Quito Every country is different, every city is different, and every community is different. We start from there, and then we adapt what we have seen work in so many places and modify it to fit the circumstances and objectives of our organizing program. No matter how many times I have done this, it still seems like a glorious miracle when we re-engineer the model, gas it up, put it on the streets, and once again see it work, which is exactly what I have been doing with Marcos Gomez from ACORN Canada over the last week.
In collaboration with Ruptura 25, we have fashioned the ACORN program we call “puerta a puerta y calle” – the “door-to-door and street” program for building contacts and commitments of support throughout the community. Yesterday we put the organizers who are going to be our potential field managers in Carcelen, an area that our friends thought might be hostile. Even on their rookie trip, the organizers did very well, so we’re on our way! “Count-on-me’s” or “Cuenta Conmigo!” as we call them were signed by 10% of the visits almost. Another 10% agreed to host house meetings (reunions en casa), and we had 25% of the visits rank as #1’s which is too high, but they will get more accurate as we go along. It’s exhilarating!
In Quito “seguridad” or safety is a constant concern. We have to navigate the visits through gates, bells, windows, and iron doors. Multi-story buildings lead us to the house meeting program to build our organizing committees in buildings, much as we learned to do in Buenos Aires and Toronto. We are pulling the organizers off the streets at 6PM as darkness closes in, so the schedule involves training, then street work among business and high traffic areas in the neighborhood to accelerate contacts on our 10-week timeline, and then four (4) hours puerta a puerta followed by the debriefing.
Some things change, but some things stay the same. We may be posting the daily results on butcher paper with all the organizers names in our “territorio oficina,” as they call it here, but we’re also posting the daily totals on Google Drive, so other folks can see the results in a timely fashion. We text back and forth to determine locations on the streets, which in much of our areas are letters and numbers (C-45 for example), rather than having names, particularly where the barrios began as informal squatting settlements.
Today we put out twenty (20) organizers to start the program, ready-or-not, in earnest in Quito Norte. We made plans for expanding to Guayaquil yesterday. Plans are moving for next week in Santo Domingo, the 4th largest city. A trip to Manabi on the coast, will open another front.
Adelante!
