Community Matters: The lies we tell ourselves

“Do you really think that you’ll ever make a difference?”

Given my role as a visible community leader, I am asked some version of this question on a fairly regular basis.

Sometimes the questioner is genuinely curious to understand my motivations and my expected likelihood of success. Other times, what first sounds like a question is really meant as a skeptical critique masquerading as a polite query.

Years ago, when I was first asked these kinds of questions, I must admit they sometimes rattled me to my core. Can anyone really make a difference? Will things around here ever change? Who am I to think that anything I do will matter? In the early years of doing community-based work, these questions and many more besides would often stick in my head for days or weeks at a time, sometimes gnawing at me to an unhealthy degree.

Over time, and with the cumulative benefit of experience, mentors, and exemplars, I now tend to have a different kind of response when confronted with skeptical versions of this question. To be sure, there are still times when the weight of these questions can settle on me in unproductive ways. But more and more, I find that such questions are helping to refine my confidence and clarity about what I am seeking to accomplish as a community leader.

As I work with residents, organizations, businesses, and collaborations throughout the region, I am coming to realize that the single greatest thing I can accomplish is to help others to experience and believe different kinds of stories about what is possible in our communities.

For far too long, both local history and global culture have conditioned residents of Beaver County to believe that what is required for generating better communities is outside of their control. We have been told, and we have come to believe, that the possibility for regional change does not really implicate the average citizen and is instead somehow dependent on getting the right pieces lined up, getting the right leader in place, or getting the right industry to pay attention to us.

To be fair, on some level each of these things may be true. There is no doubt that we could be better off as a region with a different set of variables at play.

But, more often than not, the way we frame our need for change smuggles a critical and damning falsehood into the equation. That falsehood is the belief that ordinary, average citizens of the region can do little or nothing to bring about the kind of changes they would like to see happen here.

Collectively, we have been lied to and over time we have learned to lie to one another, falsely believing that change can only come from the outside, that we are powerless to bring it about, and that all we can reasonably do is hope, wait, and lament.

Here is the truth of our situation. The future vibrancy of our region hinges on ordinary, average citizens. Politicians will not make our region exceptional. Corporations will not make our region exceptional. Charismatic leaders will not make our region exceptional. Exceptionalism will only occur among us when, together, we learn to organize community will, vision, and power.

If and until this happens, we will remain beholden to forces well outside our control and will continue to believe falsely that we can do little to make things different. We will, to put the matter directly, be passively complicit in the very same conditions that we collectively and persistently lament.

Along with our partners at New Sun Rising, RiverWise has been working for over a year to think more deliberately about how we can help residents learn to overcome such lies. This involves developing strategies and tools that help citizens to organize power, resources, and relationships to generate the kinds of communities they wish to bring about.

Along the way we have been collaborating with a team of artists, designers, writers, and storytellers. We have assembled an advisory team of creatives from around the world. We have invested in gathering, interpreting, and visualizing community level data. We have been building out technology that can be used to deploy such data in interactive and community specific ways. All of this work and more has informed the creation of something we are calling a “Creative Advocacy Playbook.”

Creative advocacy is all about mobilizing average residents and organizations to cast off the lie that they cannot change the communities in which they live. As we explain in the forthcoming “Playbook,” creative advocacy is “a public and intentional form of engagement that employs artistic practice to disrupt prevailing narratives and strengthen community movement toward an identified goal.” To say the matter a bit more simply, we are talking about strategically deploying creativity to bring about community inspired change.

In turning toward creative advocacy, we are making a bet that if we can disrupt how people think – and if we provide them with tools required to help create that disruption – then change is not only possible. It is inevitable.

In the coming months RiverWise and New Sun Rising will have lots more to say about creative advocacy. Whether folks realize it or not, we have already been deploying many of the strategies contained in the “Playbook” for some time now here in Beaver County. In ongoing conversation with people and organizations around the region, we intend to use the strategies and processes outlined in the “Creative Advocacy Playbook” to bring about increasingly sophisticated answers to the question “Do you really think that you’ll ever make a difference?”

Together, it is my hope and expectation that the answer to this question will not only be a resounding “Yes!” but also “We already have!”

If and as that begins to happen as a matter of course, we will be well on our way to creating the kinds of communities that we, our children, and grandchildren deserve.

I look forward to watching that future emerge alongside many of you.

Daniel Rossi-Keen, Ph.D., is the co-owner of eQuip Books, a community bookstore in Aliquippa and the executive director of RiverWise, a nonprofit employing sustainable development practices to create a regional identity around the rivers of Beaver County. You can reach Daniel at daniel@getriverwise.com.

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Community Matters: The lies we tell ourselves