Values

It was a wonderful exercise to name some values that I want to bring to my work. My current work falls far short of these values, but stating them can help me navigate towards them. I draw these values from two streams: the stated goals and values of the Christian faith (acknowledging that many Christians have acted in opposition to those values), and from aspects of many organizations and communities that I admire.

• Incarnate. Don’t solve other people’s’ problems; get close enough that their problems become yours. Be vulnerable. “Nothing about without”
• Seek just systems. Justice is more than “doing good”; it requires identifying oppression and fighting it. Identify how present reality emerges from both individual decisions (of both powerful and marginalized people) and the overlapping systems of culture, law, market, beliefs, habits, networks, environment, code, processes, etc. Think about how any proposed actions echo in all these systems.
• Be humble and kind. Don’t assume. Listen. Admit bias. Identify what’s broken inside first. Don’t boast. Celebrate others. Be slow to diagnose and “fix”. Forgive. Treat better than you’re treated. Be slow to anger and blame.
• Be transparent. Be honest. Share data and code.
• Be grounded. Keep motivations connected with reality. Use evidence (both data and story) to make decisions. Ask questions.
• Serve to empower, seek flourishing not dependence. Act in ways that increase the autonomy of the leats empowered. Humanize.

A Convening on Housing

Context: I’ve walked with friends through transitions both into and out of homelessness. I, the problem-solver, often wanted to find even a small set of problems to fix or blame, but the situations have been complex. But in the process I saw affordability and access as major practical barriers. In one friend’s attempt to return to housing after an eviction, he found that rents even in the “affordable” areas he was looking had skyrocketed. He encountered too many predators trying to scam needy and vulnerable people. And when he found options that were somehow both affordable and in reasonable condition, the landlords required a perfect rent payment history. Basically, you need to be housed in order to be housed. Meanwhile, “luxury” aspirational housing is going up all around the region.

So: let’s do a hackathon / policy summit on housing. Specific goal: loosen the connection between money/privilege and the right to housing that works. But since we’re incarnational, let’s do it not in elite spaces like the Media Lab, but in local community spaces like schools, churches, and homes in communities like Dorchester and East Boston that are facing cross-pressures of history and current investment. Since we’re kind and slow to blame, and seek to do nothing about without, let’s invite not only the policymakers, architects, and planners, or the housed and the homeless, but even the people we consider to be the “bad guys” — landlords, luxury condo developers, even Airbnb hosts (whom some blame for rising rents) — and find ways to not let them feel like the bad guys. Since we seek just systems, let’s invite everyone to share ways that current systems work for them, and ways that they hurt them. Since we want to be grounded, let’s center discussions around empirical numbers and data, but allow no data to go without a human story that either confirms or questions it. Since we seek to empower, let’s find ways to invite the people who come to the table with least power (e.g., homeless, tenants at risk of eviction) to take ownership — but since we want to be kind, we also need to challenge them to not just blame those in power. // The typical hackathon model can be very prideful: “we’re gonna solve this massive problem in a weekend.” Instead, what if the goal was to help us participants learn more about what makes the problem hard, and build relationships that can guide and empower our future, more deliberate actions? Making can still form a core element, both as a way to explore the challenges of the problem at hand (e.g., let’s make an interactive game that illustrates what’s hard about housing policy) and as a way of trying out how each participant’s skills and background might contribute.