GRASSSHOOTS: 
A History of the Communities Movement

PREFACE

IT IS NOT TOO MUCH TO SAY that the GrassShoots Movement offered us escape from despair. It was 1996, and like millions of other people we were all too aware of the degeneration we saw around us. The gap between the things we knew and the way we ourselves acted was also troubling to both of us. It was as if we were all caught in a trance, going through the motions of a way of life that had lost its meaning but still held us enthralled. Our society was no longer working; even though many of us had more "stuff" - cars, VCR's, microwave ovens, computers, fax machines, cell phones, monster houses - our interior lives often seemed empty and meaningless. Although the Gross National Product continued to rise, hundreds of thousands of people could not find work, more children were going to bed hungry every night, and more and more people were living on the streets- even as the world's wealth became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Perhaps most important of all, many of the Earth's vital systems were already showing signs of severe stress, even though the demands of the new Asian prosperity had hardly begun to be felt.  It seemed inevitable that dramatically increasing demand for resources would overwhelm the planet's life support systems unless there were some very fundamental changes.

Many people understood some or all of these things and were devoting their energies to bringing about positive changes in one area or another. They were doing good work and often helping to bring about important changes, but the changes did not seem to amount to very much in the face of the irreparable damage being done to the Earth's vital systems on the one hand and the increasing social breakdown on the other. Moreover these danger signals seemed to be invisible both to the politicians and to most of the media. It was hard to understand how intelligent people could believe that environmental platitudes and computer training courses could resolve the deep crises that were so obviously upon us.

A story we heard gave us one possible explanation: The children of a provincial Environment Minister were raising issues about the environment around the breakfast table. Their father was commiserating with them when one said, "Daddy, you're the Minister of the Environment, why don't you do something?" The Minister is reported to have said, with some surprise, "You're right; maybe I can."

And from that day he instituted a very effective program of creating parks in important areas that particularly needed to be protected.
When we heard that story, we realized that all of us had become so used to compartmentalizing our lives, so effective at shutting off our deep feelings and beliefs from our jobs and even from our friends and families, that we often failed to recognize how we ourselves were perpetuating the very things we abhorred by the things we did or failed to do. Almost all of us, from top to bottom, were so used to blaming the situation on the politicians, or the multinationals, or the system that we had given away our power and failed to recognize the important changes we could make in the way did our work and lived our lives.

We had campaigned for politicians who promised change, only to see them offer more of the same once they were elected. We had joined protest groups, but all too often we found that they were better at complaining than at proposing workable solutions.

The old solutions didn't work. It was pretty clear that government intervention was not a panacea. Government run or sponsored programs more often than not addressed surface manifestations rather than root causes and frequently perpetuated the very things they sought to solve. These programs typically benefited government workers or contractors much more than the people or situations they were intended to help. However, simply abandoning these programs didn't work either. Escalating unemployment rates, especially among the young, and the growing numbers of street people, young panhandlers, and teenage prostitutes were obvious signs that society wasn't working. A less obvious but no less dangerous sign was the host of single mothers and even of two income families, many of them well educated, who were barely surviving on welfare or multiple minimum wage jobs -- in the most materially productive society ever known. A society in which companies were turning ever greater profits by trading employees for machines and paying their top executives, those who carried out the deed, salaries that made a mockery of the working lives of others.

It was easy to see what wasn't working, but less easy to see why it wasn't working or what would. Then one November evening in 1996, the two of us, Caspar and George, without knowing one another at the time, went to a talk by Robert Theobald, an economist and "community futurist" who was traveling across Canada trying to spark a dialogue among Canadians about implementing fundamental change. Unlike other speakers, Theobald did not offer solutions. This was frustrating, both to the audience in general and to us. That was why we had gone, wasn't it, to find out what to do? Instead, Theobald challenged us to learn to listen to each other. He said that we were caught in "the rapids of change" and that the changes we were experiencing were so frequent and so profound that no one (including him) could possibly know enough to pose the proper questions, let alone find workable solutions. Only by listening to each other would we even be able to frame the proper questions, and once we began to understood the questions we might find that what actually needed to be done was very different from the "solutions" we had considered before.

Theobald pointed out that Albert Einstein had made the same observation about scientific advancement that he was making in the social realm. Einstein said:
The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

Theobald also said that the need for change was much more widely understood than we might have thought and that he had heard things said in corporate boardrooms which were very different from the self-satisfied things that businessmen often said in public. In particular he was adamant that no person or group should be excluded from the dialogue unless they excluded themselves by trying to hijack the process and refusing to listen to others.

He put into compelling terms what many of us had long sensed: we could not expect the fundamental change that was necessary to come down from above. And we shouldn't continue to complain about the lack of leaders with vision to lead us to a better world while we ourselves continued to play our own individual parts in destroying the world we lived in.  We could make a better world only by creating it together. We would be able to make the necessary transition from the dying Industrial Age to the potential Compassionate Age only if many, many people first changed their own lives and then, acting together, began to make the necessary changes in their communities.

Theobald's suggestion of local dialogue and action appealed to us strongly, and he inspired us to action as few other speakers had. We soon discovered that we were not alone in our reaction, because the workshop following the lecture was very well attended and the first follow-up community meeting, held two weeks after Theobald's visit, attracted more than thirty people. The second meeting drew almost twice as many. At those meetings, a group began to form which had little to do with Theobald himself but which sincerely tried to practice his approach to group participation. The group also drew on other approaches to group interaction, and it began to develop an energy of its own which refreshed and revitalized almost everyone who came to the meetings. The people who attended became more and more patient with each other, and they learned to listen to each other in ways that made them all feel free to express opinions and feelings that they had bottled up for years. Many said that they had felt alone in their ealization that the world was just not working right, and it was very liberating to find that many others shared their view.

The GrassShoots Movement sprouted from those meetings and from others like them in many other cities. No one knew how far the movement would go. We were only hoping to get beyond the feeling that we were alone in sensing that great changes were needed, and to find ways to improve our communities and cooperate with others who were doing likewise.

Many of us became involved in large part because we had given up on provincial and national politics as an effective route to the needed change. We believed that it might be possible to effect change in our communities through learning how to work together for the common good, and that many local changes would together begin to force change at higher levels, even though political power had shifted away from local governments in recent decades.

Although municipal governments had from the first been the creatures of provincial governments, they had once had great power to control their own affairs. Before the income tax was introduced as a temporary measure early in the twentieth century, property tax had been the backbone of the public revenue and most of it went to municipal governments. One side effect of centralizing taxation and payments was that local governments became increasingly subordinated to federal and especially provincial control. Senior bureaucrats and politicians got used to the idea that they knew best what was good for the local folk.

Even as the GrassShoots Movement was coming together, several provincial governments were trying to amalgamate municipalities into "megalopolises" in the name of government efficiency. This effort came to a head when the Harris Government in Ontario tried to amalgamate the municipalities around Toronto in 1997 in order to make them more susceptible to provincial authority.  The public protests that arose in response were the among the largest Canadians had ever witnessed.
The reluctance and outright refusal of officials to allow effective decision-making at the local level meant that the only way to restore local authority was for citizens to become active in provincial and federal politics. Thus it was resistance on the part of provincial and federal officials to local governments' taking back control of their own affairs that eventually forced the Movement into actions that had never even crossed our minds at the beginning of our journey.

We knew there was great discontent among the people of Canada, that people recognized the need for change, and that no one had appeared who was able to articulate that need and turn it into a movement, political or otherwise. We believed that Theobald had put his finger on the reasons for this: the problems were too complex and too swiftly changing for anyone to really get a handle on. We felt that people were fed up with traditional politics, and with the globalization of consumerism that was underway, and noted that they were still largely expressing their dissatisfaction in anachronistic left/right rhetoric.
We believed that the challenges humanity faced were so great that they could only be successfully met by engaging everyone's good will. We believed that people were basically good, and if they acted to harm other groups or the ecological systems on which we all depend they usually did so out of ignorance or fear rather than from evil intentions. We also realized the extent to which we ourselves were captives of the system. If we, who had largely forsworn consumerism and who had thought more than most about these issues, had trouble breaking free of the old thought processes, how much harder must it be for those who lived their daily lives in the consumer paradigm. We realized that the task would not be easy, but we believed in the power of necessity, and we drew courage from what Theobald called realistic optimism.

Perhaps the most important lesson we have had to learn is that there is no single "correct" point of view. In order to form effective groups, we all had to learn to let go of our attachment to our ideas. So long as we kept defending them, we couldn't really listen to anyone else. Our task is too great to let ego stand in the way. Letting go can be agonizingly difficult, but it can also be a terrific release. A reasonably complete picture can only be assembled from many different points of view, and it will keep changing even as we glimpse it- so we cannot afford to become attached to any part of it. By our actions, we have created a world so complex that we can make it work only by thinking together and working together.

The late nineties was an exciting time for us because it was then that it finally became clear that people were ready for change. Once the first meetings began, the only real issue was whether we would find the inner leadership and the courage to take the necessary steps. Any movement that creates as large an impact as the GrassShoots Movement, necessarily draws from many sources. The number of people and groups who contributed to our eventual systems and structures was enormous. We rediscovered the truth of the old maxim, "Success has a thousand parents, failure is an orphan."

Caspar Davis & George Sranko, Victoria, British Columbia