Director's Note

I was able to take a breath over the summer and look back over my first year as Director of UNP. I think it was a good one, focused on working with the staff and fine tuning the organizational structure, figuring out the new role and purpose of the UNP Hartland Center after all of the changes at the nearby apartments, and a lot of work thinking about our goals.

Most of all, I thought about how UNP’s work is creating change in these neighborhoods. The messiness and complexity of UNP’s work—creating partnerships vs. doing the direct work ourselves—is a constant puzzle that I really love thinking about.

Have you read the book, “Leadership and the New Science” by Margaret Wheatley? It was given to me when I began this new role, and I’ve found it to be hugely helpful for describing how we work. It’s based on the idea that we should think about organizations and communities as much more complex ’systems’ than we have in the past.

Rather than believing that we can control structures and outcomes in a cause-and-effect way (the sort of mechanical model that science relied on until recently), instead we should focus on the conditions of the system itself, and the individual parts will organize themselves around broad goals that are agreed upon. I love the book because it reflects how unpredictable so much of this work is, but that if we create shared values, relationships, and goals, people will do their own work to achieve them.

One of my first lessons from Irene (the founding Director of UNP) is that we have to learn to live with ambiguity. We don’t always know, and really can’t control, how a process or project is going to unfold. What we can do is get everyone on the same page as to what we are trying to achieve and our commitments to each other.

I think that’s been the basis of our success.