Peter Forbes is the Executive Director of the Center for Whole Communities, which he co-founded after eighteen years of leading conservation projects for the Trust for Public Land. The Center for Whole Communities in Mad River Valley, Vermont is a learning center dedicated to teaching and exploring the people-land connection. It is a community gathering place as well as a working farm.
Have you heard Bill McDonough’s riff about sustainability? I guess I should start by saying that I’m moved by his characterization that the rest of the world doesn’t use the word sustainable the way the environmental movement does. They use it in terms like “my job is sustainable,” “my marriage is sustainable,” as in, “the lowest, most bearable achievement.” The words I use are: “healthy, whole and resilient.” And I tend to use the word resilient, more, particularly when talking about communities, because the idea behind sustainable is a beautiful one, that it will continue forever.
The work of all of us, whether we call ourselves an environmentalist, or a sustainability-ist, or whatever, is no longer about trying to prove what’s wrong, it’s about revealing the relationships that still exist. People know when things are bad - they don’t need to be persuaded; what they want is to see the connections and the relationships and the patterns of life that are still whole, because they need those as examples in their life. So in its simplest terms, what we do at the Center for Whole Communities is reveal those relationships. We reveal them between people, between issues, between sectors of the environmental movement. That is the core of our work.
We believe that if you take a well-intentioned, well-educated person, or caring person and put them in a group experience of the land, they’re going to emerge from that with a more inclusive, more visionary, more broadly-accepted agenda for their work than when they went in.
So we do a six day program at Knoll Farm. At 4:00 in the afternoon of the first day, all nicey-nice goes away and everyone lines up in a straight line, and I or whoever the leader is that week, asks them 60 questions about the way they were raised. They begin the line holding hands, and by the 7th question, most of the white folks are edging toward the front and their fingers are no longer touching; by the 55th question, all the white men are at the very front and all the people of color are in the very back. And then I say, “Look around, see our relative positions. Every question that was asked of you is about your childhood, things you had no control over. The rest of this week is all about things that we have control over. What are we going to do about it?” And what that allows us to do for the rest of the week is to talk about the things that are almost never talked about in gatherings of environmental leaders: the roles that race, power and privilege have and what keeps us in isolation from the rest of America. And that’s a very, very painful thing; almost every week we have people who say, “I didn’t sign up for this. I’m ready to go.” But they hang in, and inevitably that’s the turning point, that’s when things get real.
After a couple of days, they begin to see the reciprocal nature of success - that no matter how much money their organization has, or how much political clout, they are really not going to be successful without other people – people of color, for example, whose work is often not seen. That’s when people begin to really hear each other, and in hearing each other they really begin to taste the wholeness. Once they get a taste of the wholeness, they cannot go back to a life where they compartmentalize and disassociate themselves from these ideas and issues.
Our assessment tool, Whole Measures, is the way that the work, from our perspective, is strategically wholesaled out. We know that leaders who come to Knoll Farm or a workshop we’re doing elsewhere, say, “I completely get it, I want to do my work, and I want to do my life differently. But darn it all, I went into the same old organization with the same set of measures of success and it was like hitting a wall.” We hear that every week, so Whole Measures is meant to be the tool that makes it easier for them to succeed at being a change agent. What happens is dialogue within an organization on issues that the organization probably hasn’t discussed before, and from that comes more dialogue with partners that the organization probably hasn’t partnered with before.
What we hear is that there’s this great boost in morale, a sense of really being able to address problems of larger scale, and no longer just putting band-aids on a wound, but beginning for the first time to treat the symptoms of the problem. Joy comes from working with people who you were always across the aisle from, but were afraid to talk to, and thought had no respect for you, and all of a sudden, you’re on the same page together. There’s a huge amount of energy that comes from that.
Our theory of change is that for change to really happen, it has to happen at three levels, at the individual, at the organization, and at the movement level. And you could say that in a different way: individual, community, nation. The land movement has lost the willingness to say what we’re really for, because we’re afraid that it’s going to begin to sound like religion, and it’s not religion. It’s what the human spirit is, and so I try to be less shy about talking about what I believe in and what is in my spirit, and what is in these leaders’ spirits who come here. What do you want? When you can speak about what you really want, you also taste that wholeness.
Jaimie Cloud
Mary Eileen Fouratt
Photograph by Barbara Beirne
