In this episode of How to Win Friends and Save The Republic, a podcast from the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers, special guests technology gurus Sara Gifford and Victor Allis talk about their app, ActiVote, which helps people increase their civic engagement by completing meaningful, daily actions.
A housing catalyst fund in Coachella Valley, California, offers a compelling model for how to shift the power balance in community development.
In the first entry of this three-part series on leaders in community development and philanthropy, we focused on why and how this crucial field needs to reframe the role of capital technicians and the market, rebalance power relationships, and prioritize community voice. Today we continue that discussion.
It’s one thing to identify new core principles; it’s another to put them into practice. No single institution can rebuild a community. The work requires collaboration among actors with a broad range of skills and perspectives. CDFIs must work hand in hand with community development corporations and other neighborhood groups, placing an emphasis on equality in the power dynamics among partners. Human-service organizations need to participate as well. Philanthropy and the public and private sectors also play a critical role.
As the field has evolved over the past 40 years, some players have gained more influence and funding than others, despite the important role each plays. CDFIs have come to exert disproportionate influence in community development efforts because they control capital deployment and infrastructure investing.
As we have noted above, the CDFI model brings both strengths and weaknesses. It has achieved scale, having deployed hundreds of billions of dollars. It has developed supportive federal legislation and resources that amplify its voice in any social-policy conversation. The field now covers a substantial share of its operating costs—a development that will lead to a more sustainable platform for the future. Yet, to achieve scale and influence, CDFIs have often constrained their products and offerings, limited customization and risk-taking, and formalized operating procedures, all of which work against creativity and flexibility.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
Because of their scale, CDFIs currently have a powerful, even dominant, voice in shaping community strategies. But to operationalize the principles we introduced above, we must shift the power balance among the players in community development. We need to make room at the table for other voices. One crucial way to do this will be through community investment partnerships that put strategy in the hands of community residents and organizations while reserving a technical role for CDFIs.
This is not only possible—it is happening across the country. We began this article with the story of CORE’s work in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Let us now turn to two more examples to flesh out the new community-driven model and demonstrate how these new principles are shaping community development for the better and transforming its work.
We Lift, Coachella Valley’s Housing Catalyst Fund, offers a compelling model for how to shift the power balance in community development. The Housing Catalyst Fund is a partnership among Lift to Rise (LTR), a community-based organization working to increase housing stability and economic mobility in California’s Coachella Valley; two CDFIs, the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF) and the Rural Community Assistance Corporation (RCAC); and Riverside County. The partnership was carefully structured to rebalance power between community voice, as represented by LTR, and the capital investment expertise of the two CDFIs.
In 2018, LTR held listening sessions across the Coachella Valley to develop a set of shared priorities and strategies for the region. With the help of the Center for Community Investment’s Connect Capital initiative, LTR used the input residents provided in the listening sessions to establish the bold goal of creating 10,000 new affordable homes in the area over the next 10 years. This goal was especially radical because only 259 affordable housing units had been built in Coachella Valley between 2012 and 2017.
Achieving this goal would require a $100 million capital fund. To raise that kind of money, LTR would need to work with CDFIs, so the organization invited LIIF and RCAC to partner with it on a new Housing Catalyst Fund.
The conventional way CDFIs raise such funds is by pledging their own balance sheets and serving as capital-raising agents. But that approach puts their own organizations at risk and forces them into the conservative parameters necessary to ensure their self-sufficiency and sustainability. It also transfers most of the power within a community development partnership to the CDFI.
LTR adopted an entirely different model. It raised $17 million from the state of California and Riverside County to provide protection against losses for the CDFIs. Even more important, LTR retained these funds on its own balance sheet, rather than ceding control of them to the CDFIs. In this way, LTR enabled its CDFI partners to take on the higher risk of working in a weak, underdeveloped market area and retained community control of the Housing Catalyst Fund’s vision and strategy.
While it has delegated lending and portfolio management authority to its CDFI partners, LTR manages the strategic direction and performance of the fund and has the power to replace the CDFIs, if necessary.
LTR has also used its authority to further engage Coachella Valley residents and local organizations in the fund’s work. It established a Community Advisory Committee (CAC) to steer the fund’s direction. The CAC meets quarterly to review and assess the fund’s performance against a set of criteria that ensure capital deployment aligns with community priorities. By controlling the risk-absorbing capital in community investment deals, LTR has also been able to shift the balance of power to determine the fund’s strategic direction from the finance side to the community side on an ongoing basis.
Today, Coachella Valley’s nascent housing market is responding to residents’ primary needs and is well on its way to vitality. Since 2017, 2,007 new housing units have been built, and another 5,700 are in the pipeline. The Housing Catalyst Fund has deployed more than $35 million to support these projects. The CAC meets regularly to shepherd the strategic direction of the fund’s work, and LTR’s CDFI partners provide the technical expertise needed to invest their capital resources.
Tomorrow, in the third of this three part series, we will explore another example and discuss the leadership needed to be successful.
Fukuzawa is a strategic advisor and former managing director at the Kresge Foundation. Andrews is a fellow at Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute and former president and CEO of the Low Income Investment Fund. Steinitz is a writer and a communications and learning consultant for schools and nonprofits, including the Center for Community Investment.
This article was first published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Read the original article
In 2016, Boyle Heights erupted in protests against a rising tide of gentrification and displacement that threatened the enduring character of the neighborhood. As in many communities across Los Angeles, residents—75 percent of whom were renters—faced skyrocketing housing costs that threatened to remove them from the city center. “Keep Beverly Hills out of Boyle Heights,” read protest signs.
In response, Inclusive Action for the City (IA), a small nonprofit that advocated for and extended microloans to street vendors, proposed that owning property was the best way for residents to avoid displacement. While IA had a bold vision, it lacked the financial resources to carry out its idea. So it teamed up with Genesis LA, a community development financial institution (CDFI), and two longtime community development organizations, East LA Community Corporation and Little Tokyo Service Center, which had experienced staff and additional financial resources.
Together, the four organizations created a new joint venture, the Community Owned Real Estate (CORE) program, whose long-term goal was to create a pathway for tenants to become owners. Their short-term approach was to purchase buildings, preserve existing businesses, offer commercial spaces to local entrepreneurs, and provide technical assistance and other resources to help tenants grow their businesses and organizations and, ultimately, purchase the buildings themselves.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
New Markets Tax Credits (NMTCs), to which Genesis LA had access, were a critical element of CORE’s financial strategy. The tax credits, which incentivize private investment in projects that support commercial development and growth in low-income neighborhoods, act as a subsidy, allowing certified CDFIs to lend investment capital on more favorable terms to qualified borrowers like CORE while reducing risk for investors. The $10 million funding stack for CORE included about $3 million in NMTCs, which supported about $5.6 million in debt; the remaining $1.4 million was sourced from equity and grants from philanthropic partners.
Using short-term acquisition loans from Genesis LA, CORE identified and acquired five commercial properties in Boyle Heights and neighboring areas. In the fall of 2019, the deals closed and many tenants signed their leases. Weathering the COVID-19 pandemic certainly strained the effort. But today four buildings are fully occupied by flourishing small businesses and nonprofits. The fifth, which faced lengthy construction and permitting delays, is almost ready, and Inclusive Action’s board recently approved the purchase of a sixth.
Thus far, CORE’s investment has succeeded on many fronts: securing financing, surviving the pandemic, and sustaining businesses and the community. CORE recently began work on a capital campaign, securing support from local foundations to increase subsidies to ensure that the properties remain affordable when the NMTCs expire. They are moving their current properties toward community ownership and exploring possibilities for a mission-driven holding company that can quickly acquire properties while potential long-term owners raise funds. Cross-sector collaboration, creative financing, and tenant involvement will remain central as they continue to grow.
CORE’s success highlights an emerging and overdue paradigm shift in community development finance. In prior decades, an overreliance on markets to drive social solutions led to investment practices that too often mirrored market conservatism in prioritizing scale over social mission and devaluing customized, community-based solutions. The new paradigm, by contrast, prioritizes equity, flexible responses to local needs, and community voice.
It is long past time to rethink how community development finance operates. As leaders in community development and philanthropy, we aim to show why and how this crucial field needs to reframe the role of capital technicians and the market, rebalance power relationships, and prioritize community voice. In what follows, we urge community development financial institutions to expand their vision beyond making markets work in underserved places. We believe the field now has the strength and breadth to incorporate customized local solutions more assertively. We argue that the field should actively embrace power sharing with community development practitioners who are not financiers. Finally, we urge philanthropy to support these strategic shifts with patient, long-term capital that places trust in the communities it aims to serve.
The history of US community development is rooted in the late 1960s and the war on poverty and Civil Rights Movement. Beginning in the late 1980s, and especially amid the rise of neoliberalism, community development financing sought to stimulate markets to reverse disinvestment in poor neighborhoods, kick-start economic growth, and undo decades of racial injustice. The idea was that economic growth would bring greater prosperity and, together with civil-rights activism, undo racism and its effects to create better lives for all. By scaling up these efforts and making markets work in these communities, community development would serve the greatest number of people with the most efficient use of public, private, and philanthropic resources. By improving the economies of poor communities at scale, the field would eventually transition to a self-sustaining community development investment model that paid for its basic operations.
This market-focused approach produced results, especially alongside tremendous growth in the United States and worldwide. The four decades since have seen intense growth: The US GDP has expanded from $2.9 trillion in 1980 to $28.8 trillion in 2024 (nominal dollars). Community development finance has achieved delivery at scale and is now a high-performing partner in American social policy, deploying billions of dollars in socially purposed capital each year to thousands of communities nationwide.
However, as robustly as this model of community development has grown, much remains to be done. The problems of poverty and racism persist. In fact, racial segregation has increased in a significant majority of the country’s metropolitan areas. Major cities, such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago, have become more segregated, despite decades of community investments. Many community development practitioners, investors, and residents now question the limits of the market-driven approach underlying community development finance and wonder how to fashion a more inclusive model. And not only has the conventional market-driven approach disappointed hopes for addressing poverty and racism, it has also fallen short of achieving financial sustainability for community development organizations.
It is well past time for community development to rethink its fundamental assumptions and adjust to the latest evidence and its past 40 years of experience. We began to sketch our thoughts on how philanthropy can shift its operations in our 2022 report,“People, Place, and Race: How Philanthropy Can Help Center People and Equity in Community Development.” Here, we argue more broadly that market-based solutions are limited and that the belief that markets can solve all social problems is wishful thinking. Instead, we call for a significant revision of the traditional community development finance principles of markets, scale, and self-sustainability and a rebalancing of the power relationships between community investment models and resident voice. And we urge philanthropy to support these changes with patient, long-term, trust-based capital and grantmaking.
Forty years ago, the dominant thinking held that capital investment was critical to development, and that community developers and financiers would succeed if they adopted disciplined business practices, created viable business models, achieved scale, and became self-sufficient. The approach reflected the double-bottom-line idea of doing good by doing well. The goal was to attract market capital, provide a return on investment, prove the work was viable, scale up, and build a platform for maximum mission achievement. The three main principles of this approach were:
Philanthropy played a pivotal role in harnessing the power of markets to shape community development. Philanthropy sought to lift the economic status of urban and rural communities through program-related investments (PRIs) and mission-related investments (MRIs), building infrastructure, such as community development financial institutions (CDFIs), advocating for policy change, and leadership development—and it succeeded remarkably in many ways.
Today, CDFIs prize scale and attract large sums of private investment. They have mobilized billions of dollars in investment capital, adopted disciplined practices, achieved top-tier ratings from Standard & Poor’s and other rating agencies, created well-defined and repeatable loan products, issued 501(c)(3) bonds, substantially influenced public policy, and bridged mission-driven work and private capital markets. An Opportunity Finance Network membership survey of more than 400 CDFIs revealed that they deployed more than $10 billion to underinvested communities in 2022 alone.
These accomplishments are massive and important. Until the past decade, few people believed that community development finance could be more than a boutique industry. Few believed it could be brought to scale or that community loan funds could influence the behavior of market-oriented institutions. Few predicted the influential role the field could have in stimulating social-policy solutions. Yet creative and visionary leaders accomplished these Herculean tasks.
But each step in the direction of market replication, scale, and self-sufficiency squeezed flexibility and creativity out of community development. To achieve their own sustainable operations, CDFIs prioritized efficiency and (relatively) large operational platforms. Community development finance increasingly mirrored the private-capital industry, with the scale, volume, and discipline this implies. But, all too often, its approach sacrificed resident involvement and creative, customized responses to community challenges—and its vision of organizations and projects sustaining themselves through self-generating revenue streams rarely came to pass. Now the field has an opportunity to rebalance power dynamics between CDFIs and community organizations and to introduce flexible new approaches to capital.
Taking community development impacts to scale requires high-volume capital deployment and the conservative risk thresholds that attract and retain private, public, and philanthropic investors. The result is a virtuous cycle of expanding capital, expanding deployment, and broader reach. Yet it is increasingly clear that to achieve the impacts it seeks, community investment needs to better address the roadblocks of structural and systemic racism, local complexities, and overly restrictive views of philanthropic leverage and investment. Fortunately, since 2010, developers and investors have been assembling the elements of a new approach to deploying capital. The dual elements of this new perspective are that systems change matters as much as scale and that community voice is critical to effective community development.
The core principle of social investing is that it is not only possible but imperative for investments to achieve social and environmental outcomes at scale. After all, the problems we are trying to address are enormous. In 2019, the Global Impact Investing Network surveyed 266 impact investors who reported a total of $239 billion in impact investing assets. To be sure, social investors recognize that the pursuit of both impact and scale presents trade-offs. Every investor sees those trade-offs differently and is willing to sacrifice for social impact. But for investments in low-income communities to avoid extractive outcomes, the balance needs to tilt strongly toward impact, flexibility, and voice.
Many leaders in community development and philanthropy have recognized and incorporated this focus on social outcomes into their practices and investments. But taking this step is not enough. Ultimately, if investors want to support low-income communities, residents of those communities must have a leadership role. Therefore, community development finance must do more to relinquish power and decision-making to community residents and organizations affected by capital and the ways in which technicians manage capital.
We are not alone in advocating this shift. Many parts of the United States are already beginning to adopt new practices. A rich body of practitioner experience is addressing the current shortcomings of the community development field and exploring new antiracist models and approaches to development. For example, a 2023 report by Cleveland-based community organizer ThirdSpace Action Lab, “Anti-Racist Community Development Research Project,” highlights the increased skepticism of many practitioners and community residents about the idea that the market-driven development approach can solve the problem of racism; instead, the report recommends more race-explicit, community-driven, place-based approaches.
Drawing from ThirdSpace Action Lab’s work and our experience, we suggest that community development finance adopt three strategic shifts:
From markets to mission and community voice | As we have noted above, the reliance on a market-based theory of change often leads community finance toward projects that serve a business model as much as mission and bring about limited impact and community disempowerment. Also, getting past the scale threshold is functionally impossible in many low-income neighborhoods, where housing projects in particular cannot cover costs without significant subsidies. This realization has led many in the community finance world to redefine the rules of investment. The resulting growth of impact investing has led to larger pools of capital that prioritize people and racial, social, and environmental justice over return.
In addition, we are seeing increasing evidence that investing in people directly—as in universal basic income demonstrations and pandemic-era public investments in income and housing stabilization, childcare, and college loan relief—has a transformative impact. Decades of research on early-childhood education and care, for example, have shown durable and lifelong impacts on career trajectories and success. More recent research on social mobility, by economist Raj Chetty and political scientist Robert Putnam in particular, has also revealed the critical importance of social capital, which itself is the product of community cohesiveness, connectedness, and engagement, in overcoming generational poverty. New models of development should seek greater community benefit and direct investment in human capital as much as, if not more than, return. Engaging community residents and organizations in defining this benefit and directing this investment will be crucial to the success of these models.
From scale to systems change | Racial inequity and poverty are deeply and historically rooted in social structures, institutions, and systems. Scaled-up capital investments alone cannot dig out these roots. It is not hard to understand why scale became the de facto goal, especially since cities are woefully short of enough quality affordable housing. But the focus on production of units has overshadowed the human and social landscape of communities. Further, the long history of publicly sanctioned segregation and exclusion in the form of redlining and discriminatory neighborhood covenants has precluded generations of Black and Brown communities from traveling paths of opportunity. Alternative models that combine public, private, and philanthropic investment; focus on local context; and support authentic community collaboration have demonstrated how to achieve equity, as well as economic growth. Flexible community-inspired and community-led solutions show greater durability, increase the agency and trust of residents, and overcome the resistance of communities to top-down solutions. The result is true systems change.
From self-sustainability to long-term investment for social returns | The short-term funding cycles (typically three years) of many foundations and impact investors create unrealistic expectations. Lasting social change requires many more years of patient investment, as any long-term investor understands—and the change required to address deep-rooted causes of racial and economic inequity requires a long-term vision. Organizations and projects that achieve true sustainability are the unicorns, not the standard. Philanthropy must shift to a longer investment horizon that embraces patient capital.
In addition to adopting these overarching mind shifts, funders need to rethink their investment practices and move beyond the specific projects in which they choose to invest to also consider their impact on the community investment field as a whole. Specifically, we have two recommendations:
The investment expectation must shift from incremental to transformative. Since the 1960s, the community development system has often measured progress in units: number of houses built, square feet of commercial developments, jobs created, and so on. Certainly, these were, and are, important markers of progress. However, few would argue now that these discrete outcomes eliminated poverty or racial segregation. Impact investors seeking to address wicked problems, whether the threat of climate change or barriers to social mobility, are not content with incremental change. They are looking for transformative investments. Grants and investments in experiments such as universal basic income are not simply aiming for a successful welfare program but seeking a potentially revolutionary model for ending the cycle of poverty. New pooled-capital funds such as the Fair Food Fund and Potlikker Capital see themselves not just as small business or farmer loan programs but as vehicles to transform the food system itself. In the same way, community development investors need to look beyond discrete developments to the wholesale reformation of communities.
The investment horizon must shift from sustainability to generativity. Under the old paradigm, funders and investors sought to create financial self-sufficiency. But the new vision for investing is to generate a level or degree of change in which the initial investment has the potential to change people’s views of what is possible. This ideal does not necessarily entail a significant financial return or scale of replication. It means looking for investments that can unleash innovation, upend the status quo, and open fresher, more effective, more equitable, and more long-lasting solutions. The narrative about social determinants of health, for example, is that social and environmental contexts play a significant role in people’s health. Starting with seed projects, this idea has spread rapidly through the private and public health systems and has begun to fundamentally change how health care is delivered, including what insurance covers. Such generative social impacts ripple out far beyond the original investments. The new paradigm for community investing seeks a similar transformative arc.
It’s one thing to identify new core principles; it’s another to put them into practice. No single institution can rebuild a community.
Tomorrow, in the second of this three-part series, we will explore how this is not only possible — it is happening across the country. We began this article with the story of CORE’s work in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Tomorrow we will now turn to two more examples to flesh out the new community-driven model and demonstrate how these new principles are shaping community development for the better and transforming its work.
Fukuzawa is a strategic advisor and former managing director at the Kresge Foundation. Andrews is a fellow at Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute and former president and CEO of the Low Income Investment Fund. Steinitz is a writer and a communications and learning consultant for schools and nonprofits, including the Center for Community Investment.
This article was first published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Read the original article.
For many in the United States, achieving the American Dream means going to college and getting a degree to help land a good-paying job and all the trappings that come with it. It means that and more for immigrants who sacrificed everything to give their families a shot at a better life. But here’s the thing: Unless you’re swimming in wealth, higher education comes at a significant cost, meaning students must secure financial aid.
Students must complete theFree Application for Federal Student Aid to receive federal aid and comprehensive financial aid packages from most colleges and universities. While this sounds easy and innocent enough, FAFSA has the potential to become an insidious tool.
For Latino students with one or more undocumented parents, the form itself is becoming apotential barrier to higher education. These students are afraid that the information they provide on the FAFSA form will supply the incoming administration with data that could make it easier to deport their parents.
An interview in the Chicago suburbs with a handyman who wanted to remain anonymous to protect his privacy illustrates the fear and the choices many Latino families are facing. He described his two daughters, one of whom is a senior in high school. Both are excellent students — one in math and science and the other in literature. The high school senior has dreamt of going to college since she was a child, and her father shared whyhe and his wife want their children to earn a college degree.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
“They would not have as hard a life as we do. This is why we came to this country, for them,” he said. He also discussed how his daughters would eventually have money to own a house, buy a car, save for retirement and have nice things.
He then mentioned that he is undocumented while his wife is here legally but is not a U.S. citizen. After reviewing the FAFSA, he said that his daughter realized she would be providing the federal government with information about his undocumented status. Although guidance counselors have assured her that FAFSA information has never been used that way, she says she does not trust that it won’t be, especially with an incoming president and advisers who have taken a hard line on immigration and vowed “from day one to deport a million undocumented immigrants a day.”
Since the handyman’s daughter cannot attend college without financial aid and refuses to fill out the FAFSA, she cannot pursue higher education. The handyman added that a number of his daughter’s friends are doing the same and refusing to fill out the form. They would rather forgo college and face a life of economic struggle than provide information that could harm their families.
College attendance, of course, relates to the Latino wealth gap. Closing it requires equal access to opportunities throughout their lives. In particular, Latinos must have equitable and unrestricted access to quality early childhood education, K-12 schooling and higher education.
Latino college attendance is crucial for improving a person’s earning opportunities and for the nation’s economic growth and stability. With a college education, Latinos' earning potential and ability to narrow the wealth gap increase significantly. Studies from Texas A&M University show that Latinos with a college degree have median lifetime earnings that are67 percent greater than those with only a high school education.
According to the Census Bureau, Latinos are the racial and ethnic group with the most significant population growth and one of the highest labor force participation rates. The nation's financial strength depends on having awell-educated and trained workforce, which isheavily reliant on Latinos.
Nearly three-quarters of Latino college students receive financial aid; attending college is only possible with such assistance, and Latino students are more likely than members of any other racial or ethnic group to be first-generation college students. Latinos are the group least likely to have trust funds, 529 educational accounts or parents who can afford college costs out of pocket. This makes it necessary for most Latinos planning to attend college to fill out the FAFSA form.
Whether the FAFSA data will be used in the mass deportation plans unfolding in the Trump administration is yet to be seen. Still, the fear and uncertainty that it will have become a barrier to college attendance for an unknown number of Latino students remains. In a worst-case scenario, a generation of Latino students would be lost to the knowledge economy, and the country cannot afford this loss of human capital. To ensure that Latino students take advantage of the opportunity to attend college, the incoming administration must take specific and immediate steps to alleviate these perceptions and fears.
Language matters and public pronouncements carry significant weight. They shape expectations, elevate fears, induce panic, relieve tensions or instill calm. President-elect Donald Trump should issue a statement assuring students and families that there will be a firewall between data provided to the Department of Education and that provided to other federal agencies involved in immigration policy. Furthermore, he should request that leaders of both parties in Congress issue a joint statement supporting the administration’s commitment to protecting the data that students provide to the Department of Education.
These actions may not fully alleviate students' and their families' fears and concerns. Still, they are a necessary first step in assuring young people that pursuing higher education will not result in their parents’ deportation. They also will help assure the rest of the country that educational opportunities and economic stability for all are, in fact, a national priority.
This piece originally appeared on Forbes.com on December 4, 2024. Why The FAFSA Can’t Be A Barrier To Latinos Pursuing Higher Education was republished with permission.
Sugrue is the senior research fellow at theLatino Policy Forum.
The rhizome metaphor reminds us that we cannot simply rebuild hierarchical structures to generate change. Instead we must go subterranean to build our own learning networks.
If you imagine our civil society as an organism, one would think its reaction would be to try to reclaim its previously perceived stable state. However, in nature, many organisms are well-equipped to embrace new realities and adapt in order to persist. For our society, we need to support and guide social change that can progress our democracy into a new paradigm. We can do this by stepping back and building new relationships for the purpose of understanding across our differences and creating change together.
I study change processes as they occur through transformative learning networks. These loose- knit social networks prioritize learning from others. To move through complex crises and spawn new realities, the people who gravitate to these networks take risks by disrupting their usual social patterns to build new relationships and understanding across ideological, institutional and geographic boundaries. These networks can give way to new professional fields, new schools of thought and even new organizations. For example, the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network started as a group of individuals from different walks of life who all wanted to build community resilience in the face of wildfires; they just had different ideas about how to do it. Acknowledging that wildfire management is too complex for a single approach, they pooled their diversity of experiences and connections to innovate new solutions.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
We have all heard the phrase “the only constant in life is change,”attributed to ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Martin Luther King Jr. is credited with proclaiming, “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”Human communities have evolved with a set of evolutionary biases that enable us to ignore and resist change. A prime example is our collective ability to discount the very real evidence for and effects of climate change. We fail to notice all the pieces of change as they assemble themselves until we are surprised by the qualitatively different state in which we find ourselves.So here we are, stunned and unsure how to make the next move.
In the mighty rhizome, nature demonstrates for us why change may surprise us and how, while we cannot stop change, we may be able to guide the change we want to see in the future. If you have ever weeded a garden you know about rhizomes. Invasive weeds (like Japanese knotweed and giant horsetails) and pretty ones (like wild iris) are all subterranean organizers. Rhizomes have no beginning and no end, they are decentralized, they struggle and spread underground hidden from our view and occasionally surface into the sunlight in bombastic manifestations showing us an organism we forgot existed has only gained vigor while we were not paying attention.
Even though we cannot see most of the rhizome's biomass and activities, underground it gathers energy, branches, twists and turns, breaks through barriers, and expands its network until it is ready to show itself again. The rhizome is a prolific botanical metaphor used by French philosopher Deleuze and his social activist collaborator Guattari along with contemporary organizational philosophers and change scholars to understand the complexities of social change as non-linear, heterogenous, non-hierarchical and subterranean.
The rhizome metaphor reminds us that we cannot simply rebuild hierarchical structures to generate change. Instead we must go subterranean to build our own learning networks, create new bonds, branch out and break through the barriers that constrain us. Engaging in civic society, participating in new relationships and learning from those who are engaged across social and political spectrum can help us reconfigure our understanding of our possible futures and gather our collective strength until we are ready to emerge as something new.
Connecting across our differences is scary. Thanksgiving tables across the country last month were full of anxieties associated with communicating in spite of our differences. We may prefer our instinctual draw to familiar homogeneous social gatherings that reinforce our biases and to fall in line under hierarchical organizational structures that provide clear rules on how we must behave. But, if we take on the rhizomatic view, we can instead be comforted by the knowledge that change happens through subterranean activity and if we want to be part of that change we need to build uncomfortable connections so we can learn together and imagine a new future.
So take a risk, be disruptive and find new people who challenge your assumptions and build friendships that create conditions for you to learn new things. You never know — you may be starting a new social movement.
Risien is the director of transdisciplinary research at Oregon State University and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
