Riding the Near Eastside

I get to share two things I love—bicycling and my neighborhood

It gives me joy to guide a weekly bicycle ride through our Near Eastside parks and neighborhoods.

It combines my love for cycling with my love for this urban community—with all its diverse wonder and weirdness.

I actually have the opportunity to pedal to and through our neighborhoods with friends on a routine basis and reveal a bit of our diverse community assets, historic places, hidden gems, emerging stories, and developing changes.

I’ve been kicking around the Near Eastside since 1987 and every time we ride through the area, I experience something I’ve not before noticed. It’s a way of tuning in and focusing on small things as well as taking in a bigger picture. Our community keeps teaching me. My appreciation and concern grows.

Our routes vary each week as we focus on different aspects of the Near Eastside: schools, churches, taverns, commercial life, nonprofit impact, distinct housing architecture, city parks, social dynamics, notable trees, community gardens, pocket parks, interesting yard art, porch life, distinct neighborhoods, and the histories and stories that abound.

I’m grateful for this community and the sense of place I’ve come to share in it. I enjoy gliding through the extent of it weekly and sharing it with others.

Living Where We Lead

Local-living leaders hold significant value

I put my support—hands down—behind neighbors who live in the community and dare to try to lead, however haltingly, over professionals who serve the community but choose to live elsewhere.

I’ve done both. The difference is vast.

I used to bristle when told I needed to live in the community where I was appointed to lead. I no longer bristle. I get it—finally.

Living where we lead is a basic Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) principle and practice of John McKnight that is often overlooked by those aspiring to lead in community service, community development, faith communities, and public service.

It is also too frequently discounted in recruiting and maintaining nonprofit Boards of Directors made up of non-resident members—who then hire and bless non-resident leaders.

Too many professional leaders have too little connection to organic community life. A lot of grass roots value and perspective can be overlooked or devalued and subtle noblesse oblige often creeps into routine decision-making.

Living distantly as professional leaders, we are not only hamstrung in our perspectives and decision making, we often cannot even recognize the power of what we don’t know—to everyone’s detriment.

Local living matters—incredibly. 

I will write more about this later, but this is an opening salvo, challenge, and invitation from a 37-year nonprofit executive director of four major local nonprofits. 

If you want to lead with organic legitimacy, then live where you lead. It’s just that basic. It’s just that important.