Civic Entrepreneur
May 17th, 2008 by Geoff 3 Comments
The other night, Alex Hilllman and I were having a conversation about our project, Independents Hall, and he mentioned the term “civic entrepreneur” in the course of a story. It immediately caught my attention because of my background as a co-founder of a civic association in Philadelphia.
As a follow up to our conversation, Alex emailed me an article titled, “Civic Entrepreneurs: Economic Professional as Collaborative Leader” that he wrote a post about after our conversation. Reading it over, though, reminded me of a different concern that I have had for awhile.
A lot of people form groups of people that share similar backgrounds, educations, and aspirations. In my mind, that is not really a challenge and does not lead to unique new solutions. And while I am very proud of Independents Hall, I would count it in that category. It is not that hard to get like-minded people with straight-forward goals to work together. I think we can do so much more.
The challenge is to bridge the gap between people that think very differently.
I learned that first hand co-founding that civic association in South Philadelphia. It is one of America’s most amazing and most diverse neighborhoods. It is a place where day laborers live next door to doctors. It is a place where a web design studio that does yoga together is across from an auto body shop. It is a place where the poor rub shoulders with (and sometime live next door to) millionaires.
The article I mentioned talks about bringing diverse parties to the table:
Civic entrepreneurs exert a collaborative style of leadership. They know how to work with people to get results. Civic entrepreneurs believe that the benefits of a changed economic context can be realized only with more collaborative, resilient connections between the new economy and the community. They provide collaborative leadership to bring diverse parties to the table, identify common ground, and take joint action. They build bridges.
More often than not, civic entrepreneurs lead with no formal power or authority, with only their credibility. Civic entrepreneurs are worthy of people’s trust.
Many of us that were raised in the United States after World War II do not have practice working with people that are not from the same socio-economic background. We are products of the trend where people moved to suburban neighborhoods filled with people that were much like them. That was my experience. My father is a PhD Chemical Engineer, so most of my friends’ parents were engineers, doctors, or lawyers.
Growing up like that does not give us the skills to have an empathetic world view. In other words, it does not give us first-hand experiences of working with vastly different people so that we can develop the skills one needs to build bridges.
I want to challenge more people to bring diverse groups to the table to solve problems to improve our communities, and more importantly, I want to challenge people to empower other people. Empowering others brings about unexpected and beautiful results. It will require many of us to leave our comfort zones on a regular basis, but the payoff is worth it.
Are you up for the challenge?
P.S. If you take a careful look at the shirts that my neighbors are wearing above, you will notice the words “celebrating diversity” in multiple languages.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Geoff – You point is interesting. And while I’m always up to a challenge, I don’t understand the type of issues you’d like to address, and also what your greater goal is. Building community? If so, what is the ultimate purpose in that?
Do you think all of the efforts should benefit the community as a whole, or is engaging one community member in an activity enough?
Besides physical environment, what are some issues you feel that are shared?
May 18th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Dan,
This article is about process.
I am not trying to define a specific task or goal.
My central point is that if you have similar people solving problems, you are more likely to produce similar results.
I am interested in the kinds of solutions that can emerge when you figure out ways to get people from different perspectives working together and contributing to solutions. (Empowerment.)
Many times the value of doing this is to understand the proper way to frame a problem you are working on.
At this point in the history of our technology, we have so many more tools to allow for input from dispersed people. My challenge is a reminder that even though you can now find more people that agree with you (now more than ever) does not mean that you should only seek them out to validate your ideas.
That only leads to an echo chamber with everyone agreeing.
I am advocating for embracing diversity so that we can all grow and learn, and it my opinion makes for better problem solving and a better world.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:03 am
Geoff, this is great. This fits in so many different situations – that I believe that you don’t need a goal in mind to see where it fits. You can see the affect diversity has in a community, in a company, and even in a marriage.
I’ve been part of companies where management would hire, what seemed to me, to be the same person over and over. The only thing that added to the company was the ability to do more of the same thing, not new things. While that was the goal, it is always interesting to bring in new people that can do different things to help round out your company profile.
Interestingly enough, nearly everything in life requires diversity to solve problems efficiently. Whether you are building a house or building a business, you will need the skill sets of many different people to accomplish the task.
I think the thing I take away from your article here is that it is easier to build a community of like minded individuals than it is do build one where the members of the community are from very different backgrounds, economies, and perhaps careers. However, the glue that holds a community like this together is a common goal.
Excellent write up.