civic saturday akron
Power in Community
Civic Reflections from Kate Tucker for Civic Saturday Akron 04.13.24
Welcome again. Today we’re talking about power, the power to make change happen, and the power we hold by coming together in community.
I am so grateful to be a member of the Akron community. I was born and raised here, I graduated a proud Zip, and I went off to see the world. I lived in Paris, Seattle, New York City, and Nashville, I wrote songs and made records, touring the country with my band. I made movies, documentaries, and podcasts, and I got to collaborate with some amazing people. It was a wild ride, and it still is. Along the way, I discovered that the world is beautiful, but there’s no place like Akron.
In the heart of the pandemic, I moved from Nashville, Tennessee to Highland Square, and for months I didn’t know anyone on my street, I had no idea who lived next to me. When the weather warmed up and we finally came out of our houses, I began to meet the most incredible people. There’s the woman with the parrot on her porch who showed us how to grow gardens in the tiniest of spaces, gardens that would yield more than enough to share. There’s the young engineer with a penchant for power tools who helped us mend our fences and clear out trees that fell in the storm. There’s the cultural historian who grew up on our street in the 1950s and told stories of our neighborhood that made us feel like we belonged to something. And of course, there’s the couple who decided to make their home in an empty old church and invite us all over for coffee and donuts. I’ve quickly realized, I live in an amazing neighborhood.
Meanwhile… in Indianapolis, a young father of two named DeAmon Harges was falling in love with his own street, in a neighborhood known as the worst in the city. He started going door to door, asking people to tell him their stories. On porches, at kitchen tables, he’d ask “Where did you grow up? What are your dreams? What are your gifts?”
DeAmon discovered such a wealth of talent right outside his door that he started a company with his neighbors. Today, his company consults municipalities and organizations all across America. They recently got a visit from the US Surgeon General seeking their wisdom in combating the loneliness epidemic sweeping the nation.
DeAmon is what’s called a social banker. He helps institutions shift from a needs-based transactional approach of handling social issues to the relational model of Asset Based Community Development. This model turns it upside down. It’s not institutions telling people what they need. It starts around the kitchen table, identifying and celebrating the gifts, talents, and resources that already exist within the community; and organizing them, to develop opportunities and restore a sense of ownership.
A sense of ownership is what saved Greensburg, Kansas when a massive tornado tore through their town, leveling 95% of their homes and buildings, and killing eleven people. Imagine emerging from the rubble to decide… where do we go from here?
After the storm, FEMA put up a big circus tent and the residents of Greensburg came together to cry, and hug each other, and envision the future. They decided to forgo the government’s cookie-cutter plan for rebuilding their town. Instead, they created a blueprint that would not only reestablish Greensburg, but would make it America’s “greenest” city with the most LEED-certified buildings per capita in the US to this day. The town would become powered entirely by renewable energy with smart infrastructure for water conservation. But, the first building they invested in, was a community art space, because as their retired postman turned mayor Bob Dixson said, they had lost everything, and a little beauty goes a long way.
Mayor Dixson would go on to share this from their experience:
“You have to envision what you can be 50 to 100 years from now. What is our ability to endure? But for a community to have that mentality post-disaster, you have to have it pre-disaster. Is the infrastructure in place for you to communicate promptly to the entire community? Do you deal with issues—as they come along—in a forthright manner? Do all the different organizations—public, private, not-for-profit—work together? Does the community function effectively? If everything is working as it should be, the community will recover, despite the challenges you face post-disaster, because you already have all the processes in place. And you have the right mentality.”
Okay so why am I sharing these stories? It’s not just to make us feel warm and fuzzy about our neighbors or to remind us that community matters. We know that. We are here because some part of us longs to be in a community. That longing, and that sense of belonging, is what energized the residents of Greensburg, and Indianapolis, to organize collective citizen power and shape their communities for the better.
Community is a mosaic of relationships. Reverend Jen Bailey, of Greater Bethel AME in Nashville says: “Relationships are built at the speed of trust, and social change happens at the speed of relationships.” And as Bob Dixson pointed out, they had the social infrastructure in place to respond when disaster hit. They had put in the good hard work to build a foundation of belonging, ownership, and trust.
How many of you feel a sense of belonging, ownership, and trust within your neighborhood? Think about it for a minute. Do you feel connected to your neighbors, to your community? Do you feel part of something?
Now let’s widen that circle to Ohio, and even wider, to the United States. Let’s have a show of hands -- who feels that we as Americans are more connected than ever? And now, who feels we are more divided?
We are living in polarizing times. Isolation breeds fear and stokes the fires of division which distracts us from getting the real work done, work that protects and insists upon our rights as Americans, that directs resources and support to our communities, that answers our need for belonging and trust. So gathering in community today feels more important than ever. And we’re off to a good start because in this room, there is enough power to rebuild a city, and to restore wealth, resources, equal opportunity, and exponential growth.
So let’s talk about power. The way I understand power is directly inspired by the work of Eric Liu who founded Citizen University and hosted the first Civic Saturdays. I read his book, You’re More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen, and I realized that I had a great responsibility as an artist with a platform, but ultimately as a citizen, to activate my own civic power.
So what is power? Let’s start with a definition laid out in the book: Power is the capacity to ensure others do as you would want them to do. Power is the capacity to ensure, not to coerce, not force -- because power is just as often about persuasion or contagion as it is about force.
Civic power is that capacity as exercised by citizens in public. This could be in elections, could be in government, or social and economic spaces. Power to ensure others do what you want them to do in the public realm, that’s civic power.
Let’s think of where we see power in civic life. We see power in wealth (show me the money) we see power in force, power in state action, there is power in ideas, power in social norms (a lot of power there), power in numbers (Black Lives Matter, Womens March, January 6, every single election). Power flows through many channels: institutions, organizations, networks, laws and regulations, narratives --the stories we tell ourselves and others and ideologies, our beliefs, our faith, the way we see the world.
I wanna stop here and check in with you, let’s give a show of hands -- how many of you think the word “power” has a negative connotation? You generally think of power as bad or dangerous or corrupt?
So a lot of us -- which is understandable. You’ve probably heard it said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolutely power corrupts absolutely.” But as Eric Liu writes: “Power doesn’t corrupt character so much as it reveals it. What will you do with this flame?”
For today, let’s work with the idea that power is neutral, like any law of nature. Like fire, it can burn us or it can keep us from freezing to death. We ultimately owe our continued existence to discovering and managing fire. So if power, like other laws of nature, is neutral, then it comes down to who has the power, and what they do with it.
Who decides? This is the main question I want us to take away today, because the answer will show us where to begin.
Think of something that you wish you could change here in Akron, something that bothers you, maybe it keeps you up at night, maybe you’ve posted about it on Nextdoor or mentioned it to your neighbor.
Now I want to ask you the question: Who decides?
As Eric Liu points out, we live in a complex world where countless layers of decisions impact every aspect of our existence. How did those railroad tracks get there and who decided what would be the right side and the wrong side of those tracks? Who decided to conduct an internal search for the new police chief? Who put the waste transfer station just 50 feet from the houses on my street? Why is this community center getting funded instead of that one? Why a new jail instead of a pre-school?
Who is responsible for the way things are?
What if it’s us?
What if every single one of these outcomes, these effects we now live with, were caused by the people of Akron, the people of Ohio, the people in this country, making decisions and sometimes, giving their power away.
In more ways than I think we realize, we have power and we give it. And that’s why, over time, these things become the way they are… and the way they’ve always been.
Anyone or any institution with power has it because we the people, gave it to them. We give our power away with our attention, or lack of, with our clicks and likes and shares on social media, with our dollars, and most importantly with our votes. Even for those of us who don’t believe our vote matters, and I’ve been there, in a democracy, there is no such thing as not voting. Not voting is voting because we hand our power over to someone whose interests might not be in our favor. And not showing up, not participating, is participating because we’re letting others hold space we would have held, we’re letting others speak louder and more frequently.
Power is a gift we each possess. We yield our inherent power and direct it to others, and as Eric writes, “We reinforce a cycle that is at the heart of politics and political history.” That cycle can be summed up in three laws of power.
Law number one: Power concentrates. Power feeds on itself, monopolizes, and compounds, as does powerlessness. Look at generational wealth, and generational poverty.
Law number two: Power justifies. People invent stories to legitimize the power they have or the power they lack and that becomes entrenched in the public psyche, playing out in our social arena -- think structural racism and sexism, mass incarceration, crony capitalism, insurrection, and pervasive sense of helplessness among those who are not clearly holding the power.
But then we come to law three, my favorite because it can subvert the whole cycle. Power is infinite. There is no inherent limit on the amount of power people can create. It is not zero-sum, it can be generated from thin air, from the air in this room today. We who are perceived as powerless can create a new deal when we see beyond the limits of our situation.
So to summarize the cycle, people who hold power want people who are perceived as powerless, to believe it’s a zero-sum game, that there’s only so much power to go around and those in power have the monopoly on it. They try to hoard power and justify why they have it and why others don’t.
But the truth is, we can generate our own power at any given moment because power is infinite. And it’s neutral, remember, it doesn’t belong exclusively to any one group, it doesn’t have to be directed in any one way. We can rewrite the story by first asking who decides? That response can determine a course of action that will change the flow of power.
Remember DeAmon Harges and Bob Dixson? They were not willing to accept the negative stories and projections made about their communities. From a place of perceived powerlessness, they tested that third law of power, proving that power is infinite, it can be generated from thin air, through the magic of organizing.
Together with their neighbors, they organized collective resources to create something from seemingly nothing. But it wasn’t nothing, the power was there, lying dormant, ready to be activated. And once they recognized the power they held in community, it was no longer a bad news story, it was their own story. It was good, and it was true.
What kind of story will we write? Akron is a place of great history, great innovation, upheaval, growth, and decline. Like many Rust Belt cities, we were once a big deal. And then we weren’t. That’s the Akron story of the 20th century. We are here, now. We are here because Akron survived its rise and its fall.
Akron is a city in transformation. When I tell people about Akron, I tell a story of grit and resilience. Of restoration and of return, to the history that was lost and buried, where we find ourselves again in community, in celebration of our own unique civic power.
What kind of story do you tell? What do you say about your neighborhood, your street, your apartment building, your people? Is it a story of power? Is it a story of hope? Because that’s what I see when I look around this room and that’s what I believe is present here as we walk in this together. Power and hope.
And while we have differences in opinion, identity, belief, and affiliation, we are united by living here together, in this city, or in this county, in the heart of it all that is Ohio. Unity is not uniformity. We can test this experiment of democracy together and find our way to a place of freedom, a place of liberty, and justice for all, a place of hope.