Horizons was a multi-year community leadership initiative, designed and launched by the Northwest Area Foundation (NWAF). Everyday Democracy and the Pew Partnership for Civic Change partnered with NWAF in this effort, which was delivered by a number of nonprofits, Tribal Colleges and State University Extension Services. Horizons was designed to build community leadership and capacity to address poverty in small, rural, and reservation communities. It was predicated on the theory that communities already possess many of the assets and skills to arrest social and economic decline, and can, with leadership training, resources and support, craft and implement a shared community vision to address poverty in meaningful ways.

Horizons was designed to contribute to NWAF's mission of poverty reduction by identifying, preparing and equipping new leaders and helping them to “take community action on poverty.” Clearly, the evidence gathered from 283 communities over five years substantiates that leadership changes have been sometimes profound, and they have been sustained. And, clearly, communities are taking action to address poverty. Indeed, over half of the alumni communities are still working on their poverty plan. Most communities acknowledged that by the conclusion of the formal 18-month program, they are just getting started on addressing poverty.

STORIES FROM THE INITIATIVE

REFLECTIONS ON INCLUDING THE WORD 'RACISM' IN THE TITLE OF YOUR CHANGE EFFORT

When you're naming your community change effort, you may have some difficult decisions to make, especially if you're addressing racism. Should you include the word "racism" in the name? Will it turn too many people away? A community in Wagner, S.D., that's been working on creating positive change for the last eight years chose to keep the word "racism" in their program name, and they shared their thoughts on the subject:

WHAT IT TAKES TO CREATE SUSTAINABLE CHANGE

AMY DOOM, COMMUNITY FACILITATOR: We’ve done 15 study circles on race and what we have found is that small, over time, with modest action steps, is sustainable. You might think small, with a small action step, and that it’s not happening quicker, is a symptom of it starting to slowly die, or this is not success, and that could not be farther from the truth. We believe now that that is sustainable and it’s an authentic reflection of what can be done.

We were a community that was a Horizons project, and that was an initiative to help small communities of 5,000 people or less, with a 10% or greater level of poverty, to look at what makes them non-prosperous, what makes them poor and what are their ideas on prosperity.

So it came in with the study circles, some leadership training and then helped us do a strategic plan for our community. Embedded in that strategic plan was 3-5 strategies, and one of those was adult education and under adult education it was some multi-cultural stuff like building a multi-cultural community. I didn’t think they had a language for that, but the word "multi-cultural" was in there.

In came SDSU Extension with the opportunity to do these study circles on race and that caught the attention of some native people and some non-native people and they said, “You know, I could be trained in that,” and that’s when my ears perked up because I felt as though this was not going to be same old, same old, kind of, show up, do some good stuff for the community, go home, but really nothing takes place but rearranging some of the proverbial community furniture.

One of the biggest poverties that we have is that hope and imagination die. There are actions that empower people to even imagine that something could be possible. We’re at a point where so many study circles have taken place, there’s this vibration that one action step that goes out, causes other things to happen and so people are touching the dialogue and receiving the effects of it without necessarily being in the dialogue. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t go through the dialogue, but not everybody has to go through the dialogue. What’s most important about the dialogue is that it never stops and that that space for the conversation exists in the community.

There was a point at which there was enough of the small actions that we started to have capacity to believe that we could create our own curriculum that would mirror what we learned in the dialogue circles, but the goal of that curriculum would be a dialogue circle that would compare and contrast different cultural leadership styles. We didn’t know that that’s where we were going, and it certainly wasn’t a prescribed path, but we were following the study circle model.

Our capacity to own that model and apply it functionally to where we needed to go presented itself, and that work has gone out into two other communities and now we are planning a state-wide conference on multi-cultural leadership.

Another of our action steps was to further the discussion on a community bike/walk path and one of the reasons why we decided to move forward in that action is that there are people who won’t self-select come to the racism study circle, but there are people who would love to be a part of creating a bike/walk path and so the action step to forward a bike/walk path comes out of the study circle dialogue but it attracts the participation of people who are not necessarily interested in that dialogue.

Why did we hang on with such tenacity over this amount of time? It’s because that was the only space where this was taking place and it was valuable and to go home was to begin a suffocation; like there was this…like we started to breathe a bi-cultural dialogue, and that breathing was so life-giving to the corpse that we were and nobody wanted to go back to that place.

You have two areas of discomfort, where what Parker Palmer calls, “the tragic gap” or the “tension in the tragic gap”. So Parker Palmer says you have “what is” and “what could be” and it’s the space in between that you invite people to begin a dialogue in. And so “what is” often times, in terms of race relations in Wagner, was intolerable. What it "should be" is unattainable.

That “tragic gap” or that tension in the middle is where you start. That place of tension is where all change has taken place, social change. Or you stay home and you have the discomfort of staying home and doing nothing. They’re both uncomfortable places. One has potential to take you to somewhere in a small action forward and the other is a zero sum.

We had enough going for us to say, “Okay, we see the two choices out there. We have to choose this one.” And to remain with the discomfort, or the tension, that creative tension, and to hang on, we have the answers here. It’s one thing to say that and to, kind of, believe that. It’s another thing to experience your own, not only personal human agency, but your collective community agency; to declare your own destiny with the capacity to fulfill it.

Hi I’m Rebecca Reyes, the communication assistant at Everyday Democracy. Today I’m talking Vince Two Eagles who is an organizer for the Horizon Study Circles on Racism in Wagner, South Dakota and also a member of the Yankton Sioux tribe. Vince, can you tell me a little bit about what motivated you to get involved?

Well I think because of my native teachings, we believe that we’re all brothers no matter what color you are. I’ve been to other discussions throughout the state about reconciliation between Indian people and white people. They seemed all to be the same. There was no action taken. First time through I was kind of skeptical because of that.When we got to the action step and started talking about how we were gonna move into action, I was really hooked at that moment. I’ve always been an advocate of reconciliation, but not the kind where you sweep things under the rug but that you have to talk about those hard issues.

So from your perspective, what do you think it takes to create change rooted in dialogue?

Change is going to happen whether we participate or not. How are you going to direct that change? I think people in our communities are starting to see that we could have a hand in directing that change for the good of everyone. I don’t know if there’s a recipe but it definitely involves an interest, reconciliation and an open mind and willingness to recognize that diversity is an asset in any community. So change comes through that discussion with the most important things coming from taking action. You have to do something. You have to move it from those talks to something done in the community however small or however big you want it to be. We’re not going to change this overnight but if we stick at it change will come.

What do you see as the greatest barrier for creating lasting change in your community?

Whatever you’re going to do it has to have a sustainability built in, in other words there has to be a way for it to continue. You can come up with all great ideas but if you don’t have the where with all, whether it’s infrastructure or interest, whatever it is, if people aren’t willing to keep their commitment to what they began in those study circles, then of course it’s going to fall by the wayside. Instead of pointing figures, we can say how can we make it better. I think that’s another barrier. If everyone starts pointing fingers and blaming, that kind of discussion is not useful. Figuring out ways of how can I make it better--that’s a better discussion.

Are there any changes that you’ve seen in your community thus far, either physical changes or just changes in perspective?

We notice that a lot more Indian people are moving into town. We have the Boys and Girls club here in town too, which is not a result of the study circles, but some of the same people who are involved with that are involved with study circles. There’s this vision of including White and Indians kids in community activities and future community development. We’re working on trying to get a multi-cultural center built, one that would showcase culture in our area, so we can draw people to our area like for tourism, and they’ll be able to learn about not only Indian culture but also Czech culture and the German culture .It would be kind of a focus point in the community, not only for the community itself but for educating the next generation about getting along.

Do you have any final thoughts or anything you’d like to add?

If we’re going to ensure a long-term future on this planet for us all then we have to have faith that human spirit, regardless of the culture, can transcend language and culture and color and that we’ll recognize each other for who we truly are. When we get to that point, I think we’ll be okay.