Transforming Community from the Inside Out
HOW AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE MIND HELPS COMMUNITIES
NOTE: FOR A RECORDING OF THREE U.S. POLICE OFFICERS SPEAKING TO HOW THE THREE PRINCIPLES HELPED THEM ENGAGE MORE POSITIVELY IN COMMUNITIES, AS WELL AS PROTECTING THE SAFETY OF BOTH COMMUNITY MEMBERS AND OFFICERS, PLEASE SCROLL TO RECORDING AT BOTTOM OF PAGE.
In the mid-1980s, my father, Dr. Roger Mills, embarked on the first comprehensive community project based on an innate-resilience/“Three Principles” foundation at the Modello low-income housing development in South Dade County, Florida. He went to Modello at the request of then Florida State Attorney General, Janet Reno.
Dr. Roger C. Mills, a pioneer in community applications of the Three Principles
The results of this project would land my father and his work on “The Today Show,” and these results were shared nationally with foundations and government agencies. This work—both at Modello and Homestead Gardens in Florida—was written up in a book by Prevention Author Jack Pransky: Modello: A Story of Hope for the Inner City and Beyond. This book won the Martin Luther King, Jr. “Storytellers Award,” for exemplifying King’s “Beloved Community.”
At Modello, Social Worker Lloyd Fields and Homestead Gardens Resident Cynthia Stennis were hired to work with kids and parents living in the community. Within three years, drop-out rates had plummeted, school attendance soared to all time highs and parents in the project went back to school and back to work, building better lives for their families. Mothers organized themselves and applied for grants for their community; they also spoke up to help direct how monies were applied at Modello.
These results would be duplicated in neighborhoods and communities across the country. In Oakland’s Coliseum and Lockwood Gardens, Community Organizer Beverley Wilson and Corporal Malcolm Jerry Williams, a community police officer, worked with my father to bring a community with one of the highest homicides rates in the nation down to zero homicides, annually, after two years.
Officer Jerry Williams received the California Peace Prize for this work, along with an invitation to the Clinton White House. He and my father were interviewed on several Bay Area news programs.
Residents in Lakewood in Charlotte, North Carolina, at one of many community meetings there and in greater Charlotte, where we shared the Principles with: residents, police, teachers, board members, agency staff and others.
Community projects were initiated in South San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley, as well as in the Bronx in New York. In 2004, my father and I co-founded the non-profit Center for Sustainable Change—and worked with the W.K. Kellogg, San Francisco and Shinnyo-En Foundations to create the National Community Resiliency Project—launching innate resiliency work across the United States in low income communities, school districts, community agencies, and with police.
(L to R) Lloyd Fields, Ph.D., Cynthia Stennis of Modello & Homestead Gardens, Larry Williams of the Mississippi Delta and Ami Chen, visiting a project site in Des Moines, Iowa.
The outcomes from this work (my father was far less involved on the ground at this time, due to illness) … also showed dramatically decreased rates of depression, increased school engagement, as well as dramatically decreased crime rates and increased academic achievement and civic engagement in neighborhoods where a Three Principles (3P) understanding was implemented. The work was also featured on news stations in Charlotte, North Carolina and in the Mississippi Delta, where we worked with Larry Williams of the Delta Citizens Alliance and others, in one of the poorest regions of the United States.
Community projects led by others, including 3P author and teacher Elsie Spittle and consultant Gabriela Maldonado-Montano have also taken place across the US, with significant, positive outcomes.
Barbara Faye Sanford led the first “Health Realization” and later “Three Principles” Services Division” in Santa Clara County (Santa Clara Valley Health and Hospitals System) through the Department of Alcohol and Drug Services.
In Santa Clara County, for more than 15 years, a “Three Principles Services Division” (originally called “Health Realization Services”) provided 3P classes and in-depth programs to all departments within the county. Run first by Barbara Faye Sanford, and then Linda Ramus, in some years, contractors and employees provided upwards of 45 classes per week at juvenile hall, the correctional ranches, the Main Jail, the county jail called Elmwood, Men’s and Women’s Work Furlough programs, alternative schools, in corrections and in homeless shelters and recovery centers. The 3P Services Division also launched a community project at Poco Way in San Jose.
I worked for this division for roughly seven years in nearly all settings, and witnessed first hand how the Three Principles applied to workplace well-being, as well as positive outcomes for youth and adults in incarceration, for teachers, for professionals—for everyone, in all areas of community.
Community work can be many things. And community work based on the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought is ongoing today in correctional institutions in the US and the UK, in schools and school programs, in Des Moines, Iowa (in restorative justice at the
West Des Moines Youth Justice Initiative), on the South Side of Chicago, in Florida and elsewhere. Please also see: One Solution (Chicago); Beyond Recovery (UK prisons, and US via distance learning) the Cypress Initiative and The Spark Initiative (Tampa Bay, Florida), iHeart (UK schools) and Freedom Thinking (UK and South Africa).
Please contact us at info@amichen.com if you would like to recommend other sorts of 3P/Innate resiliency work happening around the world, to update resources here, or if you would like to be in touch about innate resilience community work.
Resources
Stay tuned for further, and updated resources here to support community-based Three Principles work.
Videos and news footage
Currently, Innate Evolution houses the most comprehensive documentary footage of community work that has taken place across the United States. Please take a close look at their “Documentaries” website, which features original footage from the Today Show, and residents speaking about their experiences at Modello—as well as footage and stories from news programs featuring Dr. Mills and Jerry Williams, from North Carolina, Mississippi, San Jose and elsewhere.
OUTCOMES
After two years of work in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Mississippi Delta, and Des Moines, Iowa (where the National Community Resiliency Project funded work that had been ongoing for a few years), I wrote this report called “Awakening the Beloved Community” for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. (If you cannot open this report, please e-mail us at info@amichen.com for a copy.) Our work with the Kellogg Foundation would continue for two more years, but funding was greatly reduced to all projects due to the financial/banking crisis of 2008.
impacts of understanding the principles on policing, as told by police …
Including: How police can find more connection with their communities and bring out the health and wisdom of individuals in their precinct neighborhoods, even when things look bad.