[Dialogue] [SPAM] Re: Letter to Alumni of the kemper building communitiesof the last few decades

[ed feldmanis]

Dear Colleagues.

I have a few more added thoughts about creating a new community -- as it
were.

We have had to spend exhaustive time coming up with the form of the
community, and dealing with the newer version of the ICA.  These folks are
very new but hoping and even rushing to figure out how they, in their own
framework, can be "old hands."  It has been difficult for them and for us.
Now there is a director that is in place today, and not like the others,
leaving tomorrow.  When we started working with this administration  We did
not have or start this community as an organic, evolving program, which
would seem appropriate.  Instead we created community with the help from the
past inheritance, that is to say the Order and past community members, and
symbolically from all of you and the "Keystone Community."   This came over
against demands of some kind of  "new ICA  vision" of a program-matic
direction that, frankly, assumed that we could over-night build
organizational maturity of an on-going entity, say, one that would be 5
years into operation.

Along with that and the great confusion of going through 5 former executive
directors (Ken, Betsy, Suzanne, Kurt, Pam:  sometimes at no fault of their
own) the right hand of the ICA did not know what the left hand was doing.
For most of them everything appeared to be slow going. Today this is not so
much the case. Since the new direction of the ICA was created (however that
will evolve) troubling ideas and actions have had to be tackled.  For
example, on the ICA staff, incomprehensibly, there was a staffer that was
given free reign to invent rules about almost anything.  This person, now
reportedly silenced, not only was,  the defacto ICA public relations voice,
but also in what appears to be - and I mean this as an impact statement as
we take it in - making personal attacks on past  ICA staffers, the community
and on the building's clients.  I, among other people,. have put forth the
case to the that all of this kind of behavior has to stop. Whatever this
behavior was, it was outside the tradition of the old ICA and worked against
the stated aims of the new ICA.  I believe that the Executive Director has
heard the message and hopefully has taken constructive steps to put a stop
to this.

Appropriate overtures have been made by this, the Sixth Director, Nino
Tillman, who seems to be a grounded and genuine person.  The ICA and its new
director have now said that they want to work with us, create a community
program that might be replicated elsewhere and join us in various
expressions of our green ecological revolution. We welcome these overtures.
We hope to open talks in this appreciated atmosphere of what seems to be
good will.  Although we have spent a lot of time meeting ICA initiated
demands (Now well over a year and half of weekly meetings and more community
meetings than a water melon has seeds) we have also begun a major vision in
ecological education and demonstration.  Many practical activities have been
started in areas of biking, in living with conscious low energy consumption,
and in creating forums, such as our Second Sustainable Saturday programs,
with organic food, educational direction and old-fashioned socializing.  I,
myself, have become with others a worm farmer (wrangler?) making compost. We
are making relationships with those around us.  One example is our
interactions with the ecologist at Field Museum. And yet more practical
efforts than I have mentioned here.

It is true we are experiencing exhaustion. We have rising costs and I am
sure like some of you we have been greatly impacted by the current
inflation.  We still are both a community demonstration and -- I believe --
we are becoming responsible ecological pioneers. What I want you to know is
that even though we have made seemingly huge investments of time and money
(without guarantees), we still continue working.  We are also focusing on
how to live in the now.

Thanks.
Ed
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