Unlocking resilience
Becoming the generous local radicals our future desperately needs
In case you’ve not kept pace with what’s on this season’s pop culture radar and conference circuit, listen up. Dystopias are out. They’re too horrible. Utopias are also now considered passe—too perfect to be feasible.
Neither term presents a realistic view (in these troubled times) of the future—nor of the high-impact, hyper-local work hundreds of thousands of everyday Americans, local civic innovators and urban change-makers are doing to build real, positive change and better outcomes in their neighborhoods and professional communities across the country—despite the deep political polarization, loneliness and disconnection swirling about them.
Consider, instead, protopia. It’s not our word. It was coined a decade ago by Kevin Kelly, the co-chair of the Long Now Foundation and founding executive editor of WIRED magazine. Kelly introduced the word to describe a more realistic and resilient vision of the future, one he says is needed now.
During my Columbia University class this spring on change management, two of my GenZ students used the word, protopia, in a presentation to refer to what people are creating to achieve what futurist Andrew Zolli calls resilience, or “better shock absorbers for the disruptions now and ahead.” Philanthropist Kathryn Murdoch also is using the term to promote a new PBS special she’s co-funded on the future, defining protopia as “a future in which we’d be working very locally (across divides) to better deal with climate change, challenges to democracy, loneliness, disconnection and worries about AI and all the rest.”
Ready for some good news this week?
Here at #NewRules, some local civic innovators and urban change-makers in our expanding network, widely known or not, are already building new systems to help people achieve resilience. It’s not “feel good” PR. It’s real work being done, often outside the media ecosystem, and by individuals of all stripes, genders, ages and incomes who share a mindset to build resilience in ways they know it’s needed and is something they can help to create and deliver.
Growing Change
They are local guys, like Tony Hillery. After losing his limousine business during the Great Recession more than a decade ago, Hillery started volunteering five days a week in the lunchroom of a public elementary school in Harlem that was surrounded by dozens of fast food restaurants, pharmacies, nail salons and check-cashing services—but not one affordable food option.
After some months of volunteering, a number of 1st and 2nd graders there told him about an abandoned piece of land across the street that nobody wanted. Tony got permission to buy it, clean it up and create a community garden where neighborhood junk once festered. Today, it’s a farm and Hillery is founder and Executive Director of Harlem Grown, now a network of 14 community farms he’s created from abandoned lots across Harlem. They produce 3,000 tons of produce a year for neighborhood families at no cost to those who help plant and harvest what’s grown there.
What motivated him to get started was the time he asked the six- and seven-year-old students to draw a square on a piece of paper, and draw inside it their community. “Every corner would have a bodega, a liquor store, a beauty supply nail salon and a check-cashing service. Everything you see they see. But when I asked them to flip over that piece of paper and asked them to draw the community they wanted to see, they made drawing of green grass, flowers, trees and birds. We have those now, and they’ve learned that change is possible.”
Similar urban farms, modeled like those created by Harlem Grown, are now active in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and in the other boroughs of New York City. Says Hillery: “It’s about building a future of resilience, and teaching people that regardless of where they live and what they do, they have the power to do that for themselves and for others.”
Crossing the Divides
There are national innovators, like David Brooks, a cultural commentator and writer for The New York Times, and co-founder of the Aspen Institute’s project to create a stronger social fabric, called Weave. “I founded this some years ago to help identify and support those across America who are local leaders stepping up to weave a new, inclusive social fabric where they live,” Brooks says.
“Fifty-four percent of Americans say that no one knows them well. The number of people who say they have no close friends has quadrupled. Depression rates are up 35 percent, teen suicide rates are up 58 percent and people without romantic partners are up by a third. People are lonely and feel invisible and unseen.” But community builders Brooks calls Weavers, when identified by the Social Fabric Project, “are phenomenal at building relationships,” he says. “We go to towns, ask who’s trusted there and find them, connect them with others like them, support them as Weavers and through them are working to rebuild the country’s diverse social fabric.”
America has a crisis of trust, Brooks says, “but we are not hopelessly divided.” Two weeks ago, The Aspen Institute awarded a group of 20 Weavers $5,000 each in its 2024 Weavers Awards, to help support their work. Among them? A woman in Florida who said she doesn’t have time to volunteer because she spends 40 hours a week looking out for local kids and visiting sick people in the hospital “because that’s what neighbors do.”
Navigating Difference
There are academic visionaries like Sarah Federman, the associate professor of conflict resolution at the University of San Diego, who created a new class (and got it approved) called Crossing the Divide. It is being offered by the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies to engage students with other people and communities across the nation. Two weeks of the class are spent outside the classroom, person-to-person, including two weeks of train travel from San Diego to Washington DC, with multiple stops in-between to expose students to the differences in the country’s physical and ideological landscape, and to people and communities living in places “sometimes dismissed as flyover country,” she says. “Sometimes, in a classroom, when you’re studying people struggling with various challenges, it’s easy to simplify their experiences. But when you’re up close and meet people in person, it feels different. It’s real. You start to understand what they’re grappling with, and their priorities.”
During this polarized election year, Federman says, she hopes this type of engagement will serve as a model for conflict resolution at universities, within governments and inside business cultures to promote connection and to push back against disinformation and build internal work cultures that are more cohesive and innovative. Says Federman: “Our country is divided now more than ever, and political rhetoric is becoming increasing hostile. Many people are becoming tribal, but that’s the last thing you want to do. You want to get curious about and engage with each other to build better systems that work for all.”
Adds Kelly, in his 2017 book, The Inevitable: “Human history is filled with optimists who, in spite of the odds, created new things that most could not even imagine—but obviously someone did and now it has become our reality. In the long run? Optimists shape our world.”
Have a project you’re working on that’s about building resilience or are testing new ways to help others navigate change? Let us know. We’ll feature you, too, in a later article, podcast or upcoming conference or community meet-up.