Transforming Neighborhoods: The Radical Hospitality of Deep Listening with De'Amon Harges

Kate Tucker: I'm Kate Tucker, and this is Hope Is My Middle Name, a podcast from Consensus Digital Media. I am so excited to share this conversation with De'Amon Harges, also known as the Original Roving Listener. For a long time, De'Amon's main job was to listen. He would go door to door in Indianapolis asking folks to tell him their stories, their birth stories, where they come from, what their dreams are, what their gifts are. And then he'd find ways to activate those gifts to strengthen the community. De'Amon discovered such a wealth of talent within his own neighborhood that he started a consulting company with his neighbors. And now, De'Amon is a social banker. What a great title, right? And, with his company, The Learning Tree, he and his neighbors help institutions shift from a needs based, transactional approach to handling social issues, to the relational model of Asset Based Community Development, identifying and celebrating the gifts, talents, and resources that already exist, and then organizing them to create opportunities.

And it all began with a story…

De'Amon, it's so good to get to talk with you today. Thank you for taking the time. 

De'Amon Harges: Hey, Kate. How you doing? 

Kate Tucker: I have been looking forward to this conversation for months. And one thing I know about you is you love to throw a good party. So tell me maybe what's one of your more epic celebrations of late? 

De'Amon Harges: Well, just a couple weeks ago, The Community Foundation came down and my team pulled some residents together to throw a listening party at our bar.

Kate Tucker: Wait, wait, wait, wait. You have a bar? 

De'Amon Harges: Yes. That's the other piece. We got a real estate project we're doing. Resident-led, first phase is about a 12 million dollar project. So we're developing a corridor and in that we bought a bar and restaurant and event space. 

Kate Tucker: Amazing. 

De'Amon Harges: I wasn't there, but the president of The Community Foundation said it was the first time he went to a place where people displayed their individual and collective power.

And he hasn't been in spaces where residents say, well, yeah, we need you, but you need us too. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

De'Amon Harges: That was really powerful to hear. It was about 30 neighbors. 

Kate Tucker: That's amazing. Okay. There's so much I want to know about these gatherings, but before we get into that, I want to start with your story. Where did you grow up?

De'Amon Harges: I grew up in South Bend, Indiana. And when I think about the work I do now, the practices were formed with me growing up. And so my family in the 30s, they migrated from Mississippi, New Madrid, and Tennessee. They landed in a swamp. And in the swamp, in the 30s and 40s, they built these housing projects. And so my mother was born in 1952, in that place. You know what was happening around that time, segregation and all that stuff. But my grandparents and their neighbors were like social entrepreneurs and artists. And so my granddad, he was really good at salvaging old things and turning it into art. And when my mother was born, he planted a tree and he would keep this little square patch very nice and people would gather around that.

When my mother got older, they called it the learning tree. That story, I would hear, me and my cousins, every Friday, we'd have to go to our grandparents house. That story for 20 something years got told almost every Friday. 

Kate Tucker: Okay, so you have a storytelling heritage. You are at your core a storyteller, and I'd love to tap into that as we go through this conversation. Is there a story that kind of depicts what it was like growing up in South Bend, maybe what your neighborhood was like? 

De'Amon Harges: Growing up, it was a mixed neighborhood, African American and Polish. When I was in the sixth grade, one of my favorite stories is delivering papers and hearing people talk the old language In Poland. My parents were not rich and I watched my dad and mom always struggle around money. And the important thing about that is the story that we listened to around the learning tree, my grandfather saying that no gift go unwasted in this community. that was juxtaposed… so that also formed me watching my mother. My mother was a musician, my dad was a musician, and my dad worked in the car industry in the manufacturing space.

So when he got laid off, I would often see him in the trustee's office. And so that also formed me watching people in my community only being known for receiving services, not giving services. 

Kate Tucker: Right. 

De'Amon Harges: And that learning tree story early on was about community doing its own service. 

Kate Tucker: What instruments did your parents play?

De'Amon Harges: My mom was a guitar player and she taught my dad. She played since she was 11. And one of the things, brilliant thing is how she got that, my granddad found her playing air guitar. Now my granddad didn't make a lot of money, but he asked her if she really wanted to do this, play music. And she was so excited, my granddad saved up and bought her her first guitar. 

Kate Tucker: That's amazing. 

De'Amon Harges: And so she ended up later on using her gift before she passed away. She was traveling the world, playing blues, and she was really a good storyteller.

Kate Tucker: Wow. This is amazing, this sort of experience you've had at a young age, because I grew up poor and it was really hard for me to move out of a scarcity mentality into an understanding of abundance. And I'm curious, do you feel like you really started to think about money and gifts as a kid? 

De'Amon Harges: Yes. When I was a kid, I thought about dreams and hopes and call or vocation, because that's the thing that we were taught to get us out. But it was like, nothing fit. I think I was always confused about money. And looking in hindsight, I realized there was much more currency out there than money. So my daughter also growing up, she had a home meeting. She was nine years old and she pulled people together because she heard me and my wife argue about money and she was concerned and said, could we create another currency?

Kate Tucker: Wow. 

De'Amon Harges: And I think about this because it always confused me. Why does money have to do with using your gift? And so those were things that I think I was, I was really wrestling with. 

Kate Tucker: So you're seeing all this unfold, and then at the same time, I read that you were going through school and you were struggling with dyslexia. What was that like for you? I mean, how did that impact your experience in school? 

De'Amon Harges: Oh, I could never be any of that stuff that people thought was successful. But what stuck in the back of my mind is thinking about my mom and watching the creativity in my family. You know, what would it look like? What could I be that was authentic? I tried so many things. I was a salesman early on. I thought I was going to go to the Olympics. I was a wrestler. I was really into history and stories. And looking back at it, one of the right fits for me is being a cultural anthropologist. That's what I would have described, but it was so hard to look like you are capable, in knowing that you had some deficits. I really struggled, but there were things that I saw that were heightened. I can see equations, but I can't write them down. And so I used to get in trouble for that. They thought I was cheating. But I really, I wasn't diagnosed until I was like 19. 

Kate Tucker: It must've been like, A lightbulb coming on like, Oh, yeah…

De'Amon Harges: Yeah, and it was later on my whole life started to change around this one because I had a gift for getting in places.

So even though I didn't graduate from high school because of this, at the same time, I end up being a school teacher, first grade, taught poetry. I just started doing it and it had nothing to do with my skill. It had everything to do with people not only focusing on the deficit. I met this pastor in South Bend, Indiana. His name was Mike Mather and it was about 2000. And he did something that I think is super important in the world, is asking people their story. And the first story I told him that stuck in my head was about my grandparents. And he celebrated that and was very serious about, wow, I think this is an incredible way of being in the world.

De'Amon Harges: Well, I grew up at that time, not thinking that was a good way because I was taught you got to go to school. This identification and affirmation that I had this particular gift through somebody else's eyes that I was never told outside my family. And so Mike hired me and later on I moved to Indianapolis and he asked me how would I like to get paid for what I already do.

This is the beginning of The Roving Listener. So my job was to uncover the gifts, talents, dreams, and passions of every single person in the life of our community. Find a place for their gifts and celebrate their gifts in ways that cultivate community, economy, and mutual delight. Sounds really good. I had to write reports.

You already know where this is going, right? Now, I'm coming back to the dyslexia thing for a second. I come back, I couldn't fill out the reports, and everybody on the staff was like, Well, maybe we should fire De'Amon and that… We'd get in trouble for not filling out stuff. 

And Mike stopped, and he said, I know you're doing the work. I get to hear and see all the stories unfolding. He said, why don't you take some money and hire somebody? And I hired a neighbor as I'm telling the story, they recorded them. And to this day, I never do heavy admin work because I'm concentrating on what I'm really good at. This makes me need people. So this dyslexia turns around for me as a gift.

Kate Tucker: Absolutely. Talk to me about deep listening. Talk to me about that. 

De'Amon Harges: Well, quickly, for an example, I open people up to talking about their own deficits because it's okay. And I start out by saying, well, I'm the Roving Listener, but I'm an administrative nightmare. And I jokingly say that, right? Because I think it's okay to say that you don't do that. I feel like this idea of listening is like a meditation. When I hear people describe what I was doing, they say, you're going to talk to people. That's the wrong language. I'm going to listen. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

De'Amon Harges: I use Mary Oliver's advice on living. Pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. That's the basic framework.

Kate Tucker: Mmm, I love her.

De'Amon Harges: What does it mean to pay attention? I remember a couple of things that was lessons. So I had to go house to house, block to block, from the youngest to the oldest in the house. And I wouldn't go out before 10 o'clock and usually who's home in our community are grandmothers. They always were looking for me to come around because I was young and I could do chores.

And I remember first, you know, I had this checklist of questions and people looked at me like I was nuts. What do you mean gifts? And they kind of shooed me away. At one point, I went back to the [same] house and I wasn't going to ask any questions. And they invited me to have a seat. And one of the grandchildren was home and this house was directly across the street from the church.

And the young lady, she was about seven, offered me a piece of pie. 

Kate Tucker: What kind of pie was it? 

De'Amon Harges: It was a peach cobbler. 

Kate Tucker: My favorite. 

De'Amon Harges: And I ate the pie and she started telling the story about the pie. This is when I learned what listening really is. To ask a different question, you must hold those questions in your head and listen with your body. And so, what happened when she started telling the story is that her grandmother took over and you can see her body language change, right? So to listen, we have to be present with people. And then we have to change the question from the normal questions we ask every day. Because I think what I'm listening for and what my neighbors are listening for is where is the invisible contribution and gift that supports a community.

And that sometimes don't happen in one sitting.

Kate Tucker: Tell me more about the neighborhood. What did it look like at the time? What was that shift like? How did it play out? Is there a story you can think of? 

De'Amon Harges: This neighborhood for so long had changed from a White neighborhood during the 50s to a predominantly Black neighborhood. It's known only known for police runs at the time. It was known for young gang members, drugs, and poor people. And people treated people in that neighborhood like they couldn't do anything. And the church that I belong to was part of that. And so they started, I remember, figuring out, well, people need to learn about food and they had food programs. And I remember asking people why they didn't join them.

People were disgruntled. I couldn't figure it out. One day I started walking through the alleys and in the neighborhoods, it's got grass patches in the back and grass patches in the front. And I started seeing gardens. By the time I got in a four block radius, the end of a four block radius, it was 45 backyard gardens, not community gardens.

And I was like, whoa, we just assumed, no wonder people don't want to talk about their gifts. We actually don't believe they have them! And so it took some work, but two things happened. Once the relationship started to get formed, it was clear once people described their power and folks from institutions started to listen to it, there were more collaborations that would start to happen.

So with those gardeners, for example, they created a market that ended up going down to IU Health. Right, but these are the same people that “needed to be taught” about gardening. Right. And so part of really listening is paying attention. And once you hear or see, you cannot unsee it. So you have to activate it. And so getting those folks in a room together becomes super important so they can see each other.

Kate Tucker: Let's talk about that activation. So you're the Original Roving Listener, but you're not the only Roving Listener. It's just that you've kind of developed the process and the practice, and then you launch The Learning Tree. When did you launch the Learning Tree and how did that all come to be? 

De'Amon Harges: When I started doing The Roving Listener, we started paying young people to go meet their neighbors.

It was about 2008, 2009, and I kind of shifted away, I wasn't on staff at the church anymore, but I was getting a lot of calls around the country, and groups were calling me, and I'm still just trying to figure things out. I started making a little money, and I realized it didn't make me happy. 

My new neighborhood, where I had moved to in 2006, also declined. And it was seen the same way. But I'm so busy, I can't even get to meet my neighbors. At about 2010, I started thinking, what would it be like to build a company based on the gifts and talents of my neighbors? So, the idea was that my neighbors are my business partners. And to be my business partner, you don't have to put in money, but give you your gift of listening, celebrating, and whatever other gifts you bring to the table.

The other thing you had to do is give 20 percent of your income because I was giving them consultant gigs. That 20 percent goes back to small grants. So what I learned there, it's nice to find people's gifts, but it's a sin to waste those gifts. So we would put that 20 percent in and give a small grant back. They also had to follow me around the neighborhood. So you had to commit to a practice. We hadn't named this outfit yet. And we're sitting under the tree on my porch on 33rd and Clifton. And my friend said, we should name this The Learning Tree. And that's how we came up with the name. 

Kate Tucker: You are kind of going into this intuiting and understanding what people's giftings are because you've done this deep listening and this practice with them. Then you're helping them come along with you and develop that same practice. And then who's hiring you for the consulting and what kind of work are you guiding them in doing?

De'Amon Harges: So we really focus on some cross-sector groups and mostly people who want to learn or take a journey to figure out how they could be good neighbors as an institution in their communities. So philanthropy is a really big thing. So in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Foundation and CICF, Central Indiana Community Foundation, have entered into a learning contract to create other listeners called Community Cultivators. So I've been doing that for about five years. I'm working with a little college in Chicago to think about repairing relationships in a Southside neighborhood. I've worked with the Developmental Disability Council and the Surgeon General's office. We've done some work, so. 

Kate Tucker: Of the United States? 

Kate Tucker: Wow.

De'Amon Harges: Yes. Dr. Vivek Murthy and team. 

Kate Tucker: Ah, okay. He's doing all that loneliness research. Tell me about that. I mean, that's the U.S. government!

De'Amon Harges: You know, for big institutions that they're usually worried about inviting people. I think counter to that, if institutions in our country find ways to be invited… When Dr. Murthy's office hit me up on an email, I thought it was a joke.

They asked me, can we come visit? And they came for three days. hung out with us. 

Kate Tucker: Amazing. 

De'Amon Harges: Shortly after that, that report was developed. 

Kate Tucker: Are you talking about the Surgeon General's report on loneliness and isolation? 

De'Amon Harges: Right. So we as residents can ask institutions and invite them into our holy space or our sacred space.

And institutions need to look to be invited. It's the counter way of doing this. We look to go to the institutions. Now we're at a space where the innovation is, the technology is, walk outside your door and go look. 

Kate Tucker: That's incredible. So you're out there doing this work and you're doing it in a way with a sort of framework that you are skilled in called Asset Based Community Development. Is that correct? 

De'Amon Harges: Yes. 

Kate Tucker: Tell me what that is. 

De'Amon Harges: Asset Based Community Development, also known as ABCD. 

Kate Tucker: Let's call it that. 

De'Amon Harges: It's basically the framework John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann were looking at solutions to problems and they were going to look at communities that were able to overcome their own problems. What they discovered is that when a community understands its power and its gifts, it creates powerful associations, which also create really good institutions. But my first run in with ABCD was my grandparents. And before I knew about this and I realized that, oh, this is the connection, like my family was the ABCD practitioners, but also indigenous people in this land did that.

Actually, we all do that. So it's just not widely talked about as possible solutions to the ills. And the other thing is that when people hear that, they think it's touchy feely. In my community, people don't ignore their problems. It's very clear our problems are right in front of our face. So a practice we do to show that power is once you find a group of people with gifts, you find a place for them to be celebrated in the common square.

And what that looks like for us, where my idea of social banking came in, was my neighbors saying, dude, you're very connected. You know everybody. And it's not just like knowing them because I've been in meetings. These were people who would end up at my house. My neighbors started realizing, Dude, we're gonna throw a party. Can you invite this person? This was my first awareness of other currencies. So this idea that lifting people up at a party or a celebration where we invite the head of the Community Foundation, a young billionaire, a single mom, and artists and poets and people just living in their life every day, that has got us into doors because we watched currencies exchange. The first currency in this space that exchanges is trust. 

Kate Tucker: Mm hmm. 

De'Amon Harges: The second is story. People exchange stories, and when that happens, for an example, the former head of the Central Indiana Community Foundation hired my neighbor across the street. I mean, huge amount of money to do a cookout in his backyard for an event. That would have never happened if she would have applied for that. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

De'Amon Harges: That happened at a party. And we had not a presentation, but kind of a showcase of three people, vignettes. And the rule was you can't talk about work. And then we had listeners around the room. So when people seemed isolated, we brought them into the center. Now, once you describe and find people's gifts, now we have to figure out how do we get people's currencies exchanged that would never have exchanged? How can we provoke the imaginations of other humans who are segregated or isolated from one another?

Kate Tucker: Yeah. And story comes in there. 

De'Amon Harges: That's it. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah.

De'Amon Harges: I started to realize that in hindsight, what I was doing is I was finding not only using these alternative currencies, but I was also just finding the archetypes to help me live out this work. In every community, there are archetypes, and archetypes of abundance, right, that help people realize what's possible. And we don't activate those folks. So this is me activating the archetypes and then injecting currency into their gifts. 

Kate Tucker: I love it so much. Can you take me through, even if it's just one example or a story, but on a granular level, like how does this actually work? Because I feel so much kinship with this, and I love hosting gatherings. I love, love, love connecting people and seeing things unfold and making things happen. I think sometimes it's so hard to show your work, similar to your equation issue. It's like, how do you then turn around and tell someone in an institution, look what we're doing, you know? Take me through like the party. Are you in the room? How does that actually unfold? 

De'Amon Harges: This is where the archetype of the healer comes into place. There are people who are really good at throwing parties, and healers are one of those because they make great hosts. 

Kate Tucker: Oh, interesting. 

De'Amon Harges: And these parties, I mean, they're just parties, really. Sometimes they're all kind of grand things. Sometimes they're just ten people on a porch. 

Kate Tucker: Getting people together, yeah. 

De'Amon Harges: With some lemonade. So one of the people that had a pivotal influence in our work was somebody that I didn't get along with. He knew about my work as The Roving Listener, his name is Jeff Bennett. I didn't respect him and Jeff was always very nice to me and I'd give him a hard time. Ten years later, My neighbor, Wildstyle and Jeff became friends. And Wildstyle watched me give him the cold shoulder. And Wildstyle said, man, why don't you invite him over and we all sit down and talk.

This is where I discovered my own blind spot in the work and how listening to your neighbors and friends and being reminded what this work is about. After those times, we started going to have a beer. In fact, after this call, I'm going to have a beer with Jeff Bennett. Jeff became the deputy mayor and after we, you know, we had started exploring friendship together, he heard about what we were doing. He says, I can help you with this. Jeff put the bond for us to receive our first huge loan and investment. His friendship was the bond.

And what I've learned is that this is what these gatherings do. They not only lift up the gifts, but they repair. Right? They repair bonds that need it to be happening. And this wouldn't have never happened if these small gatherings, this idea that we have a practice of us journeying together and inviting people who don't look and think like us into that journey. What I ask institutions to do is to walk on a journey. And so I remember John McKnight asked me, he says, how are you going to show people? He asked me the same question and I told him Well I'm going to explain it to him like this. You know what he said? He said, Show them, make an invitation. So oftentimes those institutions are sitting on front porches.

Kate Tucker: Oh my gosh, I've got chills. 

De'Amon Harges: Oh it's an amazing thing. This is like, we don't have an office. So we got three house offices and we take them to people's homes and we asked them to listen and we learned that people trust us. It's amazing. 

Kate Tucker: That is amazing that people are willing to open their homes in that way. That's no small feat that you've built that. And it's an infrastructure within your neighborhood that you have those bonds. It reminds me of Reverend Jen Bailey. She has that amazing quote about relationships being built at the speed of trust and then social change happening at the speed of relationships.

De'Amon Harges: Yeah, Jen Bailey is also a hero of mine. I've been thinking about talking with the healers and Jen's been an influence and then another couple other friends, that we should figure out how do we call these folks “community chaplains.” And I mean, people are chaplains already. There are people in our neighborhoods, in all neighborhoods, you got to look for them, but they help actually heal people. It is important to cultivate that type of space in neighborhoods. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. Yeah, that actually brings up a good point. I love your language around the archetypes and the way you've formulated that for The Learning Tree. Can you define those roles in other terms, or how do you define those for people who are not quite, maybe, comfortable with the idea of a healer or something like that?

De'Amon Harges: Yeah, the healer would be like the community health worker. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

De'Amon Harges: So that was a term that used to be fuzzy. And now it's a job. The storyteller, right? That's the journalist. Right. The gift finder who I didn't talk about. That's the person who’s like the talent scout. And I would identify as a gift finder. I remember, I can't think of the guy's name, but he said, it's like being a talent scout for the soul.

Kate Tucker: Oh, I love that. 

De'Amon Harges: And then the imaginator, right? That's the, um… 

Kate Tucker: The visionary? 

De'Amon Harges: Yeah, the visionary. The executive spirit is the chief administrator. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. COO.

De'Amon Harges: COO, that's it. 

Kate Tucker: Oh, it's so cool. Okay, so give me some examples either that are on the horizon, you know, unfolding in the moment or maybe things The Learning Tree has been able to do where people could see your neighborhood and see sort of some shifts and some positive change.

De'Amon Harges: So in the neighborhood itself, we bought a city block and how that is going to impact in this vastly changing neighborhood is that that land would go into a trust and it is going to be owned by the residents and its descendants. 

Kate Tucker: Wow. 

De'Amon Harges: For 200 years. So it's a whole corridor project. The first phase of it is a 12 million project. We’re building 49 units of affordable housing, mixed use space and starting a hospitality school. 

Kate Tucker: Hospitality school, because it's at the root of everything you're doing, inviting people in and creating spaces for people to connect over food and drink? Is that the thinking? 

De'Amon Harges: Yes, we believe in, like, radical hospitality, and that's just what we do, but also we want to help influence that industry of hospitality with the same care and love.

Kate Tucker: So there's one Learning Tree story I would love to hear, and it's the story about the doors, where you had small stipends for your neighbors to create art on these donated doors, and they put their perceptions on the front and the back, the Perception Door Project. Tell me how that all came together. 

De'Amon Harges: So one Sunday morning, in the fall, we were walking down the alley. There were 25 doors laying there. And one of my neighbors, Mr. Ryder, was like my grandfather. He'd had big sculptures in his yard. So it made me think, who could do something with 25 doors? And I remember calling this artist, Gary Sharp, and he came back with an idea. He made a maquette that had a labyrinth of doors, 54 doors, and he called the project Perception: what's behind the door. So, we go out and put a call out, man, our porches were filled up with people coming to get doors. People donating doors, we used the 25 doors, and then we realized that people wanted to do this, and we paid them 150 bucks. We had no place to store the doors. 

Kate Tucker: That's a lot of doors. 

De'Amon Harges: Four block radius, people end up keeping their doors on the porch. Now, this neighborhood is known for its police runs. So anytime you see the news, it's always going to be bad news. I'm out of town. I come back home. My wife said, Hey, the news people came by and I'm like, Oh, I thought I was in trouble. And she come back and I was skeptical. I said, so what is it that you want to talk about? Well, I was going to do a story about a police run and I started noticing that all these doors on the porches and one neighbor told me, you're the doorman and I'd like to tell a story about this neighborhood that isn't always about bad stuff. It was the first like big thing and we had a big exhibit and we had neighbors help curate the space. We built a whole little neighborhood with the doors. Then shortly after that, we started doing hip hop cyphers at empty houses, but we would decorate it, the empty houses, with large photographs of neighbors. And so this public display of like, our stories aren't just art, but they're currency. 

Kate Tucker: Currency and this sort of invitation to draw people together to connect and continue to create.

What was it like when you first saw Perception, when you walked through those doors? 

De'Amon Harges: You know, it gave us a sense of power, or it made the power we had visible. It was there all along. And I feel like we started to learn that we have to put stories at the center of our operation. We have to put parties at the center of our operation and we have to pay attention like deeply as the center of our operation. I know that seems like well that pretty vague, but all I say if you, you know, come see us. Everybody's welcome. 

Kate Tucker: It's actually not vague, it's just simple and–  it's not simple– it's elemental, and I think we are so used to these institutional sort of processes that stack up and stack up to the point where you actually lose the person that it was meant for in the first place just around all the bureaucracy. And that's so unfortunate. So what is it like for you when you move in your neighborhood now? I mean, what are your interactions like? How do you sort of see your neighborhood maybe differently than you did when you first started? 

De'Amon Harges: Well, I automatically now see potential in every space. Most of my neighbors, I never tell like what I do.

So nobody really knows. They just call me the dude that connect people. 

Kate Tucker: That's a good title. 

De'Amon Harges: I mean, you know what I mean? And I like it like that. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

De'Amon Harges: I think what I try to avoid is the spotlight on me. None of this work is about me. It is about us. It's always why I invite my neighbors to be part of that, whatever I do.

Kate Tucker: When you are out there on their porches and just walking along, what are you hearing from your neighbors these days, you know, and is that different than when you were first going out as the Roving Listener? 

De'Amon Harges: I think I listen different and so that affects the way I see now, but I do think that there is a different awareness that people have about how serious us being isolated from one another is really affecting us. I think people are really worried about what the country is doing or if we're going to exist. Are we going to be able to survive the financial hard falls? The other side of it is, who's listening to our ideas? Who believes in us? We want opportunity to contribute. And I get to hang out in a lot of neighborhoods across the country, in neighborhoods like mine, that people are dying to be listened to, and I just think we need to throw more celebrations, but first we gotta listen.

Kate Tucker: How do you sort of work through, you gave the example of the deputy mayor, which is beautiful, how do you work through sort of a scenario where it's just really hard to build that trust in your neighborhood? 

De'Amon Harges: Some of the pushback– it sounds absurd that poor people can solve their own problems. They can't do this – you know, and the assumption is that they're going to do it by themselves, but that's not true. The other thing is that we get pushed back about the relationship piece because it doesn't seem tangible… 

Kate Tucker: Quantifiable? 

De'Amon Harges: …quantifiable, and it doesn't yield tangible outcomes. But the best way I find to help change people's minds is really, and this is no joke, is to invite them to a party with your friends.

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

De'Amon Harges: Not your co workers, your friends. And I think that, you know, Dr. Murthy, his whole thing is around social isolation. And what he's proposing to combat that is friendships. Authentic and meaningful relationships. 

Kate Tucker: Which comes back to the whole Mary Oliver pay attention and your assertion about deep listening.

So what do you advise people like me who… I live in a small neighborhood in Akron which is a smaller city than Cleveland, similar to Cleveland, not so different from Indianapolis. Where do you start? 

De'Amon Harges: Man, the next time you see a neighbor, take a walk with them. And this is one of my best and favorite practices.

Oftentimes I never meet at a table. I invite people for a walk. People say this is too deep, too fast. But the first place we need to start on our introductions is our birth story. And I do an exercise where I say, Hey, let's take five minutes. You take two and a half. I take two and a half and I won't interrupt you. And I want you to tell me the circumstances of your birth. 

Kate Tucker: Do people ever say, absolutely not? I mean, that is deep. 

De'Amon Harges: No, because people really want their stories to be heard. Now, sometimes it takes a little bit of time, but the idea of walking interrupts that anxiety. 

Kate Tucker: Oh, that's very cool. 

De'Amon Harges: And I do it in meetings too. And I mean, that's where any relationship starts, because that's the thing we do have in common. We got a birth story. 

Kate Tucker: If I went on a walk with you in your neighborhood today, what would we see? Give me the details. Paint a picture for me.

De'Amon Harges: Well, one, you get to see a lot of people hanging out and as we're walking down the street, you'll get interrupted a few times and stopped and invited to hang out with people and I would introduce you to folks and they'd ask you curious questions and laugh and joke and sometimes talk too long. You would see art around. You would see just beautiful displays of joy in our neighborhood. 

Kate Tucker: What are the houses like? 

De'Amon Harges: Man, they have big porches, big old houses that they look like welcome signs because the porches are so grand. You see people sometimes arguing. I mean, you see just regular things and you see people helping each other out and you'll probably be at a lot of dinner tables in the daytime.

Kate Tucker: Hmm. What do you…what do you smell in the air? 

De'Amon Harges: So there are two smells you probably would get. Definitely a good home cooked meal in most places, not all. Or you smell flowers or plants and dirt because people like to grow things. You'll smell construction, sawdust, wood, because there's a lot of construction going on. The noise… you could hear the cars run up and down Harding Street, sometimes loud music on the cars. And in the summertime, you will hear people's voices and yelling up until about six o'clock and then it's dead silence. 

Kate Tucker: So I saw a documentary you were in called The Antidote. And you were, you were doing something with this awesome group of people working on bikes. Is that in your neighborhood? 

De'Amon Harges: It is in my neighborhood. 

Kate Tucker: Tell us about that. 

De'Amon Harges: You know, our job is to identify what people can do and are doing and activate that. So we saw a bunch of kids on bikes, they're young adults now, but they started this shop. We invested 500 bucks. What it became though, is a thing around mobility justice. People start talking about their driver's license and daily problems and trying to get rides and how they ride bikes. So the bike shop itself, it was really an excuse for people to have deep conversations. 

Kate Tucker: And solve a problem. So you had a tangible problem. You found a solution. People came together around it. And then the deeper work is the conversation. 

De'Amon Harges: Yeah, it grew so fast for us. And at the time, we had a really good police chief and in the same way, friendships start, right? Unexpected friendships. Chief Roach was a big supporter of that, trying to get his officers to meet neighbors not as law enforcement, but as people.

Kate Tucker: Talk to me about the future. If we caught up 10 years from now and we went for that walk again around your neighborhood, what are we going to see and what's on the horizon for The Learning Tree? 

De'Amon Harges: Okay, if I had it on that walk, it'd be other people leading that walk. And there would be 25 year olds moving this work as well as elders.The work of my grandparents is 100 year work. It is creating a culture where people fall in love with each other and believe in each other. And so I'm at this place, the challenge is, how do you operationalize love? How do you build an ecosystem where everybody believes that everybody is valuable? And so I don't know if I can create that, but I want to help build the conditions to do that that can last hundreds of years. 

Kate Tucker: Mm. When you think of that dream and that work that you are right deep in the midst of, you know, is there sort of a time or a place or a moment where you just feel this conviction that this is exactly what you were brought here to do, that you are doing the work you were meant to be doing?

De'Amon Harges: There was a point about a year ago, after we closed on the property, someone came up and in front of my neighbors and said, now we need to hire experts. And it alarmed me and put me on alert. Why is it important to cultivate this way of being around abundance? It’s that we're all experts. How do we change that language? So yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot. And part of that is I'm asking myself the question, how can I build the social infrastructure? 

Kate Tucker: It's a huge question. I'm wondering, what's one of your biggest lessons you've learned in attempting to do this? 

De'Amon Harges: One of my biggest lessons is being able to invest in the people closest to you as much as you can. Because when people are committed to this, they're giving their all. The other thing is that we started doing, it's like I'm big on measuring the invisible. And so we created a tool called the Neighborhood Economic Vitality Index. It's called the NEVI. It just launched the other day, the app. What it does is make visible the currencies and the gifts and talents and the well being of a community.

And so measuring, being able to come up with things that illustrate what we do in some very concrete ways, and also being able to inject friendships. So if people don't have social capital, their idea is going to be stagnant. Somebody has to have a use for that gift. And so make that part visible. So make the connections. So throwing those parties again. 

Kate Tucker: I imagine this app came out of a real lived experience in your own neighborhood? Can you tell me kind of maybe how your neighborhood would have been valued, maybe property value, however people value things in municipal sort of government and look at a neighborhood and categorize it, and then how you were able to kind of change that narrative or discover other assets and bring those forth.

De'Amon Harges: So you remember me telling you this story about me taking walks with Jeff Bennett? 

Kate Tucker: Yes. 

De'Amon Harges: We prototyped the index. So the area median income around here is about 28,000. In about a four block radius around where we do the index, we discovered 75,000 of philanthropy, like meaning money. Do you know how we got that answer?

We asked people in the index, like, how much money do you give to your friends that they never give back monthly? They had never been asked that question. We used that money, told Jeff Bennett this story, and that's why he put the bond up. And Impact Central, CICF, and Indianapolis Foundation put up about two million dollars for us just to buy land.

Kate Tucker: Because they saw that there was a tight and committed infrastructure of trust and generosity? 

De'Amon Harges: Well, that was just part of it. But people had assets. This neighborhood has one of the highest concentration of Black ownership. But what people know it for is that it also has 40 percent of all the city's vacancies. But what we focus on is the vacancies. 

Kate Tucker: So basically the city's looking at the deficit, and you're looking at how the neighborhood excels and supports itself. 

De'Amon Harges: So that was one of the numbers, is that people had people they can go to in the community if they were sad, right? So those are the type of things, self efficacy and physical assets, social currency, that's what we started measuring.

And all we did was just ask the question, ask the question differently, and ask different questions. 

Kate Tucker: Oh, the importance of a good question. Wow. What would you want to say to people in power about building community? 

De'Amon Harges: First of all, when it comes to data, let's find ways to make data useful. So that means we need to imagine a new data set when it comes to neighborhoods and resources. Two, start building your institution out by starting to know the people intimately that work for you. And investing, when we talk about professional development, invest in learning in places where you're not used to learning from and the people you're not used to learning from. 

Kate Tucker: What has been maybe the most surprising thing you've realized about you, about yourself on this journey?

De'Amon Harges: I just wrote about this. I feel surreal moments as I thought about being six years old, contemplating what I'm going to be in the world. It ended up being that what I really wanted to be when I was a kid was a professor. The irony is that I am a good teacher. I know that because that's what people tell me. Yeah, so that's really surprising. The other thing is I joked and called myself an administrator's nightmare. Well, I am an administrator now because I'm a CEO. You know what I mean? And so the irony of knowing that you're needed, but letting other people know that they're needed has resulted in me doing things that I couldn't imagine.

Kate Tucker: Yeah. Are you on faculty at DePaul for the ABCD Institute?

De'Amon Harges: Yeah, for the Institute. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. So, I mean, you literally are on the faculty of a university. 

De'Amon Harges: Well, the other piece is that we used to hold university classes on people's porches and I was teaching writing. So the irony about I'm an author now three times in one year.

Kate Tucker: Congratulations. 

De'Amon Harges: So I'd never, never would’ve imagined that I'd be an author. 

Kate Tucker: That's incredible. 

De'Amon Harges: But the biggest thing for me is I have two children, 29 and 21, and they're changing the world. They're going to do what we can't finish. 

Kate Tucker: What do you think your grandparents would say about the work you've done today?

De'Amon Harges: My granddad, he told me one day I was going to write a book. 

Kate Tucker: Wow. 

De'Amon Harges: And so he would just be in tears right now. My grandmother who just passed away at 96, I think she got to see a lot of it pop up. They didn't know if they were teaching anything, but they did. 

Kate Tucker: What's giving you reasons to hope these days?

De'Amon Harges: Friendship. The friendships that I have. Like everybody else, it sometimes gets hard seeing the things going on in our world. That's pretty challenging, but when you got friends that are also in the same struggle that take time to remind you about what's important, and those are the friends that I'm talking about, those ones give me hope and bring me joy. 

Kate Tucker: Hmm. I'm just so grateful to have had this time with you. Thank you so much! 

De'Amon Harges: Thank you for the invitation, Kate. It was a pleasure to be with you.

Kate Tucker: Thank you so much to the original Roving Listener, De'Amon Harges, for sharing such a wealth of stories and wisdom. I am so inspired by the work he and his team at The Learning Tree are doing to build empowered, connected, thriving neighborhoods across America. To connect with De'Amon and The Learning Tree, go to learningtrees.com. And we'll put some extra links in the show notes at hopeismymiddlename.com.

Hope is My Middle Name is hosted and executive produced by me, Kate Tucker. You can find me on YouTube and on Instagram at KateTuckerMusic. And if there's someone you think belongs on the show, please send me a message. Hope Is My Middle Name can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. It would mean a whole, whole lot to us if you would follow the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. We love hearing from you. And if you're still listening, please copy the link to this episode and text it to a friend. That alone makes a huge difference in helping us reach more people with more hope. Hope Is My Middle Name is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media, produced in association with Reasonable Volume.

This episode was produced by Christine Fennessy with editing from Rachel Swaby. Our production coordinator is Percia Verlin. Our sound designer and engineer is Mark Bush. Music by the fantastic artists at Epidemic Sound, Soundstripe, and Sharbaby, De'Amon’s mother. Big thanks to Conor Gaughan, our publisher and fearless leader at Consensus Digital Media.

And thank you so, so much for listening. See you next time.