Community Sustainability: People, Planet, Profit

Positioning the Eastside to Achieve the Triple Bottom Line

· What is social sustainability? Step back.

Sustainability on a deep level is about balance. To be able to sustain something all the components must be regenerative and interdependent.

Social justice, including the ability of all of the residents of our communities to meet their basic human needs, is also about balance, the balance of power, and as such is an integral element of sustainable communities and that term sustainability as it is applied to human interaction and connection.

You might say that, Social sustainability exists when communities, families, and individuals are able to sustain ourselves and contribute back to our communities. An essential point is being able to do this without having to consistently rely on “emergency services” like food banks, meal programs, shelters, and others.

Social sustainability also includes meaningful work that pays a living wage. People in a socially sustainable community have affordable housing, healthcare, good schools, child care, elder care, and assistance for people with disabilities or special needs. We live free of racism, classism, sexism and other forms of domination or coercion in distribution of opportunity and power.

This may sound utopian, but it’s not optional. The elements of social sustainability are critical to success even if environmental or economic aspects of sustainability are your top priorities.

For example, if advocates and planners of sustainability don’t include social justice and meeting basic human needs in their understanding of a sustainable community, and their work toward creating a sustainable community, in a best case scenario, their efforts will struggle to expand beyond a segment of relatively privileged members of our communities, and their efforts will be hindered by this limited perspective and participation. Why? Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” clearly describes the reality that food, shelter and safety today take a higher priority than more intangible future goals.

And then, in a worst case, we must consider that in communities with huge and ever increasing disparities of power and wealth we have seen protest against this injustice take the form of widespread bursts of property violence that are not centrally controlled. There’s no reason to suspect these forms of grass roots political vandalism will decrease without addressing the disparities at their root.

Gifford described this dynamic in a recent blog post.

So, whatever aspect of sustainability fires your passion, you have an interest in working toward social sustainability.

As Gifford noted in a blog post earlier this year (April 25, 2010 “Social Justice and Sustainability” http://www.pinchot.com/2010/04/social-justice-and-sustainability.html)

“Political vandalism is a powerful form of protest that can only be held in check by widespread belief in the legitimacy and fairness of the socioeconomic system or a brutal system for repressing dissent.”

“The level of brutality needed to sustain a great and growing inequality is incompatible with the level of innovation and intellectual productivity needed in advanced economies.”

“If inequality continues to increase, political property destruction will be used not just against rich individuals, but against corporations and government agencies. If there is a huge population of the poor amidst great concentrated wealth, broad segments of the population may come to cheer for and support the perpetrators. For this reason, if our civilization is to persist, we will have to reduce the spread between the rich and the poor. If a corporation is to remain profitable, it will have to pay attention to its impact on the poor and powerless.” 

· What role can service providers, elected officials, funders, and other community members, those of us in this room, each play in order to reach a balanced state of social sustainability?

1^st we need to establish a shared vision for what the ultimate goal is.

THEN we each examine our goals in providing human services, education, and health care and examine, specifically, how these goals relate to our vision for sustainable communities. Will reaching for these goals get us to our vision? Or not?

It might seem obvious, but not all of us are tracking this connection.

Our goals have to align with the vision, with the balance we seek, if we ever expect to get there.

Two examples in more concrete terms of how this alignment works:

1. We are more likely to reach our vision of a balanced, just community if we do 2 things:

· work now toward creating the conditions required so that emergency services are not needed in the future, and

· work now to build-in the supports for services that we determine are an ongoing part of a healthy community.

Providing emergency services while they are needed, hopefully on a short term basis, is necessary, but not sustainable or even desirable.

How do we move in this direction? Together, we consider which of the services we provide are “emergency” services: that is, if we lived in a strong, balanced community would it be better if people didn’t need to access some services on a regular basis, but only in emergency situations? If these needs were met in other ways? Another way of getting to this is to ask which services address a “trouble” that would be better solved than mitigated?

And then ask ourselves why people need the services we have designated as emergency services and what change could relieve that need. Maybe a living wage or other economic policies? Maybe adding early childhood education to the continuum of public education? Each facet may call for different solutions.

THEN we consider which services we’d want to have available in the future in a balanced and healthy community. Which services play a continuing role in the developmental cycle of people and communities that we want to build into a sustainable community?

This analysis is a critical step in moving together, intentionally toward the vision of social sustainability.

2. 2^nd concrete example of aligning our goals with the vision of sustainability is to examine the goals we attach to “success” in human services. Do these goals get us closer to being sustainable?

One common indicator of success used in human services is “self-sufficiency”. Self- sufficiency is not a sustainable condition. And more importantly, for human beings self-sufficiency is a delusion. No man is an island. Even the most prosperous amongst us is not self-sufficient. Why do we choose to measure our program participants against that standard when it is neither possible nor even desirable?

What we probably need to be aiming for as “success” is something more like balanced interdependence. How would that change our perspectives as providers and funders? How would service provision change? Could using balanced interdependence as a goal bring our communities and families closer to sustainability?

This brings us full circle:

° Sustainability is about balance.

° Social sustainability is an essential aspect of the triple bottom line, not just an “add on”.

° Aligning our more immediate social goals with our long term vision is more likely to result in progress toward that vision.

° We all hold power that we can use to move us toward social sustainability.