Change in Kensington requires a change in mindset. We’re proof it’s possible.

June 2020 was a complicated time.

Not only were we in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, but the country was engulfed in a racial reckoning that had been building for years. In Kensington, all of these monumental issues were added to a series of ongoing, intersecting crises.

Strategic disinvestment in the community had led to unemployment, poverty, and the rise of the drug trade and consumption in the area. Deteriorated environments had led to unhealthy and often dangerous public spaces and crumbling buildings. There was a low sense of collective and political social efficacy and an increase in community trauma.

All of these crises had been compounded over the previous years by the failures of a series of imposed strategies to address the impacts of the opioid and unhoused epidemic in Kensington. We had been trapped in a multiyear impasse — not going backward or forward, only sitting in a collective suffering.

Then, in 2020, that suffering grew significantly.

On June 1 of that year, we stood on the 3000 block of Kensington Avenue in front of just another symbol of the extraction of resources from residents of Kensington — a smoldering Rent-A-Center, following a three-alarm blaze that started during a night of looting.

Neither of us can remember our exact thoughts and feelings at that moment. One of us (McKinney) lives 500 feet from the spot captured in a photo and had spent the previous couple of nights watching and listening to the neighborhood burn and explode in response to years of intersecting issues. At that time, we didn’t know each other, but we were standing together that morning in the street, both speaking with Rebecca Fabiano (founder of Fab Youth Philly), trying to understand what was happening socially and culturally, and figuring out what each of us needed to do. We asked each other: “Are you and your folks OK? Is there anything I can do to support you?”

Neither of us can remember our exact thoughts and feelings at that moment.

Eight months later, in early 2021, we met up again on the same block. As we walked around the neighborhood, we discussed how we should move forward together with the resources we both had access to. We started as many in a scarcity mindset do: by pointing out the negative, how collaborations between our organizations hadn’t worked, and generally placing blame on the other.

We eventually were able to agree that however we got to this point, neither of us was happy with the conditions of the community, and change would require not focusing on what others needed to do, but on what we needed to change.

To start, we had to switch from a scarcity mindset (what’s mine is mine) to one of abundance (let’s share resources and work toward solutions). We looked to each organization’s strengths and to what we could agree on, determining that a strategy to address the challenges in Kensington must be comprehensive, community-driven, and trauma-informed, and that solutions would require dismantling what was not working.

We immediately began acting on these agreements.

Now, two and a half years later, after a number of collaborative efforts, what do we think should change for Kensington? We could, as we have in the past, share long lists of ideas, but just as we had committed to on that walk in early 2021, we would ask others to commit to a comprehensive, community-led, trauma-informed planning process for Kensington that focuses on the priorities determined by the community — and work with them to create solutions. Not to rely on the old playbook of outside experts swooping into our community, telling us what we’re doing wrong, then fleeing when their solutions, inevitably, fail.

The recent election cycle is over. The resources from opioid settlement payouts have been deployed. We believe it’s time to embrace the reality that there can be solutions for everyone. There don’t have to be winners and losers.

» READ MORE: In election season, people care about Kensington. Then we become invisible again. | Opinion

We say these things knowing they are possible. Over the last three years working together, we have taken a trauma-informed approach, starting with constantly checking in with each other during and after difficult events in Kensington, be it a murder outside a meeting around a violence intervention program, a car driving through one of our buildings, an overdose, or people venting frustrations in a public meeting and blaming our organizations for failing to adequately address violence, crime, and trash. We check in, support one another, and move from the crisis at hand and back toward comprehensive solutions. Until we have the latter, the former will persist. In the interim, we will keep checking in: “Are you and your folks OK? Is there anything I can do to support you?”

We know it is possible to take a comprehensive, trauma-informed, and community-driven approach to solutions in Kensington because, over the past year, we have worked closely with anyone willing to collaborate to develop a strategy to bring more voices to the table. We have seen affordable housing being built and parks reopened. We have seen the city respond to collaboration and a community-driven plan by investing resources, and we have seen literally hundreds of people participate in a community engagement process that is yielding both priorities and solutions, the first results of which will be released shortly.

All of these things have come to fruition because of a commitment to collaboration and collective power.

We’ve been asked what we would do for Kensington if we were “kings for the day.” For one, we would eliminate kings — and queens — because it is through kings, queens, warlords, and all top-down approaches to creating solutions that we have landed at this moment.

It was through territoriality, competition, and a scarcity mindset that we failed to execute actual solutions and work collaboratively. It is through a mindset of abundance, collaboration, and collective and comprehensive efforts that transformation will happen.

Bill McKinney is the executive director of New Kensington Community Development Corp. Casey O’Donnell is the president and CEO of Impact Services.