Jenny Connelly-Bowen, MPPA, Executive Director with the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis
Jenny and Josephine
In January, before COVID-19 took over the world, my husband Adam and I adopted three backyard chickens, an urban gardening-adjacent adventure we’d been planning for years. Josephine, Florence, and Dragonette came to us through local nonprofit Second Hen’d, which works with industrial egg producers to give spent hens a second life after their egg-laying careers are over. They were in rough shape when they arrived (photo evidence below): missing feathers, missing tails, oversized hormone-fed combs, weak neck muscles. So we’ve both been pretty stunned by how quickly they’ve gotten their strength and their plumage back. They even started laying eggs again in March, which was by no means guaranteed.
January 2020
As I’ve been watching our flock recover, I’ve been reflecting often on a study I learned about a few years ago. To examine productivity in chickens, Purdue biologist William Muir compared two flocks: one full of hens with average egg-laying ability, and one full of high-producer “superchickens.” Both groups were left alone for six generations, then compared at the end of the study.
How do you think these two flocks fared? Conventional American wisdom might point to the “superchicken” flock as a dream team bound to send egg production through the roof. But at the end of the study, the flock with average production was the one that thrived: they were plump and healthy with increased productivity over the first generation. Meanwhile, most of the “superchickens” had pecked each other to death, with just three of the original flock remaining. The superstar hens had secured their positions by suppressing—more bluntly, murdering—others in the flock and had destroyed the entire group’s capacity to thrive in the process.
May 2020
Why does this matter as the world struggles under the enormous weight of COVID-19? As an allegory for how we humans relate to each other and our work, it matters a lot. A Medium article about this study summarized:
This study proved that “Pecking Order” is unsuccessful. When you have a group of super chickens, they compete, fight and damage each other in their drive for success and power. Regular chickens thrive off of each other and are content to co-exist in an environment that they can improve together. They work as a TEAM to progress and build.
St. Louis has every type of human flock you can imagine along this continuum between teamwork and rivalry. We have plenty of amazing organizations and sectors working as teams to progress, build, and improve our environment together. We also have many that are competing, fighting, and damaging each other in their drive for success and power. Like other chronic, systemic issues, our fragmented ecosystem feels more real and more pressing in the face of COVID-19 than it ever has before.
This is far from an original thought. I know many of us have embraced the idea of “radical collaboration,” especially in the years since the Ferguson uprising. But transforming radical collaboration from an idea into action is a lot harder. It has real costs, and it’s almost always messy. As Forward Through Ferguson’s Karishma Furtado has put it:
Moving forward, we need to figure out how we operationalize radical collaboration. We all understand that Racial Equity is in some ways this emergent property. It doesn’t live in just one system or place. It can only arise out of all systems behaving in a racially equitable way, which means that those of us working in education can’t be isolated from those working in housing and can’t be isolated from those working in banking. And it’s hard to do. We can all say it, and write it down, and be all about it on paper, but we still haven’t figured out how to actually do it in our work.
COVID-19 is a clarion call. Now more than ever, our solutions and our advocacy need to be intersectional and multisector. They need all of us.
I will acknowledge my own bias: clearly I’ve drunk the collaboration Kool-Aid. CBN was created in 2011 as a strategic response to the fragmentation that plagues us in St. Louis. Our member organizations believed then, and do now, that together, we are smarter, stronger, and more resilient. In recent years, as we’ve grown into a convener for fellow community members who also want to come together to change our region, we’ve had a front-row seat to what can happen when collaboration works.
We have plenty of growing left to do in this arena, but we will always believe that any proposal or process can be improved when we tackle it from many different angles and ensure folks with a variety of perspectives are driving the conversation and the action. As the proverb goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
Proverbs are proverbs for a reason. When we collaborate—really collaborate—we can avoid unintended consequences, tap more effective solutions, and get a whole lot closer to the futures we want to see. True collaboration means we get to see in real time how one sector’s decisions have ripple effects in all the other sectors they touch.
We also get to see how many of our decisions are colored by choices made upstream and have consequences for others downstream—even when we think we’re just acting in the best interest of our own organizations, or that of our partners. Even when we don’t think we have real “choices” to make. Because systemic racism and inequality and all its ugly fingerprints are the water we’re swimming in, and they cannot be undone by one organization, sector, or silo alone.
It’s a rare thing for the entire world to be focused on one problem at the same time. And that makes COVID-19 an opportunity. It’s widely accepted that social determinants of health (which are as intersectional as they come) are real and important, so how can we act on those connections collaboratively to fight for the health and well-being of our communities?
One example: we know that a safe home is a critical defense against contracting COVID-19; what can we do together to ensure those with homes can keep them, and those without homes can secure one?
Another: we know that systemic racism means Black St. Louisans are more likely to get sick with COVID-19 and more likely to die from it; what can we do together to ensure pandemic support flows to Black communities first?
And, most importantly: how can we guarantee that we’re not asking ourselves these questions again the next time a crisis hits? How can we turn the spotlight that COVID-19 has cast on our broken systems into an opportunity to tear down what’s no longer working—and what never did—and start over?
I don’t have brilliant answers to these questions. But I do know we’re going to have to work together to find them. The best thing our organizations and our sectors at-large can do for St. Louis right now is to step outside ourselves and put our dreams about being superchickens to rest. Let’s start planning and preparing today for the recession and recovery ahead, and let’s do it as a team.
Nothing has made me believe in healing more than to see how far our backyard flock has come since January. And yes, healing our world is going to be a lot more challenging and complex than healing three chickens. But imagine: what if there’s a reality on the other side of COVID-19 where race and zip code no longer predict life outcomes? What if this is the push we need to step out of our silos and up to our shared tables?
Florence in January 2020
Florence in April 2020
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Jenny Connelly-Bowen currently serves as Executive Director for the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis (CBN). She has a master's degree in Public Policy Administration with certificates in Nonprofit Management & Leadership and Policy & Program Evaluation from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a B.A. in English from Beloit College. Prior to entering the community development field, she spent over five years working in distribution, buying, and pricing at Save-A-Lot Food Stores, where her first role as a warehouse supervisor challenged her to rethink what it means to be a responsive, responsible community member and servant-leader. Jenny pivoted careers in 2015 to pursue work that would allow her to connect more deeply with others and to engage more deeply with the fight for change in St. Louis. She’s been an active volunteer in the community since moving into the city in 2013 and believes wholeheartedly that change will only be possible for our region if we all pull together strategically and keep racial equity, social justice, community leadership, and community voice at the center of everything we do.
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Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Jenny Connelly-Bowen at jenny@communitybuildersstl.org.
