Spiritual Capital

DeAmon Harges joins the pod, not as a guest but as a co-host, as we describe specific practices for learning to see the unobvious goods--economic and social--that circulate in our workplaces and neighborhoods.

Chris Butler's running for U.S. Congress, 1st District Illinois, and he sees a clear analogy between community organizing and what this pod is always discussing--the capability to see latent resources in workplaces and their neighborhoods.

I've done some research among leaders running tiny, fragile, plucky, missional organizations and asked them slow, sifting questions about spiritual life in their workplaces and communities. I wrote up what I learned in my recently published book Why Spiritual Capital Matters.

But here’s one 6-min takeaway from that research.

We don't often associate questions of organizational racism with questions of organizational spirituality. They seem to come from very different organizational buckets. Maybe we should rethink that arrangement.

DeAmon Harges is a founder of the Indianapolis organization The Learning Tree, and he joins me as a co-researcher into the question of how various sectors can partner better and more responsibly with neighborhood-based associations. The problem of theft looms always on the periphery of such partnerships. It doesn't have to.

Note: an earlier version of this file was disrupted by theme music sixteen minutes into the episode. I apologize for the error. This version should correct for that.

Think of the bones of a neighborhood as its economic capital. Think of the lungs of a community as its social capital. We need both, of course. But the first challenge is seeing them at all. Some of us see ribs; some see lungs. How do we learn to see both?

This episode offers a little backstory on the point when my research flipped on its head, thanks to conversation with a social entrepreneur from Indianapolis named DeAmon Harges, a self-described social banker and roving listener.

My research indexes a fair amount of obscenity when it comes to org leaders frustrated by cheap approaches to mindfulness. This episode broaches the topic of spiritual capital in just this seasons of overwhelm that make sense of the F word ready to hand.

Economic capital. Social Capital. Cultural Capital. What do all these kinds of resources have in common? They're hard to see. Hard to see, that is, without spiritual capital. This is a four-minute listen, and frankly a book promo. But it's also a cure for the organizational glaucoma that can settle into the leadership gaze, missing the gifts that are right in front of you.

Hardly anything is more revered as a pathway to spiritual wellness in workplace communities than face-to-face dialogue. Give me five minutes, and I'll suggest a reason to challenge this taken-for-granted wisdom.