Posts Tagged ‘community develpment’

Building Community with Corned Beef Sandwiches

May 19th, 2010

The highlight of the Grassroots and Groundwork 2010 Conference for me, last week, was Paul Saginaw’s keynote speech.  Paul is co-owner and founding partner of Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Paul’s speech left me inspired in a number of ways, but one specific piece of advice he gave is still ringing.  He described that as a new business owner, he made community a priority.  He knew he was going to give back from the start, and he has accomplished that in more ways than one. 

It takes money, honey

In the company’s spreadsheet, alongside salaries and wages, benefits, utilities, insurance and a host of other operating expenses was the term “community.”  Money allocated to this line item was used to strengthen community in greater Ann Arbor Michigan along with helping staff when they faced difficulties. Many businesses owners look to give back after they achieve a level of prosperity.  What’s special is that Paul and co-owner Ari Weinzweig built this financial contribution into their business from the start.

Community and opportunity for employees

Paul described that he and Ari’s business mantra from the start wouldn’t allow for reproductions of Zingerman’s Delicatessen.  But, after ten years of successful operation, they realized that expanding the business was necessary so that growth opportunities existed for staff.  They did this by making their staff partners in an expanding business, dubbed Zingerman’s Community of Businesses.  The Zingerman name now includes a total of nine companies with 590 employees and fifteen partners, including a bakehouse, creamery and candy shop. 

Feeding their community

Not many for-profit businesses can say they’ve started a nonprofit, but Zingerman’s can.  In 1988, the company’s philanthropy founded Food Gatherers, a nonprofit that redistributes food from restaurants to those who need it most.  Today, Food Gatherers redistributes more than seven tons of food a day and feeds almost 44,000 people each year. 

 

There are more, but I’ll stop at three.  We often believe that building “community” is the responsibility of nonprofits, economic development groups, and government entities.  Paul Saginaw and Zingerman’s Community of Businesses proves that businesses can contribute to community in powerful ways, if they’re willing to take the challenge. 

 

Photo credit:  Ashley Dinges-Flickr

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The Difference Between Winners and Losers

December 22nd, 2008

“The difference between winners and losers is attitudes and actions.” –Dave Ramsey

Ramsey wasn’t talking about rural communities when he said that. But he was. You see, Dave is a personal money guru, so he was talking about doing smart things with your money. What he is also saying, though, is that it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to pay off your debt or lose 20 pounds or change your community–success and failure are mostly about behaviors.

The beliefs and habits we live by in rural communities are the very things that either keep us in a downward spiral, or begin a journey toward something better and more sustainable. When we begin to realize the problems we’re having are not somebody else’s fault–and not somebody else’s responsibility to fix–it becomes clear that the only person who can change my world looks back at me in the mirror.

Winning in this game of rural community change is not about god-given talent or luck. You can go learn just about anything you want to. Branch Rickey said “Luck is the residue of design.” How your community decides to design it’s behaviors, attitudes and actions about the future will determine how “lucky” you’ll be.

If you do “losing community” stuff, you’ll be a losing community. If you want to be a winning community, decide what winning looks like for you and start learning how to do things winning communities do.

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Posted in Leadership, Rural | Comments (1)

Regional Collaboration – Part II

October 24th, 2008

In a prior post, I suggested that we have been experiencing regional consolidation of important services (i.e. education, health care, telecommunications, etc.) but that this consolidation has not resulted in true regional collaboration.  Why not?

When you stop to think about, why should we expect communities to collaborate and work together when we have not really learned how to do this effectively in our individual communities.  Most communities operate as a collection of lone ranger, silo activities.  Someone decides we need housing.  Off they go, put some dollars together, buy some land and begin to put together a housing development.  Eventually, they realize we are going to need big bucks from the community (i.e. the city) to put in water, sewer, electrical, etc. 

Guess what, train wreck.  The well intentioned housing advocates should have gotten the city and other players in the game from the git go.  I believe that working to align community organizations can bear very significant positive fruit as we seek to help community’s work smarter.  Some promising community assessment tools are emerging (more on that in the future) that can point us in the right direction. 

Collaboration requires that people & organizations need to work together.

Collaboration requires that people & organizations work together.

The key to aligning our project and community organizational silos is developing a community-wide vision for the future.  What do we want to do collectively?  How do we connect the dots?  What is most important?  Can we prioritize and sequence our projects in order to leverage and maximize our precious and limited resources?  Joe Bartmann’s earlier post about the U-Process offers guidance about how and why communities need to think more deeply and intentionally in this visioning process.  Most importantly, the community vision needs to be owned and held by the community at large and not just a small, well intentioned group that assumes it knows what is best.

If a community does not have its act together, it is very difficult to collaborate with other communities and be able to answer the question, “What can we do together with our neighbors that will help us advance our community’s vision while at the same time strengthening our region?”  Stated another way, communities are not likely to work together if they cannot answer the question, “What’s in it for us?”

Lastly, even if are communites are motivated to work together regionally, it will be difficult to achieve collaboration until we develop new regional structures.  We need an entity (structure) that can capture and articulate a regional perspective.  This group can seek to balance the need for both community and regional advancement.  They can connect the dots.  They can help communities answer the question, “What is in it for us?”

Unhealthy community competition dies hard.  Old, and I mean old, grudges based on athletic competitions and who stole the court house have held us back.  It is time to rise above that.  A vital and viable rural landscape requires both successful regionalization of services and true regional collaboration.

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Posted in Community Development, Community Engagement, Housing, Leadership, Rural | Comments (0)