Collaborate with CBEL - Discover Unity in Diversity
Written by Tim Buckley, January 2024
Team sports, gatherings, book groups, classes, church attendance, and club memberships are some of the many ways we meet needs for fun, connection, learning, recognition, contentment, and contribution.
Sometimes, the event or group can also provide a sense of comfort and emotional safety. In that respect, affinity groups are important and yet, they can also become echo chambers where our preferences, and even our biases, are unchallenged and even reinforced.
CBEL’s work in Salem and Keizer provides us an opportunity to experience all those things listed in the first paragraph. But part of the project’s novelty is that it invites us to do so in the context of personal growth and cultural awareness. Successfully Building Community Resilience hinges on “grass roots” and “grass tops” members of community being engaged, government and non-governmental leaders collaborating strategically for collective impact, and a non-wavering commitment to all families having the support they need to protect and nurture their children.
Following Dr. Wendy Ellis’ model, CBEL invites your active participation as Salem and Keizer achieve unprecedented success - financially, academically, socially, and ethically.
Click here to see a documentary film about similar efforts in Cincinnati, Ohio.
There are two levels, or methods, CBEL employs to simultaneously attain equity:
Addressing conditions that allow “Adverse Childhood Experiences” (ACE #1) to exist in our city and,
Addressing the ways in which “Adverse Community Environments” (ACE #2) continue the pattern of poverty and social injustice.
CBEL facilitates “Collaborative” meetings (in-person and virtually) six times a year, from 8 - 9:30 a.m. at the Seymour Center on north Portland Road, behind the Catholic Community Services building. We would love you to attend the next one in May.
NOVEMBER 2023
Internationally-recognized speaker Rhonda Magee presents via Zoom to the CBEL Collaborative
CBEL’s Collaborative meetings are an antidote to silo building and specialized thinking. Held every other month, Collaborative gatherings are ripe with opportunity to broaden one’s perspective, to earn your “generalist’s stripes”, adding to those you’ve gained from being a specialist.
Collaboratives aren’t random, like some pick-up game of back yard basketball. Instead, they’re an amalgam forged around the focused desire to make Salem and Keizer healthier and more resilient. Among the 100 or so people gathered are moms and dads from CBEL’s three Neighborhood Family Councils, equally curious teachers and financiers, cops and undertakers, retailers and service professionals, elected officials and volunteers, leaders and followers, the affluent and the striving.
Local Groundwork Leadership Institute Founder Chris Pineda presents to CBEL Collaborative in September 2023
What motivates the growth of our Collective is a dream, a wish, a goal: that every child in Salem and Keizer is raised in a happy home, grows healthy in body and mind to adulthood and, with a good education and equal opportunity, grows to maturity and thrives.
The Collective gatherings are social – enjoy a catered breakfast together, and meet other enthusiastic, civic-minded people with shared visions for community health.
The gatherings are also educational – learn from presenters like Rhonda Magee, Paul Schmitz, Chris Pineda and Clifton Taulbert, then spend a half hour or more sharing stories and brainstorming strategies in small groups.
A third takeaway is a shared sense of hope and possibilities, having quickly established trust with new acquaintances.
And finally, hearing from neighbors about the results of their efforts provides confidence that this effort will lift the entire metropolitan area.