Journalist Dashka Slater’s incisive interviews and sensitive, colorful observations captured the “tentative, tender unfolding that is social change” so very well. The article acknowledged Roger Mills, whose “health realization” approach influenced developments both there and in the Oakland projects’ prototype, the Modello project in Dade County, Florida.
When Roger Mills died last year, his daughter, Ami Chen Mills, was left with her father’s 30-plus-year legacy consisting of a history of transformational projects in inner city neighborhoods across the country, many boxes of archives, a small non-profit organization called the Center for Sustainable Change, an office in Palo Alto and a shoe-string budget. She was also a skilled 3 Principles teacher, and part of a network of individuals dedicated to raising the level of consciousness in communities across the country.
Ami belongs to a new generation picking up where Roger Mills left off, and the story of social change is evolving as it moves forward into the 21st century.
Six months ago it looked like the
Center for Sustainable Change
might just have to close its doors.
Six months ago it looked like the Center for Sustainable Change might just have to close its doors. The board of directors looked at the bottom line -- only $3,000 dollars in the Center’s bank account -- and turned their collective gaze upon Ami, CSC’s co-director. Ami with her characteristic serene smile assured them, “There is no good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
Her father’s daughter, Ami lives and breathes the core tenet of the innate resiliency paradigm. Ami was only a child of seven when Roger Mills had his life-altering meetings with Sydney Banks, which infused Roger’s psychology practise and his life with the belief that it is people’s thoughts, rather than their circumstances, that define their experiences.
The “message” is still what it was in 1995, when the women of Coliseum Gardens met on Wednesday afternoons in a ground-floor apartment that served as a community center to still their minds. Everyone is born with an innate resilience, a healthy inner core, they learned. It is this message, and the certainty borne of experience that there is help for suffering communities, that drives Ami to carry on her father’s legacy and trust that inner wisdom will help find a way.
Giving up the Palo Alto office and creating a “Center without walls” (in the words of CSC co-director, Gabriela Maldonado-Montano), CSC is pioneering a non-profit organizational style that “walks the walk” by trusting in a paradigm that relies more on the power of innate wisdom and less on conventional planning and thinking one’s way out of problems. Ami, and her new virtually-connected team, supervise active project partner sites in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Greenville, Mississippi, funded by a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Grant, as well as innovative programs at Principals’ Center Collaborative high school in San Francisco and budding partnerships with corporate clients -- an experiment in bringing corporate responsibility together with impoverished communities by realizing common human concerns.
The new characters in the “tentative, tender unfolding” include Dave Nichols, a leading light behind the ongoing transformation in the once-notorious neighborhood of Lakewood, in Charlotte, where crime rates dropped significantly in the first two years of applying the Three Principles approach; and Tasha Griffin and Larry Williams in Greenville, who are busy forging a connection with a distressed housing project there in the Mississippi Delta.
With the help of supporters, donors and friends, the next chapter of “Miracle on 66th Avenue” is being written. We welcome your interest, your participation and your donations.
By Maureen Latta, Grants Manager
Center for Sustainable Change
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