What better way to wrap up a week of activities designed to help us reach our full potential than with a forward-thinking look at the institutions we can build and the legacies we can leave?

William Holmes facilitated this last session of Think Outside the Cell Week and used a quote from former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver--"You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem"--to sum up the session's theme. In other words, you can make a positive contribution, or a negative one.

He framed the discussion this way: Building institutions boils down to investing in people. Leaving a legacy is paying it forward.

William said that social roles lead to social functioning, which leads to social norms. Norms lead to institutions. To define and clarify institutions, he showed pictures of a courthouse and the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. He explained that the justices were an institution and that the physical building was not, since institutions have roles, functions and norms, practices, customs, rules and regulations. If you do away with the courthouse, the institution remains. And if all of the justices resigned, there would still be the isntitution of the judiciary. People are replaceable, but systems and policies endure.

William distributed handouts that listed such institutions as kwanzaa, white supremacy and the National Action Network, and asked the men to write down what they considered to be the legacies of these institutions. That led to a discussion of the kinds of institutions the men would build or contribute to, and the legacies they would leave behind.

William brought home the quote from Eldridge Cleaver with powerful statistics that showed that gang members, by killing other young black men in numbers that surpassed the number of blacks killed by the Ku Klux Klan, were actually contributing to the institution of white supremacy.

I ended the last session by thanking the participants and telling them that they should consider Think Outside the Cell Week as an initial step in investing in themselves and, by extension, in thier families and communities. I told them that Think Outside the Cell Week is not to be a one-week exercise but an ongoing practice.
I let them know that the facilitators and I looked forward to following the progress we were certain they would make.