In Community, We Have Everything We Need
A Chat with GatherFor's Teju Ravilochan
(Residents of the Brownsville NY housing projects talking about their GatherFor “village.”)
“We are each other’s social safety net.” This is one of the revelations that struck social entrepreneur Teju Ravilochan on a visit some years ago to his parent’s home country of India where he was looking closely at how informal social systems were critical to well-being.
Another revelation: In many Native cultures, there is no word for poverty. The closest translation is something like, “people without family.”
So what would happen, he wondered, if groups of neighbors came together and treated each other like family? Even more, what if we conducted that experiment in a place like Brownsville NY, amidst the largest concentration of public housing in the U.S.?
The Covid pandemic gave him a push to begin testing these ideas with a new project called GatherFor, the origins of which he describes in our audio conversation.
Believing people closest to the problem are closest to the solution, GatherFor organizes neighbors experiencing joblessness, food and housing insecurity, and social inequity into teams of 5-7 to support each other holistically.
Drawing on their own resourcefulness and wisdom, these “Neighbor Teams” work together to find and create new livelihoods, care for their children, provide stable housing to their families, and more. Through GatherFor, they receive direct cash assistance, connection to a network of relevant partners, and the training they require as they share stories, resources, and plans to fulfill their needs.
How GatherFor employed a “kindness strategy” in order to convince NYCHA, the local public housing authority (“one of the most hated organizations in New York,” as Teju pointed out), to address a decades-long backlog of overdue maintenance and repairs is a story you just have to hear to believe.
Teju came to the project with a strong background. He was co-founder and former CEO of Uncharted (which was acquired by another nonprofit called Common Future). He is a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur, an Inc Magazine 30 under 30 entrepreneur, and a TEDx speaker.
Recently, GatherFor asked the question, “What can community do?” They put out a call for examples of their guiding mantra in this Medium post. Here’s the key section:
To cultivate the imagination of our community, we’re looking for community-based approaches to addressing the needs of:
housing (like communities throwing rent parties or families moving in together to share rent),
mental health (like peer therapy circles),
entrepreneurship (like susus, which our community members practice to help one another secure funding to start businesses)
child care (like described earlier in this post).
If you are practicing anything like the above, please reach out (email me at teju@gatherfor.org). We would love to hear how you’re going about it and learn from you, as we endeavor to learn how true it is that in community, we have everything we need.
See you next time—peace.
Elias- This just about beautifully sums up many issues in the modern societal systems: “In many Native cultures, there is no word for poverty. The closest translation is something like, “people without family.” Accurately put.