This article shares some helpful insights for those people and groups
doing organizing and advocacy.  it explores the connection between small
local issues and transformative ones that are often shared by many in the
nation.

kelly



URL: http://www.arc.org/Pages/Mchange.html


 THE LAST STOP SIGN
   If community organizing is to live,
   it must change.

   by Gary Delgado, Director, Applied Research Center

   I had my first organizing experience 28 years ago working for the
   National Welfare Rights Organization, knocking on doors in the
   suffocatingly humid summer of 1970. My turf was a small Black
   neighborhood in Northeast D.C. In preparation for the first organizing
   meeting, I "doorknocked" 61 families; 59 people came to the meeting. I
   thought I was an organizing god.

   The truth is that the times were on our side. The Black-led civil
   rights movement had just won hard-fought but heady victories. The tide
   had turned against the Vietnam War. The government felt obligated, if
   often reluctant, to address the inequities of poverty and racial
   discrimination.
   Wearing the regulation garb of a SNCC-inspired movement, dungarees and
   long-sleeved blue-denim workshirts, dozens of inexperienced young
   organizers from the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) were
   able to mobilize and build large organizations of welfare recipients,
   composed entirely of poor women. These militant organizations fought
   for basic resources like stoves, refrigerators, beds, and
   sheetsresources legally mandated, but seldom delivered without a
   fight. Our purpose was clear: build a multiracial movement of poor
   people to redesign, reset, and implement a vision for a just society.

   Our politics were reflected in our slogans: ADEQUATE INCOME NOW and
   PEOPLE BEFORE PROPERTY, and in the way we looked and dressed. As a
   young black man, allies and enemies were relatively easy to spot: all
   black people were cool; people with Afros were especially with it;
   white guys with long hair got the nod over crew cuts; women with hairy
   legs were often critical and genuine.

   Today, both politics and appearances are more difficult to decipher;
   there are shaved heads for every political preferencefrom Black
   athletes, to Sinead O'Connor, to Nazi skinheads. And Democrats and
   Republicans, liberals and conservatives alike compete to cut welfare
   benefits, build bigger and better prisons, and "make sure business
   gets an even break."

   Why not? He who pays the piper calls the tune. Thanks to the
   Reagan/Bush revolution, and now that corporate contributions have
   bought nearly every seat in the House, Senate, and local statehouses,
   is it any surprise that elected officials have been merrily singing a
   song of social cutbacks, private deregulation, and merger with a new
   refrain of "privatize, privatize, privatize"?

   What does all this mean for community organizing? A line from an old
   Bob Dylan song says, "He not busy being born is busy dying." If
   community organizing is to live, it must change.

   From the Small to the Significant
   Even 30 years ago, the simplest way to get a stop sign on a
   neighborhood corner was to dig a hole, set in a wooden post, and power
   staple on a readily available plastic replica. For time and effort
   exerted, this method beats talking to 125 community residents to get a
   group of 50 or 60 people to go down to the city's Office of Public
   Safety and demand one. The stop sign itself, however, was not the
   point. The point was that ordinary people were contesting for power
   around small "winnable" things and, if they were successful,
   eventually we could all vie for power around larger, more significant
   political issues.

   Right-wing grassroots effortsto close abortion clinics, kill
   affirmative action, and put gays and lesbians back into the closet
   have never bothered with stop signs at all. Perhaps they know
   something that we forgot. Good organizing issues are deeply felt,
   controversial. Our problem is that the gap from the "small and
   winnable" to the large and significant is often unbridgeable. As
   community organizers what are we really trying to do? Are we trying to
   change the size of the negotiating table, add a chair or two, or saw
   it up and see that everyone gets a fair piece? Or, are we saying,
   "Wait a minute, the table is in a room, the room is in a house, and
   the house occupies a particular space in relation to the city,
   country, planet, and universe?"

   Heady stuff, community organizing.

   CO's Contributions
   I don't mean to suggest that traditional community organizations have
   not made some significant strides. Our process of finding and
   developing grassroots leaders is an important contrast to the notion
   that the only people that can solve problems are anointed experts. We
   have helped people understand that their opinions count, that there is
   power in numbers, and that, even though there may be conflict within
   an organization, democratic decisions are possible. We have also
   contested for and won powerto reverse discriminatory loan policies,
   force the development of low-income housing, influence school
   curricula, stop illegal dumping, enforce first-source hiring, and
   reassess corporate taxes. We also won a hell of a lot of stop signs.

   But let's be clear: the world of traditional community organizing is
   almost completely separate from the parallel world of progressive
   activism. It was that activism which, during the 1970s, '80s, and
   '90s, built the women's & gay and lesbian movements, protested
   apartheid in South Africa and U.S. intervention in Central America,
   fostered an immigrant rights movement, and responded to "benign
   neglect" and institutional racism in communities of color by building
   independent racial justice organizations. If traditional CO is to
   become a force for change in the millennium and beyond, it must
   proactively address issues of race, class, gender, corporate
   concentration, and the complexities of a transnational economy.

   We are clearly more ready to take on some of these issues than others.
   Some of us have traded in our distaste for corporate concentration to
   embrace corporate (cause related) partners. We sat out the NAFTA "free
   trade" fight, anti-immigrant initiatives, and English-only campaigns
   claiming that they weren't the principle concerns of our members,
   while organizations like the Southwest Network for Environmental and
   Economic Justice ran cross-border tours trying to convince us that our
   notion of `community" may have to extend beyond national borders. As
   Network director Richard Moore points out, "In this global economy,
   there are very few issues that are purely local."

   Community Organizing and the Politics of Power
   In truth, organizing people for power raises the question: Power for
   whom and to do what? Our confusion too often begins with questionable
   politics, gets reflected in poor methods and misconceived notions of
   "wins," and ends by blurring our vision of power.

   Let's start with the right's favorite wedge race. Killing
   multiculturalism is the wet dream of choice for white privilege
   apologists. Whether the Grand Wizard of the Idaho Aryan Nation or
   liberal academics like Todd Gitlin and Arthur Schlesinger, these
   people would like us not to talk about race.

   But the conversation about welfare reform, even though most recipients
   are white, is about race. The expression "urban core," where most
   community organizations work, is a reference to race. Three-strikes is
   about race, and bilingual education is about race, language, and
   assimilation. Yet how many community organizations, even those in
   communities of color, have had explicit discussions about race
   relations and the racial impact of particular policies? Very few.

   Yet we cannot organize a multiracial movement without an explicit
   racial politic.

   Does CO Duck Wedge Issues?
   Three years ago an IAF organizer from New Mexico told me that the
   organization was not involved in immigration issues because, during
   his one-on-one interviews with constituents, the issue hadn't come up.
   I don't doubt his word, but I do question his reasoning. Here we have
   a white male interviewing a Latino population. Are there issues that
   Latino people discuss with each other that somehow do not find their
   way into a discussion with an Anglo organizer? Even if immigration
   didn't come up, given the salience of the issue and the tense
   political climate, what is the responsibility of the organizer to
   raise the issue?

   Here are two examples from the frontlines of wedge politics:

   A campaign by a coalition of community organizations for a
   multicultural curriculum as part of a school reform effort in Brooklyn
   is opposed by the local chapter of a national organizing network
   apparently because the curriculum's positive portrayal of gay/lesbian
   lifestyle might sidetrack the organization's school reform efforts.

   A local Pacific Institute for Community Organizations (PICO)-sponsored
   organization went head-to-head with PUEBLO, one of the Center For
   Third World Organizing's (CTWO) local groups, on the issue of a curfew
   for young people. The PICO group endorsed it while the CTWO group,
   through its youth component, opposed it.

   A slightly different lesson comes out of my own experience at CTWO.
   Anxious to secure a win out of a fairly complex set of proposals for
   police reform, a number of our organizational affiliates went after a
   "community share" of the asset forfeiture monies secured in busts by
   local police despite the fact that we knew that many of the busts
   violated the civil rights of those arrested. Our need for an
   organizational win offset our principle of civil justice. The tail
   wagged the dog and politics with a small "p" prevailed.

   As these situations illustrate, organizing people for power begs the
   question: power for whom and to do what? How is it that some community
   organizations support more police and greater penalties while others
   support increased prevention programs and alternatives to
   incarceration? Where do community organizers and community
   organizations stand on the issues that "wedge" our people apart
   abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, crime, the death penalty,
   vouchers? How do the religious-based organizations come down on school
   vouchers? School prayer? Can we really afford the claim that if it
   doesn't come up in the one-on-ones, informational doorknocks, or issue
   development sessions, it's not an issue that our group should work on?
   I don't think so.

   These portentous political questions are reflected in the internal
   workings of our organizations. For instance, what does it say about
   community organizations when many gay and lesbian people feel that
   they have to stay in the closet because the organization is not "queer
   positive"? Again, power for whom and to do what? I don't have any
   surefire answers for the challenges that CO currently faces, but I do
   have some ideas.

   Promoting Bridge Leadership
   When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I read an article in
   a local newspaper about a community organization that was fighting for
   the right of a lesbian mother to keep her kid. Wondering how the issue
   had come up, I made an appointment to talk with the director of the
   organization. The director, an "out" lesbian, laughed as she
   explained, "The woman lives in our neighborhood and I explained to the
   board how, given my own experiences, this issue was really important."

   I've never forgotten the conversation, and over the years I've become
   clearer about the importance of having "bridge people" in leadership
   positions. By bridge people I mean people of color, people with
   disabilities, some gay and lesbian people, and first-generation
   immigrantsthose who, because they don't exactly "fit" in this society,
   have been forced to carve out their own identities and their own
   unique perch from which they view the world. The ability of these
   people to see across and through similarity and differenceto see
   sidewaysand to integrate the knowledge of many cultures can be a
   valuable asset to developing new multidimensional organizations.

   Reassessing Our Relationship to Funder-Driven Partnerships
   In addition to reconsidering the kind of leadership we promote and
   develop, we need to reevaluate our participation in funder-driven
   partnerships. With few exceptions, most funders know very little about
   organizing and what they do know they don't like. They are, in
   general, adverse to conflict. We, on the other hand, deal in conflict,
   often with the very government and financial institutions that funders
   insist be "at the table" as stakeholders. I'm not suggesting that we
   can't reach an accommodation with groups that have interests different
   from ours. I'd just prefer to have the fight before the
   reconciliation.

   I'd also nix involvement with the insipid "I'm O.K., you're O.K.,
   why-can't-we-just- get-along, consensus-building," sell-outs, and the
   increasingly ineffective smart-white-boy-led, speak truth (as they
   know it) to power, unconnected-to-a-base "issue/policy coalitions."
   And, when we reflect on how easy it's been for some of us to
   collaborate with funders, we might want to ask ourselves why we find
   it so difficult to work with one another.

   Developing A Political Vision
   In order to really address the changing political environment, even
   the more authentic community organizations will have to change. We
   must not be afraid to use analytical and ideological tools to develop
   political vision. By political vision, I mean a vision that takes us
   past the strategies of a campaign, a power analysis of key players, or
   the tactics of a good accountability session. In order to be a
   critical element in future change efforts, we must work with our
   constituents to develop our vision of a future society. In a global
   society, our vision cannot simply be a warmed-over
   "lowest-common-denominator" notion of Jeffersonian Democracy coupled
   with an appetite for power, without defining power for what and for
   whom.

   How do we arrive at a vision that takes into account and combines our
   own political beliefs, values, aspirations and experiences with those
   of our constituents? Very slowly. But we will only arrive if we
   allocate the resources, create the organizational space, and make a
   commitment to read, study, and discuss wedge issues and political
   vision as part of the culture of our organizations. In finding ways to
   build our vision, we don't have to agree on everything. However, if we
   have any hope of affecting larger societal issues and continuing to be
   relevant to our own constituents, we have to create space for
   discussing and developing a collective vision. Remember, the
   grassroots movement of the right does not begin, or end, with stop
   signs.

   When many of us began organizing, we believed that the organizations
   we built would form the base for a movement. Somewhere along the line,
   many of us got stuck in our own brand of organizing. Instead of
   believing that all of our organizations might have a shot at building
   a movement, we began to believe that our network was the movement and
   that everybody else should join, die, or get out of the way.

   Given our current political situation, we may just want to rethink
   that position.

   This article first appeared in [1]SHELTERFORCE: The Journal of
   Affordable Housing and Community Building.

                    [2]ARC News and Views | [3]ARC Home

References

   1. http://www.nhi.org/
   2. http://www.arc.org/Pages/ArcMedia.html
   3. http://www.arc.org/index.html


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