The New Southern Strategy – The Politics of Self-Determination in the South

Kamau Franklin has worked as a community activist for over fifteen years in New York City and is now based in the south. In addition to his work as an activist attorney, he is a leading member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). An organization dedicated to human rights advocacy and building grassroots institutions in the black community. The organization works on various issues including youth development, fighting police misconduct, and creating sustainable urban communities. Kamau has helped develop community cop-watch programs, freedom school programs for youth and alternatives to incarceration programs. He recently moved to Jackson Mississippi to do political work, and he reflects on that move and its strategic implications in this piece. You can read more of Kamau’s thoughts on his Grassroots Thinking blog.

Many people I know expressed surprise at me moving to Jackson Ms., being from Brooklyn (back when it was the BK- but that is another story). The surprise is even more startling for Jackson folks under 30 who with amazement in their eyes ask WHY WOULD YOU LEAVE NEW YORK? Part of the answer is that I have committed myself to the fulfillment of certain ideas. So my career is the politics of black self-determination. It does not pay well by any means; you can’t always get the most qualified people to fulfill certain positions and the hours suck; but over 20 years ago I was bitten by the bug of revolutionary black politics. Those politics have cost me financially and sanity wise, but at the same time they have led me on a life mission, some great comrades and the love of my life. So on balance I still feel as if I am coming out ahead, however back to Jackson, Ms.

I would like to believe that as a committed organizer that the work I do has a larger purpose. That it is coordinated in such a way to gain results that are tangible and that build towards greater community control over social, economic and political institutions. I came to Jackson, Ms with such ideas in mind. The thinking is that the city of Jackson due to its size, demographic makeup and history could be a great place to re-test ideas both historic and current in the struggle for black self-determination.

It is way too early to suggest success; however my first twelve weeks in Jackson is a good guide to early satisfaction with the actual move. I have done more multilayered organizing here than I have in the last 5 years in either New York or Atlanta. I have met and worked with various groups and individuals from people in community civic leagues, church groups, home associations, electoral candidates, cops, preachers, politicians, farmer groups, civil rights workers, and international allies, but relatively few of the pro-black militants or overt left radicals that I have worked with most of my organizing life. Obviously most of these folks don’t necessarily share the full range of my politics but we have enough in common to work on various initiatives which can lead to progressive/radical changes in Jackson. My debates have been substantive and have led to action as opposed to conversations that only ignite plans without success because of follow thru abilities, desire, finances, scale, or scope. I have worked on achieving economic development, international solidarity, electoral strategies, and food justice issues.

More specifically we have already established the largest community garden/farm in Jackson (over 5 acres). A campaign for policy changes on healthy food is in the works. We have supported the successful election of the first Black Sheriff in Hinds County Mississippi (Hinds was incorporated in 1820) which encompasses Jackson and is over 70% black. This is a victory coming on the heels of electing Chokwe Lumumba (an MXGM founder) to the city council two years ago. We are now beginning work on a second city-council race and looking into buying property as a center and we have purchased our fist property for economic development purposes.

The overt work of struggling for self-determination in the south predates me by a few hundred years; however 40 years ago the groundwork was laid for a modern struggle that recognized the south as a battleground in an ideological and at times physical battle for self determination. In 1968 the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) was formed and later in the 1980s the New Afrikan Peoples Organization (NAPO) provided a revolutionary nationalist position for organizing in the South where the majority of black people still live today. People have changed their lives, uprooted their families and died for attempting to convince black people that the south could be more than just a place of oppression but it could also be a place of rejuvenation and control.

Two years ago a new phase of this struggle began. Momentum has been built over that time when we got directly involved in the previously mentioned electoral candidacy of Chokwe Lumumba for City Council. We made several other attempts in nearby cities to do similar work but the time seemed overtly right this time when several months prior the US electorate, partly due to an economic meltdown, open-ended wars abroad and the changing demographics of the U.S. population, voted in a moderate Black democrat as its President, who at the time for many appeared to represent much more.

The southern black population is similarly dominated by local moderate black democratic officials. As the black power movements of the 60’s and 70’s retreated under immense attack by local and national US government forces. The void was filled by “safe” politicians who did not do much to upset the economic balance of power that favored white power brokers and embraced moderate Democratic Party rhetoric on governing. In essence making places like Jackson Ms, a post apartheid South Africa, plenty of electoral power never translated into actual political power, a black petty-bourgeoisie happy to live off the scraps of the minority white capitalist class that calls the shots.

It is in this context that MXGM saw an opening to support the candidacy of Lumumba. For the black political class the needs of the community take a back seat to their own individual career paths. With no commitment to anything, beyond getting elected these officials don’t bring any overarching principles to city-government beyond the principle of careerism. This gave us the opportunity to respond with a candidate who could highlight real choices. In no other place except the South could we play on a city wide basis, where over 50% of the U.S. black population still lives and where in major cities in the South blacks still represent over 50% of the electorate. It is here where we can highlight the politics of self-determination versus the politics of careerism and moderation.

We have also borrowed from our friends in places like Venezuela with the concept of Peoples’ Assemblies. Organizing the community into specific blocks for a more direct democracy that begins to set the agenda for what candidates that are elected should be fighting for as opposed to just hearing what candidates say they are going to do. This work must be done in an intentional way, one that involves planning for what the city/community should look like and how it should be governed. Even if candidates don’t overtly share our politics they are responsive to them for the first time. In addition the Peoples’ Assembly is a larger base where policy thru community organizing can be achieved. We are developing Assemblies for each of the seven wards in Jackson and by the beginning of 2012 we should be supporting the start of two additional Assemblies in Jackson.

On the challenging side the politicizing of young people will take a while. The ideas of politics being outside of mainstream discussions is now a foreign concept to many young people. The idea that life chances are all about personnel responsibility now once again dominate discourse and that will change only through more victories. In addition despite my needed respite from only working with “professional” organizers the need to expand what we have is great if we are to keep the momentum going. As Lenin and others have pointed out the vanguard party cannot easily be discarded when thinking through strategy and planning.

We hope to facilitate several mechanisms for people close to us to move to Jackson through some of our economic development plans but that is a few years away. Unlike the past where activist would move based on what were the strategic needs of a movement they were a part of, today’s organizer is less likely to make such a move unless it’s tied to the adventure of an international struggle or a semi-natural disaster. We don’t want to overwhelm Jackson with transplants but I believe with ten more trained organizers steep in the politics of self-determination we could test our theories that much faster. My goal and hope is that within two years this work will produce real results in making Jackson a capital of black progressive change and positioning the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement as a leading community force that even if not liked by all will certainly be recognized as one to reckon with.

Organizing Upgrade is excited to repost this Media Mobilizing Project interview with two Pennsylvania organizers about the impact of Occupy on rural Pennsylvania.

Episode Description: In this episode Audra and Miguel speak with Mitch Troutman and Kara Newhouse of PA from Below about the occupations across Pennsylvania sparked by #OccupyWallSt. We also get to see stories from occupiers in Philadelphia and across Pennsylvania, a report from the UNITE HERE action against Aramark for fair work conditions, and the recent Working People’s Media and Communications Forum.

If you are having a hard time watching the video on our site, you can also find it here.

On Jan 15, SOUL (The School of Unity and Liberation in Oakland) organized a panel and discussion on Occupy with veteran organizers from community and labor organizations who have been deeply engaged in the Occupy Movement. Maria Poblet (of Causa Justa/Just Cause), Shaw San Liu (of Chinese Progressive Association), and Brooke Anderson (of East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy) share lessons from on-the-ground mobilizations in Oakland & San Francisco, and exchange ideas about challenges and opportunities in this new moment in the fight against the 1%.

Listen to the panel here

Having trouble listening to the audio? Listen on SoundCloud here.

Panel Speakers:

Brooke Anderson is the Port Driver Organizer at East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, working with immigrant truck drivers who service the Port of Oakland.

María Poblet is the Executive Director of Causa Justa::Just Cause, a housing rights organization uniting working-class black and brown communities from San Francisco and Oakland.

Shaw San Liu is the Lead Organizer for the Tenants and Workers Center of Chinese Progressive Association.

Intro and Framing: Tina Bartolome

Listen to the intro here

Listen to the discussion here

Having trouble listening to the audio? Listen on SoundCloud here.

The event was co-sponsored by: Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Asian Youth Promoting Advocacy & Leadership, Causa Justa::Just Cause, Chinese Progressive Association, Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth and People Organized to Win Employment Rights.

Audio clips from the streets for the panel recording are from “Voices from Oakland’s General Strike”, by LeftBay99, below:

The Occupy Strategy Lab of Organizing Upgrade is excited to share the thoughts of movement innovator and strategist Max Rameau. With his experience founding the Take Back the Land movement and advancing land-liberation and eviction defense strategies, Max is well positioned to provide some insight into how organizers can and should strategically connect with the Occupy movements. Over the last few months, Max has been engaged in strategic thinking, dialogue and planning with Occupy movements in Miami, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Wall Street. This article is part of a series in which Max explores the potential for movement building within the Occupy movements. Forthcoming pieces will address the Basis of Unity (between #Occupy and Liberate) and a proposal for a  2012 Spring Offensive.

The last few years have been hard for us: record foreclosures, high unemployment, drastic cuts in social services, and government actively doing the bidding of big business at the expense of regular people.

With a combination of bewilderment and frustration, concerned global citizens had asked one question over and again: when and where are people in the US going to rise up and take to the streets?

Turns out, the answer was September 17, 2011 on Wall Street.

Of course, for all it’s simplicity and elegance, that answer is not entirely accurate. Communities of color, albeit in smaller numbers and with less media, have taken to the streets for years around issues of police brutality and the impacts of the economic crisis, particularly gentrification, foreclosures and evictions.

Since 2007, The Take Back the Land movement has identified vacant government owned and foreclosed homes and “liberated” them by breaking in and transforming vacant houses into homes for families. Our objective is to transform land relationships to secure community control over land and elevate housing to the level of a human right. With the crisis deepening, many more organizations are liberating land or waging eviction defenses with increased success.

This one grand crisis, then, has elicited two very different responses, each strong and each relevant to its core constituency. With the combination of low-income communities of color and working and middle class whites taking to the streets, this society is on the cusp of a major social movement, the likes of which have not been experienced in the U.S. in more than a generation.

Far from homogeneous, this budding movement is evolving towards parallel, but interrelated campaign tracks: #Occupy and Liberate. The two look similar in many regards, but are distinguished by three important characteristics: composition, primary frame, and target/base.

1. Composition. #Occupy has mobilized mainly, though not exclusively, disaffected young and impacted working and middle class whites. Liberate is mainly low and middle income people of color.

2. Primary Frame. #Occupy’s primary frame is the economic system and the injustice it produces. Liberate frames issues in terms of land control and use (such as housing, farming and public space);

3. Target/Base. #Occupy targets those symbols, institutions and persons responsible for perpetrating the economic crisis–the 1%–through the “occupation” of public and private spaces, most notably New York’s financial district, the Oakland seaport and individual bank branches. Liberate’s base are the victims of the crisis, who are protected via land liberation and eviction defense.

Social movements are not single celled creatures on a linear path, but dynamic complex organisms with multiple moving parts, each responsible for a different series of tasks. Such a division of labor must be understood, appreciated and fully embraced. This movement is a complex organism with two tracks, and each track performs unique and critical functions.

Two intractable images of the housing crisis include the banks responsible for this financial mess and the homes from which families are evicted. This movement must take the fight to the banks, protesting and occupying them on their turf. Those same banks are occupying our communities, neighborhoods and homes. We must end that occupation through Liberation and eviction defense. The crisis simply cannot be resolved by choosing to fight on either one front or the other.

Not only must we both #Occupy and Liberate, but the chances of success for one-track increases exponentially with the actual success of the other. Therefore, the Occupy-Liberate dichotomy is not an antagonistic one; it is complementary.

We must occupy the 1% and liberate the 99%.

That is not the job of one organization, but the mission of everyone’s movement.

There is growing awareness of the two tracks, their characteristics, strengths and limitations. As we struggle to properly understand and define this relationship, we must resist the tendency towards two competing orientations:

The first tendency is to examine both tracks, note their size, frames and composition and conclude that each track actually represents its own separate and unique movement essentially unrelated to the other. The second, and polar opposite, tendency is to remark the similarities in approach and tactics and conclude the tracks are effectively identical and must be merged into a singular monolithic track. Both tendencies are wrong.

We must take care not to expect large numbers of Blacks, Latinos, indigenous, and other oppressed nationalities or immigrants, each with particular historic relationships to the police, to “occupy” banks and financial institutions. In fact, it is not clear that #Occupy could have succeeded if first executed by people of color. We must also resist the temptation to allow 1,000 young white kids to “occupy” historically people of color communities, still reeling from the more onerous occupation of gentrification. At the same time, we must find creative, effective and empowering ways to work together through parallel, supportive and even joint actions and campaigns.

While engaging the dual tracks in parallel actions is a prerequisite to building a holistic and powerful movement, it is not sufficient to guarantee trust and success. Two sets of actions, even during the same time frame and in the same city, will not result in an instant movement.

Forging these dual tracks into a cohesive movement with mutually supportive actions, requires at least three basic understandings:

1. Basis of unity. Why are we fighting and what are we fighting for? Do we want the same things or are we just doing the same thing in order to get to different places. What is the basis of our unity.

2. Framework of unity. How are we working together? How are decisions made? What do we do when one track disagrees with the other?

3. Next steps. What are we doing next? We propose a 2012 Spring Offensive.

We must Occupy to Liberate.

Max Rameau is a Haitian born Pan-African theorist, campaign strategist, organizer and author. He is one of the founding members of the Take Back the Land movement and is currently with Movement Catalyst, a movement support organization, providing campaign development and other support to social justice organizations. 

Approximately 50,000 people turned out to mass actions held during the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, called by the General Assembly of Occupy Oakland at Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant plaza, and supported by dozens of community based organizations, unions, and activist groups. The actions shut down every major bank in downtown Oakland, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Chase, and then shut down the port, and in the process built solidarity beyond anything we have seen in the SF Bay Area since the days of the movement against the US war on Vietnam.

The call for this general strike mobilization came from the General Assembly at Occupy Oakland immediately following the violent police attack which razed the encampment and fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the peaceful crowd (inflicting a critical brain injury on young Iraq vet Scott Olsen) thus galvanizing the Occupy Oakland movement into the national and international spotlight. A petition started by Causa Justa :: Just Cause at the moment of the attack, and picked up by Moveon.org, garnered 60,000 signatures in support of the 1st amendment right of the Occupy Oakland camp, and against police abuse. A mere 24 hours after the police attack we delivered this petition to Mayor Jean Quan — 60,000 signatures from her base — with an entourage of community and labor organizations demanding that the police stand down. That night back out in the streets when the fences came down and the camp re-established itself with an outpouring of community support — with not a cop in sight — it was clear that the general strike was going to be a historic moment.

Occupy Oakland General Assembly while reclaiming the camp after the police raid and after forcing the police to stand down.

The answer to the General Strike call came from all over the SF Bay Area, from organizations, unions and groups spanning different sectors of the progressive movement, from unaffiliated individuals, and from an emerging formation knows as “Left Bay 99.” Left Bay 99 developed after a successful mobilization on 10/12/11 to “Foreclose Wall Street West”, which brought together Causa Justa :: Just Cause, UNITE/HERE 2850, Occupy San Francisco, The Ruckus Society, and dozens of direct action activists, unions, and community based organizations. That mobilization shut down Wells Fargo’s corporate headquarters in downtown San Francisco and, maybe even more importantly, left us all eager to collaborate again, and to continue building across sectors towards a movement of the 99%. [watch videos and read press coverage here]

Coming out of that mobilization, community organizers and activists came together to discuss what we could do to support Occupy SF and Occupy Oakland, and what we could contribute to those efforts.  We were involved in different ways, some as members of the general assembly and camps in each city, some in solidarity as grassroots organizations, and all in advancing demands of the 99%.  We believed that these emerging relationships were important for building a long-term movement for racial justice, gender justice, and for building an alternative to the plunder and suffering that the current economic order causes in our communities here in the US, and to communities around the world.

The exciting combination of seasoned organizers and newer activists formed into committees to advance the work.  Camp defense was a high priority, and we created a rapid response network that could mobilize people in the case of a police raid.  We leveraged relationships with elected city officials that organizations and unions built over the years to secure meetings with the Mayor of SF and the Mayor of Oakland, advocating in each meeting alongside Occupy campers for the right of the camps to remain, for an end to police violence and harassment, for the release of people who had been jailed unjustly during protests, and in support of the first amendment rights of protesters.  In addition to that, we formed an action committee that worked with campers to develop and carry out mobilization plans, and a communications committee to support those actions with media work, all of which came together as a major contribution to the general strike in Oakland on 11/2/11.

Our organization, Causa Justa :: Just Cause, was deeply involved in all areas of this work.  We called the first mobilization on 10/12/11, seeing lots of alignment between the critique of Walls Street and our bank accountability campaign work against Wells Fargo Bank. And as the momentum grew we continued investing time and energy, committed not just to our own campaign but to making a contribution to building a movement bigger than any one campaign or organization.

A key priority was to respect the suspicion of some Occupy Oakland campers that organizations wanted to come in and dominate.  We worked hard to maintain constant communication to campers and camp committees, so that our work would complement and amplify the camps’ work, while adding the much needed participation and perspectives of working class people of color and their organizations.  This was an experiment, and it was not easy.  It’s never fun to be called an “outsider” when you have been organizing in Oakland against the 1% for 10 years.  But people brought their most generous spirit to this project, a healthy sense of humor, and a commitment to building the relationships and trust needed to advance the movement.  An important part of building these relationships and trust is the fact that many of us are active participants in Occupy Oakland, attending General Assemblies, contributing to work committees, volunteering at the camp, and members of people of color and feminist caucuses of the camp. Activists from Arab, Muslim, and anti-Zionist Jewish communities, including members of AROC, PYM, and IJAN set up an “Intifada” tent, where overnight campers affiliated with LeftBay99 stay, and Causa Justa :: Just Cause set up a “Serve the People” tent where free know-your-rights information is provided to tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure, to immigrants encountering ICE, and where volunteers and ally organizations provide mental health counseling, referrals, and other crucially needed social services.

The outcome of this joint work was impressive.  On November 2 city workers, teachers, students, union people, elders, children, chanted, swayed and danced through the streets of Oakland. We roared, “We are the 99%” as we marched through downtown, with dozens of inspiring actions and contingents forming part of the celebratory day.

Causa Justa :: Just Cause helped organize a march to shut down the Big Banks demanding  a moratorium on foreclosures; and demanding banks like Wells Fargo stop investing in detention centers, dirty energy, and predatory payday lending.  The marches highlighted the responsibility these banks have for the economic crisis, called for them to pay their fair share in taxes, and highlighted Black and Latino families struggling to save their homes from foreclosure.  Given that both Oakland and San Francisco bank with Wells Fargo, there was also talk of the need for cities to divest from big banks and instead create local and community-based banking options.

“This economy does not benefit us, it benefits from us. It’s time to change that,” said Causa Justa :: Just Cause Immigrant Rights organizer Cinthya Muñoz Ramos. “Our communities are being pushed out of the economy, jobs, homes, and neighborhoods into prisons and detention centers as slave labor.”

At the State Building, teachers and youth demanded greater funding for education, and disabled people and homecare workers demanded greater funding for social services.  The children’s brigade started with story time at the public library, and carried signs reading “Don’t you dare steal my future!” and “Share!”

Labor had a strong presence, including the participation and endorsement of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, California Nurses Association/National Nurses United, Service Employees International Union and Oakland Educational Association.  The Alameda County Labor Council was also supporting, and served grilled hot dogs and hamburgers to protesters, in a delicious show of solidarity.

Maria Reyes, of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Mujeres Unidas spoke before the crowd, reminding us that immigrants are part of the 99% and have been waging the battle for fair treatment long before the Occupied movement kicked off.

“We take care of the 1 percent’s children and their grandparents and their elderly.  While we’re taking care of the elderly and their children, our children stay late at school or home alone and we come home from work frustrated because we don’t get treated right. That is why we want a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights so that we are treated fairly.”

Movement veteran Angela Davis spoke: “We do not assent to economic exploitation. We do not assent to global capitalism, to police violence, to corporate inequalities. We do not assent to the prison industrial complex… the eyes of the world are on our city.”

Following the bank marches people took to the streets again, shutting down the Port of Oakland,  the fifth busiest port in the US.  Jack Hayman of the ILWU stated in a press conference that the Longshoremen had stopped work on their own in the morning. The port was shut down. “The trucks with containers are backed up for at least a mile. None of the cranes are moving… and the rank and file of the Longshoreman’s Union did this on their own. The leaders of the union wanted them to work today, but they by and large are not working the port.” Thousands then marched to the port, shutting down the roads for miles around. By 6pm the Port of Oakland announced that “all maritime activities” had been shut down because of the sea of thousands of protestors descending on the port.

Dozens of protestors clambered up on cargo boxes and truck cabs as a sea of marchers could be seen coming across the bridge toward the port.

Oakland was the site of the last great general strike in 1946 when 130,000 workers refused to work in solidarity with 400 female retail clerks.

Dwight McElroy, president of the chapter 1021 Service Employees Union said, “Our city and our coworkers are taking furlough days, they are losing their homes. We have individuals having to choose between their mortgage and having their cars repaired. We need to stand in solidarity. America has caused a marriage between the occupy and labor movement — it’s something that should have come some time ago but it’s never too late.”

Hundreds of teachers and nurses came out as well. Sharon Blaschka, a nurse practitioner, and member of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United Union said, “I believe in the OWS movement. It’s been a long time coming. It should have happened a long time ago. The 1 percent count on the fact that we don’t have enough time to get out there and do something major because we have to support our families and they’re counting on that fact. I had patients today but I rescheduled all of them and when I called them to tell them why — they were excited about it.”

She added, “I also came with my family to support our family and our schools. The Oakland Unified School District is closing five elementary school, but yeah, we can drop a billion dollars on Libya. So, if we can drop a million dollars on the war then why can’t we drop a billion dollars into our education system?  Like they say, if you’re not outraged, your not paying attention.”

Said Nell Myhand of the day’s actions. “It was fantastic. This is the moment we have been working for — many of us for years and years,” said Myhand, who is Oakland Homeowner Clinic Coordinator for Causa Justa :: Just Cause, and fighting to keep her own home from foreclosure: “We get divided within our class. But we can see this dramatic shift when we start talking about the 99%. We can see the divisions that the top 1% capitalize on based on our differences in class. Well that’s over. We see the thing we have in common is that the banks are bankrupting all of us.”

The tone after the march was one excitement about what is to come, but there are many hurdles ahead of us.

Unfortunately, some media outlets focused on incidents of property damage instead of on the thousands of people who participated in the strike, and are intent on re-framing away from the demands of the 99%.

This serves law and order types in the city, including certain city council members, who have leaped in opportunistically, attempting to paint a picture of disorder and violence in order to advance their agenda of gang injunctions, curfews, and an overall increase in policing and decrease of rights.

And besides fighting back against these attacks on the movement, there are crucial conversations to be had within the movement now.  How do we continue building on this momentum?  How can we branch out from the camps to a much broader community-based resistance to the 1%?

There are two crucial components to this next phase:

One is to get clear on the US’s role in the international arena, since our government is the 1% to the rest of the world.  We must tie our local fights to the international sphere.  We can’t separate the lack of investment in affordable housing in Oakland from the massive investment in military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We must make those links that will make our movement stronger, and grow our movement to the international scale, which the 1% operate in.

Two is to get clear on our demands. Only demands can help us win concrete changes that our communities so desperately need, and only demands will help us avoid co-optation.  Once we have demands, we can work with more mainstream or center forces, and benefit from their expertise and resources in policy initiatives that reflect those demands. Without demands, with the danger of co-optation looming, if our only reference point becomes the camps, then the possibilities to advance are limited.

With a strong set of demands, and a clear internationalist perspective, the 99% can continue to grow as a political force, have greater influence over the mainstream, and move one step closer to building a movement too big to fail.

by María Poblet & Rose Arrieta, Causa Justa / Just Cause

María Poblet is the Executive Director of Causa Justa :: Just Cause. She is Chicana and Argentine, and has more than a decade of experience in Latino community organizing. At St. Peter’s Housing Committee, María was instrumental in transforming a service provision model into a membership and organizing structure, and a grassroots leadership development and political education program. In 2009, she helped lead the merger between St. Peter’s and Just Cause Oakland that created Causa Justa :: Just Cause, bringing together the organization’s respective work in the Latino community in San Francisco and the African American community in Oakland into a single, regional organization for racial and economic justice. She has been a leader in movement building work at the grassroots, including the US Social Forum and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. Maria had the privilege of being mentored for many years by June Jordan, and was the Artistic Director of Poetry for the People before she fell in love with community organizing.

Rose Arrieta: With over 20 years of journalism experience from mainstream to community media. Rose has come on board to lead our organization’s communications work. She’s originally from Los Angles and her work has been inspired by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the Chicano Movement, American Indian Movement, and lots of conversations around the kitchen table with her pro-union family.

One significant aspect of the relationship between community organizing and Occupy movement in New York City is the synergy between Occupy Wall Street and several community organizations that have been organizing around revenue issues for the past year.   This piece is a dialogue between organizers from two of the organizations – Community Voices Heard and VOCAL New York (formerly known as New York City AIDS Housing Network / NYCAHN) – that have been active in that revenue organizing. This organizing around revenue issues – which included a civil disobedience action at the Capitol on March 1, 2011, a Wisconsin-inspired overnight occupation of the New York State Capitol in late March and the May 12^th Mobilization on Wall Street – has put CVH and VOCAL in closer relationship with larger community organizations and labor unions on the one hand and, on the other,  with many of the direct action activists who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street.  Since the occupation began in September, VOCAL and CVH have related to it in several different ways.  In this interview, CVH and VOCAL organizers reflect on those experiences and discuss their vision for how those relationships should unfold.

SONDRA YOUDELMAN: Sondra is the Executive Director of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State, a membership organization of low-income New Yorkers fighting to influence policy change around issues that affect low-income families.  She serves on the Boards of the Pushback Network and Grassroots Global Justice, and she is active in National People’s Action and the Right to the City Alliance.

HENRY SERRANO: Henry is the Lead Organizer of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State.  He is also on the Boards of both the North Star Fund and the Progressive Technology Project.

JEREMY SAUNDERS:  Jeremy Saunders has been organizing in New York since 2001. He has worked at ACORN, Community Voices Heard and the North West Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition. He is currently the lead organizer for VOCAL New York, formerly the NYC AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN), which organizes low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS, the formerly incarcerated as well as active and former drug users.

CHRIS KEELEY: Chris is the Coordinator of the New Deal for New York Campaign, a collaboration of community organizations across the state of New York that are working collaboratively to lift up the need for new revenue raising and increased investment in job creation and critical social services.

JEREMY: VOCAL got involved in the revenue fight when our flagship AIDS housing bill – which would have ensured that 10,000 low-income New Yorkers who are living with HIV/AIDS would not have to pay more than 30 percent of their income towards rent – was vetoed by Governor Paterson. Paterson had been supportive of the bill, but he said he couldn’t approve it because it would cost too much, and the state couldn’t afford it during a crisis.  So then, we found ourselves stuck in these reactive fights to defend AIDS services in New York City. It was clear that these dynamics were only going to get worse – that we were going to end up focusing on defending a smaller and smaller pool of services – unless we fought on revenue issues.  So, on March 1^st of this year, VOCAL New York and CVH organized a big action in the hallways of the Capitol building to protest the fact that the government was cutting services for poor people at the same time as it was giving tax breaks to New York’s wealthiest.  Seventeen people were arrested that day, and it got a lot of attention. Everyone – from the media to the police to elected officials – said that they hadn’t seen anything like it in a long time.  That action put us on the map. It was what got us working with these larger community organizations, unions, and direct action activists. It helped to build towards the overnight occupation of the Capitol in late March and the May 12^th actions on Wall Street.  As we started to plan more and more actions together over time, we’ve built up good working relationships.

SONDRA: Community Voices Heard started getting involved in organizing around revenue and the big banks about a year ago.  Recovery funds were dying out very rapidly. Everything that we were demanding was based on a proactive plan that would require more money, but instead we were having to fight against budget cutbacks. We felt like we needed to move into working on revenue issues and to really think about proactive revenue fights and alternative taxation campaigns if we were ever going to be able to win and fund any of the stuff our members wanted.  At first, it was this weird wonky set of issues around taxes that seemed too disconnected.  It didn’t resonate well with our members.  Then, when the recession started to get talked about in the media, and there were tons of stories about inequality, our members began to react. “Recession?  It’s a depression!  And we’ve been experiencing this for years.  But at least people are talking about it now.” The fact that government needed to be forced to invest back in people and communities if we were going to turn things around was pretty clear to our members.  And, when government kept saying there was no money, that’s when the need to get it from the institutions and people that have more to give started making sense as something to work on. This recession put us in a moment where everyone needs the safety net, so we have a chance to build broader alliances around safety net fights.  However, our members had hesitancy about what it means to build that broader front: will our issues get lost?  When we fight for the broader safety net, our constituencies – like African American and Latino workfare workers – are not the main-ticket items that are going to get the press. But we knew we needed to build this broader fight around revenue if our issues were going to have any chance of winning.  So we started working on the revenue campaign, which made it clear that we needed to do statewide work, perhaps with some new partners.  It was during the May 12^th actions that our organizations met some of the people who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street.  There were working relationships across our organizations and the activists, which has made it easier to integrate our work since it all exploded.

HENRY: There has also been a realignment of some of the other political forces that we’ve been working with: labor and some of the other community organizing alliances. Some of those   broader forces have been humbled over the last several years, and – at the same time – we’ve been growing, so we’re more powerful than we were in the past.  That doesn’t at all mean we have more people than they do, not even close.  But there’s a perception that we have power.  What was happening with some of those broader forces?  The former ACORN forces have been in a period of transition because they were attacked organizationally and shut down; they have been rebuilding.  The unions were humbled through the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) fight.  They tried to pass EFCA proactively and instead they had their collective bargaining rights shot down across the country.  Even Wisconsin – which is an important part of the inspirational narrative over the last year – was a reactive fight to defend collective bargaining.  Labor has had to reconsider what they have been doing.  At this point, union members have had to fight to defend basic quality of life issues, so it’s still a “self-interest” fight.  But what’s changing is that it can’t just be a fight for a narrow self-interest. Even a fight around self-interest has to engage broader issues because of the crisis.

At the same time, things started shifting internally. Our members’ sentiments started changing after Egypt.  We started to get calls from our leaders around these kinds of actions.  I’ve been organizing at CVH for ten years, and this was the first time that our members started talking openly about being willing to take arrests.  During a statewide strategy meeting, we talked about this spectrum of actions that went all the way out to more militant actions including civil disobedience. When we got to the point in the spectrum that talked about civil disobedience, at first everyone was silent.  And then one woman stood up and said, “We just need to go Egypt on their ass.” I saw a real change in the sentiment in the leadership during that meeting. They had been going through these long, slow struggles, and now they were ready to get more aggressive.  That was around the same time that we connected with VOCAL to start this statewide work around revenue.

SONDRA: So our work was shifting externally around our issues and we were shifting internally in terms of tactics. And there was a realignment of the groups that we were working with.  All of that positioned us to be players at a state level in a way that we weren’t before.  And then the Occupy moment happened, which opened a whole new amount of space. We were on this trajectory of building statewide power, and then suddenly there’s this massive shift in public consciousness that we could take advantage of.

HENRY: We have been working on issues related to revenue and the big banks for about a year now. In that work, we have been working on parallel tracks with the activists who initiated Occupy Wall Street, and our work intersects.  About six weeks ago, we started planning a week of action around the banks that was largely driven by labor, and then Occupy Wall Street pops up.  We’ve continued to work with them, and what they have been adding is scale and media attention.  For example, we had been planning this “Millionaires Tour,” and we expected to have about 150 people participate.  We got 700 people.   And, for the first time that I’ve ever seen, our action became a joke on Saturday Night Live: this guy who was playing Bloomberg started giving addresses to other rich peoples’ houses so they’d leave him alone. That kind of attention impacts our members.  Our membership has always felt isolated in their fights.  They feel solid in directing the actions and doing some incredible work, but they have always felt isolated and like no one pays attention to them.  And now suddenly the media is paying attention to us.  We have gotten more media hits than we’ve ever gotten.  That came under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street” but – when that banner comes together with our organizing – it can have a more tangible policy impact.  Occupy Wall Street…they aren’t trying to have a concrete policy impact, and I think that’s fine.  They bring general frustration about the bigger issues. I wouldn’t actually want them to put more structure on that or develop more concrete demands.  I would discourage them from taking on a specific issue or a structure.  What they bring is a different level of scale and media attention to a wide range of issues.

JEREMY: We had the same experience.  VOCAL went down to Occupy Wall Street with five members, and they had turned that into 300 people within 48 hours.  Our five members worked with a handful of Wall Street organizers to organize somewhere between 300 and 500 people to march to the District Attorney’s office and then to march on Cuomo.  We went down there that day because we had this leader from VOCAL who had participated in the OWS actions when they were trying to evict them. He got the shit knocked out of him by a cop, and his attack became one of the most prominent attacks by the cops because of how blatant and, probably more importantly, because it was widely captured on video. So we organized a march to the DA’s office calling for the investigation of all OWS attacks, an end to all police attacks and to demand the NYPD stop listing our leader, Felix, as wanted. Here was this low-income person living with AIDS who’s homeless and who is  a highly marginalized  person at the protest that day.  Just yesterday, we found out the charges have been dropped. After the DA action we mic-checked to the crowd that Gov 1%, Cuomo was going to get a “Gamechanger” award from HuffPo across town, so we led about 200 to 300 people across town to protest Cuomo as well.  There is just a huge shift in the kind of scale and an energy that you can mobilize quickly right now.

HENRY: That may start to change now that OWS doesn’t just want to be a “mob for hire.”  They don’t just want to show up to action to be there.  They may start organizing their own stuff and stop showing up at ours.  We’ll see.

SONDRA: That’s their strength, not ours. Our strength is not in having thousands of people in the streets or holding one big march. It’s consistent action around the public debate – whether that’s through media or hitting a target strongly or creatively enough to get attention.  You don’t actually need thousands of people to do that.

HENRY:  We should take the relationship between our work and theirs as far as it goes. We shouldn’t try to decide what they’re going to do. It’s a different constituency with different class issues and different racial issues.  I’m not big on critiquing Occupy Wall Street for being a bunch of white people. White people should do these kinds of things. They have specific issues.  They’re 63% of this country. Yes, they are entitled in a way that we will never have among our membership. But that kind of entitlement isn’t bad.  We could use more of it. They are more entitled in their demands and in their approach to confrontation. Right now, white people are the majority while we’ve always represented a strong minority. You’re going to approach politics differently when that’s the situation.

JEREMY: There is a certain level of absurdity to people – including progressive groups – saying things like “Wow. This is amazing. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”  Organizers have always known that if you did crazy shit, you’d get media coverage.  Earlier this year, we did this occupation in Albany, and we got a ton of media. We’ve shut down the Capital. Other organizers have taken over highways and shut down cities. Another part of the absurdity is how much people forget when these kinds of militant actions have happened before.  Like ACT-UP marching down the street with a dead body, or the May 1^st immigrants rights march or the time when Justice for Janitors took over the freeways in Los Angeles. The World Trade Organization demonstrations and the FTAA protest in Miami were also good examples of a moment when there was strong (though usually off the record) labor-activist support and collaboration. There’s such a forgetfulness on our part, to read this moment like nothing like this that has ever happened. There’s been an anger in this country for a long time that we’ve seen explode in a number of ways. It may have been stifled but that doesn’t mean that we should forget about it.

SONDRA: There are some things that are different about this moment though.  I think that occupying a physical space for an extended period of time adds a new element. Of course, not everyone is focused on occupying that space. There are many community organizers and leaders that are going in and out of the physical occupation over time. But it’s significant that they have created a space where people can go and – just by going – they can feel like they are part of a movement, whether they sleep there for a month or go down there for an hour.

HENRY: We’re looked at as part of the political system.  They are looked at as organic.  The fact that they don’t have an issue is an advantage.  We say, “We want money for public housing.”  They are saying, “I’m angry at our government.”  That’s great.  They should do this broad messaging and visioning stuff. We can do the policy stuff. That’s fine. They can take care of organizing on emotion; we’ll organize on policy. We have to keep doing our own very specific policy and campaign work.  No one else will take that on, and the issues of our constituencies will get lost.  The best way to interact with the Occupy movement is that we need to occasionally interact with each other, connect in specific moments around specific actions.

SONDRA: It would be stupid to reorient everything around Occupy Wall Street. And it would be stupid to not realize that we can’t do the same old thing in this moment.  It’s a fluctuating environment. We need to keep our focus on the place where were trying to get to, keep our eye on where we’re headed in terms of building power for low-income families (like we’re focusing on a point far in the distance) and be ready to navigate reality as it changes and shifts.   My hope is that this moment helps us shift that long-term vision to the left.  That’s my hope for Occupy: to shift everything to the left. Occupy Wall Street creates a moment when we can push for more around policy, more in terms of our demands. If we need to do anything with respect to Occupy Wall Street, it’s to push them to make sure to keep pushing. Because even the radical organizing groups have been limited to fighting around crumbs.  We don’t need them to consolidate into a 501c3 and consolidate their issues into specific demands.  They need to do what they’ve been doing: to focus on the public discourse and create a climate where it’s not crazy to call for bigger things.

JEREMY:  My general feeling is that this collaboration is great and needs to continue. When it comes to our organizations’ involvement I do have concerns. I’m worried that this can detract from all ongoing work that has major impact on our membership/constituency. We’re being asked by progressive allies, funders and a few OWS work groups to engage in various ways, like meetings, actions and so on. We want to stay connected. We want to continue to find moments where we can support each other, but we have to realize that the amount of time we dedicate to OWS takes away from other work. There’s just no way around that.

We’ve got to keep doing our work. We can’t let go of the campaigns we’re working on, which are all about addressing specific issues impacting our membership that others aren’t going to take up (and don’t necessarily need to) like the AIDS housing bill or changes to welfare. At the same time, we have to find moments to connect with and support Wall Street with our members when it’s around issues that we both support. This has been happening pretty well. We have to think about building a core team of people from OWS who want to help support and build community organizations that haven’t been able to grow to scale in the past because they lack a broad base of volunteers. There’s a number of OWS protesters who’ve shown that they’re willing to dedicate time and energy and want to support building stronger grassroots organizations.

I’ve heard this continued call by the progressive community, prior to OWS, to get out of our silos, to build collaboratively, to build a broader movement. We at VOCAL feel like we’ve done that in a serious way. We’ve gotten out of our silo, dedicated serious time and resources to fighting for a fair economy. We rarely ask for our agenda to be included, because we realize it’s not the space for that and that there are moments to put that to the side for the larger cause and to accept that we’ll have to fight for our specific campaigns on our own.  We get a small amount of resources to do this work, and it often doesn’t feel mutually beneficial. It often feels like we’re being asked to take action by much larger, better-resourced organizations, without recognition of our ongoing work. I don’t mind joining coalitions, breaking out of silos, and I don’t even mind others not taking on our issues, but it has to come with some acknowledgement of what’s at stake and why some of us may feel hesitant to drop everything to “join the 99%.” I think this is a moment when those dynamics can start to change and – regardless – we know that we need to throw in on the fight around the economy.  So we’ll be down there.  We just hope it will play out differently this time.

HENRY: The next step is that we have to open up the political opportunities for our membership, so our membership can get more engaged in this sense of entitlement that happens at OWS. OWS is hungry to have conversations with the communities that we work with. We haven’t gotten our members down there enough to have interactions so they can engage and help to move what’s going on down there. In some ways, staff may have even acted as a barrier for our members going down there. It could be important to figure out how to engage our members in the organic process down there.  Our members have been fighting in their individual lives forever, and they’ve been fighting collectively with us for a few years. But being down there will give them a sense of being part of a much larger movement.  Our leaders have experience in direct action, in campaigns, in not being intimidated by people in power. The people down at Occupy Wall Street could benefit from that. And our members could benefit from this sense of entitlement.

CHRIS: Getting members to go down to Wall Street is an important part of the political opportunity.  Occupy Wall Street is seen as the anchor for the broader Occupy movement around the country.  If we can build relationships and they acknowledge the members and leaders of the community organizations that have been part of this fight for a long time, Occupy Wall Street could serve as a model for other occupations in other cities and help build some important relationships.

At a time when states and cities are fighting back austerity measures, organizers in Chicago are flipping the script! Instead of asking policy makers to stop making cuts, they are exclaiming ‘Show me the Money’!  Taking up the #Occupy moment, Grassroots Collaborative Executive Director Amisha Patel sits with OrgUp editor Sushma to discuss a recent victory: an agreement with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel to return $60 million in social services for the People.

Q: This year marks historic outburst and outcries by the American public against budget cut backs and austerity measures. From February’s uprising in Madison, Wisconsin to #OccupyWallSt mobilizations last week, people are coming out of the woodwork.  Why now?

A. The housing collapse in 2008 finally signaled to the mainstream that something is wrong with this system, though people of color and poor communities have known this for some time.  The Right took hold of the narrative and used the moment to connect with the squeezed white middle class, and moved them with anti-government rhetoric that built on resentment and frustrations that had finally boiled over.

Progressives, however, have increasingly broken through.  And what’s done it has been bold direct action grounded in long-term grassroots organizing that captured the sentiment of the majority.  The 2008 winter occupation of Republic Windows by UE rank and file workers did just this.  So did Mohamed Bouazizi in Jan 2011.  The takeover of the Madison statehouse continued this work.  Occupy Wall Street, and the birth of hundreds of acts of resistance, is yet another continuation.  This isn’t to say that the conditions for each of these efforts are the same, but they all point to the sparking power of direct action that directly confronts the corporate agenda, particularly when organizations and movements of people are ready to sustain the momentum with clear demands that speak to majorities of people.

In Chicago, we have been strategic about how to move direct actions around our organizing campaigns.  We have effectively built upon the national attention of Occupy Wall Street, and the effort is grounded in local organizing.  Through a broad community and labor coalition, we organized a march of 7000 people in October to protest two conventions of the financial elite.  We followed the mass action with days of planned actions and civil disobedience, generating tremendous coverage and effectively changing the narrative.

Q. While many movements are criticizing the cutbacks and spending cuts, some Chicago organizations tried another tack.  You flipped the script. Instead asking to end cutbacks, you called for increasing revenue generation. Where did this idea come from and how did Chicago’s decision makers respond? 

A.Grassroots Collaborative groups and our allies have been fighting for more revenue at the state and local levels for years.  This stems from a shift in strategy as the economic crisis became justification for the right to slash the public sector and services to low-income communities.  If we continued to have a reactive fight against cuts, we would be pitting ourselves against many other equally critical programs and services.  For us all to win, we need to expand the pie.

In 2008, we spearheaded a coalition called the Campaign for Illinois’ Future that brought together over 130 groups to fight for an income tax increase.  By launching a hunger strike that included an 87-year old neighborhood leader, we wrested attention away from the corruption-focused media circus surrounding ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich, to the dangerous state of Illinois’ budget and its impact on women and communities of color.

Our work addressing revenue in Chicago came from a power analysis we led with 20 key labor and community organizations immediately following the election of Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Spring 2011.  Consensus emerged that the ultimate power of the Mayor lies in the corporate power that elected him.  We realized that we could no longer keep running issue campaigns that did not reframe the corporate agenda.  So, we developed a strategy to move campaigns for revenue that targets city subsidies (Tax Increment Financing dollars) meant for blighted communities.

On the eve of the Mayor’s inauguration in May, the Grassroots Collaborative held our first action on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), who received $15 million in our TIF dollars to renovate their bathrooms.  Last year, the CME posted a profit of nearly $1 billion dollars, yet took our tax dollars away from our classrooms and our libraries so they could install golden toilets.  It’s a message that resonated powerfully with the broader public.

On Oct 16, 2011, one week after introducing the RBO, Mayor Emanuel agreed to declare a 20% TIF surplus, sending $60 million back to our public services.

From the beginning, Mayor Emanuel repeatedly rejected the idea of declaring a TIF surplus.  The Collaborative’s strategy was to do a series of creative, public actions that captured our message powerfully and shifted public support against corporate welfare.  We held a Bake Sale for Billionaires, we held class on the sidewalk outside the CME, and conducted a Corporate Welfare Tour via trolley through the streets of downtown.

Meanwhile, we introduced legislation that directly challenged Mayor Emanuel on the TIF Surplus.  Called the Responsible Budget Ordinance, our legislation calls for a 50% TIF surplus declared, and would return hundreds of millions of corporate slush money back to our struggling schools, parks, libraries, and City.

On Oct 16, 2011, one week after introducing the RBO, Mayor Emanuel agreed to declare a 20% TIF surplus, sending $60 million back to our public services.

We continue to push for our 50%, but this victory is significant for several reasons:

- We forced the City to move significant dollars from what has become a downtown corporate slush fund to our neighborhood schools, parks and libraries, bringing revenue into public services at a time when most cities are cutting back

- We changed the narrative.  Even Crain’s Chicago, our right-leaning business journal, wrote articles in support of our position against the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and reader comments overwhelmingly supported our position as well.  This resulted from a key columnist taking interest in our Bake Sale for Billionaires action at the CME – it was a clever message that resonated with him and readers and put us on the radar

- In a time of regular defeats, it is critical that we claim this victory to grow momentum, acknowledge the reform achieved, and continue building.  Our low-income, majority Black and Latino leaders are energized around this work, are constantly developing their skills and knowledge around taking on the corporate agenda, and are forceful advocates for taking on corporate power and winning a people’s budget.

Q. We are rumored to be on the precipice of a double-dip recession.What new strategies do you see union and community organizers taking on in the face of such possibilities? 

We’re at an interesting moment with the national and international attention that Occupy efforts have brought to what’s not working with capitalism, but the conversations still must be deepened.  We do this by looking at 1) history, 2) participation, 3) collaboration, and 4) theory/imagination.

History. I was at a gathering a few weeks back to mark the release of a new book on Gale Cincotta.  The room was full of movement leaders active in that era.  Some remarked with dismay how little things have changed from the 70s to present time – that the signs protestors carried back then could be carried at an Occupy march today.

A different perspective is that we must know what we’ve done before to understand how we have arrived at the moment we are in.  Cincotta’s march on the American Banker’s Association preceded Take Back Chicago’s march on the ABA by 30 years.  It failed to ignite the movement she had hoped for, yet 3 decades later, Occupy Wall Street exists.  Its worth considering how many of our “failures” are actually instead sparks with the potential to ultimately shift the paradigm.  Maybe if we knew that, we would never stop trying.

Participation. As organizers, we must continually deepen our leadership development work – and get to the place where people of color and working class leaders are deeply connected with one another, because we cannot take on the oppressions we’re up against if we’re in silos, or tokens at press conferences.  The Collaborative has worked steadily to move beyond superficial engagement with our leaders, as we have tired of waging great multi-year campaigns that don’t lead to greater capacity or connection at our base.

We must be in connection and in deep community so that we can undo the internalized effects of the classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, colonization, genocide, and every other form of oppression.  We must sustain and grow spaces of learning and engagement that create real space for grassroots leaders to grow themselves as they grow the work.  We must recognize that getting our minds back is just as key as creating good policies and transforming structural inequities.

Collaboration.  Labor and community efforts could lead to work that is both deep and at scale, but only if both are open to learning from each other and innovating new strategies.  We must continue to articulate what we are for, and not simply what we’re against.

The current structures and frameworks for most labor unions and community organizations do not support this work.  It requires us to go beyond the union contract, and the measurable objective of the policy win.   Community Unionism sees that the decriminalization of youth of color, the defense of public housing, and the end to sexual violence are economic justice issues.

In Chicago, issues of turf remain strong 40 years after the death of Saul Alinsky.  Recent work though has pushed against the traditional barriers to movement building, creating shared platforms, analysis, and strategies for change.  The Grassroots Collaborative has played a useful role in this effort.  We organized 2600 people from 25 community organizations to create a citywide push for a people’s agenda during the muni elections.   We followed this with a People’s City Council meeting that brought together 19 aldermen and 1600 energized community leaders and rank and file workers taking on the corporate agenda.

Theory. Imagination. As the economy continues to worsen, the question emerges: what are we doing now to prepare to rebuild society, and how will we create a world that supports the liberation of all people?  What are we doing to make sure that low-income people and people of color not only survive the collapse, but are the center of building anew?

We must work with our leaders on their early experiences of poverty, racism, sexism etc, because as the economy worsens, feelings of discouragement and hopelessness will continue to get kicked up.  We must do this work ourselves as well.  We are still figuring it out ourselves at the Collaborative, but it seems that if we want to imagine another world is possible, let alone build it, we must undo the effects on us of the current one.

The power of telling our stories grounded in smart analysis has shifted the sense of what is possible in this city.  There is more work to be done.  But taking on the corporate agenda to win revenue for our communities has grown our power significantly, and has helped to finally begin to shift the narrative.

Amisha Patel serves as the Executive Director of the Grassroots Collaborative, a community-labor coalition working to win racial and economic justice in Chicago and Statewide.  This follows six years of work at Service Employees International Union Local 73, where she organized hospital employees and Head Start workers, as well as worked in coalition with community organizations to fight against school closings and to win more resources for parks in communities of color.  She worked for five years doing arts-based violence against women prevention programming in communities of color in the Bay Area.  The documentary that her youth created, Young Azns Rising! Breaking Down Violence Against Women, screened in numerous film festivals and won the Asian Emmy for best documentary.  

Boston Shows Us How to #Occupy with Purpose and Political Vision

Presley Obasohan is fighting foreclosure on his home by Bank of America. Mr. Obasohan is underwater on his loan because in Dorchester, MA – the most diverse neighborhood in Boston  – building values have sunk to half or less of mortgage loan debt. Presley is trying to save his home for his daughters. He has petitioned and he has pled. He has waited on hold and stood in line. But on Friday, Presely joined the Right to the City Alliance in a mass action of civil disobedience, and was proudly arrested, along with 23 other Boston residents, for siting in at the Boston headquarters of Bank of America.

“I blocked the doors at Bank of America so that my neighbors, and me, can stay in our homes,” Presely told the press. “So many people have been thrown out of their homes or lost their jobs needlessly because of mistakes made by Wall Street Banks. Yet it’s the banks who are now rewarded with billions in tax refunds. Its time to fight back!”

Bank of America announced Friday that it would begin charging customers $5 per month to use their debit cards. This comes after B of A received $230 billion in taxpayer bailouts and other assistance since 2008 and received a $4.2 billion dollar tax refund for 2009, and as the nations largest lender has ramped up foreclosures on distressed homeowners in recent weeks, according to new data from the foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac. August 2011 saw the largest monthly increase in foreclosures since August 2007, right after the housing bubble burst.

As of March 2011, Bank of America had more homes in foreclosure than any other bank in Boston, with
two-thirds of these in “majority minority” neighborhoods. 61% of Bank of America’s subprime mortgages were concentrated in these same neighborhoods, revealing a pattern of pushing bad loans on People of Color and
the poor.

Building an Urban Alliance for Municipal Power

Across the country, we are seeing the same story: the mortgage bubble created by Wall Street pushed predatory lending on urban communities, and since the bubble burst the fall out has been catastrophic. Unemployment and foreclosure have hit communities of color first and worst. This has exposed a national economy that cannot produce wealth or jobs for working class people. The economy is therefore unable to get out of a deep, deep recession.  Meanwhile, the right wing gets more and more entrenched in protecting the rights of corporations and banks to hoard wealth and to plunder the planet.

The combination of these factors means that we are hurling headlong into  cascading meltdowns in the economy, ecosystem,, and in the very fabric of social relations in our cities.  Between the apartheid-type laws in Arizona and Alabama to the murder of Troy Davis in Georgia, we are living in dangerous times.

But in this time of crisis, it is urban communities who are at the forefront of the movement to fight back.  It is People of Color organizations that are building out a more deliberate and powerful direct action flank of their organizing to demand payback from Bank of America and Wall Street, and to fight for transformation of our urban spaces – the places that are the economic engine rooms of global capitalism.

The  courageous action by Presley Oboshaun came at the end of a raucous march of over 3,000 people carrying colorful banners and banging drums to confront the nation’s largest lender for their role in the economic crisis. The march was led by members of City Life/Vida Urbana and the Right to the City Alliance, who carried signs that told their stories of predatory lending and foreclosure. As the rowdy procession snaked through downtown, they were joined by members of UNITE/HERE picketing at the Hyatt Hotel, and CWA picketing at Verizon Wireless.

The march and action was called by the Right to the City Alliance, a national movement of urban economic and racial justice organizations, deeply rooted in the neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by the implosion of the economy, and where centuries of economic and racial oppression is compounding the crisis.

Recognizing that the current political moment calls for a broad unification of key forces, Right to the City built an impressive coalition of over 50 organizations with progressive organized labor, the Green Justice Coalition, the Youth Jobs Coalition, the Immigrant Rights movement, and a diverse array of progressive groups to pull together one of the best organized and widely covered marches in recent memory.

This coalition was a representation of Right to the City Alliance’s strategy for municipal power. This strategy is to intentionally unite the core constituencies of the alliance’s member organizations with other sectors of the progressive community: progressive labor and urban environmentalists. Right to the City is advancing a program of community defense, and pro-active agenda setting to fight for the type of cities that will benefit the constituencies and provide solutions to address the root causes of the crises

Take Back The Block – #Occupy the Hood

On Saturday, Right to the City took their message into the neighborhood. The Four Corners area of Dorchester has been ravaged by foreclosures, with some streets seeing 5 or 6 properties totally abandoned. Led by the community organizing powerhouse City Life/Vida Urbana, the group staged an occupation of a wrongly foreclosed home, hoping to return it from the hands of Deutsche Bank to its rightful owner, a family who was illegally evicted and has left the area.

The action team cleaned the home, brought in donated furniture, hung art on the walls and a banner off the porch. Hundreds toured the house and cheered in solidarity from the street, while music played and children danced.
Meanwhile the youth of Roxbury’s Alternatives for Community & Environment took over an abandoned lot and created a community garden “so that the community can grow our own food.” They asked people to stand with them for a blessing ceremony of the garden, and asked for food to grow strong and the land and community to heal and be healthy. They told the story of their journey to the 2010 US Social Forum, and how they had toured a community garden created by young people in Detroit, and been inspired to create a similar project in Boston.

Right to the City supported their vision and tied it to a movement building action about the banks and the political moment. It was a powerful  example of the practical and visionary action that is needed in order to begin reclaiming our homes, our dignity, our cities.

Movement Momentum: Harnessing The Psychic Break

These bold actions in Boston unfolded in concert with the #OccupyWallStreet protests and the launch of #occupyBoston, an offshoot inspired by the infamous encampment in Zucotti park in lower Manahattan. The growing popular sentiment against Wall Street was an inspiring backdrop for the action, and indicates a growing frustration with the status quo by all walks of life.

So what is the role of community organizers and progressive leaders in this moment of #occupy momentum? After the dramatic mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge and the #occupy meme is spreading like wild fire,  progressive and liberal forces are rapidly aligning around the protests.

At smartMeme, we have a theory about “the Psychic Break:” a moment when the dominant narrative unravels and there is an opening for a new story to take hold on a massive scale. We saw this moment come and go in 2008 when the stock market collapsed, $700 billion was given to financial giants, and progressives mostly stayed home and kept quiet while the Tea Partyers got into position.

But we believe that #occupyWallStreet is re-opening that window and provoking another such psychic break moment, an opportunity that community groups, progressive labor and environmentalists cannot allow to pass by.

The Right to the City Alliance actions were organized and led by decades-old community-based organizations, led by People of Color and rooted in People of Color communities. This work will go on for decades after #occupy stops trending on Twitter, but  there is a clear understanding of the need to join these movements together and seize the political moment.

In Boston, Right to the City leadership shaped the message and the coalition building strategy, and made demands on Bank of America and other corporate targets. Right to the City had the vision, the know-how, and the people power to make this march a huge success. It was organized long before the occupation of Wall Street or the hastily planned takeover of Dewey Square next to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, but the alliance stands in solidarity with these encampments and those to come throughout the country and is working to help fortify and expand them.

One week later on “Columbus Day”/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the Right to the City led coalition in Boston was in active collaboration with the #OccupyBoston encampment, and over 2,000 people marched together to demand jobs, and end to wars and Wall Street greed. It is not surprising that this alliance, with the muscle of labor and community base-building groups behind it, represented enough of a threat that the Boston Police moved in to clear part of the encampment last night. Over 50 people were arrested and many are still in custody. The networks built by Right to the City have been activated to support the protests and mobilize support, as well as advise on strategies to move forward. This is a model for how the work must be joined and the potential that this moment holds.

We have an opportunity to offer a narrative of explanation about what has happened, how we got here, and how we can move forward together. We are faced with the potential of rooting this insurrectional energy into a strong social movement that can rival the Tea Party and change the story about our economic system, solutions to the crisis, and deepening democracy. The actions by Right to the City in Boston offer us an instructive model on the kind of analysis and organizing strategy that is necessary now.

This moment requires the building of a united front that will not dissipate after the march/rally/campaign is over.  The task before us is to create strategic alliances locally, regionally nationally and beyond, to be prepared to make compromise but hold fast to our principles and the dire need for those most affected to be leading the charge.  Like the 30,000 who marched in support of Occupy Wall Street on October 5th in New York, our numbers must swell and represent this united front.

But we must be agile and graceful and bold enough – like the ballerina on the bull of the #occupyWallStreet poster. We must be visionary and courageous and tenacious enough – like the youth of Roxbury blessing their occupied garden.  And we must be brave enough, like Presley Obasohan, to put our bodies on the line and commit civil disobedience against the banks and for the people and planet that we love.

If we can do this, and build in good faith together to harness this moment and channel the momentum towards fundamental, radical social change – we just might be witnessing the stirrings of the new world that beats in our hearts. Let us dance to that beat, sing to this beat, and march together to this beat …all the way down to Wall Street. #occupytogether!

Doyle & Rachel worked together to amplify the impact of these actions in Boston.

Doyle Canning is co-director of the narrative strategy center smartMeme, and is co-author of Re:Imagining Change – How to Use Story-based Strategies to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World (PM Press, 2010). She lives in Boston.

Rachel Laforest is the Executive Director of Right to the City Alliance.  She lives in New York.

Amanda Devecka-Rinear is a lead organizer at National People’s Action on the “Make Wall Street Pay” Campaign.  National People’s Action is part of the New Bottom Line. Check her out on twitter:  http://twitter.com/#!/AmandaNPA

There is a difference between knowing a thing can occur and having the faith and belief that it is on its way.   Occupy Wall Street has shown me a faith I didn’t remember I had, despite years of knowing.   Not only years of knowing but also years of organizing.  I was part of struggles in New York City with City University of New York students who fought to keep city and state money flowing toward educating young students of color rather than jailing them; and with Bronx residents fighting to learn and build new schools in one of the most overcrowded and neglected districts in the city.  Over the last several years, I’ve been involved with organizing across the country. I’ve seen everyday Americans stand up against predatory bank practices, Wall Street’s greed, and corporate influence on our democracy. Through all of this I believed that we could change the world, but that we would need to build the necessary movement to do it.

Now, Occupy Wall Street has ushered in a new inspiration and a new wave of possibility.  We need to support Occupy Wall Street, whether by sending supplies, being part of an “Occupy” in our town or city or supporting the “Occupy Wall Street Journal.”   And we need to continue organizing in our buildings, on our blocks, in our churches and our work places.  We must, each in our own way, match this moment and escalate our commitment and tactics.  Our vision for immediate change must be broad, powerful and significant.  And Wall Street must pay us back!

How We Got Here:

When I was part of fighting for a quality education in NYC, the fight was over how the city was allocating the money.  And just like today, politicians claimed to not have enough to spend on education.

And my mother just lost her job a few months ago.  She taught for the past 8 years at a community college in Ohio.  Several teacher positions in her department  were slashed by administration because of the state revenue crisis in Ohio.   Some things never change.

But things are different now. Since Wall Street and the Big Banks crashed the economy in 2008, one thing has become crystal clear: It is Us versus Them.  As Occupy Wall Street says so brilliantly, we are the 99%.   Money, wealth and stability are flowing from our families and communities directly to the 1%, and they would be happy to drain us dry.  Wall Street’s dangerous loan products targeted at African-American and low-income communities are at the core of what crashed our economy.  In the aftermath, they continue to foreclose on families, sometimes without even being the mortgage holder.  They leave tenants in foreclosed buildings in terrible conditions.  There are over a million people who live in homes now that are worth less than what they owe the banks.  The 1% continue to be on the winning side, no matter which side it is.

One in ten Americans cannot find a job.  And the job crisis that already existed in rural and urban communities is only deepening.   In September the national unemployment rate for African-Americans reached 16.7%.  And we know the problem is deeper than these numbers show.

And then there are the cuts.  Almost every state in this country is facing budget problems in part because of politician’s undying solidarity with corporations and the wealthy 1%; refusing to tax them and rather make us pay through cuts in services.  And states that don’t have it so bad are using this political moment to push a political agenda of attacking unions and cutting much needed services.

Bank of America is introducing $5/month  debit card fees.  Big Banks finance predatory payday lenders.  They borrow from the Federal Reserve at an interest rate of less than half a percent and then lend to corporations that charge us 400% or refuse to negotiate toxic swap deals with cities and institutions like the Chicago Public Schools, or State of Illinois.   They don’t pay taxes or fees on properties they’ve foreclosed on and pass those costs on to the former owner or the city.   And they can drop unregulated and unlimited cash in donations to elected officials and candidates.  We’re in an era of “pay to play” politics, and it’s our money they’re using to continue to screw us.

No Party Can Save Us:

Republicans are unabashedly pulling for team Wall Street.  Democrats are not doing anywhere near enough for us.  Although bolder policy and legislation, like the Financial Speculation Tax, could go a long way toward helping our communities, we cannot legislate our way out of this crisis.  Wall Street and corporations are absorbing nearly all of the profits and passing on nearly all of the costs and risks to the rest of us.  And like we say at National People’s Action, ‘That ain’t right!”  The crisis we’re facing today is a jobs crisis, a crisis of democracy, and a crisis in our economy.  This system is only working for Wall Street, not the rest of us.

We Need to Get Our Money Back:

No really.  We need to get our money back.  We have got to take back what they took from us and what they continue to take from us.  There are a number of critical ways we can do this together.  First, we can take our money out of banks like Bank of America, Citibank, and Wells Fargo and move it to a local credit union or bank.   Though this is an individual action, we can do it in a coordinated way and create a public narrative online about how we are doing this.  New Bottom Line will be launching a website in the next week or two where you can go on and tell us what you did.  So there will be a place to count and keep track. Share why you moved your money and how much you moved.  We want to keep track of how much everyday people are taking back from these banks.

Many of us don’t actually have that much of our own money to move.   Wouldn’t it be lovely to move bigger chunks of cash?  What about where you work, worship, or go to school?  Where do those institutions keep their money?  What about your town, city or county?  Where do you all keep your money?  After pressure from People Improving Communities though Organizing in California, the City of San Jose California moved nearly 1 billion dollars from Bank of America because they weren’t doing enough to prevent foreclosures in San Jose.  What if that happened in 100 cities?  What if that happened in 100 cities before the end of the year?

Their damage to our communities continues to cost us.  When a bank forecloses,   that family loses their home and whatever savings they invested in their property.  But taxpayers have to cover the cost of the foreclosure.  After foreclosure, banks often let their foreclosed properties fall into terrible condition.  These are dangerous eyesores and continue to drag down the property values of their neighbors.  Like Springfield, Massachusetts and Cincinnati, Ohio, local governments can pass ordinances that force banks to file a cash bond to foreclose, prioritize mediation, and take responsibility for their foreclosed properties.

And last but not least, Wall Street can pay taxes just like we do.  Smoke?   Pay taxes.  Eat out?  Taxes.  Drink?  Taxes?  Engage in speculative activity that drains our economy?  Taxes – not really.  A Financial Speculation Tax would be a less than one percent tax on short-term speculative activity – the kind of financial transactions that helped create the crisis – and it would generate billions of dollars of revenue.  For ordinary investors the cost would barely be noticeable.  Some estimate an FST could generate up to $150 billion a year in tax revenue a year off of Wall Street traders’ activities.

It’s Going to Take All of Us: 

Whoever you are, whatever you do, you will be part of turning things around.  The hundreds and thousands of people that are part of the growing movement to Occupy Wall Street, it’s up to you.  The hundreds and thousands of people that are part of community organizations and organized labor who are working to move your churches’ money, for dignity at work, to fight big bank backing of payday lending, who are doing civil disobiences in bank lobbies with families facing foreclosure refusing to leave until they get their loan modified, it’s up to you.  And it’s up to you, designers. You, photographers. You, writers. You, musicians. All of you who have been showing us the truth and telling us the story of this struggle. It’s up to you.

As the weather turns colder, we’ll see greed in the whites of Wall Streets eyes.  They’ll award themselves another record year of bonuses and compensation around December as a reward for their profits and the harm they’re causing the rest of us.  Our state and city budget fights will begin again with no relief in sight.  Let this be a spring like we haven’t seen in years as all together we fight for our families, jobs, homes, educations, and democracy.  Time to for Wall Street to pay us back.

Eric Mann is a veteran organizer with the Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society, and the United Auto Workers Union. He is presently the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and a member of its Bus Riders Union and Community Rights Campaign. 

Jaron Browne is the Communications Director at POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) in San Francisco.  Jaron is also a co-author of Towards Land, Work, and Power. Before joining POWER, he did organizing and campaign research against racism in the criminal justice system with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Jaron was trained as an organizer in Los Angeles at LCSC’s National School for Strategic Organizing.

“The tradition of transformative organizing always finds the paths of hope.

In dark times, what do we do?  We organize.”

Eric Mann’s new book Playbook for Progressives is one of the most anticipated publications offered to the grassroots social justice movement in years. Over 10 years ago, a group of young organizers, including myself, surreptitiously got a hold of a four-page outline from a training that Eric had given at the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles about the job description and the essential qualities of organizer effectiveness.   The rough outline spread quickly, passed around to dozens of organizers, all seeking theory that spoke to the model of Left conscious organizing in the context of the U.S.  From that point forward, we began our own campaign to urge Eric to write this very book.

That one outline was so invaluable because we were always searching for theory and reflection on how to build grassroots mass organizations with Left edge and consciousness in the context of the US.  Too many of our lessons and wisdom have largely been lost with our movement elders.   While new generations are often inspired by the legacies that came before us, we often can’t find the organizations to join or the mentors to pass on lessons learned.   From relative obscurity, we are then forced to chart our paths to power through trial and error.

In my own experience as a young anti-racist white activist, I had many years of trial and error organizing—some really inspiring moments, and some serious crash and burn failures—before I was very fortunate to be trained at the Labor/Community Strategy Center National School for Strategic Organizing in 2001.  I spent the following nine years as a full-time organizer with POWER working to build a multi-racial, multi-lingual mass organization fighting for racial, economic, gender and environmental justice in San Francisco.  For me, The Playbook for Progressives is the first book to really describe the model of organizing that I see as having the greatest potential to really transform conditions and build a movement for global justice inside the U.S.

The Playbook for Progressives is exciting, because it takes political theory that is so sharp and helpful for mass organizing in the U.S. and makes it accessible to thousands of activists and organizers.     Eric Mann is uniquely positioned to write a book on Left grassroots organizing, as he is one of the few long distance runners who has stayed directly on the frontlines building mass organizations and waging powerful campaigns in working class Black and Latino communities for over four decades.   The book is filled with concrete examples from Eric’s own experience, as well as the lessons of his comrades and peers throughout his forty year history in the civil rights movement, labor movement and environmental justice movement in some of the most exciting and dynamic struggles of our time.

For anyone directly involved in social justice work, the book literally pulls you through from start to finish by grappling with the very questions we all face on a daily basis.   Anyone who has had to plan a membership meeting in the heat of a campaign and prepare leaders to directly confront decision makers; anyone who has struggled with the fine art of building relationships and consolidating members into leadership; all of us who have been called on to lead chants in a multi-racial immigrant rights march, or deliver a rousing speech in the midst of direct action—this book is speaking directly to you.

A Call to Join the Movement

Grassroots organizing is the often-invisible backdrop to the most powerful moments in history.   Working class heroes like Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer come center stage from mass organizations.  For that matter, many of us can trace back to key individuals who pulled and supported us in taking our first actions and joining our first organizations. Eric Mann even names, one by one, all the people who helped him get to where he is today.

As essential as grassroots organizing is to movement building, we are in desperately short supply of organizers in this historic moment.    The social movements in the US need more trained and dedicated working class field organizers who are building organizations across the country, and there are very few people who do grassroots organizing.  How many people do you know who regularly knock on doors, make quality follow up calls and coordinate one-on-one sit downs with new contacts?  Eric proves this is essential to organizing and without skill in these areas, the movement will only grow slowly.

Playbook for Progressives is a call to anyone who reads it to join the movement—not as individuals, but to be part of building a larger movement that can make history.  It is a call to activists to join organizations and begin organizing in the place where you are.   It is a manual designed to help strengthen grassroots organizations, and a call to begin coalescing our various arenas of work into a broad social movement for global justice.

Transforming the System & Transforming Consciousness

Playbook for Progressives explains transformative organizing as “a tradition of building social movements to challenge the entire system that defines U.S. history and the present.”   It is the art of both transforming material conditions in working class communities and fundamentally transforming the consciousness of everyone involved in the struggle itself.

I remember from my time in the National Organizing School at LCSC that organizers would reflect that the success of consciousness building within the membership of the organization came not only in the ways that a person responded to an attack on their own community, but also how they respond to an attack on another oppressed community.  Do immigrant Latina domestic workers feel moved to action when an African American young person is attacked by the police, and is the opposite also true?  Will an organized base of bus riders or janitors also participate in a march against anti-transgender hate violence?

Broader class consciousness is critical to any true social movement, because self-interest can only get us so far.  Of course, a person may come to their first meeting because they are being under-paid, over-worked, or denied critical services for their families and loved ones.  The choice to fight for ones own survival is a powerful place to connect to why we fight in the first place.  To win, we have to reach the point were that desire for justice extends to any place where injustice exists.

The Playbook for Progressives points to some of the most incredible moments in the U.S. left, such as the thousands of leaders from mass struggles who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the 1930s to fight the rising tide of fascism in Europe.   The book draws together the best of the grassroots left organizing tradition and draws from these examples a framework of Transformative Organizing.

The Organizer as the Smallest Unit of Organization

The starting point of the job description offered by Eric Mann is that any one organizer can be seen as the smallest unit around which an organization can be built.   Contained in this one powerful charge is the essence of why organizing is ever challenging, creative, life-changing work that involves tremendous personal growth and change.

Mass movements are built through thousands of organizers fanned out across sectors, regions, varied constituencies.   At the core, an organizer spends her whole life adapting to changing circumstances and multiplying herself from each new contact she meets over the course of years.

The first half of the book lays out the practical skills that an organizer needs to master in order to be have the complete capacity to root oneself in whatever material conditions you are facing and advance the deliberate steps to build organizations and wage successful campaigns for justice.

Eric offers the multifaceted model of an organizer as a foot soldier who is often the one on the buses, in neighborhoods, laundry mats, work sites engaging with everyday people.  Rooted in the masses, the organizer must also take the roles of evangelist, recruiter, group builder, strategist, tactician, communicator, political educator, agitator, fundraiser, comrade and confidante, and finally movement cadre.

What I appreciated most is that the Playbook is written as a very accessible field manual.  It cuts through the intimidation than can paralyze new organizers having to step into new roles.  Eric makes clear that all organizers make mistakes, and you keep going.  Eric’s offers the vision of an organizer—not as someone who is born with each of these skills, but someone who pushes herself to grow.

Courageous, Militant, Agile, Relentless, Generous….

The second half of the book takes an even more delicate and engaging analysis on the practice of organizing, and the deeper level of self-inquiry that each organizer is asked to make within herself.

The sixteen qualities described in the book could be evaluated by any one of us to see to what extent our work in a given period reflects our strongest practice.  An organizer could ask herself: has my work been organizational in orientation and working toward a collective vision versus individual?  Have I listened well to the base and the leaders of the organization?  Are there contradictions in my practice of upholding the rights of all oppressed people?  Have I been self-sustaining and taken good care of myself and others in order to stay in the struggle over the long road ahead?

One of the qualities that Eric includes in this section is the practice if being tactically agile, able to read conditions and seize opportunities to advance the campaign and the work of the organization.  To illustrate this skill, Eric goes into detail describing a moment in the Bus Riders Union campaign when the organization assessed that in order to advance their campaign, BRU organizer Francisca Porchas needed to interrupt the speech that Mayor Villaraigosa would make at a high-profile national gathering of five hundred Latino elected officials.   After careful preparation around timing, tone and message, the book describes the moment Francisca stood at the close of the Mayor’s speech where he was touting his environmental justice record and in spite of her own quivering voice, found the words “Mr. Mayor I respectfully disagree with your policies.”  Having captured the entire room, and caught the attention of security guards moving toward her, she goes on to raise questions on the Mayor’s willingness to restrict the auto emission, to oppose rail construction, to buy more clean-air buses and to reduce bus fare.

Like many of the examples drawn out in the book, any organizer can see themselves in this type of challenging situation, summoning up ones own courage and preparation to take the best action possible in that moment. The book also lays out the openings that this one action, carried out skillfully, was able to unlock for the entire campaign.

At POWER, we have an edited version of these qualities as a foundation of our internal evaluations of our development as movement cadre.  Each organizer reflects on her practice in each of these aspects of work and offers a self-assessment to the other staff.  We also offer and receive feedback and support to and from staff with whom we work about their assessment of our practice in each area—where we are strong and where we have areas for development.

Taken as a whole, the qualities and skills laid out in the Playbook take a lifetime to master.  Everyone, from beginning organizers-in-training to veteran leaders of national and local mass organizations, will find something that challenges and pushes their own edges of development.

Lifting up a Nationwide Tendency

In addition to laying out a clear and powerful organizing model, the Playbook also contributes to a larger movement building process by lifting up in each chapter some of the most inspirational Left grassroots organizers and organizations from across the country.

The Playbook shares powerful lessons from national labor and civil rights leader Bill Fletcher, national domestic worker organizer Ai-jen Poo, warrior poet Audre Lorde, Black Workers for Justice leader Saladin Muhammad, farm worker organizer Dolores Huerta, Indigenous Environmental Network Director Tom Goldtooth, scholar and peoples historian Robin D. G. Kelley, civil rights veteran George Wiley, and the Strategy Center’s own Manuel Criollo, Maria Guardado, Lian Hurst-Mann, Barbara Lott-Holland, Andy Terranova, and countless others.

Lessons from each of these organizers and their real campaign experiences ground the book in material reality.  Transformative organizing is not just a theory.  Eric chose to share his math and to show the very practice where the ideas are coming from.    Many of the stories include lessons that are made from not only successes, but also from risks and errors that were then corrected.   The summations of these organizing strategies demonstrate a level of humility and careful attention to detail that alone make this book invaluable to anyone involved in social justice work.

In this way, the Playbook also offers a model that hopefully will encourage all of our organizations throughout the movement to sharpen our own practice of reflection and summation of our work.  We have so much to gain from drawing out our own lessons internally within our organizations and to share with one another.

Read this book!

Playbook for Progressives is an invitation to open the dialogue for movement activists and organizers involved in the struggles for racial, economic, gender, environmental, and LGBT justice.

The most powerful opportunity this book offers is the potential for unifying a movement building strategy from the grassroots up.  The conditions in the U.S. and around the world could not be more urgent.  The racing speed of imperialism is devastating our mountain tops, our air, our water supply.   As organizers inside the U.S., we are strategically situated in one of the most important places where space for social change must be opened up in the coming years.   The world is looking for alliance in our ranks as oppressed communities within this country.

The Left organizer is constantly aware of the uphill battle and steep climb inherent to this work.  With this book, Eric Mann reminds us why, in spite of the difficulty, organizing can be such joyful and deeply rewarding work.  The book awakens the organizing spirit in all of us, leaves the martyr behind and cheers us on saying “You can do it because we need you.”

Playbook is available at Amazon, Powells Books, Kindle, Nook, and at many independent bookstores. Group rates can be worked out with Broche Fabian at Beacon Press, bfabian@beacon.org. Examination copies for course adoptions can be arranged with Alyssa Hassan, ahassan@beacon.org and there are direct links at Eric’s website, www.ericmannauthor.com