Steve Thomas: Rich Harwood, welcome to the podcast.
Rich Harwood: Steve, thanks so much for having me.
Steve Thomas: You’ve really devoted your life, because you founded the Harwood Institute when you were pretty young, you really devoted your life to helping communities and institutions connect together more deeply. I know you’ve written about your own childhood struggles. How did those experiences in your younger life shape you into what you’ve devoted your life to?
Rich Harwood: For your listeners who don’t know, I was, when I was born, I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. In 1960, that was a death sentence. I was given three to five years to live. My parents went on a death watch. I learned very early on as a kid what it feels like to not be seen and heard, to feel like you’re invisible, to have your dignity stripped from you. I was repeatedly manhandled and violated physically for tests over and over again. I saw my parents struggle financially. They used to keep me, I’m told, ’cause I was so young, they used to keep me in the car until 12:01 at night so that they didn’t have to pay the extra day ’cause they couldn’t afford it. They had to borrow money from relatives to make ends meet. It really put a stress on my family, and it really scarred me in many ways.
All that said, though, I gained hope from the experience because of the people both in my family and outside who sort of came along and made sure I didn’t fall through the cracks, but lifted me up and so I think that, plus some other experiences in my life, led me to this work, and it propels me, Steve, honestly, each and every day because I believe that at the root of this work, I can talk about our practice, I can talk about the process, I can talk about all the ins and outs of that stuff, which as you know, we work a lot with libraries on but really at the core of this is I believe everyone should be able to fulfill their God-given potential. I believe everyone should be seen and heard. I believe dignity is not something you earn. It’s a birthright. And yet we give lip service to dignity a lot in our society and don’t uphold it for each and every individual.
I believe because of my experience with both my family, but in particular, people outside of my family literally saving me in many respects and teaching me what hope is about in real ways, I believe that community has to be a common enterprise and that there has to be a sense of shared responsibility and that community, the very word means “everyone.” And for me, all means all. And that’s what I love so much, by the way, about libraries. I think at the heart of the work of libraries, all means all. And so all of those things and many others, but these things in particular, have come to shape who I am as an individual and as a human being. They came to shape me as a professional, and they literally inform what I do each and every day still, now, 65 years later.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And like I mentioned earlier, you did found it when you were in your late twenties. When you first founded the Harwood Institute, what was your vision for it and how has it evolved to what it is today?
Rich Harwood: Yeah, that’s a great question. Most people don’t ask me that. Here’s the thing. When I founded it, all I had were eight questions that I put on a whiteboard. I didn’t have an idea of what this would look like. I didn’t start, like a lot of people, start with a product and their goal is to sell it and scale it. I didn’t start with that. I didn’t start with the things that we teach people today and support people in today. We didn’t start with any of that.
I had eight questions, and some of them were things like, “What engenders–” and you can trace these back again in some ways from my childhood, but “–what engenders authentic hope in people? What allows what are the kinds of leaders that have trust that bring people together to make people’s lives better? What are the kinds of organizations we need that span boundaries and bring people together across dividing lines and spark change? What does it mean for change to spread in society?” So there were eight of these questions, and essentially then and still today, I’ve been in search and we at the Institute have been in search, of insights and answers to these questions, and as you can imagine now, 38 years later, we’ve added a number of other questions, but really at the Institute, the thing I love so much about what we get to do every day is that these questions still animate us. It’s not about selling what we’re doing, it’s not about scaling it, you know, obviously we wanna spread the work, but I think, and particularly as society changes and as we’re taping this, we’re in the midst of a real crisis of belief and crisis in our politics and so the context around us keeps changing, which changes the very meaning of the eight questions in some ways or at least how one thinks about them.
So that’s what we started with. That’s what we’re still in pursuit of. And along the way, we created a practical philosophy called civic faith, a practice called Turning Outward. We’ve created a notion of how change happens in communities, and we spend an awful lot of time on how each of us need to show up in the work and for each other.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I definitely wanna get into all those concepts and everything, but I think it’s great that you’re still on the same path as when you first started. Like you said, the world is different that we’re grappling with, but you’re using a lot of the same architecture to look at it.
Rich Harwood: Yeah, and when I started, one other quick thing, first, everyone I talked to told me, don’t do this, including my parents. So that wasn’t too hopeful, but as you probably know, I’m kind of a rebellious individual, so that just made me wanna do it more.
The other thing was that to a person, they said, “Pick one of your questions and just focus on that.” And one of the things that I said back was, “No, these questions are interdependent.” And actually this goes back to my childhood too, because in my childhood people kept trying to isolate questions and what they were missing was the whole story of how I was experiencing being sick, what it was doing to me physically and mentally and emotionally and what it really took ultimately for me to heal. That happens in science, it happens in healthcare, it happens in civic organizations, it happens in foundations, and we keep making the same mistake of isolating things to such an extent that we miss the wholeness of what’s actually happening and the interdependencies that exist.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. You gotta look at the forest and the trees. So the new book is The New Civic Path. Can you tell listeners what you mean by a civic path? And then maybe follow that up with why do we need a new one?
Rich Harwood: Sure. Let me start if you don’t mind with why and then go in because it’ll make the what more contextualized. I believe we need a new civic path because I don’t believe we need more divisive politics. I think we’ve had enough of that and that the underlying challenges in our society are not simply political as most people would like to define them. I think they’re cultural and human. They haven’t just come along in the last four years, or eight years, or 12 years, I’ve been tracking this stuff now for 40 years.
They’ve been coming over the last 40 years and they now deal with things like what actually gives people hope in their lives. What does it mean for us not to feel so separated from one another particularly when we face an epidemic of loneliness. What does trust mean in a society that keeps fragmenting? How do we live together? Not simply vote together, but how do we live together and make things happen? So many of us believe we can’t shape our lives or our collective futures, and so what does it mean when we lose a sense of individual and shared agency that we can’t make a difference in our lives? And what does it mean when we’ve lost belief in institutions of all kinds, not just political, but faith. I’m a person of faith. Faith institutions, civic institutions, this is a challenge for libraries, obviously. We can’t talk to our friends and family about tough issues anymore in many cases. So all this is to say these are deep, deep issues in our society.
The reason why I think we need a new civic path is because we’ve got to find ways to address these deeper issues and restore a sense of belief in ourselves and in the nation that we can actually come together and get things done. I happen to think that’s not gonna start in Washington DC or in our state capitals. You’re in Georgia. I’m in Virginia. Both our state capitals are riddled with culture wars, as are others, and I think this work has to begin in our local communities.
Here’s what the new civic path is and why I think it helps us achieve this. I think in our local communities, we can actually, so I’m gonna mention four things that I think are critical to the new civic path. There are more, but these are four critical ones. I think we need to make the commitment to turn outward toward one another when we are so churned inward toward ourselves and hunkered down, and increasingly so, it’s only when we turn outward that we can see and hear one another. It’s only when we turn outward that we can uplift each other’s dignity and honor it. It’s only when we turn outward that we can understand the context of our communities so that we can understand what’s actually needed. So that’s one thing.
Second, I believe that we’ve gotta figure out what we can agree on amid our real differences in society. We as Americans have become so damn good at talking about what we’re against. It’s our reflex now. What I think we need to become more practiced at is articulating what we’re for. But here’s the thing, to get on the new civic path, we don’t need to agree on everything. We just need to figure out what we can agree on so we can get moving on it together. So that’s number two.
Number three, we’ve gotta build together. There are some people in the field, the larger field that I work in, who believe if we simply spend time bridging our differences, meaning talking to each other, almost like we’re in marriage counseling together, if we have enough civic forums and public forums, that we’re gonna alleviate all the pressure and problems and things will be better. I happen not to share that belief. Talking is important. It’s embedded in the first and second points I just made, but I think building the third point is as important because in building something together and creating something, we become partners and producers and innovators and doers again, which I think is part of the American DNA. And in building together, we begin to rediscover that we have individual and shared agency. We begin to discover that we have innate capabilities that we can tap into, and we don’t need to wait for everything from DC or Atlanta or Richmond that we can reclaim and recognize again and reaffirm our shared humanity. So that’s the third thing.
Fourth, which I think is really important, is so much of the change, there are a lot of good things happening in every community. We don’t recognize it a lot of times. We’re so inundated with negativity and that everything’s going to hell in a hand basket and we’re never gonna be able to make progress. And yet we are making some progress in communities all across the country, and it’s in every community, not just wealthy communities or middle class communities, but it’s invisible to us. So I think we need to make visible the invisible in our communities and lift it up. Not hype it up, not sugarcoat the challenges we face, not suggest we did something we didn’t do, but actually lift up the real things, the good, the bad, and the ugly cause that helps to restore belief that we can actually come together and get things done. That’s the purpose of lifting these things up.
All this is about restoring our agency, figuring out what we can agree on, moving forward together, lifting good things up so that we can restore belief. We’re at a particular juncture in our history. It’s not the ugliest, it’s not the worst, but it’s bad enough. We have faced challenges throughout our history, starting with the founding of this country and the original sins this country was founded on, which we still have to reconcile with and tell the truth about, but we did found a great country.
I do believe in this country. I do love this country, but we faced the scourge of slavery. Eliminating it, abolishing it, did not start in Washington DC. In fact, there was great disagreement. It started in our local communities. When women didn’t have the right to vote, women’s suffrage started in our local communities. I’ve been working with Selma, Alabama now for a few years. Voting rights and civil rights started in communities like Selma and in church basements like Tabernacle Baptist Church where I’ve met with the NAACP of the county there and of Selma. Child welfare laws. On and on and on it goes. Much of the significant change in our country started in local communities when we were in a fix, when we needed to get moving again. I think that’s where we are again today. That’s why the new civic path is so important.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And you all have made a very moving short documentary film about Selma. That’s a really good illustration of civic faith, I think.
Rich Harwood: It is a really great illustration. My son did that. Selma is a great illustration. The bridge we often think about is a historical thing, almost like it belongs in a museum, like it’s in an outside museum and that you go and visit and you walk across it. But the thing I love about the people of Selma and the thing that I think we need in our country is that we have to keep remembering that we as Americans, we have to keep coming together to go over the bridge to keep renewing who we are and to deal with the challenges we face today. That’s one of the reasons why we did the documentary, the short film, is because we believe the bridge beckons us again. It calls us again to go back over it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and Selma is not just this historical thing that happened, that John Lewis did 50 years ago. It’s still today.
Rich Harwood: Exactly. And Selma needs to go back over the bridge as a community. And because as you just said, Selma is so iconic in the history of this country, I think they can help lead the way in a way that reminds us that memory is so important to all this, right? That reminds us of who we are and who we still need to become.
Steve Thomas: So you’ve said that libraries are one of the last boundary spanning organizations left standing in America. Why do you see libraries as uniquely positioned to help with this civic path and especially in this current moment?
Rich Harwood: Well, in part because of what you just said. I do fervently and firmly believe that libraries are one of the last boundary spanning organizations in society, in our communities. When you think about so many, I won’t name them, but so many civic groups that once worked across communities to bring people together across geography or race or income or whatever it may be, and how so many of them have narrowed their focus because it’s the only way that they can set metrics and hit them and raise money, or it’s the only way they think they can do that. And as we become more professionalized and specialized in our society, people keep telling them, much like people told me when I founded the institute, “No, no, don’t deal with all eight questions, just deal with one.” And so, so many organizations have done that themselves. Not libraries. Not libraries.
Libraries are still in all parts of the communities that they reside in, that they work in. Libraries still value all neighborhoods. Libraries still value all people. Libraries did not decide, “Well, we’re gonna segment our audience, and we’re only gonna go to wealthy people who pay property tax or who have passed levies for our library, or have influence with our local politicians.” Which would’ve been a strategy. No, libraries said, “We’re gonna still welcome the immigrant. We’re gonna welcome kids into our library. They’re gonna make a hell of a lot of noise, but we’re gonna change the very nature of libraries because we think we need to be welcoming to those kids. We’re going to expand, not narrow our focus, because there are other things that people need in communities other than books. Some of this still deals with knowledge, but it’s a different form of knowledge. So we’re gonna help to create that or co-create that with people or enable people to create it for themselves.”
Your listeners know much more than I do about all the innovation that’s taken place in libraries during this period. It’s quite remarkable. During COVID, libraries were there and kept working with people. I had met with so many libraries during COVID where they were doing heroic acts, so many heroic acts. So I think libraries are one of the last boundary spanning organizations. I think, I know, that they are one of the most, if not the most, next to firefighters, like police forces have dropped in some communities, firefighters still remain, libraries still remain, as the most trusted civic institutions in communities.
So because of all the things I just mentioned, I think libraries are uniquely positioned to help communities get on this civic path. I just wanna mention one other quick thing, which I suspect we’ll come back to. I’ve worked now with hundreds, maybe thousands of libraries, Steve, across the country, and every library has kind of its own profile about, they all wanna be conveners, but to what extent do they wanna be catalysts? To what extent do they want to be in the action part of the work? Every library has to find their own place in that equation. I don’t have a formula for libraries in that sense. I do know libraries need to turn outward. I do know they can play a special role in helping to create this new civic path and often do. But how far they go and what role they play in doing that, I think each library needs to figure out on its own.
Steve Thomas: But given that, can you share some examples of libraries that you’ve worked with in the past and examples of what they’ve done and that might inspire somebody else to do something similar or spin off their own idea of that?
Rich Harwood: Yeah, so I’m gonna mention two libraries that we’ve have case studies on that people can get, and then a few other libraries I just met two weeks ago. So the ones that we’ve written about, one is for libraries who are in small communities. One is the library of Red Hook, New York in the Hudson Valley of New York. I think there were 1200-1300 people who lived in that community. The library, when we started working with it, was on its last legs. People weren’t going there. It was described as dingy, as irrelevant, not a place you want to go. The library started using our work along with four or five other people on an ad hoc team, and in applying our approach, they thought they were gonna create a new strategic plan to make the library relevant, but what they discovered was that a stoplight, streetlight, the timing was off. So people were circumventing it, and going through neighborhoods and creating dangerous situations for people in neighborhoods. This had gone on for 20 years, so this had undermined the trust in the community and people’s faith in the community. So the library along with the deputy mayor, along with a retired parks and rec person, along with someone from Bard College, along with a couple of other people, got the city, the county, and the state transportation department, ’cause they were all required to change the timing of this light, which they did. That led to infrastructure changes in the community ’cause the community wanted to be economically stable and vibrant. They also wanted opportunities for youth and economic opportunities for others.
All of this triggered a chain reaction of actions that the library still was a secondary player in but ultimately, the library created connections with Bard College to start teaching things for kids, new STEM things, maker things for kids. They prompted the Chamber of Commerce and others to create a women’s entrepreneur program, which sparked a whole bunch of business, new businesses and on and on and on it went and ultimately, the payoff for the library was they did develop a new strategic plan. It was outward looking. They were named one of the best small libraries in America. They attracted new grant money. They doubled the money that they got from the city, from the community, for support and their attendance numbers, the people going through the turnstile, went way up. So the library won by helping the community win first. It’s a wonderful story. It’s in my book Unleashed. I think we may have it on on our website as well.
That’s one story. I have tons of stories like that. I just wanna tell a couple of other quick ones. Around the new book, the New Civic Path, I’m on this national campaign called The Campaign for the New Civic Path. And I’m going all across the country and it happens that a lot of libraries are a host.
Case in point, I just went across the state of Virginia in an entire week, stopped in five different places. I started in Norfolk by the ocean. I ended up in Grundy, which is in the mountains of Appalachia, in the southwest corner of the state, and everywhere in between. Here’s the thing, Steve, every event I did was hosted by a public library. And in each place, like Chesterfield County, which is outside of Richmond, so this is a suburban area, growing, I was meeting with four young people who work at the library and asking ’em like, so what are you doing and had they had been to our lab and how are you using our work? And one young lady said to me, this is one of the stories they told me, she said to me, ” We decided that there are ways that we, along with others, needed to support youth in the community. And so we invited some folks, other organizations, to come together and just four came at the beginning, but we kept meeting with them and as we were meeting, we started to do things together. And as we started to do things together, other groups started to hear about it and they started to call us back. And as they started to call us back, one by one more people walked into the room when we met, like every month. And she said, now there are 40 groups that meet regularly to figure out how they can work together and build a stronger community.” This was sparked by the library, by this young woman. And there’s nothing novel about that. There is something innovative because they created something out of something that already existed and they’re making a go of it.
In Grundy, which is a town of 850 people deep in Appalachia Mountains, the librarian also went through our stuff called a meeting of community leaders. I thought maybe four or five would show up. 30 showed up, 30. The mayor, the head of the school district, the head of the Boys and Girls Club, the head of the hospital, the head of the women’s garden club. On and on it went. And here’s the thing that was important about this for the library, for our conversation, people in the room said, “The 30 of us had never been in the same room together.” And the only reason they came together was because of the credibility and the safety of the library. Again, that’s not a huge story, but I know it prompted people to do things. I’ve gotta call her back. But it prompted people to do things after we left. But for that meeting, and but for the library, those things never would’ve happened.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and that’s really a big part of what the library’s mission is to build community and that fits right in with your mission here, that you have to build community in order to make that civic path. Like, you need, the old “you need a village” kind of thing, and that sometimes feels like it goes against the American ideal of individualism, but we really do need each other.
Rich Harwood: Yeah. We do need each other. And the thing for libraries, I think is, as you know and your listeners know, is that while I say all these things and you just said what you said and what I’m saying at least sounds pretty obvious, except when you’re under stress, when you’re worried about funding, when you’re worried about these culture wars, you hunker down and turn inward. And so many people who I visit in libraries say, “Well, why would we want to do this? How is this gonna increase circulation? How is this going to increase the number of people who come into the library?” And what I have to keep saying is, “You need to think about the community first and your building second. If you think about the community first, the rest of it takes care of itself. Your relevance comes from your connection with, and in, the community, not simply bringing people into your building. ’cause by simply thinking about Friends of the Library, let’s say, you have immediately narrowed your definition of community to a very small group.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, the people you should be reaching out to are the people who aren’t using the library and find out why they aren’t using the library.
Rich Harwood: Right. So in Reading, Pennsylvania, where we’ve been doing work, there was a group called the Early Childhood Team that we were working with to create early childhood education, and they thought the challenge was we need to create more centers and teachers. This is a community that was predominantly all white. Now it’s 70% Latino. Ten years previously was declared the poorest community in America. What they found out was that most folks in the Latino community did not want or trust early childhood education for a whole bunch of cultural reasons and trust reasons of institutions. So what they realized was they had to go into the community, and it’s not about providing more programs ’cause a lot of the programs they had people didn’t trust. It was about building trust with people and finding out who they would trust and what they actually valued. And it didn’t start with early childhood education, it started with parents as first teachers.
So lo and behold, the United Way and other groups on this team went into the community. They end up in a part of the community that’s the poorest part of the community, and they start going to a park to start to engage parents and kids, and they realize that there’s a library adjacent to the park, and no one in the community goes to the library who they’re trying to reach because they’ve never been in the library and the library hasn’t been to them. So they go and form a partnership with the library and all of a sudden the library becomes this key partner in engaging with the community. This still isn’t about bringing people into the library yet. It’s about engaging these parents in the park and then engaging them, we realized, in medical settings, ’cause they trust their doctors, so we needed to get to physicians and other medical care providers and clinics.
Ultimately, it led to bringing some of these parents into the library for story time, to helping the parents gain access to literacy programs, to helping the parents learn how to read to their kids and have magazines in their homes. And then all of a sudden they were talking about early childhood education in the way that they thought they first were but really it was a broader definition and the library became central to that. But in Reading, thank God for the library. The folks in that library had the foresight to say, “Well, this isn’t about bringing people into the library yet. This is about going out into the community first.”
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I think that’s an important thing that libraries need to learn is that, yes, the library is a building and that is something that we need, but we’re kind of a service and we can put that service out in the community. If you have a bookmobile, go drive to those poor neighborhoods, those trailer park home neighborhoods and just plop it down and say, “Who wants to come?” Go to that park. Bring your services to them ’cause even in larger areas, there may not be, or any areas, there may not be transportation to the library. So that may be an issue too. So yeah, we can bring the library to you. You don’t have to have them come to you necessarily anymore.
Rich Harwood: Right. And as you know well, a lot of libraries are putting books in laundromats and other places. But here’s the thing about the new civic path that I think is important in relationship to this. The danger for libraries, and I see this happen every day, not just with libraries, but but many organizations, most actually, is we assume we know what the community really wants. And in making those assumptions, we offer all these things, whether it’s inside our building or outside. And I think the new civic path is about, how do we first understand what really matters to people? Number one.
Number two, in building together, how do we build together in a way that actually strengthens the civic culture of the community? Which means we not only have to get together, we have to work together differently like they are in Chesterfield County, or they’re doing in Reading. I think the opportunity here is not simply to provide more services, it’s actually, as you said early on in the conversation, to address what matters to people and in doing it in a way that actually builds community. And in doing so, restores our sense of belief in ourselves and in this case, our community, that we actually can come together and get things done that matter.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I think you’ve clarified this before, and you mentioned it earlier in the conversation too, that, we’re not talking about, if you’re talking about a really left wing political person or really right wing political person, the point is not, “Oh, let’s figure out a way to both compromise and believe the same things!” It’s finding that overlap of what you do agree on. But one question I think people have a lot of times is how do you get people to talk to each other who don’t like each other?
Rich Harwood: Exactly. Right. So this is embedded in the point about we’ve gotta figure out what we can agree on amid our real differences. So embedded in that point is your very question. Our reflex right now is to try to bring people together and say, “Okay, so what are the problems we face? Can we identify a common problem?” That’s the kiss of death in this environment because people will argue over those problems. They’ll argue over who is responsible for solving them. They’ll wanna point fingers and cast dispersions, or they’ll just wanna pursue their own agenda. Please don’t do that if you’re listening to this.
The alternative to that is we create these visioning exercises, which some libraries have been hosts to, maybe haven’t sponsored, but hosted the meetings, where we produce these glossy reports and these utopian visions, and they die on the vine, and they just create more frustration and cynicism because we make these promises, but they’re false promises. So it’s false hope, which is one of the reasons why I’m so interested in hope.
So here’s the alternative, which a lot of libraries across the country have used our work to do, so there are a lot of people we can connect people with who know this. We’ve gotta focus on our shared aspirations. And if you think about it, you told me before we got started, you have two high school kids, so you can do this with your kids. A lot of people have. ” So what are your aspirations for your lives and your community?” And here’s the thing, no one tells you a utopian vision when you ask that question, nor do they give you a list of problems. They tell you things that matter to them in their daily lives that typically are actionable, doable, and achievable. And when people do that together, like in what we would call a community conversation, all of a sudden they realize, “Well, we may not share all the same aspirations, but we sure do share enough of ’em, and we can actually get to work on those!”
And in discovering those shared aspirations, we realized they essentially implicate us. So we’re no longer consumers of public life. We’re now members of a community because actually we need each other to act on these. No one can do them on their own. So that’s what happened in Red Hook beyond the streetlight. And so that creates the basis for figuring out what we can agree on and then the basis for building together.
Steve Thomas: I think that’s the greatest example, Red Hook, because you said, they did the traffic light, sure, but that built community with them together because they found that one common thing and they did that, “Oh look, we did this together! What else can we do together?”
Rich Harwood: Exactly. Right. So they had these other aspirations which were around youth, keeping youth in the community. They had these other aspirations on in economically viable and healthy community, and then there was a third one. But you’re right that it was the streetlight that gave them the confidence and the sense of possibility that they could move on to the others and. Some people would say, “Well, Rich, for God’s sakes, who cares about a streetlight? It’s so small!” And what I would say is, for Red Hook, that was it. For other communities, it’s something else. It might be a little larger, but it typically is pretty small, Steve, and the trick here is we’ve gotta get away from thinking about comprehensive plans. And move towards what can we catalyze and then use that effort like the streetlight, as you just suggested, to unleash a chain reaction of actions that grow over time and spread over time, which both address what matters to people and change how we actually work together in communities and get things done.
Steve Thomas: And you even labeled that in the book and elsewhere as authentic hope ’cause you mentioned false hope, but this is authentic hope.
Rich Harwood: That’s right. And since you’re referencing it, yeah, the chapter in the book, which I started with, it used to be the last chapter, and then I would be like, “Well actually no, this would be a better place to start is that we can all be agents of hope. We can all be agents of hope.”
Steve Thomas: I think your work is so optimistic, and I just wonder as the world continues to spin and become tumultuous, how do you remain optimistic and do you have tips for other people who are feeling roiled in that, especially like, in the library world, we’re getting book bans and all these other kind of things. We feel trusted still, but we’re getting hit by these cultural battles and things. So how does Rich stay optimistic, and how can we stay optimistic?
Rich Harwood: Yeah, so I say hopeful because I keep working in local communities with people, and I’ve been doing this now almost 40 years, and I actually am inspired by people coming together and doing things each and every day. Hopeful because I believe there’s an emerging new American agenda that at a time when decency seems to be going increasingly by the wayside, we are rejecting cruelty and capricious acts and arbitrary actions. We don’t want them. That’s too far for us, that there are things that across all these communities I’ve worked with that people can agree on and work on: youth issues, mental health, healthcare issues, senior care. There are plenty of opportunities for us to come together. And I remain hopeful by the wins I keep seeing people create, so that keeps me hopeful.
The other thing that keeps me hopeful is I think you have to remember why you get up every morning and do the work you do. For me, it’s actually, honestly, it’s remembering what it felt like to lay in a hospital bed for years and years and believe that each morning I woke up was a gift and it was another opportunity, and that has never left me. And so that fuels me.
For other people, what I would say is the very exercise I took folks in Chesterfield County Library System through. Create a list of what diminishes hope in you. Just create a list: 4, 5, 6 things. Do it with other people in your library. Then create a list of what gives you hope or belief. Then ask yourself this question: “Which list do you find yourself living on a lot day to day?” I’ve tried this with so many people in the last year, and inevitably people say to me, I’m on the first list. I’m in the list of negativity. I’m in the list that change can’t happen. I’m in the list that people won’t uphold what they need to do. It’s all because we’re enveloped by all this bad news, and I bring it from work to home, from home to work, to church, to wherever I go.” Then I’d say to them, “But how did you come up with the second list? You came up with that from your own experience. It exists.” So I say to them, “Do this for me. Hang these two lists up in your conference room or in your kitchen, in your library, or somewhere. And every day, walk past that list and look at it and remind yourself that it is a choice which list you get to live on.” It doesn’t mean you’re denying the first one, but if we lived only in the first one, we will lose all our hope. We will hunker down and we will never fulfill the mission that is the calling that I know so many people who work in libraries have in their heart that called them to this work long before they ever were in a library professionally, and then make the choice that you’re gonna be on the second list and get to work on it.
Steve Thomas: That’s perfect. I appreciate the inspirational words to end on because I think your work definitely is very inspirational, and I do encourage people do learn more about your work in general and watch for when you’re doing workshops and things like that and try to work with your organization, or reach out and see if you wanna do something with the Harwood Institute ’cause it’s, you guys do great work. And your new book, of course, is The New Civic Path: Restoring Our Belief in One Another and Our Nation. And that’s available wherever you get books, probably even in your library so check out a copy if you wanna do that. But read the Civic Path because we wanna learn from the Civic Path and follow that, so thank you again so much for coming on the podcast, Rich.
Rich Harwood: Steve, thanks so much for having me. Really enjoyed it.
Circulating Ideas 