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Ronald (Ron) David Pate is a unique voice in the quest for sustainable development and urban planning. His career is characterized by interdisciplinary academic rigor and practical application, particularly in his utilization of narrative processes to facilitate the formation of a learning community where participants come to desire to "get to good together."
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Pate's educational background combines a PhD in Urban Studies and Planning from Portland State University with a Master’s degree in American Studies (University of Alabama), and 39 graduate hours of theology from Regent College Vancouver, BC, and Portland Seminary. His dissertation focused on the transformative outcomes of a narrative process in his case study of "Swamp Gravy"—an ongoing community performance project in Colquitt, Georgia. The project involved local volunteers performing stories from their community, which led to the resurrection of their town--socially, economically and spiritually.
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Ron is an experienced facilitator of narrative processes with groups and organizations, and has been a professor in higher education. His vision is to facilitate a quality of meaningful connection that elevates a learning/visioning community into acts of collaborative action. He has founded and led various initiatives, including a physical medicine rehab clinic during the 90’s. It was there he first discovered how deeply restorative results emerged from a process where client and practitioner became “stories-tellers.”
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Pate's work underscores the potential of “stories-telling” to coproduce social change, build new relationships, and inspire collective vision. He continues to apply this transformational approach through various services and community projects, always aiming to discover what is good from inside interpersonal stories--and community.
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About the book: "Community Found: a process for getting to good together"
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In early 2000, while a PhD student at Portland State University, I read about a small dying town in SW Georgia where a group of diverse volunteers engaged in a narrative process that generated transformational experiences of community. This project that began in 1992 was still going strong. Intrigued by what I read, I engaged in a dissertation case study about the process, the people, and their outcomes. I found that their experiences formed them into a learning community where they created new visions and actions, including organic forms of revitalization and development that had gone on for 15 years.
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These outcomes grew from the soil of new relationships that crossed boundaries of race, class, gender, and age, which also enabled them to create a more diverse, fluid, and emergent heritage. Participants moved beyond mere information about each other, and were 1) reconciling new personal understandings of self and other(s), 2) coproducing visions of what was broadly good; 3) and becoming community of affection where each person genuinely wanted what was good for the other. This stories-telling social innovation flipped the tables of business-as-usual and avoided the collateral damages of development determined by a few at the top.
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This book, Community Found: a process for getting to good together, is the result of two decades of interdisciplinary research on this and other narrative cases, and incorporates perspectives from: rural to urban; amateur to professional; and wealthy to left behind. Inside are stories from people of this once-dying town, along with stories from business, medicine, agriculture, and more. All illustrate a narrative process that renders community found--an earthy spirituality that defamiliarizes, reconciles, reconfigures and elevates the participants. While I believe that finding community is our highest priority, this is not a how-to formula, but a quality of personal engagement that begins with wonder.
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Come inside and see!
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