Five Things I’ve Learned from Working With Communities

In September 2022 I was honored to be named one of JCI USA’s Ten Outstanding Young Americans. I was given a platform at the ceremony to share some of my experience leading up to the award and I used it to share five of the lessons I’ve learned as a community-engaged researcher and complexity scientist. Below is a copy of my speech:

In accepting this award, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on some of the things I’ve learned from the communities I’ve have the privilege to work with.

I’m humbled to share the stage with nine other incredible individuals. The truth is that none of us got here alone. And in that spirit, I’ll share five lessons I’ve learned from communities working on complex problems ranging from opioid overdoses, food access and security, and sexual violence prevention. These lessons comprise my personal roadmap for thinking about complex problems and how we can address them.

1. Complex problems are managed, not solved: It can be so satisfying to imagine a world without poverty or hunger or violence. The nature of such problems is that they have multiple interacting causes that change over time. Even as we implement inventive solutions and see promising progress, we have a responsibility to keep an eye on how problems are changing and identify ways to adapt.
2. We need each other. Because of the ever changing, interconnected nature of complex problems, no single person, organization, or program can tackle these problems on their own. None of us can carry the weight of these problems on our own and none of us can make lasting change without each other. When we succeed at managing complex problems, it isn’t because superman flies in and takes care of them. It is because we share knowledge and energy to create pathways for action.
3. Time is a scarce resource: We know that we can’t go it alone, but what does it mean to work together? We each only have 24 hours in a day. And we can’t possibly know about every aspect of a problem or every person who’s working on it. We have to be strategic about how we work together. Finding intermediaries who exist at the nexus of multiple groups can make it easier to move information among them. Building trusting, supportive, and inclusive communities makes it possible for people to combine their efforts, experiences, and know-how to authentically collaborate for solutions. Being intentional, learning to depend and lean on each other’s strengths shared allows us to form collaborations that move towards progress together.
4. Diversity is essential: Groups that bring people with different knowledge, experiences, and backgrounds together generate the most innovative and lasting strategies for change. As a researcher, some of the science that excites me the most has empirically shown that groups with higher diversity are better at solving problems. Let that sink in, the more diverse your group is, the better your strategies, creative efforts, and products will be.
5. Honor lived experiences: People closest to the problems we care about are experts and have keen intuition about what is likely to be successful and what is not. People who have experienced hunger, people who have lived with environmental hazards in their neighborhood, people who have experienced opioid dependence are experts in how these problems work and the systems that surround them. Listen to them. 

I’ll leave you with a call to action. Take a moment to look around this room. take in all of the knowledge, skills, and capacities that exist here. And I know it’s a lot. The Jaycees are notorious overachievers! Think about what we could accomplish if we were all working together. When you go home, look around your community and your workplace. Think about your friends, neighbors, and colleagues. They all have assets. What could you do if you were all working together?