy on 30th November to help them complete their work, and he will judge the finished designs at a catwalk event to be held in the school hall.
A brilliant example of how designers can contribute inspiration and quality to design education, and also of the enrichment that partnership in our RSA Family of Academies can offer.
A citizen of the world
Working on a programme called Citizen Power is, I have to admit, a bit of a challenge coming from a human rights background. Who is this citizen whose power we’re so interested in?
For all that Socrates may proclaim himself a citizen of the world, citizenship is, by its very nature, exclusive. The citizens of a community must satisfy some set of requirements in order to enjoy membership in that community. While these requirements may have changed drastically from the fall of the polis to the rise of the nation state, they serve a similar purpose: to draw a line between those who belong and those who do not. The citizen is inevitably defined in opposition to the non-citizen – the culturally, ethnically, linguistically or politically different ‘other’ who lies on or outside the boundaries of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation state.
This is so for several (interrelated) reasons. First, in the modern welfare state, citizenship confers various social and welfare rights on citizens. In order to ensure that the state remains economically viable, it seems wise to limit these rights to those who, in turn, do their bit by paying taxes, contributing to the labour market, and so on.
Second, the principles of democratic legitimacy require that that rights of political participation are extended to all those who are affected by the political decision-making process. By exercising their right to vote or stand for office, citizens grant politicians a mandate to create or amend public policy on their behalf. Again, it makes sense to limit these rights to the legitimate members of a political community – we can’t have every tourist and their dog turning up on polling day.
And third, citizenship – particularly in its civic republican form – is a reciprocal agreement that demands active participation from its members. Yes, citizens are entitled to certain rights – but, in return, they also have certain obligations to contribute to a common social good (by engaging in public deliberation, shaping public institutions, helping out elderly neighbours, etc). This is reflected in the idea of a “Human Rights Act Plus” (which looks at supplementing existing rights and liberties with citizens’ responsibilities), and documents like the NHS Constitution and the Department for Education’s Guidelines on parental responsibility, which set out both rights and corresponding obligations.
This is all very well in theory, but in practice it gets a bit messy. There are many groups that are affected by political decision-making but excluded from the sphere of citizenship, particularly where this is premised on active participation. This may be because they fail to meet the formal requirements of citizenship (including asylum seekers, refugees and migrants); they have forfeited their rights to political participation (including prisoners); or they lack the basic capacities required to participate (including those who are very elderly, severely mentally disabled, extremely poor, homeless, unable to speak English, or otherwise marginalised).
In Peterborough, where the Citizen Power programme is based, there are relatively high levels of poverty (in 2009, 18% of working age persons were claiming a key benefit, against the national average of 15%), homelessness (in 2008-2009, 2.41 households were recognised as homeless per 1,000 people, up from national average of 1.03) and ethnic diversity (8.99% of Peterborians were born outside the UK or Ireland, up from the national average of 8.32%) and, anecdotally, large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. Citizen Power aims to revitalise a sense of attachment to place in Peterborough by building connections between people and communities and encouraging active public participation. But, in doing so, how inclusive is it of those who lie at the margins of – or beyond – the framework of citizenship, and are arguably most vulnerable? And, perhaps more importantly, how inclusive should it be?
There are definitely steps in the direction of inclusiveness. The Recovery Capital project is working closely with injecting drug users and prolific and persistent offenders. Peterborough Curriculum draws on the resources offered by a culturally diverse local community to create a unique place-based curriculum. The Take Me To project took a diverse group of residents – including members of the local Polish and Muslim communities, elderly community members, and adults with learning disabilities from 49 Lincoln Road – on an exploration of place and belonging. And the Civic Health project will examine the capacities required for active participation – including, crucially, where these are most lacking in Peterborough – and provide tools for addressing these gaps in order to encourage as broad a sphere of participation as possible.
Citizen Power Peterborough seeks to resuscitate a shared sense of community identity premised on other-regarding behaviour. In doing so, how can we best look outwards towards those on the margins of citizenship who are most in need of empowerment?
Small worlds and lost diamonds
Filed under: Arts and Society, Education Matters, Social Economy
Fairness seems a recurrent theme of late. Today’s breaking news cries: “UK society divided and unfair, report claims.”
That ‘report claims’ gets me every time. UK society is unfair: we do not need social network analysis to tell us that who you know matters. UK society is divided: the world is only ‘small’ (all six billon, eight hundred million of us) because we inhabit very specific parts of it.
But my science only gets me so far: I can construct you a diagram that highlights divisions; others can produce research that suggests that inequality fosters both unhappiness and unsafe societies; academics can debate as to what the conflicting libertarian and egalitarian views of fairness are. Yet birds of a feather flock; we fear difference and help our kind; and if inequality and stigma become the very lay of the land, then it is hard to see them.
Our flocking and fearing are very human, but are they fair? Fair for me is that distribution of benefits and duties that reflects our conception of human beings. If we understand all human beings to be equal, then that distribution should reflect this. If a woman is worth half of a man, then so too is her testimony. Whilst this all very much ties into how I view human rights (a post for another day), and borrows from Rawls in a way both outmoded and possibly to his displeasure, this understanding of fair is very important for the good of society.
Leaving the various statistical squabbles to more accomplished statisticians and their point-scoring, this unfair distribution of opportunity harms not just the individual but, lest we forget this is in our liberal age, it harms the collective. Our collective talent is our collective wealth, but this is squandered to stigma and lack of vision. If it is most often those born at the top that rise to it, we must either believe that it is only these children that hold the seeds of future success, or we are victims of a collective insanity that allows raw diamonds to pass for pebbles, as we laboriously polish cubic zirconia.
In my recent dissertation, alongside positing an understanding of social capital as the indicator for whether the right to participation is fulfilled (another day!), I followed the development of five girls as they took part in a film making and human rights course. These girls found a voice, found themselves as agents of change , and will soon find themselves addressing panels of their fellow residents, and Universty of London MA students. In this project, as in others I have worked on, we see that little is needed to turn aspirations around. And it is our aspirations that drive us.
The UK has shown us that equal opportunities is not equality of opportunity. If social mobility can be understood as sets of escalators, with some automatically on the up, and others automatically being driven down, then it must be surely viewed as discriminatory to not focus efforts on halting the downward trends of the marginalised ‘escalators’, and to instead provide equal amounts of electricity and oil and wish them both well. The fact that in a liberal society any individual can aim for anything in theory, must not be used to obscure the fact that in a liberal capitalist economy individuals are constrained by their societal and economic circumstances in practice. Life isn’t fair, but less stigma and more tailored and deliberate help to those handed a raw deal might help us on our way. And here my science may help.
It’s NOT about ‘jobs’, stupid.
The RSA event advertised in our last post, Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty? was a rallying cry for Whitehall to get over their fixation with creating ‘jobs’ and start focussing on using technology to develop existing economic activity.
As Jerry Fishenden(Centre for Technology Policy Research) put it: “The state’s idea of what a ‘job’ is is constraining productivity” and Wingham Rowan(Silvers of Time Working) added that “local authorities are beaten up by Whitehall on job creation” (thereby constraining attempts to create more flexible labour markets).
The problem is not jobs as such, but untraded resources, especially time. The focus should be on how we better harness and develop existing economic activity and help people earn money, rather than how to create ‘jobs’.
So how can we help people earn money? Who are ‘they’, and what is stopping them? It seems they tend to work at the lower end of the economic spectrum, functioning in what Wingham Rowan called unfocussed markets, where the conditions for the demand and supply of labour are fuzzy and changeable, and buyers and sellers can’t find each other(the exact opposite of the more efficient targetted markets- the kind that traders operate in).
Think baby sitters, people wanting to borrow a bike, others wanting to borrow a tenner to pay back the next day etc. There is lots of such ad hoc economic activity.., things hired, time offered, money lent, and many can do work of this nature who can’t fit in to a job structure.
The solution lies in new technology that we know to work well calledNEMs: National E Markets. Think Ebay writ large and better regulated. Slivers of Time working is an exmplar in this field, but merely one example of a much wider and still under-utilised phenomenon.
I liked the example given by Wingham Rowan:
If you suddenly need a baby sitter, you might be horrified of looking for one online, but you don’t need to merely post an add on a random website. Instead you have access to a focussed market where you can see existing baber sitters, be certain that they have the relevant CRB and ISA checks completed, have a certain amount of experience and references etc. You can aslo narrow your search to find baby sitters who have worked in your area, or with people you know. The technology can do all this hard work for you, and tell you exactly how much it will cost. You get meaningful data immediately- the kind you need to take a quick decision, just like traders do all the time… so, strange though it may seem, NEMs become a very safe way to get a baby sitter. And of course, from the baby sitter’s perspective, they are not locked in, not forever doomed and blessed to have the ‘job’ of being a babysitter, but being one as and when it suits.
How can such a system we brought into being? The most likely scenario would be that, as with the National Lottery, the private sector would fund these markets if Government could put the conditions in place.
The technology is not the problem, the problem is political will and bureaucratic inertia. The British welfare system has a binary view of being in work or out of it. If you can only earn £25 a week before your benefits are cut, you are implicitly encouraging people to work in the informal economy, or to put it more sharply, the black market. (And in this respect, Mathew Taylor commented that while working in goverment he noticed the strange reluctance of politicians and civil servants to even talk about the informal economy; “nobody wanted to go there”.)
The Government needs to work much more with the natural behaviour of people. Selling time and possessions, rather than products as such, is very difficult to regulate, tax etc, but it can and should be done.
Count me in: limiting social exclusion through regulation?
In his last blog Jonathan concludes that one of the ingredients of Barack Obama’s success as a community organiser was his “deep appreciation for people and communities.” Obama not only sought to understand ‘communities,’ but importantly recognised their diverse constitution and that reaching out to people and individuals was essential groundwork. He had what is sometimes coined the ‘human touch.’
The need for such a capacity to include is at the heart of the Connected Communities programme as we seek not only to reinforce existing community networks, but also to build these networks out in ways that oblige them to include those people at the margins with depleted stocks of social capital. We must try, that is, to overcome a recurrent pattern in community regeneration whereby projects come to work alongside the usual suspects (be they individuals or local CVS organisations) and concurrently fail to reach the most excluded (potential) community members.
How we manage this is going to be tricky, but I’m hopeful that the ‘Regulation for Regeneration’ summit being held in conjunction with the Local Better Regulation Office (LBRO) at the RSA next week may help us to develop some ideas. Specifically, this event is going to bring together local authorities and businesses to discuss the challenges that they face in the current economic recession. In particular, through a series of sessions led by expert speakers, delegates will be asked to consider what the priorities for action should be and in what ways regulation can make a contribution to meeting these priorities.
The last of the sessions will bring the summit together by enquiring into what a new model for regeneration might look like. One of the key themes of enquiry for this session concerns how regulation can help us to nurture the types of communities and local economies that we’d like to participate in. Specifically, it is posited that in this new model of regeneration we might look to draw upon regulation as a means to help us build constructive social and economic norms through which communities can ‘regulate’ themselves.
Hopefully this in-depth conversation about the relationship between regeneration and regulation will garner practical ways of harnessing the principles of regulation as a means to facilitate more equitable community regeneration on the ground. Could, for example, a framework for regulating the involvement of community members in projects be developed so as to ensure inclusivity? Or, in a related way, might the social capital strategy we create out of our work in Knowle West and New Cross Gate comment on how the reach and accessibility of interventions looking to build social networks is regulated? Out of this, the hope would be that we start to see the development of more deeply resilient and empowered communities in which engagement (and so responsibility) is more open and shared.
Obama as Community Organiser
At the Republican National Convention in the run-up to the last US Presidential election, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin both made condescending references to Barack Obama’s experience as a ‘community organiser’. Giuliani sounded particularly incredulous: he WORKED?, as a community ORGANISER?
Rudy Giuliani on community organising
Sarah Palin played the crowd in the same sort of way, comparing being a Mayor in Alaska to being “a bit like a community organiser, except you have actual responsibilities.”
Sarah Palin: “Sort of like a community organiser”
But we know who had the last laugh, and many have suggested that Obama’s most powerful asset in the election was not his soaring eloquence, but lessons learned from his experience as a community organiser in Chicago.
I remember reading an interview with a party activist around this time last year. She gave testimony to the power of Obama’s ‘ground plan’, and the sophisticated and coordinated way he organised party activists, both online and off, to ‘get out the vote’, particularly in key marginals like Florida and Ohio, which has been a stumbling point for Democratic candidates in the past. The activist ended the interview with a telling remark: The Republicans want to know what a community organiser does- well on Nov 5th they are going to find out.
But what did Obama do as a community organiser? His autobiography, Dreams from my Father (a sublime piece of writing), gives a detailed account of the inner changes he went through in the process of community organising, but offers relatively few details about his day-to-day activities.
At a practical level, we know that most of his community organising was church-related, that he played an instrumental role in
getting asbestos removed from a housing estate in the south of chicago, and creating a self-help service to get steel workers back to work. More theoretically, in 1990 Obama derided “the old individualistic bootstrap myth touted by conservatives”, and told a reporter in 1995 that “it is always easier to organise people around intolerance, narrow mindedness and false nostalgia”.
Rather than focus on tangible achievements, perhaps the process of community organising itself was key, not just because of what it taught Obama about organising people, but what he learned about connecting with human beings at the level of hopes and fears.
In his autobiography, Obama reflects on the importance of putting his ideas about stronger communities into practice:
“The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan- didn’t self-esteem finally depend on just this?”
Obama’s role as a community organiser was powerful because it allowed him to embody this kind of ‘yes we can’ message. He sounded credible, because he had lived the message, or at least tried to. Indeed, last week, as part of a wider argument about creating more space in the public sphere for vexed moral and spiritual spirtual questions, Michael Sandel remarked that a key to Obama’s success was his ability to be intellectually coherent on policy issues while simultaneously connecting with people at this deeper human level that asks why we are here, and how we should best live our lives.
On so called wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage Obama always said that people can disagree about such issues without disrespecting each other, which sounds obvious, but as Mathew Taylor indicated at the Sandel talk, it is rare for people for agree about what they disagree about, and, by inference, it is only really when they do so that this mutual respect can emerge.
Finally, while Obama’s formative influence as a community organiser is well known, we don’t often hear about the impact of his participation in the Saguoro seminars at Harvard University – a five-year long process of dialogue aimed at undestanding the role of social capital in improving the quality of social and civic life in America. An article on Obama at the Saguoro seminars suggests that they made a deep impact on the 44th President, so we can be sure that Obama is familiar with the idea of social capital, and moreover that he knows his Coleman from his Putnam.
For example, Putnam argued that television had a corrosive impact on social capital, and it is noteworthy that Barack and Michele Obama’s speeches repeatedly include references to turning off the TV. For instance: “If parents don’t parent and turn off the TV set and instill in their child a thirst for knowledge, we will not succeed.”
So I suspect what Obama learned as a community organiser was a combination of know-how about the logistics and administration of organising, deep appreciation for people and communities, and the importance of not watching too much television. More importantly for RSA purposes however, he attempted to close his own social aspiration gap, and it eventually took him to the White House.
RSA Animate
RSA Mobile
