Monthly Archives: April 2022

When people of color burn out in the workplace, they often focus on the immediate factors: a challenging relationship with a manager; unpredictable hours that complicate work-life balance; and perhaps, if theyre feeling safe in sharing, the biases and aggression that are all too pervasive in American worklife. There is no doubt being the only black trader on the floor the week after George Floyds murder had real mental health effects. Indeed, the CDC reported a rise in anxiety and depression for Black Americans immediately after the horrific video surfaced.

In response to this and other mental health crises, a number of digital health startups have entered the fray promising to address mental wellbeing for employees from all backgrounds. Indeed, with fast increasing demand from employees, employers and investors are putting more funds and resources toward mental health initiatives and startups. Firms like Cerebral, Lyra, Ginger, and Talkspace help employees connect with providers. While these services can be helpful, they tend to overlook the roots of why people of color suffer from more workplace anxiety and depression: isolation and the feeling of burnout from being the only person of color in the room. These differences are magnified by the fact that while the U.S. population has become more diverse, U.S. workplaces have become more segregated. When high-growth and high-wage firms do hire people of color, these workers are few and far between.

As firms seek to hire more people of color, how can they make sure that new hires dont end up burnt out, and looking for the exit? Black executives report that feelings of isolation drive their burnout. In response, large firms have started affinity-based, employee resource groups. For example, Black Googler Network provides everything from professional development and mentorship programs to holding dialogues on topics affecting the Black community. And the Hispanics of the Linkedin Alliance host a quarterly meeting with the CEO of LinkedIn to raise awareness over issues affecting them.

However, most companies just dont have the numbers to build out such affinity groups, either because the firm is a small business or because of an internal lack of diversity. Indeed, firms that are now committed to building a more diverse workforce face a dilemma. When people of color join they might be the only person at their company from their background, which can lead to those feelings of isolation and burnout discussed above. Research shows that when firms fail to hire enough workers of color to build community they end up especially likely to quit the firm.

Fortunately, a new model of addressing feelings of isolation and burnout has emerged in recent years, focused not on the needs of employees within one particular firm, but on addressing the feelings of isolation from employees of color across firms. Consider, for example, the Gentlemens Factory, a coworking space in Brooklyn that offers men of color an environment to develop as professionals, and find solidarity. They write on their website, Gentlemans Factory is designed to deliver one simple message: youre not in this alone.

And then, theres Chief, a networking community for senior executive women. Key to their model is an investment in core groups, wherein a small group of female executives get together to bond to discuss personal, leadership, and other challenges. Beyond promoting career success, Chiefs community focus is designed to reduce burnout and the exit of female executives.

Finally, one of the authors of this piece, Tarun Galagali, is building out a platform for BIPOC workers (Mandala). Mandala helps employers create intentional communities for their people through their flagship service, Circles, whereby an external facilitator will bring a group of BIPOC workers together to talk about topics ranging from their identity to their inner critic. In the process, they create a space of belonging and well-beingtaking the pressure off of employee resource groups. Down the line, Mandala will involve companies connecting their underrepresented talent so that there are spaces between companies just as much as there is within a company.

These examples and an increasing number of startups focused on the interaction of mental health, burnout, and inclusion can begin tackling employee burnout, especially for people of color. But it requires companies to focus on building community just as much as they focus on improving individual mental health needs. Its just not because theres a moral imperative here. The financial costs of race-related attrition ($34 billion), absenteeism ($54 billion) and productivity loss ($59 billion) are only beginning to be tabulated. So, next time leaders reflect on burnout for people of color, they should explore investing in their sense of belongingboth within the company, and by connecting employees to the working world at large.

Tarun Galagali is a second year MBA student at Harvard Business School, and founder of Mandala, a belonging and wellbeing platform for BIPOC employees. Rem Koning is an assistant professor of business administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. They are hosting a virtual Belonging summit on April 18 (free, virtual and open to all). RSVP here.

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Helping BIPOC employees fight burnout and find community - Fast Company

As you enter Walmarts Home Office you cant miss a painting on the right. The long line of trucks heading into New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, ready to bring supplies to communities in need, reminds all associates of the moment that forever changed our thinking. A moment that helped us realize how we could draw on our strengths as a business to support communities during disasters and help solve pressing challenges like climate change and food insecurity.

Since 2005, responding to natural and human-made disasters across the U.S. and worldwide, from hurricanes to wildfires, the COVID-19 pandemic to civil unrest has become part of Walmart and the Walmart Foundations DNA. As the frequency of these events continues to climb, our approach evolved, realizing that while responding in the moment is vital, our impact can be greater by also helping the places we call home prepare. We also deepened our focus on equity, because a more equitable response helps make communities stronger for everyone.

Lack of preparedness can have lasting economic and social impacts on communities especially communities of color. When communities are unable to quickly respond to disasters or access necessary resources, the impacts can increase inequality and hurt communities in the long-term. For example, a Society for the Study of Social Problems report showed that in the wake of disaster, white Americans living in certain counties gained $126,000 net worth on average, while Black Americans in the same areas lost $27,000.

By helping communities get ahead of disasters and focus on equity in response so that all people can recover, we can better serve them when a disaster strikes. Thats why we are pushing forward on new philanthropic investments in areas prone to disasters with higher numbers of Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities. Starting these investments in the Gulf Coast allows us to test solutions and learn how we can use philanthropy to help communities build the capacity to respond to disasters more effectively and equitably.

The Walmart Foundation has made an investment of more than $3 million in a group of organizations helping local government leaders and community-led organizations in the Gulf Coast prepare their communities for disasters. These investments include:

The firm belief that sparked in us after Hurricane Katrina remains the same. By using our resources and learnings from the past 15 years, we know we can have a major impact in helping our neighbors prepare for, and respond to, disasters. This focus on the Gulf Coast will help us learn how intentional investments in communities can strengthen the ability of local governments and organizations to better prepare. And by looking at the whole system of mitigation funding and planning, we hope these investments help other underserved communities access the funding and resources they need to move disaster preparedness forward.

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Pushing Disaster Preparedness Forward in the Gulf Coast - Walmart Corporate

Robbed of ancestral lands, American Indian and Alaska Native tribal communities face an unparalleled housing crisis that pleads for national housing reforms. As victims of centuries of intentional government policies to remove and reallocate lands and resources, many live in third-world conditions that have led to sky-high rates of health problems, ranging from diabetes and cardiovascular disease to chronic liver disease, obesity, unintentional injuries, substance use disorders, violence, and suicides. This paves a path to extremely high rates of disability and prematurely shortened lives.

The stark reality of poverty became obvious when I traveled to my reservation home in Mescalero, New Mexico as a child. There I saw discolored, fractured, or weather-tattered homes, and yards littered with old, rusted, and abandoned cars. According to the National Congress of American Indians, substandard housing makes up 40% of on-reservation housing compared to just 6% of housing outside of Indian Country. On reservations, almost one-third of homes are overcrowded.

In 2019, an estimated 20% of American Indian and Alaska Native people lived in poverty compared to an 11% national poverty rate. Poverty, low education levels, and harsh conditions mean that many American Indians and Alaska Natives lack the foundation for basic survival: stable, secure, adequate, affordable housing.

As historian Claudio Saunt so eloquently wrote, an "invasion" of approximately 1.5 billion acres occurred in the United States from 1776 until the present. This loss of traditional homelands has had devastating, lifelong effects on housing and living conditions. Poor health outcomes soared among the millions displaced over the past 300-plus years.

Today, as a result of poor housing conditions, American Indians and Alaska Natives struggle from environmental ills that include lead exposure, asthma from poor ventilation, infectious diseases due to contaminated water, sanitation issues, and overcrowding. Mental distress is common. Exposure to pollutants raises risk for lung disease, cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke, and many other illnesses.

American Indians and Alaska Natives have disability rates 50% higher than the national average, and among people ages 55 and older mobility and self-care disability rates are especially high. Housing that is old, in poor repair, or crisscrossed with physical barriers may not be accessible for many people, preventing them from living independently within their homes and participating fully in community life. This can cause isolation and exacerbate distress and despondency. In addition, unreliable electricity could pose life-threatening risks to people with disabilities requiring ventilator support, and threaten the safety of power wheelchair users (wheelchair batteries must be kept well-charged).

Housing is a well-known contributor to health outcomes and a meaningful lever for health equity. Despite the United States promise to assume responsibility for housing and health for American Indians and Alaska Natives in exchange for billions of acres in conceded land, little has been done to achieve positive change. Outsiders may assume that Indians are getting rich from tribal casinos, but that is far from the truth. Many tribes do not have casino revenue. Those who do often struggle to break even, with any earnings canceled out by their tribes needs.

Conditions on tribal lands sadly reveal the consequences of historical trauma, poverty, and insufficient federal government support. Each sovereign nation must create sustainable housing projects for its members as determined by its tribal government and housing departments. Federal support varies depending on tribal financial status, resources, and competition from bordering communities.

Seeking national support for these measures could go far:

The US government has a moral obligation to ensure that American Indians and Alaska Natives are allowed to acquire lost tribal lands, and afforded the best housing possible to be successful, join fully in community life, and remain healthy. Last year the US Interior Department reauthorized the regional directors of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to review and approve applications to place land into trust. This represents one important step forward, though hopefully not the last.

As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content. Please note the date of last review or update on all articles. No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.

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Poor housing harms health in American Indian and Alaska Native communities - Harvard Health

The work she has done crafting her Scripted in Black has been doing an amazing job telling the story of Black art and artists from many different disciplines, McKinney said.

Graham said she was grateful and honored to have been recognized.

What I hear from both of their nomination is my passion for the community, my passion for Black culture, creativity and art, she said. So the fact that that shines through all of the things that I do with Scripted in Black, my intentions with Scripted in Black and just how I carry myself, that makes me feel very good.

Graham formed Scripted in Black as a hobby in 2017, but didnt make it official with Ohio until 2020.

Black and brown identities didnt really have a socially forward and intentional creative space in the community, especially in the Dayton community, that was representative of our stories, who we are, how we operate, how we live, she said. I feel like the traditional creative spaces in the city didnt do a great jobs of keeping us lifted and represented in the types of content of work that they were showcasing. I just felt that there was a need to tell our stories differently, actually in our communities at black-owned businesses that our community frequents, just right there in their face and not having them feel that its not affordable or welcoming.

Throughout the pandemic and the relaunch of her brand, Graham has done an amazing job of highlighting art from a holistic perspective, McKinney said.

Scripted in Black is a place where you can learn, have fun and heal through and with art by highlighting not only important things from our culture, but by also celebrating the people in Dayton who make the art scene special, he said.

Graham said she cant ever say she accomplished what she did by herself.

I would be remiss if I did not mention (visuals and marketing director) Korey Smith and (installment coordinator) Ashley Brooks, who have definitely done amazing with hosting and curating events in the city, she said.

Scripted in Black, she said, helps the underground scene of Black creativity within cities to find their space, find their home and connect with other like-minded individuals and to be able to collaborate in a unique way that may not be mainstream.

Originally posted here:

Community Gem: Dayton woman helps tell the story of Black art and artists - Dayton Daily News

The devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on poor and low-income communities across America is laid bare in a new report released on Monday that concludes that while the virus did not discriminate between rich and poor, society and government did.

As the US draws close to the terrible landmark of 1 million deaths from coronavirus, the glaringly disproportionate human toll that has been exacted is exposed by the Poor Peoples Pandemic Report. Based on a data analysis of more than 3,000 counties across the US, it finds that people in poorer counties have died overall at almost twice the rate of those in richer counties.

Looking at the most deadly surges of the virus, the disparity in death rates grows even more pronounced. During the third pandemic wave in the US, over the winter of 2020 and 2021, death rates were four and a half times higher in the poorest counties than those with the highest median incomes.

During the recent Omicron wave, that divergence in death rates stood at almost three times.

Such a staggering gulf in outcomes cannot be explained by differences in vaccination rates, the authors find, with more than half of the population of the poorest counties having received two vaccine shots. A more relevant factor is likely to be that the poorest communities had twice the proportion of people who lack health insurance compared with the richer counties.

The findings of this report reveal neglect and sometimes intentional decisions to not focus on the poor, said Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign which jointly prepared the research. The neglect of poor and low-wealth people in this country during a pandemic is immoral, shocking and unjust.

The report was produced by the Poor Peoples Campaign in partnership with a team of economists at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) led by Jeffrey Sachs. They have number-crunched statistics from more than 3,200 counties as a way of comparing the poorest 10% with the richest 10%.

They then interrogate the interplay between Covid death rates and poverty, as well as other crucial demographic factors such as race and occupation.

Until now the extent to which the virus has struck low-income communities has been difficult to gauge because official mortality data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and elsewhere has not systematically factored in income and wealth information.

The new report seeks to fill that gaping hole in understanding of the US pandemic. One of its most striking findings is that within the top 300 counties with the highest death rates, 45% of the population on average lives below the poverty line as defined as 200% of the official poverty measure.

Sachs, a Columbia University professor who is president of the UN SDSN, said the findings underlined how the pandemic was not just a national tragedy but also a failure of social justice. The burden of disease in terms of deaths, illness and economic costs was borne disproportionately by the poor, women, and people of color. The poor were Americas essential workers, on the frontlines, saving lives and also incurring disease and death.

The authors rank US counties according to the intersection of poverty and Covid-19 death rates. Top of the list is Galax county, a small rural community in south-west Virginia.

Its death rate per 100,000 people stands at an astonishing 1,134, compared with 299 per 100,000 nationally. Median income in the county is little more than $33,000, and almost half of the population lives below the poverty line.

Among the counties with punishingly high poverty and death rates is the Bronx in New York City, where 56% of the population is Hispanic and 29% Black. More than half of the borough lives under the poverty line, and the Covid death rate is 538 per 100,000 within the highest 10% in the US.

Racial disparities have been at the centre of the pandemic experience in the US. Early on it became clear that Black people and Hispanics in New York City, for instance, were dying of Covid at twice the rate of whites and Asians.

The consequences of such racial inequity are still only now becoming visible. Last week a study in the journal Social Science & Medicine reached a disturbing conclusion.

It found that when white Americans were informed through the media that Black Americans were dying at higher rates than their demographic group was, their fear of the virus receded and they became less empathetic towards those vulnerable to the disease. They were also more likely to abandon Covid safety precautions such as masks and social distancing.

But low-income predominantly white communities are also in peril. Mingo county in West Virginia, for example, has one of the lowest income levels in the US following the collapse of coal mining and the scourge of the opioid epidemic.

The county is 96% white, with over half its residents living below the poverty line. Its Covid death rate is 470 per 100,000 putting it within the top quarter of counties in the nation for pandemic mortality.

The rest is here:

Covid had devastating toll on poor and low-income communities in US - The Guardian

[Cross-posted toFront Porch Republic]

There is an accusation which has been flung over the decades (if not centuries) at practically every sort of intentional community-building effort, thus oddly discovering something which apparently entirely disparate elements of the right and left have in common. Sometimes that accusation takes the form of condemnations of a supposedly unrealistic idealism, sometimes in terms of contempt for what is labeled a nostalgic myopia. But either way, the heart of all these attacks is the same: attempting to build communities of cooperation, equality, and justice, in contrast to the socio-economic self-interestedness which has been the rule for 300 years or more, is utopian, and thus nonsensical and wrong. The ease of that accusation, and the fact that it has been and still is unthinkingly lobbed at intentional communities of every sort, makes it worthy of push-back, I think.

The caveat which those who fling the accusation will insist upon, of course, is that it is not all community-building activities which they think deserves their condemnation and contempt; only comprehensive community-building. And for most critics, thats probably correctit would require an insanely individualist outlook to describe every effort to strengthen neighborhood ties (organizing a block party!), to secure social justice (expanding handicap accessibility!), or to serve the public through the provision of common goods (health insurance, public schools, environmental protection, the Veterans Administration, and more!) as instances of utopianism. (That some people do in fact affirm such anihilistic libertarianismis worth noting but not much more. There are also people who make life-size nude sculptures of Richard Nixon out of butter, and more power to them.) The great majority of those who look askance upon community-building would insist that they do not mean to reject every communitarian project; rather, what they reject is community-building visions and efforts that aspire to comprehensivenessor, on my reading, the ones that aspire totopography.

My point in invoking topography is to bring up that element which everyone with the slightest interest in or affection for localism must take seriously: the topos, the place or location or referent upon on which one stands or acts. Such language is, of course, what gave birth to the accusation in the first place: Thomas Mores 16th-centuryUtopia, the rationally organized no-place of agrarian communism, communal eating, universal health care, and chamber pots made of gold (so as to subliminally communicate a contempt for wealth). Mores neologism, it should be noted, was perhaps not his intended one;Utopiaconcludes with an addendum in which More remarks upon the pun in his books title, suggesting that the city is should be understood less as a dreamy no-place and more as a good-place that inspires: not Utopia, but rather rightly my name is Eutopia, a place of felicity. Whatever his intent, though, the history of the term is grasped easily enough: throughout history, there have been 1) those captivated by comprehensive visions of how to cooperate rather than compete, to encourage virtue and inclusion, to establish peace and justice, and to witness to the truth as they understand it, with the material articulations central to those visions involving the establishment of a distinct community, and 2) those who find any and all such visions dangerous and simply flawed. (And, of course, one can find plenty of capitalists in group 2) who will insist the placeness inherent to mostpopulist challenges,distributist arguments, andmutualist alternativesmeans theyre all in the same camp as the socialists and radicals in group 1), but lets stick with the clear communalist examples for now.)

The danger which canand, tragically, often doesaccompany any effort to establish a complete community in accordance with specific intentions, whether religious or ideological or both, is well established, both historically and theoretically. The genocidal historical record of many comprehensive society-shaping visions is incontestable (though whether the kill-count of all such revolutionary movements is greater or fewer than the kill-count of non-comprehensive, profit-motivated world historical slaughters like the African slave trade or the European colonization of the Americas is something I leave to the terminally morbid to calculate). Theoretically as well, the problems with this conceptualization of humanitys fundamentally social and political nature are large, though not insurmountable. Humankinds embodiment as distinct individuals means an organic, evolving pluralism willalwaysbe present in all our social and political orders, and the rationalist temptation which is entailed by many communitarian visions directly contradicts that, with frequently destructive results.

But the emphasis there must be placed on frequently, as opposed to always. Human beings, despite (or perhaps as part of) our pluralism, regularly tend towards the dialogical and aspirational and spiritual, which means that what we trulyarealways reasoning about and reaching forthanks to God or nature or bothis how to make our lives fit with that we consider to just and right and good: to achieveeudaimoniain our places, ourtopoi, and then make those places available to others. So while dangers and flaws of comprehensiveness must always be attended to, the topographical aspect of our spiritual and ideological longings is too central to the human character to dismiss it entirely. Indeed, if Wendell Berry is any guide, much of contemporary thinking reflects an overlearning (or an encouragement towards overlearning by those who benefit from our individualistic status quo) of the lessons of comprehensiveness. To automatically reject communitarian efforts and imaginings which involve the making of actual cooperativeplacesas obviously pointless from the start is to succumb to a false sense of inevitabilityan economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant (Berry,The Art of Loading Brush, p. 51; morehere).

So perhaps we can allow that the accusation of utopianism is not necessarily, or at least should not beacceptedas necessarily, fatal to the communitarian imagination. But does that allowance have anything to do with localist projects, which, while obviously centrally concerned with places, rarely approach thosetopoiwith any comprehensive vision in mind? While it is true that the watch-word for most genuinely localist politics today is incremental, eschewing comprehensive reforms for the humble and the partial, there is, I think, a utopian element usually present nonetheless, hidden in the idea of intentionality.

Every localist concern involves looking at a neighborhood, an association, or a community, and tending to it. That tending, however, unless wholly and unthinkingly reactionary (and if it were, then no communitarian tending would take place over the long haul at all, because to think outside of ones own immediate interest and ones own temporal moment isinvariablyaspirational), cannot help but involve an ideal, a visionsomething that isintended. That intentionality, like comprehensiveness, can be dangerous is a simple sociological fact, but it is also that which grants community the transformative promisewhether personal or collective or bothwhich it has always held, separating us,as Aristotle observed, from otherwise equally gregarious animals like bees.

The difficult-to-dispute point that we form communities for the sake of collective ideals and not just individual interestssomething every Bible-reader, at the very least, should have realized as soon as they came to the second chapter of Actshas, perhaps, been made harder to swallow for many by the legacy of 19th and 20th-century socialisms, particularly the statist, scientific socialisms of the Marxist variety. But even there, a fuller appreciation of the history such surprising diversity. The Oxford political theoristDavid Leopoldhas made a career out of exploring and undermining (or at least seriously complicating) the rationalist, universalist, non-utopian reading of Marxs legacy, arguing that even within the first century of the modern European socialist movement, when the materialist assumption of universal revolution were strongest, you nonetheless can find robust expressions of and arguments about the age-old understanding of socialism as a cooperative, communitarian ideal, as something that must necessarily be rooted in the organically constructed architecture of a locality and place. The intermingling of these became even more pronounced as the revolutionary determinism of Marxs early interpreters was replaced with a recognition of the inevitability, even sometimes the value, of party politics in democratic countries. Ultimately,Leopold suggests, the differences between place-obsessed reformers like Robert Owen, the founder of New Harmony who constantly experimented with forming small, cooperative, egalitarian communities (what Leopold calls the communal or horizontal strategy), and detail-oriented policy wonks like Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter, early members of the Fabian Society who worked within the Labor party to introduce specific egalitarian and collective policies to the whole of the United Kingdom (what Leopold calls the political or vertical strategy), are not nearly as great as their similarities.

You dont need to work out the historical implications of such political theories to recognize the truth of that judgment, thoughyou could, instead, simply look at the real world example of dozens of intentional communities and communes and collective projects throughout history, and the mixed perspectives they embodied. You could look at theBruderhof, an Amish-inspired movement of deeply traditional Christians, organized into communities of cooperation and equality around the world, whose communal devotion have led them to a political position ofuncompromising pacifism. Or you could look atKoinonia Farm, an intentional community of believers in Georgia who humbly practice sustainable agriculture, but were also central to shaping, in the face of enormous racial hostility,the non-violent resistancewhich politically defined much of the civil rights movement in America.

Or, much less celebratedly but with no less admiration, you could look to the Solidarity Collective, a cooperative association of activists, artists, and democratic socialists, deeply committed to the vision of living sustainably and defending justice in Laramie, Wyoming. Close to four years ago, the collective was founded by several passionate workers and dreamers, one of whom is an old and dear friend; its charter (read it here!) is frankly revolutionary in its vision of a fully democratic and inclusive socialism, while its actual operations reflect the difficult, patient, humbling work of living in accordance with utopian ideals of cooperation and consensus. It was at the invitation of my old friend that I began to seriously reflect on the particularityincluding thetopographicparticularity, or simply the localityincumbent to the physically and emotionally demanding labor and negotiations involved in building a home, a refuge, and a community that seeks to exemplify its ideals, and has only the material and psychological resources which its own members can bring to it. As no doubt everyone who has ever been part of an attempt to comprehend and bring to life a community (or a church, a labor union, a co-op, or any other such idealistic effort), sometimes it seems that community always fails. With typical honesty, the members of the collective turned their own impasses intoa podcast episode, talking about how impossible it sometimes seems to bring everyone laborious work into union with one anotherand why they keep trying anyway. (Hint: its because, in part, they genuinely believe in theplacethe house, the farm, the community, and the human resources through which they are enabling to flourishwhich theyre building.)

Listening to that podcast, as members of the collective honestly and searchingly challenge one another regarding the roots of their manifold struggles, I was struck at how intentionally and comprehensively pushing against the norms of capitalist modernity in the 21st-century requires practices that have not changed much since the 19th century, or earlier. In Chris Jennings wonderful history, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism(though his focus is really just the story of the early utopian movements which emerged in the context of Protestant revivals in Europe and America and the Great Awakenings they were part of), he lays out one of the secrets of the success of the Oneida Community, whose radical communismwhich included the sharing of not just all property and work, but of sexual partners as wellendured in the face intense opposition and deep internal divisions for more than a generation:

[T]he biggest reason the Perfectionists were able to maintain communal harmony despite such fraught circumstances was institutional: a form of weekly group therapy that they called mutual criticism.[B]y the time the community relocated to Oneida, regular sessions of mutual criticism had become a central pillar of [what the followers of John Humphrey Noyce, the found of the community, called] Bible Communism.As the Perfectionists got better at mutual criticism, most of them came to regard it as a vital catharsis and an essential means of maintaining the colonys delicate social harmony. It functioned like a cross between confession, performance review, and psychoanalysis, but crowdsourced. The fact that everyone had a turn in the hot seat took some of the sting our of the ordeal.One man was cautioned that he had masculinity carried to excess. There is not enough woman in him.Perhaps most important, the regular sessions of mutual criticism allowed the colonists to air the countless minor aggravations that will erode a cooperative colony from within if left to fester (pp. 346-348).

It is probable that Jennings would not entirely agree with my likening of the practices of the comprehensive community-builders of the 19th century with those of today. In his view, while the revival of intentional efforts to create alternative forms of life over the past half-century is admirable[l]ike the nineteenth-century utopians, the long-haired communards of the sixties and seventies rejected the prevailing values of their day as morally corrupt and expressed that rejection through the total reconfiguration of their own daily livestheir intentionality is of a lesser category entirely: [a]lthough the communalists of the sixties and seventies tried (and often succeeded) to build strongholds of cooperation, pleasure, and consciousness amid the mercantile bustle of American life, theyexpressed a secessionist impulsea leave-taking from the World[and thus their] revolution was more personal and, ultimately, far less utopian (pp. 379-380). But I find this unfair, because it wrongly assumes that any envisioning of a place that isnt millenniarianthat is, that doesnt proclaim it to be a model for a world which teeters on the edge of total destruction and/or transformationhas no radicalism, no true utopianism, to it at all.

In a world where the pluralism of the human condition has been, for centuries, from the age of imperialism to that of industrialization and beyond, both subject to and expected to express itself through an ever-evolving, ever-varying, but nonetheless also ever-expanding, technologically-enabled socio-economic universalization, privatization, and individuation, it seems to me thatanyattempt to build into onestoposprinciples and practices that aspire to, or at least are in dialogue with, ideals of social justice and civic strength and equality, cannot help but involve at leasta degreeof comprehensiveness, a degree to utopian hope. To quote the striving local socialists of the Solidarity Collective, there are many potential models of anti-capitalist activism and politics, and the search for cooperative, sustainable systems will always be a matter of good-faith deliberation.

Such deliberationor mutual criticism, for that matterisnt a rejection of the possibility of building a locality of such comprehensive, communitarian felicity that others will be inspired and transformed by it, and thus go forward to build other such eu-topian communities in other places. (That is, in fact, exactly the primary aim of the Solidarity Collective:as they write, We hope that by creating a thriving, fun, and engaged non-capitalist ecosystem we can demonstrate the viability of a more cooperative and less oppressive way of life and hence attract more people to our cause.) What it is, is a recognition that such places shouldnt be conceived as environments that will just rationally unfold, without particular work done by particular people in particulartopoi. Thus, maybe, does incrementalism and utopianism meet. If youre looking intentionally at your locality, wanting to make it more just and more civil and more communalwith, say, cooperative food practices, responsible energy usage, democratic decision-making, and social arrangements premised upon love and respect rather than financial and racial advantagewell, that doesnt automatically make you into a communard, fully engaged in the struggle to build a comprehensively new world. But it does mean, I think, that you probably share more with those inspired folk than you may think.

Teaser photo credit: New Harmony, Indiana, a Utopian attempt, depicted as proposed byRobert Owen. By Drawn and engraved by F. Bate. Published by "The Association of all Classes of all Nations", at their institution, 69, Great Queen Street. Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1838.Published by "The Association of all Classes of all Nations", at their institution, 69, Great Queen Street. Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1838. Alamy, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77106397

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Localism, Intentionality, and Utopia (Socialist or otherwise) - Resilience