On the first Thursday of every month, leaders from a diverse set of stakeholder and identity groups in Needham come together to get to know each other as individuals, share and listen to each other’s perspectives, build trust, and acquire skills in communicating around differences.
The group calls itself the Needham Resilience Network, or NRN, and it consists of representatives from Needham’s faith, identity, school, civic, service, healthcare, and business communities. Town leaders, including a representative from the Select Board, the Town Manager, the Head of Public Health, the Superintendent of Schools, and the Needham Police Chief, participate with ex-officio status. As the NRN explores local issues, its leaders will act as liaisons to their communities, collecting their communities’ stories and perspectives for discussion within the NRN and bringing information from the NRN back to their communities.
“We think of the NRN as a table of multipliers, or a ‘network of networks’ that can help anchor our community in the language of belonging and build the capacity for our residents to disagree while maintaining trust and social cohesion,” says Nichole Argo, a social psychologist and NRN co-director.
Beth Pinals, a clinical psychologist and NRN co-director, notes, “We all want Needham to be a safe, welcoming and equitable place, but it’s important to recognize the growth that needs to happen in order for each and every resident to experience this.”
The co-directors say that recent years have tested Needham, just like other US communities.
“We are a community under stress,” says Pinals. “The stress came in the form of social isolation and loss from the pandemic; mental and physical health challenges; increased food, housing and economic insecurity; and, like in the rest of the nation, an uptick in hate incidents, online incivility, and tensions around politics and racial justice.”
The NRN launched in March 2022. In the first six months of its operation, it focused on relationship- and tool-building. First, it established a “communications agreement,” a set of guidelines and principles to help facilitate conversations that entail different perspectives. This fall, it worked with the nation’s foremost community surveying platform to conduct the Community Cohesion Survey with a locally representative sample in order to identify residents’ attitudes on topics such as local belonging, diversity, and hopes for the future. Some of the results from this survey will be presented at the Needham Diversity Initiative’s November 6 Summit, and a full report will be published in early in 2023.
For the next six months, the NRN will examine locally salient themes using data from the town and lived experiences from the Network’s diverse communities. Themes include: food and economic insecurity; housing and public health; town satisfaction, belonging and equity; and public safety and law enforcement. Next year, the Network will create a protocol for responding to hate incidents, which have increased nearly 350 percent when the past five years are compared to the five years prior.
In the event of a local crisis, the NRN’s regular programming will be paused to hold a structured discussion about that event.
“Our goal for Needham is resilience, and it can only be achieved through healthy relationships,” says Argo. “We don’t need to agree on politics or policies to be resilient, but we do need to align in the way we think about the health of our community and establish a constructive way to communicate around differences.”
The NRN co-directors think of Needham as a pilot and hope to scale the project in other towns and cities across the country.
To learn more about the work of the NRN or sign up for their monthly newsletter, visit www.nrnma.org or contact info@nrnma.org.
