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Don Elmer berichtet in Berlin über Entwicklungen im
Center
for Community Change
Presentation in
Germany,
September 25, 2009.,
Don Elmer
Introduction
I feel very blessed to be here with you today.
In 1993 & in 1994, I believe, Ed Shurna & I did community organizer
training sessions here in Germany with a group now called
FOCO. Later, the two of us came
again to work with Paul Cromwell, who works with FOCO & ECON.
I have worked with Paul for many years & feel honored to be asked to come
to share with you today.
It was an accident that I got into community organizing.
It was not my intention to do so.
My father was a pastor & because of his impact on my life, I ended up
going to seminary in Chicago in the mid 60’s.
There were three very important events in Chicago during that period of time: 1) One was that Martin
Luther King, Jr. brought his civil rights campaign north & specifically to Chicago.
It had a huge impact on my life.
I’m not sure I would have gotten into organizing without that movement
experience. 2) Secondly, I met Paul Tillich during the time he spent at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
His understanding of God or the Ultimate as the ground of all being
continues to impact me to this day.
As a result I see God as not simply out there, but within us as individuals,
within us as a collective, & indeed within all of creation.
That mystery connects us to what is deepest in us & most powerful as
well. 3) Finally, Saul Alinsky, the
Father of modern day community organizing had a huge presence in Chicago during this time.
I like to say that community organizing is as old as Moses in the Old
Testament and Paul in the New Testament.
The concept is not new, but the modern day version of it (in the
US
at least) is traced to Saul Alinsky.
I kept running into Alinsky & pastors who had worked with him during my
time in seminary. He was bold and
brash & connected my theological training to the real world.
Alinsky could more than hold his own with theologians & with sociologists
of his time. To cut to the chase, I
decided that I would work in one of his organizations in
Chicago for one year before I returned to my home in
North Dakota to be a pastor.
Well, after two weeks, I knew I would never leave!
So I ended up being ordained as a United Methodist Minister the same
summer I began my work as a community organizer in 1970.
I organized in Chicago for 7 years during
which time we (National Peoples Action) did the first national campaign which
eventuated in national legislation to mandate that banks re-invest in low income
& communities of color. As a result
$1.4 Trillion has been invested in low income communities as a result of that
one piece of legislation. I then
spent 4 years in Washington,
DC putting together an African
American organization that fought for the right to stay in an area close to the
White House & the Congress & to make sure African Americans would not be
displaced by unfair condo conversion laws.
Next, I became the first director of a congregation based community
organization in Denver, Colorado serving Latinos, African Americans &
Whites. The organization is now a
part of the PICO National Network
of Community Organizations. Since
1987 I have been an organizer with Center for Community Change, which has its
headquarters in Washington,
DC, though I live in
Seattle, Washington.
I have worked to build new organizations around the country, trained &
mentored organizers, helped pull together organizations around the country to
work together on national issues, & run the Community Organizer Genealogy
Project (www.organizergenealogy.org).
There, now that’s more than enough background!
What is Community Organizing?
I was asked to spend a little time on my understanding of the basics of
community organizing. Keep in mind,
these are my own views, I don’t claim to speak for everyone.
Further, my views are based on my experience within the US
which means that they are limited to that experience.
So what is community
organizing? The tradition
within the United States is that there are two
essential components of community organizing.
The first is the ability to win victories on the issues facing a
particular community. The second is
the building of an organization that can sustain itself, continue to win on the
issues, & to speak for the community.
But let me give you a more expanded view of what I think community
organizing is about.
1)
At the heart of community organizing
is the building of a genuine sense of
community.
In the United States relationships between
people in institutions & in society as a whole have broken down.
We don’t know one another.
Modern life has isolated us from one another.
Head phones, personal iPods, blaring TV’s & non stop noise in general
have cut us off from one another.
Even in church we don’t know the person sitting next to us in the pew.
So in the US
it has been very difficult to re-build the web of relationships necessary to see
ourselves as one people or one family rather than separated & disconnected
individuals. The organizers job is
to help tear down the walls between our selves & our neighbors.
And in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. we are called to build the
beloved community, a community that loves & cares for one another.
And with that community we have the chance to forge a new identity & a
new reality. In the
US
organizers generally begin in communities that are poor & populated with
significant numbers of people of color.
In this setting it is even more important, to begin with building a sense
of community among people who have been isolated & oppressed by society at
large. When they have re-connected
with themselves as a community, they can then engage with the broader society
from a position of strength not weakness.
2)
A second task is to build an
organization that fosters this relationship building, that fosters a
democratic process within the organization, & that facilitates joint action to
bring about justice & the mending of relationships with the broader society.
So you start with building a sense of community, then you build an
organization that holds this community together, & enables it to take action on
the issues that divide this community from society at large.
This community & this organization can then build its own vision of what
they want for their community through an organization that they own.
Then they are not at the mercy of a top down political process that says
they should do this or that. Now
they can determine for themselves who they will be.
3)
A third task is re-connecting people
to their own sense of power & to their
collective power.
This is not easy to accomplish.
Traditionally, organizers have helped people connect to personal &
collective power by going into action on the issues.
If they win on getting their garbage picked up or getting a foot bridge
over a dangerous highway, they might begin to get a sense of their own power.
Though this is an important step it is often not nearly enough.
Just because the group won something, doesn’t mean that the individuals
themselves feel powerful. It may
not even touch their battered self esteem!
To help a person get in touch with their own power takes time & effort.
It often starts with listening to there own life stories.
Congregation based community organizing
has helped us see that the spiritual dimension can uncover our inherent worth &
can put mystery back in our individual & collective lives.
What the organizer is trying to do is to help people see themselves as
makers of history rather than observers of it in the same way that the children
of Israel
did. That understanding can unleash
incredible power in individuals & communities alike.
It can also unleash a powerful reaction from those in power, but no
genuine change comes without it as exemplified in the Children of Israel in
Egypt, & in the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s & in the
immigration issue today in the
United States.
4)
A fourth task is helping a community
develop their own vision of who they are
& what kind of community they want to
have. No vision or a small
vision will get you in trouble.
“Without a vision the people perish.”
The organizers job is to agitate for a large & authentic vision.
What’s recently helped us in the US the most is the fact that a
former community organizer became president, a guy by the name of Barack Obama.
No one believed that an organizer or a leader of a community organization
would ever become president of the United States.
Barack Obama helped explode our small vision for individuals & community
organizations in the movement. All
of a sudden anything seems possible for community organizations in the
US.
We can and have made history; we’re not just observers.
5)
A fifth task is to help organizations
demand respect & act with power in the public arena.
The key here is for the organizer to remember the iron rule of
organizing: Never do for others what they can do for themselves.
If we assume people cannot do what we can do, we undermine their sense of
self respect & they become dependent upon us.
That becomes a catastrophe for them and for us.
This stance is arrogant & judgmental.
Even the most ordinary people can do the most extra-ordinary things.
All of us have the capacity to act powerfully because all of us have
access to the power of God within us & within all of creation.
I want to emphasize that it is important for communities to demand
respect for themselves & to demand action from public officials or corporations
on the issues that the community faces.
They deserve to be heard & respected.
It doesn’t matter what those issues are; it could be anything from
garbage collection to bank misconduct, it could be to traffic problems to public
education. We encourage them to
start with issues that are small enough to win quickly, so that their confidence
grows. In that way they can take on
bigger & bigger issues in the future.
The organizers task is to prepare leaders to take on community issues &
demand results in the public arena. They will find strength & even mystery in
that collective action.
Various Kinds of Organizing in the
United States
1)
Individual Membership Organizations
– Individuals join the organization.
2)
Organization of Organizations
– Organizations join the overall organization.
These organizations may be loose networks of people or formal
organizations, but they have a very loose relationship to the overall
organization. Participation in
meetings tends to determine “membership.”
3)
Institution Based Community
Organizations – Similar to organization of organizations, but these are
generally more formal or powerful organizations like congregations, unions,
social service agencies, & community organizations.
Also these institutions have a very formal relationship with the overall
organization that might include dues, agreement on organizer & leadership
training, organizer time with each organization, consultation on internal
development of each member institution, etc. Many
institution based community organizations are church based alone in the
United States, though some are beginning to
move to a mixed group of institutions described above.
4)
Single Issue Organizations –
Examples here might be organizations that only work on Jobs, or Immigration
Reform, or Health Care Reform, or Civil Rights, or whatever.
5) In the United States,
organizers generally have a bias for
multi-issue organizations
so that if one issue dies out you still have others to carry on without having
to create a new organization each time an issue dies.
6)
Networks of Community Organizations
– Examples include Industrial Areas Foundation, Gamaliel Foundation, PICO Network, DART Network, National Peoples Action,
& ACORN. These networks tend to
have local community organizations that join the network and pay dues to get
formal training, get help in finding organizers, get help in learning how to do
fundraising, get regular mentoring & consultations, etc.
Some of the networks like Gamaliel, PICO, National Peoples Action, & ACORN do national
issue work as well.
7)
Independent Local Organizations
– There are thousands of these organizations who are not formally related to any
network. Center for Community
Change has often been an informal support to many of these organizations & has
encouraged them to either join a network or at least work with other
organizations on statewide or national issues.
Quick Modern Day History of Community Organizing in the United States
1) Saul Alinsky started with a single organization in
Chicago
called Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in
1938.
It was made up of packinghouse workers trying to build a union under the
Congress of Industrial Organizations, Churches representing eastern European
immigrants, community groups, youth, etc.
For the next 20 years there were other organizations started like
community councils in cities like South St. Paul,
Omaha, & Kansas City.
There was an important organization in California called
Community Service Organizations run by Fred Ross who later found Caesar Chavez
who formed the United Farmworkers Workers of America.
These organizations launched the community organizing movement associated
with Alinsky in the United States.
In the early years organizations came one at a time & most were
neighborhoods within large cities.
2) In the 60’s & 70’s
in the midst of the civil rights movement, the Peace Movement, & the Women’s
movement community organizing really took off.
The movements brought in large numbers of young people who wanted to
learn how to organize & Alinsky organizing became the place to go.
Organizations like Northwest Community Organization in
Chicago, FIGHT in Rochester, NY, The
Woodlawn Organization in Chicago & Organization for a Better Austin in Chicago as well became very
powerful & some were seen as a part of the Civil Rights Movement like The
Woodlawn Organization & FIGHT.
During this time organizations began to spread all over the country mostly one
organization at a time. The
Industrial Areas Foundation & later National Peoples Action spawned many of
these organizations, but others began to spring up spontaneously as well.
3) 80’s & 90’s
In the late 60’s Alinsky started the
first training institute for community organizing & later National Peoples
Action & ACORN formed them as well. In the early years there was no formal
training, you learned by working in a local organization under a more
experienced organizer. But the creation of training institutes & networks of
organizations didn’t really take off until the early 80’s.
When President Reagan was elected in 1980, he pulled back on
Vista Volunteers & job training programs that organizers used to
hire & pay new organizers. As a
result organizations that used to have 15 organizers went down to 5 & those who
had five went down to 1, & thousands of organizers lost all their staff & died.
In this crisis, organizers were forced to come up with new ways to
survive and thrive. First of all
many organizers decided to move to an institutional style of organizing (that
IAF had pioneered) that used fewer but more experienced organizers & most of
them swore off taking government funding completely.
Congregation based organizing began to flourish during this time.
Secondly, organizers decided to get serious about building networks of
community organizations that could help each other in crises, could help train
organizers & leaders, could help raise funds for organizing & so on.
Out of these efforts, were born three new networks,
PICO Network, DART, & the Gamaliel Foundation to join IAF,
National Peoples Action, ACORN, & Citizen Action (now called US Action).
All of them grew & became more powerful during the 80’s & 90’s.
As a result, thousands & thousands of organizations were born & were able
to not only survive but thrive.
4) 2000 to the Present
Over the years the different networks were extremely competitive with one
another & old fights & egos dominated their relationships.
Those fights kept us from winning on things we could have won if we could
have worked together. Slowly but
surely some of those fights have died down & there are signs that a new era has
dawned. Center for Community Change
has been able to get many of them in the same room to take on national issues
like health care reform & immigration reform.
Some of the networks have made special deals with one another to
cooperate like Gamaliel & ACORN and PICO
& National Peoples Action. And
gradually community organizations & unions have begun to work together as well.
The United States is a huge country &
there is no way to win on significant issues alone.
We work together & win or we work separately & lose.
It’s actually a very exciting time to be an organizer in the US now.
Part of that is because of what happened in the last election. More
organizations are now doing voter work along with the organizing.
As a result politicians have taken us more seriously.
We don’t take positions on candidates but we track who opposes or agrees
with our issue positions. Center
for Community Change held a Presidential Candidates Forum in 2004 where leaders
of the organizations not the media asked all the questions.
We held another one in Dec. 2007 with 4,000 people in attendance.
Not only were our own people impressed with the results, but politicians
were thrilled to be able to talk directly to the people and not be interrupted
by the media or another candidate.
Our leaders did follow up questions & got fresh answers free from their canned
speeches. In Dec. of 07 our leaders
asked each of the candidates if they would meet with our groups after the
election. Obama said I’ll go one
step further & have you meet with my transition team before I take office so I
get your ideas on where we should go in my first 100 days in office.
He kept that promise & as a result we have access to his administration
we could not have dreamed of previously.
But we have much work to do to really make an impact.
We are presently involved in getting a health care reform package through
Congress & the Senate. The country
has been waiting for 70 years for that to happen.
We’re also fighting for immigration reform & and a jobs program that
capitalizes on green energy.
5) Why churches or
congregations get involved in community organizing
In the United States many congregations get involved in social service
projects to help the poor, but get overwhelmed by the need they see everywhere.
They simply can’t take care of all the needs people have.
Many congregations now want to use community organizing to get at the
causes of the needs people have rather than just give out free food or shelter.
Another reason congregations get involved is that organizing is a
practical way of doing ministry in the world.
It’s a way to share their values with the world.
In the United States individuals are
expected to minister to others in the world, but there is no way for people to
do it collectively as a whole congregation or as an ecumenical group of
congregations. Community organizing
has given them a structure to do that collective ministry.
Another reason congregations get involved is that community organizing
revitalizes individual congregations.
It’s exciting to be a part of a congregation that doesn’t just pray
alone, but that goes into action with folks in its surrounding community to
bring love & justice into the lives of others.
Other congregations get involved because it’s exciting to work with an
interfaith group of people. You get
to meet people you’d never know otherwise.
Finally, congregations feel more powerful, rather than feeling like
victims in their own communities.
They can be a part of changing the realities of their community; they can be a
part of history rather than just being an observer of history.
6) Where does the money come
from to pay for an organizer in the
US?
A)
A major source of money comes from dues paid by individuals or
organizations for membership.
B) Another important source of money are
fundraisers that the organization itself puts together.
Examples might include ethnic food festivals, dances, or raffles.
C) Community Organizations sometimes do
business or corporate campaigns for money within their community or city.
They ask the businesses to invest in the organization as a way of
improving the community for its residents & for business as well.
If outside sources of money don’t see much money from dues, fundraisers,
or local corporate campaigns they may not feel like the membership is really
committed to the organization.
D) Congregations that are members of a
community organization often go to regional or national church bodies for
funding. In the US the
Catholic Campaign for Human Development is a major source of funding as are the
Methodists or Lutherans.
E) Another major source of money for
community organizations in the US are secular foundations.
I really enjoyed being among you all.
I appreciated your attention to my presentation & your very lively
participation in the question & answers period.
I wish you well as you embark on this journey called community
organizing. May it enrich your
congregations, your entire religious community, & all of Germany.
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