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City’s Comeback Serves as 'Beacon,' Harwood Says
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Change for the better in America will come from communities such as Youngstown, not Washington, D.C., or state capitals, Richard Harwood told 150 residents active in improving the quality of life in the Mahoning Valley.
Harwood, president of the Harwood Institute, chose Youngstown to kick off his National Work of Hope Tour Tuesday night because, he explained, “[What] Youngstown [has accomplished] can be a beacon for the rest of the country.”
He delivered his remarks in the main library of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County. Carlton Sears, who recently retired as executive director of he library, now works for the Harwood Institute as a facilitator and his successor, Heidi Daniel, endorsed Harwood’s work as she introduced the speaker.
In his travels last year across the United States, Harwood said he found Americans’ mood and sentiments about their situation considerably different than when he conducted a similar tour 20 years ago. “Americans don’t want to talk about politics anymore,” he related, where two decades ago they felt government could make their lives better. “They feel we live in a Tower of Babel … and we can’t come together. They feel like they’ve entered a hall of mirrors in a funhouse at the circus and they can’t find their way out. … They feel like they’re trapped in the Tower of Babel with the windows sealed and the doors are locked.”
This analogy tells Harwood, “We’ve lost our ability in this country to listen to each other, to reason together. [People with opposing points of view] talk past each other.”
His conversations with Americans lead him to conclude a sea change has occurred in how they see themselves relative to their fellow citizens. “Self interest trumps concern for one another. Mention ‘the common good’ and their eyes glaze over.”
Harwood surmises many Americans are not as active or involved in civic and social groups as he were 20 years. “Americans are obsessed with instant gratification [and] getting the best at the lowest price. We even believe we can treat our schools this way,” he said.
What’s needed, the speaker said, “is to have more contact with our fellow citizens, [for Americans] to have more humility. … We have to worry not about our own good but the common good, to meld our common interests.”
For Youngstown, which has made considerable progress over the last decade, to stay on that path, Harwood said, “You must take action together” and focus on the positive.
“I know there’s more bad news in this community than good news,” the speaker said, “but you can’t wallow the old narrative.”
New narratives must be developed, he urged, that residents will tell one another – and outsiders – to change the community. “We can tell better stories” about positive accomplishments and achievements -- not to ignore the negative -- and residents repeating the positive new stories reminds them and their fellows of what is possible instead of wallowing in a sense of failure and futility.
“Our sense of hope comes from the stories we tell each other,” the author of The Work of Hope stated.
The Work of Hope is Harwood's latest book.
He offered a four-point plan: “We need to turn out and support one another,” he began, in projects vital to the survival of the community. Americans must return to their outward focus from the inward focus so many have adopted, likely out of their frustration at the behavior of their elected in Columbus and Washington. ”People are more concerned about their own survival than bettering their community,’ Harwood said, but he thinks Youngstown has been an exception.
Those who want to improve their communities must fully realize all that’s entailed lest they become discouraged. All too often well-meaning activists confuse rearranging the furniture or thinking that designing and adopting a new logo is the answer to their problems. It isn’t, of course, and that makes it all the harder when the next wave of well-meaning activists comes to the fore. “It’s not simply a matter of coordinating people,” Harwood has found. “You must pay attention to what they’re saying [before] they’ll have trust in the leadership.”
Those intent upon improving their communities must learn the aspirations of their fellow residents, Harwood said.
And Harwood believes a group must have some way to measure its progress.
“I believe in numbers,” he stated. “I believe in impacts. … With no numbers, no matter how positive you feel, to guide you, you can’t tell how much progress you’ve made, or not made.”
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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