Keynote address from Cincinnati: Harnessing hope and imagination for public life

Abstract

Good morning. It's delight to be here with colleagues committed to improving communication. That topic is central to my own work at Imagine Chicago. I'd like to share with you this morning some thoughts about harnessing hope and on behalf of the common good as strategic investment in reinvigorating democracy. Let me begin on personal note. Ten years ago, I was working at First Chicago as corporate banker, pastoring an Episcopal parish, mothering 3 city kids, participating on numerous civic boards, and reaching the end of Kellogg national fellowship on spirituality and leadership. I was living in competing worlds which shared little common vocabulary and held each other in great suspicion. Chicago lived by what I described as a divided imagination -- manifested in patterns of racial, economic, social and political segregation. As person of faith, I live out of quite different imagination- of the possibility of an economy in which everyone has place at the table, share of what's on the table, and willingness to be put under obligation. So I organized conference on Faith, Imagination and Public Life, gathering in lots of well-known city pioneers and social innovators. I wanted to understand the that had shaped Chicago over the last century -- and stimulate broad group of civic entrepreneurs to re-imagine Chicago as whole. People introduced themselves by describing an image that had particular authority in their lives. By the second day, people were willing to dream, to describe images of CHICAGO's future ultimately worthy of human commitment. What came out of that design process was so powerful that I set aside that same week sixteen year career as corporate banker to help bring the dreams to birth. The image that propelled me was of the recycling symbol as an image of the Trinity -- with banner headline which read God's economy: in which nothing and no one is wasted. I dreamed of community, city, my city as place in which everyone's contribution matters. IMAGINE CHICAGO's work for the last eight years has been to help that dream come to birth. IMAGINE CHICAGO was founded in 1992 as catalyst for creative connections, especially which result in the development of civic identity for individuals and institutions. Our mission is to cultivate hope and civic engagement and to help people become actively identified with and engaged in creating positive and hopeful future for the city through both discourse and action. IMAGINE CHICAGO has challenged people and institutions to understand, imagine and create the future they value--and to create meaningful opportunities for those that have not been involved to discover place to belong and way to contribute that links their considerable gifts to the communities in which they live. (Marstin: Justice matter of who is included and who we can tolerate neglecting). How can we bring everyone's gifts into the equation--especially those that have been left behind? This is important not just as matter of social justice but as foundation for protecting democracy. Democracy depends fundamentally on our freedom to create, to participate actively in shaping the discourse and institutions by which we live. Out of dialogue, new things emerge including the reshaping of our own self-understanding and the invention and establishment of discourses that are more enabling. Democracy is constituted (that's why we have Constitution) through certain voluntary discourses and practices. This must happen on continuing basis. Democracy's success (as in any form of social organization) relies on the positive benefits its discourses and practices bring to individuals and its ability to create common sense of identity through which individuals secure knowledge of themselves, their competencies and abilities. IMAGINE CHICAGO helps individuals and institutions reconstitute their identities as ones who create the future of the community--and think of cities as constructive context within which meaning in created through connections. …