The Four Commitments | Part 1: A Structure for Innovation
This is a six-part series. Links to subsequent parts will be updated as they are released.
When I stepped away in 2017 as Starfire’s Executive Director, I stepped into a request from the Board to focus on “Scale.” It’s such a tricky thing for our field, as most of our “scale” shows up as segregated and congregated programs. Our big building full of 100+ people with developmental disabilities was great at answering scale. All we needed was more buildings and vans and we could double or triple that!
But I was bothered by the troubling impact that this kind of “grouping” had on the lives of each individual person with a disability, so that was no way forward. Fortunately, I worked for an organization that had left that model, and the mindsets that created it, in the past.
As I puzzled over it, I had some solid inspiration.
Starfire’s community building projects were a creative, collaborative and dignified step forward. Each person that completed one, with the support of our staff and people from their neighborhood, gained, on average, four new people in their life. Even better, they were fun and raised everyone’s imagination about what a person with a disability could do in their community.
But as beautiful as the projects were, they still had one aspect about them that was bothering me. They relied on paid staff to make them happen.
Many of the paid staff did amazing work, as you can see on our YouTube page. But they still left. And when they left, they took all the values, intention, learning and experience with them.
I was also inspired by some conversations I had with Jesús Gerena, who was running an innovative program in Oakland, California called “Family Independence Initiative” (now called UpTogether). They were paying families in their programs so set their own goals and manage their own lives. And they were using the money they had previously paid a social worker to oversee families. It was brilliant and equitable. It felt like it belonged more to the future than the past, and that’s what I was looking for.
I just needed a few families who might be willing to try it out with me.
One day, I was invited to meet with a group that included a few parents of children with disabilities. The group was spending a year together, learning about the service system their child would one day come to depend on.
I explained the “Who’s In Your Life?” pattern. I also showed some hopeful examples we had discovered of ways to work outside the pattern. People had a few questions, and I answered them, and called it a day.
A few days later, I got an email from Carol Combs, who I had never met but had been in that session. She told me that she was the mother of a child with a disability, and said ““I will not lie....the concept you presented blew my mind and has left me with a million questions and the desire to learn more.”
By that time, I’d learned that the best way to support people’s learning was to give them a few options to choose from. We all need to own our own learning, if we are going to embrace it, after all.
We happened to be hosting John O’Brien in the coming weeks, and I thought that might be a good place to start, so I sent the invitation to Carol. I admit, I am usually pessimistic that people will show up.
But Carol, to her everlasting credit, did show up.
Afterward, she told me she had even more questions, and wanted to grab coffee.
A week or so later, we huddled around a Café in my hometown and had a terrific conversation. As we left, I told Carol about an idea I had to give families a budget to run their own projects, and she said she was in, if it happened.
In the next few weeks, Starfire committed the total budget equivalent of one staff’s salary to divvy out amongst 10 families of children with disabilities. I was excited about the possibilities.
I knew where I could turn first. Carol Combs.
Over four years, we would launch dozens of “Family Projects” all over the city, and a few scattered around the country. Some of them even successfully launched in the midst of the pandemic! They were powerful examples of the power of collaboration between families, neighbors, and a creative organization like Starfire.
But in order to get there, I had to figure out one major problem:
How would I prevent families from reverting back to culturally dominant ideas around their child with a disability?
It’s not like I had the power to prevent them from doing that, but this opportunity to innovate felt too sacred to allow it to replicate the patterns that led families into the loneliness and segregated options of the past.
We knew that there was …
more to life
than what the service system was offering.
The money I was entrusted with represented Starfire’s creative hopes, which were funded by the big hearts and future dreams of its donors. I had to be a good steward of these funds, or this opportunity would slip away, and we’d all be left jaded.
I figured that in order to be successful, I’d need to give the families that said “yes” the very same resources and support I had given our staff for all of those years. That meant I had to pay them for their work, give them a budget to work with, plan regular time to learn Starfire’s values (and unlearn the unhelpful habits our society had fallen into around “disability”), and give them some kind of structure or parameters for their efforts.
The money was easy to figure out, but took some courage to implement. We gave each family a couple hundred dollars to say “yes” to starting a project, and promised another couple hundred once they completed it. It was strange to think of giving families money, but my learning from the success of Jesús Gerena’s Family Independence Initiative, which was being expanded to Cincinnati and embraced by our funding community gave us courage.
I remember us asking various versions of wild questions: “What will they spend it on? What if they spend it gambling or on beer?” Then we realized we paid our staff tens of thousands of dollars each year and it was possible that they were, in fact, spending it on gambling and alcohol!
Giving them a budget was a little trickier. We wanted to give each family at least $1,000 in a project budget. But we needed receipts for their project expenses or that would be counted as income and they’d lose a chunk to paying taxes on it. So we made sure that families could easily get reimbursed up to the limits of their budgets.
I then decided to set up a set time each month to meet with each family. I made it at their convenience. Sometimes we met in the early morning or at the end of a workday. It depended on each family’s schedule. At each meeting, I’d bring them some article or bit of reading that related to Starfire’s values, and we’d talk about how their project was going.
Carol was the first family I started meeting with, so she helped me develop these patterns early on. She’d tell me which articles were helpful, and which ones weren’t. I’d send her links to videos and invitations to events and we’d chat afterward about whether they were worth her time. Over the first few months, we’d developed a sort of curriculum for a family wanting to learn how to do a Starfire Project.
All of that was exciting, but the toughest part of every conversation I had with families was helping them let go of old mindsets and make space for new ones.
They kept wanting to go back to old ideas: “What if we launched a special needs art party? Can I use my funds to hire Starfire to do our project? Can we create a Disability Parents Support Group?”
And they desperately wanted to get together with the other families. “Can we attend and support their party? Can I send it out to my Disability Moms Group?”
I knew that wasn’t the way forward. I had already helped our staff navigate that, though I had never put it down in writing.
What families needed was structure.
I could understand that. We all need some kind of structure. But my experience in re-imagining Starfire’s programs had taught me a lot about structure.
Sure it was solid to have a building where all the people with disabilities went. And we had calendars and schedules that detailed out who was going where and with whom. We had certain days people came and other days they didn’t. We had staff who were assigned to certain roles and responsibilities. All of that was a form of structure that had our old programs running like a well-oiled machine. Everyone knew where they fit in and how and what to expect.
But what I came to understand about that kind of structure was that even though it provided certainty, it provided the kind of certainty that a prison provides. It limited what was possible for people.
As I learned new values (the Five Valued Experiences, Asset Based Community Development, Social Role Valorization and Person-Centered Planning, to name a few), I felt more and more like our old structure was unnecessary. Those values provided a new kind of solidity and structure. In fact, they came to feel more stable to me the more I practiced them.
I had a hard time explaining this experience, and one day, got some help from Mary Pierce Brosmer, founder of one of Cincinnati’s best organizations, Women Writing for (a) Change.
Mary described her concept of “the Conscious Container.” She started by describing how most structure was like our old programs, top down and rigid, inflicted upon people at the bottom. She held her hand, fingers down and spread out, in a way that created a set of prison bars. That felt familiar to me.
But, she explained as she shifted her hand palm up, fingers together creating a shape like an empty cup, a bowl is just as solid as prison bars. It holds anything in any shape without restricting or limiting the thing. It can grow or move out of the bowl in whatever way or shape it wanted.
This was how “values” can shape a structure, she explained.
That was so helpful to me. It was the perfect metaphor and rhymed with my own experience, and I started investing in values: We ramped up our trainings, we infused them into our metrics and meetings. Those values carried us through Starfire’s entire organizational shift. And they still remain strong and relevant over a decade later.
As I thought about structure for the Family Projects, I wanted to create shortcuts to the values that inspired Starfire, so they could get started quickly. I knew I didn’t have the time with them like I did with the staff on our payroll.
So before one of my first meetings with Carol, I quickly wrote down “Four Rules” that I thought might help give structure to her Family Project:
· You can’t do anything that focuses on disability.
· You can’t make it a “special needs event” that brings people with disabilities together.
· You can’t use it to purchase disability services.
· You can’t make it a special needs support group.
I proudly read them to Carol, and she looked at me awkwardly.
“I get it, Tim,” she said. “But I thought this was supposed to be about liberating families like ours from having to be told what to do by a social worker like you. I don’t need more rules, especially not from Starfire. It all feels so negative.”
I was stunned. And impressed. And a little embarrassed. Here I was being called out, rightly so, for trying to inflict the “conscious container” in a top-down fashion! Mary would have been proud of Carol, and would have likely shook her head and laughed with me.
Carol and I sat there, poring over my list. We started playing around with it.
“What are the opposites of these rules?” she asked out loud.
We made a new list:
· You can’t do anything that focuses on disability. Focus on gifts.
· You can’t make it a “special needs event” that brings people with disabilities together. Build something that is uniquely yours.
· You can’t use it to purchase disability services. Find the free connections that community offers.
· You can’t make it a special needs support group. Look for joy.
We stared at it. It felt like it was a pretty good list. And it felt so much better inverted toward these positive aspirations.
“It needs a new title,” Carol said, crossing out my “Four Rules” headline.
“What about “commitment?” I asked her. A commitment is almost the same as a rule. It eliminates certain possibilities. Like marriage vows, or a new diet, or taking on new responsibilities. But it originates from yourself, of your own volition. It’s not required or forced upon you. You choose it.
“Could we ask families to make these ‘Four Commitments?’” I asked Carol.
“I’ll make these Four Commitments right now,” Carol said laughing.
After we agreed that we were close to the right words, we started thinking about how to communicate these to families.
We wouldn’t ask them to make these Four Commitments for the rest of their life. These were just temporary commitments they would make for their year-long project.
We just wanted them to try it out and see what happened. Maybe it would be fun one-off experience for them. At worst, they walked away with some money for their trouble.
And we would make sure that we told families we didn’t care what they did with the rest of their time. If they wanted to spend the rest of their time in special needs support groups, surrounded by disability services, and hanging out with other families who had members with disabilities, that was fine. It wasn’t fair of us to ask anyone to give any of those familiar, comfortable things up, and those aspects of our life weren’t any of our business, literally and figuratively.
It seemed fair to ask them to make these commitments because they were using Starfire’s money.
And we knew there was the potential they’d discover what we had discovered: there was more to life than what the service system was offering.
