Cultivating Community: De'Amon Harges on Gifts, Good Neighbors, and The Learning Tree
Show Notes: To Be and Do Podcast
Host: Philip Amerson
Guest: De'Amon Harges
Welcome back to the To Be and Do podcast, where community, creativity, and connection are at the heart of each conversation. In this episode, Philip Amerson catches up with De'Amon Harges—the “original roving listener”—for a candid discussion about his family history, the creation and impact of the Learning Tree, and the ongoing journey to cultivate communities built on gifts, dignity, and abundance.
Three Takeaways from this Episode:
1. The Power of Story in Community Formation
De'Amon Harges traces his roots back through stories shared by his grandparents, who escaped the South’s brutality but faced fresh challenges in the North. His grandfather’s tradition of planting a tree at each child’s birth became a neighborhood gathering spot—a symbol for honoring everyone’s gifts. For De'Amon Harges, learning and retelling these stories shaped his understanding of how communities are formed: around dignity, shared experience, and the belief that “no gift goes unused here.”
2. Shifting Philanthropy: From Needs to Gifts
The Learning Tree, founded by De'Amon Harges and his neighbors, challenges traditional philanthropy. Instead of focusing on deficits and needs, they deliberately seek out gifts, talents, and passions in the community. Grants aren’t distributed through proposals but by finding people already doing valuable work, with requirements that initiatives are collaborative and that failure is allowed and even welcomed as part of the creative process. This model brings resources directly to those who need them and recognizes community members as “genuine philanthropists.”
3. Becoming Good Neighbors—Inside and Outside Institutions
Philip Amerson and De'Amon Harges reflect on what it means for institutions—especially churches—to be good neighbors. At Broadway Methodist in Indianapolis, De'Amon Harges worked with leadership to flip the narrative from charity to asset-based community development. The Learning Tree now consults with organizations, helping them invest in and amplify the gifts present in their neighborhoods.
Final Thoughts:
This episode is a profound reminder that communities thrive when the gifts of every member are seen, valued, and put to use. Instead of perpetuating cycles where only those at the top receive resources, De'Amon Harges and his collaborators are building systems that spread abundance, honor histories, and encourage imaginative risk-taking.
Tune in for more conversations on how to build communities where everyone is needed—and every gift is sacred.
Transcript
Greetings, everyone. We're back with De'Amon Harges on the To Be and Do podcast. We're talking about, well, my friend, the genuine article roving listener, the original roving listener, the man who continues to teach so many of us so many lessons. And diamond, in our first broadcast, in our first podcast, we talked a lot about philosophy and the importance of social banking and imagination being a currency. But we didn't talk a lot about your history or about Broadway church. And maybe you could tie those two together. Tell me, for instance, how the learning tree got its name and how you were connected with Broadway.
De'Amon Harges [:Okay, well, we're gonna. We can start out by saying a thousand years ago we were slaves. Anyway, so what I'm saying is partly, I think it is important to wanted a practice that I learned along the way is the importance of learning people's birth story. That's which is our formation space. And so for me, I joked and said it's the long story. But my. I'm going to start with my grandparents. I can go a little bit further.
De'Amon Harges [:My mother's parents and my dad's parents escaped the brutality of the south and ended up in the brutality of the north in South India. And I like to say this is that during the time they move, there was a place they call Beck's Lake. It was the swamp and it was where the Kankakee river ended. And so they lived in a swamp. And you know, I hear people say drain the swamp, but the swamp is. But God made the swamp, so that meant it was good. But in that same community, it's across the Linden Avenue is where the hospital I was born in would dump his biohazard. And adjacent to that was the city dump.
De'Amon Harges [:And I noticed it is. It is recorded to be true, but I used to hear my uncles as they used to go pick up the. There was a man that lived right next to the lake in the Shia, and he was collecting metal. He would pay them a nickel to go bring a bag of bag of metal and they would walk over the discarded needles. The biohazard. Needless to say that the city of South Bend didn't treat those black folks as if they were sacred. But the story that I really come to hold on to is my granddad was an artist, a quartet singer, and he, he was a tree planter. And when my mother was born, he planted a tree.
De'Amon Harges [:And he's kind of OCD was one of his things. He also remade and repurposed discarded materials. So that tree became famous. And they called him Uncle Buck. Now, he couldn't keep a job down, so this was his work. And my grandmother, she worked at Notre Dame, so she was like the breadwinner in the family. But those projects were interesting because they looked at my grandfather as somebody, as a teacher, even though he didn't graduate. I mean, he didn't even get out of eighth grade, but he was avid reader.
De'Amon Harges [:But he. He really loved the Bible. And one of his favorite gospel text is John 10:10. So my grandfather was known to help people out. Kind of the neighborhood counselor. He wasn't much for church, but he was about the gospel. And they were like, but, yeah, we gonna gather around the tree that he had planted. Now, my mother, them, they were teenagers at the time, and so they were staying on the peripheral of these elders discussing stuff.
De'Amon Harges [:My after. At the end of that, my grandfather would quote John 10:10, and then he would say, no gift goes on. Wait unused here. Now, the city of South Ben didn't treat them as sacred, but those neighbors there, they were a community center. They were the houses. It wasn't just my grandparents. It was all of those folks knew that they were needed. So that's the formation of that story.
De'Amon Harges [:Now, I've heard that story like least twice a month for all my life. And it didn't realize that story, how much value that story until I in 1999, when I met Mike Mappin, he was just coming off sabbatical. I'm also really a skeptical of pastors. The first thing that happens is they usually take you to the altar, call right away. They assume, you know, anyway, that's just how.
Philip Amerson [:Yeah.
De'Amon Harges [:So I didn't want to really meet Mike. But then when I met Mike, two magical things happened. I'm like, this guy can't be a pastor.
Philip Amerson [:So he was a pastor at Broadway Church in Indianapolis. Broadway Methodist.
De'Amon Harges [:No, he. This was what he was at Broadway Christian.
Philip Amerson [:Oh, in South Bend. That's right.
De'Amon Harges [:Might love Broadways. Anyway. And that's when I got to learn about you. But the magical thing that Mike did with me is affirmed. He asked me first, tell me your story. I want to hear it.
Philip Amerson [:Yeah.
De'Amon Harges [:And it took several conversations. Man. He affirmed the story. And he was like, man, this is beautiful. And this is kind of me beginning of my, like, artistic space, you know, Join. Yeah. So that's kind of where me and Mike start being kids on the playground together. And I think the biggest thing we shared is what does it mean to cultivate the beloved community? The community that everybody's gift is utilized and seen.
De'Amon Harges [:And so later on I end up we lost a grant. I moved to Chicago, started teaching me and my wife, we had kids. Then we moved to Indianapolis. I always wanted to go back and work with Mike and me and Mike still communicated. We hung out, he'd come see me. Well, I said, mike, I'm moving to Indianapolis. I know that's far from South Da. And he says, oh, I'm actually in Indianapolis.
De'Amon Harges [:I mean I'm back at Broadway for my second stint. But now he's a senior pastor. And the faith thing that happened really the union rep for the railroad for Amtrak lived in the neighborhood where Broadway was and that's where she suggested we lived. I'm a stay at home dad with my one year old daughter. I had a ritual with Mike in South Bend on Mondays. I would come sit with him in his study and telling stories and as. And I would tell him stories in Indianapolis about people I met in the neighborhood. And so a whole nother thing that happened through some at Broadway United Methodist in Indianapolis.
De'Amon Harges [:We were exploring what it means to be a good neighbor as a church. You know, before I feel like we had battled between being a good neighbors, meaning that we help folks with resources and stuff they don't have. And now we're saying what does it mean to see the gifts of folks? So it through that discernment, one of our members were as Sherry Johnson was working for the Community Development Corporation. And you know, they wanted to partner with Broadway so it would match resources. You know, Mike says they just needed money. But one of the most brilliant moves I've seen was that they. Mike agreed to go with them. But he did two things.
De'Amon Harges [:He said, we won't do any a strategic plan based on needs. We're going to do something based on gifts and talents and we get to hire the person. And what was more important, he said, also I get to supervise that person. Now, Mike ain't the greatest supervisor. I was never supervised by Mike Mather, which was so genius. Mike Mather himself is unsupervisable. So he saw that. But then he also came back to me.
De'Amon Harges [:It's like, how do you. How would you like to get paid for what you already do? And I said, what is that? He said, I want you to continue finding gift talents, dreams and passions of everybody in the life of that community. Find a place for the gifts to be seen in ways that cultivate community, economy and mutual delight. And I was like, dang, here we go. And so the name came up because it was a joke. My title in South Bend was the Rogan artist. You couldn't use the original name, the animators of the Human Spirit, because it was confusing to the funders. And so me and Mike looked at each other.
De'Amon Harges [:All right, how about the Rogan listener? So that's how that started. After some years of learning and success and learning about what does it take that a church can't do this alone? I wonder what it would be like to do this with my neighbors, with the same practices and infrastructure. And we did. There was a Presbyterian pastor and a few of my neighbors. January Wild Style, January York, and Amanda, and then Fernando Rodriguez, who was kind of with us on. Along the way. And the idea was to create a company that my neighbors used other. Their other currencies to cultivate community, their expertise, their gifts.
De'Amon Harges [:And so they didn't have to put in money, and I would give them contracts, but in return, they would have to put 20% into a pot that we could make our own grants to people already doing the work.
Philip Amerson [:Nice.
De'Amon Harges [:And they had to continue and walk the neighborhood with me. And we didn't have a name for it. I had, because of work at Broadway, the connection with Mike and these other connections that were friendships that were developed. I asked him, can I bring my neighbors along on my work, but don't hire me? So anyway, so that's there. And then we're sitting on the porch one time, and I'm struggling to figure out what we name this. And Fernando says to me, man, you tell this story about your granddad all the time. Let's call it the Learning Tree. And so that's how we got our names.
De'Amon Harges [:And kind of our mission is to figure out how to seek goodness in the world and how do we help institutions become good neighbors. So we're actually a consultant company that works with institutions to become good neighbors. But really what we like to do is take the money and spread it out into people who need it.
Philip Amerson [:To help institutions become good neighbors. You've mentioned John 10:10. I think I'm right. That's where Jesus says, the thief comes to rob and to steal. But I have come to give you life and to give it to you in the fullest way, in abundance, to give you life abundantly. Wow.
De'Amon Harges [:That's what Granddad's quote was that he quoted. And you know who was the thieves in the time I was growing up? Saint Memorial Hospital, the city of South Bend. That's what Jesus. They was talking about in that scripture when they said thieves.
Philip Amerson [:So we're living in a time when the poor, the thief is, well, where does the thief not exist?
De'Amon Harges [:That's the truth.
Philip Amerson [:Part of what. Part of what you're. Part of what you're sharing. The piece that I skipped over too quickly is you took 20% and set it aside to spread it in the community.
De'Amon Harges [:Yeah.
Philip Amerson [:How'd you do that with. With grants or just with. You saw opportunities, you saw initiative, you saw imagination. How was that distributed?
De'Amon Harges [:Well, a couple of things is that we had been through grant processes because we wanted to support stuff, and we realized that grant making isn't philanthropy. Total different thing. Right. And we knew this because people would tell us that our. The foundations would tell. Our response would be, our project budget is too big for our operation budget. And it didn't. We cried when we got that response because we thought we were doing social good.
De'Amon Harges [:Doesn't it mean that's how it's supposed to be? Anyway, so we. We started to think about how do we got to go look for what we're hoping to see. First of all, that was the. That was the rule my team had to do, so they needed to be able to do the practice. Second, that meant we didn't do RFPs, request for proposals. Like, because people was gonna tell us what they thought we wanted to hear. You know, that's the game they get played. But we wanted to find the people doing the work already.
De'Amon Harges [:2. We would pop up with them and do a few things, because when money and we. First of all, we make it. We exaggerated. We never gave more than 2400 bucks. The average grant was about 3 to 500. Yeah. But when you think about, like, what people do, the people we would pick was philanthropic to a fault.
De'Amon Harges [:They would spend their own money. They didn't get seen as philanthropists. And so we would do that. And they were skeptical. The big check there, and they say, what's the catch? And the rule is there are three rules. You can't do what you do alone. That was something I got from Broadway and this ecosystem. You can't do anything obscene or illegal.
De'Amon Harges [:This is a MIC thing. But we'll stretch legality because slavery was once legal. The hoodlum priests. Mike Mather. Thank you. And then as residents, you have to fail three times. So you can't. You can't do what you do by yourself.
De'Amon Harges [:So you have to have three or more people. You can't do anything obscene or illegal. But we'll stretch on the legality. And then you have to fail at least three times, because my neighbors, black people, poor people, people with disability, are penalized for failure. And we learned that and we wanted. Nobody failed if they used imagination and they said, come back and tell us. So those were. That's what we did.
De'Amon Harges [:We funded a lot of stuff, you know, and the other reason we did that, we wanted to make sure when money came into our neighborhood, it came with a. With a nurse or steward, as if we needed bibs with money. Like. Like we didn't know, like, how to handle money. And so we wanted to open up. We wanted. One of our rules is money that must flow to the hands of people who need it.
Philip Amerson [:Wow. Well, you have given us enough to think about for the rest of our lifetime. And I want to let the listeners of this podcast know that we're going to talk again one day soon, and we're going to add the hoodlum priest Michael Mather to the conversation. As diamond and I know, moving toward building off of the gifts, the assets of people of the genuine articles is a difficult thing to do in a world that's constructed so that most of the money goes to pay the salaries of people at the top and to really get to a place where what you say they were the real philanthropists? They were the genuine philanthropists. They're already investing themselves in the project. We're going to pick up on this in one of the next episodes. Right now, I know diamond has to head off to another responsibility. Man, you travel all over the world.
De'Amon Harges [:Yeah.
Philip Amerson [:You're a gift to so many and you've been a gift to us today. Thank you, De'Amon Harges, for being a part of the To Be and Do podcast. This is Phil Amerson, with great gratitude for the opportunity to speak with my friend De'Amon, and we'll do it again soon.
De'Amon Harges [:Thank you, Phil.
Philip Amerson [:God bless.
