Rick Guzman is The Neighbor Project’s Executive Director, and so important was his talk during The Neighbor Project’s 2020 virtual gala that I have posted a VIDEO of it below all by itself for anyone who did not watch the whole 45-minute gala, or even the 19-minute Gala Highlights I recently did for this site.
His talk highlighted The Neighbor Project’s impressive growth since early 2018, when Emmanuel House merged with The Joseph Corporation to create The Neighbor Project (see link below for this story), and casted a vision for its expanding service to financially vulnerable families and individuals for the rest of 2020, then 2021 and beyond.
He casted this vision in the larger context of loving our neighbors enough to invest in them, saying, “We have to believe in our neighbors enough to invest in them, invest in others the way we would want to be invested in…[so] we can keep working to break down the barriers to home ownership, which are the single largest driver of this nation’s wealth gap.” That wealth gap is unbelievably enormous (see my article “Graphic Inequality”) and even larger is the Racial Wealth Gap.
He set all this in the largest context of all by quoting from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote. “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
This talk is an example of what we need more of in this time of protest and soul-searching. It ties practical action into a deep vision of our mutuality, and vice versa: it ties that deep vision to practical steps that make that vision a reality in our everyday lives. And more, it’s also a question of Who Leads?—a question playing out in the protests and other anti-racists actions across our nation today. Writing in 1970, Robert Greenleaf, who started the field of Servant Leadership, said, “…the next 30 years will be marked as the period when the dark skinned and…the alienated of the world assert their claims…” and were not “led by a privileged elite…It may be that the best that some of today’s privileged can do is to stand aside and serve by helping when asked and as instructed.” Guzman expresses his belief that, “If we enlist and empower and engage financially vulnerable populations with opportunities…these otherwise vulnerable populations can quickly become contributing members and leaders for our communities.” That’s an expanded version of a core belief he’s expressed many times: “Every person has a God-given ability to contribute.”
♦ Go to The Neighbor Project’s website to donate and get involved, and to “Emmanuel House Becomes The Neighbor Project” for a story of the merger that created The Neighbor Project. In 2016, Emmanuel House was named one of the “Top 100 Most Innovative” social change organizations in the world.