Newsletter May 2021

A few months ago, as part of the curriculum of the Pomona Community Foundation’s “Pomona Leadership Network,” I had the privilege of hearing Mr. Ed Tessier deliver a three-hour history of Pomona. Ed is a PCF Board member whose family has lived in the community for several generations. He characterized his presentation as a “Peoples’ History” of the Pomona Valley.

Ed's narrative started thousands of years ago with the hundreds of indigenous tribes who had flourished for millennia in California. He gave a painful account of how they had nearly been wiped out, and told stories of the series of people groups that came and squeezed aside their predecessors (often with violence or chicanery), only to be squeezed in turn by successive waves of new immigrants. These successive waves have left bitter memories that continue to live in the community to this day. Each group left its unique imprint on Pomona.

Pomona’s status as a regional force began to decline in the '60s. The routing of the 10 Freeway massively disrupted the city’s downtown area. The departure of major industries like General Dynamics impacted the tax base and viability of downtown. Whites fled as Black families emigrated from South LA in the wake of the Watts Revolt. These factors created a turning point, though certainly not the end of social upheaval and demographic change. Lapses of civic leadership at key points contributed significantly as well.

All these factors made their contributions to what we see today: A city hobbled by its history, burdened with poverty, and often neglected by absentee landlords. What was once regarded as a model city, even called “the Western Eden,” is now eclipsed by neighbors that seem to have only surged and prospered. Although the same population as Pomona, the city of Ontario has a budget four times larger.

Possible Transformation

But Pomona is also a city with unique gifts: Many of these gifts are legacies of its unique history and mix of cultures, people groups, and shared struggles. It has a spirit, evident in its large coterie of volunteer associations. These include advocacy groups, tutoring services, service clubs, and social-change organizations and networks. Still other gifts may await recognition.

Today Pomona seems to be on the cusp of transformation. It recently adopted a Charter of Compassion, declaring to itself and to the world that it is committed to caring for the least fortunate of its residents. The city has taken great strides in providing services and shelter, including permanent housing, to the homeless population. It has committed to meeting the challenge of a gaping housing shortage, and means to do so without displacing people. That is, it intends to retain and lift up its marginalized residents, and not let them be squeezed out by yet another wave of wealthier arrivistes.

To meet its challenges, the city will necessarily have to draw on the assets of each of its constituent peoples and economic groups—the Tongva/Kizh, Latinx, Anglos, African Americans, Asians certainly; but also the wealthy landlords and the unsheltered; the young and the old; men and women; professionals and unskilled day laborers; established and the newly-arrived; institutions, churches, business owners; nonprofits, agencies and volunteer associations—all have a part to play. The key to revitalizing the city of Pomona will be in collaborations and collective action.

I recently heard a speaker who had built a coalition of affordable housing advocates in San Francisco. She said she found that “Collaboration can only happen at the speed of trust.” She added that she had found that sometimes, to draw one group into a partnership, it was necessary to exclude others. I’ve seen examples of this, so I got her point. Still, if it will take the whole community to build a new community, how can we avoid or exclude those whose participation is critical? How can the community’s disparate elements come to trust one another?

Rebuilding Trust

Painful histories, harbored grievances, and simmering mistrust burden a community and keep it from fulfilling its potential. Historical wounds mire us in the past and blind us to new possibilities in the present. Historian Francis Fukuyama has noted, "Widespread distrust in a society imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic activity—a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay." For Pomona, mistrust is a tax it simply cannot afford.

In my work with troubled communities, I found that sometimes trust between groups can be restored by truth-telling: confession, repentance, and burden-sharing. Even deeply fractured communities, long divided into factions, can find ways to transform their conflicts from something that undermines the community into something that builds it up. They can find ways to transform conflict into creative renewal and even redemption. Fractures become hip new fusions.

The path to this form of healing lies through the sharing of histories: people telling their stories of the struggles that gave birth to or shaped their group’s identity. There is something about sitting together, with a commitment to listen with respect and share one another’s histories, that can inspire mutual caring and concern. Hearing about each other’s values and discovering commonalities can enable people to cross a threshold of trust and get to work on shared problems. This kind of sharing also allows for the emergence of new possibilities. It opens a higher dimension, a three-dimensional volume of collaboration that replaces what was once a two-dimensional plane of win/lose, zero-sum battles.

The first step is establishing trust.

Michael Witmer
Community Collaboration Leader