By Bill Fulton, Mark Earnest and Karen Albright
Introduction
When America’s Founders chose “e pluribus unum” as the national motto, they captured not only a central challenge of their time, but an enduring difficulty of democracy. Bringing competing views into common accord is at the heart of every social challenge, from homelessness to health care reform to climate change. The greater the challenge, the more urgently people advocate for the solutions that make sense to them, and the more divided people feel from those who disagree with their solutions. Too often, the path from difference to disagreement to demonization is a self- reinforcing downward spiral. Add the algorithmic steroid of social media, reinforcing conflict and division, and society becomes unable to address even the problems that threaten our collective well-being.
Yet even when trust is low and resources seem scarce, communities possess capacity for successful collaboration that, when properly activated, produces remarkable results. Frameworks that describe the why and how of this process, such as collective impact, collaborative leadership, and results-based accountability help demystify this process and advance effective community collaboration. These approaches share an important commonality: they shift the dynamics of problem solving from zero sum conflicts to positive sum opportunities, creating an upward spiral of curiosity, commitment, and collaboration.
As practitioners in the field of collaboration, we have seen the benefits of these models firsthand and can attest to their power. We have also seen their limits, including the tendency to over- professionalize collaboration and civic problem solving. This process can lead people to grow dependent on the technical knowledge and limited funding of foundations, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies, and less likely to believe in their own collective efficacy. The culmination of relying more heavily on institutions while trust in institutions erodes across the political spectrum ratchets down both expectations and willingness to engage. Downward spirals prevail.
Communities need ways to translate the power of theoretical models and technical knowledge into the natural language of communities and into routines that are familiar and trusted. They need ways to remember that our current problems can be addressed through our collective capacity to become more than the sum of our parts. We owe our survival as a species to our ability to be more powerful together than we are as individuals. Rekindling our faith in the possibility of e pluribus unum is imperative.
The Folk Wisdom of Stone Soup
Nothing taps into our shared humanity more effectively than stories, and few stories do this more effectively than the timeless folktale Stone Soup. With variations across multiple cultures and languages, the core narrative of the tale remains consistent. (For instance, Marcia Brown’s book, Stone Soup, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.)
A hungry traveler enters a town seeking something to eat but is told by each villager he encounters that they too are hungry and have nothing to spare. To the surprise of the villagers, the traveler announces that he has a solution to their shared hunger: he will make stone soup. He puts a pot on to boil, adds a stone to the water and, as curious villagers gather, begins to extol the delights of the meal he is preparing, inviting all of them to share in it once it’s done. As he praises the dish he is making, he notes how much better the soup could be with some additional ingredients. With imaginations and appetites whetted, the villagers revisit their pantries and return with various ingredients – onions, carrots, barley, beef – to add to the soup. With each contribution, the soup grows richer and more enticing, inviting still more contributions. Before long the whole village is sharing a feast that none previously thought possible.
The story is compelling and instructive for several reasons. First, it begins with immediate and seemingly intractable problems: hunger and scarcity. Second, it emphasizes human agency, the belief that one can do something about one’s circumstances. Third, it suggests that the community already has what it requires to succeed and need not wait on resources from elsewhere. Perhaps most critically, the whole community benefits in the end. This is not a private good for some at the expense of others; it is a public good everyone enjoys. Finally, it becomes clear that their hunger is not just physical: community and connection prove just as satisfying as the meal they have made.
The dynamics captured in this tale are not dusty lessons from long ago. They remain alive and well among us, though perhaps quite underutilized. The authors have spent much of the last two years gathering modern examples of stone soup making.
- In Chaffee County, Colorado, a long-divided community found common ground in the desire to preserve the health and beauty of their region for future generations.
- In Kingsport, Tennessee, citizens transformed the trash-strewn banks of a stream into a vibrant greenbelt stretching from across town, connecting the larger community in the process.
- In Tulsa, Oklahoma, community members addressed a history of racial violence by creating a park and annual rituals that transformed these simmering divisions into social harmony.
Read more about these examples of communities making stone soup here.
In these examples we saw people come together for a larger collective good, transcending individual interests to create, reclaim, or preserve a community resource. Our goal in collecting these examples was to identify their common elements—the ingredients in the recipe, if you will—that could inspire and enable other communities to make stone soup.
These examples illustrate that the capacity for creating stone soup is inherent to any community. The soup itself may taste differently across various contexts depending on the available ingredients, the container, and so on. And the issues around which communities will seek to come together will certainly vary. But the act of making the soup together is what matters, for that is what satiates our collective hunger.
An Example of Making Stone Soup
The building of a crisis center in northeast Colorado a few years ago serves as one real-life example of how the stone soup narrative arc can play out to beautiful effect. When Jeannie Ritter assumed the role of First Lady of Colorado, she travelled around the state to find out how to best focus the limited resources she could offer in her new position. She heard heartbreaking stories of mental health crises that seemed well beyond what these small, rural communities could address.
In the rural town of Sterling, community leaders described how the lack of local resources affected people experiencing mental health crises. Most were driven in the back of the sheriff’s patrol car to the nearest crisis facility over two hours away. Safety protocols meant that many were handcuffed for the ride, exacerbating the very crisis they were there to resolve. Building a crisis center to address these needs locally would cost millions of dollars – resources they did not have.
Although Ritter could not offer financial resources, she was committed to using her position to help convene partners and see what could be done. Through the leadership of Liz Hickman, director of the local mental health center, Ritter gathered over 30 people with diverse roles and perspectives to take stock of current realities and envision how to best solve the problem they faced.
As the dialogue unfolded, the framing of the problem began to shift, and so did the energy in the room. What began as a focus on scarcity (“How do we raise $12 million we don’t have?”) shifted to one of curiosity (“How can we assess a person’s needs and keep them safe while they move through a period of crisis?”). This curiosity in turn led to commitments to meet the needs of the moment. Like the villagers contributing their ingredients to make stone soup, community partners brought forth their various resources:
- The mental health center could provide triage expertise to identify the level of crisis the person was experiencing.
- The community college could provide psychology students to act as “sitters” to be with the person as the crisis de-escalated.
- The hospital offered to convert some beds that were going unused into crisis beds, and the assisted living center volunteered to serve as a backstop if needed.
- The local churches volunteered to establish an emergency transport network to get people from triage to these beds.
- What about the deeper, root causes that precipitated the crises in the first place? The local family resource could help coordinate a range of social services that might help prevent future crises if accessed at the right time.
Before long, the community had created a coordinated crisis response process that reduced the need for police transport by 80 percent without any additional funding. What once felt like an insurmountable challenge became a series of manageable problems, addressed by resources the community didn’t realize they already had. In a fairy tale-like twist on the Stone Soup fable, news of the success of their collaborative effort travelled quickly, and eventually attracted enough funding to build an actual crisis center in the community.
Although every community may not experience this exact version of the stone soup story, we believe that the basic recipe for making stone soup can work in any community with ingredients the community already has.
The Recipe for Stone Soup
Like all folk wisdom, Stone Soup offers a simple way to understand a complex reality. It is both memorable and meaningful. While its component elements align with academic research on community change, it does not require formal training to understand or implement. The basic recipe for making stone soup in communities is straightforward:
- Feel the Hunger
- Convene the Cooks
- Create the Container
- Control the Temperature
- Add the Ingredients
- Taste and Season
- Celebrate the Feast
Making Stone Soup in Your Community
Anyone can make stone soup. It doesn’t require a top chef. It just takes a small group of people to recognize a shared hunger and engage others in exploring their common desires in a way that mobilizes their collective agency. While this experience is not always simple—indeed, it is often messy, logistically challenging, emotionally charged—it is nonetheless, like any culinary achievement, feasible if you consult the recipe. To demonstrate how the process might unfold, let’s imagine the hypothetical town of New Vista, faced with the kinds of challenges that many communities confront: lack of funding for schools, rising mental health crises, the loss of jobs due to a factory closure, a recent act of gun violence, the arrival of an influx of immigrants from Central and South America. The following scenario suggests how New Vistans might turn one of these challenges—responding to the arrival of immigrants- into an opportunity to make stone soup.
Step 1- Feel the Hunger
The critical factor at this stage is that someone begins to notice that there is a common experience in the community—hunger—that needs attention. In New Vista, let’s imagine that the local recreation center is closed to the public in order to provide emergency shelter to the new immigrants. The threads in the local online forum become filled with heated exchanges over the issue. But alongside the uproar, something else begins to take shape—perhaps a small group of friends begin talking about their concerns around the issue. They might sense that everyone in the neighborhood is upset for different reasons and that the issue is dividing the community. Thus begins the stone soup-making: someone takes the time to feel and name the hunger.
Step 2 – Convene the Cooks
While not necessarily seeing themselves as leaders, the small group might decide to host a dinner and invite others to discuss what to do. To their surprise, word might spread beyond their initial invitees and a larger group might show up to share stories about how they see the issue refracting through the community. The group may find talking about the issue cathartic, and someone might suggest meeting again. Soon enough, after a few meetings have occurred and things begin to gather momentum, someone asks what to call the gathering when they send out the calendar invite. To keep to the theme of this essay, let’s imagine someone cleverly suggests “Standing Together for Our Neighbors Everywhere,” or STONE. Whether they realize it or not, they are now a group of cooks on their way to making a batch of stone soup.
Step 3 – Create the Container
After several early, informal meetings, STONE members are likely to sense a need for more structure and clarity around what they are doing, especially as they seek to invite others to join. At this critical container stage, they need to form enough structure to ensure order, but not so much to be bogged down. Here, people often draw upon familiar structures from work, boards they serve on, or governing bodies, using them as models for things like purpose statements, member roles, communication guidelines, and achievement markers. If more structure is needed, they will add it over time.
In our example, STONE continues to meet for the next few months, using each meeting to both talk about the immediate concern regarding the rec center, but also about the deeper issues that need to be addressed, including the division in the community around the issue. After a few meetings, people begin to express concerns that the meetings are more talk than action and meeting attendance begins to drop. Who really has the time for this? At this point, a new part of the container for the process might be the formation of committees or action teams to allow people to start working on some of the ideas they have brainstormed, like proposing alternative shelter ideas to the town council and finding volunteers to gather donations for the arriving families. The cooks now have the structure—the container—in place to begin making the soup.
Step 4 – Control the Temperature
As word gets out about STONE’s approach and purpose, it attracts both more involvement from those aligned with the mission and resistance from others who are opposed. The critical move here for the chefs is to ensure they have enough heat—enough authentic energy—from the interaction among diverse perspectives to build true commitment, but not so much that it spills over into divisive conflict that drives people away. This tends to happen best when the group is dedicated to a purpose big enough to include a wide range of interests and to ways of communicating that allow those diverse interests to form a common understanding. When people truly feel heard, groups can draw strength and energy from their diverse perspectives, rather than be pulled apart. Let’s imagine that after a few heated, frustrating meetings, STONE refines its ground rules and core values to emphasize that it is a place for all neighbors’ concerns—residents and new arrivals alike—and to articulate that, ultimately, everyone wants the rec center to reopen and for the arriving families to have a place to live.
Step 5 – Add the Ingredients
Once a group reaches this stage—having a clear, inclusive purpose (they have named the hunger), a set of committed organizers (the cooks), a clear way of operating together (a strong container), and a culture of inclusion and dialogue (ways to control the temperature)—they soon begin to attract the resources they need because people understand how and what to contribute. In the case of STONE, that might be people offering to donate kitchenware, clothes, and furniture to help families move from the rec center into more permanent housing. It might include people talking to their congregations about offering transitional shelter, or reaching out to refugee resettlement agencies to learn more about how that process works or exploring short term solutions like beginning to open the rec center for limited hours that don’t disrupt the families in the shelter but still give residents access. Most importantly, as relationships form between residents and newly arriving families, the stories of both needs and dreams are likely to help generate creative solutions that were previously unseen.
Step 6 – Taste and Season
Given the complexity of community issues, no proposed solution is likely to solve an issue once and for all. To the contrary, today’s solution is often tomorrow’s new problem. To address this, good chefs keep tasting and seasoning as they go, and good community problem-solvers keep monitoring the impacts of their actions, adapting as they need. For STONE, that would likely include monitoring the threads in the online forum for pushback or common ground, offering feedback to the town council on steps they are proposing, staying in touch with families through the process to understand how everything is affecting them, and being willing to mobilize people to engage as needed to ensure the issues get addressed.
Step 7- Celebrate the Feast
To maintain momentum in a group, it is essential to celebrate even small wins along the way, especially when no clear end is in sight. For STONE, this might take multiple forms. Hosting a potluck meal that brings residents together with the immigrant families at the rec center would be a key early celebration, or at least a way of breaking the ice in what could easily be a frigid situation. Celebrating milestones of membership in the growing effort is another important step to convey growing interest. Recognizing policy solutions that emerge along the way, however small, helps remind people of their collective power. News of any successful transition to more stable housing for the arriving families helps humanize the issues and show markers of progress. And of course, celebrating the reopening of the rec center, when that day comes, is essential to not only commemorate the progress of reaching one goal, but perhaps also serving to bridge the group to a new, broader goal of resettlement for the families.
Conclusion
The size and scope of the problems we face can feel overwhelming, and the solutions we need often appear out of reach. It is tempting to believe, as the villagers did in the folktale, that we have nothing in our collective pantry. The impulse to collaborate is hardwired into humanity, but so is the tendency to retreat into a defensive crouch when threatened. Leadership can determine which impulse is expressed and what actions result from those expressions. Despondency is a reasonable response to the daunting realities we face at home and to the rising tides of despair and conflict we see around the globe, but so is hope. What we offer in this essay is not meant as a panacea for all problems. Indeed, in the face of an issue like systemic racism, making stone soup might sound like a simplistic and inadequate response. The limited space in this essay requires glossing over many of the complexities of the iterative, often messy and contentious process of soup making.
Our intent in offering stone soup as a practical and reliable approach for community problem solving is to remind us all that communities have many more resources than they usually believe they do, and that the path toward our shared solutions is one we already know by heart. It can be all too easy to forget this when so much of our experience of the world is now shaped by forces that not only seek to divide and isolate us, but also to profit from cynicism. Our goal is to restore hope in our collective capacity and to show a way to come together around common challenges and, in the process, become more than the sum of our parts.
As humans have done throughout history, we survive by creating something no one thought possible from resources we did not realize we had. To begin, we need only be willing to place the first stone in the pot and invite others to join in creating the feast needed to feed us all.
Bill Fulton is the founder and Executive Director of The Civic Canopy, a Colorado-based nonprofit whose mission is to create the conditions where the many work as one for the good of all. The Civic Canopy provides a platform for transforming the way pivotal issues in society are solved, connecting diverse groups of people seeking change in their communities and equipping them with the tools to create meaningful and lasting impact.
Mark Earnest is the Meikeljohn Professor of Medicine and Division Head of General Internal Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Karen Albright is Associate Professor and Director of Qualitative Research in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Senior Investigator and Director of Community Engaged Research at OCHIN, a non-profit health care innovation center focused on health equity.
Sources
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David D. Chrislip, The Collaborative Leadership Fieldbook, New York: Jossey-Bass, 2002.
Mark Friedman, Trying Hard is Not Good Enough: How to Produce Measurable Improvements for Customers and Communities, BookSurge Publishing, 2009.
Marcia Brown, Stone Soup, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.
Callie Jones. “Centennial Health Center celebrates opening of new respite facility.” Sterling Journal- Advocate. November 13, 2013.
Otto Scharmer, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009.