Recently, I read about a growing shortage of family doctors in this country. The day-to-day realities facing these physicians have all but erased the satisfactions that led them to choose their careers, said the article in U.S. News and World Report. To earn a good living, the average practitioner must keep a few thousand patients on his or her rolls and conclude each office visit in approximately seventeen minutes.
The doctors in the article said that they had chosen primary care because they prized the opportunity to minister to each family not only with their medical knowledge, but with the added expertise that comes from familiarity. Now, they could barely get to know the people who sought their help. During an appointment they might gather sufficient information to diagnose the problem at hand, but they seldom had time for anything else. They had little chance to discuss preventative measures-a healthy diet, appropriate exercise, and regular screenings for skin cancer-let alone probe for signs of addiction or domestic violence. These important conversations couldn't be crammed into an efficient, cost-effective time slot.
The physicians lacked the time to build trusting relationships with their patients and knew that this loss weakened their ability to offer quality treatment. One said that the emotional payoffs of his job had been replaced by "a creeping sense of burnout."
The doctors' laments struck me because for some time now I have been immersed in learning about burnout as it affects another group of people: those who work in poor and low-income communities for social, economic, and environmental justice. They have devoted their working lives to linking the poor and disenfranchised to the rights guaranteed by our Constitution. To do this they must first understand the needs, concerns, and cultural perspectives of the people whom they want to assist. Only then can they begin to teach individuals to become advocates for themselves and their communities. Like family doctors, the men and women who choose a career in this field must invest in building relationships if they are to be effective. Their work is time-consuming and arduous, and many organizers and activists also find themselves on the verge of burnout.
Since 1990, for two months in the summer and again in the fall, the guesthouse of our Montana home has sheltered some of these organizers and activists. More than four hundred individuals of many ethnicities and a wide range of ages have come from all over the United States to take part in the Windcall Resident Program.
My husband, Albert, and I began the project as an experimental response to the large number of leaders in the social change field who, physically and emotionally exhausted from their work, were leaving their jobs prematurely. We were concerned about the loss of their experience and wisdom to the organizations they led and to the cause of social change in general. Since we greatly valued these men and women and the crucial role they played in our society, we hoped to preempt their costly exodus by providing what for them was the rarest of commodities-significant time away from responsibilities and expectations in a beautiful natural environment. We wanted to help them rest and renew their physical and emotional energies before burnout could foreshorten their valuable contributions.
Changing Course tells the story of this sixteen-year project-an adventure that greatly exceeded our original expectations and surprised us with its teachings. As I began this book my objective was to call greater attention to these amazing men and women. Albert and I wanted others to better understand the immense contribution they make to our country. These organizers and activists are committed to making democracy work for all of us-even those who live below the radar of our political leaders' concern. They have long been and will always be our heroes.
As I wrote, though, my goals for the book broadened. In the process of gathering, reflecting on, and recording their story, I began to grasp the motivation and reward that drew this marvelously diverse group of people to work in the social change field. I also saw the personal price they had to pay to pursue their objectives in today's society.
The people you will meet on these pages have made a strong personal commitment to a life's work that is rooted in their deepest moral values. They respect and come to the aid of those left behind by our society. They honor the larger human relationship that connects us to one another. In return, they find greater meaning in their own lives. But our society does not give them the support and recognition they deserve.
In the United States we shower our athletes, film stars, and successful business leaders with ongoing press coverage, adoration, and enormous fortune. Yet we often fail to appreciate those others in our country who express a very different set of values-who heal, teach, and empower people to prosper. We fail to understand the nature of this kind of effort and what sustains it. It is no wonder that burnout is an ongoing problem in their ranks. Over time the residents have provided us with vital data about the causes and course of this destructive process and directed us, as well, toward effective measures of intervention. At Windcall, we gradually developed a successful model for nurturing and restoring those who work for positive social change. Our experience may offer equally useful information for people in other fields who work from similar values.
We all know and are touched by individuals in our cities and towns who are committed to improving the lives of their fellow human beings. We have moments when we do the same thing. We sit with a friend as he undergoes his first chemotherapy session. We take dinner to exhausted strangers who have spent all day moving in across the street. Each of us experiences moments of recognizing and acting from our shared humanity. At some deep level, we know that response lies at the heart of what our lives are all about. Increasingly, I thought about how many of the residents' discoveries held meaning for us all. These are troubled times and it is difficult to keep our balance in the face of so much uncertainty and turmoil. In Changing Course the residents give moving and candid expression to what can renew the human spirit.
I struggled for almost six months thinking about the best way to tell this story. Our experiment was so full of discovery for so many and yet it was essentially very intimate. Finally I decided to set the reader down at Windcall and let you learn as we all did. I wanted you to see the land because it was such a pervasive force in the process of renewal. I wanted you to hear the residents' voices in prose and poetry as they wrote about their new experiences and regathered forgotten parts of themselves. And I wanted you to come along with my husband and me as one of the richest adventures of our lives unfolded.
Susan Wells
