Spring 2008 Issue of the "Collaborative Solutions Newsletter"

[Discussion list for COMM-ORG]

From: "Tom Wolff" <tom at tomwolff.com>



Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Welcome to the Spring 2008 Issue of the "Collaborative Solutions 
Newsletter" from Tom Wolff & Associates. This is a very special issue as 
it addresses the link between spirituality and social change. It will be 
the first of a series of newsletters on this topic.

I have spent the last six months grappling with how to write about these 
critical issues. Part of the stimulus has been the growing stress and 
distress that I am seeing and feeling in communities as I work with 
them. Our communities are in greater need and our helping systems are 
increasingly facing their own dysfunction as they sink into competition, 
conflict, hopelessness and retreating from a focus on social change. 
This led to my list of six serious limitations in our helping system.

I follow this with a look at the spiritual principles that can guide us 
out of the present morass. This emphasis on spiritual principles comes 
from my long term spiritual pursuits and my ongoing hunt for ways to 
connect spirituality and social change. The questions that fascinate me 
are – how can our spirituality inform our work at social change and how 
can our work at social change inform our spirituality?
This issue of the Newsletter issues is available online at 
www.tomwolff.com. You may find that the web version to be the easiest to 
read and download. A text version can be found below.

We encourage you to distribute this information to your friends and 
colleagues. You can subscribe for free or unsubscribe at the end of the 
newsletter. The topic of spirituality and social change is one where I 
am especially interested in your response - so please le me know what 
you think - tom at tomwolff.com.

Thanks
Tom Wolff
Tom Wolff & Associates



Collaborative Solutions
A Newsletter from Tom Wolff & Associates
Contents of Spring 2008 Collaborative Solutions Newsletter:

In This Issue:

* Spirituality and Social Change : Appreciation, acceptance, compassion 
and interdependence in our community work
o Our helping systems are in trouble
o Spiritual principles can guide us in the work we do.
o Six serious limiting factors in our helping system
+ We have overemphasized the deficits in our communities.
+ Application of appreciation as a spiritual principle.
# Community Story
+ We have lost social change and social justice as our goal.
+ Application of interdependence and interconnection as spiritual principles
# Community Story
* What is new at Tom Wolff & Associates:
o New Frontiers – Community Directories on the Web Using New Technology
o New chapter in book just out
o Workshop in Lisbon Portugal this summer

Spirituality and Social Change: Appreciation, acceptance, compassion, 
and interdependence in our community work
Our helping systems are in trouble

Our helping systems are in deep trouble, and sadly we don’t even seem to 
notice. When we talk about helping systems in trouble, our first 
thoughts usually relate to money: “Oh, yeah, I know—not enough money to 
provide services,” or, “Our agency’s staff is still underpaid.”

But the kind of deep trouble I am worried about is not about money. In 
fact, I think that our problems grow from exactly that knee-jerk 
tendency to think that funding is our biggest issue—the only way we go 
about addressing concerns of human welfare is by giving money to 
nonprofits so they can provide services. Unfortunately, with that 
approach we have created a huge helping industry at the same time that 
many human problems continue to go unaddressed. In fact, I now think 
that the nonprofit sector and the helping industry are becoming a 
significant part of the problems they were established to solve.

I know I’m applying harsh words to good intentions, and by extension to 
good people who want to make the world a better place and are laboring 
at this task in the settings that are available to them. I also know 
that many of those good people are frustrated that their efforts aren’t 
producing more significant results. I think that the answers to our 
biggest problems, in human society and in individual desire to work for 
change, may best be addressed by calling not for more money but for each 
of us to remember, and work from, our highest spiritual essence.

I’d like to talk about this some more in this newsletter, which reflects 
part of what I’ve learned in a long time of working with a wide variety 
of people, under all kinds of circumstances, with the intention of 
improving the quality of people’s lives. Some of what I think now 
challenges what I’ve thought earlier. Much of what I’ve encountered has 
required me to let go of preconceptions and dig more deeply into 
understanding myself and the people around me. It’s all required me to 
become more open to possibilities, even those that evoke my skepticism.

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What works to make people’s lives better?

The big question in the long run is, “What works to make people’s lives 
better?”

I work in communities where the residents are facing profound 
issues—violence, poverty, abuse, racism, and other big, hard challenges. 
In these communities, there are many agencies that have been established 
to address these issues. Those agencies are not necessarily poorly 
funded, although they constantly complain of being under funded. The 
agencies spend much of their time and energy competing with each other 
for funding, clients, staff, and prestige. This competition often 
greatly limits their effectiveness.

When I work with local communities, we begin to create innovative ways 
to address community issues that are not based on the provision of 
services by agencies. The techniques we use to go beyond the traditional 
system include community engagement, community ownership, community 
organizing, and community empowerment. Because we’re following a 
different path, we encounter active attempts by the nonprofit service 
providers to undermine our work. This is especially true when we start 
to succeed.

The dominant model of clinical service delivery is intentionally 
disconnected from issues of social justice. But under many circumstances 
this model, this disconnection, does not make sense. And because it 
doesn’t make sense, how can it succeed? How can anyone in the United 
States deliver services in an immigrant community without addressing 
issues of social justice at a time when this country is engaged in a war 
on immigrants? How can we address issues of gang violence while we 
ignore the dismal opportunities and options that our society offers to 
youth of color?

We now understand that the emerging problems that communities face have 
such complex and interdependent origins that we can only fix them if we 
use comprehensive community problem-solving efforts rather than 
single-focus approaches. We need to meet and communicate with each 
other, including representatives from all parts of our communities. We 
need to step outside the agencies and into the community.

I have always considered our collaborative work in building healthy 
communities to be a spiritual endeavor, although I’ve generally kepts 
those thought private... I rarely describe this work as “spiritual” 
because many people associate spirituality with religion. However, in 
talking about spirituality I am not talking about religion. And as I 
walk farther in this life I find that the spirituality that I’m talking 
about comes from many places.

For many years I have been influenced by the thinking of health 
visionary Leland Kaiser. He distinguishes between religion and 
spirituality this way: “Spirituality is often confused with religion. 
They are very different things. Religion refers to a specific set of 
beliefs, a tradition, a prescribed set of practices. Spirituality refers 
to a broad set of principles that transcend all religions. Spirituality 
is about the relationship between ourselves and something larger. That 
something can be the good of the community or the people who are served 
by your agency or school or with energies greater than ourselves. 
Spirituality means being in the right relationship with all that is. It 
is a stance of harmlessness toward all living beings and an 
understanding of their mutual interdependence” (Kaiser, 2000).

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Spiritual principles can guide us in all the work we do.

Spiritual principles can guide us in all the work we do.They can help us 
understand the shortcomings of our present community systems and can 
support us as we work with the community to design better ways to 
proceed. Spiritual principles can guide us as we help communities move 
toward sharing abundance, honoring the natural environment, promoting 
social justice and compassion, and operating from a stance of 
collaboration rather than competition. A spiritual grounding lets us use 
loving compassion as a guide for our decision making. It helps us honor 
every member of our community as a valuable asset and appreciated resource.

It feels odd to be talking about reintroducing spiritual principles into 
community building and helping. We usually assume that our 
community-building efforts and our helping systems are built on 
spiritual principles. Although spiritual ideals may have begun much of 
this work, the present functioning of nonprofit systems has wandered far 
from those roots. The system as a whole is now motivated by competition, 
bottom lines, and capturing market share.

I have recently been reading a profound spiritual manuscript that has 
stimulated my thinking. The manuscript suggests that “American 
institutions now without exception are primarily shaped by what they 
perceive to be the necessity of winning in a dangerous and highly 
competitive marketplace. . . . There is no longer any heart-center 
functioning in American public and political life” (Gill, 2008). What a 
loss to have a community helping system without a heart center. This 
thought leads me to the idea that our community helping systems are 
utterly inappropriate settings for market-based decision-making.

Spiritual principles need to form the foundation of all of our work at 
building healthy communities. Community solutions demand community 
collaboration built on spiritual principles. These principles offer our 
only hope for creating a positive vision and shaking us out of our old 
patterns, the ones embodied in our dysfunctional helping systems, and 
providing a new and hopeful sense of direction. Our attempts to 
re-engineer the existing system have not been powerful enough to get us 
out of the competitive, market-based mindset.

The advantage of this approach is that it calls upon the strong 
spiritual nature of those in the helping system and their capacity to 
operate from a place of appreciation, acceptance, compassion, and 
interdependence. This is a well of spiritual goodness that we do not 
usually tap. For society and the helping system, it provides endless 
energy. For individuals, it prevents burnout.

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Six serious limiting factors in our helping system

Over the next few Collaborative Solutions Newsletters, I will address 
six serious limiting factors in our helping system that I believe are 
holding us back from reaching our full potential. I will also show how 
applying spiritual principles to these issues can make the difference 
between success and failure.

My perspective on the nonprofit helping system comes from working in the 
system for over 40 years at all levels—as a line staff member, a 
manager, an executive director, a board member, and most recently a 
trainer and consultant. Because I’ve seen the system from so many angles 
and for so many years, I now think of myself as having the view that I 
would get by flying at 10,000 feet over a community and observing how it 
works. The problems I see are not caused by bad people doing bad things, 
but by a system that has responded to social forces and wandered far 
from its intended role.

Here are the six issues that we need to address and that I will be 
discussing:

1. We have overemphasized the deficits in our communities.
2. We have lost social change and social justice as our goal.
3. Our nation continues to be dominated by racism and our helping 
systems are characterized by a lack of cultural competence.
4. Our helping systems suffer from professional dominance. Our 
communities are not driving the process of fixing their own problems.
5. The dominance of professionals has also led to another pernicious 
aspect of our helping system: competition
6. We have lost our spiritual purpose.

As a result of these limitations, we continue to fail in our attempts to 
solve major problems facing our communities and our nation. We need new 
ways, at a higher level, to overcome these limitations. We need to find 
new resources that will give us the strength to build healthy communities.

As I think about how a helping system might be designed in the future, I 
find it useful to map a course suggested by spiritual principles. Over 
the last decade, I have been deeply engaged in pursuit of spiritual 
understandings of life. I have found that non-religious spiritual 
principles—such as compassion, interdependence, appreciation, and deep 
acceptance—open up my way of understanding many issues and lead the way 
to change. The path I have been following has many branches, and the 
insights I have developed on this journey support each other in 
intriguing and useful ways. Judaism, which is part of my personal 
heritage, has in recent years become a rich discovery for me as a 
spiritual practice. I participate in weekly Jewish meditation services 
and a monthly Jewish spiritual study group.

In addition, for more than a decade I have participated in meditation 
and philosophy classes offered by Ellen Tadd, a nationally recognized 
teacher and clairvoyant (Mayer, 2007). The ideas I have been introduced 
to by Ellen and her guides have deeply influenced my work.

My spiritual studies and practices have led to new questions and 
possibilities in many aspects of my life, including a new look at my 
work in social change. After 9/11, I initiated and participated in an 
interfaith study group on spirituality and social change. We asked 
ourselves the following big, two-sided question: “How does our 
spirituality inform our work in social change, and how does our work in 
social change inform our spirituality?” Seven years later, this group is 
still meeting. We continue our struggle to understand how these 
components—spirituality and social change — interact within our lives 
and our work.

My participation in the interfaith group has brought me some personal 
clarity, but has even more strongly reinforced my need to find (or make) 
settings where I can continue this fascinating discussion, which I would 
now like to open up to the readers of this newsletter..

I suggest that spiritual principles such as compassion, interdependence, 
appreciation, and deep acceptance—by themselves and combined—may offer 
us a fresh perspective in looking at the issues facing the nonprofit 
helping system. As we chart a new course, we inevitably face questions 
like, “What is our vision and what do we value?” Where value questions 
are involved, spiritual principles can provide direction.

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Six Critical Issues for Our Helping Systems and New Directions Suggested 
by Spiritual Principles

Issue 1: We have overemphasized the deficits in our communities.

Twenty years ago, I first read and heard John McKnight’s critique of the 
formal helping systems that I had been a part of throughout my career. I 
found his analysis to be powerfully critical, highly disturbing, and 
very accurate in its description of the way the helping system went 
about doing its business.

McKnight’s perceptions opened my eyes to the realization that helpers 
love deficits. In fact, the entire helping industry is built on 
deficits. The more deficits (or needy people) we have in our communities 
and the more problems (deficits) each individual has, the more work we 
helpers have in front of us. We helpers love to be needed, and nothing 
shows we are needed better than the deficits of people and communities. 
It’s also true that the longer our waiting lists are, the easier it is 
for us to plead for more funds. For those of us who have gone into 
helping professions because we really do want to make the world a better 
place, it can be hard to accept our reliance on seeing, labeling, and 
treating the negative.

McKnight warned that the professional human service approach can “push 
out the problem solving knowledge and actions of friend, neighbor, 
citizen and association.” He further suggested that as the “power of 
professionals and service systems ascends, the legitimacy, authority and 
capacity of citizens and community descends” (1989, p. 9).

John McKnight’s writings challenged the ways I had been thinking and 
working. He offered a refreshing view both of the community and its 
capacities and of the helping system and its strengths and limitations. 
He observed, “It isn’t until the capacities of people are recognized, 
honored, respected and lifted up that the outside resources make much 
difference”(1989, p. 9). He considered the health and human service 
systems, which I’ve referred to as the formal helping networks, as 
secondary to empowering and valuing the assets and capacities of 
individuals and communities, or the informal networks.

McKnight believed that “ultimate wisdom is in communities not in an 
expert” (1990, p. 3). He argued that America’s real strength is the 
“community way.” He noted that when nineteenth-century French observer 
Alexis de Tocqueville cast a critical eye on the newly founded United 
States, he observed a remarkable and praiseworthy thing: that in this 
country there are groups of ordinary people who get together to solve 
problems, and that these groups give power to citizens to make more 
power by solving problems.

Application of appreciation as a spiritual principle.

So what do we do now, when, after nearly two centuries, we appear to 
have lost sight of one of our nation’s greatest strengths?

For many of McKnight’s followers, the answer to the overemphasis on 
deficits has been to focus on assets. Viewing the strengths of 
individuals and communities does allow us a fresh and valuable 
perspective. However, the assets approach now being promulgated often 
produces a mechanical listing of community assets. Combining an 
assets-oriented review with the spiritual principle of deep appreciation 
allows us to rethink the way we work from a more expansive point of 
view, one that allows us to perceive new approaches, to proceed in new 
directions.

Appreciation involves accepting that which is—both the positives and 
negatives (Tadd). To be appreciative, one must be present and thankful. 
When we appreciate individuals and communities and their strengths, we 
celebrate what is, we acknowledge of the wonderfulness of life, and we 
open up our abilities to develop a feeling of unconditional love for 
everyone and everything in every situation.

To love everyone unconditionally is a tall order. The advantage of 
basing our responses to problems on spiritual principles is not that 
this approach yields easy solutions but that it sets a clear direction 
and intentionality for the solutions we will devise.

Applying the spiritual principle of deep loving appreciation to the 
overemphasis on deficits allows us to step back and examine our own 
roles, the roles of our agencies, and the roles of the overall helping 
systems in our community with regard to the issues at hand. When we 
approach our communities with the idea of appreciation in mind, do we 
see things differently? Do new approaches suggest themselves? Do new 
ways of organizing our services appear? Do new ways of looking at the 
community’s residents emerge?

Imagine approaching your own community from a place of deep appreciation 
of its strengths, its assets, and even its shortcomings.

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Community Story

A story may help us see what the application of appreciation may look like.
In one low-income Latino community, a community center I was working 
with was beginning a community-building effort. Members of the 
organizing group started with door-to-door visits to homes in the 
neighborhood, building toward a community meeting. They hoped that this 
meeting would bring together residents who would form an ongoing group 
that would work with the community center to address local issues.

When the meeting occurred, at one point we organizers asked the 
participants to break into small groups and respond to an inquiry 
typically used to identify assets: What did they like about their 
neighborhood? What were their neighborhood’s strengths? As the large 
group reconvened to compare the small groups’ findings and the aspects 
of the community that people liked were recorded on newsprint for 
everyone to see, the whole group broke out in raucous applause. Most of 
them had never heard anyone say anything positive about their 
neighborhood. Hearing each group catalog strengths and seeing those good 
things written down was an important experience for the people in that 
room: this was not just a listing of assets; this activity displayed a 
sense of deep appreciation for the place where they lived.

How can we make all asset listings be this appreciative?

Issue 2: We have lost social change and social justice as our goal.

I was recently presenting my thoughts on the limitations of our present 
helping system at grand rounds at a medical school on the West Coast 
when an audience member who was about my age stated, with passion, that 
when she started her career social justice had been a primary motivation 
for people who worked in human services, but now that source of 
inspiration seems to have disappeared. Her observation struck me as 
obvious but profound, and I quickly agreed. The evolution has been slow 
and sometimes imperceptible, but the dominant concern of our helping 
system and of the people in that system has shifted from issues of 
social justice to the provision of services, billable hours, and 
reimbursable events. This may not be true for new students and young 
workers as they enter the field, but they quickly encounter the 
predominant values and practices and their idealism gets shut down or 
goes underground.

The present helping system focuses on helping clients adapt to bad 
circumstances rather than changing those circumstances. Too often, the 
helping system blames the victim for his or her disorder (Ryan, 1971) 
and fails to understand the environment and the social context, thus 
ignoring the root causes of the problem.

For example, research on health indicates a huge portion of a person’s 
capacity for health is set by social determinants, such as income, race, 
and socioeconomic class. As soon as we understand how important the 
social determinants are, we quickly see the need to make a commitment to 
social change and social action in order to get the positive results 
that we want. Only 10 percent of an individual’s capacity for health has 
to do with access to health care, yet that is where we spend much of our 
focus. Poverty and racism cannot be remedied by providing clinical services.

Articles on successful nonprofits are beginning to show that working for 
social justice and systems change is more than “the right thing to do” 
in order to change our communities and get results. It is also the way 
to create the most ”high-impact nonprofits” (Grant and Crutchfield, 
2007). The usual literature on nonprofit management success suggests 
that we need to look at key variables from the world of business, such 
as perfect management, brand-name awareness, a breakthrough new idea, 
textbook mission statements, high ratings on the usual business 
measures, and large budgets. Grant and Crutchfield’s research debunks 
these myths and offers alternatives to these prevailing practices.

They observe that conventional wisdom for extending the reach of social 
innovation “starts with strengthening internal management capabilities.” 
On the contrary, Grant and Crutchfield’s study of twelve high-impact 
nonprofits “shows that real social change happens when organizations go 
outside their own walls and find creative ways to enlist the help of 
others.” By reaching out, these high-impact nonprofits “create more 
impact than they ever could have achieved alone. They build social 
movements and fields: they transform business, government, other 
nonprofits and individuals; and they change the world around them.” 
Although these outstanding organizations’ activities may begin with the 
provision of “great programs,” they “eventually realize that they cannot 
achieve large-scale social change through service delivery alone. So 
they add policy advocacy to acquire government resources and to change 
legislation.”

The six practices that Grant and Crutchfield found to make a difference 
are: (1) serve and advocate; (2) make markets work; (3) inspire 
evangelists; (4) nurture nonprofit networks; (5) master the art of 
adaptation; and (6) share leadership. The fourth and sixth 
points—nurture nonprofit networks and share leadership—are crucial for 
our work in promoting collaborative solutions. Grant and Crutchfield 
state, “Although most nonprofits pay lip service to collaboration, many 
of them really see other groups as competition for scarce resources. But 
high-impact organizations help their peers succeed, building networks of 
nonprofit allies. . . .”

The research suggests that our retreat from social justice has 
diminished our impact and reduced our success. When we look at the whole 
community as an interconnected system whose health we can improve, we 
open the door to a more comprehensive understanding of the issues and to 
broad community involvement in devising solutions.

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Application of the spiritual principles of interdependency and 
interconnection.

 From a spiritual perspective, the answer to our failure to address root 
causes and to work for social change is to acknowledge the profound 
interconnectedness and interdependency of all beings and all systems in 
life.

All life is a single system. We know this from physics, biology, 
ecology, and community psychology, as well as spirituality. We need to 
understand the interdependence of all the aspects of the lives of our 
clients, the interdependence of all parts of the helping system, and the 
interdependence of all sectors of the community. The fundamental reality 
of human life is interdependence, not competition. Globalization will be 
the ultimate teacher of the interdependence of all beings. The healing 
heart recognizes its interdependence with all beings; the emergence of 
community, in many layers and forms, is simply an embodied expression of 
that recognition (Gill, 2008).

 From the perspective of interdependence we cannot separate the 
individual from the social determinants. A complex translation of an 
understanding of interdependence into community work involves the 
awareness that any person’s present and future state is determined by a 
wide range of factors —often called social determinants—that have an 
impact on that individual’s life.

A healthy-communities approach takes this as its basic premise. The 
Ottawa Charter, which provides the basis for the healthy communities 
movement, defines the prerequisites of health as peace, shelter, 
education, food, income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resources, 
social justice, and equity. The charter acknowledges that all these 
social determinants matter and that they are interconnected.

We need to consider both the individual and the social determinants, as 
well as their interconnections, and then we need to focus our work on 
social change and social justice. The spiritual principle of 
interdependence is central here. It notes that everything in our world 
is interconnected. Each individual’s life on earth is interconnected 
with the lives of all others, and with the earth itself and the 
spiritual realm as well. We are all composed of energy, and all energy 
is interconnected.

John Muir, the great naturalist, is often quoted as saying, “When we tug 
at a single thing in nature we find it attached to the rest of the 
world.” We know this is true of the natural world, and we have begun to 
understand how it applies in other dimensions of our lives. But there 
are parts of our world where we have not yet perceived the truth of this 
statement. When we address community issues, whether we do so as a group 
of residents or a group of institutions, we need to train ourselves to 
see how our tugging at any specific issue connects to other elements in 
our community and beyond. Then we need to learn how to use this 
interconnectedness as a source of strength.

Many religious and spiritual traditions speak of the oneness of all 
beings. The new physics and new science also elucidate the 
interconnections between all entities. Vibrations in one part of the 
world affect energy levels a great distance away (Wheatley, 2006). On a 
practical level, people who are working to solve problems, whether they 
involve local, national, or global concerns, are finding success with 
approaches that acknowledge interconnectedness and employ it to find new 
answers. We hear more and more that the creative ideas of the future 
will emerge from work that crosses disciplines, fields, and sectors, as 
well as political boundaries.

When Jim Wallis, a theological activist, was recently interviewed in the 
Boston Globe (Paulson, 2008), he observed that “[t]he quest for 
spirituality in an affluent society without the discipline of the 
struggle for justice becomes narcissistic, spirituality as another 
commodity. But the struggle for justice without being rooted in 
spiritual soil can become angry and tired and despairing and bitter and 
even violent.” We need to meld our social change work and our spirituality.

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Community Story

Let me conclude with a recent community story that illustrates the power 
of bringing to our work a spiritual perspectiveand specifically the 
spiritual principles of appreciation, interdependence, acceptance, and 
compassion.

In Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the Cleghorn neighborhood has been the part 
of the city where new immigrant populations have often settled. It 
consists of about forty city blocks and accommodates approximately four 
thousand people. At present, the most recent arrivals are Latino and 
they generally live in Lower Cleghorn. The older immigrant population, 
having been there a few generations, is French Canadian and lives in 
Upper Cleghorn. The Cleghorn Neighborhood Center (CNC) has been trying 
to get these two communities to meet and work together. Numerous efforts 
to that end have been frustrating.

Recently a new opportunity arose to achieve this goal. The city of 
Fitchburg elected Lisa Wong as its mayor. A 28-year-old Asian woman, she 
represents many “firsts” for that office, including gender, ethnicity, 
and remarkable youth. Taking advantage of this change in the city, the 
CNC invited Mayor Lisa Wong to participate in a listening session in the 
Cleghorn neighborhood as one of her first events. More than thirty 
residents, evenly split between the Latino and French Canadian 
populations, gathered one evening for this session with the mayor, the 
local city councilor, and even the head of the city council, who dropped 
in just to see what was happening and ended up staying for the whole 
evening.

Residents sat at round tables and answered four questions. They sat 
where they wished, so four of the five tables were composed of residents 
from the same ethnic group and only one table was mixed. First the 
participants ate, of course, and then they addressed the questions. 
After each question, the groups reported their results and the mayor 
responded to indicate that she had heard what they said—not to propose 
solutions. Remember, this was just a listening session. The session was 
translated, using headsets and a translator. The four questions were:

1. What do you like most about living/working in Cleghorn?
2. What do you like least about living/working in Cleghorn?
3. What would make Cleghorn a healthier and better place to live and/or 
work?
4. What would you be willing to do to make this happen?

So what happened? In response to the question “What do you like best?” 
the French Canadian tables said they liked having family and friends 
surrounding them, to whom they could turn. When it came time for the 
Latino community to respond, they said essentially the same thing. What 
a surprise to both groups to see that each group placed its highest 
value on exactly the same thing (although, of course, they referred to 
different sets of families and friends).This question spun off into 
cautious yet explicit talk about the cultural gaps between the two 
groups and how there were not enough places for them to meet.

Both groups also responded similarly to the question “What do you like 
least?”—traffic safety for the children, vandalism, and general safety 
in the streets.

And finally the groups were able to identify mutual issues that they 
wished to work on. They then created work groups, each of which was 
composed of members of both populations, on traffic safety; neighborhood 
safety; and bringing back the community fair with both populations 
present; and they also set up a planning group to design the next 
listening session with the mayor, to take place in three months. The 
evening ended with a hearty round of handshakes and introductions. The 
mayor was an enthusiastic participant, an excellent listener, and a 
great supporter of the emerging cooperation. By the next morning a 
resident from Upper Cleghorn had come to the center to volunteer the use 
of the materials and equipment, including booths, that had been part of 
the summer fairs in the past.

One can see this as a wonderful example of promoting a community’s 
understanding of its interdependence and interconnectivity, while 
bringing to the surface acceptance, appreciation, and compassion among 
and between two populations. The sequence of events clearly illustrated 
the interdependence of these groups who live in such close proximity. 
All these spiritual principles were an intentional part of the thinking 
and designing of the session. They brought the gathering to a higher 
level than it would have reached otherwise and created a supportive and 
productive environment for building community.

Conclusion, until the next time

In the martial arts, the actual practice of skills and movement is 
preceded by moments of centering, grounding, and focus. We can learn 
from this for our work at community change. We might try beginning our 
meetings with moments of silence and meditation, where the participants 
all hold what is best for the community in their intentionality and 
focus upon the principles of appreciation, acceptance, sense of 
interdependence, and compassion.

My work and that of many communities and colleagues around the globe, on 
numerous issues, convinces me that collaboration based on spiritual 
principles is a powerful force for creating healthy communities. It’s 
not easy, but it’s much easier and so much more rewarding than staying 
stuck. What we need now is some clear guidance about how to go about the 
collaborative process in a way that leads to successful community change.

More questions than answers emerge in the application of spiritual 
principles to our community work. Exactly what do we mean by a spiritual 
principle? How will we know it is being applied? What’s the difference 
between an assets approach with appreciation and one without? And what’s 
the difference between a social change action based on spiritual 
principles and one that is not?

My hope is to help launch us into these questions and for us all to be 
part of the learning that will emerge. I look forward to that exchange.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, a wonderful rabbi, scholar, and activist who 
marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, talked of the need for “moral 
grandeur and spiritual audacity” (1996). What a great call that is for 
us on these issues today.

My next Collaborative Solutions Newsletter will continue this discussion 
by looking at the remaining four limitations and potential spiritual 
principles that can be applied to them. I am interested in an 
open-hearted exchange of ideas in an ongoing conversation about this 
topic with groups and individuals across the country, both to share my 
thoughts and to see how others see this issue.

To succeed, this will need to be a shared enterprise. I welcome your 
reactions to this piece. Send them to tom at tomwolff.com . Peace and 
thanks. Tom

My special thanks to Arthur Himmelman, Bill Berkowitz, Gillian Kaye, Ted 
Slovin, Peggy Wolff, and my valued editor Deb Robson for their help with 
this newsletter. Setting out on the path of writing about spirituality 
and social change demanded lots of critique and support, which I have 
received from these valuable folk.

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References

Gill, Penny. Manuscript channeled from a teacher who names himself 
Manjushri. 2008.

Grant, Heather McLeod, and Leslie R. Crutchfield. “Creating High-Impact 
Nonprofits.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2007. 
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/creating_high_impact_nonprofits/ .

Heschel, Abraham Joshua, and Susannah Heschel. Moral Grandeur and 
Spiritual Audacity: Essays. New York: Noonday Press, 1996

Kaiser, Leland R. “Spirituality and the Physician Executive: Reconciling 
the Inner Self and the Business of Health Care.” The Physician Executive 
26, no. 2 (March/April 2000). 
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0843/is_2_26/ai_102342512 .

Mayer, Elizabeth Lloyd. Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism and 
the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind. New York: Bantam, 2007
McKnight, John. “Do No Harm: Policy Options That Meet Human Needs.” 
Social Policy 20, no. 1 (Summer 1989): 5–15.

McKnight, John. Address to the New Haven Foundation, New Haven, 
Connecticut, November 1990.

"Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, The." WHO Regional Publications. 
European Series. 44 (1992): 1–7.

Paulson, Michael. “Q and A with Jim Wallis: An Increasingly Influential 
Religious Leader Explains Why Evangelicals Should Worry Less about 
Abortion and Gay Marriage, and More about the Poor.” The Boston Globe, 
February 17, 2008: D4.

Ryan, William. Blaming the Victim. New York: Pantheon, 1971.

Tadd, Ellen. Class in Meditation and Philosophy. Contact: 
www.ellentadd.com .

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. [New York]: New American 
Library, 1956 [1835].

Wheatley, Margaret J. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order 
in a Chaotic World. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2006.

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What is new at Tom Wolff & Associates:

New Frontiers – Community Directories on the Web Using New Technology

I am sure we have all had the frustrating experience of creating service 
directories for our communities. Soon after we have them printed, we 
discover they are already out of date. With the onset of the digital 
age, we have moved these directories to the web but have not yet solved 
the issue of keeping them updated and useful.

Now one community I am working with has brought the idea of community 
resource directories to a whole new level.

In Holyoke, the community has mobilized with the leadership of Enlace de 
Familias and created Holyoke Unites/Holyoke Se Une, whose mission is “to 
create shared participation and leadership opportunities among the 
people who live and work in Holyoke to build a more vibrant, safe, and 
healthy community. Together we can improve the well-being of everyone.”

One of the first acts of Holyoke Unites/Holyoke Se Une was to form a Web 
Work Group to create a web-based directory. This group searched for 
earlier Holyoke web directories and also for model directories across 
the country. After they did not turn up much, they created their own 
design. Luckily they received enormous technical help from faculty, 
undergraduate, and graduate students at the Commonwealth College at the 
University of Massachusetts. The end product is amazing and moves the 
concept of community directories up a notch.
www.holyokeunites.org
www.holyokeseune.org

This new web directory has some traditional options:

+ Listing of agencies by name
+ Listing of agencies by service type
+ Calendars

And then some innovations:

+ Listings of coalitions and task forces
+ Google maps to help people locate the agencies
+ Sub-calendars by category—for example, youth, family, seniors, etc.
+ Links to the agencies’ web sites

And some very unique features:

+ Search engine for topics and words across the site
+ English and Spanish versions with separate URLs

And finally the pièce de résistance:

+ Log-in capacity so that agencies can get passwords and log in to 
update their own listings and add events to the calendar

This last feature takes the concept of joint responsibility, which is a 
cornerstone of community collaboration, and translates it into the 
maintenance functions of the web site.

If a particular page of the website is out of date, that is the sole 
responsibility of the agency itself, not of some central body.

We would love to hear from other communities where members have also 
created innovative web directories.

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New chapter by Tom Wolff in book : Community Psychology in Practice

Tom Wolff, “My Life as a Community Activist”

In James G. Kelly and Anna V. Song, Community Psychology in Practice: An 
Oral History through the Stories of Five Community Psychologists. 
Journal of Prevention and Intervention in the Community, v. 35, no. 1. 
New York: Haworth Press: 2008, pages 61–80.

Abstract
The author recounts his life as a social justice activist and community 
psychology practitioner. He shares his upbringing, family, and education 
and his experiences working in a variety of settings. The story shows an 
evolution from working with individuals to working with whole 
communities, from working on issues of remediation to working on 
prevention and finally focusing on empowerment, social change, and 
social justice. Parallels are drawn between his life and the social 
issues of the time. The author recounts the questions that emerged as 
his life and career developed: Can my work in psychology relate to 
larger social issues? Can I find a setting that will allow me to work to 
create social change and reduce oppression? How can our spirituality 
inform our work for social change?
Two-Day Coalition-Building Training in Lisbon, Portugal, June 2 & 3, 2008

Second International Community Psychology Conference

Tom Wolff will offer an:
Institute on Community Coalitions: Building Healthy Communities through 
Collaborative Solutions

This will be a two-day Training Institute on collaborative solutions and 
coalition building for those with many years of experience in coalition 
building as well as those just starting out. The Institute will be a mix 
of experiential and lecture formats with exercises and problem-solving 
sessions.


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