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Episode 16: Part 2 — Cultivating Strategic Imagination · America's Why Project

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: In order to reach for a different kind of world, people have to be able to imagine that a different kind of world is possible.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the America's Wide Podcast.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm your host, Matt Leventer.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to the second episode of our conversation with Professor Hari Hahn of Johns Hopkins University.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Hahn is the inaugural director, or was the inaugural director until this year, of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, which promotes inclusive civil discourse and democratic resilience.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: She stopped being director this year after she won a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation for her brilliant work on community organizing to advance causes of social justice.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: We talked last time about the very moving story of the Undivided Initiative in Cincinnati, which is at one of the nation's largest megachurches, evangelical megachurches called Crossroads.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we talked a little bit about some of the exciting successes that the Undivided Initiative had and also some of the challenges.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: I want to talk in this episode a little bit more about some of these challenges, but I want to frame it in terms of the broader question of what you call strategic imagination.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: You say in your book that action to advance this cause of social justice can be stymied by a lack of strategic imagination.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: What do you mean by strategic imagination and how can one cultivate it?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, well, thank you for inviting me back.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really um grateful for the opportunity to have this conversation.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this question about strategic imagination is something that I thought about a lot um as I was working on Undivided, but I've been thinking about in our politics more broadly.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what I mean by that is just this idea that one of the things that we know is that our community life, um, our civil society, the kind of fabric of our democracy, has been really hollowed out.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of those bonds of community have frayed over time for a variety of different reasons.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some of the struggles around racial injustice have, of course, been part of our history from the founding era, but our ability to deal with that has become even more challenged by the ways in which people have become polarized into these different camps, and that we've lost some of the innate ties that tie us together.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think part of what I saw in Undivided and that I see in our politics more broadly is that in order to reach for a different kind of world, people have to be able to imagine that a different kind of world is possible.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think for people who've never lived in a world in which we've had thick community ties and people have committed to doing the work of forging a common life together, they they can't even really imagine what that looks like.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so part of what Undivided had to do is first just kind of open up people's sense that, you know, what is doesn't have to be, right?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: You have to denaturalize people's sense of the status quo and open up people's imagination to say we can have a better world.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to live in a world in which certain people are accorded dignity and other people are not, right?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to live in a world in which we are so polarized or segregated from each other.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And just opening that up was, I think, the first is is often the first part of any kind of profound change effort, whether it's in the context of undivided or in the context of any other kind of social movement.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: So when you talk about strategic action, you distinguish that from what you call performative action.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you say that performative action is very different than action that leads to a genuine social transformation.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um what's the difference between the two?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: So one in my other work, a lot of the work that I do is is around trying to think about how we pull people off the sidelines and get them involved in public life.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that um I've written a lot about, and other people have too, is this idea that there's a real difference in my world, right?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the people like me who study these kinds of things, between um how we think about what we might call mobilizing versus organizing.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And mobilizing is about getting people to do a thing.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Organizing is about getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that distinction, in a way, can also be applied to this difference between what I might call performative action and more strategic action.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: That there are lots of things that I can do to get people to do a thing that might signal their willingness to tackle questions of diversity, of equity, racial injustice, like things like that.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: But that's different than equipping someone to become the kind of person who does what needs to be done when they recognize injustice in their communities.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that latter challenge is a much bigger challenge, right?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's about how do I equip people to develop the compass they need to see and understand and recognize injustice and then have the courage to act on it, not just once, but again and again and again, which is different than getting someone to sign a petition, give$5, show up for one event or something like that, which often, you know, can signal some kind of willingness, but often doesn't turn into much more.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the real challenges in our public life over the past half century, let's say, is that we have collapsed the distinction between mobilizing and organizing.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of the action that we call people into can often be performative in ways that don't actually tackle the problems that we care most about.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: So performative action signals to people around you that you're on the right side, that you're in the belief community, and so you can't be faulted for doing the wrong thing.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas strategic action is bringing people together around a shared goal, aiming at an important objective.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, one of the things uh yeah, I think that's right.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think another kind of other dimension about it is that, you know, performative action is often just expressive.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: People are upset about something, they want to take action that's gonna make them feel better, right?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a it's a vehicle for me to express my discontent or my outrage.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's different from strategic action that's about not just how do I express how upset I am about about whatever the situation is, but how do I actually move my community, my world towards some kind of solution?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: That, you know, what what's the strategy through which my action is going to actually move towards a solution that can solve the problem?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: So one important strategic action uh that the uh undivided community uh in Cincinnati worked toward in in 2016 was issue 44 that led to support for universal preschool in in Cincinnati.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: But that was not the only major initiative that the organization undertook.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh another important initiative was to try to take action to stop police violence against African Americans.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the uh undivided initiative was very successful in supporting issue 44, but unable to build a consensus within the broader crossroads community that that community should take serious action to stand up against police violence.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: How do you account for the success of the first initiative, the preschool initiative, and the challenges in confronting that second uh objective?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot in there.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: And um I think what you're referring to is the you know, the difference between kind of issue 44, which is a municipal ballot initiative that was designed to basically raise taxes that in a way that would fund and drive resources to the poorest communities in Cincinnati to support Universal Preschool for all kids, um, versus a statewide ballot initiative that Undivided also wanted to get become a part of, that was working on questions of police violence and incarceration.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And um they were, they got more support within Crossroads to work on the the on the universal preschool initiative than to work on the statewide initiative.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's some things that are embedded in that that have to do, that have to do with things that I think are that are outside the control of undivided.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: For example, the difference between a citywide initiative versus a statewide initiative.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Crossroads is a church that was grounded in one city in Ohio as opposed to the whole state.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um so there are some things like that that are part of that.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to minimize the complexity of everything that was going on.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's one piece.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Second, I think perhaps more directly related to your question, I think you're kind of asking, like, why is it that that Crossroads, a church, was willing to take one step but not keep not continue down um this path of justice?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one way to think about it would be that in in working on questions of justice, I think one thing that Undivided really came to understand is that it's like you create these microcosms of people that are grappling with and contending with questions of dignity and justice.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then progressively you're trying to expand that to go from interpersonal interactions towards systemic change.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you know what Undivided did is that it put people into a set of relationships in which they formed relationships across race with people who are interested in contending with these questions and grappling with these questions together, and then tried to invite those people into action in their church, in their city, in their state, right?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And as they progressively began to expand the scope of action, it got inevitably more complex, which I think is true, not only for undivided, but almost any of these kinds of programs that we see is that as you begin to um expand the scope of action, then it becomes inevitably more controversial, more contested.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's more um exogenous there are more exogenous political forces that you can't necessarily control.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's part of what happened with with the difference between between those two initiatives.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um And so I don't know that Undivided was particularly unique in contending, having to navigate those kinds of tensions.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's an ongoing struggle, I think, for anyone who's doing this work.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: I have a question related to storytelling.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and uh because this is a podcast about storytelling and how better stories can help us work together to tackle hard challenges.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Issue 44 was defined as a pro-justice initiative, that it's only just that everyone have the capacity to build out their own potential, and that the least among us, the poorest children, uh should have the same potential to get an education and to better themselves as everyone else.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: The initiative on police violence, my understanding from your book was defined as an anti-racism initiative.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things I believe about effective storytelling is that it's better to tell a story that's for something than a story that's just against something.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so that if you say we're for justice, we're for creating opportunity for children, that that in and of itself is going to be an easier sell than saying we're against racism, and racism lurks in many places.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think about the word anti-racism as an organizing objective?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, I guess I guess maybe I would um I would think about it slightly differently.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like I think it is true that you know in order to make change, we have to juxtapose hope and talent, right?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: People have to understand the talents, they also have to see a pathway towards change.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: There has to be some source of hope.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so if it's just we're against something and there's no clear alternative that's presented, I think that is true that that is a talent.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that often in talking about the different the success and failure of different political initiatives, we overemphasize the role of the message and under-emphasize the role of social communities in interpreting that message for the people who are a part of it.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what Undivided did in the issue 44 case is that they had been, this had been a multi-year initiative within their city to try to get universal preschool passed.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so when it finally came to this like municipal ballot initiative in 2016, Crossroads animated a lot of people through Undivided to get involved in that effort.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: What you had was this messaging that was happening absolutely in the citywide level around this campaign, many by many people who are not involved in Crossroads or Undivided, but it was being interpreted for the people who were in Undivided and in Crossroads through the relationships and the community they had built through that program.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so what that meant was that the message was anchored in practice, in a set of relationships in people.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that opened up, I think, a different kind of understanding and complexity that's hard when we stay at the level of message.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I think part of what happened at the in the statewide initiative is that there wasn't, you know, they they just weren't as grounded in that relationship between story and practice, you know.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that like that, you know, while hope and talent is also really important, that juxtaposition of story and practice is is equally as important.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: And and also there was strong solidarity within the group that participated in Undivided, but also some frictions between the people who were within the undivided group and the broader uh congregation of crossroads.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that was true throughout all the work that they were doing, you know, is that um, you know, see the first time they did undo they ran undivided, it had 1,200 people from the church community sign up, which is which is a lot.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, at the time I think the church was like a 28,000-person church, and so it's you know, 1,200 is a lot of people, but still a small percentage of 28,000 people.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so there was always some you know tension, you know, particularly because Crossroads is a community that holds a lot of political diversity, you know, and so there's a real range of views within that community.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in the in the time remaining to us, I wonder if we could step back and just take stock.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'd I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about what the biggest successes of the Undivided Initiative have been and what have been the big biggest challenges that it's faced, and and how that has taught you important things about your own work as a social scientist.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then I'd like to hear a little bit more about the P3 research lab that you direct at Johns Hopkins University.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: So so let's let's just start a little bit about the bottom line.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: What are the what are the key lessons of this story of the Undivided Initiative in Cincinnati?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so just to kind of give a little bit of context for people is um so Undivided started as a program within the Crossroads Church.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: And as Crossroads often does, so this is not that uh this is not unusual for them to do this, they will incubate programs that start within the church, and then they'll spin those programs off so that they can begin to work with other church communities.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what happened to Undivided, is that it started as a program within the church, it then spun off and became its own nonprofit, and now works with a variety of church communities, mostly church communities around the country.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: They've also worked with non-church communities.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: They did um, for example, they did an effort in the Miami Township of Ohio, where they worked with the police force and basically ran a secular version of the undivided program with city leaders in in that community.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so they've they've brought the program to a lot of other places.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think, in terms of the biggest learnings that came out of it, is really a learning that I think is true across a lot of the work that I've done, which is basically this idea that how we do the work affects what we can accomplish together.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's something that we often miss about social change, social movements, civil society, democracy.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's that we're just kind of asking questions about like, did people do a thing?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Did people show up?
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Did people do this thing?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And what I learned from Undivided is that the micro practices of how they invited people into action, how they created communities of belonging, what they asked people to do, all of that made a big difference in what they were able to accomplish together.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not, again, that they had a perfect formula that they've then been able to like take and share with other churches around the country or anything like that.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: But it's more that they created a context in which people could engage in a shared struggle to answer questions about justice and dignity and race and and so on.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that was, I think, one really important lesson that I think about it.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think is continues to be a success of Undivided, is in in trying to think about how they cultivate and curate those spaces for as many people as possible.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of the ongoing struggle, it's it's I think a little bit what we talked about in the previous episode, which is that um, you know, Troy Jackson, who's now the exact he's an evangelical pastor who's one of the co-founders of Undivided and is now the executive director of Undivided, you know, he sort of says this idea that like, if you think doing the work of race is going to be easy, you're just wrong.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's just no way in which we're gonna take something that's so entrenched in an in America and then snap our fingers and fix the problem.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, Undivided, just like any other program that's committed to doing this work and and doing the work in a way that tackles systemic challenges, you know, is is is you know, they're at the center of a lot of political crosswinds, they're at the center of a lot of um, you know, all these different kinds of debates and so on that are happening in the broader world, you know, also kind of happen um within the program and they're having to grapple with and and and navigate their way through that um just like anyone else's.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, again, that just kind of brings me back to the idea that part of what I've really come to respect is that a lot of what it takes is a commitment to staying in the struggle and figuring out for these answers for which we don't have formulaic solutions, um, how do we help you know create settings in which people will develop the compass they need to constantly find the solution that's necessary for that moment.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Hari, that's a really inspirational answer.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I commend your book and all of your other work too, our listeners, because it is such important work.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: As I read it, I I said, this is really a novelistic kind of uh story that you're telling that really draws the reader in.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a really wonderful read and and it you share very profound lessons.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: I know that even though it's July when we're uh uh recording this episode, you are a very busy person and you need to rush off to another meeting.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: I would though, before we let you go, hear just a little bit about your work at the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins, which aims to make people's participation in public life possible, probable, and powerful.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: What do you do in the P3 Research Lab and can our listeners get involved?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so at the P3 Lab, um, you know, we talk about, you know, we want participation to be possible, probable, and powerful, which means that people have to be able to participate, they have to want to participate, and then it has to actually matter.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so a lot of what we do is try to think about how do we use research and learning in a way that sharpens the ability of people and communities on the ground to do better and more fulfilling work, to pull people off the sidelines and scaffold their engagement in a way that translates people's actions into the kind of influence they want over the world they want to create.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we what we envision, I mean, the world that I want to live in is a world in which all people feel like they can be architects of their own future.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think right now the big challenge that we have is that some people feel like they can and most people feel like they can't.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so part of what we're trying to do in P3 is we work in partnership with constituency-based organizations, movements, networks on the ground, and essentially put research and learning around their work to try to understand how we can sharpen their ability to do that, do that work better.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so we are always open to talking to people who want to partner on trying to do learning in a way that generates lessons for us on how we can make participation for all people possible, probable, and powerful.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: Havrihan, thank you so much for your time and thank you for your very, very important work.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's been really a pleasure to talk with you today.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate it.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: You're listening to the America's Why Podcast.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: Our music is by James Fernando.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: For more information and to join the conversation, please visit our website at America's Why Project.com.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: See you next week.