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Drafting the Rules for [Philadelphia] Radicals: What the hell are we organizing for anyway, and how are we trying to do it?
Submitted by jennifer on Thu, 08/09/2007 - 1:43pm.
One of the things that struck me during the election and those voluminous conversations about "reform" and "progressive" "movements" (sorry for abusing scare quotes) was the relationship between reform groups like PFC and community organizing. Does an interest in reform and progressive politics define and create a community, which PFC then represents?
In my mind, reform of city-level politics would--above all--aim to bring the isolated and effectively abandoned people and communities and their interests fully into the political process. Basic community organizing. You'd figure out who the system is failing and how and why, and work to increase their political power--electing real representatives of those populations as well as pushing the system to respond to them.
I was thinking about this reading about Saul Alinsky's work in Chicago, in the "Back of the Yards" neighborhood in the 1930s and 1940s. I'm reading Rebuilding the Inner City: A history of neighborhood initiatives to address poverty in the United States. (I totally fail at picking beach reading. Don't even ask what else I brought.) The first chapter describes the evolution of the settlement house charity-based reform system into a community-rooted organizing model. This is no small shift, but its not the type of problems that changed: it was who was holding the reins in identifying the problems and proposing the solutions.
Alinsky started working for the "Chicago Area Project" as part of a violence-reduction project that sent stable role models into violence-torn areas to serve as ground-level counselors. Alinksy was sent to Back of the Yards to set up that sort of program. Instead he created a neighborhood-wide council that would be able to use its weight to demand political recognition and services. Key, though, was Alinsky's using existing institutions in the community as the building blocks for the council (he recognized that all these fragmented groups provided "mutual aid, protection, and support"). The council didn't substitute for those institutions, or replicate them, or replace them. It aggregated them, increasing their potential leverage.
I felt like this issue of community organizing for more effective political representation was right there in all the discussions about reforming the ward system and whether Neighborhood Networks makes any sense. And the question of community organizing has bubbled up again and again as we talk about specific problems that trouble the city: violence (as in Ben's thread about the role of strong community institutions in reducing crime) and Ray's discussions with Marc about how to best represent the interests of SEPTA riders, through the existing transit coalition or through a rider's union. And we haven't discussed it much, but there's the lack of a strong organized tenants' movement here as there is in several other cities.
Charles posed this question: "How do we create a true reform movement that is as diverse as our city? How do we create a movement that includes the people who would most benefit from reform? How can we be educated by them?" Later in his thread, Charles got called out for referring to YPP, PFC, and Neighborhood Networks as the progressive organizers in Philadelphia. The question's still good, but so's the challenge.
I'll admit up front and at the risk of alienating some of my friends that my intuitive response to something like PFC is that it can't do these thing that I am looking for, and that keeps me from really joining. It seems like a new institution that is designed to represent my political interests and priorities, as opposed to a structure that will tie into existing, community-centered, institutions. I don't know about Neighborhood Networks, either in potential or reality (beyond the back and forth on here), but I likewise intuitively feel that the structure has to come out of the neighborhoods and not be artificially imposed on them.
What I want to talk about is specifics. Specifics and strategy. Where, when we are thinking beyond very concrete issues and specific policy reforms, and thinking more broadly about larger-scale change, should we put our efforts? Is reducing the social and political isolation of vast swaths of our city--improving basic representation and responsiveness for the people who are most left out--the goal? Can Philly for Change do this? Neighborhood Networks? The ward system and the Democratic Party directly? And what can the people who've been around tell us about efforts to force more inclusive representation in the past?
PS This thread is sort of selfish. Like, please everyone tell me how to best spend my time and energy. Just to put all my cards on the table.
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why I'm not popular
Jennifer,
this is a thoughtful post.
I guess one of the first things to mention is that the Alinsky model does exist in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Interfaith Action is an affiliate of The Industrial Areas Foundation, which Alinsky started and Ernesto Cortes refined.
Though, as a community organizer here in Philadelphia for the last two years, I NEVER see them at all.
Now, there is also EPOP, which follows the same mode and is more visible. Not super visible, but moreso.
While I am a big fan of this model and even did some work to help get a similar org off the ground in Florida, once upon a time, the irony is this. You've got to be in them or you're out. The Alinsky/Cortes style does a great job of getting institutions who join to work together, but they are very, very bad at working with organizations with similar interests but who haven't joined. The reasons are complicated, but it mostly relates to the deliberate process by which these institutions make decisions.
Anyway, my very unpopular opinion on a lot of these discussions is this... I tend to think that people organize best when they are organizing people like themselves. That's why I think any effort for PFC to try to reach the non-Center City, non-semi-yuppie, college-educated scene is misguided. I know it won't work and I think PFC is better off not trying. It's a great institution that's doing well with what it has and has a lot of room to grow its identified base.
We've got some other organizations out there that are also doing okay. My shop is good, ACORN has some strength, we have a lot of unions.
It would be great if someone did a better job of banning the churches together, in the Alinsky style, but,
you know,
one of the problems we have now doing work in the institutional context is this... Alinsky honestly had more kinds of active institutions to draw from when he started. There were bigger community groups, bigger union halls, bigger organizations that people were more committed to than they are now. Now it's hard. There are a lot of unaffiliated folks out there. It stinks.
One of the areas that I still think PFC should look into is getting the sports leagues organized. I've mentioned this before... but if a political mission could emerge from some of the Ultimate and Soccer and Volleyball leagues that exist out there, we'd get a nice spike in yuppie and working man involvement in politics. They have a huge, huge base. They are not political now, but a lot of churches weren't political, either, until Alinsky style organizers started working them.
That said, if PFC folks out there think I'm a fool for saying that you guys should not organize the non-Center City scene, then a good suggestion for getting started would be for you to formally join (this will cost you some money, by the way) EPOP or PIA. I would not be sad if I were to be proved wrong... it's just my experience an Organizer informs the opinion I hold.
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BradyDale OnLine
The R.I.I.C. Blog
The Philadelphia Unemployment Project
Thanks, Brady
And maybe you can talk more about the Unemployment Project? Organizational structure, constituency, how it relates to other groups if it does at all (e.g. on legislative stuff)...
I will try to write more about the critique of the Alinsky thing. There was some good material in the book and maybe some of it is instructive. It just re-sparked me thinking about this.
Picking on PFC again, just because it is a close obvious example to me: I don't disagree with your "it won't work to reach out so they probably should try." But I wonder if it sort of causes or adds to the problem: like, would this particular (pretty large) group of people be a separate, defined, constituency if it wasn't for the group existing? And is that good or bad?
Meaning: They (PFC members) may be of a similar social class or educational background or political perspective (maybe) but they don't all live in the same neighborhoods. So what other constituencies might they be part of if they weren't identifying as "progressives" as apart from neighborhood-based issues? I don't mean these as rhetorical questions.
Sure, I can say more
PUP relates to other groups lots. We see ourselves as functioning on two levels at all times. First, as a membership organization made up of normal folks, mostly african-american, from around the city. The base is not huge. Two or three hundred folks, though we communicate with more people than that.
The second level is as a meeting place for Coalitions. Lots and lots of coalitions have successfully run out of PUP over the years. It's usually pretty informal. People come to meetings, check us out, if it works for them they keep coming. The Alinsky style is much more formal and methodical than that. I'm a firm believer that all forms of organizing have their place.
As for the question about the other people who are involved. I think that PFC is a group that's going after the low-hanging apples. Which is good. It's a group for people who are politicized, at least enough to give a little money to a group who they agree with. That is needed, and in the Bush era I think he's pushed many apples lower on the tree, to be more metaphorical.
To reach those other groups that you mention who aren't politicized enough to want to be part of a label like progressive, you need an Organizer and a staff and a methodical system for helping them see self-interest in plugging in. Here's the problem: how the hell do you reach them?
Most of our social group (college educated professionals) are not affiliated with any sort of organization, especially not one with a semi-social function, like a church. The only way to reach us are annoying ways: over the phone, email and door knocking, none of which really give you much of a chance to get into people's hearts and want to be part of something. That's what I'm saying: Alinsky had more avenues to reach people through.
It's the irony of the present: we are more connected, quantitatively, but also less connected, qualitatively. We're in touch without touching, y'know?
I don't know what to do about that... though a part of me thinks we need more JibJab style artists to make people laugh while they play on the Internet and then politicize them. It's kind of the question of the day, to me.
As an Organizer who has worked under a number of models and no longer has any special love for any of them (to be clear: I like all of them - many Organizers have an annoying tendency to think only their way makes any sense... I used to feel that way, but not anymore), I am waiting for the next model. I believe some smart kid is going to come up with a new way to reach people that's going to really take off. I'm keeping my eyes open for new approaches, but nothing is grabbing me yet.
BTW... there are lots of other books out there on the Alinsky approach in today's context, such as Dry Bones Rattling, Going Public (thought it was a little superficial, but it's popular) and Cold Anger (though I hated Cold Anger to the point of not even finishing it, lots of Organizers like it).
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BradyDale OnLine
The R.I.I.C. Blog
The Philadelphia Unemployment Project
Sorry this is only half-responsive
Yeah I am curious about these kind of detached and self-selected communities--like YPP and internet-based electoral organizing (see Alex's thread) on the extreme end, as well as PFC-style (used loosely) attempts to organize communities that are largely not connected to existing institutions. Examples of this would be Alex's work at Philly rock shows with the anti-Santorum campaign, or your idea about organizing yuppie sports leagues.
I don't know about the mechanics of trying to organize those people, so I'm interested in hearing from those who have (including the many members of the PFC steering committee who are on this site).
It troubles me a lot though that people live in the city but are pretty disconnected from community institutions. And I fear that organizing strategies that play to that will just leave us as segregated and disconnected from our physical communities (not to mention the parts of the city that no young decently well-off person I know would ever go to).
I know the positive reading of the PFC model would be that by getting everyone to that bar once a month you open the door to them becoming involved in any number of more substantive ways. And I don't want to make light of how important that is or how hard it is to reach certain groups of people. But I still feel in my gut like it's a distraction from "real" organizing because "we" are just organizing "ourselves" into this false community that is disconnected from so many of the broadest problems that plague the city.
(Please, please no one be offended. I hate making people mad! And fighting. Ask Sam. This is just me thinking things through aloud.)
Oh, and
thanks for the book links!
I want to see if I can dig up some of the research and writing my friend Ed has done--he's been studying mass social movements as his research focus for the phd he just got (yay Ed!) and I know he just did an interesting review that touches on the relationship of (Democratic party) canvassing to social organizing/change.
what it would take
It would be interesting if there were a disinterested Organizer in town who went out and tried to be in regular touch with all sorts of political leaders of existing political institutions (everything from ward leaders to union heads to co-op boards) and tried to discern common themes in self-interest and massage them toward working together. No one is trying to do that right now, but it would take money to support someone who would accomplish nothing discernible for several years, strong supervision and perhaps mentoring. The opportunity is not there at present and I don't think a person could do it on their own time.
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BradyDale OnLine
The R.I.I.C. Blog
The Philadelphia Unemployment Project
Different Perspective
Both your & Jennifer's comments are very thoughtful. I come at this from a different perspective & am critical of the dominant focus on process & involvement, not that they are not much needed. The critical element in advancing the progress agenda is to have a set of core ideas that the average person can readily identify with. After that, organizing & involvement become important.
Let's begin with our core political belief, that we seek to advance the COMMON GOOD, while the philosophy of conservatives is EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF .
Secondly, that every American is of equal worth no matter what their station in life & the purpose of the political system is to achieve the common good rather than do the bidding of elites. From there, we can go on to specifics such as universal health care, the environment, fixing our cities etc.
Common Sense
Carter, yours is very much a common sense approach, but in organizing, common sense is almost always wrong. Our instincts mislead us, perpetuate the status quo and send us after red herrings.
It seems natural to believe that the agenda drives the movement, but it's just not true.
It might drive media and voting trends right now, but that's only because people are so disconnected. And, in fact, the largest trend of all are the people who have dropped out of the process.
If there's one thing that the really successful organizing institutions have figured out (from Alinsky to the Labor Movement), that it's the process that matters. The right process sets the agenda, builds buyin, relationship, shared trust, shared identity, and, ultimately, power.
If I've learned anything from ten years of grassroots organizing it's that ideas mean nothing and "how" means everything.
Ideas are ephemeral. You can't put your faith in an idea. You can put your faith in a person, though, and that's why good organizing is all about connecting people. A lot of people try to do it around ideas, issues, whatever... they never build anything that really lasts.
BR
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BradyDale OnLine
The R.I.I.C. Blog
The Philadelphia Unemployment Project
Reform from the inside
Given the power of local Democratic committees in our city, I think a more useful approach than complaining about them would be for YPP-ers (and PFCers, and NNers, etc.) to volunteer en masse for these committees + subvert them from the inside. In other words, don't fight the power- be the power.
Or would TPTB resist attempts by reformers to join committees en masse as described?
-Z
there's been resistance!
A handful of Ward Leaders have welcomed reformers as a good source of fresh energy, but generally where the leadership was already liberally inclined. Elsewhere, there has been anything from nonhelpfulness (i.e., not appointing volunteers to empty seats) to obstruction (helping the incumbent or other opponent run against the reformers in the primary), to varying success. I think Ferrick was onto something when he suggested that the Democrats needed to stop treating young reformers as "fungus"...
:)
acm
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead
The gap is symptomatic as much as strategic
I'm not sure that the gap between community organizing and "progressive" groups is strategic at its roots so much as a product of racial/economic divisions in our greater community.
The point not being to focus on one particular organization; but, in my experiences with NN, while bridging the gap was generally a shared goal, closing the gap was made extremely difficult because the makeup of the group itself was not representatively diverse. Obviously, nothing earth-shattering there, but those experiences left me with a focused sense of priorities with respect to resolving the problem.
I don't think the decision is between developing a strategy to support/oganize other groups on the one hand, or to identify issues and enlist their support on the other hand.
Perhaps the first order of priorities should be to build mechanisms that are simply focused on creating an inclusive group. In order to do that, the first order of priorities should be to build personal links with existing groups more than "strategic" links or links centered about politicians or even, perhaps, issues. Focusing on politicians is necessarily divisive. Focusing on issues can be divisive in that almost inevitably, issues strain relationships because different issues predominate for different racial and economic constituencies.
Again, not wishing to focus on one group, but in my experiences in NN, while closing the gap was a priority, it was not the main priority; issues and/or candidates were. As a result, I feel, the progress in creating a more representative body was limited.
I don't know exactly what "mechanisms" might be developed by progressive groups in order to build personal relationships, but I think that relationship-building needs to be the primary target of progressive groups, and that other achievements will follow.
I'm struggling to come up with a cohesive post here, but I've never let that stop me from posting in the past, so don't be too hard on me?
Personal Relationships the Key
Besides tons of money given to the Republican Party by the upper class, I attribute much of the success of conservatives to use of church groups & upper middle class community networks in advancing their agenda. The Right Wing provides a ton of money to build up their college conservative groups.
The main avenues for progressives are to build up labor unions, work with progressive religious groups, environmental groups.
you're on the right track
I wrote above that you can't put your faith in ideas, but the irony is that the politicized people always do.
What you've written here is emblamatic of what a lot of the breakthrough organizers realized. Groups are always saying that they personal relationships are important, but they don't really believe it. Instead they go out with issues and try to bring people along.
The best organizing starts tabula rasa, starts bringing people together and looks for struggles they have in common. It takes a lot of time and a lot of faith in process, but it builds something.
You are really seeing the forest and the trees here. This is the kind of truth it takes old organizers a long time to get young organizers to see.
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BradyDale OnLine
The R.I.I.C. Blog
The Philadelphia Unemployment Project
Study for your bar! Or take a vacation!
Jeez jen, don't you know it's summer? There are mountains to visit and beaches to sit on. I am back in the city for a day in between vacations, but generally the word in August is chill.
As for you question:
#1- who is we? I know what i am doing, and I am sure other individuals could say what they are doing, but who is the "we" you refer to?
#2- The goal: ? My goal is probably most similar to yours in that providing economic justice and offering opportunity to all is what i care about the most. However, that's a tall order and what I have seen happen more effectively and constantly is people creating communities to reflect their interests.
# 3- can PFC do it? No way. And I don't think anyone in PFC would say it could. And not everyone will want to join PFC. I belong to PFC because it is fun to have a constant community organized in a very vague way around similar goals--like YPP. But there is no standing coalition of people joined for ANY issues--including neighborhood ones. I agree very much with Brady that the Alinksy successes that look like they create standing coalitions of people via community-based organizations were largely successful because institutional pools were bigger.
#4- who should do it? The Alinksy model was funded. Churches and foundations and even the government was giving out pots of money to organize in the 60s. This is not happening at all today. The only model that has worked well, in my opinion, is MoveOn's model of self-funding. By tapping into the pockets of middle class white people (mostly) they have funded their own work. My experience with PAS was that this could work at the local level too. However, getting this same group to give the same kinds of $100 or $200 contribututions to organizing campaigns for social change vs. beating Santorum or electing Nutter is harder. My point, however, is that PFC is never going to organize the way you want it to, nor is anything else, without paid staff UNLESS there is a real groundswell among members to do something which, frankly, I think is hard to imgaine right now. Political and social justice interest is just too diffuse along the class, race, gender and age spectrum.
It's late and I am distracted--am i even addressing your question or am i just blathering?
Oh you are not blathering
but I have tons more questions for you. I'll put them up when I back from vacation.
Oh and the "we" is me and anyone reading it or talking with me about it. Not a defined or meaningful anything. That's why I personalized it at the end, and the goals I sketched out (social and political inclusion of poor and isolated communities) are totally personal too. But I think important--well, I would--and I wanted them to be out there in the discussion that we on this website have all the time about specific policy issues.
We've seen (mayoral election!) how our various definitions of "progressive" and "reform" can end up deeply conflicting, so at the very least I'd like to push discussion of what I feel are important goals to the surface so they don't get lost beneath a push to elect X politician who will fight corruption presumably for the larger good of all of us or whatever.
And my question is mostly about what are the best organizations and organizing strategies to bring about that inclusion. Despite the logic of Brady's "communities should organize themselves," and the issues about, say, me coming in to a community that's not mine trying to organize or fix it, I am not really interested in organizing to get my political priorities better represented because I think by and large I already have a decent voice and access to power if I want it. So that's just not a priority.
I'm a lot more concerned about actually becoming connected to the physical spaces I live in (despite all our weird intercenine battles over how badly Philly is residentially segregated and despite how there are definitely vast swathes of the city that are profoundly cut off from capital in every way, this is still a very small city full of neighborhoods pushed tight up against each other) and identifying and lending whatever abilities or resources I have to the problems that surround me than I am in cloistering myself from them and furthering the detachment of people identified with "center city interests" from the rest of the working city.
So I am really interested and concerned with the organizations we choose to build and join and support, since so many of us are in a position of "choosing"--the situation Brady described as "we have quantitatively more connections with each other but qualitatively much less."
(Yeah this IS vacation. I am at the beach. And I got text from someone, you guess who, ordering me to write something up... Though I am not going to lie and say otherwise I'd be playing beach volleyball or anything. I'm not "sporty." But miniature golf is totally workable even in high heels which is stupidly all I ever pack.)
Ray, I Agree/disagree
I could be reading you wrong, Ray, but I take two conclusions from your post: (1) a progressive group needs to have a paid staff to really achieve significant goals, (1) Because of their homogeneity, PFC or other similar groups of progressives won't have significant impact on certain issues - and so, should focus on the issues that are most closely matched to the priorities of their specific constituency in order to maximize progress within a limited framework.
I agree with the first point. I disagree with the second. Again, I think that progressive goups need to address the "we problem"(tm) head on. In other words, (to repeat myself) I think that the first aim of progressive groups should be to change the current "we."
From what I've seen, the main obstacle there is mostly unfamiliarity. Even though their heart is in the right place, many times progressives are simply uncomfortable putting themselves in unfamiliar circumstances. Middle-class white people are uncomfortable going into a black church in the ghetto, or a neighborhood bar in the Northeast to explore creating a more diverse community.
reply to DE and Jen
So you two basically say the same thing, DE says:
And Jen says:
I agree with both of you. This is how things should be. However, I don't think they are that way.
I have seen members of PAS and MoveOn and PFC offered opportunities to delve into and be a part of efforts for goals outside of their own immediate self-interest and they don't take them up. In fact, Alinksy himself would say you can not organize people outside of their own self-interest.
Beyond that, this notion of "my community is cool, I want to help that other (whoever that other may be) is sometimes problematic. For instance, in 04 and 06 when my goal at both MoveOn and PAS was to turn out as many votes as possible from the city of Philadelphia, many of the members of those organizations witrh whom I worked said "we don't like the plan you have proposed to turn out voters from people in my neighborhood I want to go to [fill in the low-income neighborhood blank] because they really need the help more."
This is condescending. There is evidence that voter participation and income are linked, sure. But in Philadelphia, proportionally more black democrats than white vote. So why did white MoveOn members only want to talk to black people in neighborhoods they did not live about voting despite the fact that there real, live, identifiable people in their own neighborhoods who were not voting?
I guess what I am saying is that middle-class, white people defining a greater good outside of their own self-interest and then working on it might sound noble and good in theory, but in practice it is fucked up and only reaffirms the patriarch and the lines of oppression. That said, there are shared self-interests between people of different classess and races and that's why at Philly for Change specifically we are happy to start our Legacy Project activity which will link PFC and PUP more formally in a fight for better service at city health centers which many low-income people rely and many young people who don't have the kind of emplyment that offers health benefits should rely on.
And, back to Josh, yes you are right, I am saying we need paid organizers and I do really belive this but I also know how problematic this notion is and I think a lot about it and what it means.
And Jen, I got that text too and certain people should stop rowing and write their own posts and stop interuppting beauftiful vacation time!
Oh man
I love everyone's contributions! This is great.
A couple unsorted things, not just to Ray, but starting there:
1. I hear you. But I think the PAS voting example is a little off. This is what I see: the constituency that is created (if it is) by efforts to organize basically decently-off white people who identify as progressive is part fiction. Speaking at least to younger people, decently-off white people who identify as progressive don't just live in center city. Generalizing, they live in South Philly, the gentrifying parts of Grays Ferry and Point Breeze, West Philly, Fishtown, South Kensington, blah blah blah. We've talked about this when we've talked about housing prices and all that. So I think that while those decently-off white people may be outsiders, for better or worse they've plopped themselves down in communities that have real problems. I'd rather them be encouraged to identify with the communities that physically surround them then be able to exist at arms-length from the city.
Honestly, I think that ability to exist at arm's length from the city's problems was what allowed a lot of my peers to see Nutter as the unequivocal answer to our problems.
I think there are areas of common cause: tenants' rights, health care services, transit. This is NOT to conflate the experience of two different groups of people, but there are ways that a lot of young people from relative privilege are living now in a sort of simulated poverty--no health insurance, low-wage service jobs, rising housing prices, reliance on mass transit. And whether or not the Inquirer paints it that way, I think violent crime is all of our problem and responsibility. Anyway, I think that the sort of organizing Jethro was alluding to tries to leverage those areas of connection and I'd like to think that those are areas of great potential.
Maybe because I was just reading Dan's Jonathan Kozol book (yeah, on vacation, make fun) I am hyper-concerned about residential segregation and the cyclical forces that allow well-off people to completely detach from the ways that the political system is failing poor people all around us. So that's why I keep circling back to worry about encouraging social fragmentation and self-defined, instead of physical/geographical, communities.
2. The funding thing. I hear this too. I would love a huge independent conversation about what to do about it. I don't think that the answer can be people with money just funding advocacy projects based on their own interests. You just won't get some of the organizing that the city so badly needs.
When I was researching some public housing issues, I was startled over and over by the exciting tenants' unions and organizing projects in various parts of the country (the metro Boston area, parts of Calfornia). There'd be this amazing project to track affordable housing that was at risk of being converted to market-rate (and the tenants displaced) and to organize to preserve affordability. And it was clearly, obviously, tied to funding. Because you'd see the funding stream dry up and the organization state that they were stopping X or Y program for 2008. Without the funding, it just wasn't going to exist.
Where should the money come from? Is pressuring the government (city, state, federal) something that should be taking precedence as a goal? Should there, or can there, be some kind of private redistribution, a la the canvassing that goes on around Democratic Party electoral advocacy? Are there ways that broad-based canvassing can be connected--not removed from--community-based organizing? Should groups just fund themselves somehow as Ben suggests Uhuru does and (I think??) ACORN does?
Anyway, I am really glad for the health center thing being pushed by PFC and PUP together.
Maybe a postscript
as if that wasn't long-winded enough.
I don't want to minimize this:
it's real and it is a real danger. But as important and necessary as self-organizing is, there are huge problems that result from policies and practices of essentially embracing the segregation that separates the well-off from struggling communities on the next block or hidden further south and west than they ever go. It seems like a lot of the programs in past decades that were dressed up as cultural or community empowerment meant that resources were tossed at those struggling communities and they were left to fend for themselves. Hands were washed. It's no good if the people who hold or control money and power have no stake in the entrenched problems of huge swathes of the city.
what should be vs. what is
jen, i don't disagree with you, again,. but you are talking to a hypothetical group of people about what they should be doing vs. what they are. there is an argument to be made that the white middle clas gentrifiers you are describing should not have bought homes in gentrifying neighborhoods at all without volunteering to pay extra taxes or fees to build teh community institutions in the places that they live. but let's get real, when we still have people fighting to keeo 10-year tax abatemennts, that is not going to happen.
so in the abscence of people deciding to be altruistic and do the right thing on their own, your question about organizing comes into play.
the bottom line with any organizing is self-interest. good organizers will identify common self-interests and leverage those to deisolate people in the way you suggest.
Meanwhile, in answer to this:
The fundamental problem is a capitalist system with not a high enough tax rate on the highest income earners (thanks Ron Regan). The simplest solution to this problem is for people to give away as much disposable income as they can to poor people with no strings (like grants, loans, organizations, whatever) attached.
Again, I am doubtful that this will happen but in a practical sense, give as much as you can to Bread & Roses and let them fund organic community organizing groups.
Jethro is also right to point out training as a way to increase organizers, though rarely discussed here, there are quite a few different schools of thought on how to organize and as such many different training options. However, very few are offered locally so any at all is a good start.
my own postscript
Jen's comment here is well said...
But this comment gets to the heart of the problem too. Some people have way more money than other people in our society. Instead of acknowledging that this is an intentional state of affairs (ie the people at the top are keeping the people at the middle and the bottom in place for a reason), a culture of poverty has been created coupled with social Darwinism which basically creates the notion that people are poor because they are lazy or stupid. The unfortunate corrolallry to this is that progressives want to program empowerment and organizing too much to the point where it is just a continuation of the same application of cultural poverty.
I am not saying this to be a know it all. I mean my analysis does not help much. Jennifer's questions are important. It's just that if we could answer them, i feel like there would not be any problems.
I mean do the answers to these questions come down to anything other than greed and self-interest?
On that condescension thing
I hear you. And the feeling of being condescended to on the part of groups comprised of non middle-class whites, I believe, is a huge obstacle. Obviously, there is a long and valid history of why those groups are leery of progressive do-gooder types -- be it because of historicl ethnic/racial or economic divisions.
On the other hand, I think you're missing something here. The fact is that voting participation is largely correlated with income levels, is it not? Sure in aggregate the white/black participation levels in Philly may be similar, but compare voting levels in Mt. Airy/Chestnut Hill to SW Philly and North Philly, or Kensington and Fishtown.
In my mind, the biggest thing that progressives can do on a larger scale is to convince more of the "disenfranchised" voters that there are ways for their vote to have real impact. Rallying already active voters seems of relatively little value to me. This is the problem I have with the "New Democrat" (sorry Alex) mentality of trying to win elections by moving to the middle rather than working to get more support from the "underclass."
Anyway, I believe that one (the best?) way for progressives to do that is to use their money and network resources to make personal connections with other constituencies. In doing so, it would, in theory at least, earn progressives some credibility when they come back later to discuss issues and politicians.
As it is now, if someone from PFC goes into Kensignton or Point Breeze and says "Come out for a rally on this issue," or "Vote for this candidate," because PFC endorses this issue or canidate, the most likely response would be "huh?"
But if Ray, someone who is a known entity, comes to Kensington or Point Breeze and says that he wants to talk about how to advance an issue or candidate - a likely response might be "Talk to me, Ray. I know you've got my back."
on voting
Good points above. But in 04 and 06, ACORN and ACT (which was led pretty much by Philly operatives) were out there in full force. These groups or individuals in these groups had street cred in the communities that were mostly non-white that they were targeting. They did a good job. If they had more resources they would have done better.
Enter MoveOn. You had a group of people who did not want to give a whole lot more money, but did want to give time. But their time canvassing had less value at the doors in the communities that ACORN/ACT were targeting. Meanwhile, in places like Mt. Airy and Society Hill, there were voters who did vote who needed outreach. In this scenario, unless those MoveOn members wanted to spend their time working more hours at work to earn money to give to ACORN, why shouldn't they have canvassed their own neighborhoods to turn out votes?
Meanwhile:
Maybe I am too cycnical, but can you honestly tell me that a disenfranchised person's vote has value? It should but realistically, at the city, state and federal level, where is the proof of that?
So maybe we are saying the same thing, but it would be great if people who belive in governemnt could actually devote time to making it work immediatley, without an election, but this takes me back to my original point: are white middle-class people going to devote time to a campaign and win that may not directly benefit their self-interest?
Okay I know I have no idea what I am talking about
And this whole garbled thread was just thrown up there to see what would stick, more or less...
But even though there are like three interrelated conversations happening her (funding, strategy, goals--at least), as for goals:
On the city level at least, this is what I think is most important. And maybe it needs to be broken down into issues (health, transit, housing, etc) or maybe it is about organizing groups to exert leverage. This is what Brady was debating above. But I don't really care about fixing corruption or whatever separate from the goal of trying to re-enfranchise all citizens of the city.
That's what gives discussion of corruption and failures of city government meaning to me: these are places where the government/party is not serving the interests of the people who elect it and who it governs.
I don't know about you but this is basically a garbled articulation of what I had hoped a Fattah campaign was trying to be, and what I respond to in John Edwards's rhetoric. This idea that a whole big chunk of people are (intentionally, as Ray points out) not being served by the current power structure and policies and that making the system responsive to them has to be the priority. And at least in theory, it could resonate pretty broadly, because there are a hell of a lot of people not being well served. A hell of a lot of people without insurance, who rent and don't have a tenants' rights help line or desk, who need help buying their first house, who can't get around on SEPTA without a lot of expense and a lot of exertion.
Sorry I know I am being frustratingly unrealistic.
Although why I responded so strongly to the funding piece is that if we could get the money, a lot more could be happening. It's not everything, but it can do a lot. Even things like more legal services lawyers (we were reading the timeline of CLS and saw how in the late 1970s there were 99 attorneys there) where each single lawyer funded can have such an outsize impact. Same with organizers, right?
a good place to start...
...after i get back from the beach!
To reiterate, Jennifer is saying that the possibel self-interest of middle class white people in also dealing with economic justice is the fact that it seems government does not serve most of us well. This is a concept way bigger than just "corruption," it's also about the fundamental failing of government ot interven positively in our lives.
i think what could help move this conversation is a better analysis of the other institutions in play like lenders, unions, foundations, non-profits and business (small and large) and their interaction, influence on and service by government as well.
True confesions
I'm one of those people (well, not the "young" ones) who didn't get too involved with Moveon because I didn't see the point in rallying people in Mt. Airy to vote for Kerry in '04. (Well, for that reason plus the fact that I was pretty turned off to Moveon's unquestioning support for a DNC candidate - although as it turned out I did canvassing for the Kerry campaign in the suburbs - ha!)
Anyway, you pose an interesting question: If the alternatives are for young progressives to (1) conduct effective advocacy within their own constituency on issues that have resonance there, (2) give money to groups like ACORN or (3) to work ineffectively within "disaffected" communities, 1 or 2 would obviously be the better alternatives.
Still, I like to hold out for option 4: to create an environment where eventually they could work effectively within disaffected communities. Sure, that issue is made all that much more difficult because they can't pull out of their bag of tricks any proof that voting has ever made a difference for the poor and or minorities. But I think the reason for that is because the moneyed and connected white liberal/progressive community has not successfully allied with other communities which have greater numbers but fewer resources. I don't see that situation as immutable.
Unrealistic?
Ray, the sage
I just want to admit to everyone here that I was one of the people that gave Ray some flak about focusing on the middle-class vote early on. Later, I realized what a savvy freaking move it was. I just want to say that publicly right now. Good thinking, Murphy!
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BradyDale OnLine
The R.I.I.C. Blog
The Philadelphia Unemployment Project
thanks brady, and more to DE
just a bit more reflection on my part:
som people complained about the formation of Neighborhood Networks after MoveOn left town when PFC was already on the scene and ADA had been around even longer. i always thought this complaint was dumb. a diversity of tactics is the key to any successful organizing campaign and if different organizations with different internal cultures needed to form to enagage a possibly similar group of people, so be it. along the same lines there are at least two professional progressive staff happy hours, drinking liberally, the progressive roundtable and a gazillion coalitions in town. it doesn't matter to me--it's not reasonable to expect a single stream-lined organization to address all evils.
along the same lines, i do think that neighborhood-based electoral activity is important as well as community-based electoral activity (since not all communities have geographic locations like LGBTs or young folks). however, empirically, we know that peer-based electoral activity is the most effective in terms of ratcheting up turn-out. the problem with this is that in a segregated city, this means we will end up with segregated activity.
i don't know what the answer to this is exactly, but ignoring peer-based interaction and pretending that people are peers when they really not because we think that is the right thing to do is not a viable option.
however, i do think that one advtange that groups like PFC and NN have over groups likes PUP is that their members have more time. I worked at PUP in 2001 and 2002 organzing participants in welfare to work programs to demand better wages and job training, the reality is that the list of members I had to work with and their correspnding participation rate was much different than the list of MoveOn members who had better childcare, fewer work hours (or at least more defined ones) and easier access to transportation.
so peer-based activity is the key, but the problem is some peer groups are prohibited by economic circumstance from being as active as others. how do we solve that?
Funding organizing/ advocacy deserves a thread on its own
Funding organizing/ advocacy deserves a thread on its own. Ray is correct that:
The Reagan administration deliberately went out to “defund the left." They were quite open about it.
Jen, Brady, Ray, Ben, these are really thoughtful observations about organizing. I’d like to use your posts in my CCP class, Community Involvement Theory and Practice. Although I assume that anything on a blog is public domain, I would only do this with your permission. Send me an email if this is okay. My guess is that I am not the only teacher who gets material course from YPP.
I wish, like Jennifer, I had thought more carefully about how to use my activist energy when I was younger. I tended to drift into groups because of my friendship networks, boy friends, ex-husbands.
My great regret is having missed the glory days of second wave feminism. I belonged to left–wing groups that thought feminism was a petty bourgeois deviation. Seems ridiculous now and I didn’t buy it then, but was too much influenced by the people I hung out with to seriously challenge it. However, as one friend of mine put it, “at least you never did anything really crazy and get in a lot of trouble.”
I didn’t start seriously thinking about how I was going to spend what political energy I had left until I was in my late 30’s /early 40’s. Reagan’s election brought home to me that it really did matter who won elections, that there really was a difference between D’s and R’s, so I decided to get involved in grassroots electoral politics and become a Dem. Committeeperson. Also a growing body of research was confirming my gut instinct that we would have different priorities if we had more women in government, so I decided I wanted to focus on electing women committed to feminist values.
These decisions were the result of finally really thinking about how best to spend my shrinking time for political activism. So I wish that I, like you all, had thought long and hard about how best to spend my activist energy back in late 60’s and early 70’s.
Karen, thank you
and feel free to use whatever is helpful. That sounds like a great class.
I appreciate your telling some about the arc of your activism. It's really interesting to me to hear about both how someone made decisions over time and how they regard those decisions now.
I guess when I see a short term for me of hugely limited non-work time, I have a lot of concern over making sure whatever work I can do has the most possible effect and isn't misplaced energy. And (cross your fingers everyone) when I can leave for an, um, more ethical sort of legal work I want to choose that work carefully as well.
One more comment!: funding
I made an offhand remark in a list of questions to Ray and everyone somewhere on this thread about "so what are viable funding possibilities." I'm going to ask again, and more explicitly:
There was active defunding of a lot of these types of projects we are talking about. Just like at times people decided that renewed grassroots electoral activism was a good object for people's energies ... shouldn't maybe we talk about a project of aggressively lobbying the legislatures TO fund community organizing projects?
I mean, that's possible right? Just because there was all this momentum away from that funding doesn't mean that the momentum couldn't be reversed, especially under a theoretical Democratic administration and -controlled legislature.
Same thing with reversing those horrible legal services funding/activity restrictions.
Organizing For Funding Makes Good Sense
Organizing for getting funding for more organizing makes a lot of sense.
You would have to carefully define what goals the organizing will be on behalf of, and what sort of political activity would be allowed by the organizers and organization.
No organization, for instance, could possibly get governmental funding to run candidates for party offices. But governmental funding to increase access to social services, to increase advocacy for social services, to improve advocacy for education or mass transportation, to help neighbors get to know each other and work together to solve community problems, all is possible although far from assured.
And it certainly would good if organizing could be done to remove the existing restrictions on legal services.
The paradox here is that some volunteer organizing has to be done to have a chance of getting governmental money for paid organizers. That will undoubtedly turn off some of those who feel that organizing is, or should be, a profession for which all work should be paid for. Those people should apply for foundation grants, which are not impossible to get for this purpose.
Right right right
All that makes sense. Just for hypothetical examples and to continue my picking on PFC (kidding!):
So you have a group with a big mailing list that picks projects, including a lot of electoral organizing (setting up canvasses for agreed-upon "progressive" candidates) and now some more specific issue-based projects (the PUP health center funding thing). What I'm envisioning is that sort of broad-based organization prioritizing throwing whatever weight it has behind an effort to demand money for organizing on X or Y topic. It seems totally possible and compatible. Just another, different, project to take on.
Take tenants' and other housing issues, for one basic one. We have great coalitions working on housing issues, but at least from what I can tell, not a ton of focus on organizing residents and people affected by housing policy, affordable housing shortfalls, etc.
This is pretty close to what I am getting at:
Certainly a ton of good work is already going on on the issues---a lot of issue-based advocacy and lobbying. But specifically trying to take on, as a "progressive" cause or project, the goal of pushing the government to fund the community organizing end--I think that's been kind of overlooked and could potentially create a lot of change and political power for underrepresented people. If you had a body of very organized tenants, for example, when the involved nonprofits are fighting over housing issues or the tax abatement renewal, you'd have a more defined and broadly-based constituency of people affected who could raise their voices directly.
anyone can use whatever I say...
...on this blog or whatever random website I ramble about comic books on whenever they want.
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BradyDale OnLine
The R.I.I.C. Blog
The Philadelphia Unemployment Project
Would love to be part of a conversation, in person
I would love to get together with people to talk face to face about organizing in this city. A few thoughts come to mind quickly:
-funding for grassroots (not electoral) organizing is in short supply. Institutions like Bread and Roses need a lot more support (I am a donor and on the board of Bread and Roses). We could learn a lot from places where donor organizing is funding movement-building (the Movement Strategy Center in the Bay Area comes to mind)
-what constitutes grassroots organizing-do you know it when you see it-needs to be explored. There are many groups organizing in this city that are unknown to many white middle class progressive leaders. That needs to change. Being an ally to groups that need support from those of us with privilege (in various forms) seems key. That may mean volunteering to help a group fundraise or looking out for groups that would like to have but don't have technology infrastructure.
-training, training and more training. Last Saturday Casino-Free Philadelphia had close to 50 people over for a direct action all day training with George Lakey. People like to learn skills and then apply them. Let's commit to training in all its forms-and not just for others but for ourselves.
Funding....
I think we've got to look beyond the traditional model of non-profits and donor funding. The problem with most activist organizations is that they rely on a small donor base and are therefore subject to the whims of those individuals. Of course, there are a lot of good people who contribute money to causes, but how many organizing campaigns or other projects spring up because a specific funder wants to see something happen? I understand that Bread and Roses exists to partially challenge this dynamic, but it's still a serious problem.
I think we've got to find other ways to fund social movements. Raising money from donors is fine, but it would also be nice to have revenue streams that are more stable. I think an interesting example is Uhuru's used furniture store. I have a lot of problems with Uhuru's politics, but I think they show some creativity by using a small business to partially fund their work. It would be great if other organizations could copy this model and actually make some money independent of donors.
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Check out my blog!
I like the idea of talking in person
and also, following Karen's comment, I'd be interested in hearing about your background (I know from reading here and there that you're involved in the anti-casino work and Bread and Roses, but before that?).
Karen is the president of
Karen is the president of Philly NOW and a Democratic committee person in the Ninth Ward. She's also just generally great.
I have always loved the idea of getting older and younger activists together to discuss organizing strategies. I originally met Karen through some folks at AFSCME DC 47 who have been involved in progressive politics much longer than me (which doesn't take much) and always feel like I benefit tremendously from those sorts of discussions. It isn't always easy to create a multi-generational space for dialog, but it's almost always worthwhile.
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Check out my blog!
GTGs for Organizing in the City
Drinking Liberally events would seem to be perfect places for this. I'm the host of DL's Mount Airy chapter, which meets on alternate Thursdays (until Labor Day, when we go back to each Thursday) at the Mermaid Inn, 7673 Germantown Ave., from 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM. And Center City's DL chapter meets each Tues. from 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM at Tangier, 18th + Lombard Sts. We'd love to hear bustling conversations on organizing in Philadelphia at future DLs in either or both locations.
-Z
perhaps no current organization...
I can just say that NN is really aimed toward helping people organize (and educate and motivate) their neighborhoods, which means that it's not really about meta-organizing. However, I think that you're right that groups of organizations can pool their resources to powerful effect -- in essence the Minimum Wage Coalition is a successful example of essentially that, along with the Transit Coalition and Fair Housing Initiative, which appear to draw on the expertise and support base of a range of organizations and individuals with shared interests. That ad hoc model (building a coalition for each need) isn't bad -- it's easier to get a group to agree on one issue than many, and it does mean that the leaders get to know (and hopefully trust) one another -- but it's only a starting point to building larger momentum for larger change. No idea who might be the right folks for the latter...
just thinking aloud,
acm
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead
The First Thing Is To Figure Out What You Want To Achieve
I think a lot of organizing efforts are over-intellectualized. There is a search for organizing issues that will enable organizers to bond with affected communities, but there is often little thought on the relationship between the organizing issues and what one's deepest goals are, and little thought even as to whether one wants to win on the organizing issues and whether winning on them will actually lead to the achievement of one's deepest or truest goals.
A lot of people over the years have gotten pretty cynical over organizers who say that want to achieve A, but mean they believe that A will lead to B, and B will lead to C, and C will lead to D, and D will lead to E, and then E will lead to the real goal of F. My belief is that often the best way to achieve F is to organize around F. Organizing around A on the belief that A will lead to F runs the risk of creating rifts with people who believe in A but are strongly against F or strongly doubt that F is possible or strongly believe that A is far more important than F.
The whole business of community organizing is hurt when the words of the organizers have to be intensively parsed and studied in great detail to determine their true motives. Contributing factors to the hysteria surrounding communist participation in the labor movement in the 1940's and 1950's and white participation in the civil rights movement in the 1950's and the 1960's were the widespread beliefs that they did not really have the interests of the people they said they were trying to help at heart, that they merely saw the people they were organizing as pawns in a larger struggle.
Saul Alinsky is a worthy role model, but far from a perfect one. His organizing base--the Catholic Church--is usually and unfortunately not available for many of today's key causes. He also was frequently accused of appealing to racist sentiments. And his upfront cynicism was rather shocking to many.
In one of his books, he tells the story of a bank that leaned in favor of evening hours, but got an apathetic reception from community groups to whom no one had complained about the lack of evening hours. One day the Alinsky organizer hears about this unaccepted offer for evening hours, and calls the bank to enquire as to whether the bank is still interested. The answer was yes.
So the organizer puts out a flyer denouncing the bank as insensitive to the community for not having evening hours. The flyer noted that other banks have evening hours, but not this one. It calls for protest demonstrations against the bank for not having evening hours. At the first demonstration, the bank announced that it has decided to have evening hours, and the Alinsky organization declares that this shows what vast power an aroused public has and uses this "victory" to recruit for other causes.
This however, in reality, was just taking a corporate idea and wrapping it up in the clothes of a progressive struggle. It is all too typical of too much of what goes on in politics.
So I strongly urge people to decide what they really want to achieve--something that is really worthwhile--and then figure out who potential allies might be and who has to be persuaded. Achieving real goals with real meaning builds up real credibility for the long haul.