Oct. 4, 2000 — As a school teacher trying to revive the lost practice of sheep farming among the Navajos, Sharon Begay pauses for reflection among the plains of the Southwest desert.

She is thankful that others in her group, like the animal geneticist at her side, share in the daunting challenge.

"My mom told me one time—she said, ‘We're very vulnerable when there's only one person,'"

Whether it's a fish conservation program in Alaska, a house-building project in Texas or a youth-oriented consortium in Chicago, the core of Begay's message remains intact: Community is what gives individuals strength.

Yet there's a cadence to the words of each community project member's words that shifts and serves through dialects, slang, and personal experiences.

"Indivisible: Stories of American Community," an exhibit opening Friday at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, allows members of 12 community groups to speak through the remains of tapes and hundreds of photographs.

Two exhibits, a book and companion CD make up "Indivisible." The exhibit's second component features postcards of the photographs and audio text and will appear at the State of Illinois building, 100 W. Randolph St.

Free postcards will be offered to viewers, who will be able to record their impressions of the exhibit. Those thoughts will then be added to the traveling show. The accompanying glossy, coffee table book and CD falls under the name "Local Heroes Changing America" ($29.95, W.W. Norton & Co.).

A grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts funded the project that began as a collaboration between Tom Rankin, the director of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, and curator Trudy Wilner Stack, of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.

Each community group selected was visited, and then an interviewer and photographer documented that site, spending as much as 20 days there. As many as 5,000 words of interview transcripts appear in each of the book's chapters, which, Rankin says, represents about 3 percent of the interviews that took place.

But how were the communities chosen? In the case of the Southwest Youth Collaborative, 6400 S. Kedzie Ave., a member of The Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago suggested the organization to Wilner Stack and Rankin.

Chapin Hall's findings of the need for more preventative programs for adolescents spurred the creation of Southwest Youth nine years ago. The organization founded to nurture community networking and youth empowerment covers the five southwest neighborhoods of Gage Park, West Lawn, Chicago Lawn, Elsden and West Englewood.

More than 3,000 children are served through the collaborative's linked programs, which address such matters as tutoring, literacy, college scholarship opportunities, group studies, and meetings with local government officials.

Several of the programs are conducted at the collaborative's office; many others are scattered throughout the neighborhoods.

"I didn't witness the work of Southwest Youth Collaborative as much as the energy," says Rankin.

Take a recent Tuesday at the main offices, when there is plenty of energy to go around. It's the day of the youth meetings, when, Generation Y youth organizer Jeremy Lahoud says, the teenagers get serious while having fun.

Bouts of break dancing are interspersed with team-building meetings; teens discuss upcoming college tours and also, their Saturday night plans.

Tara Reyes and Quintana Woodridge have become good friends through their work at Generation Y.

But they say they have also learned a lot about how to make communities strong.

Woodridge, an ebullient 19-year-old with a constant, infectious smile, says that when she was in high school, she became concerned with the disintegration of Chicago neighborhoods.

"Since I've been in high school, a good 15 (community organizations) have closed down," in her own neighborhood surrounding the Ida B. Wells housing development, she said. "A lot of youths have nothing to do but stand on corners."

In her capacity at Generation Y, Woodridge says she feels empowered when she can explain to government officials why more programs are needed—and they listen. "It feels good," she says.

"I spoke in front of 770 people at my youth summit," says Reyes, 17, who is a senior at Kelly High School. Because of her experience at Southwest Youth, Reyes said, she has decided to become a journalist. "I have no idea of how much (of this) stuff I would have ever done" if not for being involved in Generation Y, she says.

The main reason that Southwest Youth was a chosen community for "Indivisible," Wilner Stack says, was because it represented "not just lip service, but real youth involvement… The board is half youth, and that's very unusual in a social service organization… the evolution of that organization will be directed by the youth they serve," she said.

Jonathan Peck, director of the Community Justice Initiative, is on of the representatives of Southwest Youth in an exhibit passage and photographic portrait. The 30-year-old says his group, which searches for ways to avoid the criminalization of youth, has found the best route is through youth involvement in community. There should never be a four-mile stretch devoid of a community center, says Peck, and he has seen such expanses too many times.

"Indivisible" makes a good argument in his defense.

It would have been so easy to have "blown into" areas, says Rankin, to have not taken two years to complete this project. But then how, he asks, could "Indivisible" have created such a powerful, positive statement about community life? It wouldn't have happened. And that statement, Rankin says, is that "In local communities, the most interesting work is on the community level. Despite what we hear in the media, local people are taking into their hands all sorts of things to bring about change."