It doesn’t take great care or a green thumb to grow crabgrass. It’s green, it’s free and it will hold your topsoil. If you want more, it’s going to take more.
And so it is with all living things—including culture.

What grows from a population of people or even micro-organisms is a ‘culture’ (i.e. the growth on an agar plate). The living nature of culture suggests what kinds of interventions and initiatives might prove useful to grow the kind of culture one would want—measures that nourish, inspire, and enliven serve best.

Peace Learning Center regularly presents a workshop, “Creating a Culture of Peace” and participants learn that initiating new behaviors is difficult. Change is a challenge; we are awkward and uncertain at first. Still, each effort to enhance common ground has impact and influences the larger reality. Culture grows one cell at a time. Patience is needed, skills must be built, but good intention often makes up for poor execution.

We all constantly contribute to culture. When we cultivate humanity in our homes, businesses, neighborhoods, schools, and churches, we create a culture that preserves and prospers all. Companies learn how honoring people, planet, and profit enhance one another. Things like integrity, effort, and mutual respect require cultivation. Otherwise, well—crabgrass.

“No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.”

—James A. Baldwin