Community Building | With Mitch Haralson, MSW, LCSW, Starfire Executive Director
From Starfire, this is a podcast on what's more possible in inclusion, community building and relationships.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
There's an epidemic of loneliness in the United States. Isolation is rampant, especially among the 60 million Americans – that's one in four of our neighbors – with disabilities. And despite the fact that we're vaxed and boosted and cases of COVID are on the wane, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy shared yesterday that the physical consequences of not being connected with others can be devastating … 29% increased risk of heart disease, 32% increased risk of stroke, and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia. Those stats are even worse for people with disabilities.
The CDC reports that chronic loneliness increases their odds of death in any year by 26%, and that is one stat that Mitch Haralson, the executive director of Starfire, does not want on his watch. I'm Robbie Jennings Michels, and I'm here with Mitch as we celebrate 30 years of working alongside people and families with developmental disabilities to, as we say, become “named and known” in our community by developing confidence, sparking connections, and nurturing relationships based on common interests.
Mitch, what are some of the ways that Starfire is seeking to break the barriers of isolation or fear or just basic lack of awareness experienced by people with developmental disabilities to fulfill Starfire's mission of becoming a more inclusive world?
Mitch Haralson:
Robbie, thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to be here. The stat that you read is staggering and upsetting. What we're trying to do at Starfire is make people named and known, and in doing so, try to find kind of tricks of the trade inside of a community to help people come out. To be outdoors, to be seen, to be recognized, and to be heard.
I see one of the worst things that happens to our communities or that has happened over the past 30 to 40 years is the attached garage. Just hit the button, hit the clicker, the garage door goes up, you pull your car in, you hit the clicker again, it comes back down. You don't have to see your neighbors, you don't have to talk to anybody. They stay over there and you stay over here.
What we're asking people to do is to be bold, to be brave, and to park in the driveway. Something as simple as just parking in your driveway. Wave to people. Use the front door and to talk to your neighbors, get to know them, recognize them, and just make friends with the person walking their dog. Walk your dog. How do we get out of our home speaking to somebody recognizing their gifts and sharing yours? So what we're really trying to do is to inspire people to take what we've coined as eight seconds of courage and go and talk to somebody. If we're able to just wave at a neighbor to say hello, I think we have the opportunity to really make some noise in our community and make some friends.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
Yeah. Breaking down those fences. You are spot on. When Starfire began working with young adults to discern interests, to discover and share gifts so that they could develop identities beyond disabilities, Starfire realized that maybe this work could start even earlier with families of children with disabilities before the hurt, before the fence, before the isolation set in. Mitch, changing the paradigm and the patterns of bias is tough work. What motivates you and why do you think this work is so important?
Mitch Haralson:
I think the first thing that's kind of jumps out at me in that question is some family members that I have, both of them have since passed away. Nathan and Jackie were cousins born with disabilities. So I got to know them and I got to fall in love with them and see their interests and their passions and participate in their lives and ask them and their families to participate in mine and in my family's life. And so that was a gift that was shared with me and my family to be able to see them, and we all want the best for our children.
And so when Starfire kind of crossed over in age groups and went from adults to late teens, early twenties, and now we're working with the spectrum of ages, it really gave us the opportunity to see, let's break the mold of what the cycle is going to be, of what the system does, rather than try to reverse the hurt that a family is feeling and has felt for the last 20+ years is to give families a different toolkit to start the path on a healthier route.
And it's been incredible to watch young families and to watch these young kids grow and develop and prosper, but to see a different outlook on their face of no, my kid is known in this area. I'm not known as the family with disabilities. We're known as the family that does the park activities or the movie nights or the splash pads.
Just recently we did a hockey clinic and it's so amazing to see 60 plus kids and everyone there is an equal, right? Everyone there is new or new-ish to this beautiful game. Everyone is coming into this with this aspiration of having a good time and not having a good time because it's a disability outing. And so it's amazing to see these new visions and these new aspirations for these families and to have the aspirations realized, it's beautiful, it's touching and it makes you want to go and do another one.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
That's fantastic. Those life moments that are made possible by changing the vision. The toolkit that you talked about, it's really necessary and so needed. As we talked about earlier, we know from the Surgeon General's report and the CDC that the impact of loneliness is devastating. There's also a terrific study that's been conducted by Harvard for the past 85 years that's studied the lives of three generations of 750 people. And the one factor that stood out for their health and their physical and mental health and longevity was really interesting. It wasn't career advancement or exercise or a healthy diet. And while those were important, the one factor that stood out was the ability to connect and maintain good relationships.
So Mitch, with about 150,000 people here in our region living with a disability, it feels as if we're at a critical juncture to drive sustainable transformative change. How is Starfire working to meet both individuals, people, and families of loved ones with developmental disabilities and organizations too? How are we working to meet both sets of people where they are?
Mitch Haralson:
It's amazing when an organization such as Harvard is able to do a longitudinal study like that. The rest of the world had a snapshot of this, of when the world shut down. COVID hit and it hit hard. We anticipate, oh, this is going to be a kind of paid three week vacation. And then 18, 24, 36 months later, we're still affected by this. And we've all seen and experienced what it's like with that isolation, that loneliness and it takes a toll. That is the day-to-day of individuals with disabilities of families that have a disability affecting them.
And so like you said, there's thousands of people in our community that are experiencing this isolation, this loneliness. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to go out into the community. We're trying to talk to organizations, to community groups to say, "Here's how we think we can make the greater Cincinnati area, we can make Ohio, the tri-state." We're working in Indiana, we're working in Massachusetts, we're talking to people in Minnesota and we've done work in Colorado. We're reaching and we're stretching, and we're being able to take this opportunity to talk to people about what a connected community is.
This summer in September, 5th through the 7th, we're doing what we're calling A Connected Cincinnati. How do we make our communities a little bit more connected? It's about really seeing the individual and individuals for all of their gifts and who they are and what they bring to the table. So we get out into the community and we talk to individuals, organizations, and we put on these educational experiences, the trainings, to teach people what they can do and how they can help.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
Geoffrey Cohen just published a book called Belonging: the Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides. In this book, he says that belonging may feel like a comfortable but inessential luxury, but he also shares what Starfire has known for a long time, that having a sense of belonging has potent, wide-ranging effects. We all know the sting of feeling unwelcome, feeling excluded, is experienced in much of the same way that physical pain is and feeling like we belong is critical to our wellbeing. Mitch, how does that translate to our work?
Mitch Haralson:
If you don't see or feel that sense, what do you have to get out of bed? What motivates an individual to make that connection or to try? If you're knocking on doors and no one's answering, then it's really difficult to knock on that next one.
So our hope is that by way of trainings like we're having this summer with Dr. Allison Lourash and Indigo Bishop is to teach people that they matter and that they too are an asset in their community. The connection is so vital. It's heartwarming when one is made and it's destructive to a family when they think that they lose it. We want to continuously encourage people to get out of that anxious location of, "Will they see me? Or we're the disabled family or the family with a disabled child on the block." We're a person first. How do we help them identify as that and to share their gifts with the community? Hearing that a study like Harvard is continuing means that the need for this information and this data still exists, but it also means that people are focusing on it. And that's what I want to look at and to take away, is that this is still important and this is still a problem that we continuously need to work on.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
I couldn't agree more. One of the takeaways from that Harvard study was an article in the January 14th issue of the Wall Street Journal, penned by Dr. Schultz and Wallinger. They said that the feeling of loneliness is subjective, but there's biological roots as well.
We as humans have evolved to be social and the biological processes that encourage social behavior are there to protect us. When we feel isolated, our bodies and brains react in ways that are designed to help us survive. The feeling of loneliness, it's kind of an alarm ringing in the body. And at first its signals may help us, but imagine as many of our cohort do live in a home with a fire alarm going off all day because of that loneliness. And if you could imagine that you start to get a sense of what chronic loneliness is doing behind the scenes to our minds and our bodies. And Mitch, I think that that's a big part of what Starfire does in connecting family mentors to families who are beginning their journey. Can you talk a little bit about what it is that family mentors share with families and how they step into the space? Are there some commitments that help them do that?
Mitch Haralson:
Great question. So loneliness, there's no scale. It's not Fahrenheit, it's not Celsius. There's no measuring stick to say, I'm “x” lonely. What we're asking these amazing mentors that kind of hold someone's hand as they start, finish one of our family projects, is to have these honest conversations of this is difficult and I recognize it's difficult.
We have what we call four commitments for community building. One, discover your community's gifts. Two, create something that belongs to you and your neighborhood. Three, grow connections. And lastly but not least important is look for joy. We're trying to focus on the good.
I'm an optimist. I always see the cup half full. I had a friend once that, oh my gosh, he was difficult to be around because he was such a pessimist. I told him once like, "Man, your cup is half broken." Whereas I think when I'm in that difficult place, my cup is waiting to be filled and is looking for that opportunity. So we're asking these families to help the ones that they're working with, that they're mentoring to find joy, to make those connections.
And when you say, "I know what you're going through because I've had to make these same connections," it gives a different air of validity, of sincerity, of honesty to say, yeah, this is difficult. There's a handful of things that we try to prepare a family in and around that are uncontrollable. We want to do a project outside. What if it rains? What if it snows? And so we're trying to build in some contingencies, but when we discover the gifts that we have and that our neighborhood has and we create something that is for our community and we have those connections and we're looking specifically for joy, the projects, they're amazing. They're absolutely fantastic.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
Do you think that the business and nonprofit community has the tools they need to help make sure, especially in this hybrid work environment.
Mitch Haralson:
I think that they say, "I have no malice in my heart. I want to do the best I can." But a friend of ours, a friend organization, Interact for Health, they had a survey for some of their partners in the region and said just barely above 60%, I think it was 62%, said that they felt that they needed more information, they wanted more help. I would round that up past 80% to really say, "We need help. How can we help? What can we do?"
And so we'll go out and we'll do that training for you in person. We've done hundreds of them on Zoom now by way of the education of the pandemic. But we're trying to get out into the community. And for a huge community partner like Interact for Health to tell us that people need this assistance, we want to be there for that call and we want to help whatever organization and anyone that needs that assistance and we're happy to do it.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
So who is Starfire today? What's our value proposition and for whom?
Mitch Haralson:
If you know some of our history and you want to know who we are now We have to go back 30 years. We turned 30, I think we look pretty great for 30.
Starfire came from Campfire Girls, which is basically a competitor to the Girl Scouts. Fortunately for us, they weren't selling cookies or their cookie business didn't take off. And so when they closed, it was turned over to an organization, a number of families working with individuals with disabilities. And so we blossomed from there and we've had 30 years to learn a lot, to touch tens of thousands of lives and to be touched by tens of thousands of lives.
Today, we're able to be pretty agile. We're able to get out into the community, we're able to travel, we're able to Zoom, we're able to get where the individual is or the organization where they are. We're able to meet a family where they are. I think some of our value that we bring to the table is we're trying to respect everyone. And when we see everyone, we mean specifically the family. We're trying to recognize and help them identify your time is worth something. I think my time is worth something. And so in asking them to make these big leaps and to do one of these family projects, and it's not always about the end result of, "Hey, all these kids learned and fell in love with hockey." We made friends, we made connections in the community, and now we have these connections.
So what we're asking people to do is something hard, something awkward. And in doing so, we want to pay them for their time. And so we give them some equity funds on the front and backend as well as some mentorship from someone that's done one of these projects before. So we're giving them kind of like a nano or a micro grant to put that investment into the family and into their community. With some of these budgets, they can pull off some amazing, amazing projects. And while it'd be amazing for them to use all of this money to go to your favorite barbecue place, what we're asking them to do is to purchase infrastructure. A cooler, tables, chairs, a tent so that they can really replicate this. They can do it again next year. It can be an annual event. And we're really excited about how they're doing a second and a third and a fourth event because they have the infrastructure, because they've had that barrier removed and they're able to continue to be named and known in their community for something other than disability.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
Thank you. This year, marks Starfire's 30th year of service, which is no small feat for a small nonprofit. Starfire's been blessed to receive funding from many charitable foundations, from Dater to Pfau to PNC, Greater Cincinnati Foundation, Schmidlapp, Hauck, and Wohlgemuth Herschede foundations at Fifth Third, Hubert, Haile, McLane, Ignite Philanthropy, Schott and Wyler among a few, along with the Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities and an incredible number of visionary and philanthropic folks for which we are most grateful. Mitch, what does Starfire need to do more of this work, and what's on tap for 2023?
Mitch Haralson:
So 2023, we turned 30. I gave the charge asking staff and everyone to help us pull off an amazing year of 30 events. People got a little anxious with such a large task, and we're going to do it. It's amazing. We have some really big events. We're going to be able to be the partner of the match for FC Cinci. We have the Zoo, we have the playhouse. We're doing some really cool things. So part of my ask is to participate.
What the community can do is to recognize there's a need in their community to talk to a neighbor. Help yourself be named and known, and help your neighbor name themselves other than the family with a disability down the block. We can work with your organization, your employer, your community group, and do a training to see what you're doing and how we can make it a little bit more equitable and inclusive for everyone. And so please look us up online, Starfirecincy.org/learn, and you yourself can come to a group, can come and sit in on a session where we talk about designing your community with more intent and hearing the story of a family after they've completed their family project. We'd love to invite you down for any and all of the above.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
Yeah, that's fantastic advice. Have conversations. We at Starfire know that having a sense of belonging leads to flourishing in every environment, and seeing your gifts being received can really let you know that you belong. Mitch, how can our listeners enjoy this sense of belonging? How can they best get involved with this work?
Mitch Haralson:
Invite people into your world. When people invite you, accept and learn about someone else. So my ask is to be gracious and accept an invitation to learn about another family, to learn about another individual. Coming out of COVID, and we're technically a year out, but remember. Remember how lonely it was at the height of COVID at the beginning and the middle. It was a difficult time. Continue to remember what it was like and break down those barriers so that we can have more conversations, so you can learn about other people. And then in turn, listen.
So please check out our website. We have an event for everybody. Come on out and just learn what we're doing. If your organization is looking for a training around inclusivity, DEIA, there's so much to do in your community and your organization and we love to be a part of it.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
Yeah, that's awesome. Hey, you talked a little bit about the conference in September. Tell us who Starfire is bringing to town for that experience.
Mitch Haralson:
So we're really excited. September 5th, 6th and 7th, we're going to be down at the Columns in OTR. So we have two experts in asset-based community development. So we're bringing in Dr. Allison Lourash and Indigo Bishop, two giants in the field to talk to us, to walk us through what it means for us to become an asset and to recognize what does our community have, how can we fully take advantage of those aspects of your neighborhood, of your street, Dr. Lourash and Indigo Bishop, they're going to sit down with us on a personal level and help us really learn what it means, really help us focus on our part, and what we can do in the future.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
How will Starfire wrap up its 30th anniversary year?
Mitch Haralson:
This is an exciting one. So I want to wrap up our 30th, basically kicking off our 31st. So we're going to be down at Knox Distillery in November to celebrate this amazing year, to talk about all of the cool things that we've done, all of the amazing projects and communities that we've been able to touch and to be touched by them. It's going to be amazing. So you can go to our website, to our events page, sign up and start the welcoming in of year 31.
Robbie Jennings Michels:
Thank you so much. And it sounds like Starfire has a wonderful year planned from the Asset-Based Community Development Conference in September to the annual event on November the ninth in OTR at the OTR StillHouse Knox Distillery to lots of fun things throughout the calendar to meet some people and get involved. So I thank you for sharing all of that. Listeners, please visit our website, Starfirecincy.org. Mitch, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your vision for this year and beyond.