Final Appeal- 2020
The Essential Work - A Message from Jamie Kalven
Moving Day at Stateway Gardens 2001, Photo by Patricia Evans
In this time of constitutional trauma and uncertainty, I find myself reaching back to the prehistory of the Invisible Institute in an effort to bring into focus ways we might contribute to the work of re-constitution that lies ahead.
Here is a booklet of selections from the human rights reporting project—The View From The Ground—that we launched two decades ago from a vacant unit in a doomed high-rise at the Stateway Gardens public housing development: the first public expression of the energies and relationships that would later become the Invisible Institute.
That venture—Studs Terkel called it “guerrilla journalism”—was born of frustration with the failure of mainstream media and academic researchers to adequately report on the lived experience of public housing residents undergoing what policymakers liked to call “transformation” but seemed from our perspective on the ground to be a Katrina-scale disaster produced by public policy.
Rereading the passages from that body of reporting in this booklet, conceived, designed and edited by young colleagues (who were just learning to read when I wrote them), I am struck by continuities of effort, theme, and voice.
You be the judge, but it seems to me these words could have been written today. Some may see that as cause for pessimism. We do not. On the contrary, in this time of extreme division and apocalyptic fevers, it recalls us to the essential work.
Years ago, in another context, I observed that there are large violent acts, but there are no large healing acts. Healing is a matter of small acts of attention and care sustained over time. Issues of racial inequality and unconstitutional policing are necessarily national in character. Yet if we are to realize the potential for enduring change at this watershed moment in our history, they must also be engaged as matters of personal responsibility in the domain of everyday life in the places where we live. That is the conviction—the faith—that sustains our work.
We are grateful for your engagement and support.
As ever,
Jamie Kalven
