Two Best Practices at Changing Misperceptions

Two things ran through my mind earlier this month as I took in a quarterly graduation event, this time for 34 residents of TROSA, a two-year substance abuse recovery program with aftercare in Durham, North Carolina.

One was that I had been sitting on an unpadded folding chair for nearly three hours without noticing it because the personal stories delivered to the audience by each graduate were so incredibly touching and compelling.

The other thought was of a paper by a researcher at Dartmouth, Dr. Brendan Nylan who had earned his Masters and Ph.D. here at Duke University in the years before I retired from a career in community marketing.

His research is about why people continue to embrace misinformation even after learning it is false.  This is particularly salient in light of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that deliberate lies to voters by or on behalf of candidates for high office are protected free speech.

But first a few words about TROSA.

It was founded in 1994 by a former addict, Kevin McDonald, who lives four doors down from me.  A few years after it opened, Kevin turned his life around at Delancey Street where he stayed on for 12 years to help others.

He came to North Carolina about the same time I did to open a much smaller 30-resident Delancey Center in Greensboro.  Then five years later accepted an invitation to build on the model by founding TROSA, which has nearly 480 residents now from around the country.

It has grown from 8 residents to a $13 million annual operation, nearly half of which is earned income from businesses such as moving, tractor-trailer driver training, framing, vintage product recycling, landscape care, stonework, catering and foodservice, sales and construction and facility maintenance, to name a few.

The program relies, in part, on donations or in-kind contributions from individuals and businesses for the rest.   There is no charge for the program; residents ear their keep through working.

In its on-going well-being index, Gallup has found that people in communities with higher well-being are more likely to give back to their communities.

Foretelling that North Carolina ranks only 43rd in charitable giving (7th  from the bottom) is that it ranks only 32nd for well-being overall.  But the metro area centered around Durham ranks second in the state and 31st nationwide, in the top quintile.

In books such as last year’s, Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy, the case is made that drug and alcohol addiction is a “preventable, treatable disease, not a moral failing.”

A few years earlier a book called, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, made the highly controversial case that the condition is merely a matter of self-destructive choices and free will, but the author also repeatedly made the point that this does not exclude neurophysical influences.

In fact, both authors essentially agree that it is both a disease and a matter of choice.  As Seth Godwin blogged recently, disease doesn’t trump choice, it just makes bad choices much harder to overcome.

This is something TROSA understands and addresses with a heavy mix of vocational training and therapeutic, educational and aftercare programs.  It builds character while addressing disease.

It is clear when looking at the effectiveness of TROSA over most rehab programs lasting anywhere from a week to a month and from listening to TROSA graduates bare testimony including a friend of mine who is a resident, that it takes two to three years for those addicted to reclaim their lives.

But it isn’t just lack of funds or in-kind donations that prevents this program from being scalable from thousands to the tens of millions who need it.

One obstacle is the number of people who still buy into barrages of misinformation that addiction is purely a failure of will power, a moral shortcoming.  For others, this merely reinforces a world view that no amount of scientific information or testimony can change.

Dr. Nyhan and other researchers delve into the best ways to correct misperceptions or misinformation as overviewed this month in a blog on The New Yorker by Maria Konnikova, author of the new book Mastermind.  She is a former producer for “Charlie Rose” who also writes for Scientific American.

One of my first challenges when jumpstarting the community destination marketing organization for Durham was not only correcting misinformation but turning around the negative image of Durham held by the vast majority of residents in nearby communities.

Research plus trial and error helped us achieve this goal by the end of the 1990s, although crucial follow-up will be never-ending.

In the early days, many friends were too nervous to be of much help while others were fearful that trying to correct these misimpressions would only reinforce them.  Fortunately, we could rely on a grassroots army of residents.

Much has been learned about reputational management since then but no one has done more research over the years to identify what works than Dr. Brendon Nylan.  I wonder if he was aware of what we were doing when he was at Duke?

In a paper last year entitled “Misinformation and Fact-Checking,” Nylan and a co-author from George State identified some techniques similar to those that had made us successful in Durham, e.g.

1. Get the story right the first time.
2. Early corrections are better.
3. Beware of making the problem worse.
4. Avoid Negations. (just saying it isn’t so)
5. Minimize repetition of false claims.
6. Reduce partisan and ideological cues.
7. Use credible sources.
8. Use graphics where appropriate.
9. Beware of selective exposure. (confirmation bias)

The paper is an overview of studies supporting each of these and a good read for anyone who is trying to overcome misinformation or misperception.

It would have been helpful if Nylan had done this work two decades earlier.  Our success was by trial and error to find the right messaging, as well as recruiting allies in other communities along with other Durham residents (Durham Image Watch) who would also help make our point.

We were also strategically focused.

We weren’t trying to change anyone’s world view, just get the facts right and in context.  We didn’t worry about the negatives among the 10% who were rabid.  We focused on the vast majority who were “soft negatives,” mostly just uninformed.

We successfully isolated those who were the source.

We also appealed to the honor of journalists, editors and news directors by showing them that our objective wasn’t to influence the content of the news, just the accuracy and balance.

No amount of promotion would have overcome the “moat of negativity” surrounding Durham.  It had infiltrated the news media, airport/airline workers and even around local “water coolers” from the 2-in-3 people working in Durham but not living here.

We knew that the negativity had not statistically harmed Durham’s image elsewhere which was always high, but research showed that if we didn’t address it aggressively, it soon would.

Anecdotally, we knew it had already significantly contaminated loan applications and appraisals as well as diverted visitors including relocating executives and newcomers.

We turned it around in the nick of time.  What amazes me is how many communities don’t even know they have an image problem, let alone address it.  The home communities of some of those trashing Durham have even greater image problems across the state.

When they get around to it, research such done by Dr. Nylan will be a good resources.

Archaeology of A Career

Last week, I was invited back to an incredible retrospective on the early years of my fifth and last community economic development startup.

Former staff and governing board members returned for the event, and the Durham community was treated to a short video created by Wil Weldon and Growler Productions from hours of video captured by DCVB for its archives.

It was humbling, heartening and a reunion with old friends.  The board member who first interviewed me credits start up experience for making me standout.

It made me realize that for anyone keeping count since I retired nearly five years ago, the number of startups in the first half of my career has continued to increase even though my last was for Durham in 1989.

I was involved in many other startups after that including grassroots efforts such as Durham Image Watch and Durham Wayfinders.  Many other startups involved strategic alliances such as the Durham Pubic Information & Communications Council and Durham Heritage Alliance to name only two.

Three in the first half of my career involved community destination marketing organizations, but I was also involved in two other closely related startups.

One occurred when I stayed a year longer in Anchorage to jumpstart from scratch its economic development corporation before taking a year and a half sabbatical mid-career from community marketing to catch my breath and try new things.

My first startup was as a student working as the supervisor for the BYU Office of Tours & Conferences under Gary Bascom, then a unit of University Relations which fell under an Assistant to the President.

The office had been around since the 1960s but our charge was to go beyond campus tours and other public relations duties such as the President’s box at sports events.

We jumpstarted the proactive recruitment, facilitation and hosting of conferences, associations and events from around the nation to fill capacity during summer term.

The office also coordinated with related units the handling of public relations, the campus visitor information desk, sports information and community and government relations.

My job also included coordinating production of marketing materials including concepting, writing, photography and production of print materials that not only communicated the allure and sense of place of the campus, but would serve as a guide to detailed event planning.

Coupled with my previous job of inventorying all campus buildings, it was fun and I was good at it, the perfect introduction to skills needed in my eventual career.

But my dream at the time was law school, a path that ultimately led back to my real purpose.

Thinking back, that first taste was, in fact, community destination marketing without the community.

But, of course, a university the size of BYU even back then was a small city of nearly 40,000 students, staff and faculty.  At the time it was 63% of the size of its surrounding community.

We were so successful that within a year or two after I graduated, BYU took a breath and reorganized.  Now that aspect falls over with Continuing Education and Alumni Affairs.

It has its own conference center and hosts many times the off-campus  events, camps and conferences that we did, including another 70 sports camps facilitated by Athletics.

Startups aren’t for everyone because of the sense of urgency, drive and strategy involved.  There are other ways to build a career in my former field of community destination marketing.

But one thing it may uniquely cultivate is an entrepreneurial sense of urgency, engagement, drive and timing.  It embeds an organic sense of continuous and never-ending improvement.

When as fortunate as I was, startups can also provide a unique fusion of the passion and purpose that makes me tick, one that was non-transferable to or from solely profit-making enterprises.

I am often asked to tell the story of how my career evolved.  It is an interesting archaeological exercise that never ceases to amaze me as new resurfaced connections arise.

Manifestation of a Community Value

Many felt it was prescient that Durham, North Carolina, where I live, happened to honor social entrepreneurs at its Annual Tribute Luncheon in the spring of 2009.

Conceived in 2008, the honorees for that event seemed to foretell an explosion of entrepreneurial interest here including campus-like hubs such as Bull City Forward and two American Undergrounds.

However, that may be more coincidence.  The roots of Bull City Forward can also be traced to meetings in 2008, one of which was attended by an ATL organizer.  So it appears the revelation itself was entrepreneurial.

But Durham’s almost temporal entrepreneurial nature had been unearthed two years earlier during a two year process from 2004-2006 involving hundreds and hundreds of residents as well as external audiences culminating in the distillation of Durham’s “overarching” personality including community values.

It may also be coincidence that the notion of “social entrepreneurs,” was simultaneously gleaned during that two year drill-down to reveal Durham’s brand, when one of the executives involved with managing that process happened to read a 2004 Fast Company Magazine article.

The magazine recognized 20 companies as “best of the best” social capitalists including one based in Durham, The Center for Community Self-Help which was founded in 1980.  This clue led to uncovering a deep vein of community interest and activism that had been long taken for granted.

The idea that Durham is inherently entrepreneurial didn’t surface from a wish to be so or from envy or because it is now in vogue, but because it was unearthed by hundreds and hundreds of citizens digging down to discover Durham’s enduring distinctiveness.

A community’s personality, or brand in marketing parlance, is not an aspiration or a slogan or a tactic or even a strategy.  It can’t be imported, exported, transplanted or developed.

Its elements cannot be not born of or made sustainable from envy or trends.  While not always unique to a community, their distinct manifestation is.

Today’s press is all about the incredible American Underground with two 20,000+ sq. ft. downtown Durham campuses within a few blocks of each other.  It was recently recognized as part of the exclusive Google for Entrepreneurs Tech Hub Network.

But this and any subsequent efforts will always stand on the shoulders of generations of entrepreneurs here dating to the late antebellum 1850s of Durham’s founding.

That is what I mean by near-temporal.

Durham’s Food Scrap Entrepreneurs

A few months ago, a start-up in Durham, North Carolina where I live began Tilthy Rich Compost, a business that picks up food scraps from subscribers on a weekly basis, then turns it into compost a few miles from downtown.

Currently, the service area is approximately a five mile radius of downtown and expanding.  Pick up is mostly by bicycle for neighborhoods and a truck service for commercial clients.

The company will even return the finished compost to you if you wish, for use in your garden or landscape.  They also offer the service to restaurants, commercial kitchens and cafeterias.

At our house, we only eat at home a few days a week, but they have a smaller bucket for people like us and a larger bucket for families that eat at home regularly.

The new company is emblematic of Durham’s distinctive entrepreneurial personality, in particular social entrepreneurship.

Forty percent of the nation’s food supply goes to waste and I am sure Durham is no exception.  Residential food scraps alone make up 12.4% of municipal waste across America, a greater percentage than plastic.

In restaurants, according to the report Wasted, analysts at the Natural Resources Defense Council calculate that 4% to 10% of food becomes waste during preparation before it gets to the consumer.  Another significant portion is served but not eaten.

Approximately 10% of fast food is discarded because it has been prepared but not purchased within safe time limits.  At home, Americans throw out approximately 25% of the food and beverages they buy.

Often, if you are like us, food products are discarded either because  plans change and they spoil or because I in particular am one of those people perpetually confused by “use by” and “best by” date labels.

Even before consumers buy groceries, a food industry consultant estimates that up to one in seven truckloads of perishables delivered to supermarkets has to be thrown away.

Analysis in the United Kingdom estimate that if food scraps were removed from landfills there, greenhouse gas abatement would be the equivalent of removing a fifth of all cars in that country from the roads.

By the time I retired four years ago, 90 cities and towns in the U.S. had begun offering food waste collection, double from two years before.  North Carolina composts below the average for the Southeast.

I suspect though, that a personalized and scalable service such as Tilthy Rich Compost will always be in demand.  In our part of the country, as a developer-friend of mine jokes, soil so easily becomes compacted that it almost qualifies as impervious.

We need all of the compost we can get.

Innovating Social Welfare

As I was growing up in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of the Book of Mormon belt that arched from southern Alberta, Canada to Mexico and sweeping over Las Vegas to San Bernardino, a claim was often heard among the million adherents at that time that the federal Government had copied the Mormon welfare system.

That has never been substantiated, but both systems did both tap into some common lineage before coming of age during the mid-1930s and the Great Depression.

While they may not have crossed paths, within a little more than a year the entrepreneurs behind each plan had volunteered at Chicago’s Hull House, a turn-of-the century outcome of the Progressive movement and were mentored by its founder Jane Addams.

Amy Brown Lyman, who would go on to lead the Relief Society, a Mormon women’s auxiliary, stopped in Chicago during the summer of 1902 on her way east during her husband’s sabbatical and not only took a class at the University of Chicago in the relatively new subject of sociology but also volunteered at Hull House.

After accepting a teaching position in 1904 in Lake Forest, Illinois, Frances Perkins volunteered for Addams at Hull House before becoming a cabinet officer through all four terms of the Roosevelt administration and championing the Social Security Act of 1935.

Thanks to written and oral histories left by a slightly younger contemporary, my great aunt Vera White Pohlman, the full story of Amy Brown Lyman’s contributions have re-emerged and informed scholarship such as that by Dr. David R. Hall of Cal State Fullerton.

The lifetime contributions of Lyman support a claim often made today by Dr. Mathew B. Bowman (no relation), a professor at Hampden-Sydney College north of Durham where I now live, that Mormonism is as much a “community” as a church and that while it is the most conservative of all faiths today, its members have a “surprisingly deep affinity for Progressive politics.”

When she returned to Utah from that sabbatical, Lyman lobbied passionately for creation of a social welfare department in the Mormon Church which she led for many years after its creation in 1919.

She even won election to the state legislature in 1922 to champion Utah’s participation in a nationwide program to promote infant and maternity care as well as establishing a hospital and a training school for the mentally disabled.

The common struggle shared by Perkins and Lyman was how to scale up social welfare to the size needed to truly address the magnitude of the challenges.  Republicans then as now opposed any role of government, hoping instead that disparate private agencies would somehow suffice.

Lyman was famous for reaching out to both non-profit agencies as well as local and state agencies to leverage efforts by the Mormon Church until behind-the-scenes lobbying among male leaders finally forbid it.  The mastermind behind that move was a former Hoover administration official, J. Rueben Clark.

Perkins succeeded and so did Lyman in a way.  Mormon leaders who disparaged Roosevelt programs as the “dole” when they were launched in 1935, created an “inversed projection” by creating a “dole” of their own in 1936 by gathering, standardizing, centralizing and reinventing a number of programs including Lyman’s while freezing her out of the process.

Unfortunately, the program was hampered by politics, both gender and ideological, including a condition that can lead “individuals or groups to subconsciously rationalize a contradiction in their own self-conception by painting themselves as the victim instead,” something hardly unique to Mormons and often witnessed in news stories today.

But as effective as the 1936 Mormon welfare program was back then and as remarkable as it has evolved into today, it was no match for the scale of hardship during the Great Depression.

Statistical reports by federal officials at the time document that the by-then isolationist Mormon welfare program didn’t come anywhere close to making Mormons along the Rockies self sufficient from the federal programs nor were pioneers such as Lyman unaware of the problems associated with the inevitability of increased government involvement.

Overwhelmingly Mormon back then, Utah had among the highest per capita use of federal welfare programs during the Great Depression, yet, the church program stubbornly insisted it was “taking care of our own.”

Church members weren’t officially reauthorized to leverage efforts with those of other public and non-profit agencies until approximately 1991.

What is increasingly apparent to many experts today is that far too many social welfare programs are not cost/effective.  They have lost the nimble and innovative characteristics with which they were inaugurated and long ago it became too expensive to provide recipients to work volunteer in return.

Too much time is wasted on attacking or defending rather than just cutting ineffective programs, trimming waste, eliminating fraud while also increasing funding for innovation and research for those programs that are effective.

All of this should be informed by the growing scientific evidence about human interactions with incentives including sense of entitlement.

Urban Timber Utilization Conference

Long before he was President of the United States, FDR used an example learned during his youth to help pass an amendment to the New York State Constitution that helped reforest that state's canopy from 25% to 60%.


He had visited a town in Germany, whose residents, through careful management of municipal forest were able to enjoy the trees and pay for the cost of public services.  This should not be confused with the idiotic proposals recently made by a couple of state legislators to denude every roadside of North Carolina.

A workshop will be held in Durham, where I live, on June 28th to inform entrepreneurial opportunities to utilize trees from North Carolina’s 1.4 million acres of urban forest.  This is sustainable harvesting for trees that age out or fall during storms or are taken out by roadway expansion etc.

Currently such trees are simply disposed of, but expert panelists at the workshop will describe how these trees are being utilized around the country in part to help fund growth of urban forest canopy.
Click here to learn how to register.  The workshop is sponsored by the North Carolina Urban Forest Council.

Alex Johnson

Alex Johnson reminds me of the foresters who frequented the mid-1950s hallways of Ashton Elementary School during my early years in the far northeast corner of that Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho.  Alex doesn't wear the Smokey The Bear hat and Ranger uniform, but he has the same well-spoken, quiet, cerebral passion for what the forest means aesthetically, economically, sociologically and to our environment.

Those foresters of my youth were stationed just steps away from my school out of the Ashton Ranger District Office of the Targhee National Forest (renamed Caribou-Targhee in 2000) created a little more than 40 years before my birth by President Theodore Roosevelt just four miles north of town across the Henry's Fork of the Snake River in an arc up both the 10,000-foot east-west Centennial and the 14,000-foot north-south Teton mountain ranges.

They frequented our classrooms as rare-for-that-area college graduate role models while teaching us about science, conservation, stewardship and the environment in that small town of 900 people surrounded by farms and ranches such as the ones homesteaded at the turn-of-the-century by my paternal grandparents and great grandparents.

Alex Johnson is the Urban Forester for my adopted home of Durham, North Carolina and the beloved tree canopy that still covers 40% of this acclaimed community, just less than the average 42.9% that covers North Carolina's cities as a whole, or about 4.6% of the state.

On average urban forests cover 27% of the cities across the nation and that’s about 74 billion trees in all, a fourth of the tree canopy of the nation. Urban Foresters manage public trees along streets and parks and encourage forest maintenance and restoration on private property such as mine where, according to a study a few years ago, if more than 80 mature hardwood as well as yellow and white pine trees had only just been planted at the time I bought the house would equal a value more than one third more than its current value in 40 years.

Alex is also currently chairman of the North Carolina Urban Forest Council spearheading an initiative to recycle trees as more than just mulch when they age out or are hacked to death for utility and cable power lines or are smothered by new sidewalks poured without the technology that would let them live or clear-cut for developments including parking lots.

The U.S. Forest Service estimates that even a decade ago, “urban wood residues in the nation’s municipal solid waste stream annually totaled 14.8 million metric tons… an amount greater than the total estimated weight of timber harvested from U.S. National Forests during that same time.”

“About 8.5 million metric tons were recovered mainly for compost and mulch.  Of the remaining 6.3 metric tons, 1.5 million were sent to combustion facilities, 1.6 million were deemed unusable, and 3.2 million metric tons were available for further processing (in other words “good wood” seeking a market.)”

Alex hopes to enlist social entrepreneurs such as the prolific TROSA headed by my neighbor and friend Kevin McDonald or the many being fostered here by Bull City Forward headed by another friend Chris Gergen who might want to rescue disposed trees from the solid waste streams across the state similar to what is done by the businesses listed below which are located in other parts of the country.  In doing so give this “green” resource another life and just maybe, as Forever Redwood does to reforest Redwood Forests, invest part of the proceeds back into planting more trees in Durham.

Horigan Urban Forest Products

Meyer Wells

CitiLog

Urbanwood

Pacific Coast Lumber