New Orleans      Talking to someone today who is part of the larger community of organizers, he started by saying that he bet that we knew some of the same people.  He mentioned Bill Lipton and Bob Masters, who had been boon comrades in the Working Families Party in New York, as well as Danny Cantor, who goes back even farther with me to Stuttgart, Arkansas and St. Louis where he worked for ACORN and with Local 100 in New Orleans and more.

His comment was incisive, revealing both a strength and a weakness of our subculture of organizing for change and power.  It’s a great thing that we have a community.  There’s strength in that.  I read a book recently about a parallel network of community organizing that branched out from Saul Alinksy.  I marveled at the fact that I knew 80% or more of the organizers mentioned, even though they worked on the other side of the street, so to speak.  The weakness though is that in building power to scale, whether in a campaign or an organization, we don’t need or want such a close degree of separation, not only for our sake, but also for the larger movement for change.  Some observers make that point about the farmworkers, civil rights, and even ACORN that big operations assemble large numbers of people to do the work, members and staff, and their experience seeds hundreds and thousands of other organizations that are similar or in the allied trades.

In another conversation this week, the community service initiative in Maryland, championed by Governor Wes Moore for young people and financed with $20,000 in a state subsidy, matched my $10,000 from the host agency, was brought up as a potential source of workers to expand our work with benefit recipients in the state.  That was interesting, and it was true.  I can remember how critical community service corps “slots” were on a similar plan in building Massachusetts Welfare Rights Organization, when I was there.  Reading Beryl Satter’s new book on the development of the Community Redevelopment Act, she mentioned how important it was in building some of the early work in Chicago, that they were able to recruit and deploy 60 VISTA volunteers.  Importantly at the time, since VISTAs were paid a stipend, it was not counted as wages, allowing welfare recipients to do VISTA community service and retain their welfare benefits.  VISTAs assigned to community action agencies funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity in the late 60s and early 70s were lifeblood in growing and expanding NWRO.  Gary Delgado was the first organizer I hired for ACORN, but the next six or seven people on staff were repurposed VISTA volunteers, who we recruited to build ACORN.  Former Prime Minister Cameron’s so-called community organizing program in the UK played an equally important role in our founding ACORN in England by creating slots for our initial organizers.  A program in France that subsidizes the first year for our affiliate there helped build the organization as well.

I’m myopic on this score, but we need more people to do this work, despite our limited resources.  What would it take to get more states to following the Maryland example?  What would it take to turn the draconian work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid upside down by qualifying thousands of eligible recipients for community service to satisfy that obligation?  That’s part of the underpinning of the Benefit Recipients Access and Volunteer Organization, BRAVO-ACORN.  Why not train volunteers as activists and organizers to build their communities while retaining their benefits?