Introduction to The Connected Community (Part 1)

Cormac Russell, interviewed by his cohost Sacha DeWolfe, shares his perspective on The Connected Community and provides a synopsis of what the podcast will highlight for listeners.

Thanks for listening to our first episode. Sacha based much of her conversation with Cormac on the contents of his new book, The Connected Community - Discovering the Health, Wealth, and Power of Neighborhoods. 

 You can read a book review  here.

Other books and thinkers referenced in the first episode include:

1. At the beginning of the episode, Sacha mentions Community Engaged Learning, and you can find out more here.
2. Parker Palmer, who wrote the Foreword to The Connected Community, Cormac mentions one of Parker’s most influential books: The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. 
3. Abraham Maslow’s Hammer: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” This famous quote by Abraham Maslow refers to a concept commonly known as the 'law of instrument' or Maslow's Hammer. It refers to an over-reliance on a familiar or favourite tool.
4. Sacha draws parallels between the teachings of author, theorist, educator and social critic bell hooks key insights from Asset-Based Community Development. 

If you’d like to learn more about Cormac’s current thinking about ABCD’s place in the world, check out a recent keynote address he delivered in Vancouver to an audience of 1,200 healthcare professionals and patient advocates from across British Columbia:  https://healthqualitybc.ca/resources/cormac-russell-plenary-presentation-quality-forum-2023/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:35

I'm looking forward to speaking to members of the world and learning with the number of possible redesigning public services, non-for-profits, and the communities that we all live in. Welcome to this, our first episode of the Connected Community, where Sasha DeWolf and I, Cormac Russell, will be in conversation with lots and lots of really interested people from around the world who are not just thinking about the connected community, but are living it in their lives, whether that's from an institutional perspective out into community-centered practice or folks who are living from the edges, trying to build community with others in their lives at the center of local neighborhoods, communities, favelas, and different meanings of community all over the world. This is a shout out to all our listeners. This is your first time meeting us, so we want to spend at least two or more episodes giving you the opportunity to meet us, your hosts. Our job is to curate what the connected community means on Monday morning and throughout the week in meaningful ways. We can't do that on our own, but we're going to start these next few episodes by giving you the chance to get to know Sasha and to get to know me Cormac, your hosts, and then we'll start inviting new people to come join us. Now we thought a good way of starting would be that Sasha would uh begin the process this episode by interviewing me and asking me lots of questions that uh some of which she's told me and some of which I have no clue are coming at me. Sasha is going to be herself, and that's my commitment to you as well. We'll try and keep this as conversational and as real as possible. So, with that, Sasha, over to you to say hi and then to uh give me a grilling.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Okay, thank you. Um, so welcome everybody. I um am a professor at Mount Allison University, which is uh, I think in the introduction I noted is in uh New Brunswick, Canada. And part of, I guess, my learning journey is to embed concepts of, I guess, community-engaged learning, but asset-based community development and experiential learning and all of those aspects of learning and knowledge that may not be easily, readily available in institutions like uh schools within the four walls. And so I'm hoping um today, just with some sort of, I guess, critical thinking questions uh for Cormac, mostly around his book that he co-authored with uh John McKnight called The Connected Community: Discovering the Health, Wealth, and Power of Neighborhoods. Um, I think this book is wonderful for anybody that is trying to understand um the sort of concepts of um community-engaged learning, um, asset-based community development. And um just from there, Cormac, I wanted to start with a quote that resonated with me from the foreword, I believe, in your book. And that is that we feel trapped by powerful external forces that make disconnection our lot, from segregated neighborhoods to economic forces that deprive us of personal and communal time. So I'm wondering, Cormac, what what is meant by that?

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Thanks, Sasha. Uh it's interesting because the foreword was written by Parker Parmer. And of course, Parker is a wonderful um elder in a number of movements. So he's probably best known for his book, The Courage to Teach. So many of our listeners who are interested in, you know, uh how education can be used for liberation uh would really know Parker's work very well. But he's also written books uh about democracy, about community organizing. And so he's a really interesting bridge builder between many of the listeners that we have, right, who may be listening from the perspective of how do we think differently about health or policing or mental health or whatever, you know. So we've got a wide base of people. But here he's saying to us, you know what? We're all, regardless of what our professions might be or we where we work in institutions, we are all residents somewhere. We all live somewhere, we're all part of a local place. We don't live on land, even if we have connections on land. And that kind of recognition that many of us are almost like um tourists on a tour bus with the with the curtains pulled across, being conveyed almost from where we live to where we work, if we're in in paid employment, or you know, there isn't that sense of our common life in the neighborhood has been marginalized. So there's very little gas left in the tank to use that term when we come home from work, if that's that's our experience. And so he's really trying to highlight this that somehow the way we've organized in modern industrial societies is hostile to this idea of interdependence at really hyper-local, small, bounded place level. And and and he's saying, please pay attention to that. That's that's not okay. Um, and I want you to be disturbed and disquieted about that. So he's kind of he's asking us uh to become conscious of that, and uh also highlighting Sasha that many of us live in a culture which numbs that out, it etherizes us to that level of awareness or that analysis.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

I think one of the advantages, I guess, and Cormac, you know this, that with my role in teaching, is that one of the major advantages of utilizing, I guess, community as a learning environment is that there isn't something that's readily assembled there. And, you know, to struggle against, I guess, institutional maintenance of power and truth. Uh, the community is just such a beautiful place for for that to flourish. And I think that sort of moves to another idea, uh, again, that I've sort of pulled from your from your book or your thoughts, I guess, is that what do you mean in the concept of uh communities sort of learning together from the inside out? What is meant by that? And how does that sort of correlate with the the quote um that we feel trapped by powerful external forces?

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Yeah, it's a it's a great question and a great place to start, I think, even the um the journey that we're going to be on with listeners and uh with the folks that we invite as conversation partners over the next few uh years, hopefully, together. Look, I I think one of the challenges is if we have a dominant narrative, a dominant story as societies that says the only way my health is going to get better is if I experience uh, you know, an intervention from a doctor, or this idea that my health is in a, you know, it's in a hospital, if you like, or my education is in a school, or the reform of our criminal justice challenges are within prisons or the judiciary. So all of these are stories that say that change happens because outside interventions get their act together, and they from outside in do something to me, for me, and maybe most progressive ones with me, right? So that that's kind of the story. So that's a story that says change is external, it happens from outside in. Um, and it's it's the big man narrative. It says, you know, um uh we just need stronger leadership. If only we had better institutions. The government needs to get its act together. And it's alluring because there's some truth to that. You know, they have work to do clearly. But what we're doing in saying that is we're externalizing our power. We're kind of almost outsourcing uh issues and we're saying, well, we expect, if you like, that um our safety is in the response time of the police. The reality though is it's not. And we therefore, in a sense, are challenged to think about, well, what's our role? Now, if we have a story that says change happens externally and it happens to us or for us, then our role is to be passive. At best, it's to consume the service that we got externally given to us, and uh, if we're not happy to complain. So, you know, we have different words for that, uh, advocating for consumer rights and complaining if we're not happy. They're legitimate. But the difficulty with that is it totally neutralizes us as key actors, as agents of change, as people who can define our own desire with each other uh in our own language. And what we're saying is it's not that these outside actors shouldn't actually act, but if they're going to be accountable, if we're going to ensure they're democratic and they're actually relevant, then we have to define our role first. So part of the challenge is that we have turned democracy upside down, Sasha. So what I mean by that in plain English uh is that the role of the citizen is being defined as that which happens after the important work of the professional is done, right? So we talk about what's the role in in the UK if you travel on the public transit, right? You'll hear uh announcements in the airports on public transit in public spaces, they'll say the police announcement is if you see a crime, then the mantra is see it, say it, sort it. So this mantra means if you see it, then report it and the police will sort it. Okay. Well, actually, there's a lot of evidence that says in our neighborhoods what keeps us safe is not the number of police and the response time, but how willing we are as neighbors to get to know each other by first name and do things together. That's actually what produces safety. What the police do is they they deal with the opposite of safety, which is crime. Um, it's the same with health. We know that what creates health is our social connections, our sense of agency with each other, our collective power. So it's not medicine that produces health. Medicine deals with, if it works well, it deals with sickness. Uh, what creates health is community. Um, and then that's supplemented with good interventions. We need our expertise, we need our doctors. I'm not saying otherwise. But it's like we've got it back to front. In a democracy, the role of the professional or the police officer should be defined as that which happens after the important work of the citizen is done. So you see how we flipped it in society? That's not the dominant narrative. So the a simple way of saying all of that, because I've used a lot of words to say start change from inside out. And that's to say, start with what you have, get it connected and mobilize. Once you say, you know, here are some things that we could do in the local context together with near neighbors, then it becomes much easier for us to say to external actors, and here's some of the things you can do to be useful to help that along. A final thought on this, because we'll keep coming back to it, I think, is to say that uh a conceptual way to hang everything that I've said is to imagine a three-lane swimming pool, right? Where whatever your challenge is, right, whatever the issue is, whether it's education or it's caring for uh elders who are experiencing isolation, whatever. Okay, I would say it's useful to think about it along this three-lane swimming pool. So your first question is to ask what is it the communities can do themselves if we remove the barriers? So, what is it they can do from ground up inside out? Okay, they define it in their language, uh, you know, whatever the issue they feel is, they define the solution in their language, but they're the primary actors, they're the key actors. Then the second lane of the swimming pool is after we know what's going on in the first lane, the second lane is it's what can they do with a little bit of help? But where that help is defined in a non-colonial sense. So it's about being on tap, not being on top. It's about servant leadership. How can I, as a professional, enable the community to be in the driving seat? What supplementary support can I offer? What things can we do to, for example, instead of incarcerating kids to create community alternatives to incarceration and then use our resources? So, for example, when a senior police officer gets a call in a neighborhood in Chicago from an elder who's frightened because there's gang activity in the neighborhood, that senior officer will say, We're going to come out, my myself and a fellow colleague who are trained in facilitation of conversations around peace circles. And we're going to invite the gang members, and if you're willing, you and some of those who are frightened to be in conversation. And we're going to hold that space until we can find a way that you guys can actually live together and contribute to the safety of your community together. We'll act as facilitators. That's the second lane of the swimming pool. So, this classic idea of enforcement first. So, you know, where the where the frightened resident reports, outsources the problem to an enforcement officer. The officer enforces the uh strong arm of the law, and the young person and the elder are now completely separated from each other, and the young person becomes pathologized. You're a problem that needs to be fixed by the institution. And the elder goes, Oh, well done, you. I pay my rates, I pay my taxes, I gotten a service. So they change that narrative. The third lane, final lane, is there are some things we need done from outside in. You know, there are very few communities that want to collect their own garbage or, you know, want to figure out how to design the curriculum of their educational system within their school. They understand that there are things that we do need sorted out from outside in, and that's okay. But the essence of what I'm saying here is we can't know as outside actors what communities need until we know, and communities know what they have. You know, so a shorthand way of thinking about this is if you start with crime, police will be the key actors. If you start with safety and justice, community will be the key actors.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

That was a nice, very good point at the end. Um, so I just want to go back to this quote for a minute, and then I'm gonna move away from it. So when Peter says we feel trapped by powerful external forces that make disconnection our lot, and and you just touched on this as well in what you just said. So I guess two things here. One is that neighborhoods are the units of change. I mean, and aside from that, just the context of how you ended what you just said there has could we could talk about that for for a whole hour on its own. But the neighborhoods are the units of change, in that you mention also in your book, and I hope I hope people read the book, and I hope I'm I'm saying this in a way that uh isn't sort of disservicing the reader or the viewer listener because they haven't read it, but anyway, in the book you mentioned an institutionalist society. Um, so I just want to talk about those two concepts and how they interweave.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. Um you know, I think that whole thing of feeling fragmented or you know, that that sense of feeling segregated or separated is something that nearly everybody can relate to at different stages in their lives. And there's periods even within our own lives where if we have school-going children, for example, the sense of connection to community will feel very different. For and this just I'm illustrating, I don't want to generalize, then for perhaps if your kids have left home, uh, if you do have kids, and you know, you're aging in place, but you're finding that you know your connections through work or through school or you know, through a faith-based connection have have become more remote. Well, then how do you actually build relationships? How do you stay connected? And I think increasingly that's become a real conundrum for a lot of people. So our connections are perhaps through our workplaces, if we if if we're we're in a work context. Um, and I'll give you an example of this really briefly, because I think it's important to, I suppose, ground this in stories and in real life. So I had a friend many years ago who was incredibly uh committed to the not-for-profit sector. So in the city where he worked, he spent a lot of time hosting different practitioners, bringing people together. Um every evening he would be at some event, you know, but it was all related to work, to not-for-profit organizations working on projects that were doing good to or for the community. But actually, he lived in a neighborhood where he knew nobody, he had no connections, and it didn't matter as long as he was at work and he had a car and he could drive and so on and so forth. Then his second wife, who, you know, he was very, very devoted to, um, experienced early onset dementia. And when, you know, she became um quite unwell quite quickly. Um, but it was her express wish and his that she wouldn't be uh institutionalized, that she would have framed it. So she didn't want to go into a congregate care setting. She wanted to stay at home for as long as possible. And uh he wanted to care uh for her. So essentially he took early retirement to begin to fulfill his promise to her. They're, you know, a devoted couple, it's it's very admirable, right? But unfortunately, he lives in a city where there are very, very few services that will actually enable you as a carer and as somebody who's trying to live well with dementia at home, right? So he suddenly goes from being, you know, the great convener of all of these evening parties and get-togethers and meetings and whatever, to within three weeks people just stopped calling him from his various work networks. Because despite the fact that he thought he was deeply connected, the connections were around work. So folks, you know, they met him for a few drinks after he retired, but eventually they couldn't quite get a sense of what to talk to him about. And some of what he was wanting to talk about was actually deeply uncomfortable. It was about, you know, end of life care, it was about fragility, it was about loneliness. And so within six months, all of his connections through work ceased. R1. And that person, you know, had had a busy life. And so very practical things like getting help walking his dog, um, getting out for 10-15 minutes, having a neighbor sit with his wife because she didn't want paid professionals coming in being proxy friends. You know, she was happy to accept a service or an intervention, but uh but not uh somebody who was paid to care for her, became deeply problematic. He was unaware, he was etherized to the absence of connections in his neighborhood until he needed them because we don't know what we don't have until we need it, and we can't reach it, we can't find it, it isn't available. We don't know what we don't know. So, in that sense, uh it's really interesting that um a lot of people are not just institutionalized as service recipients, but they can actually also be institutionalized as service providers, right? So, this kind of um uh assumption, there's there's uh a thinker whose name won't come to me quite now, but I'll I'll remember it in a few moments. But uh he he talks a lot about this idea that in the 60s and 70s we brought our bodies to work or before the 1960s. And in the 1970s, we brought our bodies to work and we were alienated as a result of that. But now, bizarrely, it's gotten worse. We're now expected to bring our very souls and our minds to work as well. So we talk about bringing your whole self to work. And he's our argument is actually that's not always a good idea because you want to keep some back for your family, for your friends, for your networks, for your passions, for your areas of interest. You don't owe your workplace the whole of you. You know, that's that's a social contract that's a step too far. But we we valorize an awful lot of this because, in a sense, we've prized the value of monetized work, you know, the idea of being paid to work. So that's a way of saying that we've all become institutionalized in one way or another. That institutions are much more a part of how our lives are governed and mediated than we realize. You get up in the morning, you go to the bathroom, you opium medicine cabinet, every single thing in there has been regulated by one institution or another. I'm not saying it's right or it's wrong, but it's the institution's in your medicine cabinet. It's in the standard of the mattress, so it's in your bedroom. It's it when you go down, you turn the cereal boxes, it's there. You know, a hundred years ago, that wouldn't have been the case. So, not right or wrong, but in all kinds of ways, institutions are a big feature of our lives. If you speak to somebody in Canada over the age of 50, and you speak to somebody else over under the age of 35, their experience of early childhood would be very, very different. So many of those over the age of 50 may not necessarily have gone to school as early or been on a school campus from the kindergarten age, right? Um, certainly by 35, that that became standard. So people would have migrated into the campus of the institution of education from a very, very young age, much, much younger than they would say 50 uh years ago. So these are movements. We can debate whether they're right or wrong. They largely haven't been debated at all. In fact, the opposite is true. Mostly they're considered to be good. You know, the idea of getting somebody into a kindergarten is really good. Well, let's say it's neither good nor bad, but it's certainly worth reflecting upon. Where is the community? Where is the family? How does that get connected? How do we understand the different operating systems between an institution and an association, right? And what I would say is that we've begun to conflate them, right? So, like my friend, he thought, well, all of my associations are in work. When I retire, they'll just follow on and we'll just keep those associations. But actually, what ends up happening for a lot of people is they struggle to transition from one operating system, which is the institutional world, where I'm a doctor or I'm an educationalist or you know, whatever, to the world of the association. And it might be helpful for people if I talk a little bit about what the difference between those two are, because I think that will explain what I mean by we live in a very institutionalized world. So a way of thinking about this is uh Abraham Maslow, the famous um humanistic psychologist, said if all you have is a hammer, all you'll tend to see are nails, right? So if all we have when we think about change or addressing problems are institutional programmatic services or interventions like that, all we'll tend to do is to see every problem in society as a problem that needs to be fixed with a service or a program. Okay. And what I'm arguing for is that while that tool is useful in some instances, it will not solve all the problems we have as a society. There is another tool for change, which is the associational tool, if you like, the community tool, which is not about money. So the glue that holds our institutions together is money. And if you don't believe this, stop paying your staff for a month and see what happens, right? Uh, the glue that holds our communities together is trust. And this is why when you offer to pay somebody in a neighborhood to do you a favor, they'll kind of it becomes an awkward kind of transaction. Sometimes it's appropriate, but often people go, no, no, no, no, no, I did that as a neighbor. So what they're trying to communicate to us there is this is an operating system that's different than the institutional world. Here we're not talking about contract, we're talking about covenant. Here we're not talking about you being a consumer of my service. We're talking about you as a neighbor, as citizen. Here we're not talking about you being needy and needing to be fixed. We're talking about you as somebody who can help me and collaborate with me. Let's try and figure out this problem together. So they're two very different realities. And a lot of what we're trying to do in this podcast is we're trying to advocate, we're not for or against institutions, right? But we're trying to advocate for not having a monopoly over one or the other. If we've got a monopoly where the institution has all the best solutions and the community is seen to be the poor cousin, that's a problem. And we need to speak out loud about that, be critical, and that's what you and I are trying to do, right? We're trying to raise critical consciousness about that. So, and and in the same way, I would argue that if everybody was walking around talking about all the solutions should be small, they should be local, we should have no institutions, we should have no top-down services. I would equally say we need a podcast that brings back the value of services. The issue here is we have swung the pendulum in the direction where it's almost like playing teeter-totter with an elephant, and the elephant is the institution, and the community on the other side literally can get no swing, it can get no purchase. And what we want to try to do is say, hey, let's remember the power of community again. So it's not an either-or. And I think we do that actually, final thought, we'll reduce the level of burnout among our professions. Because I think what we're asking our police to do is to do the work of community and of policing. What we're asking our doctors to do is the work of community uh health creation and the physicians or the clinicians' work. And actually, we're burning our experts and our specialists out because we're asking them to do the impossible.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

Yeah, and I'll add to that that the education system, and I think in you mentioned this actually, uh, Cormac, in one of your prior books, I think it was Rekindling Democracy, talk about Jamie Vollmer's book, where uh schools can't do it alone, where he sort of look at these decades in a timeline and how the education system, whether intentional or not, has taken on many of the roles in community. And that resonates with me because I'm an educator. And I see that in in the province I live in, where educators are becoming more of social service providers and taking on the role of community. And I think that goes with, you know, the third swimming lane that you talked about. I think it goes with operating systems and and how they can control the narrative. Um, I think it has, you know, and it isn't about, I spent 10 years in government prior to moving to the university. And I try not to speak from an anti-government perspective because it isn't about that. It's it is more about mobilizing as a community, and I guess not demanding, but letting the government know what it is that that you want and desire at the community level, as opposed to being told what it is that you need. You know, and just in addition to that, when you're talking about the kindergarten and those types of things, I think about Foucault and the idea of surveilling and regulating a body and how it weakens the self and you become this sort of docile part of this hog and this machine. And, you know, it's it's it's fostering the idea for me in in education that students are citizens and that, you know, this bell that goes off and you're supposed to change your thinking, or you're told when you can eat and when you can use a bathroom and and all of those things, the community, again, as a learning environment, sort of struggles and pushes against all of that. So um I think that's an important. You said a lot of things there that were really important that I could talk about, but I just wanted to sort of give my thoughts on that. I guess as a final thought, and and the idea that, you know, we are going to be bringing in speakers from across the world to highlight what it is that is happening across the world in this area and that are working and that are innovative and that are nourishing to community. And so I think it's important just for the listener to know that it's not just our opinion here, that you'll actually be experiencing um others and how they're doing this. Um, Cormac, I just wanted to get your thoughts on in your book again, sorry, and I'll move away from that. You talk about, I guess, three main acts or points, and that is discover, connect, and mobilize. And so can you just speak to that for a few minutes?

SPEAKER_00 31:22

I'm happy to. So, one of the things, and again, like you say, Sasha, we're we're trying to understand what a community-centered approach would look like from many different vantage points. So, you know, we we will be speaking with people, for example, who have reimagined hospital care uh and have done so through a community-centered lens. So it's quite helpful when you think about the the framework of Discover, Connect, Mobilize, um, to also consider the their opposites in a sense. So if you've worked both as a professional, let's say, uh, delivering as opposed to discovering, so delivering a service, delivering health or delivering education as distinct from what we're talking about, which is to start by first of all discovering what's there before you deliver what is in your particular basket of offers. Then what you end up doing is surprising yourself and actually those that live there as well. Now, there can be, I mean, let's not be semantic, uh, you know, about what community means. It means whatever you say it means. But for argument's sake, and we can come back to the this idea of the neighborhood uh as a really powerful way of thinking about change. The discovery phase is about saying we live in a world where a lot of what we might be trying to discover is a diagnostic, you know, let's diagnose a problem. So this isn't the discovery of the whole person. This is the discovery of a person as an it, not uh a thou or a you or you know, an amazing uh gifted human being. So the discovery starts with let's find out what problem can be fixed and then you know, um provide a service uh to address it. Well, when we talk about discovery, we mean something very, very different. We mean something that's really about liberation, that's about the person discovering that they have gifts, skills, talents, experience, and knowledge, which are absolutely essential uh to the democratic uh adventure. Um, so it kind of we don't start the discovery with what do you need? We start the discovery with what are you needed for? And when you ask that question, when you shift the narrative from you are needy to you are needed, albeit that you all we all have needs. I don't want to minimize those, but you are needed, you have a contribution, then it's about discovering what that contribution is, what that genius is, what those gifts are, um, what you care about enough to act upon. And that immediately takes you outside of the role of just being an individual. So we're not just discovering that so you can then go on the marketplace and accumulate private wealth, but we're asking that so we can understand how you can contribute to public health as well, right? So, what is it you might be able to contribute to the well-being of the neighborhood? What would you like to contribute? To really understand that, that discovery has to take you beyond the individual. So it's not just about lifestyle change anymore, it's about what's in and around your community that you could get involved in, you could connect with, you could contribute to, you would like to contribute to. So that's a whole discovery phase. And what's really neat and exciting about the idea of working, say, at the scale of a neighborhood, is if somebody came along to me and said, Cormac, uh, I'm calling in from Dublin, Ireland uh today, and uh Sasha's calling in from New Brunswick, she could tell you a little bit more uh in detail uh about where exactly she's calling in from and indeed uh honoring the territory she's calling in from. But for me, if somebody was to say to me, Cormac, you're very much talking about community, so what are you doing within the city of Dublin? I think that scale is too big, Sasha, or to say, you know, you're part of a community of educators. What are you doing to feed into that community? Again, that scale is pretty big for most people. But if somebody was to say to me, Cormac, you live in the neighborhood of Clanski, and you know, your kids go to school there and you walk in that neighborhood and you know your neighbors, what are the things you'd like to do if three of your neighbors helped you? That's a really cool scale at which I can think about things like uh other neighbors. I can think about the local economy. So, for example, I could say, you know, hey, we know an awful lot of folks in our neighborhood can't afford a first car for their family, let alone a second car. How about we organize to discover how we can organize our economy in a better way, right? So this is what moves us into the second phase of community building, which is about, well, we've discovered all of these potentials, let's let's connect them in a better way. So, say the problem is cost of living crisis, which is a current issue for many uh throughout the world at the moment, because of the Ukraine um invasion, because of oil price, you know, a whole range of issues internationally, which mean cost of living has just skyrocketed, right? Fuel prices crazy, so on and so forth. Well, in Westport, uh in Ireland, where I live, in the west of Ireland, 6,000 people live in the neighborhood of Westport, in the village of Westport. They're now talking about having a fleet of electric vehicles, so you know, where they will share those vehicles, taking the financial burden off families. So here's a really good example of families connecting and making the neighborhood the economic unit of change. You could take the same view, you know, the teacher who says, Hey, let's get out of the class, let's go and sit and listen to an elder in the neighborhood telling us some of the oral history about this place, right? That's a teacher who understands that education shouldn't be bound up in the fortress called the school. That educate, it takes a village to educate a child. Um, and so you know, they become a connector of that child, and there was, and and and then they facilitate the conversation to say to the child, hey, why don't you tell uh some of the elders here about some of the things that you know about the neighborhood? So it becomes deeply connected. So the connecting piece is really powerful because in every neighborhood there are building blocks to a good life, to use that more loosely, and most of them are disconnected. So you have the strengths, the resources of the local people who live there. That's one building block. You have the associations, the clubs, the groups, and we talked about this idea that they're a different operating system when they're functional and they work well. They're kind of fluid, they're quite generic, they're quite spontaneous. And so it feels to me like, you know, they're also local institutions. That's another building block. But it's the local fire station, it's the library, it's the local post office, it's not these big, big, distant institutions, these very, very hyper-local. It's the corner shop, the mama and papa stores. And then you have the place itself, the various heritage, cultures, rituals, ceremonies, um, and the economy, right? So all of these are really important building blocks which enable a good life. They enable a just life, a wise life, uh, you know, a well life. But we often look because we think faraway hills are greener, so we don't discover what's within door knocking uh distance from us. We don't we don't see that there's a a bounty or a treasure chest sitting under our noses. And that's particularly true if the neighborhoods we live in have been mapped by misery. You know, if if if somebody with expert knowledge around uh how to codify a neighborhood says, this is the most deprived neighborhood in your province, right? And because it is so deprived, you are deserving of funding. Because, of course, that's the way funding works in society, right? You've got to prove that you're more pathological and more needy and more messed up than your neighbor in order. So it's like a reverse beauty contest, right? So you literally are having to confess your brokenness in order to receive help, right? So we're not connecting people uh by deficiencies, we're connecting people by capabilities, by capacities, by desire, by possibility. Does that mean we ignore the person living who's street involved? No, actually. It's saying let's lift the label of homeless off them and see that they have a contribution. And they're much more likely to connect with the community if we valorize their contribution than they are if we just simply give them the keys to an apartment, but they don't have a sense of community, right? So it's not actually housing first, it's community first, with housing wrapped around that in a way that makes sense. So that's what connection really means. And then I think it's important to say finally, it's all well and good to discover the amazing things we have in our communities, not to minimize the challenges, but so that we could use those amazing things to address the challenges. It's amazing to put those connections together in resourceful, creative ways. But we have to mobilize, we actually have to do things together in order to create culture change, in order to build the ritual, the civic muscle, if you like, that says, hey, we know how to get things done here. We know how to be productive, how to create change. So, you know, you can have somebody in a neighborhood who discovers that there's an elder who is an amazing storyteller, and you can connect that elder with a potential group of young people who'd love to hear their story. But if that elder lives in a part of the neighborhood where they're afraid to come out after dark, then we need to mobilize to, you know, how do we resolve that? So it might be the local um lacrosse team that practice locally in the community say, hey, how about we respond to that by practicing every Tuesday and Thursday evening in that neighborhood and inviting elders to come out with some coffee and actually cheer us on, right? And afterwards, let's go to wherever it is they want to go in the neighborhood. So what you're doing there is you're mobilizing and you're teaching the community, it is a key actor, not just a thinker, but again, or just a mapper, but now we're acting. We produce things around here. We don't just consume things, we produce things. We are asset-based, we're resource rich. So all of the narrative that maps us by what we don't have, the half-empty part of the glass, be that as it may, well, look, we also have a half-full part of the glass, and that's our chosen starting point, because that's what's going to ensure that we really we make sustainable, enduring change happen.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

So in there's so much at play that I guess people may not be cognizant of, myself included, right? That there are truths that are maintained, there is power that's maintained, there are systems of dependency that have been constructed that we are, I don't want to say victims of, but we are a part of. And I we'll probably get into this a bit later, but with my background, I'm a Mi'kmaq person from uh Natawaganeg First Nation in this territory. And my lived reality was is that I don't want to say I'm defined by damage and deficit, but that is the narrative, you know. And if you are trying to better your community, you do have to submit proposals to the federal government, for example, that identify your damage and your deficit and your pathologies. And, you know, it turns into communities that are serviced under the auspice of help, but are feeding this machine of damage. And I think it's Bell Hooks that talks about I'm tired of only being able to speak my pain, right? And I think you talked about good life. So I just want to end on this note, and that in your book, I'm not to bring up the book again, but in the book, at the end of each chapter, Cormac, I think there's nine good life points, like key points to how to how to live the good life, right? And and one of those is within this type of conceptualizing the world or philosophical underpinning, however you want to frame it, is that we don't need to wait for a disaster to do this. So can you just maybe give a little closing comment on that point?

SPEAKER_00 44:05

Happy to. Yes. So I think what's interesting is when we think about our good life from or through the lens of being a citizen. And by that we don't mean people with papers or documents. We're talking about people who are defining themselves as I am in a community of other people where I recognize I am interdependent, not just with human people, but with the non-human people too. You know, uh in 1972, Christopher D. Stone, a legal scholar, wrote a wonderful uh paper entitled Should Trees Have Standing? Right? And uh, you know, it seemed a wild idea in 1972, 50 years ago, but actually um it's not so wild an idea now. So the government of New Zealand in 2016 and 17 actually um divested authority, the government is authority over a national park and gave that national park standing in its own right on its own merits. So, you know, we don't want to just talk about a good life as just a human experience. Um, there's eight million species on the planet, we're the only species that can be in a room and not show up. Uh, so that's an interesting, um, an interesting conundrum. But in order for us to have a good life, a decent life, where we have a sense of there is enough for us, our family, and uh and others, and that we're not extractive to others and to the planet in that sense. We have probably since the age of four been educated into thinking in order for me to win my good life, because of course it it's a model of scarcity, right? It's only there's only so much good life going around, Sasha. So sorry, if I'm gonna have it, then you're just gonna have to do without. So that's kind of the story. So it's the narrative of scarcity. For me to get an A in class when I'm four, sorry, you know, there's gonna have to be D's and there's gonna have to be E's, and that's just the way the world rocks, you know. So that's that's the model. And and I guess what we're saying in the book is that that is not a given, right? We do not have to just accept that any more than we have to accept that the map that people impose upon us, um, those that we call kin, those that share a place with us, um, those that we identify with, um, those who will for protected uh characteristics or whatever the reason we identify, we do not have to accept being defined externally by somebody else's map. Because quite honestly, the map that they have is never the territory. How can they possibly know what the territory is unless they live there, sleep, they're 24, 7, 3, 6, 5? It's it's not, you know, it's just not doable. So nobody can know our lives in the way that we know our lives, right? So, but then the question is not so much, you know, what's right or wrong, but you know, that old uh ancient philosophical question of what's the good life, right? And and in that sense, we think of the good life from the perspective of being a citizen, not just being a consumer with possessive individualism and the focus on I'm a unit of production and consumption in the economy, in the marketplace, but I am somebody who has a gift to give my community and many other diverse communities, multiple communities across my life course. So, how how do I do that? What's interesting is in all kinds of ways now, the the evidence backs us up that when we think about a good life, even say, for example, from a health perspective, through the lens of the social and political determinants of health, clearly the evidence, epidemiology is telling us you can't really meaningfully talk about that without talking about that from a community perspective. So you can't just speak about it from the perspective of the isolated individual. So a good life is uh social rather than an individualistic or isolated conversation. But the beauty of it is it also includes every person, and it includes every person for their gifts, for their contributions as well as their needs. And I suppose the reason we wanted to end each chapter with um a key to the good life is we think that if people remember that in order for us to have a good life, there's work that we can do together with near neighbors that isn't um the sole purview or the monopoly of external actors, but is something we can take in hand. We don't have to do it in isolation of the help uh for you know external actors. That's the great beauty of it. So it's not an anarchistic observation, but it's about changing the order. And what we've begun to see really, quite obviously, is that when you look at communities that are aging well in place, that are thinking about, you know, making sure that their dollars are cycling around the local economy three and four times more than their neighboring communities, where people aren't dying prematurely, where kids have a sense of vibrancy, where they have a sense that they can actually make and do and create things, uh, where our elders can age in place at home for as long as they possibly want, um, where our environment doesn't look torn and cold and ragged and cancerous, all those things, you know, these markers of a good life. What you begin to realize is there's something common in all of them. And what's common is that they've realized that they are the first responders. And actually, just if I may mention, I think that's what we began to see some of again in COVID. So COVID's really interesting because as COVID-19 kicked in, and particularly during lockdown, I think what people began to realize again was that they were the first responders because the institutional world were saying our hospitals are going to overrun. Your children can't be thought in school because it's not safe. So many of the functions, almost like a hydraulic effect, you know, many of the functions that had been pushed over into the institutional space were rapidly, almost without warning, unceremoniously, relocated back into the other piston of society, the other tool for change, which is community. And what's interesting is that we can't actually experience a good life simply by being given services. So you can't service somebody into a good life. You can give them all of the money, all of the services, all of the material stuff that you could imagine, right? That won't automatically result in them having a good life in their own personal subjective experience of a good life or in their communities. So you can go into a neighborhood and give them any amount of money per capita, you can put all of the police that they ask for, all of the doctors they ask for, all the education, the best of all, that won't result in a good life. Because one of the key things that's critical in a good life is that we have a sense of agency, individual and collective agency. We made this together. And if that's missing and we become passive and we become subjects of surveillance, then we will not experience a good life. We may have very good services, but a bit like two swallows do not, as summer, make good services, does not make a good life. And that's the equation that we need to get our heads around.

SPEAKER_01 51:42

Thank you very much. It's um your words are very meaningful and aesthetic. So it's I was trying not to sort of engage in a conversation too much because I really wanted to get your thoughts out there into the world without me interjecting. But later in episodes, I likely will. So very much appreciated. Uh, I think just on the final point there, um, with a good life, and in my context, being a member of, I guess, a specialized minority or whatever it is that we're referred to now in uh this province, is that oftentimes I see celebrations on campus, not celebrations, sorry, events structured around trauma, traumatic events. I see, you know, missing and murdered indigenous women, that event. You see, Indian residents, like these types of things, which are very important. Um, but again, going back to the idea of the good life, we don't need a disaster to start living this way, right? And I I talked to my students about that. These these are things that can happen, while everything else might be going to heck, you can still focus on the good life, right? Anyway, so thank you very much, Cormac. I think um the next episode we're gonna sort of be uh, I guess, engaging more with what it is that I'm I'm doing. And yeah, okay, so thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 53:07

I think being able to sit with you as a a learning um partner and uh you know in conversation with you, really understanding your wisdoms, what you've learned through your life passage and what you're learning, but also even just the the sharing that you were doing there throughout that interview. Uh it's going to be so uh enriching for me personally, but also for our listeners. So thank you, and thank you for for holding space here today and opening up space for me to share some of uh my amusings. I hope they were useful to the uh listener as well.

SPEAKER_01 53:43

Of course. It's gonna be a very uh exciting journey, this podcast. Um, so thank you very much, and we'll um see you in episode two.