By Esther Farmer

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: Journal of the Community Development Society, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2005

Improvisational performance is a useful tool to help practitioners and participants reshape our
understanding of community development practice. This reshaping can have a dramatic effect on
community building. The performance framework supports community members and community
developers to create new “stages” (or environments) on which to perform new un-scripted plays
that build on positive improvisational processes. These processes open up the possibility of new
relationships even among former antagonists. In this approach, the community is seen as an
“improvisational performance ensemble” that is always growing, always changing, and always
engaged in discovering new ways to perform relationships without a commitment to a pre-conceived
outcome or product. Similarly, community development professionals can take on a role more akin to
theatre directors who help to set the stage so that community members can work together to be open,
to welcome the unexpected, and to discover new ways to build and create together. In this case study,
the author describes the community development process that took place in a large housing project
in Brooklyn, New York. The improvisational performance approach helped to re-ignite the creative
capacity of the community to end the widespread violence that was destroying it.

INTRODUCING THE PERFORMANCE FRAMEWORK
Community building is about putting people together in such a way that they can create
new conversations, new alliances, and new possibilities. As theorists and practitioners, we
must constantly challenge our previous assumptions about what we think we know. This “lack
of knowingness” is increasingly recognized in the literature on complexity theory and social
relations, but we have not learned to use the discoveries of the unexpected and unplanned
for in community development practice. New possibilities that present themselves can
be used beneficially by framing community building as “improvisational performance.”
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how reshaping community development practice
as improvisational performance can dramatically improve even the most challenging of
community development situations.

Conceptualizing community development as improvisational performance allows
development professionals to step outside their official roles and function as “performance
directors.” In this capacity they can improvise together with community members to create
an innovative community “stage.” Actors, who might never otherwise work together, can
engage in meaningful conversations by improvising on this new stage in which the outcome
is to be discovered. Unique solutions emerge from everything they have to give including
their deep cultural knowledge of the community and their willingness to go beyond their
familiar roles to create new ways of building relationships.

Jnanabrata Bhattacharyya (2004, pp.10-11) defined community development as
“solidarity” and “agency” in which solidarity is defined broadly as human connectedness,
and agency is defined as the capacity of human beings to act and change their environment.
This all-embracing view is useful and reflects the values in this paper. The important issue
for me, and indeed all development practitioners, is in understanding how to advance the
continuous creation of solidarity and agency.

The improvisational method described in this paper is based on the theoretical and
practical work developed over the last thirty years at the East Side Institute for Group and
Short Term Psychotherapy. The Institute is an international training center for new approaches
to community building. The cultural, performatory approach that has been developed at the
Institute serves as the basis for several large-scale adult and youth development projects
nationally, and has informed and influenced my community development work in a large
housing project in Brooklyn, New York. The site of the project, like many in urban areas in
the United States, was riddled with violence, most often associated with gangs competing
for control of drug markets. The project was known for the frequent murders that devastated
families and the community at large.

This paper tells the story of how the framework of improvisational performance
created the environment in which extraordinary conversations developed among unlikely
allies, a truce was negotiated, and conflict declined. These accomplishments did not
happen because of any one person, but they were the result of creating a context in which
all participants could improvise a new performance without knowing what the outcome
would be. The value of improvisational performance is that professionals, community
members, and activists can create an environment to work together to be open, to welcome
the unexpected, and to lead without a commitment to a particular pre-conceived product
or outcome. This paper first tells the story based on my personal experience, then explores
the theoretical underpinnings of the community development tool of improvisational
performance, and finally elaborates it with a series of vignettes that illustrate some of the
different components of the approach in this specific context. The paper concludes with an
overview of the methodology.

EVEN THE PIZZA MAN DELIVERS
From 1993 to 1999, I was the manager of Maple Houses (fictional name). Maple is
a large housing project of 30 buildings and about 4000 residents in a very poor part of
Brooklyn, New York. Like many New York projects since the 1970s, Maple was plagued
by violent competition among gangs over the drug trade. Shootouts were all too common. In
order to work in the project, contractors and maintenance personnel had to develop an uneasy
truce with young people involved in the drug trade. It was joked that when the police heard
shooting coming from Maple, they mysteriously disappeared. Parents were afraid to let their
children play in project playgrounds.

It must be said that Maple, and in fact all New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)
projects, have stable populations. This stability differs from public housing in many other
U.S. cities whose population is much more transient. Most residents have lived in Maple for
many years. The population includes people on welfare, the working poor, working stable,
and fixed-income retirees. Maple residents go to work in the morning, come home at night, raise children, and go shopping. Approximately 25% of the project residents received public
assistance (this percentage was a little higher than other projects in the city). There was and
continues to be a long waiting list to get an apartment at Maple despite the violence. Still, the
project was known as one of the most challenging in the huge New York City public housing
community of 345 projects,2 and when I arrived in 1993, the urgency for “doing something”
about the violence was pressing.

At the end of 1994, it appeared that the violence ended suddenly. But it actually was
not sudden in any sense; the relative peace was hard won and the result of a complicated,
uneven, and messy process. The process took nearly two years and involved residents of the
housing project, staff, police, area churches, merchants, local gangs, local schools, and local
elected officials. What actually happened was that over the preceding two years, a new stage
was created on which a new improvisational play took place—a play that had no script and
no pre-ordained result. Community members began to engage each other without knowing
what the outcome would be. Within this process, the warring gangs found a way to have
conversations that ended the conflict.

The story of this cooperation is important to explore. The agreement between the gangs
came out of a community building process that created new conversations among diverse
elements of the neighborhood. Many key actors in this truce would formerly not even be
in the same room together, much less have a conversation. The conversations involved the
community at large demanding that the gangs stop the violence, which at that time was taking
so many lives that it became intolerable to everyone, including the young people involved.
The gangs responded to the community’s demand to end the violence because the leadership
of the community included them in the ongoing collective effort to create new ways of doing
things at Maple. This collaboration was an important aspect explaining why the leadership of
the gangs respected the leadership of the tenants. For the first time, they were performing on
the stage that they had created together.

Imagine this kind of conversation. The head of the Tenant Patrol approaches a former
gang leader who is just out of prison, and who is attempting to get a job with the contractors
working at Maple. She asks him what he thinks of the recent death of a young man, the sixth
death in several months. He says that it’s terrible, he knows the young man and his family,
and he feels that something needs to be done. She asks him what he thinks is possible. He
suggests that he talk to some of his people. She says, “Great,” and asks him to let her know
what comes out of this conversation. She tells him she is interested in helping in any way she
can to facilitate more of these discussions.

These kinds of conversations represented the ordinary and extraordinary performances
that changed everything at Maple. They originated the pact between the gangs. The
conversations were the result of inclusive improvisations that led to new relationships
created and performed on an innovative stage that was constantly being built and rebuilt
by the participants. The Tenants Association and the Tenant Patrol brokered a meeting
of rival gangs through several contacts like this young man. The gangs agreed to stop
the violence and to stop dealing drugs in the project. A tenant patrol was organized in
every building. The violence ended. Children were back in the playgrounds. Residents
came outside on project grounds to talk to neighbors. The city started investing in the
area again, constructing a new playground and initiating a program called Operation
Commitment. The major media printed stories about the changes in the community. The
Maple community was able to create the conditions to express their collective power
by drastically reducing the violence in their community. Where once no one would
deliver pizza at Maple, as one newspaper reported, “Even the Pizza Man Delivered”
(Elliot 1998). How did it happen?

IMPROVISATIONAL PERFORMANCE IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE
In my experience, community development professionals in the field are often encouraged
to downplay their role and to value community members as the real experts. The intention
is to address the problem of professional arrogance and to support professionals to work
towards capacity-building, as opposed to imposing top-down solutions. The implication here
is that what the professional doesn’t know, the members of the community do. Although there
is no doubt that members of the community know all kinds of things about their community
that a newly hired consultant (or assigned manager) can’t possibly know, clearly what they
don’t know is what to do about the problems in their neighborhood. So from the start, both
community members and professionals are in a similar box, i.e., they “don’t know.” Far from
being a problem that needs to be covered up, a “not knowing” posture is exactly what is
needed to create something new.

The Russian developmental and educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky was explicit
in showing that children learn and develop by doing what they don’t know how to do
(Vygotsky, 1978 p.89; 1987, pp.177-212). Vygotsky showed that children learn by being
supported to perform ahead of themselves (1987, p.213). For example, they learn to speak
in the social environment created with their parents in which their parents relate to them as
speakers before they (children) even know what speaking is. In like manner, when adults
learn something new, they have to go a little beyond themselves to learn it. More precisely,
adults have to create environments with others—what Vygotsky called “zones of proximal
development” (ZPDs)—that make such performing and development possible. These ZPDs
are the environments in which people experience the social nature of their existence and the
power of collective creative activity (1987, pp. 208-9). Performance is a tool that helps us
create these developmental environments.

Performance as a developmental tool, while radical in its implications, is not
completely unprecedented. The anthropologists Arnold van Gennep (1960), Victor
Turner (1984), and Brian Sutton-Smith (1972) identified performance as an activity,
which could result in individual and social change. They called it “liminal” activity,
that is, activity that passes through (or beyond) the threshold of traditional or
conventional behavior. Turner expanded the concept of liminal to explain what he
called “social drama,” that is, the transformative activities of social groups, whether
they represent inter-clan or tribal disputes, civil war, or revolutions in modern nationstates.
Turner identified performance as that activity that allowed social groups to go
beyond established relations and old ways of doing things. Sutton-Smith emphasized
the inherent subversiveness of performance. He suggested that individuals and groups
had much to learn from the “disorderliness” of performance, which he called “the
source of new culture” (1972, p. 28).

The centrality of performance in everyday life was first pointed out by Nicolas
Evreinoff, a Russian actor, director, playwright, composer, musician, and theorist. In
his book, The Theatre in Life, (1927, pp. 22-23), Evreinoff identified performance,
which he called “theatricality,” as a human instinct that allowed for transformation.
Man has one instinct about which, in spite of its inexhaustible vitality, neither history
nor psychology nor aesthetics have so far said a single work . . . . I have in mind the
instinct of transformation, the instinct of opposing to images received from without
images arbitrarily created from within, the instinct of transmuting appearances found
in nature into something else, an instinct which clearly reveals its essential character
in the conception of what I call theatricality . . . . The instinct of theatricalization
which I claim the honor to have discovered may be best described as the desire to be
‘different,’ to do something that is ‘different,’ to imagine oneself in surroundings that
are ‘different’ from the commonplace surroundings of our everyday life. It is one of the mainsprings of our existence, of that which we call progress, of change, evolution
and development in all departments of life. We are all born with this feeling in our
soul, we are all essentially theatrical beings.

In addition to Evreinoff’s work, best known to community developers, is the work of
Augosto Boal. Boal uses theatre in community development contexts by focusing on the
possibilities of theatre as a social change agent. Boal posits that we are all actors because
we act, and we are spectators because we observe. So, we are all “spec-actors.” Boal uses
theatricality to help people become more expressive and to grow emotionally. He uses
theatre as a technique for a particular goal. He teaches participants, for example, to use
theatricality and language to learn to be more expressive in the way that professional actors
are expressive (1992, p. 1).

In a further development, Newman and Holzman extended Vygotsky’s language
adding the term “tool for result.” Theatricality as Boal understands it is a “tool for result.”
In the improvisational approach, we practice “tool and result” (Newman, Holzman, 1993,
pp.127-132). Tool and result creates a unity. It is not instrumentalist. In the example of
Maple Houses, I did not say to participants, “We are now going to do a play about Maple
that will accomplish the following result.” I began to relate to the activity of people in
the Maple community as a community performance. This perspective changed what was
possible for us to do. Our activity was improvisational. It was process driven. Once you say,
“Let’s do this to get a particular result,” you limit possible outcomes. The improvisational
approach described in this paper allowed us to build with what we had without being
defined by the result.

ACTORS, PERFORMANCE, AND IMPROVISATION
The social therapeutic approach developed at the East Side Institute posits that our
human capacity to perform is critical to our human capacity to grow. For us, human
activity is performance. When people think about performance, they usually think
about film, drama, or theatre. Most of us understand performance as what happens on
a stage when an audience gathers to watch actors act out or perform certain dramatized
roles in a theater. This acting space or “stage” provides a particular kind of environment
conducive to the performance. The social therapeutic approach sees human beings as
primarily performers who are constantly creating performance spaces (or environments)
upon which ensembles (groups, teams, communities) create the millions of improvised
scenes (and some scripted ones) of our everyday lives. Human beings, as they develop,
have the capacity to create stages (environments) throughout life, and we have the capacity
to perform our lives on these stages and in these environments in new ways.

The language of the theatre does a better job than the language of psychology of
capturing the fact that people are socially connected and always creating things together. In
arguing for a new kind of psychology, Karl Scheibe says: “A psychology of everyday life
should enable us to understand—if not predict and control—the unfolding dramas around
us. Such a psychology, I propose, must be enriched by the incorporation of the principles
and the language of the theater” (2000, p. 9).

It is useful to envision the work of community building in a similar way to that of
improvisational ensemble building. Every activity in the ensemble (community) has
an impact on the overall development of the ensemble (community), and everyone
involved has responsibility for strengthening the ensemble (community performance).
Community building is a collective, creative process—of people relating, conversing,
performing, and bringing new social units into existence and at the same time, sharing
a collective commitment to their sustainability; a sustainability that demands a
commitment to continuous growth.

Too often, low-income people in inner city communities are related to and relate to
themselves as “fixed” in the sense of lacking the capacity to develop. People see themselves
as “broken” and in need of experts to “repair” them. Often young people, especially young
people of color, are related to as an instance of a label or category. These categories often
become so calcified and entrenched that they are seen as almost impossible to transcend.
Performance is one way out of this rigidified understanding. Lois Holzman states:
The problematic we are dealing with in contemporary culture is that we tend to see
experience and respond to people as products (identities, labels, and members of a
category) rather than as ongoing process. We see ourselves and others as “who we are”
(products) and not as simultaneously “who we are” and “who we are becoming.” Yet,
each one of us is, at every moment, both being and becoming (2004, p. 2).

Performance helps people see their capacity to be other than who they think they are,
other than who they have been, and other than how they have been related to, all critical
components if we are serious about seeking empowerment. Performance is a powerful
tool that offers ways for communities to grow. When communities develop, they do so
by “becoming” or going beyond themselves. When a community discovers its power, it
discovers that it can do something it didn’t know it could do. It discovers that there is such
a thing as power, and that the community can wield it. Denzin observes the multifaceted
nature of performance:
A performance is an instance of a politics of action, a circulation of power. A performance
is a de-centering of agency and person through movement, disruption, action that
incessantly contests, breaks, and remakes. Personal narrative and personhood are
constituted in the moments of performance. Every performance becomes a way of
questioning the status quo, and even as performance reproduces the status quo, it does
so in novel ways, in ways special to the performer (2001, p. 20).
It turns out that performing—being who we are, and other than who we are—is vital to our
emotional, social and intellectual lives.

The role of expertise (community development professionals) serves to support
community members and communities to create environments in which it is possible
for them to perform creatively. This supportive role differs considerably from that of the
“expert” knowing and imposing solutions, fixing problems, or scrambling to do damage
control. The improvisational framework is not a problem-solving model. The approach
begins from the premise that community development processes cannot be, nor should
they be, controlled. In their community development work, Ronald Hustedde and Betty
King (2002, p. 37) discuss the way that emotions in community life are not controllable
and how chaos and messiness are part of community life. The community must create
their own processes from the bottom up. It is a messy, chaotic process. The performatory
approach uses everything the community has including the skills, anger, emotionality, pain,
joy, playfulness, history, etc., to initiate and sustain its creative growth.

WHO IS IN CONTROL?

There is substantial difference between the imposition of authority such as a police
action that rounds up drug dealers and criminals and temporarily reduces violence and an
activated community empowered collectively to create the kind of community people want
to live in. The imposition of authority is nothing new in societies, and although it may result
in a welcome improvement, it is not particularly conducive to growth. Nor is it a long-term
solution. Everyone assumes that the violence will be back. Solutions that are coerced by
institutions of authority create the conditions for the community to remain dependent on
the police (or other authoritative institution) to take care of a problem. In addition, Michael
Briand notes that coercion is ineffective when imposed as an outside control.

Coercion generally is a weak deterrent of undesirable behavior. It teaches a person
only to avoid getting caught. The control that others exercise through (coercion)
makes it unnecessary for the punished person himself to learn to evaluate his conduct
accordingly. Coercion disposes him to behave similarly whenever he thinks he can get
away with doing so (1999, p. 166).

On the other hand, the reduction of violence that comes out of the collective activity
of the community is an example of power that comes from the bottom up. It reflects a new
kind of culture that grows out of a new kind of environment—an environment in which the
community performs its capacity to take responsibility for itself. This culture represents
an important shift from the sometimes victimized activity (or non-activity) of waiting for
the government and/or other institution or “outside scriptwriter” to come to the rescue.
The bottom-up collective activity of the community creates developmental conditions for
everyone who participates. “Who is in control” as a question is transformed. The question
then becomes, “What’s going to help develop the community?”

CONSTRUCTING IMPROVISATIONAL PERFORMANCES

Improvisational performance depends on context. The very nature of improvisation
is impossible to generalize in a formalistic way. The beauty of improvisation as a tool is
that it never stops giving. Any small change in how things are done or what people do is
an opportunity for a new improvisation. It is useful to understand how actors are taught
improvisational skills. They are trained to relate to what the previous speaker says as a
“good offer.” In other words, each speaker accepts what the previous speaker has said and
builds upon it. The key here is building. A good improviser uses everything to build upon.

Much has been written, particularly in social work and psychology, about the need
to create safety and trust when creating environments for people to take risks. In the
performance framework, and in my experience of its practice in community development
settings, when people are placed together in a new way on a new stage, there is no trust.
It’s risky business from the start. The environment is not necessarily safe. Neither safety
nor trust is a precondition for improvisation.

THE IMPROVISATIONAL APPROACH

In the following sections, I discuss several components of the Maple case that may
be helpful to illustrate the methodology. The community development professional here
is akin to a theatre director, helping to set the stage and to put performers together in new
situations to create a performatory environment. The improvisational plot cannot be known
in advance, but when all the actors are on the stage and begin to talk in new ways, the plot
thickens with new possibility.

Imagine this stage setting: The Tenant Association (TA) leader has had many
conversations with young people in gangs. They say they want to stop the violence but they
can’t talk to each other. The TA leader, who is not part of the fight among the gangs, talks
to former gang leaders who are also not part of the fighting, and have credibility among the
young people in the community. Together they set up a meeting. Here is a new stage setting
never before attempted in this community. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss how to
accomplish what everyone says they want—an end to the violence killing young people at
Maple. Everyone is uncomfortable on this stage. It is a brand new environment. You can
feel the tension. No one knows what to do. What they have in common is their desire to end
the violence. They are now creative partners in a new dialogue.

In this situation at Maple, the community was demanding a new performance from the
young people, i.e. that they talk to each other to end the violence. The young people were also asking for a new performance from the adult leaders, that is, to include them. There
was no agreement or hidden agenda that the meeting was called to build trust. People were
asked to perform differently. The new performance was developmental. Participants learned
that it was possible to do something new even with all the distrust, fear, and antagonism.

The creative process at Maple was based on many, indeed hundreds of, conversational
performances that kept building one off of another. The vignettes that follow stand out in
the process of the residents creating and re-creating the Maple community. They are not
presented as steps or stages (as a temporal concept), but as examples of how to use the
methodology of improvisational performance in the context of community development,
given the conditions of this community at a given time.

SUPPORTING EMERGENT LEADERSHIP

In the New York City Housing Authority, approximately 30% of the staff of 15,000
lives in public housing. There is a deep connection between the staff and the residents of
the projects. Housing employees are looked up to, and a housing job is considered very
desirable among the young people living in the projects. Yet, there is a pervasive culture
of blame. The staff blames the tenants for vandalism, and the tenants blame the staff for
not doing their jobs, being lazy, and looking out for their own interests. When I arrived at
Maple Houses, the staff was demoralized, the residents were constantly fighting among
themselves; the staff and the residents had a very tense relationship.

In addition, the Tenant Association (TA) was ineffectual and nonfunctional. Most of
the “leaders” were the “usual suspects,” tied to the local political machine. The environment
was hostile to new ways of doing things, and there was almost no participation at community
meetings. There had not been a democratic election for the TA in several years and the
group that ran the TA was so corrupt that the local public housing administration took the
unusual step of deposing them.

As I began working at Maple and building relationships with the residents, staff, local
police, and other community players, it became clear to me that there was a tremendous
vacuum in leadership, and new leadership was needed. My task was to be ready to jump
on the opportunities that appeared at any moment. In improvisational performance work,
everyone must listen carefully so that they can use all opportunities to build on what the
previous performer said before them. It is the same principle in community development
work. CD workers must be ready to hear and support any emergent leadership openings.
The recognition, identification, and support of emerging community leadership is one of
the most important jobs of community development work, and the director needs to be ever
attentive to supporting emerging leadership wherever and whenever it appears.

The two most important leaders that came forward organically were two longtime
woman residents. One was rumored to be a “troublemaker” by the previous administration.
Her son was murdered a few years before in what was assumed to be drug infighting.
She came into my office one day, angry about the lack of community participation and
democracy in the TA. I agreed with her and asked her what, if anything, she wanted to do
about it. I could not “fix” this problem. From the beginning of our relationship, I related to
her as an agent of change.

The other woman was providing leadership on a daily basis in her building, which
was considered the most drug-infested in the project (although paradoxically one of the
cleanest—an asset we were able to use.) She came to me with several other residents and
told me that she wanted to set up a 24-hour tenant patrol. I said, “Great,” and asked her
what she needed from me. We immediately got to work. She organized the building, set
up the patrol, and enlisted the help of former gang leaders who were interested in doing
something new in the community.

I introduced these two important actors to each other, and together we made plans
to expand the Patrol to the rest of the development. This was a creative activity, a
community improvisation. No one had tried this before in Maple. No one knew if
it would work; nor did we know what the outcome would be. We started with the
appreciative process of asking questions about our assets. Who was already providing
leadership in each building? Whom did the residents respect and listen to? Which
members of the staff had the best relationships with the residents? In hundreds of
similar settings, we found that people were able to act if the community developer as
director empowered them to improvise and helped them “cast” the actors and procure
the props they needed.

PREPARING THE STAGE

Community developers continually create stages for action, but often these stages are
not conducive to creative innovation. Improvisation is particularly powerful when people
agree to be put together in a previously improbable or unthinkable situation. The situational
context gives the participants the space to do something different and to experiment,
explore, and play with new kinds of conversations.

After the TA election, I gave the TA president space in the management office for her
to work. This was quite controversial. While it is customary to give the TA President space,
it is not considered good practice to keep her too near the employees. I gave her the space
in the office because I wanted her to see the kinds of issues that the staff dealt with every
day, and I wanted the staff to see how hard she worked on behalf of Maple. If she were
different or my staff were different, this might not have worked, but part of organizing
environments (creating stages) is to use what you have, particularly the strengths of a
situation, and this was one of the strengths. This type of strength based inquiry and activity
was repeated at Maple over and over.

The TA President had to perform in a situation that required her to go beyond herself. She
was developing her own capacity by virtue of having access to a professional management
environment where she was invited and expected to succeed. She learned to write grants, to
create tenant programs, and to appreciate the difficulty of the staff’s roles. Both she and the
staff were not only in the environment, they were constantly engaged in collectively creating
the environment. This environment-building included handling the initial resistance by some
of the staff to her presence in the office. As this resistance began to dissipate, everyone became
engaged in the activity of building the ensemble performance.

Both the office staff and the TA president learned a tremendous amount from seeing
each other work every day. They began to rely on each other for their strengths and for the
ways in which they could help each other. The staff learned how powerful it was to have
a tenant leader on their side. She could advocate for resources the staff could not advocate
for. For example, when there were staff shortages, the TA President would use her influence
to get staff for us.

One interesting relationship that emerged during this process was between the TA
President and the project’s Superintendent who was a working class Italian American man.
Under normal circumstances they might never have spoken. She had a history as a Black
militant; he was from Howard Beach, a neighborhood that had been rocked by allegations
of violence against young Black people. They weren’t “supposed” to be close, yet their
relationship blossomed to one of respect and support. She took the opportunity to praise him
at every tenant meeting and in her dealings with the “higher ups” in the agency. For his part,
he often sought her advice and counsel on difficult situations.

I helped create a variety of stages in which joint activity between the tenants and
the workers could emerge. I set up a series of building meetings, to discuss what the building caretakers needed from the tenants and what the tenants needed from the
caretakers. At first, I attended the meetings so that the caretakers would not be beaten
up. Sometimes the tenants were protective of the caretakers, particularly the skilled
ones. In these cases, the antagonism was among the tenants themselves who were
often angry at each other about destructive tenants. After the initial round of meetings,
I trained the supervisors of the caretakers, and they went to the meetings. My goal was
to build the relationship between the tenants and workers so that I was not needed as
the intermediary. At our staff supervisory meetings, we worked on how to deal with
difficult situations that came up at these meetings. As the TA President and the Tenant
Patrol supervisor got closer to the workers, they began to go to the meetings in place of
the supervisors. The workers felt supported at tenant meetings by the tenant leadership.
This was a substantial change in the culture; it was a new script, created by community
participants themselves.

THE ENSEMBLE OF ALL: AN INCLUSIONARY PERSPECTIVE

Although there is general agreement on the importance of inclusion in community
work, there is also a certain not-so-subtle bias, particularly in traditional institutions that
some people are simply “unacceptable” to work with. There are unspoken rules that
stipulate that certain people are acceptable to talk to and others are not. At Maple Houses,
we broke these barriers. New conversations were possible because there was no “litmus
test” to determine participation.

The “good/bad” dichotomy that is so prevalent in our culture is a barrier to change
and often prevents communities from organizing all of their strengths. If you start from the
premise that drug users and dealers are all “bad,” and you should only work with people
who are “good” or “squeaky clean,” you severely limit the possibilities. The new leaders
emerging were not 100% clean. How clean can anyone be in a very poor neighborhood?
The culture that promotes the dichotomy of the “evil drug dealers” vs. the “good people”
is not effective, because human beings living in communities, particularly communities
where the drug trade touches everyone, are simply not one or the other.

When people starting seeing these new conversations, they began to sense that
something new was going on. The “usual suspects” were unable to stifle every new thought;
there was an extended dialogue occurring between management and tenants. The staff of
the project and the workers began to act in joint activities, and young people were brought
into a process in the community. There were conversations going on that never occurred
before with people who formerly wouldn’t even be seen together.

NEW RELATIONSHIPS - JOBS, CONTRACTORS, RESIDENTS

The construction industry in New York is composed mostly of a White workforce
because of historical discrimination in the building trades although the residents of Maple
Houses (and other projects) are mostly Black and Hispanic. A common sight in New York
City projects is a mostly white construction crew, working among an all Black or Hispanic
resident population. To integrate the trades, Black and Hispanic workers organized into
“Coalitions” beginning in the 1970s to force contractors to hire Black and Hispanic
workers. Their tactic was to show up at major job sites physically to prevent the mostly
white crew from working until the contractors agreed to hire some of their members.4

Coalitions are familiar organizations in projects where large construction is occurring.
During my time in Maple, many modernization contracts were going on such as installing
new roofs, new steam pipes, a new community center, and new grounds landscaping. The
Coalitions appeared at the project every morning to stop work from proceeding. Their
appearance caused tension between the Coalitions and the project tenants because the much wanted work was being delayed. In addition, Coalitions demanded that their own people be
hired but project youth were sometimes not members. The competition for jobs was intense
and caused a lot of conflict. When the Coalitions first appeared at Maple, the TA President
had no idea what to do with these “outsiders” threatening violence. She was in a situation
that was “way beyond her.” She didn’t know the history of Coalitions or of construction
issues. All she knew was that young people in the project were desperate for jobs.

This “scene”—with the actors being the Coalition, project youth, tenants, contractors,
and management is common in housing projects. It usually is dealt with coercively. Police
take action against the Coalitions that often causes more conflict. Typically, one group of
Blacks and Hispanics represents the Coalitions while another group of Blacks and Hispanics
represents young people from the projects who also were seeking jobs. At the same time,
tenants were demanding that the much needed work be done. In such an adversarial and
tense “drama,” people have gotten hurt.

The tenant leadership was in a situation they had no idea how to handle, and it was from
this “unknowing” condition that a new community performance was created. I had many
years of experience working in New York City projects, and I had dealt with Coalitions
before. I pointed out that the reason for the Coalition’s existence was to support young
Black and Hispanic workers to get into the trades. Some coalition members knew local
youth, and I suggested that they be brought into the process.

I proposed that the Tenant Association include the Coalitions as a partner of the
community. We came up with a new tactic whereby the TA and some project young people
talked to the Coalition leaders to build a relationship and get their support to hire project
youth. This proposal was unusual. Coalitions are some of those “unacceptable” groups
considered “dangerous” and not to be included. No one knew what these new conversations
(performances) would produce, if anything. It was a new improvisation. It involved skills
such as negotiation, compromise, and listening. The TA leaders engaged in this process
that was beyond them, and they learned what they needed to know to become more savvy,
more sophisticated, and skilled leaders. After several conversations with the leaders of the
Coalitions, a bond was formed. Coalition leaders agreed to work with the tenants.

At the same time, as the tenants were talking to the Coalitions, I invited the TA President
and Vice President to meetings with the contractors and supported the tenants’ insistence
that contractors hire Maple youth. According to the law (Section 3 of the building code),
contractors were required to hire project residents, but the law was poorly understood and
enforced. I encouraged the TA and the contractors to meet to set up a hiring procedure that
went through the tenants. The contractors claimed they couldn’t work with the tenants
because they were under pressure from the Coalitions to hire their people. They were quite
surprised to discover that the issue had disappeared because of the community building we
had accomplished with the Coalitions. They were used to the “script” of either paying off
or hiring a few Coalition people. They were not used to this new “scene” of working in an
organized way with the Tenants Association. The TA was able to work with the contractors
directly, and the contractors had no more excuses for failing to hire project youth.

EXPANDING THE PLOT: YOUNG PEOPLE AS COMMUNITY BUILDERS

Many young people were involved in the drug trade because that was what there was
to be involved in. The Section 3 issue was so important because young people wanted real
jobs, and they were demanding them. In the interest of continuing to create new kinds of
conversations, I decided to meet with the young people to discuss the implementation of
the “Section 3” law.

While the media was invested in demonizing “drug dealers,” these young people were
the sons and daughters of the tenants at Maple. The activity of meeting with the young people was an example of putting people together in a new way to see what could be
created, to develop a new performance. When I decided to do this, I had no idea what
would happen. I only knew it would create a new conversation. The value of the meeting
was not in the content of what we discussed, although that might have been helpful to those
present, but in the fact that we did it. The young people were angry about the lack of jobs,
they were tired of the violence, and they were tired of seeing their friends die.

In my opinion, the young people were just waiting for leadership that did not impose
their own ideas or threaten the young people with police action but instead included them
in the process. The tenant leaders let the young people lead by encouraging them to organize
their friends. The young people were asked to perform beyond themselves and become
community organizers. Together, the tenant leadership and the young people created the
environment that made the pact between the gangs possible.

The new TA Board became staunch supporters of the young people’s demand for jobs
from the contractors. I helped them as much as possible within the limitations of my role as
manager. I was direct with the TA leadership and the young people about those limitations,
which helped build credibility and trust. I didn’t tell them what to do, I didn’t insist that
I “knew better,” but because of the ongoing process of building our relationship, I taught
them everything I knew about community organizing. They wanted my opinion. Sometimes
they took my advice, sometimes they didn’t, and vice versa. The content and outcome of
the advice was not of prime importance. It was the performance of our relationship that had
such an influence on the community.

UNUSUAL BEDFELLOWS: THE POLICE AND THE COMMUNITY

Another important relationship was cultivated between a very effective community
police officer and the TA president. I created opportunities for them to work together,
without knowing what the outcome would be. The relationship was delicate because the
TA was working with kids who were in and out of the drug trade. This officer was respected
(and respectful), and young people avoided doing anything illegal on his beat, so as not to
force him into a compromising situation.

At one meeting to plan for a bike race against violence, the officer came up with the
idea to ask Fuji Bike Company to donate parts, and then he organized his co-workers from
the local police precinct to volunteer to fix bikes. Fuji and the police responded in a way
we never thought possible. Before the race, we had hundreds of kids backed up for ten
blocks, some of them had two unconnected wheels, and the cops built them a bike. The
police stayed until after midnight until every kid that was on that line had a bike for the
race. Many youth at Maple had never seen a police officer doing anything nice for them.

The community was touched. Fuji promised to sponsor a race every year and assigned a
staff member to outreach to organize races at other projects. We got some media attention.
Activities began to snowball. We organized bike rides, talent shows, after-school centers,
all kinds of community building activities. We began having agencies such as local Health
Maintenance Organizations with space asking us what they could do to participate. Local
small business owners began coming to meetings.

Creating new conversations with people you never previously talked to is not easy. It places
the demand on everyone to be more open, to listen, and not to respond reactively. Think about
the change in the culture that has to take place before a group of project kids can be in the same
place as police officers, and both groups are cordial and respectful. Or imagine the “scene”
of a community meeting between housing management and young men angry about the lack
of jobs. The manager is there to inform young people about their rights under the law and to
discuss what she needs from them in order to support them. It’s a very different environment
than anyone is used to, and it requires a very different performance from everyone.

CONCLUSION

The story of the change at Maple is a story of cultural change. It is the story of
people discovering their capacity to perform as community builders. It is the story of
how solidarity and agency was created in this poor community in Brooklyn. The building
process that emerged was reflected in new kinds of conversations and relationships. These
new conversations and relationships could not happen in any environment. Just as a play
needs the stage to be set, so the environment has to be created for these conversations and
relationships to take place. At the same time, the dialectic of this process was such that the
new conversations helped to continuously create the developmental environment. Another
way of expressing this process is that to build community, people need to develop—and
to develop, people need to build community. Improvisational performance serves as an
important tool in this process of community building.

Conceptualizing the community building process as performance is useful in
understanding and shaping community practice. People at Maple were supported to put
themselves in situations that were “beyond” themselves and their customary roles, so
they could perform in ways that focused on who they were “becoming.” New stages for
performance had to be created. The tenants developed as leaders by working in the staff
office. The young people functioned as community organizers by organizing their friends
to stop the drug war. The staff became oriented more towards the tenants by working
collectively with the tenants in the management office.

In addition, the work of getting beyond the traditional barriers to inclusion created
the environment that nurtured new improvisations and developmental processes. Everyone
advanced beyond themselves and their usual roles and activities through the activity of
talking to people not traditionally regarded as friends. The tenants and the Coalition leaders,
the young people and the police, the tenants and the workers, all engaged in these unusual
improvisations and collectively participated in creating new forms of community life.

NOTES

1 The most well known of these programs is the All Stars Project, a youth development program involving 20,000 young people annually.

2 New York City’s public housing community has a population of approximately 500,000. It is the largest
in the United States, and despite its problems, it is known as the best managed, with a waiting list of 150,000 families. Overall, working families account for 41.2% of NYCHA families; 17.7% of NYCHA families are on public assistance and 41.1% are on social security or other pension benefits (retrieved October 25, 2005, from www.nyc.gov/nycha/pdf/factsheet).

3 Operation Commitment put police, social services, and other resources in Maple for about a year, and then it was withdrawn because another community was seen as needing the resources more.

4 Coalitions have had some success in integrating the building trades. Over the years, some of them (by no means all) have turned into extortion rackets, accepting money from contractors in return for leaving contractors alone. Coalition leaders point out that the trades are ripe with corruption with or without the Coalitions.

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