MindFreedom International News - 20 January 2009

http://www.mindfreedom.org

Why "community organizing" is relevant to

very disenfranchised people -- including

mental health consumers and psychiatric survivors.

 

BELOW is a chapter written about two decades ago by a community

organizer who is getting inaugurated as President of the USA today:

 

Barack Obama.

 

It's about the role of the little-known job of "community organizing"

in the empowerment of, by and for extremely marginalized people, in

this case impoverished inner city people addressing multiple problems.

 

Forwarding this essay to others isn't necessarily an endorsement of

all or part. But he does have helpful lessons that can apply to other

disempowered groups of "everyday people," including psychiatric

survivors and mental health consumers.

 

He warns that simple economic "self-help" is not enough.

 

He also warns against relying on "a 'consumer advocacy' approach,

with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the ouside

powers that be."

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[First published in 1988 in Illinois Issues]

 

"Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City"

 

By Barack Obama

 

Illinois Issues, Springfield, Illinois

 

Over the past five years, I've often had a difficult time explaining

my profession to folks. Typical is a remark a public school

administrative aide made to me one bleak January morning, while I

waited to deliver some flyers to a group of confused and angry

parents who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school.

 

"Listen, Obama," she began. "You're a bright young man, Obama. You

went to college, didn't you?"

 

I nodded.

 

"I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to

college, get that degree and become a community organizer."

 

"Why's that?"

 

" 'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody

appreciate you." She shook her head in puzzlement as she wandered

back to attend to her duties.

 

I've thought back on that conversation more than once during the time

I've organized with the Developing Communities Project, based in

Chicago's far south side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to

mind haven't been as simple as her question. Probably the shortest

one is this: It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it.

 

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward

their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T.

Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this

internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism,

between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and

boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never

been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has

recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.

During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, many of these

issues became submerged in the face of the clear oppression of

segregation. The debate was no longer whether to protest, but how

militant must that protest be to win full citizenship for blacks.

 

Twenty years later, the tensions between strategies have reemerged,

in part due to the recognition that for all the accomplishments of

the 1960s, the majority of blacks continue to suffer from second-

class citizenship. Related to this are the failures — real, perceived

and fabricated — of the Great Society programs initiated by Lyndon

Johnson. Facing these realities, at least three major strands of

earlier movements are apparent.

 

First, and most publicized, has been the surge of political

empowerment around the country. Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson

are but two striking examples of how the energy and passion of the

Civil Rights movement have been channeled into bids for more

traditional political power. Second, there has been a resurgence in

attempts to foster economic development in the black community,

whether through local entrepre neurial efforts, increased hiring of

black contractors and corporate managers, or Buy Black campaigns.

Third, and perhaps least publicized, has been grass-roots community

organizing, which builds on indigenous leadership and direct action.

 

Proponents of electoral politics and economic development strategies

can point to substantial accomplishments in the past 10 years. An

increase in the number of black public officials offers at least the

hope that government will be more responsive to inner-city

constituents. Economic development programs can provide structural

improvements and jobs to blighted communities.

 

In my view, however, neither approach offers lasting hope of real

change for the inner city unless undergirded by a systematic approach

to community organization. This is because the issues of the inner

city are more complex and deeply rooted than ever before. Blatant

discrimination has been replaced by institutional racism; problems

like teen pregnancy, gang involvement and drug abuse cannot be solved

by money alone. At the same time, as Professor William Julius Wilson

of the University of Chicago has pointed out, the inner city's

economy and its government support have declined, and middle-class

blacks are leaving the neighbor hoods they once helped to sustain.

 

Neither electoral politics nor a strategy of economic self-help and

internal development can by themselves respond to these new

challenges. The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of

Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city

neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools,

although they did achieve an important symbolic effect. In fact, much-

needed black achievement in prominent city positions has put us in

the awkward position of administer ing underfunded systems neither

equipped nor eager to address the needs of the urban poor and being

forced to compromise their interests to more powerful demands from

other sectors.

 

Self-help strategies show similar limitations. Although both laudable

and necessary, they too often ignore the fact that without a stable

community, a well-educated population, an adequate infrastructure and

an informed and employed market, neither new nor well-established

compa nies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and

still compete in the international marketplace. Moreover, such

approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back

on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.

 

In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various

strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the

premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not

result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power

to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities

to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a

common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be

achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or

two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of

their local institutions.

 

This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and

any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire

organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and

education cam paigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of

issues — jobs, education, crime, etc. Once such a vehicle is formed,

it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations

more responsive to commu nity needs. Equally important, it enables

people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape

their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities

of acting collaboratively — the prerequi sites of any successful self-

help initiative.

 

By using this approach, the Developing Communities Project and other

organizations in Chicago's inner city have achieved some impressive

results. Schools have been made more accountable-Job training

programs have been established; housing has been renovated and built;

city services have been provided; parks have been refurbished; and

crime and drug problems have been curtailed. Additionally, plain folk

have been able to access the levers of power, and a sophisticated

pool of local civic leadership has been developed.

 

But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well.

One problem is the not entirely undeserved skepticism organizers face

in many communities. To a large degree, Chicago was the birthplace of

community organizing, and the urban landscape is littered with the

skeletons of previous efforts. Many of the best-intentioned members

of the community have bitter memories of such failures and are

reluctant to muster up renewed faith in the process.

 

A related problem involves the aforementioned exodus from the inner

city of financial resources, institutions, role models and jobs. Even

in areas that have not been completely devastated, most households

now stay afloat with two incomes. Traditionally, community organizing

has drawn support from women, who due to tradition and social

discrimination had the time and the inclination to participate in

what remains an essentially voluntary activity. Today the majority of

women in the black community work full time, many are the sole

parent, and all have to split themselves between work, raising

children, running a household and maintaining some semblance of a

personal life — all of which makes voluntary activities lower on the

priority list. Additionally, the slow exodus of the black middle

class into the suburbs means that people shop in one neighborhood,

work in another, send their child to a school across town and go to

church someplace other than the place where they live. Such

geographical dispersion creates real problems in building a sense of

investment and common purpose in any particular neighborhood.

 

Finally community organizations and organizers are hampered by their

own dogmas about the style and substance of organizing. Most still

practice what Professor John McKnight of Northwestern University

calls a "consumer advocacy" approach, with a focus on wrestling

services and resources from the ouside powers that be. Few are

thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in

terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.

 

Our thinking about media and public relations is equally stunted when

compared to the high-powered direct mail and video approaches success

fully used by conservative organizations like the Moral Majority.

Most importantly, low salaries, the lack of quality training and ill-

defined possibilities for advancement discourage the most talented

young blacks from viewing organizing as a legitimate career option.

As long as our best and brightest youth see more opportunity in

climbing the corporate ladder-than in building the communities from

which they came, organizing will remain decidedly handicapped.

 

None of these problems is insurmountable. In Chicago, the Developing

Communities Project and other community organizations have pooled

resources to form cooperative think tanks like the Gamaliel

Foundation. These provide both a formal setting where experienced

organizers can rework old models to fit new realities and a healthy

environment for the recruitment and training of new organizers. At

the same time the leadership vacuum and disillusionment following the

death of Harold Washington have made both the media and people in the

neighborhoods more responsive to the new approaches community

organizing can provide.

 

Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the

traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial

resources, membership and — most importantly — values and biblical

traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church

is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape

of cities like Chicago. A fierce independence among black pastors and

a preference for more traditional approaches to social involvement

(supporting candidates for office, providing shelters for the

homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full

weight to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.

 

Over the past few years, however, more and more young and forward-

thinking pastors have begun to look at community organizations such

as the Developing Communities Project in the far south side and GREAT

in the Grand Boulevard area as a powerful tool for living the social

gospel, one which can educate and empower entire congregations and

not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a

mere 50 prominent black churches, out of the thousands that exist in

cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained organizing

staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought in the education,

housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities,

changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city.

 

In the meantime, organizers will continue to build on local

successes, learn from their numerous failures and recruit and train

their small but growing core of leadership — mothers on welfare,

postal workers, CTA drivers and school teachers, all of whom have a

vision and memories of what communities can be. In fact, the answer

to the original question — why organize? — resides in these people.

In helping a group of housewives sit across the negotiating table

with the mayor of America's third largest city and hold their own, or

a retired steelworker stand before a TV camera and give voice to the

dreams he has for his grandchild's future, one discovers the most

significant and satisfying contribution organizing can make.

 

In return, organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and

strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the

talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of

coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of

raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to

drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents

could never aspire to — it is through these stories and songs of

dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife,

subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community

not only for others, but for themselves.

 

- end -

 

[bio] For three years Barack Obama was the director of Developing

Communities Project, an institutionally based community organization

on Chicago's far south side. He has also been a consultant and

instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, an organizing institute

working throughout the Midwest. Currently he is studying law at

Harvard University.

 

above is from Chapter 4 from "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in

Illinois" ISBN: 0-9620873-3-5

 

First published in the August/ September 1988 Illinois Issues

[published by then-Sangamon State University, which is now the

University of Illinois at Springfield].

 

http://www.edwoj.com/Alinsky/AlinskyObamaChapter1990.htm

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

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