Through our work at FCS, we’ve learned valuable lessons that can benefit clients of The Lupton Center – our training and consulting arm. What we offer is the hard-won and valuable lessons from 45 years of learning, succeeding, failing, and discovering. Because we’re practitioners with real, lived experience, we know we can help clients save time, money, heartache, and friction to do healthier work from a healthier place.
One of the core ideas of our work is that every neighborhood and its context is unique. A magic formula for holistic neighborhood development does not exist. But a healthy process does.
One of the core aspects of our process is about embracing tension. Tension is a part of our work. Rather than run from it, we have made friends with tension – realizing that it makes us flexible and attentive.
Here are three healthy tensions we lean into at FCS.
Tension Between People and Place
At The Lupton Center, we practice the ability to both zoom in and zoom out. We are deeply people-centered, but when you’re so focused on the details, you can sometimes miss the complexities of the ecosystem of the place. We work with our clients to foster this same ability – sometimes you need to zoom in to see people, and sometimes you need to zoom out to see place.
Tension Between Flexibility and Strategy
In our work, we need to be both agile and innovative while also being very strategic. There are constant changes in the neighborhoods we serve, and we need to nimbly respond to them to make sure our work is healthy. However, we also need to have long-term, multi-year goals in place.
Tension Between a Serious and Playful Spirit
The issues we face are complicated, hard, and painful. It’s easy to get drawn into the struggle of it all and lose the energy for the work. To combat this tendency, FCS has a culture of playfulness, kindness, hopefulness, fun, and joy – while facing some of the world’s biggest problems. The ability to take the work seriously but not ourselves is one of the creative tensions I hope our clients learn from.
Reach Out For More Support
We love working with organizations seeking to create healthy change and transform neighborhoods and communities. If you’re interested in working with us via our training and consulting arm, reach out for a consultation. We’d love to hear about your goals, mission, and challenges.
It would be our honor to journey with you as you seek to see your own neighbors flourish!
