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Urban renewal, mental edge
How a self-improvement course with a controversial past is helping transform Highland Park.

by Desiree Cooper

2/11/98

Imagine an urban center featuring a spanking new, $45 million shopping mall drawing retail-starved shoppers from miles around. The shopping district is surrounded by upscale housing, and its main artery is clogged with commuters who have returned to the city for its convenient location and friendly, safe neighborhoods.

That, says Highland Park Mayor Linsey Porter, is what his city will be like in just three years.

It's a vision hardly justified by Highland Park's recent past. When Porter took office in 1992, things immediately went from bad to worse. Chrysler announced that it was moving its world headquarters to Auburn Hills, leaving an $8 million hole in the city's $16 million annual budget.

"I still have the newspaper articles where they said that Chrysler leaving rang the death knell for the city of Highland Park," says Porter.

Last summer, Highland Park got another kick in the gut when a vicious tornado flattened much of the city.

"We didn't have any money for emergency services," says the mayor. "We didn't have the resources to remove and replant the beautiful trees that were lost. Lines were down and city departments couldn't communicate with each other or the citizens." But not every problem, says the mayor, needed to be solved with money.

"There was something we could change for free: our mind-set," says the native-born mayor. "We had to reinstill confidence that this community was as viable as any other suburban community."

It's a winning attitude that's now bearing fruit. "I heard that recently the board of Detroit Renaissance was talking about what's happening here in Highland Park," says Porter. "There's a positive feeling coming out of this community, and people are starting to notice that we've got something special."

What he has that's special, says Porter, is a powerful mental toolbox developed by Landmark Education Corporation, a worldwide company with a controversial past that's training people on "what it means to be a human being."

Porter, who took the Landmark's Forum in 1991, says he has been able to accomplish a miracle in Highland Park because he and his staff all speak the language of possibility. Of his 25-member staff, 17 have taken the Forum on their own. Of five City Council members, three have taken the Forum. So have Highland Park's police chief, the acting director of the recreation department, the director of personnel/human resources and several mayoral appointees.

"What that means is that I have a solution-oriented government instead of a criticism-oriented government," says Porter, adding quickly that it doesn't mean that he's surrounded by a group of "yes-men."

"If you're constantly working on solutions, even criticism is constructive. That's why Highland Park is moving forward and Detroit is bogged down with negative conversations.

"When I look back at what I came into, what I was faced with, but for my training with Landmark Education, I would not have been able to do what I have done," says Porter. "Landmark gave me the tools to be the right person at the worst time for this community."
Grueling transformations

Attending an introductory session for Landmark's first course in its Curriculum for Living &emdash; the Forum &emdash; is like walking into a foreign land, complete with its own language.

"If you take the Forum, you will experience breakthroughs in the areas of relationships, communication and personal effectiveness," session leaders promise. "The Forum is an inquiry into what it means to be human."

Over the three days and one evening of the Forum (a grueling, emotional and intense 45 hours), people say major transformations occur: Marriages are suddenly repaired. Mothers and daughters become best friends after years of fighting. Adult children forgive their parents for alcoholism and abuse. People become top performers at work.

"I first heard about the Forum from a friend," says Mayor Porter's wife, Pat Reid-Porter. "I knew him before he took the Forum, and there was something different about him afterwards. He was calmer, more thorough, more available to people. I knew that something had had a huge impact on his life. I wanted to experience it too."

Reid-Porter bubbles when she talks about everything, especially the Forum. As a certified psychologist, she says that she knew her relationship with her father would impact her relationship with her husband. She decided to take the Forum in October 1988 to work on the baggage she was bringing into her 3-month-old marriage.

Reid-Porter says the course made her realize that as a child, she had decided that she would never need anything from anyone. That created a barrier between her and her father, who often felt her rejection. She saw that the same behavior had emptied into other relationships.

"I resolved issues that I didn't even remember were there. I was a happy, healthy person before the Forum, but the course made something available to me that I didn't even know was missing."

That, say Landmark officials, is what the Forum does.

"It's not about what you know that you know. It's not about what you know that you don't know," explains an introductory session leader. "The Forum works in the realm of what you don't know you don't know. That's where real possibility exists."
Controversial past

Unless you know a graduate of the Forum, you've probably never heard of it. Landmark doesn't advertise, but instead relies on its often loyal and zealous graduates to recruit people into the course. Once someone takes the Forum, there are many subsequent courses in the Curriculum for Living that promise higher levels of introspection and empowerment. The entire curriculum costs nearly $1,000. There are other courses not included in the Curriculum for Living.

Landmark began as the brainchild of the controversial '70s guru, Werner Erhard. In 1971, Erhard introduced "est" (Erhard seminar training). Est quickly became both the rage and the fury of '70s pop psychology. The est credo stated: "The purpose of est is to transform your ability to experience living, so that the situations you have been putting up with or trying to change clear up just in the process of life itself."

But the Zen-like motto was often executed with concentration-camp fervor. Est trainers screamed obscenities at participants during will-breaking sessions lasting 17 hours a day over four days. Participants were not allowed to leave the room to eat or go to the rest room except during designated breaks, a tactic designed to prevent people from slipping into traditional avoidance behaviors. While many felt transformed through the process, some complained of severe psychological trauma. In the early '90s, Erhard faced multiple lawsuits ranging from allegations of abuse to causing a fatal heart attack and manic episodes among est participants.

The controversy over the est methodology paled in comparison to the controversy surrounding its founder. According to a recent case study published by the Harvard Business School, Erhard, by his own admission, took the "low road to enlightenment."

In the late 1980s Erhard was alternately accused of tax fraud (he subsequently won a $200,000 settlement from the IRS when it admitted giving false information to the press). During a "60 Minutes" television interview, his children accused him of abuse. Later, one daughter said that she had been offered a book deal by a reporter in exchange for lies about her father.

Landmark officials argue that Erhard was ahead of his time, and, accordingly, deeply misunderstood by the public and especially by the media. Erhard discontinued the course in 1984 and introduced the Forum the next year.

"In 1991, Erhard licensed the rights to all the programs he had designed to the employees of the company," says Sharon Spaulding, director of media relations for Landmark. "They formed their own company and called it Landmark Education."

No employee owns more than 2.5 percent of the stock. According to the Harvard case study, the corporation had revenues of $49 million in 1997, $2 million of which was profit. All profits have been reinvested in the company.

Spaulding said that although Landmark considers Erhard "a friend of the company," Landmark has worked hard to distance itself from the stigma of est. "We are not a cult, anti-religious, brainwashers or Scientologists," says Spaulding, who has taken both est and the Forum.

Despite its growing popularity and financial success, the company remains extremely cautious with the media, adding to the swirl of secrecy that surrounds it. In 1994, Landmark filed a $40 million suit against the Chicago-based Cult Awareness Network, saying the network had distributed information detrimental to Landmark. The suit was settled in 1997 when CAN agreed that it did not hold Landmark, or any of its programs, to be a cult. In reporting this story, many Forum graduates refused to return phone calls, and some only returned calls after receiving clearance from the local headquarters in Troy.

To participate in the Forum, people must agree to many rules. You cannot participate if you are in therapy or taking medications which would prevent you from sitting long hours or which require a rigid eating schedule. And all conversations of participants during the Forum, as well as the proprietary course content, must be held in the strictest confidence.

Forum participants promise to always be on time, to hold themselves responsible if they missed important lessons while going to the rest room, and to be present at all of the sessions. If people cannot keep these promises, they are encouraged to drop out. When people nod off after spending hours sitting, the Forum leader would yell, "Wake up!"

To explain the boot camp-like atmosphere, Spaulding uses the example of a flight attendant. On an ordinary flight, no one listens to the safety guidelines before takeoff.

"But," says Spaulding, "If you knew you were going to be in a crash, you'd be sitting up in your seat trying to absorb every detail. When you have something at stake, you are willing to follow instruction."

Whether that means participants must leave their free will at the door depends on the individual.

"I hated the Forum," says Carol Damskey, a psychotherapist who lives in Royal Oak. "I called my Forum leader a bitch. She kept telling me what to do and I hated it. She laughed and took a poll: 'How many in here hate me?' Half the room raised their hands."

The bottom line is that you don't have to like the Forum in order to reap benefits from the training, says Damskey. Despite her rebellion, she says the Forum changed her life.

Perhaps that's why, regardless of its controversial past, Landmark Education now has 57 offices worldwide. In addition, Landmark has led 138 programs for over 10,000 people in disadvantaged communities ranging from the Maori community in New Zealand to Uganda to the 2.9-square-mile city of Highland Park.
A dream city

By 1991, Reid-Porter had convinced her husband and 30 to 40 of her friends to take the Forum. "As a group we became unstoppable. We could all speak the language of possibility."

That year Linsey Porter decided to run for mayor and Pat had just completed a graduate Landmark course entitled "Self-Expression and Leadership Program."

"It's one of the advanced courses where you actually begin a community project," says Reid-Porter. "Linsey had a dream for Highland Park to be great again. I had a dream too: What if we could shift the paradigm of Highland Park from a city of doom to a city of possibility?"

Pat established the Highland Park-Detroit Community Connection to support the newly elected mayor in his community projects. The organization, now called the Highland Park-Detroit Village Network, still sponsors an annual health fair where nearly 800 Highland Park residents receive free medical care.

Reid-Porter not only threw herself behind her husband's vision (indeed, it's hard to know which of them is more invested in the resurrection of Highland Park), she also took on Landmark Education itself, citing Landmark's $625 tuition.

"I challenged them: I told them that their tuition was too high, and that we need a community Forum here in Highland Park."

Since 1991, Landmark has held 15 community Forums in Highland Park. The price, now $325, enables many to attend who couldn't before. Although the course is open to anyone, Reid-Porter estimates that 900 of the 1,500 graduates of the Highland Park Forum have been Detroit and Highland Park residents.

"Ours is the only Forum that includes people from the ages 13 to 90. Nowhere else in Landmark can teenagers do the Forum with their parents. And out of Landmark's commitment to young people, they are providing scholarships for teens to take the entire Curriculum for Living so that they can see possibility where none was before."
Solid proof

When the heavens crashed and the trees fell in Highland Park last summer, the mayor called his staff together.

"When I said, 'We've got to create possibility,' they sprang into action. They knew what to do," remembers Porter.

With no money in the budget for storm relief, the mayor and his staff got on the phone. "We called Home Depot, Builder's Square and other companies and asked for help. By 9:30 the next morning Home Depot sent us 50 workers, gas powered chain saws, rakes, etc. Tree cutting services and neighboring cities helped us for free. Companies donated cellular phones so that city government would not be paralyzed."

Porter says that it's that kind of positive outlook which has convinced entrepreneurs to consider Highland Park.

"A few years ago, no major business would return our calls. Today, chains like IHOP and Outback Steakhouse are calling me."

The proof is on the pavement:

¥ In November, a $14 million development, Model T Plaza, opened on Woodward and Manchester. The mall is anchored by Farmer Jack, which Porter says is among the top-grossing Farmer Jack stores in the United States. Model T Plaza is across the street from Highland Park Place, a $5 million shopping center which opened in 1993.

¥ The first new, market-rate housing in Highland Park in 30 years, North Pointe, was built last year by an Illinois developer. The seven houses in it sold for up to $120,000 each. Plans are in the works to build 100 homes in North Pointe over the next four years.

¥ In October, the renovated Davison Freeway opened with new exits for Woodward Avenue, directly south of Highland Park's blossoming shopping district.

And the power of positive thinking has motivated individual Forum graduates to start putting a stake in Highland Park.

After taking the Highland Park Forum, Gail Martin decided to open a Jackson Hewitt accounting franchise there.

"I decided that this was the place I wanted to be," says the Detroit native who is the CEO of two businesses in Oak Park. "Now my store on Woodward in Highland Park is doing the highest volume in the state."

It's positive conversations which have Damskey, a 69-year-old native of Highland Park, considering selling her Royal Oak home and moving back. She took an advanced course last fall, and has since committed herself to supporting the work of Highland Park's Thea Bowman Nurse Managed Center for indigent health care.

"The Forum unblocks you," says Damskey. "If things don't happen, it's because you don't have the courage, discipline or want to do the hard work to make it happen."

While the mayor credits the Forum for much of what has been accomplished in Highland Park, Landmark's Spaulding has this to say:

"A course cannot transform a community. The Forum may have figured prominently in the resurrection of Highland Park, but it's what the people have done there that matters. They've taken the tools and used them to achieve their vision. It's to their credit."