Safer Neighborhoods Through Stewardship

This episode of Beyond the Bandaids is brought to you by Project PACT (Police And Community Together).

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Chief Mike Butler on LinkedIn
Dr. Carol Engel-Enright on LinkedIn
Kristin Daley on LinkedIn

The following three organizations—each committed to enhancing community well-being and policing integrity—joined forces to create Project PACT.

Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP)
New Blue
The School of Statesmanship, Stewardship & Service (SOSSAS)

Beyond the Bandaids is dedicated to exploring how police officers, public safety professionals, community leaders, and community members can reconnect with their sense of purpose and inspire positive change in their local community.

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Jennifer (narrator) 00:02
Carol, welcome to Beyond the band aids, with Project pact, hosted by Dr Carol angle Enright, Kristin Daly and Chief Mike Butler, where we explore how police, public safety experts, city leaders and dedicated community members can work together to drive meaningful change.

Carol Engel-Enright 00:19
Welcome to Beyond the band aids, a podcast from Project pact, pact meaning police and communities together, a new way of thinking, a way forward into an evolution of creating safe and healthy communities full of well being and accountable to their citizens. The citizens are accountable to the whole and we just want to start a whole new discussion that probably isn’t taking place in very many places around how do communities own safety? We have we have gotten to this point in time and space where we look to others to create safety for us. We look to the police. We look to now we’re looking at military. Now we’re looking at organizations, nonprofits, and what happens to our own agency, our own responsibilities and our own decisions to keep our own community safe, or do we even feel like we have community? Maybe that’s the broader question. And so I’m here with Mike and Kristin. Mike has years of experience as a police chief, but also working with the social, human issues that trouble community. Kristin is working with cohorts of police as they are looking for forward thinking futures. And I’m an academic doing research always like digging in. So I also want to Mike and Kristin, maybe we’ll just speak to this about how do you own your own community safety when it seems like it’s up to other agencies that are that you have no risk, you you’re not a part of you have no voice. How do you start to embrace citizenship as as responsible for safety?

Mike Butler 02:37
So I can start with some of that. Thank you. A great, great entry into the conversation, Carol. So first of all, from an institutional perspective, and I was overseeing public safety, police and fire, emergency management in the community of Longmont, Colorado, one has to believe that the community can play a much larger role. You can’t see the community as limited, weak, kind of messy. You have to see the community as having great capacity for self reliance, self sufficiency, that they have, the talents, the guests, the skills, the resources, the expertise to do a lot, do a lot in terms of Perm, in terms of being able to be more responsible for their own safety, the safety of their family, the safety of their home, the safety of their neighborhood, the safety of their surrounding Parks, maybe the safety of their community and so forth. You have to have a It’s not just a belief, but it’s an absolute sense of certainty that that can happen, and when you get to that point, and it can’t be just fake, and it can’t be just temporary, and it just can’t be something that you kind of, it’s kind of a side novel. So a side thing, so to speak, it has to be real, and you have to come with that perspective, and you have to lead with that perspective. And that’s that that’s that kind of working out of a stewardship model, a stewardship mindset, that people have this unlimited capacity to do things that maybe they weren’t they didn’t think they were capable of. And so we, we ended up responding that way over time. We ended up responding that way believing,

Carol Engel-Enright 04:33
say that again. People ended up believing they could do things they didn’t think they could

Mike Butler 04:41
do Yeah, no. People, people had exclamation mark. People, okay, well, thank you. And so people, at some level, had to be convinced that they could be responsible for their and accountable for their own sense of safety, for their own experiences, for their destiny, for the quality of life. In their neighborhoods, in their community and surrounding parks, etc. That that that was a shift that had to occur from an old model driven by a patriarchal like thinking process that says the institution is your answer. The institution will be the one that makes you safe, the Institute, the police, the fire and other government entities will be the ones that control your destiny, so to speak. And just, just, just give us the room to be able to do that, and we’ll take care of you. That’s that caretaking mindset that comes with patriarchy, versus a caring mindset that comes with a partnership. And how many times have we talked about partnership here on this, on this podcast? And so we had to make the conversion in those ways, from a patriarchal like way of seeing a community, a neighborhood, people, citizens, to a partnership way of seeing that. And of course, we all know that one of the attributes of partnership is joint accountability. But in essence, how many times have we said that the safety of a neighborhood has more to do with the coalescing of that neighborhood than the number of police officers or the number of armed guards or the number of government workers that kind of go into that neighborhood or are part of that neighborhood? And in fact, in reality, that hardly ever happens. I mean, the police can only respond so much. The fire department can only respond so much. Ultimately, on a 24/7 365, basis, the neighborhood is responsible for itself. And so how can we partner with a neighborhood or a community to bring that about, and how can, as a police department, we help those neighbors see that they have that capacity to be able to be self reliant, self sustaining. So the idea is, is that they end up working together. They call a neighbor, they don’t call the police, they don’t call our dispatch center and so they they more relying on each other than they are a government service. And so so we could, we could talk a little bit about how that came to be, but on the other hand, that’s in essence, where we need to go. And that’s where Longmont went, in terms of dozens and dozens, 40 to 50 neighborhoods in our community that went from the sense of we rely on the police to we rely on each other, and but that transition took time, and it took effort, and took various steps along the way for people to see that they had that capacity. And it’s not that the police and fire were totally out of the circumstances and out of the picture. We weren’t, but we became less part of that picture. And so we can recount many neighborhoods where calls went from 150 to 200 calls a month in a particular neighborhood to fewer than five and that neighborhood became a healthier neighborhood, and people became more excited about and more empowered to kind of see that they had this capacity to bring about that kind of safety. And I’m talking some really rough neighborhoods in some cases where lots of drug dealing, lots of gang activity, lots of disorder, and a lot of different ways was occurring from that kind of neighborhood, which is, which is typical for live neighborhoods in our in our country, to go from that and saying, Okay, we need the cops to come and fix, fix us, and because we’re broken, to a place of saying, No, we can. We can heal ourselves. And here’s how we can do that. So that’s that’s, in essence, my, my initial comments to that,

Carol Engel-Enright 08:45
Kristin, you’re doing a lot of work with what they the term that we hear so often is community policing, and now it’s all over the news. So what are you seeing happening in communities that looks positive? Looks like more like partnership.

Kristin Daley 09:03
Well, I don’t think I can put it any better than than what Mike said. I think it starts with institutions extending that invitation, that initial we want you to be a part of this conversation, to communities. And then I think there are a lot of community members and community organizations out there that do have gifts and resources and things that they can contribute and want to do that, but feel kind of held back by the traditional way of doing things. So it starts with extending that invitation, and then I think there are so many positive things happening in communities all over the country with you know organizations that offer programs around restorative justice or offer you know support to people who are struggling. I think it’s a matter of tapping into that and welcoming them into the conversation so that we do create a more collaborative effort and. Do think community members are well equipped to be a part of that, but they are held back by that perception of, well, this is how it’s always been done. The police have always been responsible for public safety. I’m going to wait and have them react. And when police departments extend the invite and say, We want you to be a part of this, and we know that you have positive things to contribute that changes the community’s mindset, and they feel more a part of things. They feel more willing and able to extend those gifts and those resources that they have to offer. And in new blue in the community. Community members work directly with our officers to create these solutions, these projects that that change, not only internal things within the agency, but external things within the community. These community groups want to be a part of this. They have things to offer. We just need to say, hey, we’re we’re welcoming you in.

Carol Engel-Enright 11:04
Set up the four lane highway, Right exactly. So I also in in 2023 two years ago, in February, Mike was invited to join with three other thought leaders in the US who had great experience around building community. Peter block, who he had met and worked with and trained with for stewardship, and was definitely a mentor. John McKnight, who, and I just kind of want to invite the spirit of John McKnight. If we could have him as a guest, we would. But he passed earlier this year, at the age of 92 and he started work with with research around the urban the urban centers, and he went into neighborhoods. Mike knew him personally, as a friend, as a mentor, and each week, they would talk about how to make neighborhoods and communities safer and healthier, and this sense of well being for everyone. And so today I’m going to read from some of the things that Mike wrote to John. John can’t be here. He wrote abundant community with Peter Black. He wrote several books. He worked his entire life in civil rights and urban renewal and and he was passionate about it, but he he had one thing he would always say to Mike, I just I just can’t see how the government institutions can embrace what we feel that needs to happen, and yet, you know, there was this big, this big understanding that you still need government, you still need structure, you still need enforcement. When somebody goes too far and heads in with violence and and a real criminal behavior, you need that for a community. And yet, in many cases, the community can start to work to create, to create something for themselves. But again, do people feel like they have permission? I’m just going to read a few of these paragraphs of what happened as you went into those 40 and 50 neighborhoods, Mike. And this letter is to John McKnight, trying, John McKnight trying to understand how Mike was doing this as in as a police chief with a Department of 400 staff members, given all the variables, our approach to helping a neighborhood help themselves never fell into the one size fits all, nor the quick fix categories we saw every neighborhood through the evolutionary prism. Now I’m going to stop right there and then pick it back up. What does that mean? Mike,

Mike Butler 14:34
well, what that means is each neighborhood was it was unique in its own development. It’s unique in its own progress, unique in its own sense of who they were and to what level they could help themselves, or to what level they were dependent or independent or interdependent. And so each neighborhood had that kind of way of seeing itself. And there were some more evolved neighborhoods, fortunately, that. We could that was, it was kind of an easier kind of process to have them see that they could become more self reliant, self sufficient. And then there were neighborhoods not anywhere near developed along that evolutionary track in terms of being very unhealthily dependent, and so and they were that was a more difficult, taller order, so to speak, to get people to understand that they could be the authors of the experiences that that neighborhood had. And so so all of us know are familiar with people who are incredibly unhealthy in that way, or organizations or other entities. And so we know that. But and then we also know people who are quite interdependent, quite mature, quite sense of self responsibility, self aware, self conscious. Those are the things that you know we kind of encountered. We encountered people all over that kind of, that continuum. I called it an evolutionary prism, but that’s how we looked at that we looked at through the lens of where they were, where they were involved, and what it was going to take from that point to move them towards that sense of interdependence.

Carol Engel-Enright 16:08
And did it matter the social or economic? You know? No, it didn’t. It really

Mike Butler 16:15
didn’t. The fact of the matter, the fact that matter is, we’ve worked mostly with economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and neighborhoods that would be characterized they were mobile home parks, apartment complexes, high density housing. Occasionally we worked in neighborhoods that where people, where there was home ownership, but the vast majority of what police respond to our neighborhoods where that kind of dynamic exists. But so this is, this is a testament to folks who don’t necessarily have a lot in their lives, being able to kind of step up and create something that didn’t exist before for them, without a lot of economic assistance, self economic assistance. And so just to kind of characterize that just a little bit more

Carol Engel-Enright 17:02
the social bonds, the social working together. Okay, back to the letter. Our approaches had to be adaptive, full of patients, and with an understanding that every three steps steps forward, there were likely to be at least two steps in other directions. How did you keep your staff motivated? How did you keep the citizens motivated to keep going? Because we all give up so fast.

Mike Butler 17:34
That’s a life experience for all of us, in terms of running across obstacles, challenges, things that are setbacks, or whatever that might in so many parts of our lives we run across those things. The question is, is, how do we transcend and overcome and move forward? Was a big part of you know that the lessons we learned as well, we also learned those lessons as we dealt with folks who were struggling with chemical substance addiction and or mental health issues, there was always relapse. And so our patients, in our sense of hanging in there with people in spite of their own, their obstacles, their challenges, became a big part of what we needed to do to care for so this came from a caring perspective. This came from a compassionate perspective. It came from a perspective of, we believe in you. We we trust you, we try. We have confidence that you’re going to be able to pull this off, so to speak. But we’re also going to hang in there with you. Wow, we threw out through all this

Carol Engel-Enright 18:39
and always, always always this. Back to your writing, back to John, the pace of progress was governed by the neighborhood.

Mike Butler 18:49
Yeah. I mean, we didn’t want to move any faster than they could move. And that gets into the sense of meeting people where they’re at, meeting organizations and communities or neighborhoods where they’re at but but always understanding, believing and seeing the possibilities, and so keeping those in the front of our minds in ways that said, we know the pace is slow. We know we’re going different directions, we and so, but we also know this gets into that whole evolutionary mindset of we’re moving forward in some ways, or some passion, and so, so that was always part of, part of life. And what we talk about in one of our classes, because is becoming a partner with evolution, what’s that look like? And that’s the that’s the essence of this, from our primordial ancestors to the unfound, the unfolding of all the intelligence that we’re going to eventually see, there’s a progress. There’s a process there. And so we looked at this as kind of, this is not something that’s overnight. This is something that took a while for this to become this way. And it’s maybe it may take a while for it to get to that point where people sense that they can be more. Uh, in charge of their own destiny. Yeah,

Carol Engel-Enright 20:03
the culture, you know, the culture of a neighborhood, has to shift as well. And culture takes time. Mindsets take time, belief takes time. The neighborhood’s collective will, the collective will of the neighborhood. Now what I what I found fascinating in preparing for this week was that we focus so much on individuals, but we never think about the neighborhood as a whole. We might think about organizations within the neighborhood, but I found that fascinating, that the collective will guided everything.

Mike Butler 20:45
You know, if we would have listened to one person, we would have we would have failed, but we had to listen to the consensus and the collective voice of the whole group. So to speak. It’s not that individual voices didn’t count, but their whole, the whole of those individual voices became, as we like to say, greater than the sum of just the parts of those neighborhoods. And so we had to really listen to that whole collective nature. And when people began to see that collective nature amongst themselves, that was a power within that group to kind of not drown out the individual voice. But to say, it’s more powerful, so to speak, very powerful.

Carol Engel-Enright 21:26
Yeah, and, and we, we, you writing. We, as the police chief and department, we served multiple roles as conveners, facilitators, advisors, inviters, encouragers, mentors, and yes, even enforcers. When necessary, you enforce the law. The neighborhood was responsible for making choices from the varied options that presented themselves about what they hoped for, what they were hoping for, the goals that they were setting, and wondered what they wanted to be, their own identity as a collective, as a whole, I think we’ve never talked about it. We’ve never thought about it. We’ve never, I’ll tell you, realtors use it, right? Realtors will say, Oh, this is a great neighborhood, and this is why, you know, they have block parties and they have they have a gathering place, and they have this park where everybody comes together and the children feel safe. Realtors will sell a neighborhood, but the neighborhood itself never gets together to identify what they want to be. We encourage folks to consider patterns of information, not just one time happenings or events, prior to making decisions along their forward path, everyone kept their fingers crossed for small successes early on and along the way. And I just want to kind of bring that to the conversation. Of it a dependence to interdependence is very much like raising a child, right? And they you start off with, you got to keep them safe. You’ve got to keep them fed. You’ve got to keep them contained somewhat. And I think what’s happened with police in our country is that they’ve had this they’ve been thrust into this role of of we’re dependent on you now, do do what you need to do, and we’re just going to be bystanders. We’re just going to,

Mike Butler 23:49
yeah, we’re going to, well, it gets it gets it gets more it gets more intense than that. It does it. Did you often hear police officers and police departments say, We’re the thin blue line, and we’re the ones that kind of protect that. We’re the difference between good and evil in a community, when, in fact, that’s not even close to being the reality or case when it comes right down to it. And if you need us, call us for anything. And as you heard me say, the patriarchal model was that was the mantra, if you need us, call us for anything. Well, communities took us up on that, as if we were the answer to every problem that they had, to the point where calls for service were not even related to public safety issues, they were related to lots of things. And so someone sprinkling my lawn or we had calls for people say, Can you help me do my taxes? You know, and those are things that were lots of things along those lines, where people became so dependent on us because we we kind of invited that dependency, which became, in essence, unhealthy for for everybody, including us, including the police, because we became so overwhelmed. Problems with their their sense of unhealthy dependence. We couldn’t handle it all. And so that’s how police have gotten themselves in issues. That’s how the criminal justice system has kind of gotten itself in the mode that it’s in, where it’s triaging everything is because they became the answer for all the health and social issues because and then there was kind of a co opting of elected officials saying that, well, if we pass laws and stiffen penalties, we’ll be able to fix and so and then we mandate the police invoked criminal justice system. And there we go. And so that’s the mode we’re stuck in. And you know, in today’s late August 2025 and I’m just going to say we’re dealing with this sense that the federal government believes they can send National Guard, armed National Guard, into or communities believing that they can help make those communities safer. There may be some short term, oh, that there’s more uniforms on the street, but ultimately, that’s not a sustainable like way of doing business. And ultimately we’re still, we’re saying the same message. We’re here to make you safe. We’re not asking anybody to say, can you help make yourself safe? And can we? And what can we do to help that process along, where you can help bring your neighborhood to an entirely different level. That’s not the nature of the conversation. Now the nature of the conversation has kind of reverted back to this patriarchal model of, well, the more cops and the more uniforms and the more guns and the more authority people see, the less likely there is to be disobedience or crime. And that’s there’s a very short term, very temporary like effect to that. Ultimately, in the long term, this comes down to neighborhoods and communities kind of seizing that moment and saying, Yes, we are we can be safe. We the safety of our neighborhood and our communities in our hands. And so dimension, Peter block. Peter block and I wrote a little booklet called safety in our hands, that’s on our project pact website that I would encourage people to read, that explains a lot of these things.

Carol Engel-Enright 27:08
Yeah, and you just need to get on project pack.org and put in your email, and you will receive a copy of that that you can download. Yeah, Kristin, what have you seen happening in neighborhoods. Have you seen like this? Progress, this small steps? I love that. That line the small steps of success and progress and realizing it takes time.

Kristin Daley 27:34
I love that too. And I think there were so many key words that I was picking up as you were reading Mike’s letter, adaptive, patient, giving people choices, inviting them in. I think all of those are keys to success in building a more collaborative model. And if you give communities those things, they do become naturally more involved. But you know, to your point about raising a child and how it kind of aligns with what we’re talking about. When you’re raising a child and you don’t give them any choices, and you don’t, you know, let them go out there on their own, they’re going to continue to be reliant on you, or they’re going to go in the other direction and and kind of rebel and resist you, and you’re not going to collaborate and work together, and it’s the same for communities and the police. The more that this is a productive conversation, full of choices, full of patience, full of the acknowledgement that you might take three steps forward and maybe two steps backward, and you have to be okay with that. That’s how you get somewhere. So I do see communities as being moving in a very positive direction, wanting to be collaborative, wanting to come together as a whole and support each other and offer resources and be more involved. I you know, we’ve seen some incredible programs start around being more understanding, being more open to the human experience, supporting people where they need support if they are struggling, and helping them to become more active and involved members of the community. All of those things have to happen in collaboration with the police, because ultimately, the police have been in charge of public safety for a very long time, and they have important knowledge to impart on this conversation, and once we open that up for everyone to express their needs and their wants and how we want to see communities thrive, that’s the starting point.

Carol Engel-Enright 29:51
Yeah, they’re trained. They’re trained to understand what happens in an emergency, in a disaster. After I am going to talk about my own experience with neighborhood. In 2013 we had about 18 inches of rain over two or three days, and the flood alerts were out. Of course, our neighborhood was a middle class, everybody owned their home, ring of 99 homes and but a river broke, and the water headed into our neighborhood. And I didn’t know Mike wasn’t working with him at the time, he was in a helicopter watching as it happened. Now, you know, as as we all got into that disaster, of course, we were, what’s the word, we we were evacuated, and we couldn’t go home, and it took two days, and many of us had pets in our homes, and so when we finally got to where we could get to an entrance to the neighborhood, the police were there, and they weren’t allowing us to go in, which some people were getting angry about. But guess what? They were protecting us, and they worked out the systems to bring in boats to float to the doors to help all of us. Well, first of all, you know, the firemen rescued a lot of people from that neighborhood on their backs, making sure everyone was safe, including people who had special needs, children that were in basements that filled up in in 510, minutes, no one was no one was injured or hurt. And then we floated in and got the pets out, and got to the medicine, the things you hear about in disaster relief. And then Mike brought in, and I think it’s pertinent to this conversation, he brought in the National Guard, because as the cleanup happened, as we had to bring all of our possessions out on the streets, they made sure that nobody was allowed in unless they were a registered non organization that was there specifically to help and and so we were protected from from possible looters. And, you know, we didn’t have windows. They had been knocked out. And then, and we got used to having the National Guard guarding us. We we were very dependent on it. We knew we could go in and out, and they were checking off our names, and we were we were fine. We were guarded, and we were all coming together. Every night, somebody would bring a meal, and we were working together. We were I learned more about my neighbors through a disaster than I ever learned walking next door and saying, Hey, can we have dinner together?

Mike Butler 33:03
So I just want to make make a point that there were several neighborhoods in that in that predicament, and and the National Guard was actually kind of called in by the governor, but it was at the request of the sea, so to speak. And so that wasn’t a hard call by the governor, but on the other hand, they they work hand in hand. We work hand in hand. And there were, there had to be a process of of sig we, as you go from search and rescue and rescue kind of operations to recovery, so to speak, that there’s a process of how you move forward with intervention, etc, in terms of and also citizens having access to homes. But I also want to make a point real clear that the rescues, a lot of them took place by the fire service, fire department, and a lot of the kind of the boating and the going in and out from a safe place by boat to the homes, was that was all coordinated by our fire service. And so kudos to our fire service that point. It’s not that the police didn’t help, but on the other hand, that was a fire service function. So

Carol Engel-Enright 34:15
the rest of the story is one night at dinner, the National Guard was walking around and talking with us, and they said they were leaving that night, and the fear of what would happen, this dependency to independence, to interdependence, the fear of what would happen when they left, when we still didn’t have windows. I just, I just want to say FEMA, the Federal Government came to the door and wouldn’t come in because it was too dangerous. So, you know, as you’re dealing with disasters and safety in community, the realities of what happens as you go, and I can’t imagine, you know, in an urban center, when a neighborhood just gets them. Very gang ridden or drug related problems, but we had to, as neighbors, decide what we were going to do, and we called Mike’s department, we called the police, and they came immediately, and they partnered with us, and we put plans together, and we still helped each other through the weeks ahead, and we became very coalesced as a neighborhood, and that’s what’s possible. That’s what we’re not we’re leaving out of the conversations. That’s why we’re here at Project pack. I just I want to go through, Mike, I should let you go through the list, but you gave John a list of 12 things that neighborhoods can do, specific strategies. And I know Kristin that your officers are working these same strategies, and it’s things we’ve talked about before, but just a reminder, I’m still the neuroscience geek that it takes eight times for you to get a neural pathway.

Kristin Daley 36:10
So I think you can’t repeat this enough. You’re gonna

Carol Engel-Enright 36:13
hear it over and over. You convened the neighbors multiple times. I’d like both of you to kind of talk through the power of coming together. What does convening mean? Is it one person talking and everybody else listening? What happens when you convene the neighbors?

Kristin Daley 36:36
I think it’s everyone talking, but I think it’s, you know, organizing one at a time, and, you know, letting everyone being sure that everyone feels heard. I don’t think everyone talking over each other is particularly helpful or productive, but I think we want to give everyone the time and space to express what they need to express and have others respond to it,

Mike Butler 37:02
yeah, and that. And building on what Kristin said it was often the first time that neighbors had seen each other or talked to each other. And so the building of related relationships, the relatedness piece had to be powerful enough for people to kind of sense that this was a collective effort. It wasn’t just going to be my way or their way, or it was going to be our way. And so the convening function really allowed voices to be heard, thoughts to kind of emerge, but also for the sense of building on, building from one to the other, in terms of having this kind of collective way of seeing how they could move forward that was important.

Carol Engel-Enright 37:43
And whenever we convene a meeting from SOSUS, we have guidelines for conversation. And Mike go through those guidelines first, so that people know what the rules are. Multiple Okay. Number two, multiple conversations about neighborhood residents, skills, gifts, time, interest, the meaning of partnership, joint accountability, action on their part, and hopes,

Mike Butler 38:15
yeah, I mean, that’s pretty self explanatory, but we wanted to make sure that they saw that the future was theirs to create, and it just wasn’t well, here’s here’s what we’re going to do, and here’s how we’re going to do it, and you could just follow along, but it was theirs to create. And if they wanted to create a different future, which eventually everyone did, then it was theirs to see that they could do that. And so all of those things were talked about in terms of, what’s, what are the attributes of partnerships, what are the attributes of how we move forward? What, what is the sense of, where are your who has this capacity, who can do this, who can do that, who can who has time, who has the energy, who, you know, what, days of the week, etc. All those things were kind of talked about down to finite details, often over a period of time. And so there what we clarified expectations about who would do, what, who would play, what roles, et cetera. And there became this sense of accountability to not to each other. And there was a collective accountability that grew out of those conversations, which was very powerful, but again, to that evolutionary prism kind of way of seeing things some, some of those conversations took a lot longer in some neighborhoods than they did in others, but those we couldn’t bypass those things. We had to stay with a certain aspect of how we were doing things until we had something more concrete, more substantial amongst the group to move forward with. Oh,

Carol Engel-Enright 39:48
well, I just want to say, if John McKnight, he is here, His Spirit is here, he would say the number one thing you can do is help a person identify. Okay, their gifts, the number one thing they don’t think they have is a gift that they can

Mike Butler 40:07
share, something that’s worthwhile to offer others. Yeah, I you’ve heard me say this before that. Some people say, Well, I’ll make food. I’ll bring, I’ll bring. And you know, the breaking of bread was very important in terms of this kind of relatedness piece. And some people would kind of offer a lot more in terms of, I’ll, I’ll, I have a trailer, or I have access to this, or I can I, you know, whatever that was, and so, but each each person’s gifts were honored, recognized, and, and, and we wanted to make clear to them that their gifts were going to be useful for the effort. It wasn’t just that they had a gift, but they could get back. And anytime someone senses that what they offer is useful, there’s hardly anything more powerful for people to say, I want to hang in there with this effort, and I want to be part of this, something that’s bigger than me, that we can create a future that I didn’t know, we didn’t know initially could happen so and

Kristin Daley 41:08
you don’t even you don’t always know what someone has to contribute or to offer until you ask, until you open up the conversation, until you listen, and then until You give them the time to grow and develop this, this gift or this offering?

Carol Engel-Enright 41:24
Yeah, it doesn’t always happen at the first question

Mike Butler 41:28
for our listeners, this, this is more important than you can even begin to imagine. I just want you to understand, I want people to understand that that’s very important. There’s lots of conversations you need to have, but that gift conversation maybe the most important

Carol Engel-Enright 41:41
one? Yeah, I know we’re going to run out of time, so you know, I’m going to make Mike rewrite these strategies and put them up on this on the project pack website. You’ll be able to find them there, but we’ll go through a few more, and maybe we’ll just keep this conversation going to the next podcast promises to see the project through. Now, the other night we we had a large community convening. We were talking about different different things, different topics. Every two weeks. The topic last week was transportation and infrastructure, and Mike asked for promises from people, from small groups, and he got them. People wanted to,

Mike Butler 42:30
oh, they were encouraged, enthusiastic, admit, yes, yeah, that’s what we that’s what we kind of downplay. Yeah, they’ll never do anything that doesn’t you know. Or the person who stands up there in front of the group, says, Here’s what I promise to do for you. Like a lot of politicians, do elected officials do, like a lot of leaders, do they the group wants promises from the person standing up in front of the room, but no one, very seldom, are we eliciting promises from the people who are part of the group. And so this the partner partnership, going from dependence to interdependence, requires that everyone make a promise to be part of creating a future that’s different than what we have now.

Carol Engel-Enright 43:11
And I’m gonna go one more, nurturing various people, keeping them engaged. I can’t even imagine, you know, some of the neighborhoods, because I lived here, I knew what those neighborhoods looked like. I can’t imagine how a police officer could, but we read about it all the time. I know there’s a lot of there’s a lot of movement going on in England and Canada and around this real, developing relationship nurturing various people, including those, well, you talk Mike, you know the ones that maybe,

Mike Butler 43:54
well, there were there, or those were folks who, but there were also folks who had a lot of leverage, whether they were kind of well thought of in the neighborhood, or they had lots of resources, or they had lots of capacity, you know, yeah, there were the connectors often in the neighborhood, in terms of making sure that they they felt supported, and that they felt like their efforts were going to be not In vain, that they there was something. There were going to be fruits of their labor. And so constantly having conversations with people. And then, of course, there were always others who were, I don’t know if I want to be part of this. This is getting I’ve lost my patience, or I haven’t seen progress, or whatever that might look like. And so having conversations with people to kind of hang in there until we could move we could find something different than what we had today. And so all those conversations were part of the mix and and we see that all the time, and we can go back to raising a child. How many times do we have to offer that kind of support and come. Encouragement, or a sense of you know, if you don’t, if you choose to quit. Now, here’s here, here, what the options look like for you. And so we have these conversations all the time anyway. And so we just said, Let’s just and then they weren’t from parent to child as much as they were from person to person. And people we became acquainted with, friends with and and so they and when they kept on seeing us showing up over and over and over and over and over and over again, they saw our consistency, our commitment and dedication to helping them see that they could create a different future for themselves. And so they saw that and so that encouragement and those kind of supportive conversations were were credible and most often successful.

Carol Engel-Enright 45:50
Consistency, you said consistency, commitment and dedication, not three words that we normally associate

Mike Butler 45:59
Well, there’s a sense of loyalty that happens with this, with but, but loyalty in terms of someone who’s consistent and dedicated in their dedication, there’s a sense of loyalty that we tend to not take value as much as maybe we should around that. And so you and so that loyalty becomes important. And we were loyal to these neighborhoods. We were loyal to the people, and they sensed that loyalty, and that modeled loyalty amongst them, so to speak. Maybe people didn’t know each other and they’re just simple things that I keep on saying, the police are in these cat birds. These are they have this legitimate platform. All these things are part of what we model in terms of how communities and neighbors and citizens can be with each other, but we have to first learn how to do that within our own organization. And that’s what project PAC helps with, is shifting and transcending that patriarchal culture into a culture where these kinds of attributes and characteristics can be a greater part of the culture, so to speak. And so you begin to rely more on that aspect of things, versus someone’s going to tell me what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and where to do it, and so, so that’s all part of the sequence and how we move forward.

Carol Engel-Enright 47:11
Yeah, Kristin, I know you, you, you’re passionate about shared trust and shared responsibility. Talk to us a little bit, and we’ll, we’ll close this out, and we’ll pick it back up next time, in honor of John McKnight and the work he

Mike Butler 47:29
did, I think, also in honor of communities and neighborhoods too, that are hungry for a different future than what they have. So yeah,

Kristin Daley 47:40
and I think all of these 12 attributes that that Mike named sort of click together almost like puzzle pieces, and they build off of each other. So the nurturing piece supports the asking for promises people want to feel trusted and responsible and involved and like they’re contributing something. So for me, I think they all support each other, and we have to have all of those pieces working to create this community that we all want to see. And you know, I think collaboration is is the goal, and it’s also the vehicle for success, for building a healthy community, a safer community.

Carol Engel-Enright 48:25
I love that concept of a puzzle, you know, and all the pieces fitting together. And

Mike Butler 48:31
by the way, there’s a thing it takes, there’s a scat, there’s a there’s a building of a scaffolding here as well, through these 12 pieces that are sequentially, kind of written in a way that suggests this near, comes near the front end. This comes in the middle part. This comes near, kind of where things are moving, and now what we’re trying to do is sustain what we’re doing, and so and so. There is a scaffolding, kind of building upon each other, as well as as well as what Kirsten talked about these pieces all eventually fit together as we move forward.

Carol Engel-Enright 49:04
Well, great. I think we’re going to wrap it up for today again, Mike and Kristin are available for just any kind of a telephone call. If you’re a community member and you’re like, I don’t know what to do. I’m frustrated, give them an email, they’ll set up a time to talk to you. Kristin at Project pack.org or Mike at Project pack.org Kristin with an I. Kristin with an I. I have so many Kristins in my life, and we thank you for listening today to project pact and beyond the band aids we’re getting. You know, beyond this quick fixes, how do we how do we move forward? How do we evolve into the communities that we want to see, that full puzzle, that full put together puzzle? So please subscribe, give us a five star rating so we can spread the word a little bit more. More we’re talking about pretty relevant topics today and and thank you to John McKnight, bless his work on Earth and wherever he is at at this moment, surely in some enlightened place,

Mike Butler 50:14
fixing and dancing. More neighborhoods. No. Building neighborhoods, helping neighborhoods build themselves.

Carol Engel-Enright 50:20
Yeah. So thank you for listening to beyond the band aids.

Jennifer (narrator) 50:26
Thank you for tuning in to beyond the band aids with Project pact. We hope today’s episode has inspired you to think differently about public service and community engagement. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and leave a review. Your support helps us reach more listeners and continue bringing you valuable insights and stories. For more information and to stay connected, visit our website@projectpact.org and follow us on social media. We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas, so feel free to reach out, pioneered by law enforcement action partnership new blue and the School of statesmanship, stewardship and service project pact is the culmination of three leading organizations committed to enhancing community, well being and policing integrity. Until next time, keep moving forward and stay engaged together, we can create a safer, more connected future. You.