[Oe List ...] gridding request
KroegerD at aol.com
KroegerD at aol.com
Wed Sep 3 12:49:53 EDT 2008
Summer '73, Global Research Assembly, Uptown 5, July 15, 1973
TEN CONSIDERATIONS IN COMMUNITY REFORMULATION
1. Breaking loose a community is like winding a clock. There is one small
interior spring in most clocks which you wind up tight and then it supplies the
energy for the total. The body of people who do the task have to find a way
to intensify their interior life. It is that intensity of purpose that
provides the energy for the total community. This energy is a catalyst. A lot of
aerosol cans have little balls inside and when you shake the can those balls
start going around. They do not add anything to the formula. They do not improve
it. All they do is increase the speed of the mixture getting together. As
they go around they create waves. In a community there is always motion, but
you need a catalytic action. How do you add a catalyst to intensify the motion
so that something takes place?
2. Not many people use shoe horns anymore but my uncle never put his shoes
on without his shoe horn. That shoe horn enabled his foot to work its way into
his shoe. We have to find some kind of shoe horn to enable people to work
their way into the community. The issue we are dealing with is how do you break
through the inertia? If you look around in most communities and talk with
people very long you see that there have been great visions. People have had
deep compassion for a chunk of geography. There has always been a cadre dynamic
present in every community. In one sense you do not have to create it. It is
there' rooted in what is going on. Rut now you begin to break through the
inertia that holds people fixed in a spot where they cannot move.
3. When you talk about breaking things loose or moving over against the
inertia it is not simply a great deal of excitement you are after. Most places in
the world have had a medicine man. When I was a boy we had a lot of people
come to the door to sell things. That was an aftermath of the great medicine
man shows that came to town and sold the cure for anything for a dollar. Most
communities have had their medicine men, who have come and excited them for a
moment and then nothing happened. You can understand why cynicism has a kind
of accreditation. How do you move over against that? How do you move in terms
of the long haul rather than the next two weeks? How do you begin in terms
of human deeps rather than in terms of fanciful flights of wonder? You prepare
the deeps of human beings rather than tickle their tongue with a new taste.
How do you do that sociologically? People have learned how to do some of
these things psychologically. How do you do that sociologically so that a
community wakes up to its deeps and prepares itself for the long haul of rebuilding
the earth and creating new communities?
4. How do you lay the ground for the ecumenical parish overlay? There are
ten considerations to stew over.
5. The first one is that you have to have a grid in order to begin. You
always begin with the dirt. The dirt is the base upon which social relationships
exist. Gridding is not simply laying out streets or patches of ground. It is
tying together the social relationships that add up to a community. The grid
is never just a local grid. The grid of your parish is first a grid of the
globe "ridded down to the parish level of intensity, so that your chunk of
geography represents the total. Gridding from the global is a faith stance. It is
a commitment of your life. You see that your first pre­occupation is the
global, all of mankind. And that is history long. From there you begin to see
that the task is focused on the local. We have one complexity in doing that.
You go from the global down to the local via the continent, the area, the
region, the metro, the polls, the micro and then the parish. We have said that
when you get down to the parish level you should have from 10,000 to 30,000
people. But in certain chunks of geography, following this rationale, you
could have as many as 100,000 to 500,000 people That would be an unmanageable
parish. What do you do? We had 109,000 people in our parish so we divided it
into five and called them proto­parishes. We held the name parish to hold
the common rationale throughout the movement and then anything less than that
we called proto­parishes. In other parts of our world you may have to take
four or five parishes and put them together to get enough people to be a
parish. These could be called mega­parishes. You always have the parish
dimension in your grid, and it will always come after your micro grid.
6. What you are out to do with the grid is to hold sociology, geography and
the many other factors together. It is not simply a matter of chalking out
equal bits of geography or population. There is a whole array of other factors.
These are the location of churches, serving institutions, etc. The grid is
the most important thing. In our work here we changed the grid almost daily by
just walking around and looking and then brooding. That went on for about a
week. Then we had to go back and recalibrate it and find a rationale behind
why we were "ridding what we were gridding until we could tell ourselves a
story in depth.
7. The second consideration is the economic, political and cultural analysis
to grasp the internal workings as well as the external forces. The problemat
is the key thing here, but you put it together very quickly. Its importance
is to have it before ycn1 is an objective analysis. It is also a kind of a
shoehorn to get you into the economic, political and cultural reality. This
analysis is always for the sake of the future. That is crucial. The way you do
it in a short time is to use the world's wisdom. Model Cities has grids. A lot
of agencies have done demographic studies. You get them all and see where
they differ, while building your own at the same time. You get population
figures, ethnic distribution, age and education, and income groupings, to see how
it fits together. That tells you something. Your grid always tells you your
story. For instance? when you do the housing grid you suddenly see there are
large chunks of vacant lots in your neighborhood. You had walked through there
but did not notice there was a vacant lot in that neighborhood and a vacant
lot across the street. When you put it on a grid, you notice there is a large
strip of vacant lots across your whole grid. You wonder about that. You find
out that they have been like that for three years. Then you do a little
scratching around and you may find out that someone is going to build a freeway
through there in three or four years. You see what is going on in the external
and the internal forces operative in your community? so you can get hold of
an analysis of what is going on and will be going on in the future of the
community. You have to know that better than anyone else.
8. The third consideration is that you have to have an entry plan, including
a basic model and a holding image. We saw that we had to establish a galaxy?
that we were the movement and that our job was to provide an end run to
bring a guild into being to help the emerging galaxy. This is inadequate but it
is an image that gives you permission to move. You stuff it full of data and it
tells you what you have to do first. Your basic model is just an image at
first. Then you fill it out. What are the strategic objectives? What is it you
are after to Bet this show on the road? What are the tactics you are going to
use? What i9 the timeline you have them on?
9. What are the operating principles that you are going to work through all
this? Are you going to go out with a megaphone or blow a whistle? Or, maybe
you take a stance of low profile where you are not out to broadcast but get the
job done. I like those lines from Dr. Lao. He said he never did tricks, he
did magic. You are not out to do tricks. You are out to do the magic that
transforms life. He said there were people who were secretive, and then there
were people who were mysterious. You are not secretive, you are mysterious. It
is not that you have anything to hold back from people. Do you notice that we
really do not know anything that everybody else does not already know? It is
not a matter of being secretive' but being mystery to enable people to live
their lives. You keep your mouth shut. You adopt a certain kind of stance and
distance. You have that written into your operating principles. Then, you do
not do this alone. This is always corporate and calls for some kind of
internal organization. You have to write a story of why the ecumenical parish, why
now, and what is the innocent suffering going on. What is the story that you
tell yourself. This is the story of this body of people in terms of their
task. What is the rite and the symbol that holds that group in being to get this
task done? What is the format of your meeting? How do you lay out your time
schedule? When do you meet to report? When do you meet as working groups?
Then you rehearse over and over again what it means to be a corporate body. If
you have not decided to be corporate you will not know what you are doing. Yet
if you have not decided to take your own life in charge, nor decided to be
an iron man, or if you cannot get yourself out of bed and on the task, you do
not know what corporateness is. Corporateness is deciding that your life is
given to that task and nothing else. It is getting yourself on that task. It
is seeing that your neighbor is always on that task enabling the total
journey. You build your entry plan.
10. Then fourth, you win comprehensive authorization. The most critical
factor is that every community has built into it someone who says there is no
leadership, or no one cares about this community. Every community has the
leadership dynamic present. It may be perverted but it is there. Things just do not
happen in any community unless certain channels are honored. They may either
be highly conscious or highly unconscious, but they are there. I have noticed
that some local churches are run by a little old lady from her knitting
needles, rather than by the official board. And if you do not have her permission
to move she will cut your throat, and you will never know it. You will think
it is someone on the official board or someone else, while Miss Sweet Susie
who brings you pies on Sunday, and looks around to see how you keep up the
parsonage, is the one. The community is like that. It has its authorizations.
Your task is to find out what they are, both the silent and the overt. To get
clearer on that you use your head and look and then make some lists and
gestalt.
11. We worked out one we thought were symbolic authorities without whose
symbolic "nod" you did not go very far. It included church leadership, leading
city businessmen and political figures. Then there are key figures in the
community. While they cannot give the symbolic nod, because they live out of that
symbolic nod themselves, they can block or stop anything you do. Save those
key figures are engaged in some way in what you are about you dc not move.
There are others I call middle authority figures. They cannot stop you, but can
make life miserable. Unless you have their cooperation they can generally
foul things up for you. Then there is grassroots leadership. In one sense they
can not stop you, yet in another they can stop you cold. Cave you have all
four levels of that authorization working for you, you do not move. In winning
comprehensive authorization one thing we have is that we are servants. We
never go anywhere we are not invited. Sometimes we have to go in and get an
invitation, but you get invited to do whatever you do. You are always a servant.
We are here to serve the community.
12. You have to decide what image you are going to project. What popular
image is needed at that moment to go into that situation. In 5th City there were
no structures. There we created the image that we were going to build
structures. That is a popular image. You have a way of getting out dreams, images,
plans, building the structures, and then turn that organization over to local
people so they can run their own community. Here you would not want to
project the image that you are a great structure builder. There are so many
structures around here that they do not know what to do with them all. What is the
image? Maybe it is the image of a good neighbor who is out to see that the
whole community comes off, and that whatever is here is used and honored. The
popular image you project is key in getting authorization. Finally you always
get invited. You do not go where you are not invited, even though sometimes
you have to go around by the back door to get invited. That invitation is
important. You go into other countries, and if you have not had the invitation of
the Roman Catholic bishop, the protestant leadership, and local authorities
you have cut your own throat. This is true even in your own home town.
13. The fifth consideration is ­that you capture community imagination.
You tell them their story like they never knew it before. You get hold of
their history and their understanding of their mindset and their future, and you
tell that story so they see new possibility that they never saw before. The
aboriginal people always knew they had a long heritage, so you tell them,
"You are the oldest people on earth; you are thirty thousand years old; you have
changed more than any other people; change is nothing new to you; you have
always been an adaptive people." Their jaws fall off, because they thought they
were always stuck with being cavemen. All of a sudden their whole picture of
themselves is changed' and they have a vision of their future. You take the
community story in any community you show up in. There is a deep rooted story
there of the past, and you get hold of it, love it and cherish it. You see
that the clue to the future of that story is told. Here they tell themselves
that all the new people moving in are messing up the whole neighborhood. They
say that the neighborhood is really going down hill and you cannot expect
anything good to happen. Put you say, "why this is the new global community.
This is the way it is going to be every place on earth in the next twenty years.
You are twenty years ahead of the times. You have a chance to experiment
with all the cultures of the earth and create a new life style, and to honor
your own tradition by bringing it into the twentieth century. Hooray!" You tell
the story a brand new way so that it releases people. You capture their
imagination. Then you provide a way to release their spirit energies.
14. The other key there has been that whatever we do as a community or an
ecumenica1 parish is not done for the sake of wherever you happen to be. That
would be ridiculous. You do this for tile sake of the whole world. You build
corporate community for the sake of the globe as a sign representing what it
means to rebuild the earth. This is my one opportunity, my one great chance to
participate in the globe, to recreate creation. Down in the deeps of man that
is what he is after. The release of motivity happens when men see that they
participate in the totality of their geography. Once you see that you see
that you have a way to participate in the totality of history. You capture the
community imagination.
15. The sixth consideration is that you bring structures to the local
community. For one thing you bring structure by publishing that grid and getting
that space defined. People's minds do not operate in our time because they have
no space definitions through which they can operate in terms of concern. The
news casts blitz your mind until you cannot think, because you have no grid
to organize your concern so your mind can operate. You structure the local
community by giving people a grid to provide them a symbol that informs their
lives. You give them some kind of organization, also, where people are working
on the issues that need to be worked on. In the midst of that you are out to
create the cadre to give shape and form to the leadership so you can break
the inertia.
16. The seventh consideration is that you subtly demonstrate possibility
with people who tell themselves they can do little or nothing. When people talk
about the fact that there is not much external possibility they are always
talking about the internal. They are saying, "I do not have much possibility."
Unless that is dealt with, whatever you do externally does not help at all. Be
careful how you move here to dramatize possibility. To dramatize
possibility, means that you always create the impossible, that which is unexpected and
could not be done When we were working on the parking lot park one man just
got angry. He was huffing and puffing and he said, "You guys cannot do it, you
do not even have the right tools." He was right. Some of those shovels looked
like Don Quixote's sword. When you pushed them into the ground they did not
even move. One man who came by said? "These people have to be out of their
mind. They are trying to go through concrete." There was a concrete slab we had
not noticed, but when you have decided you take the slab out with your
hands.
17. In Mowanjan they decided they needed a garden. There were three acres of
land full of rocks, stumps and everything else, and they did not have tools.
We had four shovels, ten hoes and two hundred fifty people. All the men,
women and children went out there and pulled grass with their knuckles until some
of them were bleeding. In one day they cleared the whole field. The
impossible was done. You find that that which dramatizes the impossible, in one
sense, does not have anything to do with the external. It says to my interior
life, "I can pick up my life and I can live it." It is a deep RS­I in one
act, so to speak. You operate on their felt needs in terms of dramatizing the
impossible. It is impossible to keep the city clean and beautified, so you
beautify it and then you find ways to celebrate that. You do hard labor and you
get sore. In clearing the field you worked in one hundred twenty degree heat
all day long. The next day you really feel it. It does not feel good, but you
celebrate that. Instead of talking about a day when we all got whipped and
were miserable and thought we were going to die; we celebrated it and everyone
thought it was great. We had a great celebration that night, killed a great
big cow, and roasted it, and ate it and danced around the fireside. You saw
that it was great. It was not anything to be sorry about. It was tremendous to
celebrate the impossible.
18. The eighth consideration is that you initiate leadership training. You
get the people in the community that you need, in terms of their leadership,
and you train them. You put them through LENS courses or you set them down and
teach them, or whatever way you have to train people directly in
methodologies. Secondly, you do it indirectly. You do this by defining roles, by giving
people images, and by providing people with involvement. They begin to be
trained. In the midst of that you are out to extend leadership. You go into any
community and you have fantastic human beings. Grey's is a great poem for me.
You look at that graveyard and you say, "Look at all this human possibility
that never made it. Just think, there are thousands of Shakespeare's and
Longfellows out there and they never knew it. They just died, like the three
billion people who die and never live. You extend the leadership. Anywhere you go
you find people who are fantastic, but never knew they were fantastic. You
give them a possibility. One thing that will excite a community and give it new
deeps is to see old Charlie Brown, who has always stumbled through life, all
of a sudden get a hold on his life and become a man. Everyone of us in this
room knows that he has the methodology to take some old willy limp leg and
release him as a great human being. You extend leadership and then you deepen
their commitment. You deepen the commitment of the community so it can assume
responsibility for its life, and can be a sign for the world.
19. The ninth consideration is that you dramatize the serious intent. There
are a number of ways to do this. If you happened to be in a religious house
you might improve its appearance. The neighborhood may look like a slum, and
if you tell people we are going to rebuild the community, it is hard to
believe, if we look like a part of the slum. If you go around with your hair all
straggling and you are dramatizing serious intent about rebuilding the earth, it
is hard to believe. This has nothing to do with anyone's integrity. It has
to do with getting the job done, with secondary integrity. You claim the
outcast. We have always been a people of the outcasts. We belong to the outcasts
of this world and let us never forget that. But you dramatize serious intent
by bringing in the outcasts. You take those in the community no one cares for
and claim them. You turn them into that which is great. You turn them into
that which is fantastic. Then you take awe, the that is struck and you turn it
into symbol. I imagine that very soon the awe that is there will become a
symbol. Then you create global consciousness of what is going on in the world.
Something happened when people in 5th City and Samoa and Mowanjum began to
sense that they participated in the globe. I will never forget when we put the
newspaper out in 5th City and they saw that grid, or when they went to the
festivals and learned the Chinese people were somehow different than black
people. There were fantastic dances and interesting food and all, and they became
interested in the globe and began to see themselves participating in it. Al1
of a sudden there was a whole new kind of commitment in the community from
the oldest skeptic to the youngest rebel.
1. Then, with this serious intent is commitment to the long march. Until
someone has decided that he has put his foot into the ring for life he is
never a human being. He is always thinking that there is some time in life
when his illusionary dreams will come true and he can lay down on his back and
gloat on a permanent summer holiday. Unless one sees his life as nothing but
expenditure in terms of ninety nine years, unless he lives to be one hundred,
he does not know what it means to be a human being, committed to the long
march, to be a community on the move.
21. The tenth consideration is that you solidify for the future. After you
have been through your model building you intrude into the community. It is a
painful rupture, even though it may be done in style and people were laughing
and suffering all the way and having a great time. Never­the­less it
is a rupture. Now you have to bring that together. You celebrate the
accomplishments. You get people planning. I guess that is the greatest healing that
ever comes into people's lives. It happens when they sit down and plan and
lay out what the future has to look like. Then, you have to heal rifts, and that
is not done psychologically. That is done though celebrations. That is done
through the planning. Then you pull back and talk through with the community.
That pull back is very important. People begin to pick up new roles. They
take on new tasks and begin to exercise what they know.
22. Now, here are a couple of warnings. One danger you have to watch is your
own liberalism. It comes in a couple of packages. One is that if I get my
method and model down and tell everyone what to do it will work out smoothly.
Once you have a model done, and you really worked hard on it and it is perfect,
then everything ought to go right. I cannot understand why uncle
so­and­so is upset, and why this blew up, so something must be wrong with the
model or with my colleagues. They did not do what I told them to do, or what I
thought they ought to do. A model, however, is always built to go smash. You
never learn anything in building a model. Where you learn is when you stick
it into reality and it goes crunch. Then you go aside and get your wisdom out
of that. Then you build a new model. Ortega y Gassett said, "Life is pure
problem." He was right.
23. The second danger to be watched is the conservatism in us. This is
operating out of what we are out to do, finally' is to get the whole show rolling
so smoothly that it really looks like the establishment. You get everything
operating as smoothly as it can and before you know it you are back in the
throes of the bureaucracy. No, you are responsible for the totality of life, and
you know that life is chaos. You do not forget. There is order in the midst
of that. In the midst of the chaos and your brokenness and struggle you are
made whole only in one thing, and that is the Word in Jesus Christ. Your
wholeness does not come from your accomplishments nor the approval of your
brothers nor in your futuric vision. Your wholeness is in the Word in Jesus Christ.
In a message dated 9/3/2008 1:14:43 A.M. Central Daylight Time,
ptuecke at charter.net writes:
Hi Ann,
I’m sure I have a copy of the handy little Methods Manual that you and I
created in a Summer Program – don’t remember which year. Tomorrow I will look
for it; it’s in my files somewhere. That was a fun project, wasn’t it? I
think I have a page on gridding – from some course or another.
Will look for it, scan & send both to you.
Pat (Jones)Tuecke
From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf
Of Ann Avery
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2008 6:19 AM
To: OE
Subject: [Oe List ...] gridding request
Hello everyone,
A little request for advice on teaching gridding as simply as possible--
I couldn't find anything on gridding in the (wonderful!) repository except
some images of the global grid. I would appreciate improvement on what I've
written below, and some other graphic examples that might be available. Does
anyone have a copy of the "handy little" Methods Manual (no date). Does it
have a green cover?
Gridding your geography
Geographic gridding is a way of understanding your geo-social environment.
When you grid, you make decisions about the geography concerned, guided by
observing and asking questions.
Then you represent this information with a simple straight line drawing that
anyone can reproduce easily.
This process can build consensus about your physical and social context.
You can grid the planet, your country, region, district, or community.
[Here I would like to have a few samples, in addition to a version of the
world grid from the repository. Does someone have others of smaller areas such as
districts or villages to share?]
Steps:
1. Determine the outer boundaries of the area you are looking at.
2. Simplify them by drawing straight lines to make a shape that you could
easily draw freehand.
3. Thinking about the area, looking at maps or talking to people who know it
well, ask these questions, and record the information on your shape.
What are natural or manmade boundaries within the area?
What roads, bus routes, paths, train tracks, air routes are important?
Nodes: Where do people gather for commerce, celebration, health care,
education, etc.
What are physical landmarks?
4. With that information, where would it make sense to divide the area
into 5 sections? How would you describe each area?
5. Name each area.
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