The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. For this week's episode we partner with April Doner and the Abundant Community to speak with Tim Vogt about an article published on Abundant Community's website called The Five Valued Experiences.
Tim is Executive Director of Starfire, a Cincinnati, Ohio, organization which offers programs that address the needs of teens and adults with disabilities.
Other referenced works and resources:
April Doner is a community connector, artist, and mother who is passionate about igniting the intersection between re-weaving neighbor relationships, strengthening local economies, and healing / reconciling inequities and injustices. She is a Steward at the ABCD Institute DePaul University and when not practicing neighboring in her own neighborhood, she trains, coaches, and consults in Asset Based Community Development. April also documents local resilience as well as group processes through various creative means including writing, photography, video, and graphic recording. Since 2020, she has curated content for Abundant Community.
Abundant Community is a place to visit. To read and hear stories of action. More valuable than your daily newspaper. A way to learn about citizen-led action that illuminates a new direction, away from the dominant consumerist and dependency-producing habits that we thought we had to purchase. Communities forever have known how to produce family and neighborhood functions such as raising children, building healthy local economies and caring for people on the margin. This website invites you into this possibility.
This episode was hosted and produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.
The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. For this week's episode we partner with April Doner and the Abundant Community to speak with Tim Vogt about an article published on Abundant Community's website called The Five Valued Experiences.
Tim is Executive Director of Starfire, a Cincinnati, Ohio, organization which offers programs that address the needs of teens and adults with disabilities.
Other referenced works and resources:
April Doner is a community connector, artist, and mother who is passionate about igniting the intersection between re-weaving neighbor relationships, strengthening local economies, and healing / reconciling inequities and injustices. She is a Steward at the ABCD Institute DePaul University and when not practicing neighboring in her own neighborhood, she trains, coaches, and consults in Asset Based Community Development. April also documents local resilience as well as group processes through various creative means including writing, photography, video, and graphic recording. Since 2020, she has curated content for Abundant Community.
Abundant Community is a place to visit. To read and hear stories of action. More valuable than your daily newspaper. A way to learn about citizen-led action that illuminates a new direction, away from the dominant consumerist and dependency-producing habits that we thought we had to purchase. Communities forever have known how to produce family and neighborhood functions such as raising children, building healthy local economies and caring for people on the margin. This website invites you into this possibility.
This episode was hosted and produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.
So Tim, you've influenced me a lot. I tell your story a lot, because of the huge shift that you guys made in your work and just being able to witness it firsthand brought so many things together for me about the actual work of looking for gifts and intentionally connecting people. So I, I would love to hear in your words a bit about that transition that you made early on from the, the disability service work.
Thanks for saying that April. Boy, where to start, I always blame it on Peter and john and Judith snow. I blame those three, as they came to Cincinnati and I got invited to hear him speak I had never heard any of those names before. first of all, we're all sitting in small groups, of course, which was so bizarre to me. I'm like, where is the front of the room? And why aren't there rows of seats, you know? And I didn't understand why they were doing things so differently, the small groups, and Peter gets up and he says, we have gifts in this city. We have so many, and all we talk about are our problems, and I was like, wait a minute. What's he talking about here, you know? and then John gets up and he's like, you know, my heart, my bad heart, it's worth half a million dollars to hospitals in Chicago and it's not worth anything to my neighbors and my family. And he said this line that I just won't forget, which is, uh, beware of people who profit off of other people's problems. And I was like, Oh my gosh, she's talking about me and my work. And then, Judith got up and said, there's just no such thing as a disability. She said, it just defines too many people's lives without meaning really anything. If you need help seeing something different than if you need help hearing, then if you need help balancing a checkbook, then if you need help moving around, she just kind of blew up the notion completely. And so I was pretty disturbed by all that and they helped me start to journey of learning how human beings in particular my work human beings with disabilities are number one, treated other in a way that nobody else would tolerate. Their whole lives are separate and they are given opportunities that are conditional. So their inclusion is conditional upon somebody else feeling good about themselves as a volunteer or as a donor. Their inclusion is conditioned upon People who say, well, you gotta be a part of this group of other people with disabilities, you know, so the way their life gets defined as conditional upon what society feels comfortable with, which is we'd rather you were in groups rather than be known as a part of us, or the general community, or a group of artists, or something. So, their identity is conditional, their connections to other people are conditional, and all that started to get so big. I started to realize it was a culture around disability, and that I was participating in that, and, and the last part actually fits in with the economics, which is that all of that gets turned into a business. And I was running one of those businesses, so I was really aware of the way that I could put two people in a room together and bill Medicaid 14 instead of 7. And then if I put 10 people in a room, I could bill the Medicaid 70 instead of 7, right? And so the bigger that those groups got, the more money I could make. And again, sell that to the community and donors and parents of people with disabilities as doing something good that helped these poor people. And at the same time made everybody feel good about their participation. what I was essentially doing was letting the community off the hook for its responsibility to create belonging. And I was making that a business model. So that is how we started. It was very disturbed. I was very concerned about what I was participating in and the price was being paid by human beings with Down syndrome. By human beings with autism, by human beings with cerebral palsy or something like that. And I was asking him to pay the price and so was everybody else. And then I started to realize it wasn't just me. It was the nursing home industry. It was the prison industry. It was the nonprofit industry in general. It seemed like everybody was kind of being bought and sold. And again, this gets into the economics of we're farming each other. We're producing each other. We're selling each other through, Charitable models and to me that just seems like it's the wrong direction for a society is that we all become each other's clients, right?
want to ask you to comment on two things that I've kind of encountered as I've been researching you. The first one is, I've heard you use the framing of exchanging client hood for discovering our purpose in the world together. So I would love to hear you just maybe go a little bit deeper on what you're talking about and then related to that, 1 person I was talking to about your work said that at 1 point, you saw yourself as the king of the disabilities camp and I wonder if that, if that is true, and maybe you could wrap that into how that related to client hood and move to discovering our purpose in the world together.
Yeah. Well, discovering purposes is really critical because you've got to define what purpose is and absent people showing you the way. John and Peter and Judith hinted at for me, I had them kind of point in a directional sign that way, you know, absent people doing that for you, you go along with what you've seen before. So what I had seen before was people with disabilities who were in special ed rooms and special sports teams. And they were always different, separate. When I first started in the field, literally, I worked at a camp in California for people with disabilities just because I wanted to be in California for a summer. And that was right on the coastline near Santa Cruz. It was going to be a really cool summer. And I started to really love the work. One of the parts of that that I loved was that I got hugs and high fives every single day from the campers who would be, you know, 60 to 80 campers every week. So that feels good, you know, and you start to think, I think that your purpose, Oh, I'm the center of the story. I'm the hero. I'm the big, you know, king of the story. And I come back to Cincinnati, worked at Starfire, built that up. All of my talent and energy and and everything I could possibly do. I built up and I was again the center of that, I was the hero. I had 150 people coming to the building in Cincinnati every day, giving me again hugs and high fives, you know? So story that I fell into was that, I was loved and appreciated for this. What I started to realize was that that was and still hard for me to even say today, but that was a manipulation. That was a usury of sorts. Again, getting back to our economic topics, which I'm using people to get income, but I'm also using them to get social status and to get hits of dopamine where I feel good about myself, So anyway, when you let go of that feeling of conquering the king of disability mountain or whatever it is, the term you used, you have to start to look at, well, what is my purpose in it? There's something else. to be done. And the way that I found my way out of that kind of social trap of, I guess we could call it kind of uber, altruistic looking behavior, that gives me a lot of status in the helping realm. The way out of that was for me to realize that by my purpose being so big and so dominant and so strong and so successful, everyone else's purpose was being missed. So, my heart was broke by people with disabilities that I saw that were beautiful human beings, cool people, and the best that, that they had was... Being part of my story, and then I could start to see that their story was lost, you know, so Discovering their purpose and honestly watching other people kind of not pick that up Was super super motivating to me and really informing me of how many people are losing their purpose in service of models like what we were running at Starfire in charitable models. And then, if you kind of tease that out a little bit, when you lose the meaning of yourself, there's some social trauma that comes along with that where all of a sudden people are wondering. Why was I born? Was there a reason for that? Or am I just part of Tim or somebody else's billable hour scheme? Am I just part of somebody else's donor outreach marketing plan? Am I just part of somebody else's social media like strategy, right? And, I think if people lose their personal purpose To that, it's pretty cheap and those of us in charge of it, if we're not aware of it, we don't even think of it as as a problem. We just think, well, their purpose is to be here in my building and to bill and sell as a charity. So client hood becomes a way of life. For certain people in certain situations. And again, it's not just Starfire and disability. It's also, endemic in every charitable helping mindset, even down to like PTAs. I can see it now, let's all help the children, but the things we could do to help the children would be to actually foster the community and the personal purpose we'd give to children, but instead it gets cheap and to make a donation to BTA. So, it just really helpful to discover that my purpose was overshadowing and then help people find their own purpose.
So you write in the article that April links to in the abundant community. When we discover the pattern we were made for, it gives us meaning. It frees us to follow our personal calling, no matter how random or seemingly different it may seem. That word pattern is really evocative for me. Why the choice of that word? And how does that unpack how you're thinking about calling and purpose?
Well, there's two notes to Pattern that I love. The first was that we kind of studied a pattern that was in another link that I linked to in that article, which was a little bit of research that was done in here in Southwest Ohio that showed most people with developmental disabilities, intellectual disabilities, they live their entire life in a pattern where there's a little bit of family that slowly dwindles away over time. There's a ton of paid people that are in their life that are taking care of big groups of People with disabilities, and that's largely an economic function, that you've got these people that are paid to take care of groups of people, and the more that they can put into the group, the more that they can say, this is efficient. We're good stewards of tax money or donations. And so we want more, more, more, more, more. So the bigger, if I could have a dance with 150 people, that was 150, metric points that could prove that I was valuable and my work was valuable so we could invest more into it Versus every time we held a dance or a six person group to a baseball game or whatever each one of those people lost The moment that they could have invested in their own personal purpose, right? So the grouping was a compromise and it was asking everybody to kind of compromise their identity so anyway, we noticed that was a pattern that started when a baby's born and sent into therapy and service world by early childhood intervention or therapists and doctors who hand out pamphlets at children's hospital on day one. All of a sudden that pattern starts. And the pattern has these dwindling family, a small family, and has a big service system that rotates over and over. Lots of paid people that kind of take jobs and leave jobs. You've got all these people with disabilities that are kind of stuck in it that get taken care of essentially by those paid people. And then you've got a community that's completely absent. There's no neighbors, there's no friends, there's no people that are helping to hold the long story of someone's social participation in their community, in their faith community, in their club, in their association, whatever it is. So, that pattern starts at birth and then it grows and... Eventually it goes into special education and special needs sports clubs and Starfire group homes and workshops and business models that are based on Medicaid and donations essentially, and that pattern to us was the problem. It wasn't that somebody could just go one time and be a part of the special needs softball team. That was not a problem. It wasn't that somebody one time needed to go to a special needs support group or something like that. It was that everything over the course of their entire life was in the same vein of identity and connection. It's all disability, essentially, right? And it's largely being done to them. And even if somebody were to choose to participate in that, I'd be like, high five, great, go for it. But there was no counterbalance of what's outside of that pattern. So describing it as a pattern was super helpful for us to see that we were part of it and we could also opt out of it. The second part was just inspired by Christopher Alexander's work as an architect in the 70s who said, you know, pattern language. There's ways that you can build more life experiences than deadening experiences through architecture. So a south facing porch is more life, inducing than a north facing porch. And he said, you know, here's 300 and plus. Parts of architecture patterns that can create more life. We started to see that there were all kinds of different parts of the pattern that could be just shifted a little over here and a little over there. And then people could kind of like start to build a life that, sure, probably depended on some parts of the pattern, but also could live and create new patterns outside of that. A pattern of connection with a neighbor, That could last over 30 years, you know, while we both have mortgages here. A pattern of participation in a church that isn't part of the special needs worship service, right? It's a part of the general worship service. And so those two aspects of that really helped us land on pattern as a way to build long stories. Because ultimately, the trouble that faces human beings with intellectual disabilities that I know is that their entire story eventually ends up with them alone. They have paid staff but the paid staff come and go. They have families, but obviously families are going to pass away. And, then a person with a disability is just by themselves with other people with disabilities. And the staff keeps rotating on as the business continues. So the question was, well, how would you build a long standing strong Pattern that people could count on, lean on, depend on, call on, over their lifetime and it just gets bombed out by the pattern that we were creating that gets emptied out. And there's no room for anything else.
I would love to hear when you had the epiphany. And you were at Starfire, what did it look like, you know, you've shared a bit about where you started, what that pattern was, and generally what it looks like to have examples of being more included in community life and be more intentional about that. Can you tell maybe that next chapter of the story of the work you did to really restructure that architecture that you guys had built. I know it's a long story, but giving us some idea of like where did you start? Where did you move into? What did that look like? What does it look like now?
We started playing around with our own internal culture. So the first kind of things we did was we, and it's in the article that you linked April. We took those five valued experiences from John O'Brien and we designed a strategic plan around them. So those things are real simple, you know, sharing typical places is a step beyond sharing segregated special needs places, making choices for myself that I want to do is a step beyond and a step better than having everything told to me what to do. Instead of having to do everything the institution tells me, I get to choose some ways out of it. And choice is super interesting because it's not just as easy as saying, Oh, do you want to go, this place or that place? That's what we were doing. It lets everybody off the hook for choice. Choice is more like I live into something. As soon as I take a step, new doors open up. So I don't really know what's beyond the next step. But I'm going to live into it. And I need a lot of people around me. So if I make a bad choice, I don't fall too far. It's all really very interesting because now people are saying, well, people can choose to live segregated lives. And how do you fight against that? And I'm kind of like, well, is that really a choice or is that just very convenient to all of our service models? So anyway, we took those five experiences and we, we said. we said everybody in the room, it was totally different than strategic plan. We said board members, staff, families of staff, people with disabilities, their families, the general community was invited. And we just talked through them for six months. We said, what kind of choices are important to you? You know, people are like, if I couldn't have my coffee or a hot shower in the morning, I would go rage all day, you know, and we started to really, well, what would happen if somebody took that away? What would happen if you couldn't have coffee in a hot shower and how bad would your life be? And people started to really internalize how different, and this is a kind of a privilege issue is what we we're hitting on. How different is it if you live the life that was a life that is inside the disability pattern versus the life that you currently live, the privileges that you get to make about choices and where to hang out and who to know and how to show up. And we, we changed the entire kind of flavor of the organization over about a year by doing that. And we set some big goals for 10 years off that we were going to kind of like get to a place where we could really live into those five valued experiences. Then we started to play internally with personal futures plans. So instead of giving everybody this idea that, Hey, you gotta go here and do this because we say, so we started to say, what do you want to do? So this was really an interesting flip. And looking back on it, we started to call it the difference between logistics and purpose. So we'd always put logistics first. Where do people go? When do they go? How do they get there? Who goes with them? What do they do? All that stuff. When we started with that, the disability and the convenience of our programs took the driver's seat, So you go to our building, you go from 9 to 3, the staff are there, and they are staff that we hire and train, and you do the things that we say you do, whereas when we started to change it to each person's personal purpose, individual purpose, we had to discover that, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, you're a photographer. Hmm. Well, you got to go take pictures or you got to go to the camera store. You got to know photographers. You got to have a show an exhibit, right? You got it. So all of a sudden, when we flipped it to the person's individual purpose leading, then that changed the logistics of how we got people there. Who we hired, who they connected to, who they talked to, how they spent their time, all that stuff just shifted. And then, like I said, once we discovered purposes were being missed, we were like, this is too sacred. We've got to invest in this instead of this group stuff. It's easier, makes more money, but it's really asking everybody to lose their identity and their purpose. So we shifted to one on one work and we started doing these cool projects. We probably, they're on our YouTube channel. We've probably done like close to 200 at this point. But we started saying, what about if somebody wanted to brew beer, they brewed beer. If somebody wanted to write poetry, they did a poetry slam. We started to realize that these little cool projects gave us enough of a end point that our staff could work at it and build it. And then the person with a disability who was part of that project could actually get the value of that project. They would gain a new aspect of their identity, They would gain new connections that were outside the disability pattern. And the last part was the coolest part, was that every single project contributed to a more inclusive culture around that person. So the more projects that we could do that were fun and livening, they were just quick bursts of energy, but they actually started to create a culture for us. And they created a unique individual culture around the person. I have to believe that if we did this on a big enough scale, if everybody got a cool project to work on every year of their life and Medicaid funded it, all of a sudden people with disabilities would be generating a bigger, broader culture that is better for everybody. Cause everybody that did the poetry slam reading or the beer brewing or the play acting, they all loved it, too, whether they had a disability or not, whether they were connected to Starfire's staff or if they were just from the general community that we networked with. So those projects started to become our core purpose as an organization. I mean, to shift all of our logistics around it, our funding and our billing and our staffing and training and all that stuff. And that was really super interesting. And then we said, Well, then why the heck are we doing the segregation stuff? And so we just shut down. It took a while. Some people loved it. Some people didn't. A lot of people didn't. But we did it. And I think that that was a huge step for us, which is if you're part of something that is asking another person to compromise some part of their life, I think you have to consider your role in that. And we did and we rectified that. So, then we started really getting into cool work, which is we were like, why are we doing the work? And we started to give out micro grants to families. We started to give families of children with disabilities. I mean, some of these kids were one year old or three years old, and we give the grant to their family. And our whole thought was we keep investing in the staff. They're doing great. But after two years, they take a job. They go somewhere else. And we're like, All the value walks out the door, the training that we invested in the staff, the money that we put into their salaries, the help that we had them to understand to be a great connector. Why aren't we training families to do this? And so we started to give families some money equity. We'd give them 500 bucks and say, look, you get two 50. If you say yes to doing a project in your neighborhood and you get two 50, if you finish it up. And then in between you get a thousand bucks and you can spend it however you want. Just make sure you turn in receipts cause the IRS and stuff, you know? And so families started doing that and then we would meet with them once a month and we just teach them some of the things that we had learned. And they were like, Oh, I never thought about it that way. So all of a sudden we could see that we were investing in future generational wisdom. And we thought it was scale that would outlast us because even if a family completed a project and never came back to us, they kept the learning, they kept the connections, they kept the neighborhood culture, they kept the kind of the epiphany themselves. It wasn't our staff and us, it was them. And that's borne out to be true is that families then say, well, this has shifted everything that I think about my kid, then they can talk to the service providers. They can talk to the therapist. They can talk to the people that are caseworkers or whatever. And the families hold those values. so that's been super interesting and enlivening to watch and now we're trying to figure out what if we paid neighbors to do those projects like that, so we're in that space now trying to figure out like, what if you went to a neighborhood and said, how about we give you a little project budget and we pay you all to do something interesting together. So, economics gets tied up in that stuff too. It's really interesting to play around with money. You never want to take over. I remember I was talking to John about this once. I was like, we don't want to take over what a community can do with and for each other by paying them to do it right. The worst thing that could happen is all of a sudden people only engage with their neighbors. And john said, Tim, don't worry about that. He said, your money's just kind of like the bait he said. And that's true. So our money is please say yes. And then people's epiphanies of their own purpose of their opportunity to connect and build their own neighborhood and their own community culture. That becomes the thing that we're not in charge of. And we can't control. And it just goes on in these wild, beautiful ways that It makes the initial investment seems so small because all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute. This changed your life too. And it was only in like 1500 bucks. Best money we've ever spent.
So you're shifting into this last Pillar of what we talk about here at the podcast. And I would love to hear you talk just a little bit about how crucial is commitment to a specific place, especially as it relates to the structure belonging that you're trying to cultivate, to come alongside.
we say that the people who invest in their neighborhood those are the people that get the most value out of what we do. It's also the hardest thing to do. So you can start with the term community and people say community a lot, right? And it kind of gets overused and sometimes it can be really like means nothing, but We define community in kind of two ways. We say, look, it can be geographic, meaning you're immediate neighborhood, or it can be an affinity kind of community, right? An association, it's like people are in clubs or they are in faith communities, or they are in the Bird watchers community and all that stuff's valid, so it's kinda like, both. But the interesting thing about the geographic community, which is where we shift into the term neighborhood, is that it belongs to everybody and everybody's in. Whereas if somebody has an interest in brewing beer, then people that don't like beer are out. If somebody's interested in poetry, then people that say they don't like poetry are out, so people can say no legitimately to those interesting community questions, but when we can fund projects that are neighborhood based, everybody's in. Thank you. And that is interesting for a couple reasons. One is, we found that families used to say, Well, you know, poetry's her thing. It's not my thing. And then all of a sudden the family can be absent from a person with a disability's exploration into poetry. Whereas the family can't say, well, this street is her thing, it's not my thing, right, it's your thing, and that was also interesting in neighbors. If I knocked on every one of my neighbor's door and said, hey, I'm really interested in poetry, they could, half of them, probably 90% of them would say, not me, they could say no. But if I knocked on their doors and said, I'm interested in how we can meet up for welcoming of the new neighbor who's coming on, September 15th. Um. Everybody has a stake in saying yes to that, and everybody can say yes. So that's where we kind of look at place as the really critical lens. And I'll tell you, I mean, I have some friends that are really deep in the placemaking world. You guys have heard that term, I'm sure. And there's something that feels off about it to me, which is We're going to make our place better to sell it to developers. Like it's really, really sad. So we try to share some of the ethos of placemaking with families and with neighbors that we are helping learn how to placemake and create local places that are shared with human being with a disability that lives there. But recently they've started talking a lot about placekeeping. That you can use the same strategy for placemaking, but instead you call it placekeeping. And then the whole goal shifts. We're not here to build something cool and then sell it to a bunch of developers and rich people We're here to build something cool that we get to keep right And I think that's been a huge shift for us to really think about how do we help build a place that we're going to get to keep? How do we help live in the fruits of our own labor? In the love of our own connections, right? How do we live in that big old neighborhood hug? And it might take the rest of our lives to build, which is what's super fascinating about all of this is that people with disabilities and their families are asking, how do I live a good life? And the service system gives them like these weird little answers. Well, we'll set a plan and we'll help you, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. But really the only way to live a good life is to live it. You don't even get to know about that until you like take your final breath and have your like life flash before your eyes. So it's kind of like, well, Everybody that's done something with Starfire, I think that what they've learned is that it's absolutely true. The means of getting there, the path that we walked is what matters and that path can shift and change and grow. New people will join people, move in, move out, and the more that we keep thinking about ways to connect, ways to be together, ways to build memories together and share those memories. That's how we get to finally on our last day say, it was a good life, right? And no one can promise it. No one can give it to us. It's gotta be lived. So that's kind of the interesting trick is you're investing in the long haul with short bursts of energy place is where that can most effectively, I think, take root and flower.
I love that shift from placemaking to placekeeping. There's also been something that always felt off to me about the placemaking. One thing that comes to mind as you're talking about the shift in wording is we talk a lot in the asset based world recently more about, how do we shift from more Masculine wording, energy where we're trying to move, I think, as a culture, into embracing some of that feminine and motherly language. working from, even saying community building to community cultivating, and I think too, even the indigenous wisdom in many cultures of we are stewards of this place. We are stewards of each other. It's not about making each other or making this something new, but recognizing what's there and investing in that, I'm curious, in my world, there's a lot about this idea of, leading by stepping back and learning to make space for other people's gifts and other people's purpose. And I'm curious what you've learned about, as you do that, how do you ss. See your own gift or your own purpose. How do you not do a thing where you sublimate yourself? But you keep yourself as part of the equation as part of the the recipe.
That's another great question April I mean, I stepped down as executive director of Starfire in 2017 after the last segregated group I stayed on at the organization. I still work there so I can tell you what I've learned about that, which is The work of meeting with families and to your point about the feminine, primarily moms to help them think about how to build more connections and identity and respect and dignity and culture around their beloved Children. That has been my favorite work. Is to meet their energy and to provide them value that they can take and create and make their own value from. I think that's wonderful. And, and we, What we call this is institutional humility. When I was a kid, my dad would say, don't pick the last mushroom, don't pick the last flower. It might be the last one, you never know. So we always kind of learned to be very careful with what you did to a place that might harm it forever. And that's what I think we do as systems and services is we accidentally bomb out the place and take the place of care, right? This is careless society one on one. And so, being able to have, some humility about your role in a community is really cool because you get to say, well, what if you had the money? Not all of us, right? And what if you had the power and decision making authority? And what if, what if you marketed and told your own story versus us telling it for you ? So all of a sudden things really get it. interesting. And what's fascinating about this is what we hit on the biggest thing. If you said, what's the one thing you learned through this whole thing, I'd say it's disability is not the problem. It's culture, culture that makes their life hard is the problem. And then the correlating idea is, well, then who are your colleagues in healing the culture? Well, it's not just the people on my payroll, It's people with disabilities and their families and their neighbors. And then it becomes super cool because you now have an infinite number of colleagues and you have to figure out like, how do you work that in an equitable manner so that you're paying people and that you're giving people authority. And that's really tricky right now. Cause institutions are mostly scared of that stuff, but that's been cool to see, a shortcut for that, I don't know if it's interesting to you, but we say defer, prefer, refer, defer to the community, to the neighborhood, refer to the community in the neighborhood, and prefer the community in the neighborhood. That helps you remain humble as an institution. Just keep asking that question. Oh, maybe this is something the community already has going, or how do I strengthen their ability to do that? How, instead of referring to more systems and services and therapies and clients and all that stuff, how can I refer to the people around this person as part of their support system? And lastly, I actually do prefer that. I prefer what the community does, what I can do, you know, as an organization. And the second part of that though, as I have learned that, the path of thinking the institution isn't the main story, that charitable economies are something that need to be rethought and re reformed, And that social workers could think of their work as social, uh, really connective. That's still a pretty radical idea. And it gets you in a lot of trouble. And so it's an interesting question, which is when there's not a thumb on the levers of power that says this is the right thing to do, it's pretty vulnerable. I wonder about that. That's a thing I don't have an answer for, is how would someone retain the power to make something good happen without unintentionally creating the problems that power creates. So it's still an open question to me
so these two questions don't really go together, but I want to ask him. Let's see what you do with it. Okay. I have this framing in my head from hearing your voice and reading your words and the idea that is really like sticking with me is this idea of exchanging the story of safety for a larger story of loving glances of an entire community. I love that so much. So I would love to hear you talk about that. And if you could relate it to your love of bourbon.
Yeah, okay. How do we relate? Safety is a huge concern for human beings who have an intellectual impairment, everybody's always worried. How do we keep them safe? And this is true, we don't want anybody to be abused or neglected or hurt and that has happened throughout history, The problem is that we farm that responsibility out to the place where that happens. I mean, if you drive up to Orient or go over to Longview, these are places that are within Cincinnati. Longview is in Cincinnati. Orient is 90 minutes up the road. These are the places where human beings with disabilities were buried without names. The new article of the Atlantic actually has a cover story about institutionalization of people with disabilities and the asylums that that are in the horror movies. So there's horrible things that have happened under institutional control. And I can give you more benign example from Starfire. We have these interesting forms we have to turn to the state of Ohio. If something happens to somebody, we have to fill out an unusual incident form, and we have to write up what happened. If something really bad happens, we have to write up a major unusual incident form, so we call them UIs and MUIs. And we have to send those up to the state, and they have to make sure that we're not putting people at risk, so when we had our group based model, our building with our big groups, 150 people coming every day, we figured out that we were writing a MUI UI form for one out of every 400 service hours. So every 400 hours that we were giving service to people, we had some incident happen and it was usually somebody got lost because I was focusing on the rest of the group. Somebody tripped over the parking barrier because I was focused on helping somebody else getting out of the van. Uh, Somebody thought somebody else was their girlfriend or boyfriend and made the mistake of making a move and I had to write that up, there were things that happened because we were in the setting that made things happen. It diminished attention. It diminished personal care and personal support. And so, When we shifted to only doing the one on one person at a time, one on one work, we shifted to that, we found that we only had one of those reports every 4, 600 hours. So, that's some data for you, is that our program was actually more dangerous to people with disabilities than our work when we were in the community. Now, it doesn't mean that they weren't also experiencing some tough stuff out there. We just don't know, right? But we can guarantee you that in our building, tough stuff happened. And that was because we were segregating them. So we did come to the understanding that people are safest in the presence of many loving glances, as you said. And so what we're looking for is constant checking in. How you doing? What you been up to? And we're asking people in the community and families to say, Look, you don't have to like change or adopt somebody with a disability. You don't have to like change their whole life, but you could check in. Does anybody have fresh bruises or where did the gift cards go that they got for Christmas and, how about that staff? That's kind of grumpy and not so nice. You know, are those some things that a community could learn to just check in on? And so in a sense, that's what we're looking for is those glances where people can be like, I don't know if that's right. Tim needs me to go check in on this, I think. So, that's our shift is safety can only come from people that care enough to ask what's going on versus people that say, well, I wrote my check and star fires got it covered, right? Uh, how does that relate to my love bourbon? I'll tell you, I grew up in Kentucky, still live in Kentucky, and in 8th grade, Father Bosher took our 8th grade class to Maker's Mark, which is an interesting thing for an 8th grade class trip. We didn't go to Chicago or D. C., but that's where we went. And so from then on, it was like, this is our story, but I think that what's interesting About bourbon. It's a sip and drink, you don't shoot it. Some people do. I've done that before. It's just not a smart way to do it. You know, It's a sip and drink. And what's nice about a sip and drink is it takes time. It takes a while to finish that drink and in between you're talking and you're getting into the softer parts of your stories with each other. And so I, I think that's what's beautiful about it is it, it takes time. And I think that's what safety comes from, right? Is it, We've known each other long enough that I think about you, there's that great saying out of sight, out of mind, Well, if somebody's not seen, they're not thought about. And so if they're in my building or in my program, they're not seen by their neighbors. So then they're out of mind. And we also say things like, Oh, I've been thinking about you. You've been on my heart, so if I can't be thinking about you, I can't be caring about you. And so for us, it's like sight. Mind and heart. So if you're out of sight, you don't get to the mind. You're not top of mind. You're not in someone's heart. And so if you're insight, there is the potential to be top of mind. There is the potential to be in someone's heart. So that's where we get to it. And, if you cheers and drink a little whiskey on the way, I think that'd be fine too.