Case Study #3
The Fledge: Investing in Self-Actualization

Core Problem #2: Corrupt individuals that are supported, enabled, protected, or hidden by an institutional apparatus can cause significant damage by perpetuating these cycles. These individuals are often difficult to hold accountable and remove. These same institutions do little to acknowledge and support the people, spaces, systems and structures left picking up the pieces. 

Funding Problem: Sustainable community centers call for long-term economic development models that require significant capital investment and a long runway for return. There are too few funding organizations who are structured to fund these efforts, especially in degrading communities where funding is needed the most. Those that exist, including major American universities with massive dowries, can do more to acknowledge and fund nearby community centers that deal with the consequences caused by their negligence and degradation, past and present.

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“There’s a lot of people who would no way in Hell do my day to day,” says Jerry Norris, the founder of the Fledge, a radically inclusive social organization and multifaceted community center operating out of a former church in Lansing, Michigan. Like other cities in the state, such as Detroit, Kalamazoo, Flint, Benton Harbor, and Muskegon Heights, Lansing often finds itself in listicles chronicling some of the most dangerous cities in America. Michigan, of course, has long watched many of the industries that supported or even built their economy shrink or vanish, leaving many families behind, pollution in the lakes, and various ghost structures in the cities.

Like the previous case studies emerging out of Radiical Systems, it’s important to understand that highlighting a city’s more beleaguered elements or populace does not negate the healthy, happy or positive data nodes, but rather emphasizes the humans and systems supporting the marginalized, while pointing out failed practices, policies and entrenched corruption. Like a dermatologist scanning seemingly immaculate skin, the smallest detail may engender concern.

Changemakers like Jerry Norris are ferociously optimistic and usually obsessive to a degree when it comes to helping the vulnerable in their community due to and often despite some core personal wound or compounded wounds, healed over enough to become scar-tissue armor for an indomitable spirit. Jerry’s conjoined impetus, intention and engine, combined with a potent professional skill-set, including a savant-level mathematical mind housed in a formerly elite D-1 wrestler’s body, together infuse and reverberate out through all layers of his neighborhood, city, and state, disruptively revealing points of rot and sparks of beauty throughout the entire apparatus, all challenged with righteous indignation and a borderline manic level of empathy.

Community centers like the Fledge don’t just support people negatively affected by toxified or failing systems or the pollutants therein, they serve as a hub and forum to discuss and critique them. The Fledge is a space where neighbors can organize and gather in order to improve or fix these systems, safely, outside of the oft-complicit institutional complex, whether that be an actual dogmatic religious structure, a corporation with a closed HR culture, a rigidly partisan news outlet of any size, or a university covering its tracks. Formal structures, such as city council or even local PTA forums can be manipulated by proctors or those in charge as a means to alienate or outright silence citizens coming forward with valid grievances, while using state resources (police and security hired by the state or entity) to intimidate and censor. Not only this, in 2024, American politicians at all levels rarely speak to journalists outside of their own party silo, and if they do, it’s usually an exercise in gaslighting and other bad faith tactics.

79 OTSEGO ST, Brooklyn, NY, United States