Former commander-in-chief to help CRI mark anniversary

Former President Jimmie Carter will be in Shreveport to help Community Renewal International celebrate its 20th anniversary next month.

Plans call for Carter to tour the Friendship Houses and speak at the anniversary celebration Oct. 30 at the Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium.

Kim Mitchell, who is familiar to many Shreveporters as a well-known architect and community voice, joined the Community Renewal team this year to head the Center for Community Renewal. He explained how the former president came to be aware of CRI’s work.

“John Dalton is a Shreveporter, Byrd high graduate, former secretary of the navy under Bill Clinton, and was in Carter’s administration. He set up a meeting with Mack McCarter [Community Renewal International executive director] and Jimmie Carter.”

Mitchell said Carter met with McCarter and explained that he had attempted an initiative in the Atlanta area, similar to the programs of CRI, which floundered for lack of funding.

“But he could see why what Community Renewal was doing worked. And he wanted to come and see it for himself,” Mitchell said.

After leaving office, Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, have maintained a high profile working with groups working to better their communities. They also founded the Carter Center in partnership with Emory University to alleviate human suffering and protect human rights.

In 1994, McCarter started the then-Shreveport/Bossier Community Renewal. He went into some of Shreveport’s most impoverished areas with the goal of making friends. In 1998, the Pew Partnership for Civic Change recognized McCarter’s organization as a “Solution for America.” It was also selected a model of best practices by the White House Conference on Community Renewal and was chosen by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard as a case study in restoring community.

The Observatory for Cultural and Audiovisual Communication, a charter

office of the United Nations, chose SBCR for its 2005 Social Entrepreneurship Award for innovative solutions to social problems. In 2007, the organization was honored with the General Omar Bradley Spirit of Independence Award at the Independence Bowl. Due to its growing recognition, the organization changed

its name to Community Renewal International in January 2008.

Today, CRI has a staff of more than 25 people from many different disciplines who facilitate the group’s programs. This year, CRI launched the Center for Community Renewal, a partnership with Bossier Parish Community College.

“The center is really about supporting replication of this model to other communities around the country,” Mitchell said. “At this point, we are putting together the training experiences, setting up an institute for Community Renewal, which will grow a whole new social technology and also resource support, which is looking at how to fund a new workforce.”

Mitchell said the effort is designed to illustrate how communities can put “caring” into a system in the community.

He said it requires having a paid and nurturing workforce in the community to allow the caring effort to succeed as a diffuse system through the societal structure. “Otherwise, you’ve got caring people and they are becoming more and more isolated in our society.”.

How it works in the CRI model is on a three-tiered platform. The first tenet CRI maintains is that most people are good and caring, Mitchell said. The challenge is “how do we make caring more visible.” Locally, that resulted in the creation of the “Renewal Team” of concern citizens. That group boasts about 125,000 members now, Mitchell said.

The second level is the Haven House concept, in which block leaders create an environment of friendship within the community. Mitchell said this helps eliminate the feeling of isolation some neighborhoods can foster. It also creates connections across socioeconomic barriers, he said.

The third component is Friendship House, a gathering place within a targeted area. These areas are described by Mitchell as the “most disinvested.” The houses serve as a community center and are staffed by a family who actually lives in the community with the goal of assisting the neighbors make their area a better place to live. Mitchell said crime statistics have shown as much as a 65 percent decrease in these areas.

Mitchell said all of these developments grew from a plan Mack McCarter initially outlined in 40 index cards back in 1994. From those pieces of paper has evolved what he called McCarter’s epiphany. Mitchell said McCarter felt “if society is a system of relationships, he believed we can stem the disintegration [of communities] because relationships have rules. If we can begin to learn to follow those rules then we can learn to avoid collapse and actually get to better and better communities.”

– Joe Todaro