Ingredients for Authentic Collaboration and
Partnership
David Romain, Iron Triangle Community Collaborative GSEEC and
Jeff Hohensee TreePeople:
Exploring
the ramifications
of engagement among members of a diverse population seen in the context of
our need to collaborate over a wide range of skills.
Four Models of Community Collaborative Efforts: Experiments in open engagement
among people of different backgrounds.
By David L. Romain
Introduction:
This exploration seeks to take you through a few different scenarios, in which different community gardens emerged. It is an example of teaching and learning outside the box. This is a cyclical story that I can begin anywhere. So I may as well begin where you are, at the crossroads of our Western Civilization.
The compelling similarity between these projects is that each group had serious goals to provide necessary food to the poor in their neighborhood, which included themselves. Their neighborhoods are indeed distinctly poor! However, the opportunities presented to them to solve the problem of local poverty were different. Thus, their paths toward achieving their goals have been very different.
I am an instructor in Physical Geography. I teach at community colleges and am very intimately challenged by the widespread generic incompetence of our education systems that supply our children with compulsory education. This system, by its generic nature, fills children with such an acute detachment from their environment, that even their propensity to learn is significantly impaired! I say this, because, embedded in the very process of education in the public schools are patterns and learned customs that steer students away from the "ready-to-learn concept" on which the system has been grafted in recent years.
I teach Physical Geography as if it were a course in Stewardship of the Earth. In is a coup I instigated on my own that uses the basic theme of Physical Geography – Learning how the earth works; as a means to bring the students to continually compare their own lifestyle, (our lifestyle), with the Earth’s lifestyle!
I want to briefly describe the projects. The first, for which I have an accompanying video, is about an after school project that spun off a community garden as an art project. The collaboration than grew out of this project eventually involved teachers from the school and community folks, curious to see what the children were doing and friends from the California Conservation Corps.
A second project began as an intentional collaborative in the Richmond, called the Iron Triangle Community Collaborative. Out of their collaborative process, an empty lot was requested for from the City, preparing the lot for a garden was assisted by a County agency and students from UC Berkeley, who needed a spot to demonstrate the building of a compost heap. The CYCLE binder that is being circulated shows pictures of their effort.
I am currently volunteering with a youth group in San Rafael, called the Canal Ministries. It is our demonstration Engagement project, through GSEEC. The group is in the process of planning a community garden, starting from scratch. They have received $1,000 from GSEEC. They are currently refining a proposal going for matching funds. In addition, they are seeking to forge a collaborative relationship with one of the many community gardens in the area.
I stumbled into a fourth example of a community collaborative quite by accident, last weekend. I participated in a weekend Interfaith Youth Retreat, as a youth counselor. Their focus is on peace and a part of the Retreat on Sunday was a visit to a local farm, called Eco Village, in which they put in 4 hours working at a variety of tasks in the garden.
In each one of these projects, there is an emphasis on bringing children into the garden to heighten their awareness of Mother Earth and how she works. In each case the children come, mostly from the inner city. They come with some sense deep detachment from the earth. Their introduction to the garden is an exposure to an alternative sense of peace.
Peace? Yes, many, including the children are discovering a sense of calm that they seldom feel in any other activity that is often available to them in their ultra-busy lives . . . . . and they, for the most part love the change. But, more important, they begin to see themselves as a part of the equation of life. They begin to see Mother Earth as the source of their food! That attracts attention! Salads cease to be "nasty"! And, there are so many other growing things they can eat! They can even grow things to sell in the Farmers Market for extra spending money!
Consider Collaboration in the Context of a Cooperative:
The Iron Triangle Community Collaborative came into being when neighbors became concern over city plans to develop their neighborhood. Yes, this long-neglected residential area sorely needed redevelopment. But the assessment presented to City Council in 1993 did not resemble what they knew of their neighborhood. It had been skewed to justify the staff plans to serve the Marina, a waterfront area being improved from unused industrial to residential.
In these plans, the Iron Triangle neighborhood would be rezoned for a new designed commercial center to serve the nearby affluent Marina District. From that development, the surrounding neighborhood would be gentrified and many of the current residents displaced. Older residents who had survived the profound disappointment of the Model Cities betrayal of the 1960s were quickly reminded of the City’s promise of economic development for them that was abandoned, just when their plight was being turned around.
#Diversity is not simply a question of race:
It also involves class inequality, residential segregation and increasing income disparity. Our Eurocentric attitudes often lead us to not acknowledge other players, when we enter a field of interest. We walk in assuming that nothing that preceded us is valuable. We don’t value what we think we see. Our way of living is the best! We are modern. Do away with the ancient, primitive customs of the past.
Environmental education is particularly affected by this phenomenon. The natives of all the lands we conquered had a deep abiding sense of harmony with nature, we are just beginning to appreciate. We, as a civilization, have actually killed, (and lost), many of the principles, wisdoms, practices and customs of these forbearers we had ignored. As such, we are slow to recognize that most traditional societies had a very powerful sense of stewardship to the earth, when Europeans first encountered them.
The natives of North America know stewardship as an integrated way of life. So do the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas. We are still looking at environmental education as isolated knowledge and good ideas. In fact, we approach it as new science and we only recognize what we can "prove" in the laboratory, using "scientific methods". We should look, not only at the teachings of these past cultures, but also listen to their living elders who have closer connection to the traditions of their ancestors than anything written.
This last point is particularly important, when we consider our own traditional goals. Our educational tradition has grown out of the abuse of pseudo-science, seeking to promote a concept of an emerging scientific knowledge superior to Earth’s lifestyle. This new "religion of the sophisticated" was promoted to affect lifestyle changes in our population that would encourage the modern era we now enjoy that has become well educated to have lost touch with our formerly natural connection with the Earth.
Our children, our main audience, will learn more and learn better, when we can expose them to nature at an early age. We are born from the Earth. Our formal education has been designed to divorce them from those natural ties. They want to "go outside and play". We chain them to a desk and force feed them artificial "lessons" they would not easily learn any other way!
When the CYCLE project took children, who were often school drop-outs and engaged them on creek clean-up projects as an alternative to summer boredom, they came alive! And Richard, a frustrated EPA retiree was elated! He had finally found someone who would appreciate his considerable expertise, (fictitious name).
The Iron Triangle Community Collaborative had gotten a community garden going on a vacant corner lot in downtown Richmond, under the guidance of Thelma, (fictitious name), a young grandmother, highly skilled, unemployed social worker, whose non-profit CBO serving young mothers in the flatlands had been defunded. After a couple years, Thelma found a job and the CYCLE project took over maintenance of the garden.
The Attitudinal Healing Connection is a group residing at the edge of West Oakland, opposite to Hoover Elementary School. This is a project that has just begun to receive local government funding, after ten years of the service to local children you see in the video. Even now, it is still easier for suburban non-profits to come into Oakland and receive funds from the city to pretend to do what this and many other such grass root groups are actually doing with far less funds. There is much we can do to help steer funds to these groups. This is what GSEEC is doing with the Canal Ministries in San Rafael. This is a part of the effort at Engagement that we promote.
We need to teach environmental education in the context of social science as well. Our technology is well equipped to teach in the context of physical science, but we are trying to produce social change out of our efforts. That goal will only be met, when we come to understand the environment in its spiritual context, which incorporates all that is necessary to bring peace and justice to everyone involved.
Our economy is in far worse shape than our government, (at all levels), makes it out to be. Official data has made invisible the unemployed and disguised the working poor, many of whom are homeless! The result is that What ever the government plans is based on false data and cannot deliver what it promises. The greater dilemma is that we cannot see the damage we continue to do by following the status quo. In effect, our efforts to serve the poor are more effective at poverty maintenance! We continue to produce, multiply and sustain an increasing level of poverty in our cities and rural hinterlands.
When we set out to teach environmental education, if we present it in the context of a physical science, we fail to consider the context in which implied behavioral adjustments do not occur as expected. After all, we are products of the lifestyle we decry. The technologies we rely on to get our points across are well equipped to teach the exact opposite of what we set out to do. Thus, a vital part of our message has to become social science oriented.
In effect, some of what makes this conference possible, establishes a lifestyle and a set of built-in expectations that rely on affluence. We and our audience may be in two very different frames of reference, hearing the same words. It can be a subtle difference in context similar to you stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway listening to the same symphony of water music that I am listening to next to a quiet stream in the botanical gardens!
This is one compelling reason why the outdoor classroom becomes so much more realistic an arena in which to teach environmental awareness to children. The teaching method has to be more presenting the opportunity for exposure. Our example, embedded in the way we carry ourselves will invite the children to observe intently, the life that exists in the natural environment. The quiet, slowed down movement that seeks to avoid disturbing the bee pollinating the flower is of intense interest to the child. They so appreciate smallness!
We need to become more like children! Let us go, play outside with them. Discover each little thing as if I have never seen it before. Actually, I haven’t! They will eventually readjust the lifestyle handed down by our generation much more easily than we can. Furthermore, by observing their responses, we may better learn to adjust!
And, do not forget the elders from traditional societies in our midst. They have skills and/or know of valuable techniques that we have never learned. They will point you to their rich stories and legends, in which they looked to the animals around them and studied their lifestyles. The wild animals in our midst live completely in tune with Mother Earth! Their wisdom far exceeds ours, if we would get "off our high horse and down to Earth" to realize that Mother Earth’s wisdom far exceeds ours!
In the final analysis, the greatest wisdom of diversifying the environmental field lies in rediscovery and exploration, (on our part), of the wisdom of the traditional peoples of this land. They knew the land far better ecologically than we have allowed ourselves to learn and we have already lost much of their wisdom. We should be desperate and anxious to learn as much as possible from them, before all their wisdom dies with their elders, isolated on reservations on some of the most marginal lands left to them.