We are delighted to feature a guest blog post from our NCLR Affiliate, Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation.
By Lowell Herschberger, Director of Career and Education Programs
The young person sighed as the teacher emphatically tried to communicate his point. The student’s body language reflected disenfranchisement and disconnection. Attempts to “get the point across” only resulted in a further negative reactions by the student. Was this just another classroom management issue? It sure looked like it. Everyone knew the script—we’ve seen it before. A student acts out, and then there are disciplinary measures followed by a lost opportunity for the young person.
Fortunately for everyone, the young person was participating in a program at Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation (CHLDC), an organization built on grassroots leadership development. The young adult was in Youth Build Cypress Hills, a green jobs training program for students who have dropped out of high school. The traditional educational pathways had been ineffective, and a new approach was needed. This green jobs training program consists of 28 weeks of training involving a time split between 50% GED instruction, 40% construction/green jobs training, and 10% leadership development.
At that moment, the CHLDC teacher called a time out. Rather than brush off the incident or simply manage the behavior, he began to dig deeper to find a solution. He used a technique called “unpacking the message within the message.” The technique focuses on asking questions of participants to identify the real message about what bothers them, not punishing the behavior.
The idea of solving problems by listening and learning is not new. In the book Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice, Stephen Preskill and Stephen Brookfield describe how one can lead by listening. They offer numerous examples of how the most effective leadership can actually occur by asking questions. Questions empower the group and recognize the fact that solutions are not imposed by the expert (a position of power) but are created from within the group. By carefully asking questions and listening, a leader can equalize the power dynamic and promote grassroots solutions. This happens when we stop long enough to unpack the message within the message.
The intervention is based on the notion that most conflict results from a failure to listen to all of the messages involved in a given communication. This approach is particularly helpful when the underlying core values of the speaker and the listener are in agreement, as in the case of youth development staff and young adult participants.
Here is how it works. Posted on the wall are five questions to ask about every communication:
1. What did the speaker say?
2. What did the speaker intend to say?
3. What did the listener hear?
4. What did the listener understand the speaker to mean?
5. What past experiences influenced the meaning?
During an interaction, anyone can call a “time out,” at which time the communication is unpacked starting in the middle with question 3. By starting with the listener, the facilitator immediately values the perception of the listener and solicits him as a problem solver. The facilitator then proceeds to questions 4 and 5 to hear out the listener and put words to the nonverbal reaction by the listener. Question 5 is particularly helpful as youth begin to see how history impacts communication. One youth said, “For a second, you reminded me of the guards when I was upstate. They used to yell at us.” This youth’s candid reflection was invaluable to the staff because nothing could be further from their intentions!
Finally, the teacher returned to question 2. Inevitably, his intentions were good, though misunderstood. Having had plenty of time to reflect on what he heard, the young adult is ready to entertain this new intention behind the communication. When the listener feels fully heard and the intentions are seen to be good, the original message as revealed in question 1 becomes clear and the situation is resolved. Most importantly, the listener is empowered by the process of having a real conversation that is not characterized by one-sided, power-laden messages. Rather, a true dialogue occurs and mutual understanding is created.
It is this grassroots approach that permeates through CHLDC’s history, a history created by local residents and merchants in 1983, after a period of rapid neighborhood change. Long-time residents of Cypress Hills in Brooklyn, New York had moved out, stores along the commercial strip closed, and banks decided that the community was not a place to do business. In addition to developing a building for Cypress Hills Community School, an alternative public school that was co-founded with local parents, CHLDC also founded Cypress Hills Collegiate Prep, an alternative public high school that opened in 2006 and assists parents and teen groups in organizing to improve local public schools and help local businesses grow and connect residents with public benefits. CHLDC offers recreational, educational, and vocational services for youth, adult education, family counseling, and college counseling. The Cypress Hills Child Care Corporation runs a family day care network, an in-home Head Start program, and a day care center.
CHLDC’s mission is to revitalize the Cypress Hills community through housing preservation, economic development, and the positive development of youth and families. CHLDC serves 8,000 residents per year with affordable housing and helps owners and renters fix up their homes. CHLDC educates and counsels first-time homebuyers and organizes tenant associations. In the construction component of the green jobs training program, participants receive weatherization training from the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA), the Roots of Success Environmental Literacy Curriculum, the Sherwin-Williams Renovation, Repair, and Painting Program, the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) Core Craft Curriculum, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 30-hour training. This mix of introductory training, coupled with positive communication skills, enables participants to enter the workforce or make a meaningful decision about what sort of advanced training they might pursue. Together, CHLDC’s programs strengthen the area’s physical and economic infrastructure, providing quality educational and social services and fostering local leaders.