Extra: Rachel Ferguson and Neighborhood Stabilization and Civil Society

Life is organic. This seemingly obvious statement is lost on many of us today which is why Rachel Ferguson and Juliette Sellgren’s conversation about civic society, community, and neighborhood stabilization is essential to hear.  

You can listen to the full episode here.

Rachel Ferguson is the director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia University in Chicago and an affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute. She is also the president of the board at Love the Lou, a neighborhood stabilization project which this episode talks about. 

In this interview, Ferguson flushes out the importance of maintaining an organic perspective of the world. While technological advances are wonderful and can be beneficial, we must, she says, be wary of becoming “scientistic” in our thinking. “I think,” Ferguson comments, “when it comes to social science, we can often become sort of mechanistic in our view of human life and so we think there’s always a mechanism that's causing something or a mechanism that can solve something when in fact, sometimes the things that is both causing or solving a problem is an organic thing.”  

One such commonly misunderstood problem is the lack of stability and success of modern communities. The decrease in stable families and decline of other organic communities like churches and neighborhoods force individuals to be hyper-intentional about making genuine connections with people. Ferguson admits this is very hard to do and has left many young people floundering without answers. Furthermore, Ferguson credits social isolation with much of the poverty in America. There are  opportunities for  a kid in the ghetto but if  crossing the street to get a job means entering a different gang’s territory, that opportunity might as well be in another state. 

A solution is rebuilding communities through local, long-term investments. Love the Lou, the neighborhood stabilization program that Ferguson runs, is a great example of this. This organization rejuvenates city blocks one at a time by raising up grass-roots leaders and empowering young people. They connect small neighborhoods to local social networks and foster community through group projects like community gardens. 

Not only are they providing accessible opportunities to work, cultivate relationships, and grow social capital, but Love the Lou also recognizes an essential part of organic solutions: natural scale. By working at the neighborhood level, Love the Lou works within the proper scale for a community. Since humans are limited in their relational abilities (think about it – how many sincerely deep friendships can you have?), change within relational categories must happen at a smaller scale. Communities function best as small groups of genuinely connected people. Such groups are what Love the Lou strives to encourage in their neighborhood stabilization program, and something that we should emulate in our everyday struggle to build relationships. 

Rachel Ferguson and Juliette Sellgren also discuss another important concept of effective social transformation: true charity. Not all charity is beneficial, and some methods of helping people can be toxic and feed into the problem. Giving money to a homeless drug addict begging on the street is not going to feed them tomorrow. Rather, Ferguson recommends practicing Marvin Olasky’s seven marks of charity. These ABCs of compassion - Affiliation, Bonding, Categorization, Discernment, Employment, Freedom, and God - recognize the inherent value and dignity of each human and work to solve the long-term problem rather than simply addressing immediate concerns.

These concepts of true charity and natural scale are important to remember when we consider solutions to the current decline of community. 

1.)   How might the organic idea of natural scale and true charity be applied to strengthen your community? How would such concepts challenge, change, or collaborate with the current legislature and government welfare? 

2.)   What other social problems might be better seen and addressed as an organic issue rather than a mechanical one? 

3.)   Does our society tend toward a scientistic view of the world as much as Ferguson might suggest?

 

Further listening
Rachel Ferguson on Black Liberation in the Market Place, a Great Antidote podcast
Elizabeth Anderson on Worker’s Rights and Private Government, an Econtalk podcast
Anna Claire Flowers on F.A. Hayek and Social Structures, a Great Antidote Podcast  

Further reading
Marvin Olasky’s Tragedy of American Compassion
Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help and How to Reverse It by Robert D. Lupton