A thousand communities blooming

This year, Americans succumbed to mental manipulation on a mass scale, and fear remains the driving force behind much of public life. But to say that America is doomed is neither helpful nor accurate. Under the surface, integrity and hope are very much alive.

Marla Crockett is a former producer, news director and talk-show host with KERA public radio in Dallas. Working now as a community coach with the Harwood Institute, she enables Americans to address the problems that bedevil their cities, towns and neighborhoods, and to find solutions that create unity instead of fear.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Keith Collins, Editor, Be Not Afraid

Good morning, Marla. You got your start in public radio. Why there?

Marla Crockett

I loved storytelling, loved the public mission we had. Public radio was the perfect place to tell stories. I also didn’t like the fearmongering in a lot of the media. In public broadcasting you could talk more about ideas.

Keith

And was it all you hoped it would be?

Marla

It was satisfying to tell a wide range of stories in greater depth, but I loved politics and gravitated to political reporting, which is more of an insider’s “horse race” game. I eventually became disillusioned with the shallowness of it all; it just wasn’t meeting the public’s needs. There was this bias toward negativity, saviness, learned hopelessness, a fear to mention anything good. People need room for ambivalence, room to work through the gray areas. They want to see how we got here, how things connect. They want to see their own place and role, but the media just push the public to the side, to the point where we’re just participants in our republic, instead of people with agency.

I came to these realizations when I got involved with civic journalism and saw more clearly what it meant to represent the public during political campaigns. This was transformational for me and for my practice of journalism. I proposed to the station manager that I do a talk show, which we called “The People’s Agenda,” and it lasted nine years. It was one of the highlights of my career, because I really wanted to start where the public started on issues and try to frame things more in a civic way.

Keith

Can you give me an example of how this civic journalism worked?

Marla

Sure. This example pre-dates my civic journalism days, but the station I worked at, KERA, took its public mission seriously and responded in a civic way to a tragedy. In 1989 there was a police shooting in Dallas. A black man killed a white police officer, and it threatened to blow the city apart. Our news management team decided we had to do something, and we came up with Project Crossroads, a two-year effort to help North Texas look at racial divides.

We brought major racial groups together in separate conversations. We asked each group the same set of questions, such as, How often do you think about or talk about race every day? Many people said, all the time. They faced hatred in some form every day. But for whites, it was dead silence. There was an unwillingness to look under the hood and see how the city had been influenced by racial discrimination – for example, when minority communities were cut off by putting in highways. One time this white man called me, saying complimentary things to me, and we got into a conversation, and he asked me, What motivates you? I said, Fairness, dealing honestly with race. Click. He hung up. There was a lot of denial in Dallas.

But one of the things we did was partner with the Greater Dallas Community of Churches. Church congregations that didn’t know each other got together, visited each other’s houses of worship and talked about issues. We recorded and broadcast the conversations and let the community hear them. This to me was the highest and best of public service journalism. We weren’t the decisionmakers, we didn’t live in the neighborhoods, but as journalists, we could promote a civil conversation and bring people together who had never been brought together before.

It really seemed to accomplish some good, although I didn’t find out about it till much later. Fast forward 12 years, and I was interviewing someone with the Community of Churches, and during the conversation he asked me, Do you know those conversations? We kept them going. All these years we’ve kept them going. I was dumbfounded. We were really a catalyst for community conversations.

It’s about the relationships. We wanted our community to work well, and I think we helped make a difference.

Keith

When you dealt with issues in these communities, did you find that fear was a factor in the issues they faced?

Marla

Yes, of course. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people, and fear underlies a lot of the issues they face. There’s a fear of change, for example. People see change, and it scares them. Wind farms and solar farms, traffic, other people. A way of life that they value is being upended. But also there’s fear of the other, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of losing power. Dallas didn’t want to face the consequences of abject racism, but by bringing major racial groups together in separate conversations, we were able to help the community look at the culture with a bit less fear.

Keith

You’re a community coach now. It sounds like there is a strong connection between how a journalist deals with a community and how a community coach does it.

Marla

Absolutely. As a community coach, I help my teams understand their community’s shared aspirations and concerns, so they can start with small steps that gradually unleash a positive contagion that others want to be part of. I found this in Dallas as a journalist: When people do something together, they’re less fearful. When they are left in their own bubble, or consuming whatever media they consume, those things can feed fear, but when people turn outward to their neighbors and begin working together across organizations, amazing things can happen. We watch things ripple out and grow. Whether it’s painting a school, planting a community garden, picking up trash, when people work together, they’re less fearful.

Keith

Looking at what’s happening now in the US, is it possible to scale up and do this for a nation, helping people work together and be less fearful?

Marla

A strictly national conversation is a hard place to start, and I don’t know how useful that would be, but starting in local communities works. Rich Harwood, founder and president of The Harwood Institute, is conducting a civic campaign all over the country right now. Part of the message is that every major reform our country has seen has started in local communities – not in Washington, not in state capitals, but in church basements, around kitchen tables, in community centers. People want to see something different – safety, communities that are welcoming and friendly. People care in local communities. They care about kids, education, seniors, affordable housing. If we could get a thousand communities blooming, it could grow. The political path is tearing the country apart. We need to be on a civic path, as Rich puts it. And journalists can’t just be observers on the sidelines, reporting on the community but ultimately not caring what the community is going through. They have to want to help make communities stronger. Like we did with Project Crossroads, they have to care that communities are healthy.

And here’s another example of what can happen locally: An environmental team I coached in Kentucky wanted to focus on recycling and protecting the environment. But when they asked people in their small town what they valued, no one talked about the environment. They talked a lot about safety in the parks and how they were afraid to enter them, because they had heard a lot of stories about drug needles. This public knowledge shifted my team's emphasis away from their own agenda to what mattered to people. So they shared this knowledge with the police chief, the fire chief, the parks department, and they held a picnic in a large neighborhood park where they brought in musicians and food, and the police talked to folks and helped them understand what the police were doing about the problem. It was the perception, the rumors, the fear, which had kept people in their homes. After this, more people began using this park. Their fear had been diminished, and they felt a little more hope.

Another important point Rich Harwood makes is that there’s a difference between false hope and genuine hope. I see genuine hope when I see people working together to make a difference. Right now, I’m working with a group in North Carolina, and we are addressing hope through stories. A major factor in determining whether a community moves forward is the story it tells about itself. We are finding genuine stories where people saw problems and faced obstacles and challenges but decided to move forward, and good things happened. That creates hope. People need hope. They need to see other people doing things, which gives them a sense of possibility, and then they find the inspiration to step forward and work more productively with others in their communities.