What if you could change your life as quickly as you can change your mind? That idea is the driving force at the Center for Sustainable Change, a local nonprofit agency. Its work in low-income communities has caught the attention of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which recently awarded the organization a $100,000 grant.
What if you could change your life as quickly as you can change your mind? That idea is the driving force at the Center for Sustainable Change, a local nonprofit agency. Its work in low-income communities has caught the attention of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which recently awarded the organization a $100,000 grant. The money will fund the National Community Resiliency Project, a branch of the CSC that targets high-risk areas across the nation. Currently the NCRP is focusing on locales in North Carolina and the Mississippi Delta, where members are working with residents to increase civic engagement and school attendance and reduce crime.
The CSC teaches three simple psychological principles that, once mastered, are designed to elevate the consciousness of the individual to help empower communities from the inside out. Members of the CSC hold workshops and begin dialogues with willing community members about the specific changes they’d like to see in their neighborhoods and what steps they can take to make those changes happen.
Enthusiasm from local residents is crucial to the success of these projects. “Everyone has the capacity to have an insight, but most people live in subjugation to their own thoughts,” explains co-founder and Educational Director Ami Chen Mills-Naim, a former Metro Santa Cruz reporter who now lives on the Westside. “When an individual becomes empowered from within, they can turn that insight into wisdom. Wisdom breeds creative thinking, which facilitates community renewal.”
It’s a highly organic approach, but Mills-Naim says it can work to turn around high-crime, low-income communities. She points to Lakewood, North Carolina, a community where the NCRP is currently working and where crime has dropped off measurably while civic engagement has increased in the last two years.
Locally, the CSC works with juveniles in trouble, organizes educational workshops in schools and offers private, family and corporate counseling. Although the aid work of the NCRP and CSC focuses on troubled communities and individuals, Mills-Naim believes that everyone can benefit from this philosophy. “We create these mental and emotional worlds from thought, but if you realize that it’s just your thoughts, you can mitigate it. Your thoughts are powerful, but they don’t have to control you.”
Ami Chen Mills-Naim is holding a drop-in Introduction to the Three Principles on the Westside of Santa Cruz on Monday, July 23, 6pm–8pm. Email [email protected] or call 650,424.0705 for more info
