Dalia Ugarte
PA 311- Winter 2015
March 2015
Final Integrative Paper Assignment

I’ll start off with a quote from Block and McKnight that we read in The Abundant Community, “it is one who chooses to create the life, the neighborhood, the world from their own gifts and the gifts of others.” Those are the acts of a Citizen in a community.” Now days we don’t go into the true meaning of what is means to be a Citizen in our communities. How many times do we have a conversation with our neighbors? How much time do we actual spend in our respective communities? For parents, do you know your children’s communities at school? What I’m getting to here is how much do we really spend connecting and building relationships within our communities? Like mentioned in Block and McKnight, we have turned into this world of consumers, the power that comes from within the community is diminishing because people are turning to products and services. Throughout this paper I’ll go into some essential elements that build and promote civic engagement. “Citizens create satisfaction by recognizing their individual capacities and skills. We begin to see that the neighborhood is a treasure chest” (Block & McKnight 2010). Citizens find gifts within a community, when we do this we start to realize the potential that lies within out communities. This ties directly with some main points in The Arts and Social Capital article we also read. “Whether visual, musical, dramatic, or literary, the arts allow us to “create together” and discover shared understanding” (The Arts and Social Capital 2000). Whether it is in different kinds of form, everyone has some sort of art they connect to, and realizing this connecting is realizing gifts in the community. Many times we walk passed a monument or a painting, or even chalk on the sidewalk. All of these are gifts our neighbors have. There are many ways to build connections and see these gifts flourish, just take citizens in a community to strengthen these gifts. Not only that but they allow for space to celebrate and come together and in a safe way of interaction. Block and McKnight would also see this as a way for the community to come together in safe space to celebrate the gifts of its members. One of the things I’ve learned throughout these two courses is that listening is a very important skill in civic engagement. Not just listening with our ears though, it goes much deeper than that. Here’s a question to ask yourself, “Do you listen with your own autobiographical filter? Or do you listen to actually understand the speaker?” (Covey 2011). Do we really pay attention to how we are listening? Really putting aside our urge to relate what we are hearing to our personal experiences is important, being a good listener is about putting our self in the speakers shoes. In another one of Block’s books, The Structure of Belonging, one of the ways of creating a restorative community is “citizen’s willingness to own up to their contribution, to be humble, to choose accountability, and to have faith in their own capacity to make authentic promises to create the alternative future” (Block 2008). We build all these traits by empathic listening of some sort. How well we are able to listen to others puts us in the mindset of really knowing other citizens in the community. Sometimes just by really listening to someone we might be able to find this connection between us. One article that was also brought up was Frankly Not About Food Forests, and the main point to that, is that it is “frankly, not about food forests.” Don’t mean to sound repetitive but that’s where the key point is. If we use empathic listening and really listen to understand, we might be able to find the underlying reasons. Block would agree with this because to be good Citizens we need to bring in everyone’s gifts and voice. I’d like to bring an author outside from this course because it will it bring in an important point that ties directly into civic engagement. Mike Green was one of the authors, who wrote When People Care Enough to Act, Green’s idea that we should look at the gifts that the community has within will give us a better starting point to expand on. Just like mentioned in the text when decision makers try to make changes in the community it’s as they’re “throwing seeds on concrete,” unlike when citizens who realize what they have they’re able to find good soil that “can grow into solutions,” (Green 2006). This ties into Block’s theme in The Structure of Belonging because we are talking about changing the context to one that restores and looking at gifts instead of needs. It is for the people in the community to feel like they belong there. It also explains that everyone who wants to has the power to make that difference. To create this we have a sense of belonging throughout the community as a whole. I feel like this is also universal to a lot of what we have learned in this course. Creating bridges within the neighborhood to find solutions instead of services being brought in and creating consumers (Green, 2006). This idea goes back to Block and McKnight’s topic on Citizens. A lot of the topics brought up in the readings tied directly into our community project in Lents. We were forming citizens within our classroom, we took part and decided to participate and help out the Lents community partners. It was work we did outside of class that really mattered. We took the time to participate in the canvassing. We might have not started in the beginning but we contributed to this project. Whether it is big or small, we played an important role with the community. You might think that we are not a part of this community because we don’t live there, but if you really think about it, we form this community of volunteers. There are many different communities we can be a part of. A part of canvassing was implementing those listening skills as mentioned earlier. We were acting as a part of that community and get their opinions. It is very important to hear what they have to say because they will be around that area daily. Not only that but to really listen and hear what they have to say. It was my job to transfer that message back to the organizers without putting my own opinions into it. We were spreading the word of the Orchard as well, what if many residents hadn’t heard about the project in general. Informing them was our way to also find gifts. One of the questions we would ask was if they wanted to be a part of this process and help out in any way. Whether it was by gardening or adding some gift to the Orchard. We were there to find these answers from community members. This project started because neighbors wanted to make something out of this blackberry-covered area. They saw that this area had potential of creating an environment where the community could come together and celebrate. Going back to Green’s idea of starting with gifts in the community and expanding off of that. This space could’ve easily been taken over by elected officials and done something else with it, but it didn’t and it’s in the process of becoming this community space where gifts will flourish. Our gifts in class were utilized to help this project. We had many people willing to go out of their way and support this project. I am sure that most of my classmates feel like something was accomplished by our time spent in the community. I feel like a welcoming space was and is needed when going into these projects. Being able to have a safe environment is very important when it comes to sharing ideas and having open views. During this experience of being involved in two community projects I would have to say that building a community within its own gifts is an essential element. There are many things that go hand in hand with this topic and the list may go on and on. It starts off with our ability to see, listen and hear for these gifts. Starting the term we agreed to make it a safe environment. We were able to share our personal thoughts and ideas without being scared. This greatly helped us when going out to the community. We had built this foundation of strengths within our classroom. As the term progressed we kept adding more and more gifts within our group. From the classroom out to the neighborhood, we took those gifts with us and were able to share them. Our connections grew and we became a part of something bigger.

References
Block, P. (2008). Community: The structure of belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
Covey, S. (2011, December 26). Using Empathic Listening to Collaborate. Retrieved March 1, 2015, from http://www.fastcompany.com/1727872/using-empathic-listening-collaborate
Green, M., & Brien, J. (2006). When people care enough to act: ABCD in action. Toronto: Inclusion Press.
McKnight, J., & Block, P. (2010). The abundant community awakening the power of families and neighborhoods. Chicago, Ill.: American Planning Association ;.
The Arts and Social Capital. (2000, December). Retrieved March 1, 2015, from http://www.bettertogether.org/pdfs/Arts.pdf
Toi (2013, September 26). Frankly Not About Food Forests -Retrieved January 26, 2015, from http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/09/frankly-not-about-food-forests/