Creating Stages for Development: A Learning Community with Many Tasks and No Goal

On a cold November evening in 1990, about a hundred people got out of their seats in a public high school auditorium in lower Manhattan and walked into the street, chanting, “We define community!” This spontaneous “peaceful demonstration” was catalyzed by Fred Newman, co-founder with me of the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy (Institute). Newman was delivering his annual Institute-sponsored lecture, this one entitled “Community as a Heart in a Havenless World” — a play on both title and sentiment of Christopher Lasch's 1977 Haven in a Heartless World, a book that enjoyed significant popularity among intellectuals. Newman's talk (an edited version appears in The Myth of Psychology, a 1991 collection of early Newman lectures) made the point that there is no haven in this world (Newman, 1991). What there can be is community. He introduced a new concept of community — community not as a static entity defined by others according to geography, ideology, or identity, but community as a passionate living environment/activity that has the capacity to support and nourish people who are committed to engaging the cruelty of a havenless world. With creating community, Newman told the audience (the majority of whom were community activists and their friends), comes the responsibility for defining what community is not once but over and over and over again. He asked people to get out of their seats and join him in the street, and then come back and ask him hard questions.

That evening remains with me as a particular moment of conscious articulation of the Institute community's practice/understanding of community as collectively self-defining, non-goal directed, developmental activity. The Institute is ambitiously dedicated to creating and supporting learning communities in practice all over the world. An important part of this task, as the Institute sees it, is taking a serious look at what learning is, what communities are, and what constitutes practice. All of which I will try to bring to life in this chapter.