Speed-hump victory: community organizing

Christian Century, May 20, 2008 by Scott M. Kershner

ON THE CAMPAIGN trail, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have spoken of their backgrounds in community organizing. Clinton refers to formative experiences knocking on doors in south Texas when she ran the state Democratic Party's 1972 voter registration drive. Barack Obama worked as a community organizer for two years on Chicago's South Side after finishing his bachelor's degree and before entering Harvard Law School. While both cite organizing experience as formative, they have drawn from it slightly different lessons.

Community organizing is both a philosophy and method of civic engagement. Its contemporary incarnations in North America descend from the work of organizing pioneer Saul Alinsky, beginning in the 1930s in the industrial neighborhoods of Chicago. Alinsky sought to mobilize the poor and working class to achieve particular pragmatic goals--from better schools and public services to nondiscriminatory hiring practices. Urban churches became vital allies. For his work for social justice, Alinsky was awarded the Pacem in Terris Award, named for an encyclical by Pope John XXIII. Alinsky died in 1972, and the community organizing movement he set in motion continues to grow and change. For many urban churches, organizing has become a vital part of their public witness.

Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky's techniques: "There Is Always the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model." But she rejected his confrontational, populist methods. She concludes in her memoir Living History, "I agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas, particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves. But we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't. Later, he offered me the chance to work with him when I graduated from college, and he was disappointed that I decided instead to go to law school. Alinsky said I would be wasting my time, but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within."

Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father, recounts in highly personal terms the challenges, disappointments and small victories of directing the Developing Communities Project in Chicago. For Obama, organizing was connected to a personal desire to forge a sense of belonging in light of his cosmopolitan, biracial heritage. Of his motivations to become an organizer, he writes:

   Communities had to be created, fought
   for, tended like gardens. They expanded
   and contracted with the dreams of
   men--and in the civil rights movement
   those dreams had been large. In the sit-ins,
   the marches, the jailhouse songs, I
   saw the African-American community
   becoming more that just the place
   where you'd be born or the house
   where you'd been raised. Through
   organizing, through shared sacrifice,
   membership was earned--because this
   community I imagined was still in the
   making, built on the promise that the
   larger American community, black,
   white, and brown, could somehow
   redefine itself--I believed that it might,
   over time, admit the uniqueness of my
   own life. That was my idea of organizing.
   It was a promise of redemption.

The Spanish translation of Obama's campaign slogan, Yes we can--Si, se puede--suggests his organizing roots. While the phrase may sound trite, to an organizer it is a compact political philosophy. Puede is from the infinitive poder, to be able. As a noun, it means "power." In everyday English usage, the word power tends to suggest Corinthian columns and imperial decrees. Its connotations tend to be somewhat antidemocratic. But in organizing, to have and exercise poder is to be an empowered citizen, to have agency, to be able.

I didn't know anything about community organizing when I first arrived at the church I serve in Brooklyn. We had just begun to get involved in the local faith-based community organizing group. Local churches, mostly Roman Catholic, founded the organization in the early 1990s to mobilize around issues of justice and quality of life--from things as headline grabbing as police-community relations to those as mundane and essential as trash pickup. As I sought to establish myself in a new city and a new vocation, the group provided me with an instant ecumenical network of collegiality and shared mission.

When our church first got involved, I attended a six-day crash course in organizing philosophy and methods. We learned to conduct the one-to-one meetings that form the foundation of all organizing--to listen for a person's passions and deep concerns. When people come together around shared concerns, effective organizing can come about, making use of insurgent power and energy. As Obama's memoir suggests, it is not always easy to locate discrete, winnable issues on which action might be taken, but I knew I had located such an issue when one day I asked in church, "How many people think traffic moves too fast on Newkirk Avenue?" Nearly every hand shot up.

The church I serve has a parochial school. The school complex is on the north side of Newkirk. The church complex, where the gym and lunchroom the school uses are located, is on the south side. With several blocks between stoplights, cars race down this largely residential but very busy street. Every year, there are collisions as drivers attempt to cross Newkirk at the corner on which our church and school sit. And every day our students cross the street multiple times to travel between the school and church complexes.