The Ghosts of Work Past

The past crept up on me this past fortnight. It told me off, offered a thanks, and then reminded me that we need to stop talking and start doing. 

First, the telling off

In my last post, I offered four policy ideas towards co-governance (the process needed to blend the best of government and the best of communities) but talked about ‘lowering the bar’ so that informal community groups could receive funding. All I meant was that we have to stop insisting that people with shared interests (the core definition of a ‘community’) establish formal nonprofits for them to be supported by public money. 

Gerry Balcazar, a reader in California and a senior manager at Vision y Compromiso, asked if I really meant to say ‘lower’. He worried that it seemed to “perpetuate the power dynamic that the community-level individual operates on a lower level than those with money, power and influence, and is at their mercy to create opportunities”. 

Gerry was right to call me out on that. Words matter. I did not mean to suggest that folks operating at the community-level are in any way lesser than those with formal positions. And I apologise to anyone else that interpreted my words that way. 

Now, the thanks 

Around the same time, I received a comment from Carl Baty on an old article. Carl was a presenter at a conference I held in 2017 on community agency and health. He’s been repeatedly homeless over the course of his life and describes having a 47-year addiction (alcohol and crack, amongst other things). He shared a stage with S Leonard Syme, the father of social epidemiology, and together they discussed the endless failures to improve health for all. 

During the discussion Carl started to cry. As he explained it afterwards, it was because he was “telling a room full of people that there is nothing wrong with me”. All his life he’d been told he was the problem, he was wrong, he was too angry. But then, at the age of 65, someone had said to him, “you have a reason to be angry”. 

These days, we have fancy polysyllabic words for that ‘reason’: systemic racism. Carl is wonderful and unique but he’s also just one of millions of Black people who have been intentionally held back by unfair and unjust structures (laws, policies, practices and norms). And yet he was blamed for the inequities he endured. 

As Carl says in his comment, those seven words – you have a reason to be angry – were “soul freeing” and a “gift”. It made him realise: “There’s nothing wrong with me”. 

Getting a comment from Carl after all these years made me go back and re-read some of what he wrote for us back in the day (at the time, my work was part of a nonprofit called Bridging Health & Community, Inc). I like his assertion that healing is about being able to express yourself, about people listening, and about acknowledging that what happened to you was not right. But I especially like that he said what’s needed is “figuring out how to get to work”. 

And here’s the reminder

Earlier this week, I was talking to a significant public health leader in the US. She’s currently thinking about how the highly influential organisation that she leads needs to evolve. We seemed to have the same diagnosis – health is complex, public systems can only do so much, and greater partnership between systems and people is needed. 

I found myself talking about co-governance. I nodded to New America’s work on it (interesting but somehow lacking depth), Demos’ (ok but largely the same as New America’s), and Race Forwards’ (the best of the three but still lacking meat on the how). One of the things she said at the end of the call was that she needed to work out what to do with the things I’ve said. 

And then it hit me. 

We’re still where we were in 2017. We’re still “figuring out how to get to work”.

What’s stopping us? I wish I knew. Back in 2017, S Leonard Syme suggested that we “need a new kind of expert, one that can respond to the real issues in the lives of the people we are trying to reach”. Whether that’s right or wrong, I’m not sure, but what I do know is what an old friend told me a long, long time ago: 

• We can’t think ourselves into a new way of doing, we have to do ourselves into a new way of thinking. 

Happy Thanksgiving, Americans, and see you all in two weeks. 

Pritpal S Tamber 

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Notes

• Gerry gave me permission to quote his email 
• These days, part of what Carl does is help teach a class at Tufts University that seeks to reunite human biology and social context. 
• The image behind the title is by Gary Waters / Ikon images.