New Orleans

Re:generate Trust has focused on developing “community activists” according to its literature, rather than community organizers.  Their methodology correctly takes “listening” as a foundational part of the organizing process, which I agree is fundamental and often not sufficiently credited (see my NPR piece on this website), but then it veers away from developing organization and engaging in building power at least in any way that I can discern.  To the degree that Prime Minister Cameron’s Big Society centerpiece now focuses on training and developing 4500 volunteer “organizers” as the outcome of this contract it is a certainty that we are really only talking about identifying gatekeepers and channeling activists.

For all of the talk about these community insertions, particularly in the wake of the ongoing riots, it seems that we should really translate the language of “building social capital” into “achieving social control.”  Those that might have ascribed an agenda to Cameron and his government of creating burrs in the saddle of local governments and bureaucracies in the current austerity slimming have misunderstood their intentions completely.  This is about tamping down trouble, creating pressure values for hopelessness, rage, and malaise, and effective use of soft power to achieve great social control in poor localities.  Community organizing is at risk of undergoing a total perversion of program and purpose in the way this worm has now turned, regardless of what might have been the best intentions of Citizens UK and Locality, particularly given the current crisis in British society.  Given the evolution of this type of organizing methodology in Britain, perhaps this evolutionary aberration was inevitable and intentional.

The “lessons” being drawn by the powers that be in Britain from the current unrest are profoundly disturbing.  The role of the police and second guessing of its tactics in dealing with British unrest recall nothing so much as the same debate in Cairo in the wake of the street protests there and whether or not police are an instrument of public safety or the hard fist of political power.   Cameron might be vying for a place in the dock with Mubarak in his widely reported call now to shut down social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, curtail use of smartphones, and generally eliminate civil liberties in a new British Raj imposed on poor neighborhoods in London, Birmingham, and other cities.

As George Lakoff or Drew Westen might argue, part of this is a desperate governmental effort at strategic reframing.  Cameron wants to limit all debate and conversation to the issue of vandalism and “criminality” wrenched from any other context.

The context that British society with the help until very recently of most of the press and world media is most interested in fleeing has to do not just with poverty, but as importantly with race and the huge divisions that are masked over in denial in British culture and politics.  The riots were ignited after all in Detroit like fashion with the injury to a black man, yet the usual “narrative” stumbled when so many of the rioters seemed to be the young whites typecast as soccer hooligans in Brit-speak.  The tragic killing of three South Asians acting somewhere on the fault line in Birmingham between vigilantes and community “police,” through vehicular homicide with an Afro-Caribbean driver underscores this divide as well as recalling the fierce violence in the UK’s second largest city a couple of years ago between black citizens and south Asian cities.

There seem to be acknowledged institutions that respond to the rigid class divide in British society though like the unions and the Labour Party they are weakening and diluted, which may be part of the problem here as well.  There do not yet seem to be such recognized institutions that are part of the practice and byplay of power in the UK.  Given the different though critical importance and recognition of the role of race in the last 60 years of American political life, it is past debate that gatekeepers, activists, mediators, animators, and others are all nice, but irrelevant to making progress around race and its tensions.  Dialogue and debate in the absence of real political, institutional, and economic power is a fake conversation from the first words to the last.   We are witnessing powerlessness feeding on itself not on some kind of text messaging, flash mob phenomena and then erupting in violence and rage.  Race matters in Britain, too, and they need to read the memo, not just note that they saw it on streets and in the news.  This is a call for radical surgery and not Band-Aids.  People have to find a place and a voice now or there is nothing but the fire next time, especially for the disposed among the poor and racial minorities.

A government now even more committed to command-and-control, cutbacks, and conservativism does not get that, but community organizations and organizers need to fully embrace both the challenge and opportunity.  The curious contradiction at the heart of the United Kingdom debate over the role of organizers speaks to a growing, unacknowledged divide in our work as well.  Even while we all continue to speak the language of power building, the role of organizers in this process is being distorted.  They are being placed at the head of class, not at the back.  They are being separated from their role as organization builders and twisted into a role as mediators, translators, reconcilers, and advocates, which may all be valid parts of the job description but have no meaning when uprooted outside of specific organizational service and context.

Though it is controversial in the United States, it is ridiculous for organizers to pretend that we are not agitators, since our business is creating change and building power.  Somehow in the United Kingdom, and perhaps elsewhere, community organizers are being confused with collaborators, confidants, networkers, process technicians, organizational theorists, and relationship experts, which can easily lead to misunderstandings about whether we are instruments of social control or organizational empowerment.  There is hardly anything more strange than imagining community organizers as insiders (there reasons that Barack Obama was not a good community organizer and had to find a way to make a living elsewhere after all!) rather than outsiders.  We are not the handmaidens of power, but the working tools of the powerless.

The riots in the United Kingdom against the backdrop of the potential distortion of community organizing as part of Cameron’s Conservative Party Big Society are a wakeup call for organizers and organizations to get back to basics and the fundamentals of our work.  The traditional culture of community organizing emerged from the riots in the United States that centered the debate about poverty and race.  The contemporary culture that puts a necktie and a prayer on the deep demand for power and change needs to remember and return to a recognition that power is not build without struggle, demand, and, even conflict.  The United Kingdom now needs great community organizers to help build powerful community organizations to work fight right at the crossroads of these issues now.  The advertisements are not for training programs with the “kickstarters” in September, but right now in the headlines of the daily papers and the film footage of burning stores and cars.   The organizations and organizers that step into the streets of London and Birmingham and elsewhere now can create the change that matters.

New Orleans

Citizens UK as the widely acknowledged inside lane front runner for the contract was embarking on its bid for a first time every government contract.  Having been an advocate of organizing, the program was partially a concession to their growing stature.  Doubtlessly, Citizens UK would have had reservations about the whole mess given their tradition and commitment to building power in carefully orchestrated formations through painstakingly patient methodology, but nonetheless would have felt compelled to compete rather than surrender the likely hegemony over community organizing that the bid winner would have not only for the four year span of the project, but even more so through the creation of a permanent training capacity for the long term future.   Reading and watching the situation, I could not help thinking about the same Hobson’s choice ACORN had felt in establishing CORAP (the Community Organizing, Research and Action Project) in 1978 to seek and then receive one-hundred VISTA volunteers in the opening years of perestroika during the Carter Administration.  Almost needless to say, by training the volunteers and putting them directly into ACORN organizing programs, some of which most controversially included advocating for household workers in New Orleans who were then being newly covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the contract was terminated after one-year despite the fact that liberal luminaries at the times like ACTION’s Sam Brown (previously of anti-war moratorium fame) and VISTA’s Marge Tabankin (formerly of the Youth Project), followed later in a prequel to the events 30 years later including Congressional hearings and all manner of mayhem.

But, a funny, though not surprising, thing happened on the way to the bank and the endless future travails of governmental contract administration:  Citizens UK did NOT get the contract.  The wheels had seemed to have been greased, yet the contract came off the rails.

Why?  There are probably too many right answers, since more appropriately from a distance and a US-perspective, I would have wondered how anyone, including Citizens UK, might have thought they could have been awarded such a contract.  For it to have happened would have been such a political contradiction that it would have made the award miraculous.  By definition conservative, rightwing governments do not invest in power building for the poor.  The analogous situation would have seen faith-based community organizations (FBCOs) winning lavish support from President George W. Bush’s initiative to support faith based initiatives with a special office and funds during his terms;  that was politics and patronage, not policy and empowerment or allowing ACORN to create a national training center under President Clinton or Gamaliel under the Obama Administration due to their past ties with him.  No way is any of that happening!  There is simply a fundamental difference in building — and seizing — power by low-and-moderate income families and their communities and any government, especially on the right, giving away power or ceding it through such collaborations.

That’s my cut on why Citizens UK came a cropper.  An added problem likely was the fact that they had also been in very public discussions with the out-of-power Labour Party leadership, and even sometimes with the Conservative Party apparatchiks about some form of training program that would modernize their operations.  As the Loving Spoonful once sang, “sometimes you have to pick up on one, and leave the other behind,” and I would make a solid bet that the footsy with the parties made a big government contract highly unlikely.  It is possible that Citizens UK had also come to that conclusion internally and therefore had assessed the risk and went with one in hand rather than stalking harder the bird still in the bush.  A friend reported having run into Arnie Graf, the well respected Baltimore-based IAF organizer over in London in June already doing some consulting with Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband, to this end, though of course the outcome of the contract was settled by then.

The winner of the contract was a newly created amalgamation called Locality, formed by a merger of two mainline UK national community development non-profits with long government contracting experience, the Development Trusts Association and the British Association of Settlements and Social Action Centres (BASSAC).  According to Matt Parker, a former BASSAC employee writing on a community organizing listserv based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Locality’s winning bid involved the following:

“Locality committed to deliver a 21st century UK version of community organising training based around the programme of the ReGenerate Trust, a training agency little known in the UK. They have pioneered an organising approach ‘Root Solution -Listening Matters’ based on the work of Paulo Friere and Saul Alinsky.  Locality recruited eleven local hosts from their membership to act as KickStarters to get the programme underway in a short timeframe. They will act as the pilot sites with more hosts being recruited through an open process from the autumn / fall.”

Though Parker claims they are little known, ReGenerate Trust boasts of a 20-year history of conciliatory programming on their website with an avowed aim of reducing poverty through mediating collaborations of the poor with police and other local officials.  Perhaps more revealing and elucidating is a quote on their home page from Cameron before he became Prime Minister:

”’…the people that run them(social enterprises) are the real entrepreneurs – as dynamic and as forward thinking as the like of Richard Branson and Anita Roddick…. In North Tyneside recently, I met the people who run RE:generate, which creates community activists by going door to door, listening to people’s concerns…. Social enterprises like these are dealing with some of the most intractable problems facing society, family breakdown, chaotic home environments, persistent unemployment, drugs, crime. Just as business entrepreneurs have helped cure the British economic disease, so social entrepreneurs can help cure Britain’s social malaise…. They are vehicles of innovation.’  David Cameron – Leader of the Conservative Party”

According to Parker, Locality attributes its winning the contract over Citizens UK to the fact that it submitted a much cheaper bid and that they were superior in the interview portion of the process.   I can only speculate, but perhaps Citizens’ Neil Jameson was frank in continuing to discuss empowerment at that stage of the game?  There is certainly nothing quickly visible in their website that would lead anyone to believe that they will create organizations or perhaps even organizers rather than “community animators,” a hybrid term I only know from years of work in Canada which is a cross between advocates, facilitators, and street workers.  As close as Re:generate comes to talking about “power” that I could find quickly was in its “outcomes” section, and that only refers to “personal empowerment,” as you can see below:

We foster social inclusion and build the social capital that drives holistic development. We stimulate voluntary action, learning, employment, social enterprise and awareness of citizenship.  Our work is about personal empowerment, restoring a sense of the collective, rebuilding networks of trust, and helping communities express their spirit in a way that official structures can relate to them.  Statutory agencies who work closely with us can harness community power and boost local democracy.  The process we initiate is self-sustaining because it releases creativity, trust and self-confidence, enabling communities to run their own projects rooted in their own agendas, allowing us to eventually withdraw.”

On the whole this contract award looks like a safe, should I say “conservative” bet.  Furthermore, the cheaper bid meant a training process involving a three-day session together and then remote supervision while connected to the pilot “kickstarters” within their own apparatus.  Locality’s negotiations over how to pay the “community organizers,” were difficult because the rate of pay was gross before taxes and potentially compromised any autonomy for the organizers.  The rate was 20,000 pounds or $35,000 USD roughly.  This problem has delayed the kickoff of the program but ended up with the organizers as hourly clocked employees of Locality itself.

Tomorrow let’s look at the chances of any of this making much of a difference and the clear and obvious intentions for the program’s future in the United Kingdom and any chance that it will speak to the continuing social unrest that has now erupted tensely throughout the country.  In Part III let’s also examine why “race” as one of the issues at the heart of all of this has been so successfully submerged.

New Orleans

All of this is becoming crystal clear as change continues to come in the Middle East. When reporters began interviewing the small cadre of younger activists who seemed to serve as the catalytic organizers of the early protests and marches that ended up toppling the Mubarak regime in Egypt they were unequivocal in explaining that the sea change in their development of a significant mass base of support was when they finally abandoned middle and upper income neighborhoods with their call for democracy and participation and instead went directly to the poor and working areas and called to people flatly about their need for jobs, higher wages, and better housing. In other words when they turned from being sloganeering activists to fundamental organizers, and in fact community organizers, talking to people about their real issues and helping them link the connections to the lack of responsiveness of the government, then they saw success.

The superficial intellectual left critique of community organizing for decades has been the inability of community organizations to move past stop signs, drainage, and loose dogs to “more fundamental” societal and political issues in their analysis. To say that such a criticism is elitist is equally one-dimensional. To answer simply that one builds a base with such issues is also less than satisfying and does nothing to silence such criticism if there is no further explication of what the base might do or essentially “power for what.” Frankly, too often community organizing has stuttered and stalled past the “stop signs” so to speak. The Alinsky formulation of “organizing the organized” and aversion to direct politics has continued to confuse many organizations and their organizers in the United States for decades. ACORN’s very difference and distinctiveness in strategy and battlegrounds made it target, and the lack of consensus on these very issues isolated the organization, fatally as it turned out.

No such qualms about the effectiveness of such issues in developing strategy and tactics can be seen in the Middle East or elsewhere. A fascinating piece, “Revolution U” on the work of some of the old Optor organizers from Serbia written by Tina Rosenberg in Foreign Affairs, was forwarded to me by a friend, and gave a fascinating report on her witnessing conversations between Srdja Popovic, one of the founders of Belgrade-based CANVAS (Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies) along with Slobodan Djinovic, with activists among the Burmese trying to organize against this repressive regime. The conversation was one I have witnessed and been a participant in perhaps a 1000 times, as the group discussed possible issues useful for organizing and began focusing on discontent around garbage collection and the strategies and tactics useful in moving people around the issue. From our organizing with ACORN International in slums around the world, we know that garbage is the developing world’s “stop sign” issue as a failsafe common concern that is virtually universal.

CANVAS has had these kinds of basic trainings in what can only be called community organizing techniques applied to political action in fifty different countries around the world. Not all of them have ended in revolution. This is not a cookbook session after all. Nonetheless the seeds have been planted and the inevitability of change is present as long as the end is clear and the work is done.

Community organizing is dangerous stuff in the hands of people who want to participate fully as citizens and create democratic change. Anyone who opposes the will of such people expressed with determination and dedication, should be worried, whether Glenn Beck, Republican Congressmen, or dictators wherever they may live and rule.

New Orleans

Nick had some small questions for the introduction of a book he was finishing for Perseus which he described as something of a homage to Alinsky.  He wanted my opinion on Alinksy’s legacy.  We talked about the several times that Alinksy had done sessions with my staff at Massachusetts Welfare Rights in early 1970 and various other things that we dispatched quickly.

More interesting to me was my quid pro quo. I wanted to ask Nick a couple of questions from his time about Alinksy’s real views from his perspective as opposed to the views that have been carried forward by the acolytes to the present.

One was whether Alinksy’s hostility to “movements” as opposed to “organizations” was tactical or fundamental.  Von Hoffman replied quickly that in his view there had been a lot of false attributions in his name.  He claimed that he had not heard Alinsky make this argument, and told me a story, that I thought I had read in an Alinsky biography, about when he was organizing The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) in Chicago and some of the TWO leaders wanted to invite some of the Freedom Riders to come to a meeting.  He was not too excited because in the past when they had pushed for similar meetings and they were lucky to pull 25 folks.  This time there was a huge crowd!  Nick said that he was talking to Saul, who was in Carmel (CA) later that night after the meeting, and told him about the meeting and that there was a real movement afoot.  Saul asked him to send him a memo, because this was worth attention.  Nick claimed he had never heard Saul movement bashing, and expressed surprise based on this story.

Of course I had heard Saul on this rant myself and it is well reported, but von Hoffman’s insight was valuable, because it might reveal something closer to Alinsky’s real opinions and curiosities rather than how he felt he had to handle his business in public.  Nick also told me there had been a serious debate, led by Saul, about putting the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) out of business and retooling to a wider range of projects, including an attack on the Daley machine in Chicago, but with his death that didn’t happen obviously.

Similarly I thought from the Alinsky book on John Lewis that his view of movements should have been different from his arguments there, but I also assumed the labor federation structure had fueled the “organization of organization” structure used in the Alinsky organizations in the 1950-60’s particularly.  Von Hoffman also pushed back on that and argued that Alinsky would have been much more open and flexible about the ACORN structure and membership base, and cited the work done with Fred Ross and the Community Service Organization (CSO) in California.

All of this led me to my second real question about the why Alinsky organizations were so apolitical and anti-political despite the discussions about power.  My theory had always been that if that were really Alinksy’s viewpoint, it came from the environmental experience in Chicago and the power of the Daley democratic machine then.  Von Hoffman scoffed at all of this.  He believed the only reason any of the Alinsky or IAF had to strictly with funders and the ease of getting funding to a tax exempt organization.  He said he and Saul talked about politics all of the time and none of what ACORN had done in terms of moving political action would have been anything but applauded by Alinsky.

Who knows at this point?  It’s nice to have someone like von Hoffman looking after the Alinsky legacy and willing to broaden Alinksy’s vision and work to encompass much of what has grown up and proven successful in the last almost 40 years since his death.  I hope someone does as much for me 40 years after I’m dead!

It was such a pleasure to have the conversation after all of these years with Nick.  I remember what he actually wrote about ACORN decades ago when he was a columnist, but didn’t bring it up, since he had already joked about not remembering much of what he had written in the past himself.  One thing about the right’s new – and perverse – interest in Alinksy’s books, is that it probably made room for something that von Hoffman would get to write now with this new audience, so that’s a contribution I should thank the Glen Beck people for myself.

207 turns out to be in Maine, so once there’s a spring thaw, I’ll start looking for this volume, and Nick was delighted that I was interested in an excerpt in Social Policy, so this is all good.