Mumbai           In Delhi and Kolkata, I sat through meetings that were ostensibly government certified food safety meetings for hawkers.  Our affiliate, Janpahal, has been trained and certified to give these workshops about food safety.  Many topics are covered including the temperatures to cook chicken and other items.  Aprons, hair nets, and plastic gloves are distributed to all participants, which they dutifully don during the presentations.  The Indian government has made committed to support such programs and certifications for hawkers employed as street sellers.   There were more than 50 at the meeting in Delhi and over 200 in Kolkata.  It’s quite a sight to see whole crowds of men and women kitted out in this gear listening intently.

This is a two or more birds’ program with one stone.  The other part of the agenda is updating the assembled crowds on the work and progress of another ACORN affiliate, the Hawkers Joint Action Committee, the national federation, whose growth has been tremendous over recent years.  Providing the training with costs covered by the government in this case, allows the HJAC to provide a service, knit new affiliates in an area more tightly together, update people on the work of the Town Vending Committee, required in each community, and recruit new members and hawkers’ groups to the federation.  In Kolkata, two women leaders from Darjeeling, famous for its tea plantations in the far north of West Bengal, travelled more than 15 hours to come to the session, be recognized, and move closer to joining the Hawkers Joint Action Committee.

These are good examples of an often-unrecognized tool in membership-based organization building.  Most outsiders only see the outreach program of house meetings and door knocking, and often miss how much growth is also based on the intake program.  Like food safety, these programs don’t all look and feel the same, but are all intake, bringing the base to the office, organizers, and leaders, rather than pushing all of them out to the base.  In ACORN’s work in many offices in the USA, tens of thousands of members were recruited through housing and loan counselling workshops. Others came in for income tax assistance or benefit access.  Some offices like New Orleans and Philadelphia used “bank fairs” in much the same way, often funded by banks and mortgage company contributions, and drawing crowds of interested members and borrowers to see if they could get a loan for home repairs or purchase.  The membership tables were bumping during these affairs.  Covid distributions, whether masks and PPE in community and workplaces or food distributions in India, were also huge “intake” tools where people were brought together and found in doing so the value of collection action and joining the organization.

Even regular, monthly meetings of the organization are sometimes variations on these themes where guests at different times might be service providers, government representatives, or politicians. They are invited by ACORN in order to meet the needs of the community, but also swell the numbers past the usual members and regular order of business to give folks the opportunity via the organization’s platform to solve a problem or make a connection, and potentially join as well.  Since the pandemic, the New Orleans affiliate, A Community Voice, has done a mass, come one, come all, phone call every Thursday, where they host and provide the platform.  These group calls have become almost institutionalized as a forum for many, while also providing the organization a way to make its case.

Watching the crowd in Kolkata and Delhi, often attention would wander over the more than an hour-long food safety discussion, but when it came to chanting and raising their fist to hear the other speakers or shout the name of the Hawkers Joint Action Committee, everyone was on their feet.  It takes a lot of tools to build mass organization. In some cases, it means taking the program out to people, and in others, it means bringing the people into the program.