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"Tom Rankin discusses the Documentary, 'Indivisible'" Interview by Bob Edwards

© Copyright NPR® 2001. The text and audio of a news report by NPR's Bob Edwards was originally broadcast on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition ®" on January 8, 2001, and is used with the permission of National Public Radio, Inc. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

BOB EDWARDS, host:

This is Morning Edition from NPR News. I'm Bob Edwards. The best-known documentaries often deal with big, difficult subjects, often using disturbing images of death, famine, war, or poverty. A new national documentary project called "Indivisible," is a departure from that. It explores how people solve local problems rather than live with them, portraying grassroots democracy as it plays out in 12 communities across the country. The project also includes a Web site, indivisible.org, a traveling museum exhibit and a book called Local Heroes Changing America. In each place, a photographer and interviewer armed with recording equipment gathered photographs, essays, and voices of the community. A CD that comes with the book allows readers to hear these local voices, leaders such as Rick Bass in Yaak Valley, Montana, who compares his community with the forest.

SOUNDBITE OF "INDIVISIBLE"

Mr. RICK BASS (YAAK Valley, Montana): There's windstorms and ice storms in the woods. And we have those kinds of flurries of activity in our community. But a healthy community cannot only withstand those stresses, but bends and sways and develops a strength as a result of those stresses, if there's, you know, commitment to do that. In the forest, that kind of commitment is called life. The trees have to do it to survive. The forest has to do it to survive. In a community it's called democracy.

EDWARDS: Photographer Tom Rankin is co-director of "Indivisible," and director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where the project was produced.

Mr. TOM RANKIN (Photographer; CO-director, "Indivisible"): What we found is that all kinds of people in these communities are engaged in very humble but ultimately very heroic ways of trying to make a difference on their own terms and in their own communities. And this project looks at that through the documentary arts and sees how small efforts reverberate and become, in some ways, model efforts.

EDWARDS: Is there a type of person that's more likely to get involved, someone perhaps who feels a calling to do this, or is it someone drafted almost against their will, because they have to do something?

Mr. RANKIN: I think there is some sense of calling and you hear different people characterize that calling in very different ways. There are particular people who lead that call. And you see sort of the interplay between the individual leader and the group. Each of these communities have some key leaders. There's no question about it. We worked with that faith-based community in South Carolina, and that calling is very much rooted in religious faith.

SOUNDBITE OF "INDIVISIBLE"

Mr. HENRY BRYCEY: And so as I stand before you, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I welcome you to the land of clear water. The water is not so clear anymore and the stream that once ran through the heart, as the artery runs through the body, has been covered and paved but there's a lot of things that are going on that represents a clear vision. Give thanks that God created a community called Eau Claire. Thank you.

SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE

Mr. RANKIN: Henry Brycey (ph) is a former president-elect of the Eau Claire Community Council. And at an annual event they have in Eau Claire, he gave a history of the Eau Claire community and did it in the language of a sermon. It's a way in which Henry Brycey described Eau Claire as being this wonderful place, as kind of declining because of people losing interest and losing their involvement in the place and then a way in which it is a process of renewal.

The Eau Claire story is very much about renewal. It's about renewing an understanding across racial lines. It's about renewing the recognition of the importance of collaboration to create a community. And Henry Brycey speaks to that in this Thanksgiving celebration, which brings together a very, very diverse group of people under one roof the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to really say, 'Before we go home with our families and have that celebration. We're going to recognize that we all live in the same place and it's our duty to find a way to live fruitfully and relevantly here together.'

EDWARDS: You have a chapter about a housing initiative in Texas for migrant farm workers.

Mr. RANKIN: Yeah, I think housing is an enormously big issue in this country and in some ways a kind of symbolic issue. Everybody wants a house, a home. And in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, there's an effort, begun by migrant farm workers, to build their own houses and to move from very, very rough impoverished situations to owner-built houses that again embrace that notion that everybody should have a home. Yolanda Hernandez (ph), one of the people we interviewed there, is very eloquent in talking about what a major move that is and how symbolic that is for people.

SOUNDBITE OF "INDIVISIBLE"

Ms. Yolanda Hernandez: I do believe that everybody deserves to have a home and a comfortable home where you can have your own space, your own privacy. You can feel this comfortable, how I feel, how my children come home every afternoon and how comfortable they feel. I had never seen them so calm in my life till now. My husband, when he comes home, he knows he comes home to our home which is going to be our home when we're done paying for it.

EDWARDS: Tell me about the Southwest Youth Collaborative in Chicago.

Mr. RANKIN: That's, I think, one of the most interesting stories. You know, most board of directors of non-profits has a bunch of stodgy old folks from the university and from different places. Well, in the Southwest Youth Collaborative, there's a youth board of directors, where the young people are considered just as wise, just as important, as someone who's lived a long time and worked a lot of different jobs. It's a fascinating sort of inversion of seeing young people as really having enormous amount to give, particularly if we're going to do anything for the problems of young people.

SOUNDBITE OF "INDIVISIBLE"

Ms. ANDREA SHIELDS: Now being at the collaborative, I know the meaning of community, the fact that we're all here together supporting a cause, and that's the main thing. It's like I'm not so close-minded no more, I'm open-minded. And it's like I've changed from being a taking person to an actually giving person.

Mr. RANKIN: That was Andrea Shields, who's 18 years old and a member of generation Y, the Southwest Youth Collaborative-sponsored effort to improve conditions for teens in the southwest of Chicago. Community--and she uses this wonderful play on words of common unity that she knows, the meaning of community is common unity. She goes on to say its' not about your color and it's not about your age. We heard that throughout the country where people begin to recognize that in order to have community, you kind of have to let go of distinct notions of conflict over color or over age, that you have to reach across lines between youth and adults, between rural and urban, between black, white and so on. And Andrea Shields (ph), so eloquently and so personally, gives a sense of that. For her, being involved in community work has moved her, as she says, from a taking person to a giving person. It's her call to become active.

EDWARDS: This is about local heroes. What makes them heroes?

Mr. RANKIN: Well, I think the way that we use heroes in this book is the notion that the heroic act is, in some ways, the most ordinary act, at least initially, that it begins from a place of personal humility and personal action, but it's these ordinary acts that are really, ultimately, the extraordinary. And I think what we're arguing is that in this country, where grassroots democracy really matters, the most heroic folks are those in the trenches day after day and who may get, from media of from writers or maybe even from their own community, very, very little credit for what they do. But it's ultimately their work that resonates and becomes the model for future people to get engaged in their own communities

What we try to do with this project and with this book and the traveling exhibitions and the Web site is suggest to others that there's a beauty in seeing this through the documentary arts, but there's also a power and understanding that we can, in small ways and in large ways, make a difference.

EDWARDS: Tom Rankin in director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and CO-director of the "Indivisible" project. The project's traveling exhibit, "Indivisible: Stories of American Community" is at the Akron, Ohio, Art Museum and will be touring the country through 2002.