Interview with Dr Amyn Sajoo, Scholar-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University
The.Ismaili is pleased to publish an interview with Dr Amyn Sajoo, a specialist in international human rights, civil society, and public ethics. As part of a series of interviews with key figures, Dr Sajoo discusses the notion of civil society, its history, significance, and potential to enrich democratic life around the world.
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https://the.ismaili/our-stories/intervi ... university
Civil Society and its Institutions
United States Jamat continues tradition of engaging in civic life
As long ago as 1835, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States and recognized a unique characteristic, namely, the role played by voluntary private associations in social, political, and economic life. He suggested this freedom to associate was the “mother science” which illustrated how other societal problems might be resolved. Today, the United States Jamat is continuing a long tradition of volunteering for the public good.
Today, we refer to these private associations as being part of civil society, the social space where individuals come together to address issues of concern to a particular group or to the general public. Governments, from local to national, realize that they cannot meet all the needs of their citizens, and that they need to rely on private organizations to assist in this endeavour. Historically, faith-based institutions, private philanthropic organizations, and individual citizens have helped fill this void, dealing with extreme poverty, basic healthcare, and education, especially for marginalized segments of society.
Civil society today
Civil society organizations (CSOs) are now universally recognized as being instrumental in helping address societal issues and, indeed, as being vital to a well-functioning democracy, often by partnering with civic institutions.
"Democracy cannot function reasonably without two preconditions. The first is a healthy, civil society…. The second precondition is pluralism," noted Mawlana Hazar Imam at the 2004 Governor General's Canadian Leadership Conference.
In recent decades, there has been an exponential increase in the number of CSOs that have been created to meet a number of needs, consisting of NGOs, faith-based groups, and professional and community organizations.
"Culture is born of values, and civil society is where people live values most urgently," wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks. He added, "Amid growing social isolation in the United States, a new set of values is emerging around community, healing, and belonging, and they will likely define an era."
Whether addressing poverty or hunger or racism, Brooks sees groups of like-minded individuals "reweaving community." And the World Economic Forum has recognised the role that faith communities play as "drivers of community cohesion."
Photos and more....
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/united- ... civic-life
As long ago as 1835, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States and recognized a unique characteristic, namely, the role played by voluntary private associations in social, political, and economic life. He suggested this freedom to associate was the “mother science” which illustrated how other societal problems might be resolved. Today, the United States Jamat is continuing a long tradition of volunteering for the public good.
Today, we refer to these private associations as being part of civil society, the social space where individuals come together to address issues of concern to a particular group or to the general public. Governments, from local to national, realize that they cannot meet all the needs of their citizens, and that they need to rely on private organizations to assist in this endeavour. Historically, faith-based institutions, private philanthropic organizations, and individual citizens have helped fill this void, dealing with extreme poverty, basic healthcare, and education, especially for marginalized segments of society.
Civil society today
Civil society organizations (CSOs) are now universally recognized as being instrumental in helping address societal issues and, indeed, as being vital to a well-functioning democracy, often by partnering with civic institutions.
"Democracy cannot function reasonably without two preconditions. The first is a healthy, civil society…. The second precondition is pluralism," noted Mawlana Hazar Imam at the 2004 Governor General's Canadian Leadership Conference.
In recent decades, there has been an exponential increase in the number of CSOs that have been created to meet a number of needs, consisting of NGOs, faith-based groups, and professional and community organizations.
"Culture is born of values, and civil society is where people live values most urgently," wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks. He added, "Amid growing social isolation in the United States, a new set of values is emerging around community, healing, and belonging, and they will likely define an era."
Whether addressing poverty or hunger or racism, Brooks sees groups of like-minded individuals "reweaving community." And the World Economic Forum has recognised the role that faith communities play as "drivers of community cohesion."
Photos and more....
https://the.ismaili/our-stories/united- ... civic-life
Preaching Faith in Democracy
A movement spreading across the country since the 2016 election evokes a church. Its teachings? Civic engagement.
Excerpt:
Why is this happening right now? In part, it’s a reaction to an unpopular president and what many see as particularly divisive times. But it’s also, perhaps, a result of the growing population of Americans who don’t identify with a particular religion (23 percent of the general population and 35 percent of millennials, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study) and yet desire a place where they can experience ritual, consistent community and the space for self-examination.
Casper ter Kuile, a Ministry Innovation Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, has co-authored a series of reports on the new ways in which spirituality is showing up in gatherings like these. “There’s a great hunger for meaningful community,” he told me in an interview. “The drastic decline of religious communities is happening at the same time that we see growing rates of social isolation, mental illness, and polarization in our politics. Civic Saturdays gives local leaders a way to invite others into a relationship that is oriented around meaning and purpose — something that more and more of us are craving.”
Civic Saturdays are meant, however, not just to scratch an existential itch for the individuals who show up but to change the nation. Mr. Liu explained that citizenship is “not about papers and passports.” Instead, he said, he has a favorite equation: “Power + character = citizenship.”
“A lot of Civic Saturday is about cultivating civic character,” he said. “But that has to be coupled with a growing literacy on power. That’s cooking with gas — activating civic capacity that can make our community regenerate from the bottom up.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/opin ... y_20190703
A movement spreading across the country since the 2016 election evokes a church. Its teachings? Civic engagement.
Excerpt:
Why is this happening right now? In part, it’s a reaction to an unpopular president and what many see as particularly divisive times. But it’s also, perhaps, a result of the growing population of Americans who don’t identify with a particular religion (23 percent of the general population and 35 percent of millennials, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study) and yet desire a place where they can experience ritual, consistent community and the space for self-examination.
Casper ter Kuile, a Ministry Innovation Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, has co-authored a series of reports on the new ways in which spirituality is showing up in gatherings like these. “There’s a great hunger for meaningful community,” he told me in an interview. “The drastic decline of religious communities is happening at the same time that we see growing rates of social isolation, mental illness, and polarization in our politics. Civic Saturdays gives local leaders a way to invite others into a relationship that is oriented around meaning and purpose — something that more and more of us are craving.”
Civic Saturdays are meant, however, not just to scratch an existential itch for the individuals who show up but to change the nation. Mr. Liu explained that citizenship is “not about papers and passports.” Instead, he said, he has a favorite equation: “Power + character = citizenship.”
“A lot of Civic Saturday is about cultivating civic character,” he said. “But that has to be coupled with a growing literacy on power. That’s cooking with gas — activating civic capacity that can make our community regenerate from the bottom up.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/opin ... y_20190703
The article below highlights how civil societies working with the government can promote and bring about progress in societies.
As Rome Falters, Milan Rises
Italy’s economic powerhouse can teach the nation’s leaders: Don’t bash each other. Govern as if you had much in common. Because you do.
Excerpt:
Why is Milan smiling while Rome sulks? After all, they belong to the same country, which is arguing with the European Commission about excessive public debt and low growth, is losing educated young people to jobs abroad (120,000 last year) and has two pensioners for every three people in work.
There is more than one answer, but one is paramount: In Milan, political opponents work together, and business and cultural institutions tend to join forces for the common good. They think glory and wealth can be shared, if things get done. This belief has been the city’s hallmark for 20 years, and now, despite the infighting and the impotence of the national government, it is producing results.
The Milanesi are individualists, like most Italians. But they can play as a team, and win matches.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/opin ... y_20190709
As Rome Falters, Milan Rises
Italy’s economic powerhouse can teach the nation’s leaders: Don’t bash each other. Govern as if you had much in common. Because you do.
Excerpt:
Why is Milan smiling while Rome sulks? After all, they belong to the same country, which is arguing with the European Commission about excessive public debt and low growth, is losing educated young people to jobs abroad (120,000 last year) and has two pensioners for every three people in work.
There is more than one answer, but one is paramount: In Milan, political opponents work together, and business and cultural institutions tend to join forces for the common good. They think glory and wealth can be shared, if things get done. This belief has been the city’s hallmark for 20 years, and now, despite the infighting and the impotence of the national government, it is producing results.
The Milanesi are individualists, like most Italians. But they can play as a team, and win matches.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/opin ... y_20190709
The article below highlights the effectiveness of civil societies where corrupt governments have lost trust of civilians.
Why American Cruelty Doesn’t Deter Migrants
We told Hondurans of harsh U.S. asylum policies. They said it was still better than facing poverty and death threats at home.
Excerpt:
As lawyers, we aren’t experts in foreign aid, international development or foreign policy. But based on what we saw and heard, to actually deter migrants, America must go to the root of the problem. That would mean a recommitment to support Honduras and the other Central American countries producing the vast majority of asylum seekers. In doing so, it cannot simply put money into the hands of a transparently corrupt government that has failed the public and completely lost its trust.
The United States could instead back the many local civil society organizations we met with that are doing exceptional work in job training, education and community building. With extra aid aimed at reducing violence, strengthening infrastructure, getting desperately needed medicines back into hospitals and books back into schools, more people will stay.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/opin ... y_20190729
Why American Cruelty Doesn’t Deter Migrants
We told Hondurans of harsh U.S. asylum policies. They said it was still better than facing poverty and death threats at home.
Excerpt:
As lawyers, we aren’t experts in foreign aid, international development or foreign policy. But based on what we saw and heard, to actually deter migrants, America must go to the root of the problem. That would mean a recommitment to support Honduras and the other Central American countries producing the vast majority of asylum seekers. In doing so, it cannot simply put money into the hands of a transparently corrupt government that has failed the public and completely lost its trust.
The United States could instead back the many local civil society organizations we met with that are doing exceptional work in job training, education and community building. With extra aid aimed at reducing violence, strengthening infrastructure, getting desperately needed medicines back into hospitals and books back into schools, more people will stay.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/opin ... y_20190729
The article below highlights how the lack of civil societies traditionally provided by religious institutions is creating the vacuum and void - conditions propitious for violence.
The Religious Hunger of the Radical Right
Until we understand what really drives extremists, we will not be able to stop them.
Domestic right-wing terrorists, like the man accused of the shooting last weekend in El Paso, are not so different from their radical Islamist counterparts across the globe — and not only in their tactics for spreading terror or in their internet-based recruiting. Indeed, it is impossible to understand America’s resurgence of reactionary extremism without understanding it as a fundamentally religious phenomenon.
Unlike Islamist jihadists, the online communities of incels, white supremacists and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists make no metaphysical truth claims, do not focus on God and offer no promise of an afterlife or reward. But they fulfill the functions that sociologists generally attribute to a religion: They give their members a meaningful account of why the world is the way it is. They provide them with a sense of purpose and the possibility of sainthood. They offer a sense of community. And they establish clear roles and rituals that allow adherents to feel and act as part of a whole. These aren’t just subcultures; they are churches. And until we recognize the religious hunger alongside the destructive hatred, we have little chance of stopping these terrorists.
Now more than ever, the promises religion has traditionally made — a meaningful world, a viable place within it, a community to share it with, rituals to render ordinary life sacred — are absent from the public sphere. More and more Americans are joining the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated. There are more religious “nones” than Catholics or evangelicals, and 36 percent of those born after 1981 don’t identify with any religion. These new reactionary movements, with their power to offer answers at once mollifying and vituperative to the chaos of existence, is one of many ways that Americans are filling that gap.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/opin ... y_20190814
The Religious Hunger of the Radical Right
Until we understand what really drives extremists, we will not be able to stop them.
Domestic right-wing terrorists, like the man accused of the shooting last weekend in El Paso, are not so different from their radical Islamist counterparts across the globe — and not only in their tactics for spreading terror or in their internet-based recruiting. Indeed, it is impossible to understand America’s resurgence of reactionary extremism without understanding it as a fundamentally religious phenomenon.
Unlike Islamist jihadists, the online communities of incels, white supremacists and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists make no metaphysical truth claims, do not focus on God and offer no promise of an afterlife or reward. But they fulfill the functions that sociologists generally attribute to a religion: They give their members a meaningful account of why the world is the way it is. They provide them with a sense of purpose and the possibility of sainthood. They offer a sense of community. And they establish clear roles and rituals that allow adherents to feel and act as part of a whole. These aren’t just subcultures; they are churches. And until we recognize the religious hunger alongside the destructive hatred, we have little chance of stopping these terrorists.
Now more than ever, the promises religion has traditionally made — a meaningful world, a viable place within it, a community to share it with, rituals to render ordinary life sacred — are absent from the public sphere. More and more Americans are joining the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated. There are more religious “nones” than Catholics or evangelicals, and 36 percent of those born after 1981 don’t identify with any religion. These new reactionary movements, with their power to offer answers at once mollifying and vituperative to the chaos of existence, is one of many ways that Americans are filling that gap.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/opin ... y_20190814
‘PUREST FORM OF FAITH’: COMMUNITY RALLIES AROUND 6 YEAR OLD WHO WANTED TO TAKE MOM OUT AFTER LOSING DAD TO CANCER
The day after Brady Campbell, 6, lost his dad to colon cancer, he decided to start a lemonade stand so he could take his mom out on a date. He says it was his dad’s final wish.
“My dad and I came up with the idea,” Campbell told Fox 31 Denver.
So, he set up a lemonade stand outside of his home that read “25 cents or best offer,” according to the report.
Friends and neighbors came out to support the tender gesture. Then a police officer who took notice of the stand and learned the purpose of it called in reinforcements.
On his first day in business, Campbell raised more than $200.
And that was just the beginning.
A virtual GoFundMe lemonade stand started on his behalf brought in another $52,000 (at the time of publication).
“My heart is bursting,” Amanda Campbell, Brady’s mom, wrote on Facebook. “I cannot even express the love felt when our community wrapped us in their arms.”
All the love has inspired Brady and Amanda to give back. While they will use some of the funds for weekly date nights, the rest of the money will go to The Brandon Campbell Memorial Fund, which benefits the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The Campbells hope the funds will help the team of doctors and nurses that cared for Brady’s dad.
A neighbor, Mandy Ericson, summed up the compassion and outpouring with these inspiring words:
“Sometimes in the midst of the worst tragedy, the most beautiful parts of humanity surface. When you witness it, it is the purest form of faith and hope – the definition of community.
Video at:
https://faithcounts.com/purest-form-of- ... to-cancer/
The day after Brady Campbell, 6, lost his dad to colon cancer, he decided to start a lemonade stand so he could take his mom out on a date. He says it was his dad’s final wish.
“My dad and I came up with the idea,” Campbell told Fox 31 Denver.
So, he set up a lemonade stand outside of his home that read “25 cents or best offer,” according to the report.
Friends and neighbors came out to support the tender gesture. Then a police officer who took notice of the stand and learned the purpose of it called in reinforcements.
On his first day in business, Campbell raised more than $200.
And that was just the beginning.
A virtual GoFundMe lemonade stand started on his behalf brought in another $52,000 (at the time of publication).
“My heart is bursting,” Amanda Campbell, Brady’s mom, wrote on Facebook. “I cannot even express the love felt when our community wrapped us in their arms.”
All the love has inspired Brady and Amanda to give back. While they will use some of the funds for weekly date nights, the rest of the money will go to The Brandon Campbell Memorial Fund, which benefits the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The Campbells hope the funds will help the team of doctors and nurses that cared for Brady’s dad.
A neighbor, Mandy Ericson, summed up the compassion and outpouring with these inspiring words:
“Sometimes in the midst of the worst tragedy, the most beautiful parts of humanity surface. When you witness it, it is the purest form of faith and hope – the definition of community.
Video at:
https://faithcounts.com/purest-form-of- ... to-cancer/
The Virtuous Corporation Is Not an Oxymoron
Cynicism about big business can be healthy, but we don’t always have a better tool for bringing about social change.
At a time when the federal government is doing little to nothing on matters of great public concern — gun control, paid parental leave, higher wages, you name it — the corporate sector has been urged, pushed and sometimes shamed to fill in the gaps.
This year Amazon decided, under pressure, to raise wages for its employees. Carmakers have voluntarily agreed to preserve higher emission standards. Walmart vowed this month to stop selling certain types of ammunition. And corporate leaders like Chip Bergh of Levi’s and Timothy Cook of Apple have been speaking out on political issues, suggesting a broader, more public vision of what the corporation is for.
It’s all part of a trend toward “corporate virtue.” This is a loosely organized movement that encompasses various efforts to promote or make high-minded policy changes. It also includes a commitment to so-called stakeholder capitalism (as opposed to shareholder capitalism), in which companies operate in the interests not just of stock owners but also of employees, suppliers, customers and the communities to which they belong.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/opin ... d=45305309
Cynicism about big business can be healthy, but we don’t always have a better tool for bringing about social change.
At a time when the federal government is doing little to nothing on matters of great public concern — gun control, paid parental leave, higher wages, you name it — the corporate sector has been urged, pushed and sometimes shamed to fill in the gaps.
This year Amazon decided, under pressure, to raise wages for its employees. Carmakers have voluntarily agreed to preserve higher emission standards. Walmart vowed this month to stop selling certain types of ammunition. And corporate leaders like Chip Bergh of Levi’s and Timothy Cook of Apple have been speaking out on political issues, suggesting a broader, more public vision of what the corporation is for.
It’s all part of a trend toward “corporate virtue.” This is a loosely organized movement that encompasses various efforts to promote or make high-minded policy changes. It also includes a commitment to so-called stakeholder capitalism (as opposed to shareholder capitalism), in which companies operate in the interests not just of stock owners but also of employees, suppliers, customers and the communities to which they belong.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/opin ... d=45305309
The article below is about how knowledge and awareness of the soul in everyone enables racial reconciliation and building of civil societies.
What Makes Us All Radically Equal
It’s not our brains and it’s not our bodies.
Excerpt:
And here we get to the nub of what sustained Douglass and what sustains people today as they do this work. It is the belief that all humans have souls. It is the belief that all people of all races have a piece of themselves that has no size, weight, color or shape, but which gives them infinite value and dignity.
It is the belief that our souls make us all radically equal. Our brains and bodies are not equal, but our souls are. It is the belief that the person who is infuriating you most right now still has a soul and so is still, deep down, beautiful and redeemable. It is the belief that when all is said and done all souls have a common home together, a final resting place as pieces of a larger unity.
When people hold fast to their awareness of souls, then they have a fixed center among the messiness of racial reconciliation and they give each other grace. If they lose the concept of the soul, they’ve lost everything.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/opin ... d=45305309
What Makes Us All Radically Equal
It’s not our brains and it’s not our bodies.
Excerpt:
And here we get to the nub of what sustained Douglass and what sustains people today as they do this work. It is the belief that all humans have souls. It is the belief that all people of all races have a piece of themselves that has no size, weight, color or shape, but which gives them infinite value and dignity.
It is the belief that our souls make us all radically equal. Our brains and bodies are not equal, but our souls are. It is the belief that the person who is infuriating you most right now still has a soul and so is still, deep down, beautiful and redeemable. It is the belief that when all is said and done all souls have a common home together, a final resting place as pieces of a larger unity.
When people hold fast to their awareness of souls, then they have a fixed center among the messiness of racial reconciliation and they give each other grace. If they lose the concept of the soul, they’ve lost everything.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/opin ... d=45305309
The article below illustrates how technology enables individual participation in the construction of public spaces and hence construct communities.
Building for Real With Digital Blocks
To improve community structures with citizens’ input, the United Nations uses a computer game inspired by Lego.
Excerpt:
The branch of the United Nations that works to improve cities, U.N.-Habitat, brought Minecraft to Kibera. “When we first started, it felt like a crazy idea,” said Pontus Westerberg, the program management officer. “But the most surprising thing is that it actually works. We see positive engagement in these workshops. It’s a tool that gives ordinary people a way to think like an architect.”
Mr. Westerberg said that Minecraft wouldn’t be good for planning a neighborhood or designing a building — it’s too blocky and low-resolution, and there’s not enough detail. (The only lighting choice, for example, is a flaming torch.) But it’s useful for planning public spaces, he said, because you want people to stick to the big questions. Residents need to decide where to put lights. What they look like is a question for a designer, later on.
Today, people all over the world use Minecraft to design public space. The projects are a collaboration of U.N.-Habitat and the Block by Block foundation, which is funded by Microsoft and Mojang. Together they work with community groups, usually in the slums of developing countries, where there is often just a bald patch of dust or no public space at all.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/opin ... d=45305309
Building for Real With Digital Blocks
To improve community structures with citizens’ input, the United Nations uses a computer game inspired by Lego.
Excerpt:
The branch of the United Nations that works to improve cities, U.N.-Habitat, brought Minecraft to Kibera. “When we first started, it felt like a crazy idea,” said Pontus Westerberg, the program management officer. “But the most surprising thing is that it actually works. We see positive engagement in these workshops. It’s a tool that gives ordinary people a way to think like an architect.”
Mr. Westerberg said that Minecraft wouldn’t be good for planning a neighborhood or designing a building — it’s too blocky and low-resolution, and there’s not enough detail. (The only lighting choice, for example, is a flaming torch.) But it’s useful for planning public spaces, he said, because you want people to stick to the big questions. Residents need to decide where to put lights. What they look like is a question for a designer, later on.
Today, people all over the world use Minecraft to design public space. The projects are a collaboration of U.N.-Habitat and the Block by Block foundation, which is funded by Microsoft and Mojang. Together they work with community groups, usually in the slums of developing countries, where there is often just a bald patch of dust or no public space at all.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/opin ... d=45305309
Council for the Western US hosts Egyptian Leaders
In an interview with La Cohorte earlier this year, Mawlana Hazar Imam said, “I have always taken the view that civil society must play a fundamental role in the future of all populations. So, we have to consolidate and strengthen it. And that means taking the most important institutions of civil society and giving them support and encouragement wherever we can perhaps help them do things differently from anything we have known up till now.”
The International Visitors Council of Los Angeles (IVCLA) is a civic organization that arranges people-to-people exchanges between emerging international leaders and the citizens of the Los Angeles region. Janet Eliot, President/CEO of IVCLA describes the work of the organization as playing a vital role in building bridges through host exchange programs, and that they “bring hope to the world at a time when honest dialogue between nations has reached a very low point.”
In August, IVCLA coordinated activities in collaboration with the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). IVLP is a professional exchange program funded by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The mission of IVLP is to offer current and emerging international leaders the opportunity to experience the richness and diversity of American political, economic, social and cultural life, through carefully designed exchanges that reflect participants’ professional interests and the public diplomacy objectives of the United States government.
Three fellows from Egypt were invited to learn about best practices in the United States related to combating trafficking in people. According to the 2019 Trafficking In Persons Report, “The Government of Egypt does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so.” Some of the opportunities identified included establishing, “appropriate protection services, including shelters, for victims of all forms of trafficking, and in-kind support or funding to civil society organizations that provided essential victim care.”
Guests from Egypt included Mr. Elsayed Abouelela, Programs Director, Cairo Center for Development, Mr. Mahmoud Elsayed, Capacity Building Consultant, Arabic Network for Human Rights Information and Ms. Shimaa Hassan, Program Director, Combating Violence against Women and Protecting Women from Trafficking and Sexual Abuse, Center for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance. It was the first time that these individuals had traveled to the United States.
The Council for the Western United States hosted a dinner for these Egyptian leaders on August 18, 2019. The guests were extremely appreciative of the information that had been shared with them by the organizations they visited. Ms. Shimaa Hassan stated, “this has been a great experience for us. A wealth of information has been shared from a number of organizations and we plan to use these best practices within our organizations when we return to Egypt.” It was also noted that they had formed relationships that they could continue to draw upon once they returned to Egypt.
When asked about their experience with the Aga Khan Park in Cairo, a guest shared that “the Aga Khan Park is a beautiful place where people of all religions and perspectives can come and enjoy. We are impressed that priority was given to the development of this park. It is definitely a place that the population of Cairo can cherish ”
Photos at:
https://the.ismaili/usa/council-western ... rce=Direct
In an interview with La Cohorte earlier this year, Mawlana Hazar Imam said, “I have always taken the view that civil society must play a fundamental role in the future of all populations. So, we have to consolidate and strengthen it. And that means taking the most important institutions of civil society and giving them support and encouragement wherever we can perhaps help them do things differently from anything we have known up till now.”
The International Visitors Council of Los Angeles (IVCLA) is a civic organization that arranges people-to-people exchanges between emerging international leaders and the citizens of the Los Angeles region. Janet Eliot, President/CEO of IVCLA describes the work of the organization as playing a vital role in building bridges through host exchange programs, and that they “bring hope to the world at a time when honest dialogue between nations has reached a very low point.”
In August, IVCLA coordinated activities in collaboration with the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). IVLP is a professional exchange program funded by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The mission of IVLP is to offer current and emerging international leaders the opportunity to experience the richness and diversity of American political, economic, social and cultural life, through carefully designed exchanges that reflect participants’ professional interests and the public diplomacy objectives of the United States government.
Three fellows from Egypt were invited to learn about best practices in the United States related to combating trafficking in people. According to the 2019 Trafficking In Persons Report, “The Government of Egypt does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so.” Some of the opportunities identified included establishing, “appropriate protection services, including shelters, for victims of all forms of trafficking, and in-kind support or funding to civil society organizations that provided essential victim care.”
Guests from Egypt included Mr. Elsayed Abouelela, Programs Director, Cairo Center for Development, Mr. Mahmoud Elsayed, Capacity Building Consultant, Arabic Network for Human Rights Information and Ms. Shimaa Hassan, Program Director, Combating Violence against Women and Protecting Women from Trafficking and Sexual Abuse, Center for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance. It was the first time that these individuals had traveled to the United States.
The Council for the Western United States hosted a dinner for these Egyptian leaders on August 18, 2019. The guests were extremely appreciative of the information that had been shared with them by the organizations they visited. Ms. Shimaa Hassan stated, “this has been a great experience for us. A wealth of information has been shared from a number of organizations and we plan to use these best practices within our organizations when we return to Egypt.” It was also noted that they had formed relationships that they could continue to draw upon once they returned to Egypt.
When asked about their experience with the Aga Khan Park in Cairo, a guest shared that “the Aga Khan Park is a beautiful place where people of all religions and perspectives can come and enjoy. We are impressed that priority was given to the development of this park. It is definitely a place that the population of Cairo can cherish ”
Photos at:
https://the.ismaili/usa/council-western ... rce=Direct
WHAT WALL PLAQUES TELL US ABOUT THE KHOJA CIVIC SOCIETY
"I RAJANBHAI NANJI IN MY MEMORY HAVE GIFTED LAND FOR THE JAMAT KHANA AND APPROXIMATELY R 2000 FOR REPAIR WORk DATE.21-9-1923"
When my long lost third cousin, Arif Rawji, brought back the wall plaque of our great grandfather Rajan Bapa (1853 -1929), carrying it in his rucksack from Juno Savar in Gujarat (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juna_Savar) to Calgary in Alberta, many stories ran through my mind. The immediate ones were family and migration stories about the ancestor we call Rajan Bapa that the Mombasa Jamat knew as Mukhi Rajan Nanji. Mukhi Rajan Bapa’s involvement in the building of Jamatkhanas led me to reflect on the Ismaili Khoja tradition of giving, which created properties for communal benefit and planted the roots of the civic society in both Africa and India.
More...
http://khojawiki.org/Khoja_Civic_Society
"I RAJANBHAI NANJI IN MY MEMORY HAVE GIFTED LAND FOR THE JAMAT KHANA AND APPROXIMATELY R 2000 FOR REPAIR WORk DATE.21-9-1923"
When my long lost third cousin, Arif Rawji, brought back the wall plaque of our great grandfather Rajan Bapa (1853 -1929), carrying it in his rucksack from Juno Savar in Gujarat (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juna_Savar) to Calgary in Alberta, many stories ran through my mind. The immediate ones were family and migration stories about the ancestor we call Rajan Bapa that the Mombasa Jamat knew as Mukhi Rajan Nanji. Mukhi Rajan Bapa’s involvement in the building of Jamatkhanas led me to reflect on the Ismaili Khoja tradition of giving, which created properties for communal benefit and planted the roots of the civic society in both Africa and India.
More...
http://khojawiki.org/Khoja_Civic_Society
How Helsinki Built ‘Book Heaven’
Finland’s most ambitious library has a lofty mission, says Helsinki’s Tommi Laitio: It’s a kind of monument to the Nordic model of civic engagement.
You might say, “Yes, of course I love the library.” We do, too. But I’m not sure anyone loves libraries quite like the Finns do.
In a country that boasts one of the world’s highest literacy rates, the arrival of the new central library in Helsinki last year was a kind of moon-landing-like moment of national bonding. The €98 million facility, whose opening in December 2018 marked the centenary of Finnish independence, has since been widely celebrated internationally as a model reimagining of these critical pieces of social infrastructure. At the CityLab DC conference this week, Tommi Laitio, Helsinki’s executive director for culture and leisure, offered his own, more personal take on exactly why this building is so important to Finland’s future.
Designed by Finnish architecture firm ALA and dubbed Oodi (“ode” in Finnish), the three-level structure is a kind of spruce-clad monument to the principles of Nordic society-building. Still, Laitio opened his talk not with shots of the building’s sleek interiors but with a sobering image from Finland’s brutal civil war of 1918, which killed 36,000 people, many of whom perished in prison camps.
“You can be your best person inside this building.”
“This progress from one of the poorest countries of Europe to one of the most prosperous has not been an accident. It’s based on this idea that when there are so few of us—only 5.5 million people—everyone has to live up to their full potential,” he said. “Our society is fundamentally dependent on people being able to trust the kindness of strangers.”
Photo and more...
https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/11/ ... =edit-swap
Finland’s most ambitious library has a lofty mission, says Helsinki’s Tommi Laitio: It’s a kind of monument to the Nordic model of civic engagement.
You might say, “Yes, of course I love the library.” We do, too. But I’m not sure anyone loves libraries quite like the Finns do.
In a country that boasts one of the world’s highest literacy rates, the arrival of the new central library in Helsinki last year was a kind of moon-landing-like moment of national bonding. The €98 million facility, whose opening in December 2018 marked the centenary of Finnish independence, has since been widely celebrated internationally as a model reimagining of these critical pieces of social infrastructure. At the CityLab DC conference this week, Tommi Laitio, Helsinki’s executive director for culture and leisure, offered his own, more personal take on exactly why this building is so important to Finland’s future.
Designed by Finnish architecture firm ALA and dubbed Oodi (“ode” in Finnish), the three-level structure is a kind of spruce-clad monument to the principles of Nordic society-building. Still, Laitio opened his talk not with shots of the building’s sleek interiors but with a sobering image from Finland’s brutal civil war of 1918, which killed 36,000 people, many of whom perished in prison camps.
“You can be your best person inside this building.”
“This progress from one of the poorest countries of Europe to one of the most prosperous has not been an accident. It’s based on this idea that when there are so few of us—only 5.5 million people—everyone has to live up to their full potential,” he said. “Our society is fundamentally dependent on people being able to trust the kindness of strangers.”
Photo and more...
https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/11/ ... =edit-swap
The article below is about the role of faith based communities in promoting and strengthening civil societies
To Take on the Religious Right, We Need a Religious Left
My faith shapes my progressive politics. I wish this were true of more liberals.
Excerpt:
What do we relinquish as a society when a cooperative faith dissipates? Beyond spiritual guidance, the church was my earliest exposure to effective social organization, people rallying around collective belief to create lasting material change in the lives of those who needed it most. Collective belief demands social cooperation and interdependence bound to a principled obligation with expectations of self-sacrifice.
These values have been the foundation of many previous American progressive social movements. Though the Civil Rights Movement had clear legislative aims, it was a deeply religious movement, sustained by the spiritual empowerment and social organization of Southern black churches. The church served not only as a place to worship, but also as a community support group, regular meeting space and bulletin board; a place to solve disputes and center political organizing.
The motto of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, over which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presided, was, “To Save the Soul of America.” When their faith in the American government dwindled, black Americans relied on a unified faith in God to deliver them from the sin of racism. This hope was not a passive acceptance that their collective lot would be improved in the next life, but instead a critique of the status quo that moved them to political action in this one.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/opin ... ogin-email
To Take on the Religious Right, We Need a Religious Left
My faith shapes my progressive politics. I wish this were true of more liberals.
Excerpt:
What do we relinquish as a society when a cooperative faith dissipates? Beyond spiritual guidance, the church was my earliest exposure to effective social organization, people rallying around collective belief to create lasting material change in the lives of those who needed it most. Collective belief demands social cooperation and interdependence bound to a principled obligation with expectations of self-sacrifice.
These values have been the foundation of many previous American progressive social movements. Though the Civil Rights Movement had clear legislative aims, it was a deeply religious movement, sustained by the spiritual empowerment and social organization of Southern black churches. The church served not only as a place to worship, but also as a community support group, regular meeting space and bulletin board; a place to solve disputes and center political organizing.
The motto of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, over which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presided, was, “To Save the Soul of America.” When their faith in the American government dwindled, black Americans relied on a unified faith in God to deliver them from the sin of racism. This hope was not a passive acceptance that their collective lot would be improved in the next life, but instead a critique of the status quo that moved them to political action in this one.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/opin ... ogin-email
https://www.lbcnews.co.uk/uk-news/one-i ... -homeless/
One in every 200 people in England are now homeless
17 December 2019, 20:06
By Maddie Goodfellow
The number of homeless people in England has risen to 280,000 - the highest figure ever.
This is an increase of 23,000 since 2016, meaning that one in every 200 people in England is now without a home.
Homeless charity Shelter said that the real numbers could actually be higher due to some types of homelessness often going undocumented.
This includes people who "sofa surf" and stay with friends and family while they have nowhere else to go.
A new review found London came out worse in the figures, with one in every 52 people now homeless in the capital.
But shockingly, one in 24 people are homeless in Newham, which has the highest number.
This is closely followed by Haringey and Kensington & Chelsea, both with one in 29.
The charity's report also found that, outside the capital, rates of homelessness are "stark" in areas such as Luton (one in 46), Birmingham (one in 66), and Brighton and Hove (one in 75).
Shelter have warned the numbers may actually be much higher
Sarah Martin, from Brent in north-west London, spent a year living in "squalid" and cockroach-infested temporary accommodation with her 14-year-old son, Ishmael.
The pair became homeless after Ms Martin's mother died and they were evicted from the house.
The 40-year-old said: "I suffered a mini-stroke as a result of MS, which led to myself and Ishmael moving back in with my mum for extra support.
"We were dealt another blow when my mum passed away - before I even had time to grieve, we were facing eviction from the place we'd called home for years."
In the temporary accommodation the small family were forced to share a bathroom and kitchen with other tenants.
"People would stumble around the corridors wild-eyed on drink and drugs and one poor woman tried to set herself alight.
"It was completely terrifying.
"Ishmael's cheeky smile vanished, replaced by a nervous frown. He had been getting really good grades at school but they plummeted.
"We finally moved out of the hostel and into a flat this summer, which is also temporary accommodation. I'm so happy to be out of the hostel," she said.
Levels of homelessness in the UK have risen
Shelter chief executive Polly Neate said: "This is the grim truth our new Government must confront and do something radical to change.
"Until the Government acts to stem this crisis, the work of our frontline advisers remains critical.
"With the public's support we will do everything we can to help people find a safe and stable place to live - no matter how long it takes."
The charity is warning the new Government must take "urgent" action to address the "dire lack of social homes at the crux of this emergency, before the situation is likely to get worse".
A spokesman for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said it was supporting councils to reduce the numbers of people in temporary accommodation.
He added: "(We're) giving £1.2 billion to tackle all types of homelessness.
"Everyone should have somewhere safe to live, and councils have a duty to provide accommodation to those who need it, including families with children."
The findings are published in Shelter's report This Is England: A Picture Of Homelessness In 2019.
One in every 200 people in England are now homeless
17 December 2019, 20:06
By Maddie Goodfellow
The number of homeless people in England has risen to 280,000 - the highest figure ever.
This is an increase of 23,000 since 2016, meaning that one in every 200 people in England is now without a home.
Homeless charity Shelter said that the real numbers could actually be higher due to some types of homelessness often going undocumented.
This includes people who "sofa surf" and stay with friends and family while they have nowhere else to go.
A new review found London came out worse in the figures, with one in every 52 people now homeless in the capital.
But shockingly, one in 24 people are homeless in Newham, which has the highest number.
This is closely followed by Haringey and Kensington & Chelsea, both with one in 29.
The charity's report also found that, outside the capital, rates of homelessness are "stark" in areas such as Luton (one in 46), Birmingham (one in 66), and Brighton and Hove (one in 75).
Shelter have warned the numbers may actually be much higher
Sarah Martin, from Brent in north-west London, spent a year living in "squalid" and cockroach-infested temporary accommodation with her 14-year-old son, Ishmael.
The pair became homeless after Ms Martin's mother died and they were evicted from the house.
The 40-year-old said: "I suffered a mini-stroke as a result of MS, which led to myself and Ishmael moving back in with my mum for extra support.
"We were dealt another blow when my mum passed away - before I even had time to grieve, we were facing eviction from the place we'd called home for years."
In the temporary accommodation the small family were forced to share a bathroom and kitchen with other tenants.
"People would stumble around the corridors wild-eyed on drink and drugs and one poor woman tried to set herself alight.
"It was completely terrifying.
"Ishmael's cheeky smile vanished, replaced by a nervous frown. He had been getting really good grades at school but they plummeted.
"We finally moved out of the hostel and into a flat this summer, which is also temporary accommodation. I'm so happy to be out of the hostel," she said.
Levels of homelessness in the UK have risen
Shelter chief executive Polly Neate said: "This is the grim truth our new Government must confront and do something radical to change.
"Until the Government acts to stem this crisis, the work of our frontline advisers remains critical.
"With the public's support we will do everything we can to help people find a safe and stable place to live - no matter how long it takes."
The charity is warning the new Government must take "urgent" action to address the "dire lack of social homes at the crux of this emergency, before the situation is likely to get worse".
A spokesman for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said it was supporting councils to reduce the numbers of people in temporary accommodation.
He added: "(We're) giving £1.2 billion to tackle all types of homelessness.
"Everyone should have somewhere safe to live, and councils have a duty to provide accommodation to those who need it, including families with children."
The findings are published in Shelter's report This Is England: A Picture Of Homelessness In 2019.
Video Quote: MHI on the Role of Civil Societies
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhnaZdQpUL0
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Graduation ceremony of the University of Alberta, Canada, 9 June 2009.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhnaZdQpUL0
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Graduation ceremony of the University of Alberta, Canada, 9 June 2009.
The Church As Forged Family: A Reply to David Brooks
Editor’s Note: The following essay from Andrew Walker is the seventh response in the Institute for Family Studies' symposium on David Brooks' essay on the nuclear family. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ke/605536/
David Brooks has written a masterful essay on both the history and state of the American family. It is so good, in fact, that I intend for it to be required reading in my family ethics class at the seminary where I teach.
There is much in his essay worth commenting on, but I want to focus my comments on one area in particular—Brooks’ reflections on what he calls the “forged family.” This is a form of family relationship defined less exclusively by biological or bloodlines, and more by the chosen family—the “fictive kin”—that one surrounds themselves with amid the sundries of life. Brooks describes this arrangement as the type of family defined by “determined commitment.”
These are the networks of thick relationships born of spontaneity and organic development. They cannot be so much planned as much as they naturally arise through the vicissitudes of life. They are the people who have your back no matter what, the friends you end up sharing holidays with because, well, why wouldn’t you? This is not meant to displace the biological family, as much as it is to accent or fill-in the areas where thick familial relationships fail to take shape. The use of such language as “forged” is as telling as it is vivid: to speak of something being “forged” is to speak of something having been refined, purified, and tested by trial. The ingredients of that which is forged imply a new substance has taken shape, which means new families.
Undoubtedly, trial and tribulation are unique catalysts for the types of relationships that sustain and nourish common life. A lost job, a miscarriage, a divorce, a diagnosis—all provide a platform for our networks of relationships, biological or not, to step up and offer the resilient backdrops necessary to carry people through hardship.
Brooks then offers a number of examples of how the “forged family” is making appearances throughout American life. He points to the many examples where the pressures and humdrum of daily life force people to rely on each other in the unlikeliest of ways.
What I want to suggest, however, is that Brooks’ call for the “forged family” can already be found in an institution so familiar to us that its routineness makes us blind to its offerings. I am speaking of the local church—not the abstract, universalized “the church.” The church remains a pillar of American civil society, and while it has traditionally played an irreplaceable role in forging community, as church participation has declined and the spiritually fluid increase, people are now able to seek forged families elsewhere. And while those who seek it elsewhere may find it, there is no other institution more apt to be the central force in forging family and social connections than the local church.
By “local church,” I mean the supposedly declining, not-worth-imitating, and discardable institution that almost everyone can find something to complain about, but who rarely seem willing to put in the effort to reap the harvest of forged relationships. It’s all too common of a refrain, especially for those flirting with a new church, that the church lacks “community.” But the person who complains about not being able to “find community” in the local church is honesty not really looking for it. Because in looking for it, stages of awkwardness and possible offense have to be worked through. Sure, not everyone can be each person’s best friend. But I’ve yet to find a local church where the people who were really looking for thick and forged relationships were not able to find it if they really get involved.
This model of church-as-forged-family cannot be the province of only married families like ours...the local church is uniquely primed—and in fact called—to be the forged family for the unmarried, for single parents, and for the fatherless.
I write about this church paradigm from a personal (and what I hope is a temporary) experience. My family recently relocated from the Nashville area to Louisville, Kentucky where I teach at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Though we have countless friends in Louisville, we are still without a local church. Not yet having a church to call home is an example of experiencing even minimal accounts of loneliness and isolation (all of which, I want to add, are normal in a season of transition). If anything, our move to Louisville is teaching us how the absence of a local church home can make a new town seem even more foreign and dislocated from normalcy. This is because our church is our family. This is especially pronounced considering that we live five-to-seven hours away from in-laws and grandparents. For us, church is not only an option, it’s a requirement. It orients us to our community and brings ballast to life’s uncertainties.
The backdrop of our current predicament is having left a church in the Nashville area where our family thrived. It was the centripetal and centrifugal force for our relational networks. Our church relationships drove us closer to one another and more attached to our church. There were a number of years where it was common for us to be with people from our church family three to four nights a week—from the spur-of-the-moment restaurant outings, to the after-church meals, to discipleship groups, reading groups, to service projects, to the number of people who had the passcode to our front door and an open invitation to raid our pantry. For now, that is gone, but the promise of relationality and the gift of the church means that new friendships of similar depth can just as easily be on the horizon (with no intention of displacing our Nashville friends!). Such transmutability from one location to the next is but a demonstration of the church’s brilliance.
No amount of central planning can configure a web of such relationships. There was no conscious choice to form the types and depth of relationships we had (and still do, from a distance)—they just happened.
But this model of church-as-forged-family cannot be the province of only married families like ours, as if enlarging the bank of reserve childcare is what forged family is all about it. No, as Brooks’ essay reminds us, the local church is uniquely primed and, in fact, called to be the forged family for the unmarried, for single parents, and for the fatherless. It is there that the fatherless can find a fatherly example. For the person desiring family life, open seats at the married family table provide a glimpse into the beautiful chaos of raising children. And it is in the church that young marrieds can learn from older married couples (a gift my wife and I are particularly thankful for). It’s why faith and healthy marriage go together.
To understand the church as a forged family is to understand it is as a place of welcome, habit, and nurture—a place where those without a spouse, or those who experienced a breakdown in a marriage or parenting relationship, can find grace and acceptance and the warm embrace of family.
To understand the church as a forged family is to understand it is as a place of welcome, habit, and nurture—a place where those without a spouse, or those who experienced a breakdown in a marriage or parenting relationship, can find grace and acceptance and the warm embrace of family.
What we experienced in Nashville, and what I am hopeful the Lord will provide us in Louisville, is an embodied reflection of why the New Testament depicts the local church in familial terms. The New Testament church is a “forged family” by virtue of the calling it has for itself. The New Testament does not describe fellow Christians as “colleagues.” I would venture that the New Testament model is far more than “neighborliness,” as well. We are brothers and sisters. While Jesus did not dispense with the foundations of the biological family (Matthew 19:4-6), Jesus made it clear that a new family is forged in their quest to follow after him (Mark 3:31-35). Members of a church are to care and look after one another in patient, long-suffering love (Galatians 6:10; Ephesians 4:2). We are “members of the household of God” who are “being joined together” (Ephesians 2:19-22). And these verses are nothing to say of the manifold numbers of verses in Scripture teaching the biological family how to relate to one another.
The nuclear family is necessary. This is a matter of simply reality born of Genesis: Man and woman are called to multiply and exercise dominion. But it is a mistake to believe that a solitary man and solitary women united together in their socially-isolated marriage is sufficient for all their needs. Families need families. Of course, kids depend and rely upon their parents, but research shows that parents nestled in a church community are more likely to thrive, endure, and promote an ecology of personal and social flourishing. This is not coincidental: the Genesis portrait of marriage is one of culture-formation, not just home-formation.
What David Brooks’ laudably describes as the “forged family” is available to everyone, for in knowing Christ as Savior, “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). For in knowing and experiencing the fatherhood of God through the local church, we are offered a family forged by his love that we are called to share with others.
Andrew T. Walker is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. He also serves as Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement. You can find him on twitter: @andrewtwalk.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-church-a ... vid-brooks
Editor’s Note: The following essay from Andrew Walker is the seventh response in the Institute for Family Studies' symposium on David Brooks' essay on the nuclear family. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ke/605536/
David Brooks has written a masterful essay on both the history and state of the American family. It is so good, in fact, that I intend for it to be required reading in my family ethics class at the seminary where I teach.
There is much in his essay worth commenting on, but I want to focus my comments on one area in particular—Brooks’ reflections on what he calls the “forged family.” This is a form of family relationship defined less exclusively by biological or bloodlines, and more by the chosen family—the “fictive kin”—that one surrounds themselves with amid the sundries of life. Brooks describes this arrangement as the type of family defined by “determined commitment.”
These are the networks of thick relationships born of spontaneity and organic development. They cannot be so much planned as much as they naturally arise through the vicissitudes of life. They are the people who have your back no matter what, the friends you end up sharing holidays with because, well, why wouldn’t you? This is not meant to displace the biological family, as much as it is to accent or fill-in the areas where thick familial relationships fail to take shape. The use of such language as “forged” is as telling as it is vivid: to speak of something being “forged” is to speak of something having been refined, purified, and tested by trial. The ingredients of that which is forged imply a new substance has taken shape, which means new families.
Undoubtedly, trial and tribulation are unique catalysts for the types of relationships that sustain and nourish common life. A lost job, a miscarriage, a divorce, a diagnosis—all provide a platform for our networks of relationships, biological or not, to step up and offer the resilient backdrops necessary to carry people through hardship.
Brooks then offers a number of examples of how the “forged family” is making appearances throughout American life. He points to the many examples where the pressures and humdrum of daily life force people to rely on each other in the unlikeliest of ways.
What I want to suggest, however, is that Brooks’ call for the “forged family” can already be found in an institution so familiar to us that its routineness makes us blind to its offerings. I am speaking of the local church—not the abstract, universalized “the church.” The church remains a pillar of American civil society, and while it has traditionally played an irreplaceable role in forging community, as church participation has declined and the spiritually fluid increase, people are now able to seek forged families elsewhere. And while those who seek it elsewhere may find it, there is no other institution more apt to be the central force in forging family and social connections than the local church.
By “local church,” I mean the supposedly declining, not-worth-imitating, and discardable institution that almost everyone can find something to complain about, but who rarely seem willing to put in the effort to reap the harvest of forged relationships. It’s all too common of a refrain, especially for those flirting with a new church, that the church lacks “community.” But the person who complains about not being able to “find community” in the local church is honesty not really looking for it. Because in looking for it, stages of awkwardness and possible offense have to be worked through. Sure, not everyone can be each person’s best friend. But I’ve yet to find a local church where the people who were really looking for thick and forged relationships were not able to find it if they really get involved.
This model of church-as-forged-family cannot be the province of only married families like ours...the local church is uniquely primed—and in fact called—to be the forged family for the unmarried, for single parents, and for the fatherless.
I write about this church paradigm from a personal (and what I hope is a temporary) experience. My family recently relocated from the Nashville area to Louisville, Kentucky where I teach at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Though we have countless friends in Louisville, we are still without a local church. Not yet having a church to call home is an example of experiencing even minimal accounts of loneliness and isolation (all of which, I want to add, are normal in a season of transition). If anything, our move to Louisville is teaching us how the absence of a local church home can make a new town seem even more foreign and dislocated from normalcy. This is because our church is our family. This is especially pronounced considering that we live five-to-seven hours away from in-laws and grandparents. For us, church is not only an option, it’s a requirement. It orients us to our community and brings ballast to life’s uncertainties.
The backdrop of our current predicament is having left a church in the Nashville area where our family thrived. It was the centripetal and centrifugal force for our relational networks. Our church relationships drove us closer to one another and more attached to our church. There were a number of years where it was common for us to be with people from our church family three to four nights a week—from the spur-of-the-moment restaurant outings, to the after-church meals, to discipleship groups, reading groups, to service projects, to the number of people who had the passcode to our front door and an open invitation to raid our pantry. For now, that is gone, but the promise of relationality and the gift of the church means that new friendships of similar depth can just as easily be on the horizon (with no intention of displacing our Nashville friends!). Such transmutability from one location to the next is but a demonstration of the church’s brilliance.
No amount of central planning can configure a web of such relationships. There was no conscious choice to form the types and depth of relationships we had (and still do, from a distance)—they just happened.
But this model of church-as-forged-family cannot be the province of only married families like ours, as if enlarging the bank of reserve childcare is what forged family is all about it. No, as Brooks’ essay reminds us, the local church is uniquely primed and, in fact, called to be the forged family for the unmarried, for single parents, and for the fatherless. It is there that the fatherless can find a fatherly example. For the person desiring family life, open seats at the married family table provide a glimpse into the beautiful chaos of raising children. And it is in the church that young marrieds can learn from older married couples (a gift my wife and I are particularly thankful for). It’s why faith and healthy marriage go together.
To understand the church as a forged family is to understand it is as a place of welcome, habit, and nurture—a place where those without a spouse, or those who experienced a breakdown in a marriage or parenting relationship, can find grace and acceptance and the warm embrace of family.
To understand the church as a forged family is to understand it is as a place of welcome, habit, and nurture—a place where those without a spouse, or those who experienced a breakdown in a marriage or parenting relationship, can find grace and acceptance and the warm embrace of family.
What we experienced in Nashville, and what I am hopeful the Lord will provide us in Louisville, is an embodied reflection of why the New Testament depicts the local church in familial terms. The New Testament church is a “forged family” by virtue of the calling it has for itself. The New Testament does not describe fellow Christians as “colleagues.” I would venture that the New Testament model is far more than “neighborliness,” as well. We are brothers and sisters. While Jesus did not dispense with the foundations of the biological family (Matthew 19:4-6), Jesus made it clear that a new family is forged in their quest to follow after him (Mark 3:31-35). Members of a church are to care and look after one another in patient, long-suffering love (Galatians 6:10; Ephesians 4:2). We are “members of the household of God” who are “being joined together” (Ephesians 2:19-22). And these verses are nothing to say of the manifold numbers of verses in Scripture teaching the biological family how to relate to one another.
The nuclear family is necessary. This is a matter of simply reality born of Genesis: Man and woman are called to multiply and exercise dominion. But it is a mistake to believe that a solitary man and solitary women united together in their socially-isolated marriage is sufficient for all their needs. Families need families. Of course, kids depend and rely upon their parents, but research shows that parents nestled in a church community are more likely to thrive, endure, and promote an ecology of personal and social flourishing. This is not coincidental: the Genesis portrait of marriage is one of culture-formation, not just home-formation.
What David Brooks’ laudably describes as the “forged family” is available to everyone, for in knowing Christ as Savior, “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). For in knowing and experiencing the fatherhood of God through the local church, we are offered a family forged by his love that we are called to share with others.
Andrew T. Walker is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. He also serves as Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement. You can find him on twitter: @andrewtwalk.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-church-a ... vid-brooks
The article below illuminates the role of civil society in the present pandemic.
To Fight Coronavirus, U.K. Asked for Some Volunteers. It Got an Army.
More than 750,000 people are pitching in to help older and more vulnerable Britons, helping dispel the discord of the Brexit era.
Excerpt:
When the government appealed recently for 250,000 people to help the National Health Service, more than 750,000 signed up. It was forced to temporarily stop taking applicants so it could process the flood. In addition to the national program, hundreds of community-based aid groups have sprung up around the country, enrolling tens of thousands of volunteers, like Ms. Sellars.
All told, it is a stirring display of British national solidarity — a good-news story amid a grim tide of bulletins about overwhelmed hospitals, inadequate testing, a rising death toll, and a depleted political establishment, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson in intensive care and several of his aides still struggling after contracting the virus.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
To Fight Coronavirus, U.K. Asked for Some Volunteers. It Got an Army.
More than 750,000 people are pitching in to help older and more vulnerable Britons, helping dispel the discord of the Brexit era.
Excerpt:
When the government appealed recently for 250,000 people to help the National Health Service, more than 750,000 signed up. It was forced to temporarily stop taking applicants so it could process the flood. In addition to the national program, hundreds of community-based aid groups have sprung up around the country, enrolling tens of thousands of volunteers, like Ms. Sellars.
All told, it is a stirring display of British national solidarity — a good-news story amid a grim tide of bulletins about overwhelmed hospitals, inadequate testing, a rising death toll, and a depleted political establishment, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson in intensive care and several of his aides still struggling after contracting the virus.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The article below highlights the role of civil society in bringing about social equality
Who Is Driving Inequality? You Are
Excerpt:
But we can reduce the opportunity gap if we follow the lessons of Compton: First, the neighborhood is the unit of change. Social mobility rises village by village. Second, the people in the community have to be in charge. They need resources from outside, but only local control does the trick. Third, spending money on preschool, apprenticeship and other human capital programs really works.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opin ... ogin-email
Who Is Driving Inequality? You Are
Excerpt:
But we can reduce the opportunity gap if we follow the lessons of Compton: First, the neighborhood is the unit of change. Social mobility rises village by village. Second, the people in the community have to be in charge. They need resources from outside, but only local control does the trick. Third, spending money on preschool, apprenticeship and other human capital programs really works.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opin ... ogin-email
ISLAM AND CARING COMMUNITIES
Shenila Khoja-Moolji
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only been a test of our resilience, but also of our social fabric. We are seeing people come together in all kinds of ways. Establishments are reserving times exclusively for senior citizens in an effort to decrease their risk to the virus; religious communities are venturing into online spaces to provide pastoral care to their members; and many individuals are volunteering service, from conducting classes to running errands, to relieve the burden on others.
At the same time, we are also observing people with means escape from the cities to take refuge in rural towns and resorts. There have been numerous instances of hoarding, perhaps out of fear, that have severely limited the availability of essential items for those who rely on weekly paychecks for purchases. Some people are even engaging in price gouging, trying to unduly profit from this crisis.
Muslim ethics, however, guide us to build caring communities. A caring community does not leave the labor of care to the few; instead, it shares this labor. It does not hoard resources in times of stress, but goes out of its way to extend them to the collective.
More...
https://sacredmattersmagazine.com/islam ... mmunities/
Shenila Khoja-Moolji
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only been a test of our resilience, but also of our social fabric. We are seeing people come together in all kinds of ways. Establishments are reserving times exclusively for senior citizens in an effort to decrease their risk to the virus; religious communities are venturing into online spaces to provide pastoral care to their members; and many individuals are volunteering service, from conducting classes to running errands, to relieve the burden on others.
At the same time, we are also observing people with means escape from the cities to take refuge in rural towns and resorts. There have been numerous instances of hoarding, perhaps out of fear, that have severely limited the availability of essential items for those who rely on weekly paychecks for purchases. Some people are even engaging in price gouging, trying to unduly profit from this crisis.
Muslim ethics, however, guide us to build caring communities. A caring community does not leave the labor of care to the few; instead, it shares this labor. It does not hoard resources in times of stress, but goes out of its way to extend them to the collective.
More...
https://sacredmattersmagazine.com/islam ... mmunities/
Hope, faith, and community
How does one define their role and value in society, or one’s purpose in life? Are we atomised beings moving through life in a random fashion or connected and “born of a single soul,” as the Qur’an informs us? How are we connected, and what is an individual without a community?
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent,” wrote poet John Donne in the 16th century. We have been accustomed to being independent, believing ourselves to control our own destinies. Today, we face a cruel reminder of just how truly interdependent we are, marooned in our island homes, able only to view the mainland of humanity at a distance.
Unable to experience the comfort of our own community spaces, we are finding solidarity with others, including strangers, and offering help to those in need. Saadi’s 11th-century words predate Donne’s, and have been oft-quoted by Hazar Imam in the context of pluralism.
“The children of Adam, created of the self-same clay, are members of one body.
When one member suffers, all members suffer, likewise. O Thou, who art
indifferent to the suffering of the fellow, thou art unworthy to be called a man.”
These words were also quoted by Mawlana Sultan Mahomed Shah in his Presidential Address on the Adjournment of the 18th session of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1937. He went on to say, “The tribulations of one people are the tribulations of all. That which weakens one weakens all. That which is a gain to one is surely a gain to all. This is no empty ideal…”
Living in a society that encourages self-awareness, self-expression, and self-promotion, one's identity can be inward-focused; yet, for Muslims, the community is paramount and the primary determinant of one's identity, even if these bonds are weaker in communities in the west. With Ramadan approaching, this year there will be an added impetus to seek help from the Almighty and to help those in need.
In his “The Age of Paradox,” author Charles Handy described the individual’s need for a sense of connection: "We are not meant to stand alone. We need to belong — to something or someone.” The closing of our Jamatkhanas has reinforced, not weakened, our sense of identity. We may be secluded but we are not isolated and alone, as volunteers, families, and friends from the Jamat call to ensure we are safe.
We recognise the absence of communal prayer and social interactions in these spaces, that are more than just places for individual solace and comfort. They shape us, teach us, and represent us, as a collection of individuals, bound together in a community of faith. They encourage us to think in terms of “us,” instead of “I,” and offer opportunities to relate to others in meaningful ways. We can truly appreciate the value of community by seeing our neighbours, many of whom are alone, often without family or others to turn to or rely upon at this time.
The decline in physical social interaction has accelerated in the last few decades, as smaller nuclear families have replaced extended ones, distances have separated many, and lives have become busier with less leisure time to connect with others. People have needed to become more self-reliant, out of necessity.
The loss of community spirit and engagement with and concern for others is a topic commented on by Hazar Imam, in his 2006 address at Columbia University. He asked, “How can we inspire people to reach beyond rampant materialism, self-indulgent individualism, and unprincipled relativism?” He also mentioned the “false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism.”
The individual has now been dwarfed by the need to appreciate community, in our effort to fight this disease. Solidarity in the face of this crisis, and the realisation that we are not independent but interdependent, and united against this threat, is a marked difference from recent cultural attitudes. Cooperation has become better accepted than in the past few decades where ethnocentrism, nationalism, and chauvinism have been on the rise.
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see,” said the French artist, Edgar Degas. Many of us have seen paintings, read history, or seen films illustrating calamities that have afflicted humanity through the ages. They are useful in allowing us to see anew how they arose, the actions and inactions that resulted, and to remember that pestilences ended with personal protection, sensible policies, and community cooperation.
This virus is infectious. But “[…] just as fear is infectious, so hope is infectious,” Mawlana Hazar Imam has said, indicating that all crises do pass. What will accelerate the recovery is a united and concerted global effort, one that may also lead to greater realisation that we are part of a single community, inseparable from others, sharing the same pain... and fate.
So, while we follow precautions and patiently endure this health crisis, in our solitude we reflect upon what is important in our lives, reach out, connect, help others, appreciate those close to us, and recognise that we are all part of a community that cares. Each of us can do our part to make the body whole once again.
https://the.ismaili/global/news/feature ... -173435533
How does one define their role and value in society, or one’s purpose in life? Are we atomised beings moving through life in a random fashion or connected and “born of a single soul,” as the Qur’an informs us? How are we connected, and what is an individual without a community?
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent,” wrote poet John Donne in the 16th century. We have been accustomed to being independent, believing ourselves to control our own destinies. Today, we face a cruel reminder of just how truly interdependent we are, marooned in our island homes, able only to view the mainland of humanity at a distance.
Unable to experience the comfort of our own community spaces, we are finding solidarity with others, including strangers, and offering help to those in need. Saadi’s 11th-century words predate Donne’s, and have been oft-quoted by Hazar Imam in the context of pluralism.
“The children of Adam, created of the self-same clay, are members of one body.
When one member suffers, all members suffer, likewise. O Thou, who art
indifferent to the suffering of the fellow, thou art unworthy to be called a man.”
These words were also quoted by Mawlana Sultan Mahomed Shah in his Presidential Address on the Adjournment of the 18th session of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1937. He went on to say, “The tribulations of one people are the tribulations of all. That which weakens one weakens all. That which is a gain to one is surely a gain to all. This is no empty ideal…”
Living in a society that encourages self-awareness, self-expression, and self-promotion, one's identity can be inward-focused; yet, for Muslims, the community is paramount and the primary determinant of one's identity, even if these bonds are weaker in communities in the west. With Ramadan approaching, this year there will be an added impetus to seek help from the Almighty and to help those in need.
In his “The Age of Paradox,” author Charles Handy described the individual’s need for a sense of connection: "We are not meant to stand alone. We need to belong — to something or someone.” The closing of our Jamatkhanas has reinforced, not weakened, our sense of identity. We may be secluded but we are not isolated and alone, as volunteers, families, and friends from the Jamat call to ensure we are safe.
We recognise the absence of communal prayer and social interactions in these spaces, that are more than just places for individual solace and comfort. They shape us, teach us, and represent us, as a collection of individuals, bound together in a community of faith. They encourage us to think in terms of “us,” instead of “I,” and offer opportunities to relate to others in meaningful ways. We can truly appreciate the value of community by seeing our neighbours, many of whom are alone, often without family or others to turn to or rely upon at this time.
The decline in physical social interaction has accelerated in the last few decades, as smaller nuclear families have replaced extended ones, distances have separated many, and lives have become busier with less leisure time to connect with others. People have needed to become more self-reliant, out of necessity.
The loss of community spirit and engagement with and concern for others is a topic commented on by Hazar Imam, in his 2006 address at Columbia University. He asked, “How can we inspire people to reach beyond rampant materialism, self-indulgent individualism, and unprincipled relativism?” He also mentioned the “false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism.”
The individual has now been dwarfed by the need to appreciate community, in our effort to fight this disease. Solidarity in the face of this crisis, and the realisation that we are not independent but interdependent, and united against this threat, is a marked difference from recent cultural attitudes. Cooperation has become better accepted than in the past few decades where ethnocentrism, nationalism, and chauvinism have been on the rise.
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see,” said the French artist, Edgar Degas. Many of us have seen paintings, read history, or seen films illustrating calamities that have afflicted humanity through the ages. They are useful in allowing us to see anew how they arose, the actions and inactions that resulted, and to remember that pestilences ended with personal protection, sensible policies, and community cooperation.
This virus is infectious. But “[…] just as fear is infectious, so hope is infectious,” Mawlana Hazar Imam has said, indicating that all crises do pass. What will accelerate the recovery is a united and concerted global effort, one that may also lead to greater realisation that we are part of a single community, inseparable from others, sharing the same pain... and fate.
So, while we follow precautions and patiently endure this health crisis, in our solitude we reflect upon what is important in our lives, reach out, connect, help others, appreciate those close to us, and recognise that we are all part of a community that cares. Each of us can do our part to make the body whole once again.
https://the.ismaili/global/news/feature ... -173435533
Mediation in the Present Moment, Cov360 Live with Dr Mohamed Keshavjee and Prof. Albie Sachs
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S_fHpF ... e=emb_logo
The discussion revolves around how to strengthen civil society as a means of dealing and coping with the present pandemic
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S_fHpF ... e=emb_logo
The discussion revolves around how to strengthen civil society as a means of dealing and coping with the present pandemic
Why You Feel At Home In A Crisis
When disaster strikes, people come together. During the worst times of our lives, we can end up experiencing the best mental health and relationships with others. Here’s why that happens and how we can bring the lessons we learn with us once things get better.
“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
— Sebastian Junger
The Social Benefits of Adversity
When World War II began to unfold in 1939, the British government feared the worst. With major cities like London and Manchester facing aerial bombardment from the German air force, leaders were sure societal breakdown was imminent. Civilians were, after all, in no way prepared for war. How would they cope with a complete change to life as they knew it? How would they respond to the nightly threat of injury or death? Would they riot, loot, experience mass-scale psychotic breaks, go on murderous rampages, or lapse into total inertia as a result of exposure to German bombing campaigns?
Robert M. Titmuss writes in Problems of Social Policy that “social distress, disorganization, and loss of morale” were expected. Experts predicted 600,000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries from the bombings. Some in the government feared three times as many psychiatric casualties as physical ones. Official reports pondered how the population would respond to “financial distress, difficulties of food distribution, breakdowns in transport, communications, gas, lighting, and water supplies.”
After all, no one had lived through anything like this. Civilians couldn’t receive training as soldiers could, so it stood to reason they would be at high risk of psychological collapse. Titmus writes, “It seems sometimes to have been expected almost as a matter of course that widespread neurosis and panic would ensue.” The government contemplated sending a portion of soldiers into cities, rather than to the front lines, to maintain order.
Known as the Blitz, the effects of the bombing campaign were brutal. Over 60,000 civilians died, about half of them in London. The total cost of property damage was about £56 billion in today’s money, with almost a third of the houses in London becoming uninhabitable.
Yet despite all this, the anticipated social and psychological breakdown never happened. The death toll was also much lower than predicted, in part due to stringent adherence to safety instructions. In fact, the Blitz achieved the opposite of what the attackers intended: the British people proved more resilient than anyone predicted. Morale remained high, and there didn’t appear to be an increase in mental health problems. The suicide rate may have decreased. Some people with longstanding mental health issues found themselves feeling better.
People in British cities came together like never before to organize themselves at the community level. The sense of collective purpose this created led many to experience better mental health than they’d ever had. One indicator of this is that children who remained with their parents fared better than those evacuated to the safety of the countryside. The stress of the aerial bombardment didn’t override the benefits of staying in their city communities.
The social unity the British people reported during World War II lasted in the decades after. We can see it in the political choices the wartime generation made—the politicians they voted into power and the policies they voted for. By some accounts, the social unity fostered by the Blitz was the direct cause of the strong welfare state that emerged after the war and the creation of Britain’s free national healthcare system. Only when the wartime generation started to pass away did that sentiment fade.
We know how to Adapt to Adversity
We may be ashamed to admit it, but human nature is more at home in a crisis.
Disasters force us to band together and often strip away our differences. The effects of World War II on the British people were far from unique. The Allied bombing of Germany also strengthened community spirit. In fact, cities that suffered the least damage saw the worst psychological consequences. Similar improvements in morale occurred during other wars, riots, and after September 11, 2001.
When normality breaks down, we experience the sort of conditions we evolved to handle. Our early ancestors lived with a great deal of pain and suffering. The harsh environments they faced necessitated collaboration and sharing. Groups of people who could work together were most likely to survive. Because of this, evolution selected for altruism.
Among modern foraging tribal groups, the punishments for freeloading are severe. Execution is not uncommon. As severe as this may seem, allowing selfishness to flourish endangers the whole group. It stands to reason that the same was true for our ancestors living in much the same conditions. Being challenged as a group by difficult changes in our environment leads to incredible community cohesion.
Many of the conditions we need to flourish both as individuals and as a species emerge during disasters. Modern life otherwise fails to provide them. Times of crisis are closer to the environments our ancestors evolved in. Of course, this does not mean that disasters are good. By their nature, they produce immense suffering. But understanding their positive flip side can help us to both weather them better and bring important lessons into the aftermath.
Embracing Struggle
Good times don’t actually produce good societies.
In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger argues that modern society robs us of the solidarity we need to thrive. Unfortunately, he writes, “The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate commitment to the collective good.” As life becomes safer, it is easier for us to live detached lives. We can meet all of our needs in relative isolation, which prevents us from building a strong connection to a common purpose. In our normal day to day, we rarely need to show courage, turn to our communities for help, or make sacrifices for the sake of others.
Furthermore, our affluence doesn’t seem to make us happier. Junger writes that “as affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up, not down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in society seems to foster it.” We often think of wealth as a buffer from pain, but beyond a certain point, wealth can actually make us more fragile.
The unexpected worsening of mental health in modern society has much to do with our lack of community—which might explain why times of disaster, when everyone faces the breakdown of normal life, can counterintuitively improve mental health, despite the other negative consequences. When situations requiring sacrifice do reappear and we must work together to survive, it alleviates our disconnection from each other. Disaster increases our reliance on our communities.
In a state of chaos, our way of relating to each other changes. Junger explains that “self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside of group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.” Helping each other survive builds ties stronger than anything we form during normal conditions. After a natural disaster, residents of a city may feel like one big community for the first time. United by the need to get their lives back together, individual differences melt away for a while.
Junger writes particularly of one such instance:
The one thing that might be said for societal collapse is that—for a while at least—everyone is equal. In 1915 an earthquake killed 30,000 people in Avezzano, Italy, in less than a minute. The worst-hit areas had a mortality rate of 96 percent. The rich were killed along with the poor, and virtually everyone who survived was immediately thrust into the most basic struggle for survival: they needed food, they needed water, they needed shelter, and they needed to rescue the living and bury the dead. In that sense, plate tectonics under the town of Avezzano managed to recreate the communal conditions of our evolutionary past quite well.
Disasters bring out the best in us. Junger goes on to say that “communities that have been devastated by natural or manmade disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.” When catastrophes end, despite their immense negatives, people report missing how it felt to unite for a common cause. Junger explains that “what people miss presumably isn’t danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender.” The loss of that unification can be, in its own way, traumatic.
Don’t be Afraid of Disaster
So what can we learn from Tribe?
The first lesson is that, in the face of disaster, we should not expect the worst from other people. Yes, instances of selfishness will happen no matter what. Many people will look out for themselves at the expense of others, not least the ultra-wealthy who are unlikely to be affected in a meaningful way and so will not share in the same experience. But on the whole, history has shown that the breakdown of order people expect is rare. Instead, we find new ways to continue and to cope.
During World War II, there were fears that British people would resent the appearance of over two million American servicemen in their country. After all, it meant more competition for scarce resources. Instead, the “friendly invasion” met with a near-unanimous warm welcome. British people shared what they had without bitterness. They understood that the Americans were far from home and missing their loved ones, so they did all they could to help. In a crisis, we can default to expecting the best from each other.
Second, we can achieve a great deal by organizing on the community level when disaster strikes. Junger writes, “There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one’s way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous may be to community. If the human race is under threat in some way that we don’t yet understand, it will probably be at a community level that we either solve the problem or fail to.” When normal life is impossible, being able to volunteer help is an important means of retaining a sense of control, even if it imposes additional demands. One explanation for the high morale during the Blitz is that everyone could be involved in the war effort, whether they were fostering a child, growing cabbages in their garden, or collecting scrap metal to make planes.
For our third and final lesson, we should not forget what we learn about the importance of banding together. What’s more, we must do all we can to let that knowledge inform future decisions. It is possible for disasters to spark meaningful changes in the way we live. We should continue to emphasize community and prioritize stronger relationships. We can do this by building strong reminders of what happened and how it impacted people. We can strive to educate future generations, teaching them why unity matters.
(In addition to Tribe, many of the details of this post come from Disasters and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles Drawn from Disaster Studies by Charles E. Fritz.)
https://fs.blog/2020/06/crisis/
When disaster strikes, people come together. During the worst times of our lives, we can end up experiencing the best mental health and relationships with others. Here’s why that happens and how we can bring the lessons we learn with us once things get better.
“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
— Sebastian Junger
The Social Benefits of Adversity
When World War II began to unfold in 1939, the British government feared the worst. With major cities like London and Manchester facing aerial bombardment from the German air force, leaders were sure societal breakdown was imminent. Civilians were, after all, in no way prepared for war. How would they cope with a complete change to life as they knew it? How would they respond to the nightly threat of injury or death? Would they riot, loot, experience mass-scale psychotic breaks, go on murderous rampages, or lapse into total inertia as a result of exposure to German bombing campaigns?
Robert M. Titmuss writes in Problems of Social Policy that “social distress, disorganization, and loss of morale” were expected. Experts predicted 600,000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries from the bombings. Some in the government feared three times as many psychiatric casualties as physical ones. Official reports pondered how the population would respond to “financial distress, difficulties of food distribution, breakdowns in transport, communications, gas, lighting, and water supplies.”
After all, no one had lived through anything like this. Civilians couldn’t receive training as soldiers could, so it stood to reason they would be at high risk of psychological collapse. Titmus writes, “It seems sometimes to have been expected almost as a matter of course that widespread neurosis and panic would ensue.” The government contemplated sending a portion of soldiers into cities, rather than to the front lines, to maintain order.
Known as the Blitz, the effects of the bombing campaign were brutal. Over 60,000 civilians died, about half of them in London. The total cost of property damage was about £56 billion in today’s money, with almost a third of the houses in London becoming uninhabitable.
Yet despite all this, the anticipated social and psychological breakdown never happened. The death toll was also much lower than predicted, in part due to stringent adherence to safety instructions. In fact, the Blitz achieved the opposite of what the attackers intended: the British people proved more resilient than anyone predicted. Morale remained high, and there didn’t appear to be an increase in mental health problems. The suicide rate may have decreased. Some people with longstanding mental health issues found themselves feeling better.
People in British cities came together like never before to organize themselves at the community level. The sense of collective purpose this created led many to experience better mental health than they’d ever had. One indicator of this is that children who remained with their parents fared better than those evacuated to the safety of the countryside. The stress of the aerial bombardment didn’t override the benefits of staying in their city communities.
The social unity the British people reported during World War II lasted in the decades after. We can see it in the political choices the wartime generation made—the politicians they voted into power and the policies they voted for. By some accounts, the social unity fostered by the Blitz was the direct cause of the strong welfare state that emerged after the war and the creation of Britain’s free national healthcare system. Only when the wartime generation started to pass away did that sentiment fade.
We know how to Adapt to Adversity
We may be ashamed to admit it, but human nature is more at home in a crisis.
Disasters force us to band together and often strip away our differences. The effects of World War II on the British people were far from unique. The Allied bombing of Germany also strengthened community spirit. In fact, cities that suffered the least damage saw the worst psychological consequences. Similar improvements in morale occurred during other wars, riots, and after September 11, 2001.
When normality breaks down, we experience the sort of conditions we evolved to handle. Our early ancestors lived with a great deal of pain and suffering. The harsh environments they faced necessitated collaboration and sharing. Groups of people who could work together were most likely to survive. Because of this, evolution selected for altruism.
Among modern foraging tribal groups, the punishments for freeloading are severe. Execution is not uncommon. As severe as this may seem, allowing selfishness to flourish endangers the whole group. It stands to reason that the same was true for our ancestors living in much the same conditions. Being challenged as a group by difficult changes in our environment leads to incredible community cohesion.
Many of the conditions we need to flourish both as individuals and as a species emerge during disasters. Modern life otherwise fails to provide them. Times of crisis are closer to the environments our ancestors evolved in. Of course, this does not mean that disasters are good. By their nature, they produce immense suffering. But understanding their positive flip side can help us to both weather them better and bring important lessons into the aftermath.
Embracing Struggle
Good times don’t actually produce good societies.
In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger argues that modern society robs us of the solidarity we need to thrive. Unfortunately, he writes, “The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate commitment to the collective good.” As life becomes safer, it is easier for us to live detached lives. We can meet all of our needs in relative isolation, which prevents us from building a strong connection to a common purpose. In our normal day to day, we rarely need to show courage, turn to our communities for help, or make sacrifices for the sake of others.
Furthermore, our affluence doesn’t seem to make us happier. Junger writes that “as affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up, not down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in society seems to foster it.” We often think of wealth as a buffer from pain, but beyond a certain point, wealth can actually make us more fragile.
The unexpected worsening of mental health in modern society has much to do with our lack of community—which might explain why times of disaster, when everyone faces the breakdown of normal life, can counterintuitively improve mental health, despite the other negative consequences. When situations requiring sacrifice do reappear and we must work together to survive, it alleviates our disconnection from each other. Disaster increases our reliance on our communities.
In a state of chaos, our way of relating to each other changes. Junger explains that “self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside of group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.” Helping each other survive builds ties stronger than anything we form during normal conditions. After a natural disaster, residents of a city may feel like one big community for the first time. United by the need to get their lives back together, individual differences melt away for a while.
Junger writes particularly of one such instance:
The one thing that might be said for societal collapse is that—for a while at least—everyone is equal. In 1915 an earthquake killed 30,000 people in Avezzano, Italy, in less than a minute. The worst-hit areas had a mortality rate of 96 percent. The rich were killed along with the poor, and virtually everyone who survived was immediately thrust into the most basic struggle for survival: they needed food, they needed water, they needed shelter, and they needed to rescue the living and bury the dead. In that sense, plate tectonics under the town of Avezzano managed to recreate the communal conditions of our evolutionary past quite well.
Disasters bring out the best in us. Junger goes on to say that “communities that have been devastated by natural or manmade disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.” When catastrophes end, despite their immense negatives, people report missing how it felt to unite for a common cause. Junger explains that “what people miss presumably isn’t danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender.” The loss of that unification can be, in its own way, traumatic.
Don’t be Afraid of Disaster
So what can we learn from Tribe?
The first lesson is that, in the face of disaster, we should not expect the worst from other people. Yes, instances of selfishness will happen no matter what. Many people will look out for themselves at the expense of others, not least the ultra-wealthy who are unlikely to be affected in a meaningful way and so will not share in the same experience. But on the whole, history has shown that the breakdown of order people expect is rare. Instead, we find new ways to continue and to cope.
During World War II, there were fears that British people would resent the appearance of over two million American servicemen in their country. After all, it meant more competition for scarce resources. Instead, the “friendly invasion” met with a near-unanimous warm welcome. British people shared what they had without bitterness. They understood that the Americans were far from home and missing their loved ones, so they did all they could to help. In a crisis, we can default to expecting the best from each other.
Second, we can achieve a great deal by organizing on the community level when disaster strikes. Junger writes, “There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one’s way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous may be to community. If the human race is under threat in some way that we don’t yet understand, it will probably be at a community level that we either solve the problem or fail to.” When normal life is impossible, being able to volunteer help is an important means of retaining a sense of control, even if it imposes additional demands. One explanation for the high morale during the Blitz is that everyone could be involved in the war effort, whether they were fostering a child, growing cabbages in their garden, or collecting scrap metal to make planes.
For our third and final lesson, we should not forget what we learn about the importance of banding together. What’s more, we must do all we can to let that knowledge inform future decisions. It is possible for disasters to spark meaningful changes in the way we live. We should continue to emphasize community and prioritize stronger relationships. We can do this by building strong reminders of what happened and how it impacted people. We can strive to educate future generations, teaching them why unity matters.
(In addition to Tribe, many of the details of this post come from Disasters and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles Drawn from Disaster Studies by Charles E. Fritz.)
https://fs.blog/2020/06/crisis/
Enhancing civil society
Founded on ethics and values that drive progress and positive change, these civil society institutions – of education, health, science and research, and culture, to name a few – harness the private energies of citizens committed to the public good.
The AKDN has been building these institutions for over 100 years – including schools, clinics and hospitals, companies offering essential goods and services, early childhood programmes that give poor children a head start, tree-planting programmes that plant millions of trees, public parks and museums, hotels that set standards for environmental stewardship, farmers’ associations that allow farmers to speak with one voice, an architectural award that has influenced architectural discourse for over four decades, universities and nursing schools that provide essential human resources for developing nations, and savings groups that help the poorest of the poor weather financial hardship and build a better future. Some of these institutions that the AKDN currently operates in 30 countries have been setting or raising standards in their fields for decades.
Gallery at:
https://www.akdn.org/gallery/enhancing-civil-society
Founded on ethics and values that drive progress and positive change, these civil society institutions – of education, health, science and research, and culture, to name a few – harness the private energies of citizens committed to the public good.
The AKDN has been building these institutions for over 100 years – including schools, clinics and hospitals, companies offering essential goods and services, early childhood programmes that give poor children a head start, tree-planting programmes that plant millions of trees, public parks and museums, hotels that set standards for environmental stewardship, farmers’ associations that allow farmers to speak with one voice, an architectural award that has influenced architectural discourse for over four decades, universities and nursing schools that provide essential human resources for developing nations, and savings groups that help the poorest of the poor weather financial hardship and build a better future. Some of these institutions that the AKDN currently operates in 30 countries have been setting or raising standards in their fields for decades.
Gallery at:
https://www.akdn.org/gallery/enhancing-civil-society
Grassroot groups critical to the Covid-19 response
Friday, September 25, 2020
What you need to know:
- With local networks and often meagre resources, the organisations are devising ways of rallying communities to protect themselves against Covid-19.
Deep in the hearts of Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu’s informal settlements, staff of a grassroots community organisation move from house to house distributing face masks and food items, comforting distressed community members, and offering a myriad of other direct community services.
Meanwhile, their colleagues brief a local government administrator on the challenges facing the community and identifying most vulnerable community members in need of support.
Local grassroot organisations have emerged essential participants in the battle against Covid-19. Critical and adaptive, they are juggling community support with ‘donor’ priorities, and championing community resilience strategies for mitigating Covid-19.
With volunteers drawn often from the very communities they aim to serve, these organisations have rallied family members, neighbours, friends, and well-wishers in pulling together resources.
Take Grace, for example. A member of the Women Volunteers of Peace in Kisumu County , she has worked with her mother to help make homemade face masks for the vulnerable communities. Grace serves in the Manyatta and Nyalenda slums of Kisumu.
To date, she has distributed hundreds of face masks to vulnerable households including children, street vendors, people with disabilities, boda boda operators, and the elderly.
With local networks and often meagre resources, the organisations are devising ways of rallying communities to protect themselves against Covid-19.
In Uthiru, a low-income peri-urban neighbourhood to the West of Nairobi, community volunteers identify vulnerable households, and deliver food rations, while linking poor households with individuals who can offer financial support to meet essential services. In mounting community-led responses, the organisations are restoring hope in communities that would ordinarily be passive recipients.
Latent creative energy
From the work of the organisation Hope Raisers in painting murals that raise public awareness about Covid-19 in Nairobi’s Mathare and Korogocho to the work of women’s groups in Kibera making hand soap, Covid-19 has unleashed a latent creative energy, that has enabled communal and collective action in devising solutions to common challenges.
In Mombasa, Sauti ya Wanawake wa Pwani, a local organisation, is collaborating with the County Government of Mombasa to maintain a ‘situation room’ dedicated to tracking and supporting survivors of gender-based violence (GBV).
Unlike many organisations, whose staff are mostly working from the comfort of their homes during the Covid-19 pandemic, local grassroot community organisations are operating on the frontlines with community led responses to the pandemic.
Despite limited resources, these community rooted organisations have sprung into action, in a variety of ways to support vulnerable women, men, children, and youth in coping with the devasting health and socio-economic impacts of Covid-19.
The key question is how these organisations have continued to offer critical services to vulnerable communities while other, often better resourced organisations have either scaled down operations or closed altogether?
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) views civil society as a force which binds public and private activity in a common purpose. We recognise the central role these local organisations play in the design and implementation of community initiatives, and we work closely with them in strengthening their capacity for delivering services and ensuring that they continue to have a sustainable impact.
In Kenya, the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) supports the efforts of grassroots organisations in committing their resources and rallying stakeholders in response to community priorities. With the increase in new Covid-19 cases in the country, these actors will continue to play an increasingly important role in nurturing community resilience.
Larger organisations stand to benefit from local grassroot initiatives that are attuned to the issues those in need face. At AKF, we are leveraging our partnerships with over 900 civil society organisations (CSOs) through the Yetu Platform and county governments to better understand the rapidly evolving context.
This includes adapting approaches and reorientating resources to better meet partner and community needs.
In our Covid-19 response plan, AKF has initiated local resource mobilisation efforts with a focus on three key areas of intervention: Slowing and stopping transmission and spread; providing optimised care for all patients; and minimising impact on communities, the vulnerable, social services and economic activity.
With increasing cases in Kenya, AKF recognises that grassroots organisations will become critical lifelines in supporting the delivery of healthcare and other essential services by the government.
Grassroots organisations are also able to leverage their experience and credibility to drive public health messaging to populations that may be sceptical of government communication.
They help to forge bonds of solidarity and a common purpose between and among communities and play a crucial role in sustaining collective action while holding government to higher levels of accountability.
As international organisations, we need to step up our efforts to support emerging local initiatives and amplify local civil society voices in pandemic response efforts.
Grassroots organisations are the glue that holds communities together. With Covid-19, we need their voice, their expertise, their influence and their extensive presence more than ever before.
https://nation.africa/kenya/blogs-opini ... 25c8c5fc8d
Friday, September 25, 2020
What you need to know:
- With local networks and often meagre resources, the organisations are devising ways of rallying communities to protect themselves against Covid-19.
Deep in the hearts of Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu’s informal settlements, staff of a grassroots community organisation move from house to house distributing face masks and food items, comforting distressed community members, and offering a myriad of other direct community services.
Meanwhile, their colleagues brief a local government administrator on the challenges facing the community and identifying most vulnerable community members in need of support.
Local grassroot organisations have emerged essential participants in the battle against Covid-19. Critical and adaptive, they are juggling community support with ‘donor’ priorities, and championing community resilience strategies for mitigating Covid-19.
With volunteers drawn often from the very communities they aim to serve, these organisations have rallied family members, neighbours, friends, and well-wishers in pulling together resources.
Take Grace, for example. A member of the Women Volunteers of Peace in Kisumu County , she has worked with her mother to help make homemade face masks for the vulnerable communities. Grace serves in the Manyatta and Nyalenda slums of Kisumu.
To date, she has distributed hundreds of face masks to vulnerable households including children, street vendors, people with disabilities, boda boda operators, and the elderly.
With local networks and often meagre resources, the organisations are devising ways of rallying communities to protect themselves against Covid-19.
In Uthiru, a low-income peri-urban neighbourhood to the West of Nairobi, community volunteers identify vulnerable households, and deliver food rations, while linking poor households with individuals who can offer financial support to meet essential services. In mounting community-led responses, the organisations are restoring hope in communities that would ordinarily be passive recipients.
Latent creative energy
From the work of the organisation Hope Raisers in painting murals that raise public awareness about Covid-19 in Nairobi’s Mathare and Korogocho to the work of women’s groups in Kibera making hand soap, Covid-19 has unleashed a latent creative energy, that has enabled communal and collective action in devising solutions to common challenges.
In Mombasa, Sauti ya Wanawake wa Pwani, a local organisation, is collaborating with the County Government of Mombasa to maintain a ‘situation room’ dedicated to tracking and supporting survivors of gender-based violence (GBV).
Unlike many organisations, whose staff are mostly working from the comfort of their homes during the Covid-19 pandemic, local grassroot community organisations are operating on the frontlines with community led responses to the pandemic.
Despite limited resources, these community rooted organisations have sprung into action, in a variety of ways to support vulnerable women, men, children, and youth in coping with the devasting health and socio-economic impacts of Covid-19.
The key question is how these organisations have continued to offer critical services to vulnerable communities while other, often better resourced organisations have either scaled down operations or closed altogether?
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) views civil society as a force which binds public and private activity in a common purpose. We recognise the central role these local organisations play in the design and implementation of community initiatives, and we work closely with them in strengthening their capacity for delivering services and ensuring that they continue to have a sustainable impact.
In Kenya, the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) supports the efforts of grassroots organisations in committing their resources and rallying stakeholders in response to community priorities. With the increase in new Covid-19 cases in the country, these actors will continue to play an increasingly important role in nurturing community resilience.
Larger organisations stand to benefit from local grassroot initiatives that are attuned to the issues those in need face. At AKF, we are leveraging our partnerships with over 900 civil society organisations (CSOs) through the Yetu Platform and county governments to better understand the rapidly evolving context.
This includes adapting approaches and reorientating resources to better meet partner and community needs.
In our Covid-19 response plan, AKF has initiated local resource mobilisation efforts with a focus on three key areas of intervention: Slowing and stopping transmission and spread; providing optimised care for all patients; and minimising impact on communities, the vulnerable, social services and economic activity.
With increasing cases in Kenya, AKF recognises that grassroots organisations will become critical lifelines in supporting the delivery of healthcare and other essential services by the government.
Grassroots organisations are also able to leverage their experience and credibility to drive public health messaging to populations that may be sceptical of government communication.
They help to forge bonds of solidarity and a common purpose between and among communities and play a crucial role in sustaining collective action while holding government to higher levels of accountability.
As international organisations, we need to step up our efforts to support emerging local initiatives and amplify local civil society voices in pandemic response efforts.
Grassroots organisations are the glue that holds communities together. With Covid-19, we need their voice, their expertise, their influence and their extensive presence more than ever before.
https://nation.africa/kenya/blogs-opini ... 25c8c5fc8d
The article below suggests rebuilding civil society key to reversing social decay in America.
How to Actually Make America Great
Reversing 50 years of social decline.
This pivotal moment isn’t just the result of four years of Donald Trump. It’s the culmination of 50 years of social decay.
“The Upswing,” a remarkable new book by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, puts this situation in stark relief. A careful work of social science, the book looks at American life from about 1870 to today across a range of sectors that are usually analyzed in separate academic silos.
The first important finding is that between the 1870s and the late 1960s a broad range of American social trends improved: Community activism surged, cross party collaboration increased, income inequality fell, social mobility rose, church attendance rose, union membership rose, federal income taxes became more progressive and social spending on the poor rose.
Many of us think that the gains for African-Americans only happened after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but Putnam and Garrett show that the fastest improvements actually happened in the decades before. Black school attendance, income gains, homeownership rates, voter registration rates started rapidly improving in the 1940s and then started slowing in the 1970s and 1980s.
The American century was built during these decades of social progress. And then, around the late 1960s, it all turned south.
Over the past 50 years, the positive trends have reversed: membership in civic organizations has collapsed, political polarization has worsened, income inequality has widened, social trust has cratered, religious attendance is down, social mobility has decreased, deaths of despair have skyrocketed and on and on.
Putnam and Garrett take the data from diverse spheres and produce different versions of the same chart, which is an inverted U. Until the late 1960s, American life was improving across a range of measures. Since then, it’s a story of decay.
Why did all these different things happen in unison and then suddenly turn around all at once? Maybe economic change drove everything? But no, the timing is off. Economic inequality widened a bit later than most of the other trends. Maybe it was political dysfunction? Nope. That, too, happened a bit later.
The crucial change was in mind-set and culture. As Putnam and Garrett write: “The story of the American experiment in the twentieth century is one of a long upswing toward increasing solidarity, followed by a steep downturn into increasing individualism. From ‘I’ to ‘we’ and back again to ‘I’.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
How to Actually Make America Great
Reversing 50 years of social decline.
This pivotal moment isn’t just the result of four years of Donald Trump. It’s the culmination of 50 years of social decay.
“The Upswing,” a remarkable new book by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, puts this situation in stark relief. A careful work of social science, the book looks at American life from about 1870 to today across a range of sectors that are usually analyzed in separate academic silos.
The first important finding is that between the 1870s and the late 1960s a broad range of American social trends improved: Community activism surged, cross party collaboration increased, income inequality fell, social mobility rose, church attendance rose, union membership rose, federal income taxes became more progressive and social spending on the poor rose.
Many of us think that the gains for African-Americans only happened after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but Putnam and Garrett show that the fastest improvements actually happened in the decades before. Black school attendance, income gains, homeownership rates, voter registration rates started rapidly improving in the 1940s and then started slowing in the 1970s and 1980s.
The American century was built during these decades of social progress. And then, around the late 1960s, it all turned south.
Over the past 50 years, the positive trends have reversed: membership in civic organizations has collapsed, political polarization has worsened, income inequality has widened, social trust has cratered, religious attendance is down, social mobility has decreased, deaths of despair have skyrocketed and on and on.
Putnam and Garrett take the data from diverse spheres and produce different versions of the same chart, which is an inverted U. Until the late 1960s, American life was improving across a range of measures. Since then, it’s a story of decay.
Why did all these different things happen in unison and then suddenly turn around all at once? Maybe economic change drove everything? But no, the timing is off. Economic inequality widened a bit later than most of the other trends. Maybe it was political dysfunction? Nope. That, too, happened a bit later.
The crucial change was in mind-set and culture. As Putnam and Garrett write: “The story of the American experiment in the twentieth century is one of a long upswing toward increasing solidarity, followed by a steep downturn into increasing individualism. From ‘I’ to ‘we’ and back again to ‘I’.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
U.K. community members rally to feed hungry children after the British government says no
After the British government voted against a plan to feed hungry kids in schools in the United Kingdom, the business community has taken up the cause.
Ali Waterworth's son Ruddi is now 12 years old and doing well, but that wasn't always the case.
Before his first birthday, he was diagnosed with bladder and prostate cancer.
"I managed to feed my kids still but I nearly lost everything so I know how tough it is," said Waterworth, who has a small cafe in the village of Slaithwaite in West Yorkshire, England.
Her family's experience led her to create a children's charity called Ruddi's Retreat.
She decided she'd use her cafe to make lunches for children in need with no questions asked after a move by Boris Johnson's government on Oct. 21.
Conservative members of Parliament voted 322 to 261 against a Labour Party motion to extend school meal programs to ensure children in need would continue to be fed over the half-term break and through to Easter of 2021.
"It leaves me speechless, if I am honest," Waterworth said. "If you look at some of the news reports about these children, it's ridiculous. I cannot believe that we are not doing some form of an initiative as a country to help out."
She is now one of hundreds offering to help and letting people know where they can turn for support, using the social media hashtag, End Child Poverty.
Marcus Rashford, a soccer player for Manchester United and England, has been the voice in the fight to end child poverty and food insecurity in England.
Earlier in the year, he wrote a heartfelt letter detailing his own experience with hunger as a boy growing up in Manchester.
His efforts were seen as a guiding hand when the Conservative government extended the same meal programs for children over the summer months.
In England in 2019, 1.3 million children claimed free meals.
Groups that work with families in need say things are getting worse because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
According to data published by The Food Foundation, 10 per cent of parents/guardians, affecting an estimated 1.9 million children, reported that food insecurity had affected their children in a variety of ways in the last six months, forcing them to rely on only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed their children (six per cent) and provide unbalanced meals (five per cent) and to resort to smaller portions (one per cent) or skipping meals entirely (two percent).
Rashford was surprised by the government's recent decision and some of the comments made about why children are in need and who is responsible for supporting them.
"I know, for sure, a lot of them speaking the way that they are speaking is so insensitive about the issue and they have definitely not been through it themselves," Rashford said.
Despite the British government's rejection, community members are taking action. Proof of that exists on the 22-year-old's Twitter page, which is full of retweets and shares of offers to feed children across England.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/wellne ... ailsignout
After the British government voted against a plan to feed hungry kids in schools in the United Kingdom, the business community has taken up the cause.
Ali Waterworth's son Ruddi is now 12 years old and doing well, but that wasn't always the case.
Before his first birthday, he was diagnosed with bladder and prostate cancer.
"I managed to feed my kids still but I nearly lost everything so I know how tough it is," said Waterworth, who has a small cafe in the village of Slaithwaite in West Yorkshire, England.
Her family's experience led her to create a children's charity called Ruddi's Retreat.
She decided she'd use her cafe to make lunches for children in need with no questions asked after a move by Boris Johnson's government on Oct. 21.
Conservative members of Parliament voted 322 to 261 against a Labour Party motion to extend school meal programs to ensure children in need would continue to be fed over the half-term break and through to Easter of 2021.
"It leaves me speechless, if I am honest," Waterworth said. "If you look at some of the news reports about these children, it's ridiculous. I cannot believe that we are not doing some form of an initiative as a country to help out."
She is now one of hundreds offering to help and letting people know where they can turn for support, using the social media hashtag, End Child Poverty.
Marcus Rashford, a soccer player for Manchester United and England, has been the voice in the fight to end child poverty and food insecurity in England.
Earlier in the year, he wrote a heartfelt letter detailing his own experience with hunger as a boy growing up in Manchester.
His efforts were seen as a guiding hand when the Conservative government extended the same meal programs for children over the summer months.
In England in 2019, 1.3 million children claimed free meals.
Groups that work with families in need say things are getting worse because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
According to data published by The Food Foundation, 10 per cent of parents/guardians, affecting an estimated 1.9 million children, reported that food insecurity had affected their children in a variety of ways in the last six months, forcing them to rely on only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed their children (six per cent) and provide unbalanced meals (five per cent) and to resort to smaller portions (one per cent) or skipping meals entirely (two percent).
Rashford was surprised by the government's recent decision and some of the comments made about why children are in need and who is responsible for supporting them.
"I know, for sure, a lot of them speaking the way that they are speaking is so insensitive about the issue and they have definitely not been through it themselves," Rashford said.
Despite the British government's rejection, community members are taking action. Proof of that exists on the 22-year-old's Twitter page, which is full of retweets and shares of offers to feed children across England.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/wellne ... ailsignout
The article below suggests revitalizing civil society for solution to deeper problems.
Either Trump or Biden Will Win. But Our Deepest Problems Will Remain.
For politics to function, we need to act at the local, personal level.
A presidential election naturally concentrates our country’s attention. For a time, everything seems to depend on the answer to one clear and simple question.
But then what? On rare occasions, the country’s fate really does rest on a discrete set of policy choices embodied by competing candidates.
More often, though, our deepest problems aren’t really amenable to resolution by a president. These problems have been adding up to something of a social crisis, evident not only in the breakdown of our political culture but also in the isolation and despair that have driven up suicide and opioid-abuse rates, and in a sense of alienation that leaves whole communities feeling excluded from the American story and in turn angrily rejecting it.
Even in a time of bitter partisanship, we know we need more than the right person in power. Each party treats the other as a mortal threat to America’s future, and so persuades its voters that electing the wrong president would make things worse.
But that doesn’t help us see how to make things much better. If you think our country has bigger problems than just the people you disagree with, then you’re likely to find that they aren’t swept away by an election victory.
In fact, these problems now make it difficult for us to have traditional policy arguments. As the intensity of the election subsides, we now need to ask ourselves how to deal with hopelessness and hostility, because they undermine the preconditions for a functional politics.
The answers may be closer than we think. At the heart of our pervasive crisis of alienation are widespread failures of responsibility, deep-seated cultural divisions and a deadly dearth of solidarity. Such challenges can seem impossibly immense when we look at our country from the top down. No president could resolve them, no Congress could address them. But from the bottom up, there are more opportunities to take them on.
That’s not because there is some magic to local action. It’s because what has broken down is fundamentally communal and institutional, so that a recovery of the ethos required for our national politics to function is likely to happen closer to the interpersonal level.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Either Trump or Biden Will Win. But Our Deepest Problems Will Remain.
For politics to function, we need to act at the local, personal level.
A presidential election naturally concentrates our country’s attention. For a time, everything seems to depend on the answer to one clear and simple question.
But then what? On rare occasions, the country’s fate really does rest on a discrete set of policy choices embodied by competing candidates.
More often, though, our deepest problems aren’t really amenable to resolution by a president. These problems have been adding up to something of a social crisis, evident not only in the breakdown of our political culture but also in the isolation and despair that have driven up suicide and opioid-abuse rates, and in a sense of alienation that leaves whole communities feeling excluded from the American story and in turn angrily rejecting it.
Even in a time of bitter partisanship, we know we need more than the right person in power. Each party treats the other as a mortal threat to America’s future, and so persuades its voters that electing the wrong president would make things worse.
But that doesn’t help us see how to make things much better. If you think our country has bigger problems than just the people you disagree with, then you’re likely to find that they aren’t swept away by an election victory.
In fact, these problems now make it difficult for us to have traditional policy arguments. As the intensity of the election subsides, we now need to ask ourselves how to deal with hopelessness and hostility, because they undermine the preconditions for a functional politics.
The answers may be closer than we think. At the heart of our pervasive crisis of alienation are widespread failures of responsibility, deep-seated cultural divisions and a deadly dearth of solidarity. Such challenges can seem impossibly immense when we look at our country from the top down. No president could resolve them, no Congress could address them. But from the bottom up, there are more opportunities to take them on.
That’s not because there is some magic to local action. It’s because what has broken down is fundamentally communal and institutional, so that a recovery of the ethos required for our national politics to function is likely to happen closer to the interpersonal level.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Video Quote: The Role of Civil Society Institutions in the Success of Democracy
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5XjTH8NOrM
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5XjTH8NOrM
The article below highlights the role of civil society in solving the present agriculture and food issues in America.
My Great-Grandfather Knew How to Fix America’s Food System
In the mutual aid and stewardship of an earlier generation of American farmers, there might be hope for our own communities.
The pandemic revealed just how brittle our food system has become. It has also made me think a lot about my paternal great-grandfather, Walter Howard, a farmer whom I knew as Grandpa Dad.
Born in Idaho, he was 7 when the 1918 flu pandemic swept America and 18 when the Great Depression began. He was in his 90s when I knew him. When he started his own farm as a young adult, drought and economic uncertainty were ravaging Idaho — yet, somehow, he and his farm not only survived, but thrived
Unfortunately, the things my great-grandfather sought to foster in his lifetime — healthy land, resilient farms, a robust small-town economy — have suffered in mine. Farms and farmers have become isolated and specialized, and many rural towns have emptied out.
In this pandemic, we’ve seen some of the damaging consequences of these changes. The cost of our “efficient” meat production is revealed in the treatment of food workers: Many meat processors forced employees to continue working even as the coronavirus spread at meatpacking plants. Grocery stores struggled to keep their shelves filled while farmers were dumping milk and euthanizing hogs and chickens they could not get to market because of processing and distributing bottlenecks.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/opin ... 778d3e6de3
My Great-Grandfather Knew How to Fix America’s Food System
In the mutual aid and stewardship of an earlier generation of American farmers, there might be hope for our own communities.
The pandemic revealed just how brittle our food system has become. It has also made me think a lot about my paternal great-grandfather, Walter Howard, a farmer whom I knew as Grandpa Dad.
Born in Idaho, he was 7 when the 1918 flu pandemic swept America and 18 when the Great Depression began. He was in his 90s when I knew him. When he started his own farm as a young adult, drought and economic uncertainty were ravaging Idaho — yet, somehow, he and his farm not only survived, but thrived
Unfortunately, the things my great-grandfather sought to foster in his lifetime — healthy land, resilient farms, a robust small-town economy — have suffered in mine. Farms and farmers have become isolated and specialized, and many rural towns have emptied out.
In this pandemic, we’ve seen some of the damaging consequences of these changes. The cost of our “efficient” meat production is revealed in the treatment of food workers: Many meat processors forced employees to continue working even as the coronavirus spread at meatpacking plants. Grocery stores struggled to keep their shelves filled while farmers were dumping milk and euthanizing hogs and chickens they could not get to market because of processing and distributing bottlenecks.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/opin ... 778d3e6de3