Creating Supportive Communities

Community. The word has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? I feel an immediate sense of calmness and protection whenever I hear the word. But what does “community” mean to us collectively? And how can a community help to assure the safety and well-being of our children? My thesaurus lists “area, district, locality, neighborhood, region and section” as synonyms for “community”. Also “public, people, village, colony and hamlet”. My dictionaries define it as “society in general, the members of a political unit; collectively, those who share a common interest, a social group whose members reside in the same locality.”

Does a common interest in the safety and well being of our children make us a community? And how many of us actually share a common interest in all children from newborn through college age? Or do we think of “our” children as just those under our roof, or in our extended family, or on our block? Do we limit our embrace of children only to those we know? Or those who look like us? Or those in our social circle?

Can we, as an entire state, come together as one community with a common interest in the safety and well-being of all of our children?

We cannot limit our definition of community to just the geography. We must embrace it as more than a physical thing. It is also a metaphysical and spiritual thing. It is my hope that we will think of every child as sacred and our responsibility to them as if we were truly caring for gifts from God. I often quote a statement I heard somewhere that really reaches into my soul, “Every brand new baby is like a full glass of water, and our job is not to spill a drop.” What an awesome responsibility.

That is the responsibility we have been given, and it is time we learn how to fulfill it. We seem to easily reach out to families when they lose a child to illness or accident or have a tragedy like a fire or flood. Can we also reach out when a family has an alcohol, drug or domestic abuse problem or when one of the parents is in prison?

Those children and families also need a community. And we can learn how to help.

A program in Ramsey County called Wakanheza, created by folks from the Ramsey County Health Department, has been having some pretty impressive success training people how to treat our children as “sacred beings” (the meaning of Wakanheza in the Dakota language). They have been expanding more broadly across the state training trainers, and our staff members have become trainers in this process. If you are interested in learning more, please let us know. It is a way of being with each other that encourages treatment of everyone as sacred.

I believe that we can and must become the community our children need and create a trajectory in their lives from happy baby to happy, healthy adult. Let’s be the “community” for all of our children. Consider joining the Minnesota CAN Prevention Force. Just go to our Web site at www.pcamn.org, click on the CAN Force logo and make a commitment to do whatever you can to make the lives of all of our children better.
Thank you.