Trick
Him
Back.

She never talked to anybody. That was the thing. She would just move around the café, the Unleavened Bread Café on 30th Street in Mapleton-Fall Creek, picking up coffee cups, stone-faced, one tooth announcing itself to the room regardless of what her mouth was doing.

Miss Marie was older than most things. If you asked De'Amon, he would tell you she was probably 350 years old, that she came up during Pangea, that she was here before water. He said this with complete sincerity and a straight face. He was not entirely wrong.

She was, it turned out, a widow. A professional concert pianist. A woman who didn't need to work and chose to serve anyway, taking the bus in, moving quietly through the room, asking nothing of anyone.

Except for when De'Amon and I walked in.

"There he is. The Tricker. Going around the neighborhood with his tricks."

Miss Marie · Unleavened Bread Café · Mapleton-Fall Creek

Every time we walked through that door, Miss Marie's face cracked open. Stone cold all morning. Then De'Amon walks in and she lights up, loud, warm, certain. She'd get a bag of chips. She'd smile. She never explained what she meant. She didn't need to.

Miss Marie understood something that twenty years of community development practice, hundreds of millions in philanthropic capital, and an entire ecosystem of institutions had not yet figured out how to say: the trick is not deception. The trick is revelation.

It is the act of walking into a neighborhood not to fix it, not to serve it, not to measure it, but to ask it what it already knows. De'Amon was the Roving Listener. I was the Illustrator of Gifts. Together we were building something the field didn't have a name for yet. Miss Marie had a name for it. She called it the trick. And she was the first person to tell us we were doing it right.

Unleavened Bread Café · Campaign Season · Special Invite Only

Chelsea Clinton comes to my neighborhood.

Chelsea Clinton, on the trail for her mother, in a small café two blocks from the Lilly Endowment, in Eli Lilly's own neighborhood. Around the table: community leaders, program participants from a nearby recovery organization called Bethel House, and me. I'd known Chelsea before, through our shared connection to Oxford and Oriel College. Now she was here, in my neighborhood, on a campaign stop.

Bethel House served a very specific niche: people returning from prison who had HIV/AIDS and drug addiction. The kind of intersectional, complicated, beautiful humanity that the social service system had spent decades designing programs around without ever quite designing with.

These women talked about their lives. About navigating systems. About the institutional harm embedded in the infrastructure they were required to survive. I could hear it, the weight of being processed rather than seen. And I looked around the room at the social service people and the politicians and the community leaders and it felt very deaf to me. Like nobody was actually listening to what these women were saying about their own lives.

She was not wrong. She was also not right. And that tension, between the bedrock and the people it was built on top of, is the entire argument. I say that as someone who campaigned for her father in 1996. I say it as someone who studied at the same university. I say it as someone who has become more radical the more I have learned the data, not because I've drifted from myself, but because I've become more true to myself.

I need to tell you what 29th Street actually is. Not the framework. Not the dancing. The whole truth of it.

It was a Tuesday. I was in my living room on the 2900 block of Delaware, four blocks from Broadway United Methodist Church, the church where my wife Karen had worked as secretary for sixteen years, the church where De'Amon and I had built everything, attending an Aspen Institute webinar on digital equity. The kind of thing practitioners do. The kind of thing that feels important until your phone lights up.

I closed my laptop. I ran to my car. I called 911 screaming, active shooter, Broadway United Methodist Church, 29th and Broadway. I drove four blocks.

When I got there it was the quietest I have ever heard a city. That silence after a shooting, I know it now, I have been there before, it is like the air takes the trauma out of the environment for a moment. Recording studio quiet. Eerie and absolute. Beautiful blue sky above it. The kind of day that has no business being beautiful.

Karen was hiding in a bathroom tucked deep inside that cavernous Gothic church. Petrified. Silent. She had heard the gunshots and run.

I walked up the front steps, those big beautiful steps, the thick wooden doors, the Gothic entrance, and a police officer blocked me. Sir, you cannot go in. It's not secure. I started arguing. My wife was in there. You do not tell me I cannot go in there.

And as I argued, I looked down. There was a man at my feet. His feet were at my feet, his head away from me, like he was my shadow. He was covered in holes. Both holes and blood, everywhere, on the ground, on the walls. It looked like a horror movie and it was absolutely real. He was moaning and shaking and grunting, sitting up and lying back down, and you could tell he was in agony and you could tell he was at the end.

And then he looked at me.

I don't know what I was saying to the officer anymore. I just know I was looking at this man and he was looking at me. And he froze. And he fell back. And the paramedics lifted him and they left. I was still arguing with the cop. I didn't understand yet what had just happened.

I walked away. I found Karen. I brought her home. And then I understood that the man had died in front of my face. On the steps of my church. On 29th Street.

Gun violence has wrecked my family. Not as a statistic. As a lived reality, repeated, on the streets where I have spent twenty years asking people what they love. My son Max, every McAleavey who ever lived, blue eyes still open and still moving forward, started a chapter of Students Demand Action because of what this violence has done to our family and our neighborhood. He did it two blocks from the Lilly Endowment.

"The miracle on 29th Street is still happening. So is everything else. Both things are true. And the field only has instruments for one of them."

This is the neighborhood I am asking you to fund. Not a neighborhood of problems. A neighborhood of people, carrying grief and gifts simultaneously, who know exactly what they need and have never once been asked to build it themselves.

In 2025, the Trump administration terminated nearly $400 million in AmeriCorps grants overnight. Public Allies Indianapolis, the organization I founded, was defunded. The community agency infrastructure built over decades is dismantled while the institutional reform model continues to receive philanthropic support.

The Zawadi model produced dancing in the streets and $5M+ in documented economic impact across 10 blocks. De'Amon was named one of the eight most influential neighborhood organizers in America by the Kettering Foundation. Not one instrument in the field had any way to measure it. Not one funder has replicated it at scale.

The trick is not over. It just needs to become bilateral.

De'Amon Harges walked into a neighborhood and asked people what they loved. No clipboard. No assessment tool. No eligibility criteria. Just a man asking a question the field didn't know how to ask. What happened next, the connections, the gifts, the dancing, the documented impact, was not a program. It was a methodology. And that methodology needs a permanent home.

The Community Ambassador program must not be cut. The Zawadi model must be funded. The Roving Listener approach must be codified, sustained, and scaled, not by institutions that replace community leadership with professional management, but by community members themselves who own the work and define the outcomes.

"The trick is not deception. The trick is revelation. And it's time to trick him back."

Miss Marie saw it before anyone had a name for it. The women at Bethel House knew it before Chelsea Clinton arrived with a campaign team. The neighbors of Mapleton-Fall Creek lived it before any foundation designed a program for it.

The field has instruments for measuring what institutions build. It is time to build instruments, and fund the people, who measure what communities already are.