Show notes
Rich Harwood shared insights into sparking change that evolves over time. He founded the Harwood Institute in 1988 with work centered around developing community change-centered conversations. A philosophy of civic faith and community driven solutions fueled this initiative’s efforts for the more than 30 years. Society became increasingly polarized in the experiences and opportunities people encounter based on their backgrounds. Rich explains that most of the initiative’s work focuses on building communities of shared responsibility and common enterprise. Overall, the institute is teaching people “…how to create change in their local communities that reflects what matters to people in those communities, that reflects the local context of that community, and that develops strategies that have a real shot at producing impact in people’s lives.” Rich also mentioned the equally important intention of communities solving problems together and sustaining longevity. One approach being used to accomplish this effort is the initiative’s Public Innovator Lab. The Harwood Institute hosts programs to engage people in what it means to adopt a mindset of being “turned outward” toward your community. In the case of being “turned outward”, individuals use the community as a reference point. Rich spoke about the Public Innovators Lab that is active in Jackson, Mississippi, after starting the virtual version during the pandemic. Participants are mainly coached for guidance, but given room to personally develop their capabilities. Rich expressed how this approach translates from community to community. Moving an idea between different communities builds on practices being adapted, and a mindset spreading. Rich brought our attention to the commonality of any great idea or culture shift spreading, which is “a small group of people”. Most of history’s enlightened periods or trends started from a dedicated group of small people coming together. As the idea grows stronger, the small group recruits more people over time. Having a very clear understanding of the idea helps each person share the idea to bring more people, and keep that movement growing and multiplying. Rich spoke more deeply on the topic of not only articulating an idea but understanding the components of bringing the idea into action through collaborative effort. His perspective on “action” gives an alternative feeling to the saying “actions speak louder than words”. He explained the collaborative mindset and the realizations contained in the creation process needed between community members, or anyone, working to solve an issue. Rich illustrates this point with an example of two women proactively learning to address drug concerns within their community, which later led to the initiative Achieving Recovery Together. Working towards a solution includes making mistakes, and Rich expressed his own thoughts on trial and error when building a worthwhile initiative. Talking about “trial and error” led us to discuss how change can overlap and the reasons why questions are a great tool for getting started. If you’d like to learn more, you can visit their website, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Gain more insight from Rich’s work with his book “Unleashed: A Proven Way Communities Can Spread Change and Make Hope Real for All” Read Full Transcript Adam: [00:00:00] Welcome to People Helping People, the podcast to inspire greater social change and give you ideas on how to take action. I'm your host, Adam Morris. Today, I am so honored to have Rich Harwood join us. He founded that Harwood Institute over 30 years ago, back in 1988. Their work is centered around developing community conversations that create change and have worked with groups in all 50 States and 40 countries, with a philosophy of civic, faith, and community-driven solutions, basically they're who you call when your community is stuck and doesn't know what to do. His new book "Unleashed, a proven ways communities can spread change and make hope real for all", is available for pre-order now and illustrates how to develop change in a community. Rich is also leading a redesign of the virtual public innovation lab centered on helping you unleash that impact. So Rich, welcome on the podcast. Rich: [00:00:53] Good to be with you, Adam. Thanks so much for having me. Adam: [00:00:56] Can we start off, could you share just a little bit about what the Harwood Institute is? Rich: [00:01:00] I started back when I was 27. And what we're interested in is how do we bridge divides in communities? How do we build a culture of shared responsibility and how do we make community a real common enterprise? So that communities for all of us, not just for some of us. Particularly in these times when we're polarized, when things are acrimonious, when we've lost faith in one another and in our institutions, how do we make communities work for everyone, regardless of the color of your skin, regardless of your creed, regardless of what God you pray to, if you pray to any God, regardless of who you love, regardless of your zip code. I happen to believe that our work really is about how do we ensure that every individual can fulfill their human potential, and how do we make sure that every individual has an opportunity to fulfill America's promise. We know that's not true today. But how do we make it true? And how do we make it real in people's lives. And the Institute, last thing I'll say, and then maybe we can get into this more in a really practical sense is that we, we teach people a practice about how to turn outward. And how to create change in their local communities that reflects what matters to people in those communities, that reflects the local context of that community. And that develops strategies that have a real shot at producing impact in people's lives. And importantly, just as importantly, for us helps build the civic culture of the community so that we can actually solve problems together over a long period of time. Adam: [00:02:28] What does that actually look like when you go into a community to help facilitate this change? Rich: [00:02:33] We're launching in three new communities right now as we speak. But let me tell you about Jackson, Mississippi, which we launched during COVID of all times. We thought we'd have to delay the initiative, but we didn't. So in Jackson, like in many of the communities where we work, we start with what we call a public innovators lab. As you mentioned in the intro, we have a virtual version of that. We also have one that's place-based that actually happens in person. The one that's place-based is two-and-a-half days. The one that's virtual is five sessions over every week, over a five week period. In that lab we engage people in what it means to adopt a mindset of being turned outward toward your community. Most of us are turned inward toward ourselves. We're turned inward toward our own organizations, our own strategies, our own metrics, our own fundraising, unfortunately, our own survival, organizationally, many times. And we're not turned outward toward the community where the community is our reference point for what we do, not ourselves on our own strategies.And then we teach people a series of practices, not techniques, but practices about how to bring themselves into the world and work with other people in a turned outward way. And then from there, Adam, what we do typically like in Jackson is there are about 50 people who went through that lab from all walks of life. And then we have coaches who walk beside people. They're not consultants. They literally are coaches to help people learn. And there's a huge difference, right? A consultant tells you what to do, and they provide all the answers. They write memos, they lead meetings for you. We don't do any of that. Adam: [00:04:03] This seems like a cornerstone of the Harwood Institute, right? That, that you're not imposing solutions on a community. Rich: [00:04:10] We believe that people have innate capacities. That we have the ability to create change ourselves and what Americans, and I think, in working around the world now, but what Americans want more than anything as a sense that they can shape their own futures, that they have a sense of control over their futures. That we have a sense of agency, we have the ability to do things not only alone, but to come together and do them together and be co-creators of our communities, partners and code builders in our communities. And so our philosophy and our practice is to honor that and to help people develop the capabilities to do that and the conditions within their communities. So these coaches if they were coaching you, or in the case of Jackson, the five teams that were coaching in Jackson, they walk beside folks and help them adopt and adapt our practice and make it their own. So people can call their own shots in their own communities. These aren't our communities. I don't live in Columbus where you are. I don't live in Jackson, Mississippi. These are their communities. And what we want to do is enable people in their own communities to shape their own futures in ways that make sense for themselves, their families, their neighbors, their fellow, community members. And and we've had great luck in doing that so far. Adam: [00:05:28] If you're listening to this podcast, you can go to the Harwood Institute.org, and there are stories on there of all these different places where you've gone in and, and facilitated that change. Typically, like what does that look like? Rich: [00:05:42] So in this case we were doing place-based work. Not all our work is this way, but in this case, in, in many communities, the three communities we're launching in Redding, Pennsylvania, Clarksville, Tennessee, and Lexington, Kentucky about educational equity issues. Those initiatives are going to be 18 months long. And so our coaches who walked beside people for 18 months in Clark County, Kentucky, which started as an 18 month initiative where I've seen the most rapid change of any place that I've worked in my over 30 years now of doing work, that then morphed into 24 months, that morphed into a few years. And we're still walking beside them in smaller and smaller ways. And they're doing actually as we pull back in this book on Unleashed that you mentioned when you started we went and looked at communities like Clark County and other communities that we've worked in over the last 30 years. And what we studied was not what happened when we were there. What I was most interested in is what happened in after the 18 months when we left. And what we saw Adam was that's when most of the change occurred. That's when things really got Unleashed. That's when things started to spread, we're living through this negative contagion of called COVID right now. Our working communities acts like a positive contagion. This practice that we teach people, this mindset that they adopt. It's built in such a way so that people share it with others. We want them to share it with others. It's not a closed system. It's an open system to be shared. And so in this book, Unleashed what we have are illustrations of how the works spread like a contagion through the community, into different places, into different networks. And that's where you begin to see real change start to take place. It's where you begin to see the change. Start to spread. It's where you begin to see the civic culture of the community start to transform. And so going back to Clark County, where we started with them when they were stuck during COVID two and a half, three years later, they brought together 60 representatives from different organizations, who two and a half years ago never would have worked together. Many of whom didn't know each other. Many of them, if they had been brought together would have been protecting their turf and fighting over resources. Now during COVID, they came together to make sure that there were mental health services that kids didn't fall through the cracks during distance, remote learning. That people that I know you deal with homelessness, that they could begin to address the systemic issues around homelessness and make sure people weren't going to get evicted from their homes or from their rental apartments. And so now they've created this collective response to COVID that two and a half years ago never would have happened. That all happened after we left. And that's the beauty of this work. Adam: [00:08:35] I love that. Now, when this work starts, like how many people really need to come together to kick this off the ground? Rich: [00:08:43] Yeah, that's a really great question. I used to think you know, as much younger and we were doing this work, I used to think it was hundreds of people. And in fact, in some communities, we did bring hundreds of people together to take them through our lab and everything. And then I thought it was 125 people. And then I thought it was, and in some communities, depending on the size, it's like a hundred people. In Jackson, Mississippi. We just brought together. As I mentioned, about 50 people in these three educational equity communities that we're launching that I mentioned initially, I think it's going to be 25 people. And what we've learned, essentially the lesson here is that small groups of people. If they come together and can adopt a different mindset and can start to use different practices and how they're going to engage people in these conversations you mentioned, and also spark change beyond the conversations that small groups of people can catalyze that. And as they catalyze that they can begin to spread these ideas and practices to others. And ultimately over time, you have hundreds of people in a community doing this, but it doesn't have to start with hundreds of people. That's the beauty of it. And and that's actually the power of it. And I think last thing I'll say about this is, I discovered this in our work over time, but if you read about how ideas have spread throughout civilization, if you read about how religion has spread, if you read about how the American revolution started. If you read about how the civil rights movement started, it always started with small groups of people that ultimately spread out over time and enlisted more and more allies as they were going. And our work is no different. Adam: [00:10:27] And it seems like they need to have something very clear that they can share in order to bring more people into that. And keep that effect growing and multiplying. Rich: [00:10:36] I think what they have to have is an ability to first understand what really matters to people and an ability to understand that everyone, regardless of their station, life is trying to create a better life for themselves and for others. And so the work is not rooted in simply articulating the problems in society. Although we need to recognize what those are, the reality that we live in. It's articulating a possibility for the future that's actionable, doable, and achievable. And engaging people in that work and enabling people to be co-creators of that work and sharing the stories of that work over time. I think if you look at all chains, they always seem to have those ingredients. And this is where I get off the boat with some folks in this work, because some folks believe that, if we simply get together and talk enough, we'll be able to solve our problems. And I happen not to ascribe to that point of view. I actually think that we do need to articulate what we share in common, because we need to work on things that we share in common in order to com…
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