Renew Civic Life

How Can Perking Up Your Board Influence Your Community?

May 11, 2010 By Jim Lord 3 Comments

Here’s a thought for your next board meeting …

What can happen if you start in a new place — just for part of one meeting? Could you get some new oomph into the room?

And how might that new perspective ripple outward, influencing your community?

Hear what I learned from Sonja Garber, when we met late in the evening at the end of the year-long leadership program.

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You can start with a question, something as simple as “Why are you here? What’s important to you about serving?” (So rarely do we talk about this, in the press of day-to-day business.)

Or maybe even: “In your life as a volunteer, when was a high point — a time that stands out, when you were most gratified, excited, or satisfied. Is there a story there?”

Sonja Garber is chair of The Center for Vital Community in Sheridan, Wyoming. I had the privilege of working on a community-building initiative in Sheridan; you can learn a bit more about it here.

Filed Under: Articles, Energize Your Nonprofit, Front page, Renew Civic Life Tagged With: american politics, board, board chair, civic life, community development, group process, hope, leadership program, organization development, Renew Civic Life, success stories, values, video, workshop

A Bold Foundation for Your Work: Appreciative Inquiry

March 1, 2010 By Jim Lord Leave a Comment

Everything you see on this web site is founded on the methods and perspective of appreciative inquiry (even if the term itself is pretty much missing).

We’ve found this approach can be used to enliven and embolden an organization, a person, a group, a community, a country — or an idea or profession. It’s an exciting way to take any human enterprise to its next level, and to inspire people, for the benefit of us all.

Big ideas

What is Appreciative Inquiry?
Appreciative inquiry (or “AI”) asks us to pay special attention to “the best of the past and present” — in order to “ignite the collective imagination of what might be.”
Talk About What You Want
Many folks launch social initiatives (including nonprofit organizations) in order to “solve a problem” they see in their community (or the larger world). But here’s another way to think about what you’re going to do.
How the “Paradoxical Theory of Change” Can Make Your Work Easier
People are more open to change than one might expect, even eager for it. What we object to is being changed. (Understandably!) What might happen if we stopped using up so much of our energy trying to change people?
Words Create Worlds
Could it be that the words we speak each day, often without thought, can be of historic importance? They just may be, especially in times like these.

Success stories

From Victims to Leaders
How students from Jonesboro and Columbine showed, in an especially poignant way, what can happen when the common discourse of despair is interrupted in order to draw attention to the life and hope contained in a situation.
Deepening Engagement in Civic Life
Civic life is almost always problem-focused. Whether the talk is of potholes or poverty, it’s almost always about the community’s deficits. And political campaigns are notoriously negative, with candidates eager to attack and blame their opponents. What might civic life look like if a different kind of dialogue were taking place?
What Can Street Children Teach Us?
When circumstances seem daunting, where can you look for resources and vitality? Here’s what I learned from street children in Africa.
Can We Make an End Run Around “Problems”?
An organization facing budget deficits and layoffs shifts its focus to its best moments (with surprising results).
Do You Start with “Feasibility” … or With Who You Are and What You Want?
“If we’d begun by analyzing the ‘feasibility’ of founding a new school, we probably would’ve stopped dead in our tracks.” How a relentless focus on resources and assets led to the founding of an exceptional school in Canada.

What’s Next for You?

Click here to see how this approach can come alive in your life — and what it can deliver for you.

Filed Under: Articles, Bring Meaning Into Your Business, Energize Your Nonprofit, Enliven Yourself, Front page, Guides, Renew Civic Life Tagged With: appreciative inquiry, dreams, group process, nonprofit organizations, organization development, passion, social change, success stories

Can We Make an End Run Around “Problems”?

February 15, 2010 By Jim Lord Leave a Comment

A chapter of a large international organization was facing a looming budget deficit and had just laid off staff — the first layoffs in its history. You can imagine the talk in the halls about how dire the situation was, how tenuous the future looked.

At the same time, a small team was preparing for a staff retreat that would kick off a strategic planning process. One member of the team argued, with considerable passion, that time must be allowed for people to vent and grieve, out of respect to the staff’s feelings in this difficult time.

That’s the conventional wisdom: We must “meet people where they are” and give them a chance to say what’s on their minds. It seems the honest thing to do. Only when all of the difficulties have been confronted and handled can we start looking toward the future.

Makes all the sense in the world, but I feel weary just writing that, much less going through it. What we have here is the metaphor of organization as machine: All we have to do is clearly see and fix what’s broken and everything will run perfectly, or at least well enough to chug along.

What if we approached our personal health that way, finding every possible fault with our bodies, sharing with others how badly we feel about ourselves and focusing on fixing all the defects before we let ourselves start to do the health-promoting things that will make the biggest difference in our lives? We’d be so preoccupied with our hangnails that we’d never get around to riding a bike, meditating, or eating well. We might even worry ourselves to death.

What happens when we set aside the standard practices that require us to identify and fix problems as the first order of business?

What if we ask people to talk about their best moments and highest aspirations, rather than their grievances? What if we treated the organization as a living system and searched for what gives it life?

Back to the retreat: It was designed from that unusual stance. The facilitator opened the session by asking staff to tell stories of recent successes, those projects and accomplishments that they felt represented their best achievements.

The planning team had expected only a handful of people would speak. To everyone’s surprise, dozens of people stood to talk about their high points. Several eager hands were still in the air as the facilitator reluctantly moved to the next part of the agenda.

Susan, a much-admired staff member, had arrived at the retreat in a skeptical frame of mind. As the meeting came to a close the following afternoon, she quietly remarked to the people at her table, “Now I know we can do the impossible.”

For some, the retreat would have worked better if time had been provided to air complaints. I know there were some who felt the “real issues” had been swept under the rug. But they were few in number, even fewer than the retreat’s planners had imagined. And maybe even they began to experience a different reality as they heard their colleagues’ stories.

The way I see it, the meeting was designed to show respect for people like Susan, those who have in them the kind of energy that moves a group forward (often just waiting to be released).

What would have been gained by subjecting her, and the many like her, to an airing of grievances? What would have been gained by sweeping under the rug their accomplishments, their pride in their work, their hopes and dreams?

A group always has a finite amount of time to do its work. So it’s crucial to ask: what will move us forward both quickly and effectively?

Do we spend time dissecting and attempting to solve all the problems we can find, or do we lift our gaze to our capabilities and worth — as seen in our best moments — so we can go straight to a higher level?

Even in the most dire of situations, there is a way to locate the energy to get us where we long to go.

Filed Under: Articles, Bring Meaning Into Your Business, Energize Your Nonprofit, Enliven Yourself, Renew Civic Life

What is Appreciative Inquiry?

February 15, 2010 By Jim Lord Leave a Comment

In a nutshell, appreciative inquiry (“AI”) is about asking questions.

Questions that are much more powerful than the usual because they contain in them an assumption of life and vitality — an assumption that there’s something good and worthwhile in whatever you’re studying.

By asking positive questions, we generate new ideals for the future … possibilities “proven” by the best of the past and present. In the words of its primary originator, Dr. David L. Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University, AI asks us to pay special attention to “the best of the past and present” — in order to “ignite the collective imagination of what might be.”

It’s an exciting way to take human enterprise to its next level, and to inspire people, for the benefit of us all.

Seeing hidden strengths

AI is about seeing what others may not see. It’s about heightening our awareness of the value, strength, and potential of ourselves and others — and overcoming the limits that we impose, often unconsciously, on our own capacities.

One example of great historical significance is the way that Winston Churchill appealed to the beleaguered British people in the darkest days of the Second World War.

Churchill’s impact was the result of his towering ability to cognitively dissociate all seeming impossibilities, deficiencies, and imperfections from a given situation, and to see in his people and country that which had fundamental value and strength. His optimism, even in Britain’s darkest moment, came not from a Pollyanna-like sense that ‘everything was just fine,’ but from a conviction that was born from what he, like few others, could actually see in his country.

David Cooperrider

Most of us have had glimpses of these possibilities. And yet, the pervasive “background music” of our culture seems to draw us all into a chorus of hopelessness, irony and negativity.

Churchill and many others have demonstrated that we can find signs of life and hope, if only we decide to look for them — and that what we choose to pay attention to has everything to do with how we see ourselves, how we envision the future, and how the future actually turns out.

But in everyday life, most people and organizations are constrained by the perception that their resources, and hence their horizons, are limited.

This perception — that we must “face realities” — is without a doubt the greatest single constraint on human imagination, vision and enterprise.

Appreciative inquiry begins with a different set of assumptions. We begin with the belief that we have a choice — that we can consciously choose what we “see” and act upon. In both the personal and social realms, we can choose to focus on problems, needs and deficits — the traditional problem-solving approach. Or we can choose to see strengths, capabilities and possibilities — the basis of appreciative inquiry.

By focusing on what’s right, rather than what’s wrong with an organization, an individual or even a society, AI gives us access to the kind of energy that can be transformative. Having that kind of energy to work with gives us the confidence to develop and pursue a new image of the future.

A key question: If you want to inspire, mobilize and sustain human energy which is the most effective way — by focusing on problems or pursuing possibilities?

So, AI can be a way of seeing the world. It also can be a methodology. Through a carefully developed set of questions, we uncover stories of our “peak experiences” — those moments in our lives when we felt most effective, most connected, most alive.

These stories provide irrefutable proof of our actual capabilities. They give rise to new images of what the future could be. They raise our sights, energize us and give us the courage to dream and act boldly. They give us a grounded confidence in the future.

Rather than “accepting reality,” we see that what we call “reality” is defined by what we choose to see, to think and talk about, what we choose to act upon. It follows that we have the capacity to create the kind of future we desire.

Filed Under: Articles, Bring Meaning Into Your Business, Energize Your Nonprofit, Enliven Yourself, Inspire People to Act, Renew Civic Life

Deepening Engagement in Civic Life

February 9, 2010 By Jim Lord Leave a Comment

Civic life is almost always problem-focused. Whether the talk is of potholes or poverty, it’s almost always about the community’s deficits.

And political campaigns are notoriously negative, with candidates eager to attack and blame their opponents.

What might civic life look like if a different kind of dialogue were taking place? Is it possible to have a civic dialogue that begins by looking back and remembering our best experiences, rather than our worst, and using them as a launching pad for initiatives by communities, organizations, and even individuals?

Imagine Spokane

Elinor Magnuson, a respected leader in Spokane, Washington, decided to find out. After participating in a philanthropic quest workshop, she personally conducted about 70 one-on-one interviews with leaders in her community — people she had specifically sought out because they had positive and hopeful views of the future.

I had the privilege of facilitating a one-day gathering of these engaged citizens. The event took place a week after the 2000 election, in which a bitterly-contested mayoral race that had divided the community.

A few months before the event, Elinor and I happened to see one of the mayoral candidates on the street. She told him about the idea. She knew that she wanted the candidates to attend. Of course, come November, one would be the victor and the other the vanquished.

John said he would be there, win or lose. He liked the idea of an “envisioning meeting” and told us he thought some healing would be called for by then.

I told him my idea was to be less direct. Given the design we had developed, a one-day program, I didn’t want anyone to think we were going to heal anything. Besides, healing focuses on an illness and pathology.

Envisioning one’s own contribution

Most important: I thought that creating an image of the future of the community was too common an exercise — one that often led to disappointment rather than realization. (Even when aspects of it are realized, they can seem obscured.)

So I told him that I saw the day as a forum for people to come together and envision and begin to plan something different: what they wanted their greatest contribution to be to the community.

The work begins by voicing for each of us what we have going for us, and our wishes for the kind of world we want to live in — and then we see how we come together to create the contribution each of us wants to make to society. All of this stands in contrast to the more common practice of seeing how people can simply be instruments for others’ visions.

Creating new social norms

This kind of shared experience can create new norms about what’s OK to talk about in civic life.

Anne Nickerson heads a family foundation in Sheridan, Wyoming, one of the most dynamic communities of its size (15,000 people) I’ve ever encountered. According to Anne, she used to feel timid about expressing her optimistic ideas in meetings with others in the community.

“I didn’t want to look silly,” she admits. “Sometimes people can make you feel that way.”

After participating in a community-wide inquiry process, Anne realized how many people in the room wanted the same kinds of things for the community she did. From that point on, she vowed to speak up with confidence, instead of holding back on her thoughts and feelings.

What might we all be able to accomplish if people everywhere brought that kind of confidence to their civic engagement?

Filed Under: Articles, Renew Civic Life Tagged With: american politics, appreciative inquiry, civic life, community development, Renew Civic Life

What Can Street Children Teach Us?

January 9, 2010 By Jim Lord Leave a Comment

When circumstances seem daunting, where can you look for resources and vitality?

Here’s a story that might be useful …

I once went to Nairobi to work with trustees and staff from relief and development organizations in Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya.

Most of them wanted to work on “the problem of street children.”

Well, that had me scratching my head.

I hadn’t prepared myself for how my “appreciative” work could apply to this situation that weighed so heavily on their hearts.

Then it came to me: What if I were a child of the streets? What would that be like? What kind of person might I be?

That shift in perspective allowed me to ask the group: “What are street children like as individuals? What do they have going for them? What capabilities and assets do they have?”

Beginning with such odd questions, we were able to see a resourceful group of young people who live by their wits, creativity, and tenacity.

We saw that, no matter how daunting the circumstances and how little the hope, street children somehow continue to have a will to live. Learning about the vitality of these courageous children, and where that vitality comes from, would be a worthy pursuit.

As a group, I think we did rather well in shifting our “deficit eyes” toward strength and possibility.

By the way, relative to philanthropy: One of the countries, Tanzania, went on to raise $1.5 million US during their annual campaign — within the country, an unprecedented accomplishment. Perhaps this had less to do with philanthropy … and was merely a different expression in themselves of the self-reliance they saw in the children of the street

Filed Under: Articles, Energize Your Nonprofit, Enliven Yourself, Renew Civic Life

Can coffee shops upstage the “tea parties”? (Part 2)

December 2, 2009 By Jim Lord Leave a Comment

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As promised, here’s some of the back-story about how folks in North Central Washington are reclaiming the civic stage — and countering what Rufus Woods called “the social, political and economic malaise that infects our country.”

One of the instigators of this positive revolution, Nancy Warner, told me how they got themselves organized — without a lot of hoopla — at the local coffee house.

We have our think tank, which is Caffe Mela. We have a kind of ongoing meeting at Caffe Mela. Ben and I will go, and then Rufus will come in. Sometimes Joan is part of it. You know them, and then there’s Cheryl who you have yet to meet.

You mean this is just informal, and you know that if you stop by, they’re there? This is at a coffee shop?

Yes, it’s the coffee shop in Wenatchee where we have had many power meetings about shaping the future of North Central Washington.

It’s informal and develops without an agenda? Just people you trust and have some common interests with, and whatever topic shows up?

Yep. We have an amazing team of people.

I’ve never worked with people like this. It’s like we are such a tight sync in our perspective about how central success is, and how we’re basically trying to recreate a storytelling culture in which everyone is a player and has a voice.

We have a really strong foundation. With that strong foundation and culture, we’re able to spend a lot of time thinking creatively about how to get there and promote that.

Nancy told me more about how they work together, which seems to me exactly the kind of world I want – and a process that is ideal. (The modern day version of the “old-boys” lunch?)

Rufus, of course, is there right with us. He’s also juggling the paper and all the reality of that business. We do the nonprofit, and he’s doing the for-profit juggling act. These two balls are increasingly looking like a whole.

That is actually what we saw when we were in Little Rock. We got just a glimpse of it at that first workshop. There is something there with a nonprofit focused on gathering successes, elevating people’s success and tying it to the ground like we do.

There is something about that in combination with a regional, for-profit paper. We’re still puzzling it out, but I think we’re getting closer all the time.

Talk some more about the culture your small group shares. You’ve said you share a recognition of possibilities, a sense of looking at what’s positive and what’s working.

We believe in the possibility of change. We believe we can actually have an effect.

We start our conversations at such a high level. We’re really productive. There is a high level of trust and respect. There’s also a high level of adventure. It’s like we are very open to risk, I would say.

I’m having a really big adventure here. I couldn’t have dreamed this up. I just love what I’m doing. I think it’s so interesting. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out exactly, but I know that it’s a really strong moment that we’re a part of.

We’re trying to do something bigger than any of us are. I think we’re actually aware that we can do something. We are doing something pretty significant. It’s heady stuff.

You said, “We believe in the possibility of change,” and then, “We believe we can have an effect.” From my way of looking at it, those are the two most powerful ingredients to really being able to create something that is beyond-the-boundaries.

About this little group of two, three or four people meeting at the coffee shop in an ad hoc, informal, unstructured way … Do you see this as the seed of what you hope to see more in the community?

It could be. We all have a very deep respect for the possibilities in everyone.

We don’t think about the conservation community, the business community and the ag community as separate anymore. We don’t even talk about them as being all that separate anymore, which is different. People are used to having things in boxes.

What’s so curious to me is the serendipity of it and how that’s really valued. There is almost the sense that you know you must be doing something important if it’s working out so well like that. It’s also a picture of small city that’s very attractive to me. It’s the fact that you’re compact enough that that can happen.

It is pretty cool. To think about the future, one our strategies in our project from the beginning has been to infiltrate the coffee shop network.

I’m sure this happens in Ohio, too. When I say that, I mean that farmers traditionally will meet at the corner gas station or the cafe. The farmers talk to other farmers and they complain about things. That’s how they understand the world. It’s through their coffee shop talk.

They’re critical. They’ll celebrate things. They have a very tight social network in many rural communities that happens in the coffee shops.

We want to change the tenor of the coffee-shop conversations.

And not just have ag talking to ag, but have community talking to community. We want to have it be about positive change and possibilities.

That’s one of our strategies. It’s to recreate Caffe Melas all over North Central Washington.

We’re looking for other coffee shops besides Caffe Mela. It’s intentional. Where are these story nodes around the region? Where do people gather? Where we can we build on that good energy?

Thank you, Nancy, for letting us in on your conversation of What could be? It’s clear that it was born of what you have going for you.

This kind of talk can give me even more of a charge than pouring another cup of Columbian or English Breakfast.

Ahhh…

Jim

Related links:

Catch up with Part 1 of this article.

The full story of the Success Summit — and their next steps — will be available soon at http://www.irisncw.org

Filed Under: Community News, Renew Civic Life

Can coffee shops upstage the “tea parties”? (Part 1)

November 30, 2009 By Jim Lord 1 Comment

Quest alums Rufus Woods, Joan Alway, Ben Fields, Nancy Warner (with the cool hat) and Maggie Coon (inset)

Rufus Woods, Joan Alway, Ben Fields, Nancy Warner (in the cool hat) and Maggie Coon (inset) ... Quest alums all ... at their recent Success Summit in North Central Washington

Rufus Woods, editor and publisher of The Wenatchee World, recently wrote in his newspaper about an auspicious day in his community.

But first, Rufus was on a rant.

Allowing ourselves to succumb to the social, political and economic malaise that infects our country is the single greatest limiting factor in building healthier communities.

Let’s be honest. Most news organizations, special interest groups and political figures devote an inordinate amount of energy wallowing in the long litany of seemingly insoluble problems and as a result a profound sense of defeatism and powerlessness has been created. If you watch the 24-hour news channels for more than a few minutes, you’re getting a mind-numbing dose of pessimism and cynicism. The FCC ought to require broadcast outlets to provide written warnings about the hazard to your mental health.

You go, Rufus! (My emphasis, btw.)

The good news is that in North Central Washington, we’ve discovered an antidote for the malaise.

Indeed, folks in Rufus’ community are working to reclaim the civic stage. A couple of days earlier, they’d organized a “Success Summit.” The idea was that celebrating and talking about successes will breed more successes. As Rufus put it …

We discovered the secret of getting out of the cycle of hopelessness. It’s by connecting with like-minded people to do something meaningful and profound for our communities.

It is that simple.

Rufus also told of how Maggie Coon was working with a group to create a center for arts and culture, agriculture, green technology and innovation. One tidbit that struck Rufus: “It’s not unheard of for opponents to carpool to public meetings.”

And this is just the beginning. Who knows where this will lead?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this saga … in which we’ll discover how this bold journey was born in a Wenatchee coffee shop.

Jim

Related link: Read Rufus’ editorial on his paper’s web site. (But first, leave a comment below!)

Filed Under: Community News, Renew Civic Life

From Victims to Leaders

November 23, 2009 By Jim Lord 1 Comment

On an ordinary Tuesday morning in 1998, in the small town of Jonesboro, Arkansas, two boys came to school armed with high-powered rifles. Just 11 and 13 years old, they opened fire on their classmates, left four children dead and 10 wounded, and killed an English teacher who had tried to shield a student.

As the heartbreaking news spread, everyone in the community–indeed, in the world–struggled to make sense of such a bizarre and frightening act. “Babies killing babies,” as one mother put it.

The unimaginable happened again a year later at Columbine High School in Colorado. Two teenage boys smuggled in backpacks and duffle bags crammed with sawed-off shotguns, semi-automatic weapons, and nearly a hundred bombs. In less than an hour, they shot dead 12 students and a teacher, and left 24 wounded.

If two of their bombs had gone off as planned, the devastation could have killed all 2,000-plus students. The boys ended the massacre by committing suicide.

The corridors at Columbine High soon filled with boxes of teddy bears, letters and cards, and other expressions of sympathy. Matt, who was a senior at Columbine when I met him two years later, told me:

It felt good, but we never really went through them. What we paid attention to was one item. And that’s still on the wall in the school: a poster created by the kids at Jonesboro and signed by all of them.

Matt was with a group of high school students from Columbine, Jonesboro, and Paducah (the site of an earlier school shooting) who had gathered at Ferncliff, a Presbyterian camp in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Five of them met to give voice to what they had learned from their experiences. They wanted to figure out how to deal with future tragedies.

Some had been injured in the gunfire, some had lost friends, all had been affected emotionally. Yet we asked them to tell stories of when they had been at their best in the dark days of the shootings.

It may seem odd, or even unfeeling, to ask people to talk about their best moments when they have suffered through such horror. Yet there were more high points than even I could have imagined.

And out of that work, they came up with two principles to guide them in the future:

The Jonesboro poster principle. Just “being there” with us is as important as words — maybe more important.
The victims-to-leaders principle. Becoming a leader is the best way to rise above being a victim.

The students had seen for themselves that being in service to others can be a potent affirmation of one’s self, as well as a path toward healing.

Guided by this hard-won wisdom, these young people stood ready to answer the call of the next school tragedy (which seemed, at the time, a near-certainty). Alongside their terrible memories, they added the ability to see images of the future they wanted and the knowledge that they had the capacity to bring it about.

The group filled a backpack to show us what their contribution could be. Matt pulled each item from the bag as he spoke.

When it happens next, we’ll send a backpack filled with tissues for when they cry. With water because you get dehydrated when you cry. And with candy and Disney videos for when they begin to feel better and maybe can even laugh a little.

A few months later, they were called on to ship 100 backpacks to a school in Minnesota.

To this day, I’m still deeply moved when I remember the time I spent with these young people.

Yet I hesitated telling you this story. There is something sacred about their experience that belongs to them. In the end, I decided to honor their courage and wisdom by giving you the chance to learn from them, as I did.

They showed me, in an especially poignant way, what can happen when the common discourse of despair is interrupted in order to draw attention to the life and hope contained in a situation.

They also taught me one more time that there are many ways to tell the story of an experience that we didn’t want to have. Even in our most difficult times, we can choose a narrative that gives us a new and stronger sense of our identity.

That sense might well include such human characteristics as courage, tenacity, resilience, and faith, which can exist only if life holds challenges.

When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.

Sufi saying

In my own life, I can see my mother’s early death as a time of sadness and loss. From a different (perhaps more distant) vantage point, I’m able to see how that experience contributed to my sense of myself as strong and independent. Both accounts of that event can be called true, yet they shape my self-identity in very different ways.

Working with the great kids from Jonesboro, Columbine, and Paducah also strengthened my conviction that people, even so-called “victims,” know a good deal more about their lives — and about what can be — than the “experts” who are trying to help them. Sure, there had been psychologists at each of the schools who did what they could to help the kids, to reassure them and teach them how to cope.

But the students didn’t tell stories about receiving professional assistance. They told stories about how they had been there for each other.

There comes a time to trust ourselves and the wisdom that can be drawn from our own best experiences.

Filed Under: Articles, Energize Your Nonprofit, Inspire People to Act, Renew Civic Life

What is Your Work Really About?

August 6, 2009 By Jim Lord Leave a Comment

Getting clarity about what we want can lead us to rethink the very essence of the causes we support.

Imagine this scene: A researcher watches as a five-year-old girl draws a picture of her extended family. The girl grabs bright-colored crayons and carefully draws her smiling parents, brother, and sister in the middle of the paper. Then she reaches for dark gray to sketch her grandparents, smaller and off to the side.

Theresa Bertram got wind of this research and thought about what it meant to her: As young as five, we’ve begun to hold images of diminishing as we grow older.

Theresa was executive director of the Cathedral Foundation, a service arm of the Episcopal Diocese of Jacksonville, Florida. The Foundation had earned a national reputation for its services to senior citizens, including retirement communities and Meals on Wheels.

Still, Theresa wasn’t satisfied.

We’d built our services based on what was best for seniors, as we saw it. We were responding to external factors — medical problems, isolation, lack of engagement. And we were focusing on programs for which funding was available.

This was under the banner of restoring independence. But it occurred to me that when we deliver meals to people at home, or care for them in retirement communities, we might actually create or perpetuate isolation and dependence. We might inadvertently preempt a different response from their families, their neighborhoods, or the community.

Theresa began to wonder whether the Foundation might make an even more significant contribution to society.

Instead of focusing on the Cathedral Foundation and its programs, how much money it could raise, or even on the needs of the Jacksonville community, what if they could explore the larger questions of aging in American society?

What if they could take a serious look at the best that aging could be, in order to reframe the conversation about aging and create a new set of social expectations?

An ambitious agenda, to be sure, and one that’s yet to be realized. My point in telling you this mini case study is to spark your imagination about how you might think of your work in a larger way.

What’s the most significant contribution you and your organization could be making?

And what is your work really about?