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Topics: Community

Reweaving the Fabric
The Iron Rule and the IAF Strategy for Power and Politics

Ernesto Cortes, Jr.
Reprinted with permission from Interwoven Destinies: Cities and the Nation, Henry G. Cisneros, ed. pp. 295-319. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by The American Assembly. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) is the center of a national network of broad based, multiethnic, interfaith organizations in primarily poor and moderate-income communities. Created over fifty years ago by Saul Alinsky and currently directed by Ed Chambers, it now provides the leadership training for over thirty organizations representing nearly 1,000 institutions and over I million families. The central role of the IAF organizations is to build the competence and confidence of ordinary citizens and taxpayers so that they can reorganize the relationships of power and politics in their communities, in order to reshape the physical and cultural face of their neighborhoods. The IAF works with organizations in the New York City area, Texas, California, Arizona, Maryland, Tennessee, and the United Kingdom, and is assisting the development of about a dozen more in other regions.

Challenges of the 1990s

There is a consensus that the quality of life in our cities has seriously deteriorated over the last twenty years. This thesis runs through a number of popular works, including Robert Reich's The Work of Nations, John Kenneth Galbraith's Culture of Contentment, William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disantavantaged, and William Schneider's Atlantic Monthly article on the growing suburbanization of American political life. Clearly what has occurred is Reich's "secession of the successful," that is, the distancing of the wealthy and fortunate from the fate and communities of the less fortunate. As a result, there has been a deterioration in the quality of life of our cities that has profoundly affected the economic, social, and political health of this nation.

There are, in fact, a number of serious crises affecting our society: (1) the decline of our cities, particularly the exodus of meaningful employment and leadership opportunities; (2) the crisis of our educational system; (3) the changing structure of our economy; (4) a pervasive cynicism and withdrawal from public life; and (5) an attenuated moral, cultural, and civic infrastructure. Unfortunately, to the extent that these issues are addressed at all, well-meaning people tend to develop solutions that deal with crises in isolation from one another, thereby limiting understanding of the mutually reinforcing and cumulative impact. This conceptual failing contributes to our political incompetence and lack of political imagination.

There has been widespread agreement heretofore that our politics and our political leaders have been unable to address these problems in any effective, relevant fashion. As a result, most of our adult population believes that politics is largely irrelevant to them. Our public discourse has become impoverished amidst a growing disillusionment and stasis inhibiting our ability to act collectively to acknowledge and confront urban decay.

At first glance, the decline in political institutions and public discourse may seem to have little place in a discussion on poverty. Yet clearly, one of the most significant causes of poverty in the United Sates is the inability of working people to absorb the costs of change in the economic and political institutions of the United States.[1] There are always costs to change in a dynamic economy, and invariably those who are the least articulate, least connected, and least well organized bear an inordinate share of the burden of these costs.

Reagan economics, excessive financial deregulation, the acquisition of enormous corporate debt, and the burden of financing that debt have disproportionately affected the poor and working people in the United States. The globalization of economic competition has left U.S. firms facing intense competition from lower-cost producers in other countries. These lower production costs are frequently due to lower wages paid by Third World employers. Additional competition is due to more efficient, higher-quality production methods by producers in industrialized nations like Germany and Japan that may actually pay higher wages than U.S. firms. U.S. companies are under intense pressure to cut costs, which usually means cutting jobs.

As documented in Frank Levy's Dollars and Dreams [2], real income in the United States has been declining since 1973, affecting most seriously the incomes of the less well educated. Whereas one job used to be sufficient to keep a family above the poverty line, a similar standard of living now requires two or more such jobs. Families that used to survive on the income of just one adult worker now have to have at least two, and possibly three or four—the third or fourth often being children. This development has driven more and more families below the poverty line, leaving even those above poverty without the time or the energy for their children, their families, or their communities.

The potential impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is another case in point. Even though in the long run NAFTA will probably be beneficial to people who live in the United States and Mexico, in the short term there will be tremendous costs on both sides—costs that will once again be borne primarily by the least powerful and least articulate. For example, the immigration that is expected to result from NAFTA, particularly as Mexico phases out corn farming subsidies, will affect most severely the urban poor in the United States and the rural poor in Mexico. The influx of immigrants willing to work long hours for low wages has already depressed wage levels and increased competition for relatively unskilled, low-wage jobs in the Los Angeles area. As Jack Miles articulated in his disconcerting Atlantic Monthly article, the African-American underclass in Los Angeles has been largely squeezed out of the unskilled labor market by Latino immigrants, who in turn are forced to compete with even more recently arrived immigrants. By the end of the 1980s, 40 percent of all Los Angeles residents were first-generation immigrants.[3] Aside from the economic tension this situation has created, the lack of shared values or common history has made the Los Angeles community increasingly vulnerable to fragmentation. The resulting polarization makes it very difficult to identify shared interests.

Despite the obvious political nature of issues such as the costs of change in a dynamic economy and the divisiveness of competition for a limited pool of resources, political and social renewal is rarely discussed as a means of alleviating poverty. Instead, society focuses on the results of the crises rather than the causes, results such as hunger, homelessness, unemployment, violence, and so forth. Although attention to the immediate needs of the poor is an important facet of the resolution of these crises, such a short-term solution will have only limited success without corresponding long-term changes in social and political institutions.

Importance of Political Renewal

The premise of the IAF is that the most important strategy for the alleviation of poverty is one that is imbedded in the re-creation of cultural and civic institutions that identify and mentor people capable of exerting the leadership to organize constituencies for the development of stronger, more active and cohesive communities. Such an approach recognizes that the problem of poverty is more than the lack of sufficient income. It is a crushing burden on the soul. Yet because such pressure is so deforming to the human spirit, the impoverished often view themselves as incapable of participating in the life of the civic culture and political community. This makes creating broad based institutions extraordinarily difficult. Yet there can be no transformation of the human spirit without development of practical wisdom and meaningful action through the practice of collaborative politics.

Politics, properly understood, is about collective action initiated by people who have engaged in public discourse. Politics is about relationships enabling people to disagree, argue, interrupt one another, clarify, confront, and negotiate, and through this process of debate and conversation to forge a compromise and a consensus that enables them to act. Practical wisdom is equivalent to good judgment and what the Greeks called praxis, the action that is aimed, calculated, and reflected upon. People must be given the opportunity to develop practical wisdom, to develop the kind of judgment that includes understanding and responsibility. In politics, it is not enough to be right, that is, it is not enough to have a position that is logically worked out; one also has to be reasonable, that is, one has to be willing to make concessions and exercise judgment in forging a deal. Elections understood in this sense are not to discover what people want, but to ratify decisions and actions the political community has reached through argumentative deliberations.

Aristotle said that we are political beings: there is a part of us that emerges only to the extent that we participate in public life. Sheldon Wolin, in Presence of the Past, describes as our birthright our political identity, which involves our capacity to collaboratively initiate action with other human beings.[4] This kind of action enables us to open schools, change the nature of schools, create job-training programs, or initiate flood control programs, and by so doing re-create and reorganize the way in which people, networks of relationships, and institutions operate.

Politics is where our moral dimensions emerge. We are social beings. We are defined by relationships to other people. These include family and kin. These also include the less familiar people with whom we engage in the day-to-day business of living our lives in a complicated society. When people do not have the opportunity to connect to meaningful power and participate in public life effectively, they learn to act irresponsibly—a complaint that is frequently voiced about the residents of our inner cities.

Focusing on the least important elements of political action—voting, elections, and turnout, trivializes our citizens by disconnecting them from the real debate and real power of public life. We fail to recognize that voter participation is the wrong measure of the health of our politics. Voter turnout was high in Pinochet's Chile. Voter turnout was never a problem in the totalitarian countries. Becoming mere voters, clients, taxpayers, and plaintiffs, rather than citizens, renders people incompetent, making them passive viewers of an electronic display. If there is to be genuine participatory politics in this country, there must be opportunities for ordinary people to initiate action about matters that are important to their interests.

Power

Understanding politics requires understanding the nature of power. Frequently people shy away from the discussion of power. "Power tends to corrupt," said Lord Acton, and few people want to appear power-hungry and corrupted. What we must realize is that powerlessness also corrupts—perhaps more pervasively than power

It is important to recognize that there are two kinds of power. Unilateral power tends to be coercive and domineering. The use of unilateral power is that in which one party of authority treats the other party as an object to be instructed and directed. Relational power is more complicated. It involves a personal relationship, subject to subject, developing the relational self. The IAF teaches people to develop the kind of power that is imbedded in relationships, involving not only the capacity to act, but the reciprocal capacity to allow oneself to be acted upon. In this context, relational power involves becoming calculatingly vulnerable—understanding that a meaningful exchange involves getting into other people's subject and allowing them to get into yours—in a word, empathy.

There is no power without relationships: two or more people come together, express and argue their concerns, develop a plan and the intention to exercise that plan, and take some sort of action. The challenge is how to teach them to get enough power to do the things they think are important. This can happen through two routes, organized people or organized money—obviously the poor have more of the former than the latter. Two or even ten people by themselves may not be able to do much, but if they begin to build coalitions with other people and learn the rules of politics, including relational power and reciprocity, then they begin to learn the process through which they can take advantage of the opportunities presented by economic, social, and political change.

The IAF believes in the importance of expanding the sphere of public participation. In every community throughout the nation there are literally thousands of people with the potential to participate successfully in public life. Such participation is the crux of the IAF's strategy for resolving the crises of poverty. It is not that we view other strategies as inappropriate policy, but rather that they should be connected to broad based institutions working to develop this human potential.

The Iron Rule

The human potential of ordinary people emerges when they engage diverse human beings in the serious business of the polis, particularly the issues of family, property, and education—which have been the central work of the IAF for the last fifty years. IAF organizations have witnessed thousands of ordinary people developing extraordinary capacities to lead their communities into action and interpret those actions into the possibility of development and change—both for themselves and for their communities. The daily work of the IAF's organizers is searching for, identifying, challenging, testing, and developing potential leaders within our organizations. Each of the IAF's victories is the fruit of the personal growth of thousands of leaders—housewives, clergy, bus drivers, secretaries, nurses, teachers—who have learned from the IAF how to participate and negotiate with the business and political leaders and bureaucrats we normally think of as our society's decision makers. The IAF lives by the Iron Rule: "Never do for others what they can do for themselves." The IAF has won its victories not by speaking for ordinary people but by teaching them how to speak, to act, and to engage in politics for themselves.

This is the centerpiece of the IAF's organizing and educational philosophy. It is the practical consequence of Alfred North Whitehead's warning about the danger of teaching inert ideas—ideas that are merely received without being utilized, tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. Inert ideas make people the passive receptacles of disconnected information. The Iron Rule recognizes that the most valuable and important aspect of intellectual development is self-development, which is critical to the accountable utilization of power. The Iron Rule recognizes the preciousness of self-discovery. As John Stuart Mill said, "If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode." [5]

The Iron Rule is a process that stimulates curiosity, inquiry, judgment, and mastery of new areas of understanding through action and reflection. It recognizes as John Stuart Mill did that people can only learn confidence through competent participation. We learn by doing.

The Iron Rule goes beyond the rejection of paternalism; it is centered in a vision of autonomous yet interdependent persons who respect each other and appreciate the values of reciprocal accountability. In the IAF vision, healthy relationships in public life are developed through the back and forth of conversation, in contrast to the unilateral communication that our modern world directs at people in much of daily life. Just as conversation demands listening as well as speaking, public relationships demand reciprocity. They are a process that demands an openness, a willingness to suspend judgment, to argue and yet be willing to adjust one's own views. Public relationships demand an openness to others. One enters into public relationships not with self-righteousness, but with a commitment to the dignity and respect of others. As in a conversation, the exchange of a relationship does not have a foreclosed beginning and ending. It represents rather a moment in a relationship—a relationship that builds long-term trust through collaborative action.

Role of Broad Based Organizations

The development of such public relationships will be possible only to the extent that there is an institution, a broad based organization, that teaches ordinary people how to engage others in conversations and arguments, to reflect upon their actions, and enable them to make informed political judgments. These must be mentoring institutions that cultivate curiosity, imagination, and a vision of what is possible for citizens and their families. Simply designing isolated programs and making them available to a community will not expand the capability, vision, and political acumen of the community's residents. The development of judgment is critical. In the modern political campaign, electioneering and voting have become our most common "political" encounters. This places an inordinate amount of importance on the measuring of opinions and preferences, which reinforces the learned helplessness that comes from being disconnected and isolated. Such a focus reinforces dependency, rendering citizens incompetent as mere voters, customers, and clients. Too often our citizens have become professional plaintiffs who are unwilling to responsibly engage their fellow citizens and neighbors on any serious collaborative initiation, instead selecting a course of either costly litigation or exit strategies.

People in the United States have been left with litigation and exit as the most common mechanisms for the expression of dissatisfaction. As Albert Hirschman outlines in Exit, Voice and Loyalty, the ideology of exit is very powerful in America. [6] The nation was settled because of it, expanded westward because of it, and views upward social mobility as one of the most valuable expressions of it. "Love it or leave it" is a uniquely American expression, one that is embraced more and more frequently as citizens retreat into the walled security and complacency of the suburbs and enclaves. The theory behind the ideology of exit is that such an expression of dissatisfaction will force "management" to correct the problems that are driving people away. However, because the exit mechanism destroys social capital and weakens the mediating institutions of the community, it becomes in the self-interest of the "managers" for the vocal "troublemakers" also to exit, allowing the further disintegration of community to occur unimpeded. "Managers" are left with the most inarticulate, vulnerable, and compliant members of the community—those least likely to agitate for change.

The alternative to the exit mechanism is that of voice designed to bring about change through internal agitation. This is the paradigm that the IAF is trying to teach, that people are citizens and neighbors who have to learn the art of making judgments and taking action. Institutions must be created to allow citizens to develop their alternative of voice, to learn to exercise their political nature, and to reclaim their political birthright. The importance of discourse and debate in the deliberative process exemplifies the need to make judgments in relationship with other people. Anyone can be rendered incompetent by not having access to interpretation or context, or by not having a frame of reference or access to other people's reactions and interpretations.

Because the art of making judgments is an interpretive process, one of the most important aspects of a broad based organization is that it be action oriented. What we mean by "action" is not just displacement of energy, not just reaction to a crisis, but rather praxis. In praxis the most important part of the action is the reflection and evaluation afterward. Our organizations plan "actions"—public dramas, where masses of ordinary people collaboratively and collectively move on a particular issue with a particular focus—which sometimes produce a reaction that is unanticipated. This reaction then produces the grist for the real teaching of politics and interpretation—how to appreciate the negotiations, the challenge, the argument, and the political conversation.

An IAF broad based organization is like a "mini-university." Our organizations have multiple agendas, traditions, independent dues based financing structures, and include a wide variety of individuals. Universities and broad based organizations are two types of institutions in which persons can engage in constrained conflict, opening the conflicts of our traditions to the inquiry and reflection of our citizens. Acknowledging and welcoming these tensions allows for the tempering of conflict to a manageable level. Repressing these conflicts can lead to war. Like a good university, a broad based organization does not just teach people about skills. It does not treat inquiry as a technique. It also teaches people about perspective. In the words of William Galston, there are two kinds of education: there is a philosophic education, which is about inquiry and the rules thereof, and there is also a civic education, which is about character formation, enabling persons to effectively conduct their lives and provide support for building and sustaining their community. [7] Civic education requires institutions, because character depends upon culture, values, and perspective. We do not learn those as isolated individuals. We learn those only in relationships with others, and in the context of our history and traditions. Institutions, be they familial, religious, cultural, or political, provide the framework within which civic education, character development, and leadership development must be nurtured. The IAF believes that both types of education are important, and indeed within a democratic society, each augments and supplements the other.

The organizations of the IAF are primarily federations of congregations; they are connected to institutions of faith and agitated by their traditions of faith. In this context the term "faith" does not mean particular religious beliefs, but rather a more general affirmation that life has meaning. Congregations are the conveyors of tradition, which connects people and holds them accountable to both their past and their future. They force us to recognize that we are encumbered beings who have a responsibility to deal regularly with the business of transformation, thereby engendering hope. These institutions, churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples, are built on networks of family and neighbors. Tragically, they are virtually the only institutions in society that are fundamentally concerned with the nature and well-being of families and communities. In addition, religious institutions have a commitment, albeit somewhat attenuated, to the vitality of the city. They are accountable to the vision of the prophet Jeremiah, who stated clearly, "Seek ye therefore the shalom [welfare] of the city. For there you shall find your own shalom."

Through these institutions we learn to accept the tension between what we are—our nature and our limits—and what we can be. We have to be able to embrace the dialectic of that tension and not yield either to cynicism or romantic sentimentality. We learn that there are always intended and unintended consequences to actions, and that to practice politics, citizens must be prepared to deal with both. Most importantly, and this is perhaps the crux of the tension, we must accept that the best often gets in the way of the good, and that there will never be total justice. This is a precept that is difficult to deal with unless one is situated in a political context. Political beings understand the limits and boundaries of power and action, and do not try to make inordinate claims on life. That is why there has to be in the teaching, the mentoring, and the evaluating the constant attempt to grapple with the human condition: what is the self, what is the relationship of the self to its situation and context, and how do we begin to understand the potential for the development of personhood. Our politics have to be connected to that search for meaning, for authenticity, and for identity.

Religious faith, history, and tradition are important because they embody the records of the struggles of those who have gone before—their struggles both to understand and to act. Others have made efforts, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. In this context, one learns not to take one's self too seriously, and to recognize that there are limits to what one can accomplish in a lifetime or in a generation. Traditions, to the extent that they are meaningful and useful, enable us to deal with the realities of ambiguity, irony, and tragedy. They convey to us, through symbols, those dimensions of the human experience.

The root of the word "religion," re-ligare, means to bind together that which is disconnected. There is always an effort to connect. The best of religious traditions try to be inclusive. They respect diversity. To the extent that they are good traditions, they convey a plurality of symbols that incorporate the experiences of diverse peoples. The whole concept of the mixed multitudes in Sinai and Pentecost is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition; there is a constant incorporation of different traditions in the reweaving of the social and political fabric.

Social Capital

The IAF is concerned with the social capital embodied in relationships among adults in a democratic public life. Broadly defined, "social capital" is a term identifying the value of a community's relationships. In contrast to human capital, which is locked up in the skills of an individual, social capital is a measure of how much collaborative time and energy people have for each other: how much time parents have for their children, how much attention neighbors will give to each other's families, what kind of relationships people in congregations have with each other, the relationships in organizations like PTAs and scout troops, and the quality of many other potential webs of relationships in a community. The social capital of a democratic public life comprises relationships among adults who are equal in essential aspects and yet unequal in their virtues. The IAF is concerned with the relationships of people who aspire to learn and to grow—to acquire the virtues of leadership and satisfactions of becoming, in the phrase of Thomas Jefferson, "participators in the affairs of government."

Social capital is not a familiar term in the current debate, but it is as crucial to the resolution of crises and the alleviation of poverty as are the other forms of capital we already understand. In order for community development (both economic and social) to be successful, there have to be investments in human capital, physical capital, and social capital so that financial capital or entrepreneurial activity can be productive. The 1980s were absorbed by concern with financial capital, and now the United States is paying the price for that narrow focus. Differing types of capital must be mixed with each other to be productive. The items of "physical capital" such as machinery alone are not enough, but require workers with the "human capital" of skills to operate them. Teams of workers need not only tools and skills, but the trusting relationships of "social capital" to work together. They all need "financial capital" to facilitate the exchanges and investments central to economic life. Men and women of vision must be able to coordinate these different kinds of capital.

To think of our relationships as "capital" suggests a different way of thinking about other people. To create capital we must invest labor, energy, and effort in the here-and-now to create something for later use. We must expend energy now in creating a tool, or learning a skill, or saving money, or building a relationship in order to put it to use in the future. Investment requires the ability and discipline to defer gratification, to invest energy not only in the needs or pleasures of the present, but also in the potential demands of the future.

Capital also requires maintenance and renewal. Workers find that their tools wear out with use and rust with disuse. Knowledge and skills must be updated and refined. Similarly, the partners in a venture must renew the means of trusting one another. Neighbors in a community or members of a family must maintain their relationships to renew the social capital they represent.

University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman has examined a particular example of the importance of social capital in the context of education.[8] He identifies the social capital of a school as "attention from responsible adults" that students receive in the various institutions of their daily lives—their schools, families, churches, and neighborhoods.

Coleman studied public, Catholic, and non-Catholic private schools in Chicago, and found that Catholic schools had been more successful at educating students than either public or non-Catholic private schools. Even when he took into account the advantages and disadvantages of varying family backgrounds and incomes (i.e., different levels of "human" and ''financial" capital), students at Catholic schools had slightly higher achievement rates on math and verbal skills and dramatically lower dropout rates. In fact, the dropout rates were one-quarter the level of public schools and one-third the level of other private schools.

Coleman argues that the strong, informal adult-student relationships of the Catholic school and community were responsible for the significantly lower dropout rates. Even when children had relatively diminished attention from adults at home—as in the case of single parent families—the Catholic schools were able to keep them in school. He suggests that adults in the Catholic community were attentive to the children's growth and willing to intervene early when they saw trouble. They provided role models and mentored children. By their example and their actions, they taught children how to relate collaboratively with others. They were available to ask for help or guidance.
The concept of social capital places credence as much in the quality of relationships among people as simply their number or availability. Social capital implies a richness and robustness of relationships among people, that the members of a community are willing and eager to invest in one another. Our broad based organizations are trying to build, expand, and agitate the social capital that is imbedded in the networks of human relationships.

The Development of Leadership

IAF leaders begin their development in one-on-one conversations with a skilled organizer. Individual meetings are not interviews. Rather than a communication of information, convictions, or instruction, they represent an exchange of views, judgments, and commitments. The organizers see themselves as teachers, mentors, and agitators who cultivate leadership. Their job is to teach people how to form relationships with other leaders and develop a network, a collective of relationships able to build the power to enable them to act. They begin with small, winnable issues—fixing a streetlight, putting up a stop sign. Then they move into larger concerns—making a school a safe and civil place for children to learn. Then they move to still larger issues—setting an agenda for a municipal capital improvement budget; strategizing with corporate leaders and members of the city council on economic growth policies; developing new initiatives in job training, health care, and public education. When ordinary people become engaged and begin to play large, public roles, they develop confidence in their own competence.

IAF leaders are women like Virginia Ramirez of San Antonio's Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), who was afraid to speak out because she felt she wasn't educated. But she was angry at the injustice done to her neighborhood—at watching a neighbor die because she did not have heat in the winter. COPS taught Mrs. Ramirez to tap that anger and forge it into a tool for the renewal of hope in herself and her community. She learned to speak publicly, to lead actions, to take risks with herself, and to guide others. The IAF process taught her to develop relationships within which she could challenge the indifference and apathy of corporate and government officials. She learned how to negotiate with the holders of power: how to compromise, how to confront when necessary, and how to rebuild collaboration. She gained the confidence to negotiate with the City Council and mayor. She went back to school at age forty-four, earned her general equivalency diploma, and entered college.

Virginia Ramirez is now president of her parish council. She is also a co-chair of COPS and represents her community at the negotiating table with the head of the Chamber of Commerce, the mayor, and the bankers of San Antonio. She leads a team of community leaders and clergy engaged in transforming the public hospital system to truly serve the inner city. She guides and mentors young leaders, some of whom are the sons and daughters of founders of COPS from twenty years ago.

Mrs. Ramirez, as a result of being part of COPS, has learned how to exercise power—relational power. She has learned not only how to act, but how to be acted upon. She has learned how to collaborate. She has learned how to develop a political institution inside the COPS organization. She has learned how to leverage that institution in a relationship with the city government and the corporate community. As a result, San Antonio has one of the most creative community development block grant (CDBG) programs in the country. In addition, a new, innovative housing strategy has been created, including a $10 million Housing Trust Fund. COPS has used public dollars to leverage many more private dollars for construction and purchase of single-family homes. As a result, the organization has literally physically and spiritually revitalized neighborhoods so their residents have the opportunity to generate stability and growth.

Virginia Ramirez and her personal and political growth are extraordinary but not unique. The IAF has developed more than twenty institutions that have transformed the lives of thousands of persons like her, who felt a deep anger at the injustices done to their lives but believed they had no ability nor right to speak out to make their communities more just and more fully human. The IAF organizations have been schools for the development of politics and community.

What Politics Has Brought

One of the twelve Texas IAF organizations is Allied Communities of Tarrant (ACT) in Fort Worth, composed of 14,000 families from twenty-two congregations of diverse faiths and ethnic backgrounds. ACT is a very broad based institution, involving African-American, Anglo, and Hispanic leaders from both Protestant and Catholic congregations. Formed in 1982, ACT has organized its families in a number of efforts to direct public investment to the inner city. Among other accomplishments, it guaranteed the passage of a bond referendum to finance $57 million of new streets, sewers, and other improvements in 1985.

In 1986 ACT leaders began to work closely with the principal of Morningside Middle School, a predominantly African-American school that had all but ceased to function as anything other than a holding place for children and adults. Its students ranked dead last on measures of performance among the district's twenty middle schools. Half of the children were failing at least one subject. Half failed the state's writing skills test. The police were called to the school two to three times a day. The school's parent-teacher organization had one or two persons attending meetings.

In collaboration with the principal, ACT leaders developed a plan to rebuild the relationships among the parents, teachers, and students of the school to revitalize the school. The principal took the lead in building a leadership team within the school's staff. ACT built leadership among the parents through a two-pronged strategy.

First, ACT congregations near the school organized periodic "Recognition Days" in which the congregation as a whole would applaud children for progress at school. Each congregation took care to recognize every child for some form of progress, no matter how small. These ceremonies generally formed part of the worship service. Often the homilies were directed toward recognizing and supporting families in their efforts. Nearly twenty local congregations held "Recognition Days" for the children of the school.
Second, ACT leaders organized a series of individual meetings in which they met or attempted to meet with the parents or guardians of every child, regardless of whether or not they belonged to an ACT congregation or to any congregation at all. The building of relationships in individual meetings is slow, hard work, but there is no shortcut or substitute. It is the means by which people begin to recognize and understand their own interests. It is how they articulate their vision of themselves and their hopes for their families. It is how they build reciprocal relationships with others.

Over 600 meetings were conducted in a period of a year and a half. While leaders learned about parents' concerns, the more important result was that they began to build relationships to draw them into involvement with the school. Parents attended training sessions on how to support their children's study habits. They began to meet more often with their children's teachers individually.

The most visible sign of change was the school's transformation into a successful institution. The children's performance on standardized tests rose from twentieth of the district's twenty middle schools to third. The percentage of students passing the state writing skills test increased from 50 to 89 percent. The percentage of children failing at least one subject decreased from 50 to 6 percent. Police calls fell off to virtually none. Now it is not unusual for 200 or more to attend parent assemblies at the school to learn about drug awareness, study habits, or other education related themes. Parents also staff an after-school enrichment program that ACT and the principal of the school jointly conceived and implemented. Leaders from other churches and schools have begun to duplicate this effort in another middle school and three feeder elementary schools

Beyond making the school a more successful institution; parents became successful in ACT, a mediating institution, and developed the capacity to negotiate with other institutions to pursue their interests and the interests of their children. In the second middle school, parents identified the need for substantial physical renovation of the building. They drew up a $1.8 million plan and negotiated it with the school board. The board approved the plan and doubled the capital spending originally allocated to the school

Such accomplishments are only the outward signs of the organization's real achievement—the development of mediating institutions that shape and support their families in both their private and public lives. Whereas before, the children had been failing, the new relationships built among parents strengthened their family lives and enabled them to succeed in school. One ACT leader has commented that the project calls parents to be parents, changing the culture within families. Through their experiences in ACT, parents learned how to organize and how to act. They no longer merely celebrate their values and their hopes as fantasies in the privacy of home or pew, but have acquired the power to make them a real part of the public life of Fort Worth.

Communities Organized for Public Service in San Antonio is the oldest and most established of the IAF organizations. For twenty years, one of COPS' focal points has been pioneering a strategy to rebuild the infrastructure of its inner city community. With its sister organization, the Metro Alliance, COPS has brought over $750 million of sewers, streets, sidewalks, parks, libraries, clinics, streetlights, and other infrastructure to the poor west, east, and south sides of the inner city. The IAF organizations in San Antonio have helped working families build over 1,000 units of new housing, rehabilitate 2,600 existing units, and purchase 1,300 more. Beyond these new homes and infrastructure, however, the most important accomplishment of the IAF organizations is the leadership development of people like Virginia Ramirez.

In the early years of the San Antonio housing efforts, professional organizers worked intensively to identify and mentor individuals who would form a core of leadership, equipping them to reshape city policy. This core group, and the thousands of others whom they led and collaborated with, organized hundreds of house meetings, neighborhood actions, and research visits, which built both the COPS housing agenda and the power to move it forward.

COPS first major housing initiative came to be known as the "Select Housing Target Areas" program. Unlike many other cities, in which substandard housing was razed or refurbished without regard to the original low-income residents, COPS was able to develop a strategy in which community improvements did not dislocate residents. Their aim was not to redevelop real estate, but to rejuvenate communities. Formulated in cooperation with city officials and the San Antonio Development Agency (SADA), the program has built over 900 new homes and rehabilitated 2,600 more since its inception in 1974. Ninety-five percent of homeowners have chosen to rebuild their homes in the redeveloped neighborhoods, rather than seek housing in the suburbs.

COPS leaders, when encountering obstacles or gaps in the community redevelopment strategy, have been able to initiate new programs to complement existing ones. One gap identified from the experience of the Target Areas program was the need to help young families purchase their own homes. Working families in San Antonio, like others in the United States, have seen their wages and incomes fall in real terms over the last decade, while the price of housing has risen. In the words of one COPS leader, they saw young families "losing the American dream of owning their own home." Many were able to afford monthly payments, but were unable to raise the lump sum of down payment, closing costs, and prepaid insurance and taxes.

To address this barrier, COPS and Metro Alliance leaders worked with SADA to create the Home ownership Incentive Program (HIP) to help young families finance the lump-sum payments. HIP enables moderate-income families who qualify for FHA insured loans to receive a thirty-year, zero-interest second mortgage to use as a down payment. Since 1988 the city has made loans to leverage private mortgage funds to over 1,300 families. These families have an average annual income of $17,500, and 18 percent are headed by single mothers.

The central component of the San Antonio IAF organizations' work to redevelop the city's neighborhoods has been the annual community development block grant program, $4 million of which remains the principal funding for the Target Areas and the HIP effort. Designed to replace numerous federal categorical programs with a single, flexible grant to cities, the CDBG program since 1974 has been a steady, though small and diminishing, source of funds for the redevelopment of inner cities across the country. COPS and the Metro Alliance have ensured that the funds are used carefully and effectively, maximizing expenditures for durable capital improvements and minimizing the demands on CDBG for ongoing operating expenditures of city and private agencies. In fact, San Antonio's program has been recognized nationwide as a model CDBG project.

COPS leaders drive the annual CDBG process, in which residents of eligible neighborhoods meet in their homes, schools, and churches to draw up their lists of potential projects, the costs of which are always three or four times their neighborhood's CDBG allocation. People begin their bargaining, trimming some projects and delaying others in exchange for mutual support. They proceed from house meetings concerned with one street or drainage issue, to neighborhood meetings proposing a package of projects, to meetings in each City Council district to shape a proposal with the council member, and then, in collaboration with the City Council member, community leaders finalize the selection of the year's project. COPS leaders have incorporated into the organization's collective culture the expertise to plan projects and the skills of negotiating and facilitating the bargaining among neighborhoods.

The principal constraint on COPS' efforts has been the lack of resources. San Antonio had received roughly $40 million a year in federal aid in the early 1970s in various categorical urban programs. Now that amount has fallen to $14 million through the CDBG program.

COPS and Metro Alliance leaders have sought new sources of funds to complement the limited resources from CDBG. In 1988 leaders from the two organizations developed a plan for the creation of a City Housing Trust Fund. They researched the operation of local trust funds across the country, designed their own proposal and negotiated with the City Council to establish it. The City Council was more willing to create the fund than to actually fund it, but a windfall of $22 million from the sale of San Antonio's cable television franchise gave the IAF organizations an opportunity. IAF leaders negotiated with the council and representatives advocating other capital spending priorities to set aside $IO million of the $22 million sale to endow the City Housing Trust Fund, ensuring an annual stream of $500,000 to $1 million in new funding for housing.

San Antonio's City Housing Trust Fund provides an important source of flexible financing to fill gaps left by other sources too restricted or too highly taxed to be accessible to low-income families. So far the City Housing Trust Fund has financed the planning of several housing projects for the elderly and one affordable single family development—the Brighton Park subdivision.
The Brighton Park story is one that begins not with a government housing program, but with the frustrations of neighbors with a trashy vacant lot. House meetings were convened to discuss possible uses for the lot. Each house meeting, where ten or fifteen neighbors would gather for an hour or so of conversation, reported back to the leadership with the same issue: housing for young families. Neighbors became excited when they imagined the prospect of new, modern, single-family homes as good as the ones in the new subdivisions outside San Antonio's Outer Loop.

The story proceeds through the development of a core of dedicated and competent neighborhood leaders who for five years worked doggedly to secure the participation of the city government, commercial banks, the San Antonio Development Agency, the City Housing Trust Fund, and private builders. In essence, the COPS leaders became developers. The story concludes with young families moving into a new neighborhood of sixteen custom designed homes-the first new subdivision in the south side of San Antonio in over twenty years.

Time and again, COPS and the Metro Alliance have initiated new ideas for the creative use of local, federal, and state public dollars to help working families rebuild their neighborhoods, both physically and socially. They formulate their goals and strategies from the experiences and dreams of working families. These IAF organizations have institutionalized a culture of politics in which citizens have both the real power to act on their hopes for their communities, as well as the responsibility to put forward not just complaints but constructive plans. They have created a culture of reasoned debate, accountability, negotiations, respect, and compromise within which the powers of a city can collaborate to guide its destiny.

Other situations in which disenfranchised citizens have developed the power to initiate action to improve their communities include the following.

The Nehemiah Homes Project in Brooklyn and Bronx, New York. East Brooklyn Congregations has built over 3,000 new single-family homes for working families, renewing completely devastated neighborhoods. This was possible because the broad based church organization, under the auspices of the Industrial Areas Foundation, leveraged land and tax abatements from the city of New York and no-interest construction financing from religious institutions. In addition, each home carries an interest-free second mortgage loan from the city government of $15,000 as a lien repayable whenever the house is sold. A similar Nehemiah program was established in Baltimore by BUILD, also an IAF organization.

Job Training in San Antonio. COPS and the Metro Alliance, the business community, the city of San Antonio, the local Private Industry Council (PIC), the governor of Texas, and several other state and local agencies have collaborated to create a $7 million high-skill job-training effort. Employers have committed several hundred high-skill positions—primarily in health care. The governor committed $2.3 million in state funds for development. The city government committed $2 million for income maintenance. The PIC committed $2.6 million for job training. COPS and Metro committed the sweat equity of neighborhood leaders to holding job trainees accountable to the community for a commitment to long-term training.

Commonwealth in Baltimore. The corporate community in Baltimore contributed $20 million in scholarship funds, to be matched by funds from local universities, for high school graduates achieving good grades and attendance. The BUILD organization helps to raise additional resources from government sources, and mobilizes the participation of families and local schools. COPS and the Metro Alliance created a similar program called the San Antonio Education Partnership.

Colonias in South Texas. The state of Texas has pledged $250 million in grants and low-interest loans (which is helping to leverage federal and local funds) to build water and sewer systems in the 400-plus unincorporated rural communities along the Texas-Mexico border. Colonia is a Spanish word for neighborhood, and along the border in Texas it is a word for communities of people who were deceived by unscrupulous land developers—hard-working people who were promised complete utility services but were left with open sewage ditches, unpaved streets, no running water, and an unfathomable number of public health problems. Valley Interfaith, the Border Organization, and the El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization (EPISO), with support from the entire network of Texas IAF organizations, initiated and promoted the legislation in collaboration with the elected leadership of the state government, the Texas Water Development Board, and local providers.

Moral Minimum Wage. In 1987, after nine months of hard dialogue and negotiation with Southern California IAF, the California Industrial Welfare Commission raised the state's minimum wage to $4.25 an hour, then the highest in the nation. This case is one in which the work of the Southern California IAF made a positive difference in the real income of families, and contrary to the prophecies of the opposition, subsequent studies have demonstrated no adverse effect on levels of employment.

Community Policing in Hudson County, New Jersey. The Interfaith Community Organization (ICO) in Jersey City and Hoboken has for three years worked with police departments to create a new culture of "community policing"—an approach to public safety that involves the commitment of a city's resources to the day-to-day work of building ongoing relationships between police and neighborhood residents. Although the struggle ran the gamut from replacing the police chief to developing a true public consensus on community policing as a priority, ICO's work has led to a firm commitment of resources and personnel for eight neighborhoods in Hudson County.

Texas Alliance Schools. The Texas Education Agency has pledged additional resources to thirty-two schools that are collaborating with local community organizations to seriously reorganize neighborhood schools. Modeled on the experience of Fort Worth's Morningside Middle School, in which leaders of Allied Communities of Tarrant rewove the fabric of community linking families, teachers, administrators, and community leaders, the Alliance Schools project works to build a constituency and commitment among stakeholders in education to make dramatic improvements in the performances of the schools and develop an effective constituency for education reform.

The Role of the Government

Reinvigorating urban life requires a new vision of civil society appropriate to the challenges of this age. The IAF believes, with Arthur Okun, that the two primary institutions of modern times, the market and the state, have their places in social life, but must be kept in their places. [9] Without strong countervailing institutions, the imperialism of the market will dominate and penetrate all relationships, in both public and private spheres, as it did in the 1980s. The healthy functioning of an enterprise-market system depends on balanced relationships among society's major institutions—family, community, and church—and market mechanisms. These institutions teach the values of social intercourse, reciprocity, trust, exchange, and accountability, which are requisite for the effective functioning of the market system.

Americans have already seen contemporary politics—both electioneering and governing—reduced to marketing strategies. Politics no longer mediates the market but is part and parcel of it The advertising executives and media consultants now shape campaigns centered not around debates of public philosophy or the governance of what Daniel Bell called the "public household," but around negative thirty-second television ads. Even worse, the media advisors now attempt to govern, fashioning the rationale of war and peace by opinion polls. The result is an incoherent, inarticulate, and trivial political leadership, and a growing, cancerous cynicism and alienation from the community. The failure to center public life around genuine discourse is poisoning the reservoirs of good will in social relationships. Trust is unraveling not just in the political sphere, but in other public spheres—between doctors and patients, pastors and parishioners, teachers and students.

The tools of a market mechanism—money and prices—are effective signals for what is to be produced, how much, and for whom. The market is also an effective mechanism for the creation of wealth; the coordination of economic activity, and the buffering of citizens from the state. Yet the market has fundamental limits. It accepts grossly unequal distributions of income and power, which distort the very workings of the market process. The market cannot deal with external factors, nor can it calculate intergenerational costs. Market mechanisms often seem oblivious to the many examples of market failures that lead to air and water pollution, environmental degradation, and social imbalance-what John Kenneth Galbraith called private affluence in the midst of public squalor.

Government provision of consumer goods, services, transfer payments, or tax credits will provide some relief from the conditions of poverty. To the extent that they allow some people more choices, such policies are useful. Yet these consumables, however benignly bestowed, will not provide a long-term solution to the culture of poverty and despair that exists in communities today. The alleviation of poverty requires not just an increase in income, but the development of the capacity to act—to make choices. This means that any strategy to alleviate poverty must also address the question of inequities of power. The role of those who have power in shaping political and economic decisions is critically important. If poor people are to have any real dignity, they must play a meaningful role in making these decisions. Market oriented strategies are not sufficient. There must also be strategies for developing political entrepreneurship.

Just as the government cannot create entrepreneurial economic activity, neither can it create political entrepreneurship. The government cannot "empower" people, because power is not something that can be bestowed. Government can facilitate, encourage, recognize, and reward grassroots organizing, but it cannot create it. Government cannot create local initiatives, but it can understand the importance of these initiatives having an institutional base rooted in people's imagination, curiosity, values, and search for meaning.

The IAF has developed an innovative proposal that is rooted in our organizational community base. We propose that the federal government structure a matching grant strategy to leverage the commitments of states, local municipalities, and communities. The strategy would be based on the concept of an augmented community development block grant program and a more flexible Job Training Partnership Act. Communities would receive a certain minimum entitlement based on need, as in the current program. The federal government could then increase the amount of the grant to the extent that a results oriented strategy had been developed that would reward the achievement of certain outcomes. These outcomes could include some combination of the following: increases in meaningful employment, reduction of a percentage of poverty, increased access to health care, improvements in infrastructure and security, facilitation of first-time housing purchases, and so forth. Essentially, the federal government would provide matching grants for local investments of money, resources, and "sweat equity." Ideally these efforts should be developed as part of a larger strategy for state and local governments, corporations, and private sector institutions to make available resources to match the social capital of authentic indigenous local community based organizations.

Theoretically, the granting of additional moneys to cities in which such strategic organizing is taking place should generate interest in other locales, thus facilitating the replication and dissemination of a new institution-building process. At the same time this strategy recognizes the necessity for macroeconomics initiatives to ensure a growing economy and full employment. In addition, it also recognizes potential labor demand and supply problems. Thus there is the need to develop job-training initiatives strategically, with consideration for the future as well as the current situation in which the local economic structure is embedded.

Conclusion

The task of rebuilding our civic and political institutions is an urgent one. People in modern industrial societies, particularly those living in the cities, are atomized and disconnected from each other. Particularly in the suburbs, far too much of the American search for "fulfillment" is centered on the individual, making his or her relationships utilitarian and narcissistic in nature. This fragmentation leaves people increasingly less capable of forming a common purpose and carrying it out. Vaclav Havel pointed out in his address to the World Economic Forum in February 1992 that global civilization is in danger of destroying itself through inattention to any number of massive threats—the population explosion, the greenhouse effect, AIDS, and so on.

The large paradox at the moment is that [the hu]man—a great collector of information—is well aware of all this, yet is absolutely incapable of dealing with the danger. Traditional science, with its usual coolness, can describe the different ways we might destroy ourselves, but it cannot offer us truly effective and practicable instructions on how to avert them.... What is needed is something different, something larger.... The way forward is not in the mere construction of universal systemic solutions, to be applied to reality from the outside; it is also in seeking to get to the heart of reality through personal experiences. Such an approach promotes an atmosphere of tolerant solidarity and unity in diversity based on mutual respect, genuine pluralism and parallelism. In a word, human uniqueness, human action, and the human spirit must be rehabilitated. [10]

As Havel indicates, this rehabilitation can only be done through a different kind of politics, that is, a politics that creates authentic democratic political institutions that teach, mentor, and build a constituency of leaders and a network of stakeholders to initiate and support appropriate public policies that can rebuild our cities and reinforce the development of viable communities and mediating institutions.

The work of the IAF is in fact designed to create a different kind of politics. Developing a strategy that deals with the structural inequalities built into our dynamic economy requires an organized constituency with the power and imagination to initiate and support policies for change. If we are to create such a constituency and restore health and integrity to our political process, mitigating the distorting role and influence of organized concentrations of wealth, then we must be vigilant in the development of real democratic institutions. The work of the IAF is to create organized constituencies that are effective in teaching real politics.

Notes

1 Mishel and Frankel (1991).
2 Levy (1990)
3 Miles (1992), pp. 41-68.
4 Wolin (1989).
5 Thompson (1976).
6 Hirschman (1990).
7 Galston (1989), pp. 89 101.
8 Coleman (1989).
9 Okun (1975), p. 119.
10 Havel (1992), pp. 8-14.

Ernesto Cortes, Jr. is the Southwest regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), founded by the late Saul Alinsky in 1940. Cortes has played a key role over the past twenty years in developing the IAF's successful approach to institution based community organizing. A native of San Antonio, Cortes returned to the city in 1974 and established the organization known as COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service), which has become a model for organizing efforts around the country. He went on to establish similar organizations in Los Angeles, Houston, and other cities in the Southwest. Cortes has received widespread recognition or his many accomplishments, including recognition as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1984. His work has been highlighted in numerous publications on social change and in Bill Moyers's PBS series A World of Ideas.

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