Of course officials who are elected and empowered by government to take action are often central to many kinds of community progress.  But it certainly doesn’t mean that getting elected is the only way to be a leader in your community.

So, I offer this list of Five Ways to be a Leader in Your Community Without Running for Office:

1. Volunteer your time. Find an organization or a project in your community that meets a need or tackles an issue that’s interesting to you.  This may seem like an obvious one, but giving of your time not only provides tangible assistance to your community, but it helps you connect with others who are working on making it a better place.  From these experiences you can see what other parts of the community need your attention and how you can best serve.
2. Participate in public debate and feedback.  When you’re asked by organizations or other leaders in the community for your input, or if someone is doing a survey or conducting focus groups, participate!  It can be tempting to think your individual response won’t make that much difference, but a well-thought out comment or an observation or question shared from the heart can often make ALL the difference.  School boards, government agencies and community improvement organizations can wander around in the dark for a long time without regular feedback from the people they serve or represent.  If you have the chance to help guide them, do it, and encourage your friends and family to participate too.
3. Find an unmet need and lead the way to meeting it.  In many communities there are often basic services, programs or bits of infrastructure that aren’t in place but could be.  Look for those times in the course of your daily routine when you think “Somebody should…” or “I wish they’d…” and then become the person who moves that thing forward.  You don’t have to be an expert or a full time advocate to help get a process unstuck or bring something to the attention of appropriate decision-makers.  And it doesn’t have to be a big project or an expensive solution to make a difference.
4. Ask for accountability. Make sure you understand the job descriptions for your elected officials at the local and state level, and then make sure they’re actually living up to that job description.  If they’re doing a good job, tell them that and encourage them – it’s not easy being a politician and you can never make everybody happy, so affirmation goes a long way.  If they’re not doing a good job, tell them that in constructive ways – letters that suggest alternate approaches, showing up at meetings where you share your perspective, and so on.  Let your representatives know that you’re watching and that you care.  In the end, most of them will serve the community a little bit better because of it.
5. Develop your network.  Build relationships with others around you – neighbors, co-workers, friends, strangers – and look for opportunities for people to work together or share resources to achieve a common goal.  Even if you don’t have an active project or effort right now, knowing who to call or connect with when an opportunity arises will help make things happen more quickly.

These suggestions may be obvious, and practicing these kinds of leadership may not yield the same kinds of recognition or public exposure that elected officials receive (this can be a good thing), but every successful community depends on its members to take some active role in making it a better place.

What other ways do you work at being a community leader?

1. Most high profile community leaders and organizations aren’t modeling awareness of sustainability issues, sometimes even at a basic level.
2. Almost all development and expansion efforts continue to incorporate a car-centric model of transportation and community zoning/planning.
3. Most of the focus on environmental education is targeted at individuals instead of at businesses, factories, and government organizations, the latter groupings being the ones that tend to use the most resources.
4. The notion of conducting “green business for green living” has been widely adopted as a goal, but also significantly watered down in its impact, often to the point of minimal actual benefit.
5. Sustainability-oriented efforts and organizations are fragmented and overlapping, despite valiant efforts of a number of projects to bring them all together at the same table.
6. The status of and appropriate use of natural resources has been made into an emotionally charged political or religious debate, which often leads to an avoidance of the topic for fear of offending.
7. There are basic educational challenges in the community about the question of how food is produced and where it comes from.  For many people, food is effectively created at the grocery store.
8. Some people seem to feel that solely by financially supporting one environmental organization or another, they’ve “done their part” for sustainability efforts in the community.
9. Our ability to transform the community mindset about sustainability issues doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the realities of peak oil, climate change and economic despair.

(These are some locally specific issues on top of some other challenges I’ve already identified, e.g. our personal fears around sustainable living.)

So, what are some paths forward that might address some of these challenges?

1. More organizational collaboration and communication.  It might be hard, it might be messy, but it has to happen.
2. More effectively mobilizing community members who care about these issues and who can have an impact on decision-makers
3. Asking corporations / factories / governments to participate as much or more than individuals in making Richmond and Wayne County more self-reliant.
4. Clearly defining sustainability and environmental concepts and terms, to avoid watering down or misapplying them.
5. Creating strong advocacy efforts, or better fund the existing ones
6. Bringing in speakers from other communities with success stories, real life experiences, practical suggestions that we can begin implementing today.
7. Work to untangle the science of sustainability issues from the emotional, religious, and political connotations.
8. Continue education about issues of peak oil, climate change and economic trouble, and how they impact our community.

That’s one set of challenges and possible solutions that I see.  What are the challenges and solutions you see in your community?

I’ve asked a version of this question before: Must we become the change we wish to see in the world? You can maybe tell that there’s a theme here – impactful personal lifestyle change is not often convenient, and sometimes it is downright scary.  But that’s not a reason not to spend as much energy and time as it takes to try to live more sustainably, right?  Change has to happen with each person individually before we can expect the system to change, right?

Or does it?

There’s an essay out there that’s been weighing on me lately, bothering me, in fact.  Essays like this don’t bother me unless either (A) I know they’re speaking the truth and I’m having a hard or slow time integrating that truth into my own life, or (B) I know that they’re missing something important in their treatment of the subject, but I just can’t put my finger on what it is.  In this case it may be some of both.

The essay is “Forget Shorter Showers: Why personal change does not equal political change” by Derrick Jensen.  Jensen basically says that it’s problematic to see an individual living more sustainably as an effective political act, and that devoting time and energy to doing so is not necessarily worth it unless it’s personally rewarding for you.  His reasons:

1. Simple personal living as a political act is focused on harm reduction, instead of on helping bring about needed positive change
2. Simple personal living assigns the blame, guilt and burden to individuals for addressing sustainability issues, instead of to the entities (corporations, governments, etc.) who are creating and perpetuating the problems.
3. Simple personal living as a political act accepts the capitalist redefinition of people from citizens to consumers, reducing our forms of action to “consuming” and “not consuming.”
4. If we don’t question the intellectual, moral, economic and physical infrastructure that create destructive, unsustainable ways of life, but insist that we want to personally be a part of the solution, the inevitable conclusion leads us to self-destruction (or, as Jensen puts it, suicide).

I’ve rephrased some of Jensen’s reasoning, so I hope you’ll read the full essay to get his original thoughts.  But here’s my take on what he’s saying and my original question:

I agree that it’s silly and self-defeating to expend significant resources on personal change without also challenging the pieces of infrastructure that cause harm in the first place.  I do think that a balance can be found more easily within the construct of a community than it can within an individual’s life.  Some people may be really good at effecting personal lifestyle changes while not so good at doing the work needed to challenge a broken economic system, and vice versa for someone else.  Working together, a community unit can do both effectively.

I also agree with Jensen that we must not accept the premise that we as individuals hold the sole power to make our existence as humans more or less sustainable, and that our mechanisms for doing so are choosing what products we do and don’t buy.  I feel embarrassed that I spend any time worrying about making sure the hallway light is off when I’m not using it as I drive by empty strip mall parking lots lit up like daylight, using far more energy than my hallway light ever will.

But I also know that corporations, governments, etc. are made up of individuals just like us, and so I believe that there is power in changing individual minds, modeling sustainable living for each other, and planting seeds of possibility.  It may not be as powerful as getting that strip mall to change their lighting practices, but it’s not nothing.

Jensen concludes his article by saying “the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.“  I know a number of people who believe that they’re doing both – that by navigating systems of oppressive power well, they are playing a role in confronting them, changing them, and even taking them down.

It may come down to the math of the situation, in equations where we can’t know all of the variables right now.  If enough people effecting personal lifestyle change or working within broken systems is enough to actually make a lasting difference, then we’re all set.  If it turns out that the systems of power and corporate/governmental destruction and resource consumption are far more effective than we could ever hope to stop, then we better hope that our individual decisions along the way were personally rewarding, as memories of a life well-lived in the face of a world breaking around us may be the only reward we get.

How does the math work out for you?  Is personal lifestyle change worthwhile and effective?

First, I want to say that I do offer my genuine congratulations to the youth, their mentors and supporters who put together Richmond’s application and saw it through to the win.  To achieve national recognition for our city is commendable, and I know that the passion, time and energy you put into this effort comes from a deep love of this community and its potential.  Richmond needs more people like you who care enough to act, and who do so with a bright future in mind.

Now on to the harder part:

My fellow blogger Jean Harper has written a critique of this effort that raises some very worthy questions about the value of spending our time trying to win this label.  Other people in other candidate cities are asking the same questions. The recurring theme: “why should we put all that time and money into competing for a title that is just a title, when we have real problems to solve back home?”

I think it’s a good sign that these questioning conversations are happening, but I have a difficult time with some of Jean’s more biting comments:

I would like to take the community leaders aside and say this: Look. Quit lying to our kids. Quit filling their heads with boosterish nonsense. Quit leading them on these exhausting exercises which result in virtually nothing.

I posted a response to her entry on her blog, but I thought I’d share it here too:

Thanks for putting out some challenging thoughts about this award news.

I’ve been cogitating on similar ideas for a while now, and while I share your concern that the return on investment for this effort might not be justifiable, I’m not sure I can follow you all the way to the point of calling it lying to the youth involved, or to saying that a community improvement effort that doesn’t necessarily directly engage the homeless is one to eschew.

This comes from my general philosophy of community improvement, which I think fellow commenter Aaron touched on: “There is no one right way to make Richmond a better place.”  That is, it just won’t work to say that there’s a single plan of action for helping this community solve all of its problems, and then execute it and hope for the best on the other side.

We do need to engage all of the disenfranchised populations you talked about, and re-think our education system and notions of meaningful employment.  But we also need the rallying and the parades and the vague award titles and the hype.  We need all of it, and we need anyone who has a bit of passion and energy for this place to manifest their care in whatever way they think they can bring the most to the rest of us.

Richmond has suffered recently, I think, at the hands of those who preach homogeneity and “one right way, there is no alternative” when it comes to community improvement and economic development.  So I just can’t begrudge the successes of someone who is willing to say “well, what if we try something else?  What if we go a different direction and see what happens?”  I may have serious concerns about their particular choice of direction (as I do in this case), but until there are more people taking Richmond’s future into their own hands, until there are so many “shovel-ready, high-impact” projects for people to plug into that we don’t know where to start, I don’t think we have the luxury of criticizing those who are making a go of it in their own way.

Even with limited resources, even knowing there are those with other clear and pressing daily needs that are not being met, I still think there’s value in diversity of approach.  We don’t know what might spark the kinds of revival and rejuvenation that really will make a big difference.

Thanks again for calling us all out on this, not allowing for unquestioned or unconditional glee when we know reality demands more of us.

At the same time, I recognize that other people are out there coming up with their own ideas about how to make Richmond better.  I hear those ideas mentioned at meetings, in casual conversations, in planning documents, and all over.  Sometimes I hear people talk about idea overlap – how something they thought was a new idea was something someone else had worked on in the past.  And then I start to worry that we might not be fully honoring the collective brain power we devote to improving Richmond, and I wanted to create a resource that would allow for some consolidated storage of all of those great ideas.

Thus was created the concept for a new website I launched this week, Richmond Brainstorm.com.  It’s a place where people can submit their ideas for how to make Richmond better, and discuss the ideas already on the site.

It’s not going to be a place that tries to then take ownership or leadership of those ideas.  It’s not trying to promote one kind of idea over another, or to advance any particular agenda.  I’ll leave that up to everyone else to do in their own work.  No, this is just a place to collect and refine ideas to make our community better.  Some of them may sit there a while untouched, but my hope is that some day, perhaps when someone with new time, energy or money comes along and asks “what can I do?,” we’ll have given them a head start.

It’s been beta tested pretty thoroughly now (thanks Anna Lisa, Carol, Amy, Jim, Scott, Mark, and Aaron for your feedback!), but I’m sure there’s room for improvement and new features.  I hope you’ll try it out and let me know what you think.  Most importantly, I hope you’ll share your ideas.

It turned into one of my most intense speaking experiences to date.

I’ve given presentations and led discussions about a lot of different stuff, but they usually trend toward technology topics with which I’m very comfortable and have lots of experience talking about. They also tend to be specific enough that I don’t have to demonstrate a greater understanding of the universe or tie a whole bunch of big themes together. But in “Going Local,” it was about taking a hard look at how we (humans) got into the mess we’re in (energy crisis, climate change, economic collapse, widespread war and injustice) and making some very specific recommendations about what to do about it on the local level. Personal suggestions. Things that might offend, or at least cause discomfort. Things I’ve had a hard time saying out loud before.

It was also a kind of culminating presentation for me. The place where community-building, good communication and discussion, concerns about the energy and climate crises, and creating a vision for the future of Richmond meet is a nexus where I’ve been spending more and more of my own personal energy lately. There’s minimal personal risk in talking about optimizing a website for Google’s search engine, but when you’re talking about the sustainability of our lives in the place we call home, it somehow feels more edgy, vulnerable, scary.

Despite my anxiety, I think it turned out quite well. What’s more, I think it started some good conversations, some of which are still going on. I was grateful that the talk was not only attended by the somewhat academic population at whom it was originally targetted, but also local economic development officials, business owners, sustainability educators, friends, and at least one member of the media. Thanks to everyone who came and who shared your feedback.

For those who were there, I’ve posted the “menu” of suggested action items for futher comment and expansion, over at ProgressiveWayneCounty.org. And if you weren’t there, the suggested items may make more sense when you hear the rest of the spiel – I’m available to give the talk to your group or organization if you want. I’m ready to face the discomfort again, knowing how important having these conversations might be, trusting that I still have much to learn, and hoping that it will get easier each time.

For now I won’t try to record the conference proceedings here (they’ll be on DVD soon), but I have a number of blog entries in the works. If you’re interested in hearing about some of what I learned, I’ll also be covering it in a talk on Thursday, November 15th at 12 PM in a session called “Going Local: Building a Self-Reliant Richmond, Indiana.” Join us if you can.

The essence of radical simplicity, of the gift/generosity economy, of natural community, and of natural entrepreneurship, I think, is needing less. Needing less makes us, as individuals, members of enterprises, communities and societies, more self-sufficient, and more resilient, and allows us to give more with the ‘excess’ time, energy and money that we have by virtue of needing less.

Dave goes on to list a few ways that needing less in everyday life might manifest itself. Perhaps obvious to some, overly abstract to others…a pleasant reminder for me.