Common Vision Can Create Beautiful Results
By Patrick T. Reardon
Published: August 23, 2010
"A one-man band's music is never very good, right?"
It was early in the first-ever Neighborhood Innovation Forum in San Diego, and Jim Capraro, the keynote speaker, was explaining the theory and practice of comprehensive community development.
A longtime community organizer in Chicago, Capraro had been named only days before as a senior fellow at LISC's Institute for Comprehensive Community Development
He displayed a humorous image of a one-man band – an overloaded musician, carrying a drum set on his back, clanging cymbals at his ankles, fingering an accordion keyboard with his right hand while alternating his lips from the mouthpiece of a trumpet to the mouthpiece of a tuba.
"Nobody's good at everything," Capraro said, especially when trying to do everything at once.
Indeed, he warned that any community group attempting to revitalize a neighborhood by itself is doomed. "You will fail if you try this."
Unlike a one-man band, a symphony orchestra can produce beautiful music – Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," for instance – when the strings, the woodwinds, the horns and the other instruments combine their talents and work in unison.
How do they do it? A common vision.
"A vision can be a powerful thing," Capraro said.
And the same thing happens in a marriage. "I've been married for 35 years," Capraro said. "When I was dating my wife, I had a vision about how life would be better for us as partners. Guess what? It's true."
Then, Capraro told a story about just how powerful a vision can be.
He told about a two-month-old baby named Betsy who, in 1977, began having seizures. Her frantic parents took her to the local hospital and eventually learned that she was suffering from hydrocephalus, more commonly known as "water on the brain."
This is a medical condition in which an excessive amount of cerebrospinal fluid collects in the skull and begins putting increasing pressure on the brain because of a blockage or malformation.
"The only treatment – had Betsy been born five years before – would have been deep morphine sedation to ease the pain until she was dead," Capraro explained.
By this point, it had become clear to the 150 listeners that he wasn't talking about someone else's baby. He was talking about his own daughter.
But Betsy had been born at a moment in history when a vision of medical treatment for hydrocephalus had begun to develop.
A neurosurgeon at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago "had a vision, had an idea that he could implant a tiny little valve in a newborn baby's brain and drain off the pressure," Capraro said.
"That vision caused many other people to do many other things.
"It caused industrial designers to come up with different designs for valves. It caused plastic experts to come up with a specification for the material to make the plastic so the body would not reject it. It caused them all to work together to create a prototype, and then the government to approve it.
"And families like ours had to approve giving their precious little baby into a trial surgery."
He paused.
"Because of that, Betsy turned 32 last year."
No question. A vision is a powerful thing.
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