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Topics:
Religion & Community (cross-referenced)
East
Brooklyn Congregations Build Nehemiah Homes
"Come, let
us rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, so that we may no longer suffer
disgrace." With these words from the Book of Nehemiah, local ministers
drew upon the prophetic Old Testament imagery of the the black
church tradition to inspire grassroots action and move the mayor
of New York City to support what has since become an innovative
housing program for cities around the country. East Brooklyn Congregations
represents the values-based style of organizing of the Industrial
Areas Foundation, which sees community organizing as not just
advocacy but as schools for public life and public leadership
development. Case study plus.
Case
Study Plus: Reconnecting Power and Vision
Reconnecting
Power an Vision, a 20-page case study by Harry Boyte, who is Co-Chair
of the CPN Advisory Board, and the national coordinator of the
American Civic Forum. Excerpted from his book: CommonWealth: A
Return to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1990), chapter
6: "Reconnecting Power and Vision: Education for Public Life."
Copyright by Harry Boyte, 1990. Printed case study may be distributed
for nonprofit civic education purposes only.
The Industrial
Areas Foundation, or IAF, is a network of large-scale, successful
citizen organizations made up of poor, minority, lower and middle
class groups associated with a training center established by
Saul Alinsky. It has reinvigorated an understanding of citizen
action by taking advantage of the multiple resources and dimensions
of power in the modern world. In particular, IAF groups have addressed
a context where information, itself, is increasingly a central
strategic resource and form of power.
IAF organizing
went through two stages of development. Especially after Alinsky's
death in 1972, through the seventies organizers and local leaders
explored new ways to ground the organizing process in a deeper
connection with community institutions, preeminently local churches
of mainstream Catholic and Protestant orientation. Such a development
gave rise to a new approach, called "value based organizing."
Value based organizing wedded the struggle for power to communal
fabric and cultural traditions in a way that enlisted groups of
community "sustainers"—those they called "the moderates"
—that rarely form the foundation of visible public action,
in minority communities or elsewhere. As these groups experienced
growing successes and began to think about their longer range
rationale, they added a second dimension to their self-understanding,
coming to understand themselves as "schools for public life."[1]
"Schools
of public life," in the IAF view, are self-funded citizen organizations
where people learn the arts and skills of a politics much more
multidimensional than voting. IAF experience is intensively debated
and discussed throughout the affiliated organizations. Its approach
to knowledge and learning develops ways to overcome people's lack
of access to civic knowledge and the ability to think about the
meaning and values that must be added to information, alike.[2]
The IAF
network forges a thoughtful, constantly evaluated political practice
out of the tension between the "world as it is" and the "world
as it should be." It teaches people not only specific political
information about legislation, issues and the skills to cooperate
and act together effectively. It also adds a dynamic intellectual
life involving a practical theory of action, employing
and constantly developing concepts like power, mediating institution,
public life, the meaning and management of time, judgment, imagination,
and self-interest. Such concepts, in turn, are tied to discussion
of the democratic and religious values and traditions which inform
and frame their efforts—justice, concern for the poor, the
dignity of the person, diversity, participation, heritage.
Of particular
importance as these groups have evolved and developed is their
concept of "governance" for sustainable citizen activity. IAF
groups believe that it is not sufficient to simply protest; to
"move into power" on a continuing basis in the modern world, citizens
must also assume an important measure of responsibility for the
basic public goods of their community. IAF leaders and organizers
sometimes refer to such goods as the commons, or commonwealth.
Sometimes they give them other names. In either case, it can have
a major impact.
East Brooklyn
Churches (EBC) is a citizen organizing project affiliated with
the IAF training network that Saul Alinsky and his associates
established in late 1968. For a number of years, they had had
local successes in the impoverished neighborhoods of the East
Brooklyn area of New York. In the early 1980s, they had taken
on a housing building project on a scale that drawfed not only
their own prior activities but any other low income housing development
initiative in the country. Early in 1982, they had waited for
weeks for word from Mayor Edward Koch about whether he would support
their plans. It still seemed uncertain.
EBC envisioned
an enormous undertaking: construction of 5,000 single-family,
owner occupied housing units designed for lower-middle income
buyers, built in the midst of the decimated and mostly black neighborhoods
of East Brooklyn. Drug dealers ruled the streets, even in daylight.
Block after block had been bulldozed into rubble, like some vast
war zone. Most middle income families had long fled. But EBC had
lined up a remarkable group of financial backers, including Bishop
Francis Mugavero, leader of Brookyn's one and a half million Catholics
and theologically conservative church groups like the Missouri
Synod of the National Lutheran Church. And EBC had a long track
record of smaller victories.
The group
had begun far more modestly in 1978 with a small group of Catholic
and Protestant clergy and laity to discuss the formidable array
of community issues they faced. They followed the Alinsky dictum
to start with immediate, small "winnable" issues around which
poor and powerless people can experience confidence-building success.
EBC members had forced clean-ups in local food stories, pressured
the city to install hundreds of street signs, forced renovation
of local parks and worked together to clean up vacant lots. And
slowly through the process they had forged a sense of solidarity
and potency. "We are not a grassroots organization," thundered
the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, a key leader in the organization,
at one rally. "Grass roots are shallow roots. Grass roots are
fragile roots. Our roots are deep roots. Our roots have
fought for existence in the shattered glass of East New York."
Then EBC
turned to housing out of the conviction that only widespread home
ownership could create the kind of "roots" essential for renewed
community pride and freedom from fear. Teaming up with a well-known
Daily News columnist and former developer, I.D. Robbins,
they adopted his controversial argument that for half the cost
of high-density, high rise apartments, it would be possible to
build large numbers of single family homes that could create stable
neighborhoods.
EBC had
come to name their undertaking the "Nehemiah Plan," recalling
the Old Testament prophet sent back to Jerusalem by the King of
Persia in 420 to lead in the rebuilding of the city after the
Babylonian captivity. "The story connected our work to something
real, not something bogus," explained Mike Gecan, organizer for
the East Brooklyn Churches. "It got it out of the "housing" field
and the idea that you have to have a bureaucracy with 35 consultants
to do anything. It made it a 'nonprogram,' something more than
housing." Or as one EBC leader, Celina Jamieson, emphasized, "We
are more than a Nehemiah Plan. We are about the central development
of dignity and self-respect."
To the amazement
of almost everyone in the housing field, EBC had secured funding
nearly sufficient to begin. What remained was approval by the
mayor of a plan for loans from the city for each house, payable
upon resale, that would bring the prices low enough for middle
income families. Leaders held a press conference. "The first question
was about the mayor's support," Gecan remembered. They couldn't
speak about Koch's intentions, but they declared their intention
to go forward.
One of the
local network affiliates traveled to the site after the press
conference. Cameras rolled over block after block, building after
building. That night, as scenes of desolation appeared on the
screen, an announcer read from the book of Nehemiah to illustrate
EBC's intent:
You see
the trouble we are in,
How Jerusalem
lies in ruins with its gates burned.
Come, let
us build the walls of Jerusalem,
That we
may no longer suffer disgrace.
Audience
response was immense. The next day the mayor approved the project.
Koch, with the flair for publicity that had long been his trademark,
soon was comparing himself with the prophet Nehemiah in speeches
across the city. [3]
The Nehemiah
story is a window into the organizing approach of the IAF network.
It testifies to major changes in its organizing over the years,
from the scale of the effort (involving tens of thousands of families)
to the sorts of projects worked on—assuming responsibility
for a large-scale infrastructure effort like the creation of a
small township of houses. The language of the Nehemiah undertaking,
resonant with the prophetic Old Testament imagery of the black
church tradition, is far removed from the "nonideological" vocabulary
of raw power and self-interest most often associated with community
organizations. Indeed, much of EBC's power comes from its capacity
to frame its action in a language that has a widespread appeal:
it adds values to "issues," in a way that re-embeds problems like
housing once again in a sense of human agency. These changes suggest
ways in which Industrial Areas Foundation groups have evolved
since Saul Alinsky's death in 1972.
In the context
of a growing economy and the Great Society of the 1960s—even
through the mid-seventies—the classic Alinsky approach to
community organization often proved effective in the immediate
terms, at least for those served by dominant organizations in
poorer communities. Sufficient resources, controlled by city administrations
or local economic power brokers, existed to provide a wealth of
local targets for campaigns for tangible benefits in municipal
services, housing, education, economic development and a range
of other areas. There continued to be a broader public that poor
and powerless communities might appeal to on the basis of their
right to a fair share. And, at least until the early seventies,
dense networks of local neighborhood institutions continued to
thrive in most inner city urban areas which could be pulled together
and mobilized through effective organization.
Yet the
context for community organization changed dramatically through
the seventies and into the eighties in ways that prompted changes
in IAF methods. Innovations in telecommunications, urban growth
and development patterns, the appearance of massive suburban shopping
malls and industrial and office parks far from downtown areas
indicated a further erosion in the numbers of jobs available in
inner city areas and a transformation of the nature of jobs. Cities
became less regional retailing and manufacturing centers than
centers for administration, finance, conventions and recreation.
Those who moved to the suburbs—including, in the aftermath
of sixties' civil rights laws, much of the black middle class—were
mainly those who could afford to move. Inner city areas were left
with large populations of the poor, new immigrants, working class
ethnics and others whose traditional blue collar jobs were fast
disappearing. An increasingly large number of women-headed, single-parent
households were trapped in welfare or low-paid, dead end or part
time jobs, which accounted for the growing percentage of woman
and children among the poor. [4]
With the
flight of jobs and the disappearance of many middle class residents
came a weakening in the elements of community that had furnished
the foundations of traditional community organization: unions,
political groups, ethnic associations, small business organizations.
All lost ground, save only religious congregations, which remained
centers of local neighborhood life. In view of such changes, the
1983 report of U.S. News and World Report on the next 50
years certainly represents a plausible, bleak scenario. The magazine
envisioned "large, aging cities [where] vast neighborhoods housing
the least mobile of Americans—the poor, the elderly, and
new immigrants from other lands—will continue to crumble.
The residential parts of central cities 'will be more a repository
for those who have fallen off the train.'"[5]
At the same
time, the growing conglomeration of the economy greatly limited
the maneuvering ability of local power brokers. Between 1980 and
1985 alone, $380 billion dollars were spent for corporate mergers
and hostile takeovers, many involving the purchase of locally
owned business by multinational corporations. Patterns of concentration
reflected such merger activity. By the early 1980s, the assets
of the largest two hundred companies matched the percentage of
the economy held by the largest one thousand in 1941.[6]
In turn,
the gobbling up of locally owned industries and businesses, the
trends toward centralization of financial and economic power and
wealth all meant transfer of effective authority to national or
even global managers. Meanwhile, Reagan-era cutbacks in aid to
cities have severely circumscribed the resources of the public
sector.
These shifting
terms of political and economic power greatly affected the IAF
practice by the middle seventies, as organizers tried to cope
with changing community landscape. "We began across the board,
working with middle class whites as well as blacks and chicanos,"
explained Chambers. "We began looking not so much at geography
as at communities of interest." They discussed how to deepen the
process of organizing, which led to an even stronger emphasis
on community institutions, especially congregations. And they
began to stress that citizens organizations needed a clear independence
from government funding, foundations and corporate donors if local
communities were to have a strong sense of "ownership" and power.
"We became very strong on the need for the organization to be
based on the people's own money or it won't last," said Chambers.
IAF leaders and organizers began to stress the need for citizen
groups to be largely self-financed through dues from affiliated
group and membership fundraising campaigns.[7]
The new
focus on religious groups as the foundation for organizing came
partly out of IAF organizers' readings of the changing urban environment.
It was also made possible by the generational change in IAF leadership.
Ed Chambers,
the organizer who took over as executive director of IAF after
Alinsky's death in 1972, certainly conveys something of Alinsky's
legendary style. He is brusque, often contentious. And he mingles
the persona of "organizer" with Alinsky-like intellectuality
as well: Chambers seems something of a cross between political
philosopher and stevedore. Recruited to the IAF in 1958 to work
with The Woodlawn Organization, Chambers combines reflections
on books he has been reading lately with profane observations
about the state of American politics and society. He constantly
uses stories from his three decades of organizing to make his
points. At times, he interrupts the conversation to challenge
you: "what do you mean by that?" "Why do you think so?" His early
encounters with the sponsoring committee of East Brooklyn Churches
had this quality, participants remembered. "He stood up there
and kept telling us that we were living in a garbage heap," explained
Lutheran minister Dave Benke. At times, it made Benke furious,
but Chambers also forced attention to things the community leaders
had closed out of their minds, "just to survive." "The man kept
us in touch with reality and with our anger. He insisted that
our people, pastors included, should be training in organizing
skills. He demanded that we research every project or issue
to be addressed. And he made us practice ahead of time for every
important meeting or action." [8]
In ways
that resemble Alinsky, Chambers radiates a "tough guy" organizer
stance that is abrasive to many. But he has made sharp breaks
in the IAF traditional approach to women organizers and leaders.
Alinsky was reknown for his comment to Marge Tabankin—a community
organizer who headed the ACTION program for the Carter administration—that
"women couldn't be organizers" during a training session in the
early seventies. In contrast, Chambers has sought out women as
paid organizers since his days with FIGHT in the sixties, and
he has encouraged women like Christine Stephens and Maribeth Larkin
to become leading, highly paid organizers in the IAF network.
Chambers is also well known for encouraging women in IAF affiliated
groups to take on top leadership positions. And over the past
ten years, IAF training sessions have come to depict the contemporary
women's movement in a strongly favorable light—a notable
difference from earlier years.[9]
Chambers
brings a different set of passions to organizing than Alinsky
did. A former seminarian, Chambers has strong interests in theology
and religious thought, for instance, which have infused his perspective
on what organizing is about. As a young man he had travelled through
Europe and was inspired by the example of worker priest movements
in the fifties. He is also driven by the concern for developing
organizing as a respected, reasonably well-paying career
with security. Today, IAF "lead organizers"—those who direct
large organizations—make comfortably middle-income salaries,
and cabinet members, the most senior IAF organizers, make more
(such salaries, unprecedented elsewhere in the world of community
organizing, are possible because of the strong emphasis on membership-based
fundraising—mostly dues from member church, synagogue, union
and community affiliates of local groups—and because their
new organizing approaches devolve most authority and tasks, eventually,
on voluntary leadership themselves). Perhaps most notably, Chambers
is more "relational," as one young IAF trainee put it. He constantly
encourages, prods, and supports the network of organizers for
whom he feels responsible. And he asks for criticisms, feedback
and reciprocity from others, as well. Chambers is visibly a man
who enjoys public life. [10]
Ed Chambers
pointed the IAF organizing network in new directions. But the
changes were given depth and substance through an organizing effort
called Communities Organized for Public Service, COPS, that proved
dramatically successful in the sprawling, impoverished Mexican
barrios of San Antonio.
Ernesto
Cortes, COPS first organizer, had grown up in San Antonio in the
forties and fifties. He had always felt, himself, as a Mexican-American,
something of a stranger in the town where the majority Mexican
population had been excluded from political and economic power
for over one hundred years. "The struggle was to become American,"
Cortes remembered. "If someone called you a Mexican you were supposed
to beat them up." For years, he had been frustrated by the ineffectiveness
of traditional approaches to poverty, from the poverty programs
to voter registration and economic development strategies. The
underlying problem seemed to him the lack of power, reflected
in no Mexican representation on City Council. He decided to get
organizing experience.
Cortes had
read Reveille for Radicals in the early 1960s and had liked
the book, but he had thought Alinsky in person too cynical when
he heard him speak in college. IAF groups like Rochester FIGHT
and TWO were known as the best community organizing around, however.
So Cortes went to Chicago in the summer of 1971.[11]
The need
to "listen" to community traditions and individual self interests
was becoming codified in IAF organizing in a constant practice
of individualized, face to face meetings. Organizers and leaders
learn how to regularly "interview" people within churches or neighborhood
groups and in the larger community, alike, to find out "who people
are," what motivates them, what are their interests and concerns.
IAF organizers see this structured listening process as the singular
"genius" of their work, the key to their successes. They argue
that most "organizing" involves one-way communications between
activist or group and a passive constituency; direct mail fundraising
appeals for causes or electoral politics are familiar examples.
By way of contrast, in IAF groups a constant process of interviewing
grounds organizing in an ongoing conversation. Sister Margaret
Snipe, a copastor at an Hispanic parish in Brooklyn connected
to EBC, illustrated the point. She said that the training of a
group of lay members of her church in the skills of listening
through individualized, face to face meetings worked a dramatic
rebirth in the community. It created a group of church "organizers"
who were sensitive to other's points of view, more aware of their
own needs and interests, skilled at interpersonal communication.[12]
In IAF projects
in Chicago and Baltimore, Cortes learned similar skills. "I learned
the value of listening," he explained. "I had always had a tendency
to jump down people's throats, to intimidate."[13]
When Father
Edmundo Rodriguez, a priest in San Antonio, asked for help from
the IAF in putting together a local community group, Cortes returned
in 1973. He brought with him the IAF emphasis on detailed attention
to the community's concerns—Cortes did hundreds of interviews
in his first months to get a mapping of local issues, before anything
else. It turned out that the chief concerns were concrete problems
close to home like the drainage system that overflowed each time
it rained and substandard housing—not the more visible issues
like racial discrimination and police brutality which Chicano
militants had sought to organize around. Father Rodriguez suddenly
began to feel that this effort at organizing was different than
earlier, unsuccessful campaigns. It wasn't that people were apathetic
or unconcerned; they had rarely been asked what concerned them.
"It was like one of those light bulbs that suddenly appears in
cartoons," as Rodriguez described.
Ernie Cortes
brought the conviction that it didn't make sense to organize in
the Mexican - American community without an attentiveness to what
people actually believed, as well as what issues were on their
minds. "I thought a lot about a conversation I'd had once with
Cesar Chavez," he explained. "Every organization needs an ideology
if it is to continue." For the Mexican community in San Antonio,
like the U.F.W. union, Christianity in the form of Catholicism
was by far the strongest, most vital belief system, and it was
hard to imagine successful civic activity that would not draw
on the rituals and traditions of the church, as well its institutional
strength.[14]
Combining
careful listening to basic community issues with an organizing
approach based on the core convictions of the community led COPS
in San Antonio, and the IAF network more broadly, to several critical
innovations. In the first instance, "self-interest" as a concept
became considerably richer and broader. IAF training began to
combine the two earlier Alinsky themes of listening to community
culture and individual self-interests to gain a different view
of what motivates individuals. It began to distinguish between
"self-interest" and "selfishness," arguing that people's basic
concerns are not only for themselves in an immediate, short term
sense. When people think about what they care about in the longer
term they evidence a strong interest in the intangibles of their
lives—their families' well-being, their own sense of contribution
and dignity, their core beliefs, their friends and closest associates,
and their sense of efficacy in the world.[15]
A more elaborated
approach to listening to community needs also resulted in a change
in the base of those organized. The IAF organizing method reached
deeper into the community's institutional and social fabric than
it ever had before—in the process drawing in conservatives,
for the first time, and establishing the organization on the basis
of community moderates, through attention not only to community
issues but also to concrete needs of institutions such as religious
congregations. COPS helped local parishes with tangible concerns
such as membership rolls, fund drives, liturgy, music.
Thus the
organizational leadership also shifted, from the more visible
"public" actors—most typically male—who had championed
activist issues like police brutality and protests against discrimination,
to a more invisible tier of leaders, frequently women, who had
worked behind the scenes to keep school PTAs going, run day-to-day
activities of churches and the like. COPS organizers termed such
community sustainers, "moderates," in contrast to activists or
liberals or "politicos." COPS built on the basis of P.T.A. leaders,
parish council members, stalwarts of the church guilds: "Not the
politicos, the people who have been in and defined public
life, the people who have wheeled and dealed," said Christine
Stephens, staff director of the organization in the early eighties
who is a student of American social protest and political theory.
"This approach builds around the people who have sustained the
community instead. The women, for example, whose lives by and
large have been wrapped up in their parishes and their children.
What COPS has been able to do is to give them a public life and
a public visibility, to educate, to provide the tools whereby
they can participate in the political process." In the process,
"politics," "public life" and "leadership" became redefined.[16]
Janie Gonzalez,
the sort of community stalwart to whom people turn instinctively
in times of need, remembered Cortes' first approaches. "When Ernie
was interviewing people in 1973, he always kept coming back to
me. I said, 'Why?'" Cortes's reasoning was clear. For many years
she had been active in her church parish and her school PTA. Ms.
Gonzalez still speaks softly—until she is in a public setting.
In those years, Cortes would challenge her a little: "Ernie used
to say you have to speak loud, from your stomach. I'd say, "I'm
sorry, I'm not that way." For COPS leaders like Janie Gonzalez,
the fusion of particular issues with values and faith gave created
a potent alchemy. "We'd talk about what values come from our families
and our faiths," she remembered. "Love, caring. Then we'd talk
about the pressures on families nowadays: unemployment, drugs,
the media, peer pressure, alcoholism. And we'd talk about how
the church should be responding." COPS provided a new vehicle
for acting on strongly held convictions that had had no
outlet.[17]
Such new
dimensions of the IAF approach had the visible consequence in
San Antonio of delivering a series of stunning political and programmatic
victories. The organization forced a the city to act on drainage
problems, dirt roads, schools, and soundly beat a "Proposition
13" tax limitation initiative with a massive, door to door campaign
in 1987. Its network of affiliated organizations in Texas also
passed landmark statewide legislation around issues of school
district financing, health care and farm safety in the mid-eighties.[18]
In the early
seventies, San Antonio still had a "colonial" air where a small
group of businessmen, most of whom belonged to the segregated
Texas Cavalier Country Club, held sway. City council members were
elected at large, which meant that Mexican and African American
candidates could almost never raise funds to compete. COPS "shattered
San Antonio's established conservative order." The City Council
now is elected from single-member districts: by 1977, five Hispanics
and one black formed a new majority in city government. Henry
Cisneros, rising to political leadership in the city in large
part through his championing of COPS issues, gained national visibility
as the first Hispanic mayor of a major American city.[19]
It became
clear that in groups like COPS, the "organizer" played more of
a catalytic role, encouraging others to take on increasing responsibility
for getting people to meetings, planning strategy, doing research,
and training itself. "No organizer comes in from the outside and
organizes," said Cortes. "All you can do in any situation is to
identify those leaders who want to organize. I didn't organize
COPS. The leadership did. I taught them; I trained them; I identified
them; I challenged them; and I worked with them on a one-to-one
basis. But they did the actual organizing. They had already the
relationships for years and years, mostly built around the churches.
The question for leaders is to what extent they feel serious enough
about the problems to work the networks they already have and
to build new networks. The basic process was developing the skills
to act."[20]
Organizing,
then, began to involve a much more extensive process of skill
development in the IAF groups. "We began to see every action as
an opportunity for education and training," described Maribeth
Larkin, an organizer first in United Neighborhoods Organization,
an IAF affiliate in Los Angeles, who later became staff director
of COPS. "If you look at it in the right way, there are all kinds
of opportunities for training—every presentation before city
council, every meeting, every discussion with the media." Chambers
saw this more elaborate focus on what the local organizational
leaders were learning as a fundamental difference with the older
Alinsky style: "the mistake of the first forty years of Alinsky
organizing was the absence of political education. We were very
good at the action, very clever and imaginative, but we didn't
make a commitment to the growth process of the people. We never
forced people to reflect. We never took retreats, or did extensive
evaluation."
The IAF
"iron rule of organizing" now is "never do anything for people
that they can do for themselves." Indeed, IAF's "iron rule," with
its insistence on self-reliance and independence as a condition
for self-respect, has intriguing parallels with the step by step
assumption of personal responsibility one finds in self-help groups
like Alcoholics Anonymous or Al Anon, on the one hand, or the
more political stress on "self-determination" found in movements
like Black Power or women's liberation, on the other. But what
is unique about I.A.F.'s approach is its location of this stress
on autonomy in a specifically public environment, where public
is understood as an arena of difference, not homogeneity. The
combination of an emphasis on autonomy with one on the different,
unique needs and motivations that bring each individual into politics
furnishes a constant prod in the IAF organizations for people
to acknowledge their mistakes and account for their actions—behavior
that in most "public settings" renders the individual too vulnerable
to sustain, or changes "public" back into a more personalized
communal style. In IAF, public life is seen more as a particular
kind of craft, an artful way of acting in a specific setting.
With such an understanding, personal vulnerability is diminished
by learning the craft itself. And people's experience of "transformation"
comes most directly from public roles, connected to feelings of
power which result from lessening dependence on experts, professionals,
and organizers themselves.[21]
Six years
after Alinsky's death, the changing approach of the network were
articulated in Organizing for Family and Congregation.
"We are in a conversation about families, churches and institutional
power," began the document, reflecting "the collective experience
of lay leaders, clergy, women religious and professional organizers
in twenty cities." The document situated IAF-style organizing
in a wide-ranging analysis of American culture and society, with
something of the stark, even apocalyptic tone of Alinsky in his
1972 Playboy interview. "If we follow where our dollars
go, we fill find the institutions that shape our daily lives,"
it argued. "Our dollars end up in banks and savings and loans,
in insurance companies, in oil companies, in utilities, and in
the hands of major manufacturers, real estate developers, retailers
and organized criminals...They buy the second level, the politicians,
lawyers, the advertisers, the media...and other professionals
[who] provide the rationales and jargon to perpetuate the top
power institutions and screen them from the public."[22]
This sort
of skeletal power analysis was vintage Alinskyism. It departed
from the original method, however, in its depiction of the nature
of the conflict and its prescriptions about what to do. The document
listed a number of consequences—economic pressures that result
from families struggling to meet bills; community pressures like
drugs, pornography, crime, violence against children; and more
subtle cultural pressures as well. "Television tells people how
to eat, how to look, how to love, and how to feel." People increasingly
were subjected to "overscheduling" that eroded free time and family
ties. All of these pressures, moreover, added up to a value crisis:
"Our country is in the kind of crisis that both Madison and de
Tocqueville warned us about. The intermediate voluntary institutions—including
churches—are ineffectual in a power relationship with the
powerful. As a result, the middle is collapsing, confused... sucked
dry by a vacuum." [23]
The result,
argued Organizing for Family and Congregation, was a "value
war," fought over the "fundamental question: who will parent our
children? Who will teach them, train them, nurture them? How will
they be taught and trained and nurtured? Will this parenting take
place in a strictly secular setting where the system is said to
be the solution, or time is money, or profit is the sole standard
of judgment? Or will the true teachers and prophets—parents
and grandparents, pastors and rabbis and lay leaders—win
this war and continue to convey the best values of the Judeo-Christian
tradition?"[24]
Such a framing
of the "crisis" in America pointed to the distinctive changes
in IAF methods of organizing. Sixties-style movements weaknesses,
in IAF terms, included a reliance on charismatic leaders, an absence
of ways to teach accountability, activism without careful thought
and purpose, and an alienated cultural style which turned off
most Americans. As an alternative, Organizing urged the
growth of new forms of citizen organizations that had roots in
a variety of institutions—from religious congregations to
Lions Clubs. Such groups had to build on and respect the traditions
and culture of the community, but also be open to diversity. There
was no prior specification of what issues such new forms of organizations
might address (though the nature of the institutional foundations
certainly put limits on what issues they were likely to raise:
gay rights was not a likely cause for Catholic parishes, for instance).
Rather, the document expressed the conviction that broad and inclusive
citizen groups, deciding their own agendas but drawing and reflecting
on religious and democratic traditions in the process, would allow
"a collection of families, a church or synagogue or an alliance
of churches [to] break out of the materialist pattern" and "arm
themselves for a value war."[25]
Such an
approach spoke powerfully to minority, poor and working class
communities, and it also had a wider appeal to Americans, in the
period of "Me First" morality and consumer culture. By the end
of the decade, the IAF was able to help local leaders build larger,
more potent "people's organizations" than had previously appeared
out of the community organizing tradition. Indeed, in many ways
such groups were no longer "community groups," but broader, more
diverse citizen organizations that drew, especially, from congregations.
The experiences
and relative successes of such groups, in turn, brought new challenges
and questions: how could they be sustained over time? How might
new leadership emerge and develop? And, finally—since IAF
had spurned the model of sixties-style social movements, which
they saw as transitory and superficial—what was such organizing
about in longer range terms, in a world whose dominant
institutions and culture palpably differed from their values and
interests? "Value war" had specific content for participants in
these groups. They saw justice, participation, the dignity of
people and other key values undermined by "me-first" selfishness.
But it was unclear what they were proposing as the alternative.
In the 1980s out of a concern for the meaning and content of their
broader vision, these groups rediscovered the language of public
life. [26]
In the 1980s,
the IAF network continued to be widely viewed as models for populist-style
citizen organizing. No other local groups in the country could
boast the thousands of delegates that IAF affiliates like COPS
in San Antonio, BUILD in Baltimore or, East Brooklyn Churches
in New York or United Neighborhoods Organization in Los Angeles
could turn out to conventions every year or two, nor the scale
of victories for poor, working class and minority communities
that IAF groups sometimes achieved. San Antonio's Communities
Organized for Public Service, for instance, had secured three
quarters of a billion dollars for roads, schools, sewers, parks,
economic development and other infrastructural elements in once
devastated barrios. Moreover, it was understood seen to be catalyzing
broader political changes in Texas and even the Southwest. In
Texas, the original COPS organization had led to a network which
included groups like Valley Interfaith in the Rio Grande, EPISO
in El Paso, Austin Interfaith, The Metropolitan Organization in
Houston and others. [27]
On the face
of it—and even in the view of many grass roots organizers—IAF
continued to resemble Alinsky's "classic" approach. "Saul believed
power was such a good thing that people should have it and lots
of people should have it," said Ed Chambers, Executive Director
of the I.A.F. since Alinsky's death, to a reporter in 1988, explaining
the animus of the mass based organizations that IAF helps put
together. It was the sort of language Alinsky himself certainly
would have employed. But in fact, the IAF organizations developed
basic themes in ways Alinksy could not have anticipated.
[28]
In particular,
the IAF approach transformed Alinsky's understanding of "self-interest"
and "power" into far more dynamic concepts. Their evolving understanding
of such terms now highlights the multidimensional motivations
that initially bring people into organizations and the
fashion in which any exercise of power is always relational, changing
the actor as she or he changes the environment. Moreover, greatly
elaborating Saul Alinsky's rhetorical dedication to "democratic
values" like diversity, conflict, participation and difference,
the IAF has rediscovered older populist ideas of public life as
a distinctive, vital arena in its own right, where citizens exchange
ideas and power, achieve visibility, engage in conflict and collaboration.
Their organizations have also significantly reworked the practical
theory of public life and its relationship to private life-worlds.
The IAF theory of public life highlights in a novel fashion the
dependence of the public realm on the private, as well as the
public's distinctiveness. And though groups like COPS haven't
solved the problem of organizational inertia and routinization,
they have addressed it through an intense stress on the need for
self-reflection and education if citizen organizations are to
remain vital.
Some of
these concerns were visible as early as the Organizing for
Families and Congregations book. Leaders in citizen organizations
were defined not as simply individuals but as those in relationship
with others, who "recognize that leadership is not by nature a
form of individual aggrandizement but rather a means to continually
expand the number of their fellow leaders in the interest of collective
power." A premium was placed on "leadership training," including
skills that ranged from "how to listen to and affirm other people"
to raising money and negotiating with decision makers. The question
of how to hold leaders accountable—both within organizations
and in the broader public environment, where they dealt with office
holders and others—emerged as a central problem. All of these
issues had to do with forms of public activity.
The tone
of IAF's book remained, however, parochial. Thus, there was little
attention to building any ongoing relationships with groups or
individuals outside the citizen organizations. By the late 1970s,
in fact, I.A.F. had developed a reputation for an unwillingness
to work with other groups. Moreover, organizing was described
in terms of its effects on families and congregations, not on
the larger institutional patterning of communities or the dominant
culture. But several things moved IAF to frame its work more broadly.
In part,
the IAF was led to "discover" the nature and distinctiveness of
specifically public relationships out of the dynamics of organizing
itself, as organizations lasted and matured. Despite their attentiveness
to "getting people to do things for themselves" and avoid staff
domination or excessive responsibility, patterns of reliance on
organizers like Cortes nonetheless developed. What would happen
in COPS if he left? Could leaders "do it on their own"? And what
happened to the possibilities for new leaders emerging if someone
assumed the presidency of the group and kept it year after year?
A remarkable feature of the I.A.F. network is the extent to which
such questions are constantly posed, in the name of a self-reflective,
educational process intended to expand the number of leaders and
keeps organizations alive and dynamic. But it was still not an
easy process.[29]
Furthermore,
relationships over time with politicians had been a prod to thinking
more carefully about the nature of public. COPS attentiveness
to power and self-interest led them to challenge politicians'
personalized styles out of the suspicion that first name relationships
and expressions of endearment were in part a mystifying ploy,
to win voters support. Moreover, COPS saw itself as creating a
different sort of relationship, based on "collaboration," not
support. As Christine Stephens put it, "what we create in actions
with public officials is a world in which leaders control the
agenda for the space of that meeting. It is the people talking
and the politicians listening, and not having the central place."
[30]
Ed Chambers
saw himself as having worked on the distinction between "private"
and "public" out of his difficult experiences over the years with
the organizing tradition. "Saul never paid attention to organizers'
private lives. They were a mess." Indeed, Chambers spoke with
some visible pain of Alinsky's cavalier, dismissive attitude towards
his associates' family life, retirement and security needs: "He
called me up long distance to order me to Rochester." [31]
All of this
led to a major innovation in their method by the late 1970s: a
basic workshop given in every national training session and reproduced
countless times in local groups that I.A.F. calls "public and
private." In their typical pedagogical approach, making a distinction
to be discussed, the trainer divides the board and makes a serious
of paired contrasts, corresponding to "appropriate behavior" in
different realms:
Private
family/friends/self
sameness/commonality
fidelity/loyalty
givenness
intimacy/closed
vulnerability
the need
to be liked
self-giving
Public
church/school/politics/work
diversity
accountability
choice
open, fluid
dramatic
role
need to
be respected
quid pro
quo/ self-interest
The distinction
between public and private is always framed by I.A.F.'s basic
rules of "knowledge": "universals," principles that they have
found seem to apply across widely varying cultural and communal
contexts, need always to be contextualized to have any real meaning.
Thus, I.A.F. teachers argue that with public and private, as with
other distinctions, nothing is ever completely "either-or" ("we're
the same people, after all, whether we are in public or private
setting," explained Gerald Taylor, the staff director of BUILD
in Baltimore). All categories should be seen as provisional and
fluid, based on lessons of experiences (Taylor pointed out that
"public" would have a qualitatively different meaning in most
traditional African societies, for instance). And different settings
partake of different "public" and "personal" or private qualities—a
church, explained I.A.F. cabinet member Arnie Graf, is far more
"personal" than a convention or a political rally.
[32]
But with
all the nuance, the very outlining of this sort of distinction
works often large impact on participants, in a culture where such
distinctions are regularly muddled or mystified. "The first time
I gave the workshop in a training session with UNO in Los Angles,
I knew this was something very powerful," Chambers remembered.
"The discussion could have gone on all day. And people lined up
afterwards to talk about their lives." I.A.F. has used this basic,
working distinction for a decade now, and it always stimulates
intense, sometimes agonizing reflection, as participants think
through the ways such boundaries are obscured or confused in their
lives. "It was the most meaningful experience I ever had, more
important than seminary or college," said the Reverend Doug Miles,
a dynamic minister who heads one of Baltimore's largest black
churches, Brown Memorial Baptist Church. Miles described his emotions
during an I.A.F. "ten day" training session he went to in July,
1982. After the workshop on public and private and a follow-up
discussion of the way participants defined their own individual
self-interests, he suddenly was overwhelmed. "Preachers historically
have problems in their personal lives at home because they're
so busy in 'public,' taking care of everybody else. When I figured
out what priorities I had been living by, I set there and cried.
My wife was 14th, after the NAACP. For the first time it dawned
on me just now neglectful I was being.
"It also
altered my view of the ministry," Miles continued. "The church
had been functioning so that if the pastor was not involved, the
program did not go. I began to see the fallacy of that. The ministry
was not something I was responsible for; it was something
the church was responsible for. I began to see the need to share
responsibility, not to be afraid of training people to become
leaders." After the 10 day training session, Miles instituted
a program of leadership development in his church, tying 10 day
principles" to scriptural and theological reflection. By 1987,
the church had grown several-fold. [33]
This distinction
proved significant in teaching leaders the dynamics of effective
political action, from the parish level to the life of communities.
"We would never have been able to challenge the priest to stop
acting like our 'father' without this sort of training," said
Beatrice Cortez, a president of San Antonio COPS in the early
1980s. "You learn what's appropriate and inappropriate for politicians.
They shouldn't try to get us to love them, for instance." Cortez
frequently tells the story of her daughter, to illustrate how
children can quickly pick up the point. Ms. Cortez had a COPS
phone in her house, during her tenure as president of the organization.
One day the mayor, Henry Cisneros —whom she had known for
years—called up on the line. "My daughter answered and at
first didn't know who it was. 'Who should I say is calling?' she
asked." Cisneros said, "'Tell her it's a special friend.' Then
she recognized his voice," Ms. Cortez continued. "She said, 'on
this line, you're not a friend. I know who you are. You're the
mayor! I told her, 'you got that right, honey!'" Cortez subsequently
found that in training Mexican communities in other parts of Texas
in effective "public life," the distinction proved invaluable.
"In these towns, politics has come to be equated with family ties.
People get mixed up through marriage, godparents and don't want
to challenge close ties." Evocation of a "public realm" where
dynamics of personal loyalty were not dominant did not undermine
extended family patterns, nor consign "family concerns" to the
private realm. But it positioned them in a way that allowed common
work with people beyond traditional family ties. Cortez
does role plays built around scripture to bring home the point.[34]
The self-conscious recognition of the public realm in which
I.A.F. organizations functioned as significant actors thus began
to make explicit and clear what had often been known intuitively
but never quite identified: public life has its own distinctive
dynamics, principles like accountability, respect, diversity,
self-interest, pluralism, "quid pro quo," visibility and collaborative
action. But public life, for the I.A.F. groups, also stands in
a different relationship to "private" than the arena has been
classically conceived. Indeed, they partially reverse the traditional
attributes of public and private and their corresponding valorizations,
alike. Private, in the I.A.F. terms, is the more self-sacrificial
and idealistic realm, while public is the world of "quid pro quo"
and "self-interest." Moreover, public life in the I.A.F. view,
though it has an integrity and value in its own right, also is
"meant" to serve the personal interests of families and private
relations.
The republican
tradition across the centuries has privileged public life, sustaining
in various forms Aristotle's metaphor of public life as like the
body, while private life is like limbs, that can be cut away if
necessary.[35] In contrast, a more apt metaphor for I.A.F.'s construction
of public and private is the BUILD organization's symbol of tree.
In these terms, roots serve as the "private" foundations of public
life, while trunk and branch, symbols of the visible public world,
are expressions of "maturity"—but continue to draw sustenance
and support from their roots. Such a set of reversals, conceptually,
has its counterparts in the sorts of communal and family issues
that are taken up by groups like COPS. And they have led to a
radical recasting of the nature of leadership and politics, that
encourages women for instance, to take new roles. After COPS first,
every president of the organization was female.
Finally,
I.A.F. Groups shifted from simply protest organizations
to the assumption of some responsibility for policy initiation
and what they call "governance." Affiliates began to take on issues
of infrastructure that had to do with the entire life of communities,
in addition to the issues that affected their own particular constituencies.
The results included fascinating examples of how public life can
combine difference with discovered commonalties, conflict with
cooperation, around a renewal of citizen responsibility for the
commonwealth.
1
Interview with Wade Goodwyn on Chambers' "relational" quality,
November 8, 1987, Baltimore; on COPS depictions, interviews with
Beatrice Cortes, July 8, San Antonio, Christine Stephens, Ernie
Cortes, San Antonio, July 4, 1983. Cortes was the first to begin
describing COPS as like a "university of public life." See also
Peter Skerry, "Neighborhood COPS," New Republic, Feb. 6, 1984,
p. 23.
2
An exchange with Ed Chambers, the successor of Alinsky as head
of the I.A.F. training institute, illustrated their epistemology.
Chambers, describing the importance that I.A.F. organizing has
come to place on people's disentangling of "public" and "private"
realms, remarked that people lose the "public" side of "mediating
institutions," associations between the individual and the state
or large scale systems. "They think of things like churches simply
as private, so they make all sorts of inappropriate demands,"
he argued. I replied that the very concept of mediating institutions
(seeing them as private) maintains a narrow view of public life.
Chambers
went off on another track: "I haven't read Berger in years. The
only thing I know is that this thing is very close to the truth."
He continued, "I've seen the response to this now in hundreds
of meetings across the country over ten years now. It strikes
home. People come up, sometimes with tears in their eyes, priests,
women religious, lay leaders, saying 'I wish I'd known this years
ago.'" Interview in Baltimore, November 6, 1987.
The exchange
illustrated I.A.F.'s feedback process. What it calls "universals"
of organizing are always contextualized, provisional and aimed
at the particular problems they encounter in their work. As Ernie
Cortes, a key figure in their network, pointed out, the I.A.F.
methodology bears resemblance "critical method" of Karl Popper,
philosopher of science, who argued for a view of "truth" not as
positive assertion, but as theories formulated out of practice
and aimed at problem solving that had not yet been refuted. See
for instance, Popper's selections in Adey, Glyn, and Frisby, David,
Translators, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London:
Heinemann, 1976).
I.A.F.'s
epistemology combines "qualitative" and "quantitative" methods—a
vast process of detailed information gathering about particular
individuals, cultures and settings with a rigorous analysis of
the economic dimensions of issues and the like—that is rare
in practice today. But it is in keeping with what Michael Patton,
a leading theorist in the field of evaluation, has called the
growing consensus about what should be done: "pragmatism, methodological
tolerance, flexibility and concern for appropriateness rather
than orthodoxy now characterize the practice, literature and discussions
of evolution." Michael Quinn Patton, Utilization-Focused Evaluation
(London: Sage, 1986), p. 210.
3
Interview with Mike Gecan, Brooklyn, N.Y., November 14, 1984;
interview with Ed Chambers, February 22, 1983; Youngblood and
Jamieson quoted from Jim Sleeper, "East Brooklyn's Second Rising,"
City Limits, December, 1982, p. 13.
4
These trends are documented in Harry C. Boyte, The Future of America's
Neighborhoods (Flint: Mott Foundation, 1986); for a discussion
of the flight of the black middle class, see for instance, Nicholas
Lemann, "The Origins of the Underclass," The Atlantic Monthly,
June, 1986, pp. 31 - 55.
5
US News and World Report, quoted from David A. Roozen, William
McKinney, and Jackson W. Carroll, Varieties of Religious Presence
(New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984), p. 5, which also has a good sketch
of the sources of increasing poverty in inner city communities.
6
Figures on merger from Gar Alperowitz and Jeff Faux, Rebuilding
America: A Blueprint for the New Economy (New York: Pantheon,
1984), p. 34; see also Robert Reich and Ira Magaziner, Minding
America's Business: The Decline and Rise of the American Economy
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
7
Interview with Ed Chambers, Chicago, April 29, 1977.
In a memo
to other staff at the United Church of Christ Board of Homeland
Ministers dated July 18, 1977, staff member John Moyer reported
on extensive conversations with organizers Chambers and Dick Harmon
in which they stressed the developing I.A.F. View that organizing
had classically used religious congregations to build community
organizations, but it needed to take more "seriously" religious
congregations and religious language. In particular, though they
continued to try to enlist Jewish synagogues as well, this meant
a particular emphasis on the sorts of mainstream, ecumenically
inclined Catholic and Protestant church groups which normally
proved most responsive. Moyer argued that "I.A.F. Has made a radical
shift in direction since Alinsky times: namely to view the Church
as the one institution in society with the potential to work positively
for the empowerment of people. In both San Antonio and East Los
Angeles, the churches have been the basic organizing units and
the leadership has come directly from parishes and congregations...Training
sessions for leaders and organizers emphasize the relationship
between theology and the dynamics of power relationships."; Memorandum
to Paul Sherry, Wes Hotchkiss, Herb White, Bob Strommen from John
Moyer, "Re: IAF," 18 July, 1977, in author's possession.
8
Benke quoted in Jim Gittings, "Churches in Communities: A Place
to Stand," Christianity & Crisis, Feb. 2, 1987, p. 6.
9
For all of that, the five most senior organizers—comprising
what the I.A.F. Calls its "cabinet"—continue to be men: in
addition to Chambers, Ernie Cortes, Mike Gecan, Larry McNeil,
who directs the southern California staff, and Arnie Graf, in
charge of oversight of midAtlantic organizers. Cabinet membership,
according to Chambers, who decides, means an especially intensive,
ongoing process of political discussion and training process intended
to challenge, develop and mature their thinking. It depends mainly
on seniority, he claims—although it has seemed to me there
is controversy in the I.A.F. about membership, and several others
would appear to have a strong claim. When asked, Cortes told me
that the I.A.F. still has far too few strong women organizers—and
too few black and Hispanic organizers as well. Organizing, for
I.A.F., Has all the seriousness and craft of a highly skilled
guild —with something of the weaknesses (of 'handed down'
traditions and leadership) as well as the strengths of guilds.
Relatively few who intern with I.A.F. projects make it through
the rigorous training and evaluation process. The network's most
pressing, constantly invoked need is more people who will begin.
10
Trainee was Wade Goodwyn, conversation, November 8, 1987, Baltimore.
11
Interview with Ernesto Cortes, San Antonio, July 4, 1983.
12
Interview with Siste Margaret Snipe, Baltimore, November 6, 1987.
13
Interview with Ernesto Cortes, July 3, 1983, San Antonio.
14
Rodriguez quoted in Paul Burka, "The Second Battle of the Alamo,"
Texas Monthly, December, 1977, p. 144.
15
Modern conceptions of "interest" are dominated by the utilitarian
theories developed by Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and others
in the 18th and 19th century which argued for a moral and political
principle of "the greatest happiness for the greatest number,"
with each individual conceived to have separate wants. As Bentham
put it, "A thing is said to promote the interest, or to be for
the interest, of the individual when it tends to add to the sum
total of his pleasures." The interest of the community, in these
terms is "the sum of the interests of the several members who
compose it." In such individualized terms, the notion of "self-interest"
took on the character, especially, of material and economic concerns,
and was closely associated with a defense of usury (Bentham's
first work, published in 1787, was titled Defense of Usury showing
the impolicy of the present legal restraints on the terms of pecuniary
bargains). Bentham quoted in Ghita Ionescu, Politics and the Pursuit
of Happiness: An Inquiry into the Involvement of Human Beings
in the Politics of Industrial Society (London: Longman, 1984),
p. 114. Ionescu has a useful discussion of the concept.
But the
concept of "interest" "self-interest," deriving from the Latin
inter esse, to be among or intermediary, had a richer and more
social history. As Albert Hirschmann has observed, "when the term
'interest' in the sense of concerns, aspirations and advantages
gained in currency in Western Europe in the late sixteenth century
its meaning was by no means limited to the material aspects of
a person's welfare." Interest suggests "interestedness," as Ionescu
points out—entailing the question, "what's in it for me?"
But such a question obviously can be answered in deeper or more
immediate and superficial ways.
See also
Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977), p. 43.
16
Interview with Sister Christine Stephens, San Antonio, July 6,
1983; Mike Gecan, an I.A.F. cabinet member, described the far
larger number of "moderates" in leadership roles in I.A.F. affiated
groups as the single largest change in their approach. Interview
with Mike Gecan, November 11, 1987, Baltimore.
17
Interview with Janie Gonzalez, San Antonio, July 7, 1983.
18
See Applebome, "Changing Texas Politics at its Roots," New York
Times, May 31, 1988.
19
The quote about San Antonio's conservative order is from the Editorial
Sidebar, quoting Warner's The Book of America accompanying Ernesto
Cortes, Jr., "Changing the Locus of Political Decision Making,"
Christianity & Crisis, February 2, 1987, p. 18.
20
For a candid look at the staff-domination of ACORN, for instance,
see Delgado, Organizing; see also Boyte, The Backyard Revolution,
for a discussion of the typical patterns of staff domination;
interview with Cortes, Los Angeles, May 17, 1977.
21
Interview with Ed Chambers, New York, Feb. 22, 1983; Cortes interview,
Los Angeles, May 17, 1977.
"We began
to see that you have to train the people," continued Chambers.
"Now we recognize that the most important part of any action or
process is not the thing itself, but what happens afterwards,
how people evaluate it, what people learn." I.A.F. organizers
and leaders alike came to focus on the process of what they call
"political growth" that takes place in successful citizen efforts.
"Fundamentally, I think COPS is about metanoia," explained Cortes,
using the Greek term meaning transformation from one state of
being to another. Cortes argued that groups like COPS provided
participants with "an opportunity to develop themselves as people.
For a lot of them, it means getting in touch with themselves,
their anger, their job, their own sense of who they are. It means
building the kind of relationships they never had." But all of
this was made possible by a new capacity for powerful action.
"Most important, COPS provides an opportunity to do something
about things that people have been frustrated about all their
lives. It means being able to move on issues. It means real hope,
not just fantasy or a wish."
22
Organizing for Family and Congregation (Huntington, N.Y.: I.A.F.,
1978), p. 3, 2, 13.
23
In developing this sort of analysis, I.A.F. found especially helpful
the concept of "mediating institutions" developed by Peter Berger,
Richard Neuhaus and others—voluntary and small scale associational
ties standing between the individual and the "megainstitutions"
of business and government. As Berger put it in his 1977 book
Facing Up To Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1977), "the best
defenses against the threat [of disruption and danger in modern
life] are those institutions, however weakened, which still give
a measure of stability to private life. These are, precisely,
the mediating institutions, notably those of family, church, voluntary
association, neighborhood and subculture." p. 134. In the I.A.F.
terms, however, such structures were not simply bulwarks, but
also centers from which to act to change the world.
24
Organizing, p. 3.
25
Ibid., pp. 3-4, 17-19.
26
When I first observed I.A.F. training in the fall of 1980, a long
discussion of the way in which "democratic values" like pluralism,
conflict, accountability, participation, equality and "religious
values" like justice, concern for the poor and individual dignity
formed a central part of the curriculum, and counterposed to what
trainers called "corporate culture." This sort of discussion also
a regular workshop in local organizations.
27
Peter Applebome, "Changing Texas Politics at Its Roots," New York
Times, May 31, 1988; for further description of the scale of I.A.F.
successes in comparison with other citizen and community efforts,
see for instance, Harry C. Boyte, The Backyard Revolution (Philadelphia:
Temple, 1980); Frank del Olmo, "Latino Activists Travel Separate
Paths: Traditional Politics Versus Community Organizations," Los
Angeles Times, July 29, 1983; Michael Ollove, "Md. Organizer Helps
Poor in Memphis Seek Power," Baltimore Sun, Feb. 7, 1988, and
especially the special issue of Christianity & Crisis, February,
1987, on community organizing in America.
I.A.F. affiliated
projects by 1988 included East Brooklyn Churches (EBC), Queens
Citizen Organization (QCO), South Bronx Churches (SBC) and the
Interfaith Community Organization (ICO) of Jersey City in the
New York - New Jersey area; Baltimoreans United for Leadership
Development (BUILD) in Baltimore, efforts, Interfaith Action Communities
(IAC) of Prince Georges County, Maryland and the Interfaith Sponsoring
Committee (ISC) of Memphis in the MidAtlantic region; San Antonio's
Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), the Metropolitan
Congregational Alliance (MCA) and the East Side Alliance (ESA),
The Metropolitan Organization (TMO) of Houston, Allied Communities
of Tarrant (ACT) in Forth Worth, El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring
Organization (EPISO), Valley Interfaith of the River Grande valley,
all in Texas; and United Neighborhoods Organization (UNO), the
South Central Organization (SCCO), the East Valleys Organization
(EVO) and the new San Fernando Sponsoring Committee (SFSC) in
southern California, along with several other fledgling efforts.
28
Chambers quoted from Michael Ollove, "Md. Organizer Helps Poor
in Memphis Seek Power," The Sun, Feb. 7, 1988.
29
"I had to argue with COPS leaders like hell to get them to have
a principle of a two year presidency," said Chambers. "And we
started a principle of two and a half years for a staff to direct
an organization, and then out. If you stay in one place and you're
creative, it will be too much your organization." The network
also came to accent the importance of a broad, heterogeneous base.
"We realized the strength of organizations came from their diversity,
as well as their roots. So we don't organize communities. It's
not defined by neighborhood. It's pluralist and nongeographic,
defined by a mix of interests and values and power."Interviews
with Ed Chambers, Minneapolis to Franklyn Square, May 2, 1988,
and New York, Feb. 22, 1983.
30
Stephens interviews July 6, July 4, 1983.
31
Chambers interview New York, Feb. 22, 1983.
32
Gerald Taylor interview, Baltimore; observations of Arnie Graf,
I.A.F. 10 day training, Baltimore, November 5, 1987. Different
I.A.F organizers and teachers, it is interesting to note, place
significantly different emphases on the relative degree of "publicness"
of churches, for instance.
33
Interview with Douglas I. Miles, Baltimore, November 14,
1987.
34
Interview with Beatrice Cortez, July 8, 1983.
35
"The notion of a city naturally precedes that of a family or an
individual, for the whole must necessarily be prior to the parts;
for if you take away the whole man, you cannot say a foot or a
hand remains..." Aristotle, The Politics (New York: Prometheus
Books, 1986), p. 4; see also Jean Bethke Elstain, Public Man,
Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) for
description of the Greek privileging of "public life."
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East Brooklyn
Congregations, 287 Lott Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11212. Phone: 718-498-4095.
Industrial Areas Foundation, 36 New Hyde Park Road, Franklin Square,
NY 11010. Phone: 516-354-1076.
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