As a result, caring organizations are becoming very quiet places. Its not only the presence of managers, carpeting and word processors, its the a lack of characters and clamor. And the chaos of conflicting ideas. We think of ourselves as being in the caring business. We care about other people, that is what brought us to medicine or social work or ecology or politics. But the organizations we've built are so removed from the object of our care that we rarely have anything under our nose to care about. So care ends up being a feeling, when in fact its an activity.

As those of us in the helping and caring professions become more and more administrators of others work, we lose our revolutionary fervor. We don't care so much about change. We become instead very careful people. In the business of the media, this kind of caution is rarely rewarded.
I propose we change this. And that we start by re-bundling the bureaucracy on a smaller scale. We will have more organizations, they will be, leaner, keener, faster and more fun. I propose we bring back to our organization an implementation agenda and the crafts people who make things. We will take our nooks and crannies of specialization back, our peculiar people with their artistic indiosyncrasies and healthy obsessions. We will bring back the self-satisfied glow of a deadline met, a crowd turned-out, a program produced and a job well done. How can others be inspired to change their behavior and build community when we've hollowed out our own professional community and lost touch ourselves with what it means to work together as a team in the production of a product.

The products we produce might very well be a community center in one town, raising the roof has often been a community affair. Or, in an age where the media is as much an environmental structure as a roof over our heads, it might more likely be communication vehicles we produce ourselves.

Creating media messages is no longer a wholly corporate affair, the province of multi-national media giants. Technology has made message creation everyone's business. The creating of videos, radio programs, films, magazines and music is relatively inexpensive and accessible to most teens, for example, in most communities, with a little help from knowledgeable adults. The products we produce may not have the clean corners, nuance, and technical competence we associate with professional image-makers, but a quick sampling of television's offerings demonstrates that anyone and everyone is putting out anything anyway. The inexpensive publications read by teens called Zines, are popular precisely because of their rough edges, home made look and professional naiveté. What's more, the product in our case is only an excuse, we want people creating things together. The creation of entertainment and information messages in itself creates community, just like the roof raisings did yesterday.

There is communication on a modest scale community based organizations all have the technology in-house to produce. And the more modest the scale the closer to the creative source, the more likely we are to meet the source of our own creativity. Along with producing magazines and videos we might be organizing a co-operative effort with a community theater group in one part of town, the staging of a mini-play in another, perhaps we're directing a musical staged by teens addressing pre-teens about dating and sex. There might be anti-smoking rallies for mid-schoolers, or a parade against alcohol for pre-teens, or a teach-in on the high school steps about violence and abuse on the home front.

In order to create these kinds of products we will have to hire the kinds of people who can produce them. We will need drama coaches, art teachers, party organizers, rabble rousers, event planners, video film makers, web site creators and others who know and can work with the corporate media, organize events and manufacturer communication vehicles themselves. But more than anything it will require that we add people to our organizations who have honed a craft and established a level of expertise in discipline other than planning, management, analysis or report writing.

More disciplines of craft, and daring-do, will mean people with specific points of view, and more likely than not the kind of personal piccadlillios that make life and work interesting. Because a craft is an expression of some natural talent or ability, these people will inject more of themselves into their work, and see their work as a kind of personal practice. This kind of personal practice - repetition within an area of expertise leads to work done with both hand and heart. Our caring will be right under our nose.We'll reinvigorate our activity with what was lost when we stopped producing a product and began planning for the products others produce. We'll have more people in our organizations capable of infecting others with their energy and focus.

The cross-fertilization that occurs when people with different disciplines work together around a single goal to produce a finished product creates heat and light. It necessitates human interaction, co-operative relationships and ultimately a sense of community. This of course is how movies get made. And it is no accident that the groups of people involved in the process call themselves the film "community." When we talk about building community, we need to be talking about building it around something other than core functions of policy and management.

Nothing raises one persons awareness or changes their behavior like our interaction with someone operating at a higher octave. After crisis and epiphany, people relating to other people is our most direct form of inspiring change. Everything else we do — marketing, creating social policy, or new regulations — we do in lieu of that.

As well as producing things ourselves we should also be able to bend the ear of those in change. We have to have a structure that can plug directly into the power source; corporations, local business and the media. We have to be like them. Or at least have a part of us that acts like them. We have to have a converter, a transformer, a differential, to engage the wheels and convert spinning energy into forward motion, and interaction with the powers that be.

Advertising agencies do this all the time. So while advertising agencies may not be our best model of benevolence, compassion or the higher aspirations of the soul, there is much we can learn from their inner works and the way they get things done. These organizations have leverage. They have done much the way to shape the way our world looks and how we live.