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. 

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.

Readers Forums are a space where Organizing Upgrade’s readers can weigh in on the debate.  This debate between Subhash Kateel and  Sally Kohn has inspired a number of people to submit extended comments and reflections. We wanted to share their thoughts with you and invite you to join the dialogue.  Share your thoughts here (using the comment function below), or email us an extended comment at upgrade@organizingupgrade.com and we can upload into this post. And, remember, Organizing Upgrade wants to encourage principle and productive debate, not character assassination and division.

Organizing Upgrade also wants to encourage our readers in New York City to join the community-labor march to Wall Street next week (information below), an action called by several organizations that are members of National Peoples Action (the national network which is helping to lead the New Bottom Line campaign referenced in this debate). 

COMMUNITY / LABOR MARCH to WALL STREET

WHEN: October 5th at 4:30 pm

WHERE: City Hall (250 Broadway)

DETAILS: Let’s march down to Wall Street to welcome the protesters and show the face of New Yorkers hardest hit by corporate greed. Union workers and community members impacted by the economic crisis have been demanding Wall Street and the wealthiest New Yorkers pay their fair share. It’s time to stand together and continue what started in in Wisconsin.

MAE SINGERMAN

“Exactly who I expected to be at Occupy Wall Street is there doing exactly what I expected them to be doing,” a white friend of mine and an experienced organizer said as we wondered around Zuccotti Square a couple of days ago.

“So what is wrong with that?” I asked her.

She said she just couldn’t help but see Occupy Wall Street cynically. I’ve overheard the snarky cynicism from friends and read it in articles. I can’t help but wonder if the critique, which I’ve heard from white folks especially, is a way to separate ourselves from young, white activists. And more troubling, I worry that it represents an inability think beyond the formula that non-profit organizing groups have prescribed in the past few decades.

First, it is important to say that I generally agree with the critique that I’ve heard. Do I think organizing is more effective and long term? Yes. Are white men in their 20s the majority of people at Occupy Wall Street? Yes. Have they been unable to create actionable demands? Yes. Is it a turn off for “mainstream America” that many people there look raggedy and punk? Yes.

The critique is accurate, but loveless and cynical. Not to mention that most of it has come from the mouths of white people who just 10 or 15 years ago probably would have been setting up camp there in an excited flurry, learning how to use (and abuse) consensus and make large vats of food for lots of hungry people.

There is a time in my life when I (and many of the movement critics) would have dropped everything I was doing and headed to Wall Street. On more than one occasion, I drove 24 hours to attend a mass demonstration. Most were unsuccessful in reaching their stated primary goal of stopping the war, ending free trade agreements or halting toxic environmental practices. Many were disorganized and though they tried, never lived up to their idealistic premise.

I participated on the edges of Take Back the Land Miami, which took over a vacant lot for six months with a demand that Black people should have control of all vacant property in Black communities. Take Back the Land was not a non-profit and had no funding. Their revolutionary demands were not met, but Umoja Village stood for six months, sparking a national debate on housing and inspiring groups around the country to take up the banner. Five years later, a national network of Take Back the Land exists to continue the struggle. Are there critiques I could make of Take Back the Land? Of course. But, I will always honor the imagination and vision that it took to do something completely outside the bounds of what any non-profit organizing group at the time would touch. Take Back the Land’s actions may have even played a role in inspiring Occupy Wall Street’s initial organizers.

Major demonstrations, protest encampments, and other outside the box actions were the first things to draw me into the movement. They introduced me to a worldview I never even knew to imagine previously, to issues of privilege and race and to debates about tactics. Actions and occupations like Occupy Wall Street helped me have a vision that still helps guide me, though I’ve shifted as far as the tactics I choose to use and prioritize.

Occupy Wall Street is a training ground for future action and for a new batch of rabble rousers. It was a starting point for a march to protest the murder of Troy Davis and to support postal workers and an ending point for a City University march about education funding. Three thousand people are watching their live stream at any given time as experienced organizers  pass on their histories of resistance and share information in formal and informal ways. Occupy Wall Street is bringing us the gift of a conversation about capitalism, revolutionary action and how to craft reformist demands in a rotten system.

Most importantly, it is a space that is unabashedly calling bullshit on capitalism. Yes, white activist and organizers should critique it, but with love and respect for people who are part of our collective journey in seeking a more just world. We never know what and who they could be laying the groundwork for and we shouldn’t pretend like we do.

Special thanks to Padraig O Donoghue for contributions to my developing thoughts on Occupy Wall Street.

MARC KRUPANSKI

Many thoughts to respond to Sally’s post, but a few questions…

- I am not certain what she is calling for other than calling names: smelly, anarchist (I’m guessing “anarchist” is a negative term)? Does she want the Occupy Wall Street protests to stop? Does she want the imagined or real “smelly” people to shower? Does she want the imagined or real white people to stop being white? Does she want people of color to go to the protest? Really, Sally, I’m confused as to what you are calling for here – other than, “When you protest, please shower, dress nicely and make sure you wear clean underwear so when the NYT or other media come knocking (or the NYPD come thumping) you can scream angrily, but look pretty for the camera.”

- Her initial post calling for the “well-organized” and well-groomed early 1960s decades reminds me of the in-fighting then between certain leaders of the SCLC against the participants in urban riots across the U.S., the younger crowds in SNCC and later against the Black Panther Party (“don’t try to organize the “lumpenproletariat”!”).

- Also, seeing that she bases her assessment of the Occupy Wall Street protests on that one NYT article (to which a decent response was made by Kilkenny in her 26 September The Nation article) doesn’t only take the columnist from the NYT at their word, but also does not take the activists at theirs. Meaning – she silences and thus, assumes who they are. Many of the activists at Occupy Wall Street are involved in a number of long-term community-based organizing campaigns. I think this is a significant damaging factor of her article: that she silences who the activists are without an attempt to engage with them. Many have come to Occupy Wall Street as an expression of their everyday work, which they continue to do otherwise.

Having been a long-time member of a mostly white, mostly anarchist, and I suppose mostly “weird” or “smelly” seeming organization, I know the immediate reaction many of our members would conjure in the likes of Sally (btw, I agree too with Subhash that not only does Sally silence the other work these activists do, but also the number of other participants who are not “smelly”, “anarchist” or white.). I also have shared the apparent instant gasp at seeing “smelly” “weird” “anarcho-hippie” kids as a face of a movement or organization. I agree that to a certain extent, the way we project ourselves and express ourselves affects the impact we have on various communities. Yet, this does not mean these folks don’t organize. For my group, we were also involved in providing committed, long-term ally support to women-of-color led community based organizations and their campaigns. I guess, in essence, what I am saying is: don’t judge a book by its cover and especially if that cover is the New York Times.

- Lastly, this whole “protest for protest sakes” business. In her line in this article: “Second, yes, Families for Freedom sometimes protested for protest’s sake — understandable given the desperation and powerlessness many of their members felt.” Clearly, this is not protesting for protesting sake. This is protesting as a way to express individual and collective frustration, anger and yes, love as well as a way to feel collective support and empowerment at a time in which we are made to feel increasingly disempowered. Protesting for protest sake can actually help regenerate our energies and build collective strength and at the very least, demonstrate a modicum of dissent and opposition. What is “protest for protest’s sake” for, Sally, if we don’t “win”? So, then all the marches against the U.S. invasion in Iraq or protests for protest’s sake? Again,  in this context, I think she is using this phrase as she assumes the extent of the Occupy Wall Street’s political participation. A sad thing to do.

In the end, if you really want people to shower or change their appearance or – more substantially – change their tactics, maybe you shouldn’t start with insults and dismissive rips, the kind of which are received enough by those in opposition? Generally not a good idea when our movement is already small and you identify OWS participants as being within our movement. I’m sure this is not the organizing tactic taken by the New Bottom Line.

CHRIS GUNDERSON

Subhash was right to take apart Kohn’s original piece. Kohn’s piece polices the boundaries of what is considered acceptable protest in the United States. Not in the literal sense of policing with a badge, a gun and a can of pepper spray. But in the no less important sense of marginalizing and isolating those acts of protest that fall outside fairly narrow bounds.

What are those bounds? Most generally they are the familiar bounds imposed in much community organizing of “winnable demands” which automatically excludes from the outset all demands that challenge the foundational assumptions of capitalism or otherwise involve a radical transformation of power relations. The most important victories of progressive movements did not start out as “winnable demands” of course. They started out as insistent cries against injustice that were promptly dismissed by the pragmatists of their age. Cries that were “poorly messaged” and often embodied by spokespeople no less wild-eyed and unkempt as some you will encounter in a sleeping bag in Liberty Plaza north of Wall Street. It has been one of the signal accomplishments of the non-profit industrial complex to separate so many dedicated day-to-day organizers, now dependent on annual grants for their meager salaries, from the wild-eyed, unkempt and often un- or underemployed who have historically been the conscience of progressive movements.

More specifically, the bounds are quite clearly articulated in Kohn’s piece. First, they are the bounds of respectable appearances and hygiene that she lays down by the predictable resort to ridicule which permeates the whole piece. She laments that her “jokes about smelly anarchists fell flat with many” not because they were a cheap resort to an ad hominem argument, but only because they failed to fulfill their mission of marginalization.

Second, they are the bounds of the editorial policies of the New York Times. Never mind that this action is an attack on the heart of global capitalism and the New York Times — and all the other “mainstream” (read: corporate) media who Kohn rightly notes take their cues from the Times — is fundamentally beholden to the preservation of capitalism.

Whether she sees herself this way or not, Kohn was acting as a gatekeeper when she wrote her piece. She ended up sending a message to liberal funders, non-profit staffers, and other progressive “opinion leaders” to keep away from the smelly crazies down camping out on Wall Street. Fortunately events have outpaced that position. A constant flow of people has broadened the base of the Wall Street occupation. The police attacks when they sought to link up with the Troy Davis protests have outraged a broad swathe of New York progressives. And now solidarity actions are being prepared in dozens of towns and cities. It turns out that the smelly white anarchists actually did have a message and that it has captured peoples imaginations in a way that little else has done (Wisconsin being the most notable exception) since the financial crisis began. It may not be sufficient to bring down the rule of Wall Street, but its a real start. One that happened in spite of, not because of, the gatekeepers of respectable protest. Good for them.

PAUL GETSOS

NOTE: This is more of a report from the field, than an engagement in this debate.  but we wanted to include it because of Paul’s long-time experience organizing in communities most impacted by the crisis. 

Down in Zuccotti Park, a few blocks north of Wall Street, a couple of hundred people have taken over a local park, more a sliver of concrete with some trees that provide shade from the sun, in what is simply called “Occupy Wall Street”.

The people in the park are mostly younger and diverse. The overwhelming commonality is that most could fall under the banner of “alternative” lifestyle, people who had made some commitment to living and creating a space or movement that is essentially countercultural. But there were people who did not fit this mode, including a smattering of low-income people, workers from local restaurants, and some suits and ties who were observing the scene.

At the General Assembly I attended, leadership was shared and people who were under the age of 30 facilitated the meeting. A diverse group of people, maybe 120 people participated actively in the General Assembly. Young children tagged along with their parents or played by their side.  Older people connected with more traditional institutions, labor groups, community organizations and campaigns, were also present in the crowd and presented to the larger group.  The GA was a combination of agenda items that dealt with the logistics of keeping an encampment going over multiple days, food, safety and security, clean-up, communications etc. and a range of announcements of various activities and actions. The day’s actions were supporting a rally for postal workers.  There were pieces on outreach, communications and media, and how to engage new people who joined the encampment. At the end of the day, it was in some ways, agenda items about a tactic, not about strategy, power, goals or demands.

Many organizers from the professional organizing field have been as critical of the encampment and the young people who are trying to do something as right wing and conservative commentators and press. And from a traditional community organizing analysis, lots of critiques can be made. There is no clear demand or target, There is no clear plan to build and develop a more powerful base. It’s a tactic that lacks a strategy. Its “middle class elites who are protesting or it’s a revolutionary chic kids who are not connected to a base.

While these critiques may mostly be correct, the critics fail to see something that the media (mostly right-wing and business press) and even Mayor Mike Bloomberg see. That it’s the first time that a group of unorganized young people who no matter what their family background is, feel like that the current economic system where a few smart and/or lucky people win big, and the vast majority of us, no matter how smart, hard working luck or all three lose. And the fact that these young people and their older allies have come to Wall Street, without staff, foundations, individual or labor money, on a limited budget of contributions and pooled resources, have garnered more sustained attention, press, on-lookers and support, than many organizations that have toiled for years in the field or developed and run smart strategic and well financed campaigns.

I believe the reasons for the attention that Occupy Wall Street has gotten are a few. The first is it’s the left critique at the right time.  The economy is in crisis and Wall Street is a good target and while there has been some strong work that has gone after banks, corporate greed and Wall Street, the fact that these are young people and students has resonated in the media and with elected’s because the other formations have not been led or particularly consisted of them. In addition, the media has been interested in what happened in the Middle East and are more interested in “spontaneous” movements and this fits well into that narrative.

Whatever the reasons, for the moment, this group of young people have captivated some amount of press and have tapped into a political moment and an untapped energy. As one young person I met in the crowd who works  as a waiter at a local restaurant told me: “this is exciting. It’s the first time I have seen people my age, out of college with limited options for work and a good jobs, come together. I am angry at Wall Street and the bankers and stockbrokers who are making all this money. I come here and I see people who are also angry and trying to do something, and I want to be a part of it.”

Organizers and activists should be supportive as well and figure out how to join and help this group grow from a few hundred, to a few thousand, the tens and then hundreds of thousands.

Here, authors Amy Sonnie and James Tracy discuss their forthcoming book, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times, which explores radical organizing among working-class white communities during the 1960s-1970s (now available for pre-order).

Amy Sonnie is an activist, educator and librarian who has worked with U.S. grassroots social justice movements for the past 17 years. She is co-founder of the national Center for Media Justice.

James Tracy is a long-time social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and has been active in the Eviction Defense Network and the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. 

Let’s start with the basics.  Can you give us a brief summary of what Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power is about?

Amy Sonnie (AS): The book shares the stories of poor and working-class whites who found common cause with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the Sixties and Seventies. They organized in white slums and industrial centers, and they also evolved a version of feminism relevant to poor women’s lives. In Chicago, we look at JOIN Community Union, The Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry; in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood we share the story of October 4th Organization; and in the Bronx we introduce White Lightning. Together they represent a kind of “political family tree,” unique but influenced by each others’ work.

Some of the groups shared members, and we tell their organizational stories through the lens of their leaders and participants. Some were in well-known groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but most of these organizations and individuals have never been written about. Many people have heard of the Young Patriots – poor whites from Appalachia – who formed an alliance with the Black Panthers and Young Lords called the Rainbow Coalition. But we asked, “How did the Rainbow Coalition come to be?” The book takes a longer view of the “rainbow politics” that inspired that alliance and that continued even after government repression decimated groups like the Panthers and Patriots.

Blocking Highways! Blocking Hallways! How do we build a workers (and unemployed people) movement in the United States? Lessons from Argentina

Paul Getsos is a widely recognized expert on strategy development, organizing, leadership training and community power-building. Paul has extensive experience working at the national, state and local level. He has been a lead staff person on two national campaigns focused on jobs and unemployment and health-care reform, as well as a key strategic partner representing Community Voices Heard (an organization he co-founded) on national welfare reform, TANF re-authorization and global justice issues. He is also the co-author of Tools for a Radical Democracy. The following is reflection written by Paul Getsos on in early March when he was in Argentina studying unemployed movements, seeking for transferable lessons for U.S. based organizing.

The main objective is easy. Stop the normal operations of society. No business as usual.  Stop the means of production be it the flow of products and services or the ability of government workers to go to work.

It is simple. We need more localities, cities and towns in the United States to erupt in protest, civil disobedience and militant action demanding jobs, unemployment benefits, no cuts to poor and working people. We need working and middle class people to demand taxes on the rich and corporations and to bear the costs of education and basic services and community needs for all.

We do these things and then we can beat back the current right wing attacks and begin the long term work of  building a mass based left progressive movement that takes on corporate power and the politicians who feed at the trough of corporate contributions and then heed their will and demands.

In Argentina where the unemployed movement has been organizing for years, workers without jobs block streets to stop the transport of goods and workers.  In Albany, workers who want jobs and under-employed poor people who need government support block the halls to the State Capital. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands rally at the State Capital to preserve worker rights.

Blocking highways, blocking hallways. Marching on capitals.

Disruption of the normal flow of business is the tool that is most available to workers who have no jobs or those who are under attack.  It is the tactic that those who are part of the labor market, but who are not actively working, have at their disposal as workers. Employed workers strike or engage in slow-downs. Workers faced with firings and layoffs occupy factories. Workers without jobs block the transfer of goods, services and other workers. Its the tool that is at their disposal to force those with both economic and political power to answer to their demands.  If its jobs, cash assistance, food, or education, these tactics are key to reinforcing the identity of those without jobs as workers who are still part of the labor market.

When the hundreds of people from Community Voices Heard and NY VOCAL held banners across the entrances to the State Capital and forced state workers to take another path, they were echoing the actions of workers without jobs in La Plata, Argentina. Here 1200 people took over the main highway two weeks ago to demand that the federal government release millions of pesos for jobs programs in the state.

The protests in Albany and in La Plata included those without work, low-wage workers, students, working class supporters and retirees who saw the importance of working on this issue.  In La Plata, the two local union affiliates sent hundreds of people along to block the highway in solidarity with those seeking work.

I have been studying social movements of unemployed workers and the poor here in Argentina for 3 months. I have been meeting with organizers and leaders who have worked since the mid- 1990′s on these issues, and talking to workers and poor people themselves.

In all the various movements and organizations I have talked to,  there are four main points that those who seek to build a movement in the United States should think about when organizing around the issues of jobs, benefits and services for the poor, working and middle class.

These points are:

1. Organize people as workers and have a clear “working class identity.”

People do not want to identify as unemployed or even poor.  People are workers. Some with jobs, some without.  Some don’t have enough work to sustain themselves or to save for the future.  Some are not making enough at 40 hour a week jobs. By starting from this common identity as workers – you lay the ground for keeping people involved in political action and your organization or movement, even when they get a job.

Also it is important to redefine what a worker is and what working class means, both within your organization and as you talk about your movement to people outside of your organization. When you engage politicians, corporate targets, new members or the press use the language of working class identity for everyone that is not benefitting from the economic restructuring of society.

2. Build a Multi-Sector Movement.

Every organizer and leader I have met in Argentina told me that the thing they learned is that a multi-sector organization and movement is critical for winning enough power to win.  While it takes work, the importance of both getting people of each sector to work together on a common issue and supporting each others struggles is the key for building a strong movement.  Students, union members, retirees, welfare mothers, and workers without jobs, are all key to building enough power to take on corporate power and conservative political interests.   An example of the importance of building these multi-sectoral organizations and movements, is that when the state starts to crack down and repress the movements, broad based support will help to neutralize the repression.  When politicians work or make offers to divide and conquer the interests of each group, it will be easier to maintain a united front and have mutual support. For one another struggles.  The tactics of pueblados, when entire neighborhoods or towns go on what is essentially a general strike to support militant actions and protect the participants of these actions  against state repression is the most important result of multi-sector organizing here.

3. Organize at the local neighborhood level and engage in easy fights to win things that people say they need.

Working at the local level and building organization in the neighborhood  helps to get people working cross sector because they will ultimately work on and win things that will impact the whole community. They will learn  and understand the power of working together.  In the process of this work, they will build relationships and accountability with their neighbors. When the work, meetings and campaigns are based locally, they will more likely turn out their friends, families and neighbors to mass actions, increasing the scale of the movement. By achieving local wins, they will stay involved in the longer battles.

4. Invest the time and energy to engage in deep democratic processes and political education.

By building organizations that are democratic and rooted in the base and where community level decisions inform the larger movement, you can keep people involved for the long haul. Make sure community members are informing the campaign and making decisions about demands and tactics. Have clear organizational structures that include representation and participation from the base at every level of the larger organization.

When engaging in the work at all levels, make sure political education and critical analysis is a key component of the work. Maintain and articulate a vision beyond a single demand and one that has a vision for the world we want to build.

These are only some of the lessons from Argentina,  but these are the key ones, where people from every movement and organization agree.

These are points that might be useful to consider to those who seek to build organizations and movements that seek to address the challenges of the new economic realities in the United States, attacks on unions and workers, a jobless recovery, and attempts to dismantle the already bare boned social safety net that exists for those without work and in need.

This piece is primarily excerpted from the “Unity for Dignity: Expanding the Right to Organize to Win Human Rights at Work” report recently released by the Excluded Workers Congress.  The full report is available for download at: www.excludedworkerscongress.org.

Who are Excluded Workers?

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, millions of workers in the United States are excluded from one of the most basic human rights: the right to organize. Either by policy or by practice, millions of workers cannot organize without facing retaliation. They cannot bargain collectively to transform their workplace conditions, and they cannot access basic labor protections. In short: millions of workers are robbed of dignity.

These workers include more than a million and a half farmworkers, nearly two million domestic workers, millions of public employees in the eleven states and private employees in the twenty-two states that have right-to-work laws, nearly three million tipped workers and hundreds of thousands of guestworkers and day laborers. Some of these workers are excluded through explicit policies: farmworkers and domestic workers are named as exceptions to the right to organize, while restaurant workers are defined as “tipped workers” and excluded from minimum wage laws. Taxi drivers are explicitly excluded from the legal definition of “employee” itself and thus excluded from any labor protections.  Other workers are excluded from labor rights and protections through practice – either because existing laws are not enforced or because their precarious economic and legal status make it dangerous for them to claim even their guaranteed rights. But whether these exclusions are explicit or implicit, they undercut workers’ ability to organize. This leads to exploitative and degraded working conditions for excluded workers that, in turn, lower the floor for all workers.

These exclusions developed out of the convergence of two social dynamics: (1) the historical legacy of racial exclusion that has been institutionalized in US labor law (like the exclusion of farmworkers and domestic workers from the National Labor Relations Act as a concession to segregationist Southern senators in the 1930s) and (2) the impact of globalization, which has rendered much of current labor law structurally ineffective in addressing the changed dynamics of workplaces worldwide.  Fundamental shifts in the organization of global political and economic power have forever transformed the conditions facing workers in the United States and around the world. These shifts – the decline of the manufacturing economy in the United States and its emergence in Latin America and Asia, the development of a service economy in the United States, the rise of international migration – have creating new and challenging conditions for workers worldwide, conditions that are becoming increasingly similar over time. The problems facing excluded workers are not theirs alone. The struggles that they face – low wages, unstable employment and weak labor protections – are the struggles of increasing numbers of working class people in the United States.

The Rise of a New Workers Movement

Over the past two decades, hundreds of independent workers centers have emerged from these historically excluded sectors.  At first, these organizations were seen as hopeful upstarts, but they have grown and matured into well-respected organizations that have built sizable membership bases and won significant and innovative victories.  Many of these workers centers have affiliated with national sector-based networks or expanded into national membership organizations: the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Restaurant Opportunities Center United, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network and more. 

These independent workers organizations have waged a number of inspiring campaigns over the past twenty years, and each one provides an inspiring story of triumph against all odds and against every prediction of defeat. Given the long-standing challenges facing the labor movement and other progressive movements, these inspiring moments are important in themselves. But – perhaps more importantly – these hard-won victories suggest larger and more significant trajectories for the emergence of a new framework for labor rights and workers’ power for the 21st century.

The successful passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State has already inspired the introduction of similar legislation in California and the beginnings of similar campaigns in other states around the country. This Bill of Rights is not only significant because it challenges the decades-long exclusion of domestic workers from basic labor protections. Its provision of paid sick days actually extends the reach of government regulation beyond the normal range of labor protections.  Going beyond a more hands-off governmental mediation of “collective bargaining” between workers and employers, the Bill of Rights suggests a model of state-mandated “collective standards” for all workers.

The New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice and the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity waged a dramatic confrontation with immigration authorities, and they were able to win full legalization for guestworkers who had been trafficked from India by a major corporation. This victory is a demonstration of the ways in which contemporary workers’ struggles must necessarily expand beyond narrow workplace battles or “civil rights” frameworks to incorporate a broader “human rights” framework that can address the full range of international dynamics impacting workers’ lives today.

The HOPE Coalition waged a tenacious confrontation against a North Carolina law in that bars public employees from collective bargaining.  Their fight demonstrates that the long-term battle waged by the labor movement against right-to-work policies in the South is far from over. The multi-racial nature of their struggle also suggests that the vibrancy that is normally attributed strictly to contemporary immigrant workers’ struggle is actually much broader.  They vibrancy extends across racial, sectoral and regional lines.

These positive developments demonstrate the potential for excluded workers to help rejuvenate and transform the broader labor movement. But they also suggest the broad contours of new framework for transformative labor rights and protections for the 21^st century.  These new frameworks must end the explicit exclusions that intentionally restrict the rights of currently excluded sectors, but they must expand beyond inclusion alone. Labor laws must be reshaped so that they reflect the changes in workplace structures and the composition of the workforce in the 21st century. New frameworks for the right to organize, the right to bargain collectively, and other workers’ rights and protections must be rooted in human rights, and they must address the international dynamics of labor in today’s economy. While the specific contours of these policies remain unclear, the formation of the Excluded Workers Congress provides a vehicle for the formation and clarification of new transformative vision.

The Formation of the Excluded Workers Congress

During the June 2010 U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Jobs with Justice and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network brought together nine sectors of excluded workers to found the Excluded Workers Congress. The nine sectors of the Excluded Workers Congress include domestic workers, farm workers, taxi drivers, restaurant workers, day laborers, guestworkers, workers from Southern right- to-work states, workfare workers and formerly incarcerated workers.

These sectors came together around a common dream: to vastly expand the human right to organize in the United States, to win a new era of rights and policies for  workers, and to transform the labor movement in this country. The Excluded Workers Congress was formed to bring “the human right to organize” to life.  All of these workers need a new era of rights and protections. The current framework for collective bargaining in the United States has not caught up with these shifts. Our framework for organizing and bargaining, and our framework for labor law, was won in the 1920’s and 1930’s.  The Excluded Workers Congress is imagining an entirely new framework for organizing. Instead of seeking refuge from antiquated labor law, excluded workers are asserting that they have the human right to organize—and building campaigns to prove it. In response to the transformation of the economy and their own conditions, excluded workers are leading transformative campaigns that bring a human rights frame to life.  By coming together to build the Excluded Workers Congress, these organizations hope to build a shared basis of power that will allow them to work together with established unions to rebuild and transform the labor movement, to win expansive reforms in federal labor law, and to create a reality in which all workers can exercise their human right to organize.

During the first gathering of the Excluded Workers Congress, more than four hundred workers engaged in hours of story-telling to educate each other about the conditions in their different sectors and about the innovative campaigns they have developed to expand labor protections and to build worker power.

Building on the foundation of unity established in Detroit, representatives from each of the nine sectors came together in Washington DC in October 2010 to develop shared analysis, vision and collective strategies. During this meeting, the members of the Excluded Workers Congress formalized their federation and committed to engaging in shared campaign work. After reflecting on the history of racialized exclusion from labor protections and on the recent political-economic shifts that have altered the terrain of workers struggles, the members of the Excluded Workers Congress defined their shared mission to be expanding the right to organize for all workers to meet the new conditions of the 21^st century. They situated that struggle solidly within a human right framework, recognizing that globalized economies require that contemporary workers struggles must also be international in character.

In addition to developing an interim structure and plans for collaborative campaign work, the Excluded Workers Congress used the opportunity of being in the Capital to network with the Department of Labor, members of Congress and national labor leaders.

Congressional Hearings: Restaurant Opportunities Center United held a congressional hearing on health and safety issues in the restaurant industry, and Community Voices Heard led a congressional hearing on Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) during the Congress.  Additionally Jobs with Justice and the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice led a meeting with Representative Miller.

Department of Labor: Members of the Excluded Workers Congress held an extended meeting with the Department of Labor.  The Congress educated Department officials on the conditions of workers in their industries, shared strategies for improving working conditions and discussed the possibility of establishing an Excluded Workers Task Force at the Department of Labor.

Labor Movement: The Excluded Workers Congress also engaged in strategic dialogue with high-ranking representatives from SEIU and the AFL-CIO. The meeting with the AFL-CIO was particularly hopeful, opening the door to ongoing dialogue and meaningful collaboration towards organizing these sectors, which have historically been excluded from the traditional labor movement.

These meetings helped the Excluded Workers Congress to begin to establish itself as a meaningful political force in national labor politics.

Looking Forward

During the DC Gathering, the Excluded Workers Congress identified several broad arenas for shared work: (1) Shared campaigns to win immediate improvements in the conditions facing excluded workers; (2) Strengthening and expanding the labor movement; and (3) Long-term efforts to develop a new framework to transform and expand workers rights to organize in the 21^st century. The Congress intends to use both of these arenas of work as opportunities to deepen its relationships with the broader labor movement.

(1) Collaborative Campaign Work: The Excluded Workers Congress chose two campaigns around which to focus their collaborative campaign work:

Demanding a meaningful minimum wage,campaigns at both state and federal levelsto raise and index the minimum wage.  These campaigns would also work to include workers who are currently excluded from minimum wage protections, including tipped workers, home health care workers and agricultural workers. These campaign efforts are spearheaded by ROC-United.

P.O.W.E.R. Act, federal legislationthat would give legal status to workers who are victims of serious labor violations or are pursuing workplace claims.  This would protect undocumented workers who are fighting for their labor rights, shielding them from the threat of retaliation. The POWER Act campaign was initiated by the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity.

(2) Strengthening and Expanding the Labor Movement: The Excluded Workers Congress is working to come together with allies in the trade unions to rejuvenate and transform the broader labor movement. The Excluded Workers Congress hopes to engage in joint practice and strategy with the established labor movement in order to develop and advance a new transformative vision for labor rihts and protections. Specifically, The Excluded Workers Congress hopes to:

Engage in ongoing strategic dialogue across the labor movement – dialogues that bring together excluded worker organizations and trade unions to share lessons about the limitations of current collective bargaining policies and to develop new visions toward an expansion of labor protections and the right to organize.

Promote the inclusion of excluded worker organizations in local labor councils and statewide labor federations in order to ensure that solidarity manifests in concrete shared work.

Build solidarity and mutual support between excluded worker organizations and trade unions by supporting each other’s campaigns at both the local and national levels.

Develop and participate in collaborative campaigns that unite excluded worker organizations with trade unions in order to reach unorganized groups of workers and to expand the rights and power of all workers.

(3) Develop new frameworks for the right to organize in the 21^st century: The Excluded Workers Congress is working to develop a big-picture and long-term transformative vision for workers rights and power. Centrally, this vision includes the expansion and transformation of workers rights to organize. The explicit exclusions that intentionally restrict the rights of certain sectors of workers must end, but the Excluded Workers Congress believes that inclusion in current labor laws is insufficient. Labor laws must be reshaped to reflect changes in the structure of workplaces and the composition of the workforce in the 21^st century. Rather than limiting workers’ rights to organize to the restrictions of the National Labor Relations Act, the Excluded Workers Congress believes that new frameworks for workers’ right to organize must be rooted in human rights and that they must be international in scope. Because the specific contours of these frameworks and policies are still unclear, the Excluded Workers Congress is engaging in intentional work to develop clarity on these issues through structured dialogue with researchers and scholars who specialize in labor rights and worker organizing and through joint strategizing with labor organizers in the United States and around the world.  In 2011, the Excluded Workers Congress intends to convene a series of scholar-organizer roundtable and an International Excluded Workers Congress to bring excluded workers from around the United States together with labor organizers from around the world in order to envision a new and more transformative model for workers rights to organize for the 21^st century.

More information about the Excluded Workers Congress is available at www.excludedworkerscongress.org.

Joseph Phelan of Organizing Upgrade sat down with Purvi Shah and Chuck Elsesser of the Community Justice Project based at Florida Legal Services in Miami in early April to discuss the role of lawyers in grassroots organizing, social movements, and building another world.

What is the relationship between lawyering and social justice?

Historically, while not always clearly articulated, different legal models have developed as to how to use the law to create social justice. The civil legal-aid model, believes that the major problem with the legal system is a lack of lawyers.  It argued that if there were just enough lawyers to represent every single poor person, the courts would be able to administer a just result. The test-case or impact litigation model, believes that systemic social change can result from carefully targeted class action litigation.   The social-rescue model believes that poverty is the result of failure of  social and other support services, including, legal services.

The first two of these models believe in the underlying justness of the legal system – if you can simply have a lawyer to enforce the law, or have the right case argued to the right judge justice will result.  The third model assumes that poor people are poor largely because of their own failings. They are simply “broken people” who need comprehensive services to be “fixed.” Not one of these models takes into account the long standing systems of class and racial discrimination and oppression, which have resulted in systemic powerlessness of whole communities.  Many of the classic conflicts between organizers and traditional legal services lawyers can be attributed to this disconnect between their differing theories of social change. Traditionally, lawyers and organizers have vastly differently analyses on why our world is the way it is.

We believe that the poverty of our clients is simply a symptom of the larger disease of systemic oppression and conscious inequality.  We use legal advocacy to build the power of communities to challenge and eradicate these systems of inequality.  In this model, rather than saviors or gatekeepers, lawyers are tacticians in the struggle for change.  We call it community lawyering.

Can you break down your model a little more?

Similar to the different schools of thought in organizing (community vs. union, Alinksy vs. ideological), community lawyering has many different strains. What sets community lawyers apart from each other boils down to their answers to the following three questions: Who do you work with? What do you do for them? And how do you work together?  Similar to organizing, the answers to these questions vary depending on the political orientation of the lawyer and the theory of social change they ascribe to.

Our particular brand of community lawyering believes in supporting community organizations and other organized groups of people (i.e. worker/tenant associations, community coalitions, and unions) that shift power through collective action and strategic campaigns. Like many organizers, we believe sustainable change comes through building large-scale, democratic organizations focused on building the power and conscious leadership of poor and working people. By using legal advocacy to support organizing, community education, and leadership development, community lawyering allows lawyers to have a much larger impact that any one lawsuit.

That brings us to the “what.” This is the area of our work that is least regimented. Pretty much anything is fair game. Depending on the campaign goals and our relationship with a particular organizer/organization, we will support a campaign with a variety of tactics including litigation, policy advocacy, research, community education, and infrastructure/institution building. In the past we have: conducted know-your-rights trainings; presented at public forums to advance campaign demands; worked with members to develop their public-speaking and writing skills; litigated individual cases on behalf of workers and residents; litigated actions on behalf of classes of workers, tenant associations or the base-building organizations itself; drafted policies or legislation; researched and provided technical assistance to develop a campaign strategy; and provided transactional and corporate advice to new and existing organizations. Our goal is to increases our clients’ participation and control over complicated and time-consuming legal processes that can otherwise be alienating. But perhaps more important than what we do, is what we aim not to do. We aim to transfer knowledge and skills to organizers and clients so that we are not relied on all the time. Through every case, we hope to be expanding the collective knowledge base within the organization.

For us, the “how” comes down to accountability. We believe that our clients (whether organizational or individual) are partners—not just in name—but in leadership, control and decision-making. The lawyer-client relationship is rife with power dynamics that do not evaporate simply because the long-term goals of the lawyer are aligned with that of the organizer or client. Therefore, we also believe that community lawyers must be engaged in a regular practice of self-scrutiny and self-reflection. If lawyers want to practice law in respectful, responsible and accountable manner, we believe you have to be constantly evaluating your work to determine if it perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and elitism. To that end, we believe that community lawyers should be engaged in a process of political study and growth collectively with organizers.  Poor communities of color face multiple and intersecting injustices and good lawyering requires a deep understanding of race, class, and power.

How are you as lawyers able to encourage collective power building?

The legal system in the Unites States is very individualistic. It tends to atomize disputes, which works against an organizing model. The legal system is designed to address disputes between a single plaintiff and a single defendant. Because of this, many ethical and procedural rules make it incredibly difficult to use litigation to achieve collective goals. For example,  when you settle a lawsuit, attorney-client privilege only applies if you don’t involve a third-party in the discussion–which means organizers cannot be in the room when you discuss settlement with you client. The obvious solution would be to try to represent a group rather than individuals. But sometimes the rigorous procedural rules of litigation force disputes to remain individualized, because for whatever reasons we don’t have standing to represent the worker association nor tenant union as a whole. These rules and many others are serious obstacles to utilizing a collective approach to grievances.

Lawyers that are battling these obstacles have to constantly be thinking of mechanisms to both obtain positive results for their individual clients while furthering the goals of the client’s organization. We struggle with this challenge constantly and work with clients to reinforce their understanding of both their dispute as a collective grievance and the legal strategy as simply a tool in a collective response. Hopefully, the clients themselves will want to share their learning experiences and their increased understanding of the problem by continuing to participate in the organizational campaign.  But poor clients and their families are burdened with enormous pressures so it doesn’t always work that way. However, we are constantly working in an educational way to foster that collective understanding of the problem.

Another common experience is that clients will be offered a settlement agreement that, while of marginal benefit to the collective, offers substantial benefit for the individual. We’ve seen this tactic used time and time again to split off individuals from the collective. Many lawyers handle these situations by simply communicating the offer to the client without any conversation about its benefits/detriments to the collective goals. Though we agree that ethical rules require lawyers to allow the client to make all settlement decisions, the rules do not prohibit honest and frank discussions between lawyers and clients about the individual and collective benefits of any possible settlement. We are not shy about reminding clients about the collective goals they had at the beginning of the case and that the individual settlement being offered to them doesn’t reflect their original goals. In this way, lawyers can work refocus clients back towards their initial collective vision.

What are some lessons you have from being lawyers and engaging in that level of consciousness raising, encouraging people to engage in collective action or understanding? What are the limitations that law puts on you in engaging in this type of work?

One of our major observations is that most people, regardless of their personal history, expect the legal system to deliver justice. Our educational system, T.V., pop culture, all reinforce the idea that ultimately if we have the opportunity to tell our story to a judge, justice would result.  Initially, it is also important to remember that very, very few poor people ever get the opportunity to tell their story to a judge (at least on the civil side.)  The number of poor people actually represented in civil disputes, such as landlord-tenant matters, is infinitesimal.  However, so many people believe that if they could just get that “champion” lawyer, they would be able to obtain justice and fairness.

But the reality is that most of the harms experienced by poor and working people in this country simply are not illegal.  Even if represented by the best lawyer, any poor person who goes into court will be outgunned by overwhelming resources. In addition, they face the systemic biases of both the substantive law and the judicial decision makers whether judge or jury. As such, the law quite literally is designed to protect private property and capital investment and not to render justice.

None of this is to say that we do not believe in challenging and pushing the law to change—reform struggles in the law can be incredibly important in highlighting contradictions and challenging the dominant narrative. We often engage in counter-hegemonic conversations with our organizer counterparts and our clients in order to set reasonable expectations around what type of justice is possible to obtain from the legal system. We consistently have to remind people that the law is a tactical tool, not a solution. We often times have shift perspectives from seeing winning the lawsuit as victory to seeing the lawsuit as simply an opportunity in a larger strategy.

In addition, we constantly remind the client and the group that the court is just another political venue. The truth is, sometimes we have to remind ourselves as well. Experience has taught us that when you pack the courtroom with thirty people, you transform that venue back into a political one where success is influenced by collective power. Judges like any other political entity respond to this. As people associate the political struggle with the legal victory it demystifies the whole process of the lawyer winning a case. You get something that is a response to the collective struggle and presence.

This model sounds  like it is directly in line with this model of organizing that is paired with  political education and leadership development of grassroots communities. What is the response to this coming from other lawyers? Is it growing in popularity?

This style of lawyering has been around. It has been present in different movements and different struggles but it remains fairly uncommon due to the challenges and obstacles to institutionalizing this approach. The first of these challenges is that, amongst lawyers (and the public), there is lack of understanding of what organizing is. A lot of lawyers out there simply don’t understand what organizing is. It is this lack of a common language that often perpetuates the divide and disconnect between organizers and service providers. Part of it is that people are speaking different languages and can’t see how to connect the dots. However, historically (and rightfully so), there has been considerable distrust of “community” lawyers. All organizers can recount examples of where lawyering in support of communities or in the name of communities has been done wrong and has created a lot more harm than good. Lawyers can take up a lot of space. Power can gravitate to lawyers. If both lawyers and organizers are not hyper-vigilant about managing and passing along that power, lawyers can be destructive for community organizations or organizers.

An additional challenge is that, unfortunately, young lawyers are not being taught community lawyering in law schools. If you are a progressive or left lawyer, there are not many places to get training to figure out how to lawyer in support of community organizing. There is a dearth of mentors and elders to train the next generation of community lawyers. Many progressives who decide to attend law school end up being frustrated and choose to never practice law. Like anything else, a community-based practice of law is something that has to be taught. Our project is working to bridge this gap by teaching in clinical programs at local law schools and running a summer institute for law students to train the next generation. Also, though there are a number of lawyers across the country engaged in the practice of community lawyering, the theory on community lawyering is, at best, embryonic. Those of us engaged in the practice have simply not been able to effectively distill and document our experiences in a cohesive and clear theory.

Finally, for those lawyers who believe in this type of work, most are housed in institutions that tie their hands because of limitations from funding sources. The vast majority of lawyers that represent low-income people are housed in legal-services/legal-aid organizations many of which are funded by the Legal Services Corporation Grants from the federal government. These LSC grants put specific limitations on the type of legal work grantees can engage in, the most notable being that LSC-funded lawyers cannot bring class actions and cannot engage in lobbying. These limitations, as they were designed to do, have had a stifling effect on community-based legal work. As a result, part of our work at CJP has been to build new partnerships and identify clear opportunities for community lawyering to occur within existing legal-services institutions. We firmly believe that the individual legal representation that traditional legal-services organizations engage in is still really important work. However, there are no funding restrictions that prevent that same work from being done in partnership with sophisticated community organizations.  If just a small part of that resource could be redirected to lawyering support of organized communities that could have a huge impact.

When you go back and look at the history of the various models we have talked about they were all models that were led by people who had a belief they would work to affect social change. They were based on all sorts of ideas about how social change comes about at different points in our history.  While one could argue their efficacy in the past, there is general agreement that they are no longer effective.  Indeed the past decade has seen a dramatic retrenchment in the ability to bring social change cases into court.  Simply getting past procedural challenges has become an almost impossible barrier.  And substantive challenges then confront an increasingly hostile judiciary and legislature. Lawyers who do this type of work are looking for more alternatives, and looking again at some of the ideas that were considered secondary when the appellate courts were more supportive, where the federal courts were much more open, where you used to be able to go into court and obtain a hearing and have an impact. That is not the case now. Models that take this change into account and internalize it and say that lawyers can still effect change become more attractive. This is a clear opportunity for community lawyering.

Can you tell us about some of your most effective collaborations with community organizations or community organizers?

We have worked on a number of different collaborations with local groups. But when you are in a defensive mode success is relative. But certainly we would say our collaboration with the Miami Workers Center around the Scott Homes Campaign was successful. [Scott Homes was a public housing project in Miami that was demolished using federal funds through the HOPE VI program]. Miami Workers Center and Low-Income Families Fighting Together waged an 8 year campaign to defend former residents’ rights, and build back the projects. We worked with LIFFT and MWC throughout that campaign both as litigators and as advisors. We used the courts to: create a forum, a space, to push out a different perspective on HOPE VI; to bolster the political power of the residents; to slow down the project to some extent; and to provide organizers with knowledge of opportunities to insert themselves in the development process.  We see it as a successful collaboration even though the projects have yet to be built back.

One of the enormous benefits of working with organizers is that they focus on a set of clear and specific demands. Those clear and specific demands in the Scott campaign were one-for-one replacement and the right to return. These demands dramatized and underlined what was wrong with HUD’s existing program and highlighted the need to fix it. That, over time, is what allows for a change in the political climate. It is not individualized responses in different places it is a clear and cohesive response that makes change. That is an organizing approach and not a lawyer approach.

One of the other reasons that this was, and continues to be, a successful collaboration is because we [CJP and MWC] have been able to shift the debate in the policy world.  The demands that came out of this campaign (and others like it) have infiltrated the U.S. Department of HUD. We recently attended a conference where the Secretary of HUD highlighted the right to return and one-for-one replacement as the crown jewel of a new HUD program. Whether HUD will truly honor and enforce these demands is up in the air (and probably unlikely), however, it is undeniable that the Scott fight and other similar fights like it across the country significantly shifted the debate and dialogue at the federal level. Rather than arguing about whether public housing residents should have the right to return when their homes are demolished, the conversation with HUD now is about how to truly ensure that public housing residents have the right to return.

That ability to shift the debate, and shift the conversation around policy really is the opportunity for lawyers and organizers. Whether we win our concrete campaign demands or not, the collaboration between lawyers and organizers creates real opportunities. Lawyers can pull organizers into spaces we have access to where these discussions are happening. Over time, these on-the-ground fights shift the general understanding of what true wealth and strength is in low-income communities, and change common sense to be that there is plenty worth preserving in low-income communities.

One of the challenges with campaigns like Scott and others we have been involved (such as Power U’s Crosswinds campaign) is that victory is the absence of destruction.  Even if we get one–for-one replacement, Scott will still never be back, that community will never be back and what we end up with is the least worst of the alternatives.  Many organizing struggles in recent history have been strictly oppositional struggles focused on stopping the destruction of a community by unrestrained development and capital. One of the real challenges for organizers and lawyers and everybody that are fighting these campaigns is figuring out how to shift from these defensive battles where all we are trying to do is get the least worse result to battles that look at the creation of positive alternatives. This is something we all have a great deal to learn about.

What role can lawyers play in putting forward an alternative progressive vision?

Community organizers looking to build progressive social movements need to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of how the government works. This role is one that lawyers can play since lawyers, unfortunately, are the priests and priestesses of power. Our daily work involves engaging within systems of power. We can thus contribute to social movements a different perspective and analysis from within  “the system.”

Ultimately, it all depends on the relationship between the organizers and the lawyers. As relationships grow and as trust develops lawyers can be very important to have in the room as you are doing campaign planning and campaign development. We can see opportunities; we speak in the language of power. We can identify forums for the political dialogue. There is a real shared dialogue that can happen in a fruitful way.  There are certain things that only lawyers can do. But there is also a whole bunch of thing that lawyers can do in support of communities that communities can do for themselves as well. The way we see our role if we know how to do something we try to pass that on, to allow people to be in more control of information. As individuals deal with different situations they have an expanded vision of how to tackle what is going on in front of them.

In addition, when folks come up with alternative solutions, lawyers can figure out how to craft and implement solutions in a manner that truly changes people’s lives. Is there something unlawful or illegal that’s happening? Is there some way to advocate that the system function differently? Are there rights that are being trampled on? That is the main role lawyers can play. One thing we can do is break down the legal rule in a way that helps groups to facilitate their own power. We can say in particular project that there needs to be a hearing because the law says there needs to be a hearing, and we can help draft the language to the hearing. This has little substantive relevance but it does create a forum for political power and interface with whoever the government power is. We can interpret the rules in a way that allows the expression of the power and the will of the community to better impact the government.

While lawyers certainly are not central to change, lawyers have skills that throughout history have been useful for progressive and revolutionary movements for change. Gandhi and Mandela were both lawyers. And while being a lawyer is not what made each of these individuals most helpful or insightful, their legal training and legal skills were no doubt assets to the movements for a free India and a free South Africa.

Are there any legal openings or shifts in policy that ground organizing groups are not taking advantage of?

We could propose a couple from our experience. Our analysis is that most community organizations have been in a very defensive mode, they have been using all of their resources just to give up as little as possible. That leads to a certain type of organizing which is oppositional.  There is a particular type of lawyering that goes a long with that, which blocks projects that tries to maintain the status quo. That has grown out of the objective reality of the past decade.

We think that the political conditions and the political moment have changed. The economic recession has stemmed the tide of the gentrification and the gobbling up of land, temporarily easing the pressures that were leading to the outright destruction of our communities. In addition, many organizers have played out the limits of that oppositional approach. We have seen the extent of which how much power that position can build. The trick now is to figure out how to take the next step that can affirmatively build power and institutions. We don’t have a lot of examples because our clients have been so deeply involved in the defensive strategy. But people, at very low-levels, have been trying to build affirmative institutions and governing institutions.  People are trying to figure out how to build successes that don’t just maintain the status quo but that quantifiably improve the material conditions. That is a shift in the mode of organizing and lawyering.

We think this is the time for organizers and lawyers to develop solutions. To think deeply about how to design policies and programs that would work differently, to engage the hard practice of figuring what does work. Coming up with solutions is hard work. It requires all of us to engage in levels of conversation that we are not used to. We are used to protesting. We are used to bite-sized slogans and critique. But if we breakthrough our habits and beginning coming up with true alternatives, there are opportunities right now to implement these ideas.  There are opportunities to amass more power and a larger base through providing services and tangibly changing the landscape of communities.

How to get in the game, when you have been shut out of it for so long, is the difficult thing. Therefore, we think it is still critical for organizers to engage in some bread and butter organizing. We still need political power to move ideas and capitalize on the opportunities out there right now. But overall, there is an increasing sense that opposition to gentrifying projects, destructive projects, destruction of communities is not enough in and of itself to build a significant movement. There has to be more than that to excite people, to build the kind of power that people need. Lawyers and organizers need to work together to inspire people to take action from their heart and souls.

The Community Justice Project was founded in 2008 to provide legal support to grassroots organizations in Miami’s low-income communities. Rooted in the law and organizing movement, CJP’s lawyering style has many names—community lawyering, political lawyering, movement lawyering—but fundamentally we believe that lawyers are most effective when they assist those most impacted by marginalization and oppression lead their own fights for justice.

For the last eight years, Purvi Shah has worked for economic and racial justice at various organizing, legal, and policy organizations across the country. Purvi joined the staff at Florida Legal Services in 2006 to provide litigation and policy support to community organizations fighting gentrification in Miami’s urban neighborhoods.  In 2008, she co-founded the Community Justice Project, to develop and advance the theory and practice of community lawyering. Over the last four years, Purvi has litigated numerous cases on behalf of community organizations in the areas of affordable housing, racial justice, community development and tenant’s rights.  Purvi is also a law professor at the University of Miami, School of Law, where she co-directs the Community Lawyering Clinic. She serves as corporate attorney to the Miami Workers Center Board of Directors and a resource ally to the Right to the City Alliance. Purvi received her dual degree in Social Policy and Political Science from Northwestern University in 2002 and a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 2006.

Charles Elsesser has  almost 40 years of experience in lawyering for the poor. Early in his practice in the he represented poor people in California as a part of California Rural Legal Assistance, doing double duty as a Clinical Instructor of Law at University of Southern California Law Center in Los Angeles. Following this early training  he served as the Director of Litigation at Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, was awarded the Award of Merit by the Legal Assistance Association of California, served as Senior Consultant to the California State Senate Rules Committee, and the Director of the Housing Department of the City of Santa Monica, Ca. In 1992 he relocated to Miami, Florida.   Initially he was employed as an attorney at Legal Services of Greater Miami, Inc. and, since 1997, he has worked at Florida Legal Services, Inc. where he has been involved in civil rights and housing litigation and advocacy, and where he co-founded the Community Justice Project along with Purvi Shah and Jose Rodriguez.

Sushma Sheth interviewed  Ng’ethe Maina for Organizing Upgrade in August 2009.

We are living through dramatic times. What do you find to be the significant shifts and how do they change the context of the work we are doing now?

I go back and forth on how significant the shifts are for the movement.  Obviously the economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama are pretty significant shifts.  Those two combined allow for a different conversation of what the conditions are.  However, the response by the administration to the crisis has not been a significant shift. The initial response (i.e. We need to Save the Banks) and the later response focused solely saving the financial industry, instead of taking the opportunity to invest in other kinds of economic recovery.  The response followed pretty mainstream and historical reactions to crisis.

From my perspective, the potential shifts around the economy are giant and have made two things clear to me about the left and progressives: The first is, our generation of movement folks have never experienced anything quite like this and do not know what to do. We have witnessed a huge opening where the mainstream media has been talking about the death of capitalism.  I think it was The Economist that had as one of its covers “Capitalism as a dying animal.”  Even a year and a half later there is still a huge opening and my sense is that this is completely beyond the experience of our generation.  Nothing like this has happened since the 30s, since the Great Depression. And in some way, I feel as though we are a deer in the headlights: either we are stuck and we do not know what to do; or we see the shifts, but we are so mired in our current ways of doing things that our inertia will not allow us to move.

Minimally, there is an opening to do vast quantities of political education with everyone: grassroots leaders, staff, the mainstream public. My feeling is that there’s been nary a peep from the Left in terms of a loud and concerted response to frame the crisis that we are facing.  Nor does it seem that there has even been a determined and systematic effort to do this simply within the community organizing world. There was an opportunity to engage and force a real conversation about what is a just economy.  I think that the opportunity still exists. But the movement proved that in the last thirty to forty years of organizing we have not done enough to be prepared for the moment of crisis.  As a result, the debate is not about the end of capitalism.  Instead, it’s a conversation about “what kind of capitalism do we want to have.”

The second thing is the utter lack of power we have.  It just seems as though the left, the social justice movement and progressives (I am putting a wide range on this) are relatively powerless to do anything.  We see the U.S. government doing things like nationalizing parts of the financial industry. This is something that many of us on the left would say that’s a really good thing. But, it is happening through Democratic bureaucrats, rather than people on the left.  There are some exciting pockets of organizing happening in various places around the country, but they are relatively small and weak given the scale of challenge we face.

What are key interventions that community organizers should be making right now and are there particular contributions that left identified individuals in that process?  Can you comment on the kind of power we have?

In the conversation so far, we have been looking through the lens of power and consciousness. When the opposition is strong, then it is understandable that our power is weak.  But it is inexcusable that consciousness-raising is weak.  There are ALWAYS opportunities for consciousness-raising. Part of the reason why we are not in a position of having the power to seize the moment in front of us is because of a lack of consciousness-raising.  In the community organizing world, political education seems to be narrowly issue-focused, and/or trying to understand the channels of power within government or the private sector in order to leverage the power we have to win victories for very concrete and specific demands. There has been less focus on larger ideological issues and understanding the nature of the economy which really undergirds the society that we have.  This is a big indicator for me of why we are weak and paralyzed now.  There is an opening to debate the nature of the economy and we generally have little to contribute to the larger public discussion, or even to the discussion happening within and between organizations.  Moving towards interventions, my hope is that the lessons of the economic crisis can teach us that we can never slack or stop doing that kind of consciousness raising and political education.

I think it is also a flaw in how community organizing has evolved. Community organizing evolved over the last wave of movement in the 1960s and 70s to a more micro community focus. The model took on issues without putting them in an ideological context. As a result, we did not create room to have a broader conversation about the economy, how the government should work, etc.  And those who were trying to do political education were engaging fairly small numbers of people.  There has been no mass consciousness-raising.

If we want to take the long view, we can say that the crisis and lack of response is an indicator of the failure of community organizing as we know it.  From my perspective, community organizing plays two roles. The first is that it helps lay infrastructure. Real societal change happens through movement, in terms of fundamentally altering power relations, and changing culture and people’s hearts and minds. The role of community organizing is then to help lay infrastructure prior to movement so that it can spark and anchor the movement and help it grow.  The second is then within movements or post movement, the role of community organizing is to take advantage of windows of opportunity that open.  Community organizations represent concentrations of resources, people, staff time, skill and expertise so that when a window opens these organizations can point those resources in a focused way.  They can also point these resources to helping secure and institute the victories during the implementation phase, even after a movement has faded away.  Community organizations can do this when movements open opportunities, or when crises open opportunities. Years from now, we may look back at this moment and say that the community organizations failed at doing what they are designed to do.

So, then what is the role of left identified people?

Simply stated, it is to push things to the Left. To push community organizing to the left: base building, consciousness-raising, but also how we consider campaigns, how we structure them and our demands, how we structure our organizations, the kinds of practices we engage in inside them.

There are roles to be played.  People need to decide on what their role is and then play that role.  The role of left leaning organizers is to figure out how to do organizing and consciousness-raising, and make sure campaigns are connected to a broader ideological debate. We should not be doing campaigns that cannot be connected to a broader ideological conversation. We also have a responsibility to not create 1000 more tiny organizations.  There is probably a more efficient way to have scale, and I think it is the responsibility of people on the left to figure that out and talk about why that needs to happen.

But there is also a role for Left thought. To think that organizers are going to do all things is unfair and not realistic.  There are intellectuals on the Left that should be putting forward ideas:  ideas on the economy, what expanded democracy looks like.  They need to put them forward in a context that is directly related to organizers doing work in the field. There needs to be discussion and debate around those ideas.  Otherwise, ideas are disconnected and being put out by people who are just critics.

When Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Angeles, he received an agenda from the business community. But from our side, we weren’t sure.  There were some ideas like “a home for every homeless person” that were righteous and just, but also unrealistic given the conditions. We need ideas that can lead us towards a policy agenda that is doable and lead us towards somewhere else.

Another thing that left organizers can do is to prepare people for roles outside our organizations, in running the economy and government, which is something we are putting very little attention on.  We do not encourage our organizers to go to policy school. We do not encourage our organizers to go to business school. We do not pay for them to go.

We look at the economy right now and say we want to be engaged with the (Obama) administration. But the reality is that we do not have that many people who can sit across the table with the level of expertise needed to engage in that conversation, and who are connected to the on-the-ground work.  We do not actually have the skills and expertise inside of our organizations or even inside of our movement to be putting forward alternatives. We have been anti-intellectual for so long. We do not support it and we do not encourage it. So much so that when someone wants to go back to school, they get shouted down.

Our movement needs dedicated experts who can focus on policy, research, economics, etc., but we also need organizers who have some of those skills inside our organizations as well.  I can remember a time a few years ago when people would freak out if they could not be an “on-the-ground organizer.” Because it was cool.  People were not interested in trying to develop the multi dimensional pieces that we need in order to actually call ourselves a movement.

It seems like among organizers there is disdain or fear around a breadth of development. Things like being able to do demographic or economic analysis, or policy development. We need to think about a division of labor and the relationship between the different roles: how organizers relate to researchers and policy analysts, etc.  But that should not narrow the set of skills that organizers need to also develop. Otherwise what happens, and I’ve certainly seen this here in New York, is an over reliance on “experts” to move a certain piece of work; and organizers, in the absence of that capacity, end up waiting.  There is a timidity in terms of taking steps to do that work on their own.

We need to build internal expertise so that we can engage with our external allies.  But we have to be careful about believing that we can “do it all”.  While we may hesitate from engaging policy organizations because they may have a more conservative approach, by avoiding a relationship with them, we also get more caught up in our “pie in the sky” notions of what is possible.  At the policy level, I think we lack political savvy. We believe that the bill we write is the bill that should be passed, no compromises. And that isn’t how legislative processes work, especially when we ain’t got no power.

When someone tells us that something is not practical, we say they are “sell outs.”  But we are often unrealistic about the things that we think can happen because we are trying to make it all happen at one time. By not engaging and not having pushback, we end up talking to ourselves, creating echo chambers, and not winning.

I know that it may sound like I am saying contradictory things:  we need to be ideological and boldly visionary, and we need to be practical and not pie-in-the-sky.  But the truth is we need to be both of those things.  We need to be ideological in our political development and in being clear about how today’s work will lead to a transformation of society years from now.  And we need to be open to being practical at certain tactical levels, such as policy work and the building of united fronts.  But such tactical practicality is expressly a function of lack of power.  We aren’t the majority power, and so we need to have tactical flexibility in order to succeed.

What are old strategies that our sector should be turning away from?

Good question. The frame for me is looking at the conditions we are in and how they have changed over the last 40 years. And then taking a look at the organizing models we use and how they haven’t really changed in the last 40 years. In this country, non-profit community organizing is a descendant of the Industrial Areas Foundation (1950s) and ACORN (early 1970s).  The models we use came from a specific era, in response to a specific set of conditions, and the question we need to ask is if those models fit the changing conditions of our present time.  This is not a knock on the hard work that people are doing in organizations now, but I am asserting that we aren’t even asking the question of does the model fit the times. I mostly feel we are blind to this (though there are notable exceptions like the advent of workers centers).

We gave some critique as to why we think organizing models need to change in terms of lack of ideological development. I think another point of change is our time frame and orientation. It is always astonishing to me that people tend to think five or ten years out, but do not have a vision for society in fifty or seventy five years.  If we are serious about making history, we have to look at the long arc of change and recognize that the country has had 300 – 400 years of practice in disenfranchisement, social exclusion, dispossession, economic exploitation. This has laid the foundation and been woven into us in a very deep mass and individual level. In contrast to this reality, on the left we almost have Star Trek-ian ‘transporter’ approach where we work hard, do some left things for a few years, there is a blank spot, and then thirty years from now we will have revolutionary change. I think that shows a deep denial about what it will take to make that change.

For example, we mostly think about structural change in society (civil society, government, how people relate to decision making, the economy, etc.).   We do not think about changes in culture (society and individual level).  Each of us, in our daily actions, replicates and reproduces capitalism. The notion of buying, the notion of money, we are mainly blind to how deeply they are ingrained within us. If we want to fundamentally change society, we have to change culture at the mass level and individual level.

From my perspective, structural and cultural change starts with those who are tasked with pushing change in society: organizers, grassroots leaders, and people on the left. We need to be fighting for and modeling change in culture. This has been mostly absent from left or progressive work in the last thirty to forty years.  Cultural nationalism is an example of some attempts but it’s been absent from schools of organizing, and its got its own set of pros and cons. More recently, we see pre-figurative approaches that try to address this problem.

How do we need to shift our orientation to current conditions, i.e. with relation to the Obama Administration?

We need to let go of the notion that we are only the opposition.  That we are somehow here only to wave banners and noisemakers and not here to figure out how to govern.  This is the character we have created of our organizations and of our movement. I think we talk about structural change and broad social change but we never imagine ourselves running anything or taking over anything. This limits the way we build our organizations and the way we develop leadership.

When there was a push to staff the Obama administration, everyone was complaining about the kinds of people that were getting jobs. When you spend thirty years acting as if you do not care about governance, then you do not prepare yourself to take advantage of opportunities when they come.

There is no question that Obama has limitations in terms of his politics.  But its also true that there were openings for us there.  The truth is our movement is not thinking about governance.  I wonder, when the revolution comes, who will rewrite the constitution? I think Barack Obama is a shock to everyone. And even with his limitations, suddenly we are scrambling. We are scrambling because we were not building real power in our communities, in our states, nor in our national networks. We are scrambling because we didn’t do good mass education. We did not think about how we are partnering in the governance of this nation. We have to decide that this (governance) is a part of who are and what we are going to do. This is it.  We have to decide whether we are in it govern or that we are in it just to complain.

What is inspiring you these days?  What do you find hopeful?

I do not want to sound like someone who does not believe in hope.  But, I feel that hope is not appropriate at this stage.  For me, the term “hope” connotes either that we have the solutions to our long term problems and hope we can win them, or that we have abdicated responsibility for our destiny and hope that an equitable  society just sort of happens to us.  I believe we are in a moment where need a lot of experimentation – we don’t have the solutions yet, but we cannot give up responsibility to try different things to figure it out.  And some of those things, many of them even, will fail, but our responsibility is to keep experimenting diligently, with loyalty only to the vision and to the quality of our work.

We may not have a blank canvas, but we do have a shifting canvas where we can pretty much insert anything we are creative enough to come up with.  I think of many of the conversations that are happening around consolidating small organizations into bigger ones, working together in different kinds of ways, and recognizing our weaknesses — that alone is inspiring in and of itself.  For so long, we pretended as if we were not weak.

I am inspired by the potential for broader conversations about alternative economies and rebuilding movement infrastructure in the black community where it has almost eroded to the point of nonexistence.  How do we have a black president and not have black people engaged?  Those conversations are exciting.

And speaking of… I don’t want to say this in a way that sounds crude, but “white folks need to organize some poor white folks.”  We can be certain in the next two to six years there will be a tremendous backlash in terms of the Obama election. Some people think it will be a worse backlash than Nixon, a worse cultural backlash than Reagan. We can expect that because history tells us to expect it. But not many folks seem to be preparing for that.   There has to be some strategic investment in poor and working class white communities, beyond organized labor that has failed in its job to develop working class white consciousness that is tied to the rest of the social justice movement. We need to think about strategies to mitigate or preempt what could be a huge cultural and economic backlash in the next decade. Burt Lauderdale cannot organize all the poor working class white people in America.  There have to be other institutions and individuals willing to do that work.

We need to experiment to see what will get traction. I think it’s a mistake to think that whatever is working now will work thirty years from now. When we are on the cusp of qualitative change towards justice, equality, and democracy, I do not believe that what we are doing now is the same thing that will push us through that moment.

There is more openness to try new things and to look more long term.   There is more and more discussion on form of organization. What form do we need for the functions that are necessary?  I do not think that these were the conversations ten years ago.  How do we look at the culture of society that is ours? How do we change our root habits? These questions were not asked inside organizing ten years ago at the scale that they are now.  There are also good questions around class and race dynamics inside organizations and evaluating leadership development within the constituencies they are organizing in.

I would not say that these things make me “feel hopeful.”  I would describe the feeling as a confidence in change. Things will always keep moving.  I believe in the nature of reality, or rather the reality of nature.  It is the reality of nature that things will always change.  Things may be tough now, but if we pay attention and do our practice diligently, we might just be ready to make history when the time is right.

Ng’ethe Maina is Executive Director of Social Justice Leadership.  The mission of Social Justice Leadership (SJL) is to help usher in the transformation to a just society by catalyzing a new generation of social justice leaders and organizations with the skills, analysis, and competency to lead a renewed social justice movement.   Ng’ethe was a founding organizer at SCOPE, a grassroots community-based organization in Los Angeles from its inception in early 1993, helping to develop it into a leading voice for poor people in struggles for social and economic justice.  As a Senior Organizer, and eventually as Organizing Director, he helped lead successful economic justice campaigns to win jobs and training for poor people across the Los Angeles region, as well as set policy precedents for the use of public capital; he also helped pioneer cutting edge tools and technologies for social justice organizing.   After more than 10 years at SCOPE, Ng’ethe moved to New York in 2003 to found and launch Social Justice Leadership.  He brings to his position more than a decade of social justice organizing, and several years of transformative organizational change work and coaching.