In my work as an organizational development consultant, I spend lots of time studying new models of organizational structure; new ways to rejuvenate bureaucracies; new methods to increase productivity, new approaches to improve morale.

I’ve spent years working with organizations and groups who are trying to create a healthy work climate or to re-create their corporate or organizational culture. From the golden age of new organizational and management models, I’m sure many of you may remember the One Minute Manager; or Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; and on and on…

I’ve been a cog in many corporate cultures myself, where every year or so, the human resources department latches on to the latest management fad making the rounds of corporate America. So I’ve been One Minute Managed, where all my supervisors wore tennis shoes to work so they could walk around all day making sure none of us could ever get any work done; I’ve tried the seven effective habits of highly effective people and I’m still trying to implement the first effective habit. I‘ve forgotten what the other six are; I’m up to speed on Baldrige Quality Principles. I’ve been in Quality Circles…after a while, you become addicted to “New” and “Improved” management methods and forget why you’re trying these new methods to begin with…and after awhile, it seems, we go back to where we were before: we suffer from uninspiring leadership, we are cubicled with unproductive co-workers, and we spend unhealthy amounts of time daydreaming about the weekend instead of making work re-create us, re-energize us, re-form us.

But there are still a number of models that, when healthy and well implemented, have proven superior to anything the post-industrial world has yet come up with.

For me, the strongest organizational model ever invented is the healthy family, or even the semi-healthy family.

I want to talk a little about families, and especially my own family, in hopes that all of us can draw some positive ideas and some droplets of hope for the work we are engaged in: saving, supporting, managing, and praying for families to function and to function well.

I was one of 11 children born to Anna Kavanaugh and Benjamín Sandoval in northern New Mexico.

We were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor.

We were rich, but we didn’t know we were rich.

Because there were so many of us, we didn’t get out much. My Dad earned a small salary working for the government, so all of us had to pitch in at an early age to make ends meet.

For example, my brother Eugenio was able to save enough money working at a local general store to buy a really neat Schwinn bicycle. As soon as he bought it, my brothers José and Alberto and I started eyeing that bicycle with longing. We knew that some day, in a few years, down the road, maybe, hopefully, that bike would be passed down among the brothers and that each of us would proudly own the green Schwinn. And so it came to pass. After Eugenio graduated from high school, the bike went to José, who added a padded coaster to the bike and repainted it. A few years later it was mine. And finally, Alberto became the proud owner of the Schwinn. That bike lasted 15 years and served four Sandoval brothers really well.

But what made our lives magical was my Dad’s 1949 GMC ¾ ton truck with an extra long bed. In that truck, we went on our own magical carpet rides.

Almost every fall, for example, we’d all pile into the back of the truck and head for either the Jemez Mountains or the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in search of piñon. My Mom would pack a homemade lunch and we’d take our tarp along as well.

Once in good piñon picking country, we were really organized to pick piñon. My older brothers would help us climb into the trees, where we would shake the upper branches as hard as we could so that piñon cones would fall onto the tarp. There, my older brothers and sisters would gather the nuts into 100 pound floor sacks.

We were so good at picking piñon, it was customary for us to gather about 400 pounds a season. And the great thing about it was, we got to eat all the nuts! All winter long, we’d sit around the fogón cracking piñon and reaping the fruits of our labor.

The greatest thing about all that was we never considered it work. For us, it was a family outing. The fact we had to work to pick piñon was just an afterthought. What we valued was being together.

Also in the fall, the GMC would take us to numerous private orchards up and down the Rio Grande. There, we would spend days picking ripe fruits like peaches, cherries, apricots and apples from orchards owned by neighbors and friends who couldn’t afford to pay anyone to pick the fruit, and who didn’t have any children like us—that is, really organized chamacos.

We split whatever fruits we picked fifty-fifty, and then we’d all help my Mom can a huge quantity of fresh fruits. So all winter, we had canned peaches, apple butter, canned pears, dried apples. It was pretty tough work, but all I can remember of those days were the fruit fights we’d have at the end of the day, the laughter as we got home a sticky mess, and all the apple butter we had to eat.

My family energized me. I felt I belonged to a powerful unit that protected me, taught me, disciplined me. My older brothers and sisters set high standards for all of us out in the community. They were A students, so all my teachers expected the same of me. They were great kids, so all my teachers expected the same of me. And so that’s the way I behaved. It was hard for me to go wrong. And every single time I did something juvenile, my Mom had already heard about it before I even got home and before I could make up some great story—some might call it a lie—about what I had done.

Our community was equally engaged. And here I want to mention just one of many examples.

Every Spring—early March I believe—our community had to clean the acequia madre. The acequia madre is the main irrigation canal that provides water for everyone’s individual plot of land. On our plot we planted vegetables, corn, beans, alfalfa, chile. We depended on those plots to help complete our diets. You may have guessed there were no Wal-Marts in my village at the time.

Everybody was committed to cleaning the acequia madre—literally translated “the mother canal”. Without the acequia madre clean and functioning, nobody got beans or chile. There was strong social pressure to ensure everyone put their backs into opening the acequia madre. Once that was done, it was back to good old capitalism—what you did with your plot of land was your own business. If someone was lazy and let the weeds take over their plot, well, let them eat weeds, we’d say. But on the days we cleaned the acequia madre, there were no lazy people in our village. Not one. Ever.

I wish I could say that everyone lived happily ever after. We didn’t. We don’t. If I seemed nostalgic and that what I spoke about here is so outdated and so passé, I plead guilty.

In fact, the old order of my childhood and of my community in the Española Valley has given way to a bitter reality. Rio Arriba County has one of the highest per capita heroin addiction rates in the country.

And yet…and yet…

If we are to create a society here in New Mexico that treats children and youth with the love, the affection, the joy and the respect they deserve, we have to have a model we can use to achieve that reality.

What I’m trying to say is the past can serve the future. We must place our energies into re-creating healthy families. We need to re-seed core values, not core programs, back into our communities.

We need family units that can nurture, not neuter, our young.

How we create those healthy families I don’t even pretend to know.

What I do believe is that in New Mexico we have—in our rural cultures, in our Hispano culture, in our Native American cultures, strong family and community models that we’ve shelved in favor of Wal-Mart models designed in New York or Peoria, and with little resonance here in our corner of the world.

I’m afraid we’ve ignored our traditional cultures in favor of the treatment model of the month.

It is my sense that it’s way past time we seek out our ancianos, our elders, our traditional lifeways, and bring them back into the circle of healing, bring them back into our daily lives.

Blessings.