The Flourishing Community: a Story of Hope for America's Distressed Places: A Story of Hope for America's Distressed Places by Brad Ketch

Author:Brad Ketch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Forefront Books
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7 The Black Chapter

My answering of emails was interrupted by a confident knock on the door of the new Rockwood CDC office, and Willie Chambers walked in. At the time, the Rockwood CDC was still using the shuttered barbershop as our office. We had closed down Foxy Girls, and next on the list was the check-cashing store and the hourly motel. I wasn’t the only one working in this one-room office. There were always people coming and going, and we were so tight that we would often have two separate meetings going at two ends of the same table. Nevertheless, Willie and I found a place to have a conversation.

Social entrepreneurship ran in Willie’s family as far as family memory allows. His people were in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 when “Black Wall Street,” a thirty-five-square-block area that was home to America’s wealthiest black community, was razed to the ground by mobs of whites, and Willie’s newly impoverished family fled Oklahoma for south Los Angeles. The downstream devastation for Blacks has not stopped, much less healed.

“Willie, we are working to bring African Americans to the table, but it hasn’t gone well. Creating a functioning community with full African American participation has unique challenges. What do I do?”

“I say that you start by listening to our stories. Learn who folks are, and what they want out of life here. There is history with people from my community. We should be saying, “Wow, this scab has been on here for 125 years, and it has never healed.” Why? Because we never looked at it and talked about it.”

Getting a small group of Black adults together in Rockwood took a while, but eventually fourteen gathered to talk. Scott McCracken, one of my teammates, invited people to dinner in his home. Scott and his wife, Vicki, had lived in Athens, Greece, for many years, and she rolled out one of her for-the-ages Greek dinners. I soon realized that most of the guests didn’t know each other. When people are in a given geography because of serial forced displacement, they tend to not know their own neighbors. “I have a suggestion,” Scott said. “We’ll go around the room, and everyone gets eighteen minutes to tell their story. After that, everyone is welcome to ask clarifying questions, like ‘When you said that, did you mean this?’ but none of us is free to challenge the story. Obviously, Brad and I are the white guys in the room. We aren’t going to say anything at all unless someone asks us to.”

This practice of being quiet—all by itself—is a powerful environment changer. This is going to sound funny, but as a white CEO, I never knew that I wasn’t always welcome to ask whatever questions I wanted to ask. I have been told since I was a boy that “active listening” was a sign of engagement and valuing and, well, respect. But only in Rockwood did I learn that when a power imbalance exists and the more powerful

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