The community organizing industry

Dislike: In the U.S., as a result of the professionalization of community organizing, a lot of operative decisions are made by the staff of the non-profit community organization. Therefore, a big part of action-related decisions are delivered in the staff meeting, and for the sake of dynamic action or because of the routine, the planning and implementation processes are not inclusive enough towards members. Together with this, it is fair enough that the community organizer does not want to become an external facilitator. But to what extent should they intervene? Can they take up tasks in organizing an action or an event? Or does the independence of the membership overwrite the potential benefit of such a contribution?

Alinsky formulated the vital core of community organizing in his sentence: "Never do for others what they can do for themselves." Instead, you should have ears and the heart to understand where the other person's self-interest lies (what is the goal that is personally important for them and which would make them take action), where this self-interest intersects with the self-interest of the others, and then you can start to agitate. A community organizer is to create a platform so that at least some community members start to develop trust towards one another, and start to believe that taking action is worth it (the community organizer arouses self-interest), and start to involve others and motivate them to make the decision-maker accountable. These initiating members may become community leaders.

The practice of professionalized community organizations seems to contradict to the Alinsky principle: the community organizer delivers a lot of tasks which the membership could deliver if there was a more inclusive strategy. In the professionalized community organizations, naturally, the primary goal is to involve more and more people affected by the issue through participating in negotiations with the decision-makers, giving media interviews, and sitting in thematic committees; and to some extent, members also have a say in the decision-making process through the listening tours and at the annual membership assemblies. However, this does not mean at all that all action-related tasks are carried out by the membership, or there were no strategic decisions made without the approval of the membership on tactics or media communication, on statements or press releases. While based on the Alinsky principle, it may seem that in the ideal world of community organizing, the community organizer is not there to take up part of the action-related tasks, or it may seem as if the community should only set such goals and actions which members can deliver without having the community organizer help them out with some of the tasks.

However, community organizations in fact work along the Alinsky principle because the "Never do what others can do for themselves" does not necessarily mean that community organizers should remain external facilitators, and let community members implement the action by themselves. But it certainly should mean that, through participation, more and more people should have an opportunity to get involved in social action. Apart from this, if the organization has a professionalized, paid staff, and its operation becomes dependent on grants, this always raises the concern that the decision-making and strategic processes become a routine and this routine becomes institutionalized due to the lack of any regular community revision of organizational structure. This is true even if the membership vested the staff with the responsibility to support chapters by taking over operative tasks, knowing that this will weaken any opportunities for direct democracy and consensus-based decision-making.

The dilemma of intervention

Aside from the advantages and disadvantages of the operation of the institutionalized civil society, compliance with the Alinsky principle raises further concerns: in a nutshell, the dilemma of intervention. When group work starts, it becomes one of the first concerns for a community organizer to decide to what extent they should contribute with their own knowledge to the group talk. Where is the border line between adding new viewpoints to the group ethos and between pushing the setting of goals which members do not have enough skills, knowledge or experience to realize, and therefore it would weaken rather than strengthen members? Where is the point at which the unbalanced power relations tilt in favor of the experienced community organizer (of possibly better social status) against committed members who may have less experience in organizing?

Let's take an example. When talking to homeless people about possible solutions for the housing crisis, some of the very first answers coming up are the utilization of vacant flats and property: barracks standing vacant since the transition of the '90s should be renovated, vacant public housing should be used, opportunities should be given for people with housing problems to refurbish the flat in exchange for housing. These answers would undoubtedly result in an immediate remedy in people's lives and for the city, but still raise a lot of concerns: turning barracks into flats would bring about segregated neighborhoods, and would contribute to the expulsion of the poor from the inner city, the majority of the vacant buildings are in bad shape, and people moving into these neighborhoods could in the long run (without other supplementary measures) contribute to the exclusion of the poor. In addition to this, these solutions would not necessarily serve a systemic change even if they could become good pilot projects. Systemic changes are the extended and integrated public housing system, the housing benefit increase. And as temporary solutions, the housing poor and the homeless need more shelters for victims of domestic violence and more temporary family shelters to give the family a chance to stay together, well-operating social services and well-functioning debt management at a district level. Bread and work. And of course, it is also true that by renovating vacant flats, the decision-makers may easily pretend that they took care for the housing of the people.

This situation raises several questions for the community organizer. Let's stick to the group talk example above: to what extent can the community organizer shape the strategic direction set by the group or to what extent can they direct the way of thinking of members towards something totally new? Second of all, to what extent should the organizer take part in the implementation of the action-related tasks for the sake of the victory and group cohesion in case the group does not possess all the knowledge needed for the realization of the action? And, most of all, how can the community organizer balance out power inequalities between them and the group without taking over too much of the leading role and dismantling the status of the community leader, but still finding a way to be able to share their ideas with the group?

Let's start with the first dilemma. During community organizing those people who don't have a say in the decision-making process organize for a more equal redistribution of power and resources by democratic means. The ultimate aim is the long-term and systemic change, whereas the tactic to involve people is to build on the issues they determine for themselves, which can first be smaller, local goals. Community organizing is therefore a joint learning process. The responsibility of the outsider community organizer is to enrich the perspective of the community with new aspects, while he or she expands his or her own perspective through understanding how members of the community define their problems and what they think is possible to shape their own future. Joint learning can help weighing the pros and cons: inviting people affected by the issue (experts by experience) or "anointed" experts, elaborating questions together before the talk, discussing presentations or films in the issue, organizing internal trainings to activate the experience and knowledge of community members. In order to achieve long-term social change and a more equal redistribution of resources and the building of bridges between social classes, it should not be the aim of the community organizer to deactivate his or her own knowledge, and to deprive the community of his or her own ideas and viewpoints instead of enriching group strategy (provided he or she has ideas addressing systemic change on the issue), but he or she must integrate any smaller goals into the strategy which are set by the people affected even if they address particular issues.

The second, very frequent dilemma for a community organizer is to what extent he or she should participate in the operative tasks, in the implementation of the action: what he or she should take over (or whether he or she should take over anything at all) so that the action and the message become stronger (as a result of his or her experience and skills acquired during years of organizing demonstrations and dealing with the media). In the case of his or her active involvement, it is unavoidable that there will be people in the group who cannot properly follow what is going on and the group will not necessarily be able to reproduce the event on their own. The community organizer, however, is in charge of maintaining the energy level of the group: for this, he or she needs to provide an effective and dynamic framework for the group action and for the sake of victory, she needs to contribute to achieve the goals, and to bring tons of inspiration and perspective to the group.

The goal naturally would be that the community organization becomes self-sufficient. Therefore, we need to shape those processes which make it possible that every member can take part with some smaller or bigger tasks in group activities and to make leadership development an organic part of group life (internal training, tasks for new members, etc.). However, the principle that we should never do what others can do for themselves is not equal to facilitating from the background. Due to the myriad of tasks, the challenges of organizing actions, and the disappointment in politics, it would be difficult to maintain the energy level of the group, to strengthen its integrity, to achieve its first victories and a growing membership if the community organizer sticks to the role of an external facilitator and does not take part in the delivery of action-related tasks.

This of course raises important power dilemmas which leads us to our third question: how to deal with power inequalities. The community organizer is usually an outsider, not the member of the community (the group of people affected by the issue), he or she knows and understands the theory and practice of community organizing, and, in case he or she managed to gain the trust of the community, this outsider position can help him or her identify those members who enjoys the trust of the community and are democratic and inclusive. They are potential community leaders who can bring people together, help the community formulate the most immediate issues and mobilize for the sake of social change - with the help of the community organizer. The community organizer enters the life of the community, strengthens group cohesion, helps build the democratic decision-making processes and a democratic communication culture, helps the group find new solutions and brings in new viewpoints. And, because the community organizer is an outsider, he or she is a messenger to the other world, from which members of the community can draw on for new knowledge and values.

After trust has been built between the organizer and the community, however, it can happen that the organizer has a bigger say or represents a greater authority when making decisions than the members or community leaders (e.g., in case of vacant buildings, when saying that the vacant building issue should not explicitly be included in the policy recommendations because it can be misleading and contra-productive in the long run). It would be naive to think that inherent inequalities in the cooperation of an organizer and a community can be solved only by consensus-based decision-making and democratic communication mechanisms. We have to be conscious of these power inequalities originated in our social status, gender, ethnicity, and we have to find out newer and newer mechanisms in order to even these out as much as possible, and transform into something nourishing instead of something oppressive. The task of the community organizer is therefore to activate the knowledge of the community about their society: to formulate questions which bring forward new viewpoints based on the experience of the members and which, therefore, the community organizer does not have access to (e.g., in case of vacant buildings: why is this topic so self-evident when talking about housing problems with people affected by the issue? why don't people come up with the idea of subsidized housing instead? how can this issue inspire people with housing problems to get involved? what policy recommendations can be made? is the renovation of a dilapidated flat with the participation of skilled or unskilled realistic? what help would the new resident need to be able to finance their new housing? etc.)

The "checks and balances" are significant in community organizing, too. A community organizer needs to fulfill a lot of roles in a group which has just been established (he or she needs to take care of group dynamics and communication, creating the group ethos (system of principles and attitudes)), where roles have not yet been solidified, where principles are still not compact, or there may be oppression among members, where the internal communication culture has not yet been established. For me, therefore, it seems more effective and fruitful when two or three community organizers work in one group, supporting and controlling one another, making it more fluid to bring in new energy and new viewpoints, and making the above mentioned power dilemmas more controllable.

The "Never do what others can do for themselves" principle therefore does not necessarily mean that community organizers should facilitate from the background, but it wants to say that everybody should take up tasks and roles according to their skills, including the community organizer after considering the above mentioned dilemmas, so that everybody becomes responsible for victories or failures.

The way how professionalized non-profit community organizations operate justifies this task-sharing direction. In their case, however, it is a disadvantage that the efficiency of how these tasks are shared between chapters and the staff (namely, which set of tasks and responsibilities are delegated to the staff and decided at a staff meeting) is usually not questioned and revised on a regular basis by the community and there is no regular confirmation of the organizational structure by a community decision.

Read it in Hungarian.
An extended version of the article was published in a Hungarian community development periodical, Parola (2012/4).

The best way to learn is while doing something - American pragmatism in practice

Source: equark.sk

Like: The American pragmatist, fundamentally optimistic and supportive attitude. Usually, Americans go beyond the critical assessment of ideas and instead, they urge you to realize your conceptions. In order for this, they focus on why an idea can work when they talk to you. This post may seem to be an intercultural detour but these thoughts still organically belong to community organizing: our ability to achieve social change is determined by the atmosphere of the society where we are active.

I would, of course, carefully make generalizations about the American culture. Although my experiences are based on a relatively broad range of impressions (I visited many states, spent almost a year in the U.S., met a lot of people of different social statuses), I essentially lived in a bubble: I have mostly met socially conscious, progressive-minded people and in fact, I got to know the world of the democratic middle class. And of course, I was a stranger, and people in the U.S. usually like to be nice and understanding towards strangers, and to show their better side. And a stranger also tends to make generalizations based on particular things. And of course, I can't often decide to what extent my cultural impressions reveal more about myself than the American culture, and to what extent these notions are distorted by my personality.

Comments like this, therefore, are necessarily subjective, but together with this, they carry valuable interpretations about how pragmatism and entrepreneurial spirit, both are so much of a characteristic of the American attitude, take shape in practice in the U.S.

During most of my time, I had the impression that Americans are so supportive to new ideas: when  they share a plan with one another, let it be immature or thoroughly thought through, they mostly give supportive feedback to one another: this is great! go ahead! Apart from what they really think about the feasibility of the conception (whether the other possesses the skills, the network, the comrades, the financial background to be able to realize their goals), at this point these are not subject to assessment. What is appreciated is that you decided that you WANT TO DO something. And this determination is always welcome, the enthusiasm should not be smothered. Any social action can become important, because you never know what others may draw inspiration from. Therefore, in their feedback, they concentrate on the positive side: why something can work out well, not only why not.

This does not end up in empty, superficial optimism: it only means that critical remarks come a little bit later. It is in particular true when you do not know each other well: in this case they don't feel that they would be entitled to do anything else but conveying positive energies. They don't show dissatisfaction, instead, they are happy that there is a new person who wants to do something. They will not disappoint you even if what you have done is not super-perfect because it can develop on the way. Critical feedback comes when there is something more concrete to be analyzed. Or after they get to know you better.

On top of this enthusiastic and positive attitude, so much of a characteristic of the Americans, they are so expert in energizing. In demonstrations, trainings, community events, they usually manage to create such a good and energizing atmosphere: I often had the impression that there is a public agreement that they gather together to create an explosion of cheerfulness. They give themselves over to enjoy the moment, and even if they are only viewers, they become active participants of the event. The American audience is very interactive: they reply, shout, cheer, boo. It often happens that the animator loudly asks questions so that the group can give the same or similar answers, e.g., are you feeling good? or why did you come here? The simultaneous loud replies help build group cohesion. At first sight, this is, of course, culturally alien for an introverted Central European, but if you accept that this is the rule of the game, and you give yourself over to it, you can learn a lot. I found it an honest and useful community attitude.

In Hungary, I often feel that people tend to recognize why things don't work - including the intellectual elite. We have a very good sense of critique to recognize why things can fail, which is very useful so that we don't delude ourselves and we see the pitfalls, but at the same time, many people often forget to observe with the same intensity what the chances are to avoid those pitfalls. So, instead of turning their good critical observations into more conscious and more precise action, they get stuck in the negative aspects and they come to the conclusion that it is not worth starting anything. The spirit of doing is often smothered by the sense of critique paired up with skepticism, which otherwise, paired up with some entrepreneurial spirit, optimism, pragmatism and in-the-middle-of-the process analysis, could otherwise be very fruitful.

Read it in Hungarian.

The myth of small and winnable issues

Is this really the appropriate small and winnable social issue?
Source: trogerizmus.blog.hu

Dislike: Some American community organizers promote as a one-size-fits-all recipe that organizers should start organizing apathetic and marginalized groups first around "immediate and winnable" issues.

This organizing tactic, which builds on the Alinsky tradition, but is often presented in a distilled manner, holds out the promise that a quick victory on a small issue (a parking space, a stop sign, garbage delivery or bus service change) can give impetus for the organization and the members to grow, which is essential for a bigger campaign. Without dismissing the merits of this tactic, however, community organizers often forget to consider its pitfalls, which may arise in particular because they set the standards too low by choosing a "small" issue at the very start. To what extent is gradualness the best way to make people believe that they can demand systemic change?

In August, I participated in a one-week training of the Midwest Academy in Chicago. This is one of the most acknowledged training programs in the U.S., where many community organizations enroll their organizers. This definitely became one of the two greatest training experiences of my life: I often felt I was watching an interactive play or I was one of the actors because the way the trainers shared knowledge was so dynamic and entertaining. The training was very comprehensive and very strategic. In connection to the "immediate and winnable" issues, however, we were asked to do an exercise to rebuild a fictional, once well-operating neighborhood organization. Our task was to decide which issues we should pick in the very beginning in order to organize the residents for social action. The target group was middle-class. Residents of this fictional neighborhood showed dissatisfaction around the following issues: 1. a child was hit by a car in the neighborhood, 2. items in a shop were priced lower than what their real price was, therefore inattentive customers might have paid more that they thought they did, 3. there were leaves in sewers, which may cause flooding in basements, 4. a sales tax increase. While I was contemplating choosing between the issues of misled customers and the sales tax increase, to my greatest astonishment, the leaves in the sewer got the most outstanding number of votes. The trainer did not question the arguments in favor of this issue (namely, that it is a small and winnable issue, therefore it can bring quick success to the community and members can gain experience in advocating for their community on easy grounds).

I did not fully understand that if the sales tax increase or the lower priced items were highlighted by the imaginative community, why would it seem a good idea to start from zero? On top of this, why should we take it as readily understood that we can connect the leaves in the sewer to a sales tax increase within foreseeable time (not many years later) so that we can finally talk about tax justice which may lead to systemic change. I see a lot of pitfalls in this: is it certain that it pays to pick an apparently easily winnable issue with such automatism? Can community members lose impetus because we did not try to speak about essentially important issues? Can it happen that we underestimated the community? Is it certain that we found the good leaders that we are not brave enough to shoot for bigger targets? Do we really see the bigger picture? Do we adjust our activities at all to the actual "temperature" of the society or are we captured by some theoretical-methodological institutional frame?

The protest of The Woodlawn Organization in Chicago.
The organizer was Saul Alinsky. Source: newswise

But what does Saul Alinsky precisely say about the "immediate and winnable" issue? Alinsky writes in the Rules for Radicals, "The organizer knows, for example, that his biggest job is to give the people the feeling that they can do something, that while they may accept the idea that organization means power, they have to experience this idea in action." (1989:113) The job of the organizer, Alinsky continues, is to build the confidence of the group so that the group believes that when they managed to win with a limited number of people, they can dream bigger. (1989:114) "You have to very carefully and selectively pick his opponents, knowing full well that certain defeats would be demoralizing and end his career," Alinsky compares the process to the contest of a prize-fighter. (1989:114) He goes on, saying, "Therefore, if your function is to attack apathy and get people to participate it is necessary to attack the prevailing patterns of organized living in the community.. [...] The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization.  [...] An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into which the people can angrily pour their frustrations." (1989:116-117.)

As a result of this, an issue becomes an "appropriate" issue for a new community organization not only because it is easily winnable but because it gives an opportunity for people to articulate their anger. "There can be no such thing as a “non-controversial” issue," Alinsky continues. (1989:117.) (Controversial in the sense that it creates conflict and controversy between decision-makers and citizens by making a step towards the rearrangement of unfair power relations.) According to Alinsky, people take action because they realize that the source of their situation and frustration does not lie in themselves (or not eminently in themselves), but more likely in the accumulated impact of the unjust functioning of the institutions and the bad political decisions. Therefore, the leaves in the sewer can be an appropriate "immediate and winnable" issue when it can stir up and channel such anger and when it becomes an instrument for the community to believe that it is possible and reasonable to fight in cooperation against seemingly unmovable bastions. According to Alinsky, new community organizations grow in this process. (1989:117.)

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, however, question whether building an organization is the best way to enforce systemic change. (1977, in particular, The Welfare Rights Movement - Mobilizing Versus Organizing section) On the one hand, they think that community members can lose their impetus if they focus on building the organization, the process which community organizers hail: it can be contra productive in particular in those moments when people have already broken out of their apathy as a result of current social events. On the other hand, Piven and Cloward think that disruptive tactics also much better serve social change and the rearrangement of power relations: as a result, they urge to mobilize people for confrontational actions (understood within the democratic framework) or for civil disobedience instead of building organizations which entails unavoidable limitations. In their view, a national network of cadres connected to several loosely coordinated groups contribute to the aim of social change better than a national cooperation of community organizations. They thought that the period of the welfare crisis in the second half of the 1960s in the U.S. favored this tactic. (Piven and Cloward finally realized a combination of the two tactics in cooperation with community organizers - with the National Welfare Rights Organization - in the Welfare Rights Movement.) Without listing the pitfalls of this theory at this moment, the Piven-Cloward idea has something to say to the myth of the "immediate and winnable" issues: it balances this tactic by implying that a community organizer first and foremost needs to measure the "temperature" of the society so that it can the most extensively build upon the current social events.

Garbage piles in Naples during the garbage crisis (2011).
Source: time

Is it really an effective strategy when a new organization sticks to "small and winnable issues", fighting for a parking space, stop signs or garbage delivery? In the last decade of community organizing, has the gap between small and winnable issues and big and significant social issues, in fact, been bridgeable? Does this really lead us to long-term social change,? asks Gary Delgado (American researcher, lecturer, activist, one of the founding members and organizers of ACORN) in his article from 1998 The Last Stop Sign.

Right-wing grassroots efforts, which would close abortion clinics, would put gays and lesbians back into the closet, he says, have never organized for stop signs. These groups, he adds, supposedly know that "good organizing issues are deeply felt, controversial." Delgado does not want to deny traditional methods of community organizing: empowering grassroots community leaders, organizing a wide democratic base, or community learning through which marginalized people could prove that they can articulate their issues and they do not need anointed experts. He does not intend to dismiss real victories either: the improvement of public housing, school reform, tax reform. But he also says that community organizing often has "misconceived notions of "wins"" and "is almost completely separate from the parallel world of progressive activism" which, he thinks, achieved significant results (women's movement, gay and lesbian movement, immigrant movement, etc.).

The essence and merit of community organizing is the building of a community infrastructure, which can lay the foundations of a new movement, or can enhance an existing one (see the activities of National People's Action related to the Occupy Movement here or here). Naturally, the progressive activist movements, which Delgado and perhaps Piven and Cloward were hailing, could not have evolved in their full potential without an existing community infrastructure, through which participants could mobilize one another. And therefore, it is essential that neighborhood groups fight for less spectacular, smaller issues, so that group identity can shape and citizen participation can become a familiar phenomenon. Accepting all this, it is important what Delgado in 1998 said that "if traditional CO [community organizing] is to become a force for change in the millennium and beyond, it must proactively address issues of race, class, gender, corporate concentration, and the complexities of a transnational economy."

In the U.S., where community organizing is embedded into a strong movement tradition and is closely connected to organizing for putting pressure on the legislature (by promoting bills and using the voting power in the power spectrum of politics), it should of course be self-evident for many that small issues are only a tool for organizing for long-term goals and to build the community infrastructure. Therefore, it is important that when we talk about the Alinsky-tradition in a new context, e.g., in Europe, (so outside its progressive historic context, in an unavoidably distilled manner,) it is important that these tactics gain ground in a way that they have resonance to the current progressive social events of the actual country and to avoid that it is simply interpreted as a methodology, deprived of its original context and set of values.

Read it in Hungarian.

Literature: Saul D. Alinsky: Rules for Radicals. A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, Vintage Books, New York, 1989. Frances Fox Piven és Richard A. Cloward: Poor People's Movements. Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Pantheon Books, New York, 1977. Gary Delgado (1998): The Last Stop Sign, available online: http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/102/stopsign.html

Even though I don't want to establish a party, can I call you a voter?

My professional development training is coming to an end soon. There were a lot of things which captured me, and there were things which I would do differently. By the end of the summer, I had collected a lot of best practices in this blog, without making a particular effort to provide a critical context. So I would like to start some more reflection. In the next few weeks, I will be publishing a series about five things that I like in community organizing in the U.S. And five things I would do differently.

Source: USNews

Like: The citizen is considered a voting citizen - not only by political parties but also by community organizations.
One person, one vote, says the American. And that's how community organizations count as well. Not because they would want to recruit voters to a political party, but because they know that a forgotten issue will only be important for a decision-maker if they can make political capital out of it. Therefore, the "buying power of the vote" becomes important not only in political but also in civil campaigns. Before a campaign, community organizations make a political analysis: they research the makeup and size of the voting base of the decision-maker, or of their opposition, they check how big the number of undecided voters is and they build a coalition on the basis of this if necessary.

Having observed this, I have the feeling that in Hungary, and maybe in other Eastern European new democracies, we do not utilize this tactic enough. Many civil society organizations simply do not use it because they don't think they should act political in their role (i.e., making a political statement in social issues). Instead, the groups provide services or do soft advocacy, and they try to influence decision-makers behind the scene.

But even those civil society organizations which take a confrontational stance against people in power do not use this tool effectively. On the other hand, in the U.S., I have seen examples of letter-writing and phone-banking actions when citizens simply declared to the decision-maker: I voted for you, or I am an undecided voter, but I can't agree with this statement of yours; or they demonstrate power in a rally by emphasizing how many people they represent in their organization and who their stakeholders are.

The right to vote is a tool and power in the hands of the citizens. It can happen that a marginalized group in itself is big enough to demonstrate power, and it can also happen that it needs to build a coalition with groups which represent power in the eyes of the decision-makers.

In addition, before the elections, most community organizations run campaigns to register historically underrepresented groups and urge them to vote. (In the U.S. - as opposed to Hungary - there is no comprehensive voter database, so that's why voter registration is necessary here.) My host organization, Virginia Organizing, for example, reached out to tens of thousands of people by doing phone-banking in the months preceding the election. (You can read more on voter registration campaigns, and the overlaps between the agenda of the Democratic Party and that of community organizing here.)

Demonstration against harsh voter ID provisions. Source: TPM

Thinking over to what extent we as civil society workers can act as political beings (or to what extent we need to become one) has become relevant in Hungary because of the recent curbing of voting rights. Distancing from parties is naturally fundamental: holding accountable any political party on power, without expediency, always with the same vehemence. Co-option is a threat: we want to criticize the legislature from the outside, without having strong leaders becoming part of the establishment.

But we want to be involved in decision-making. That's why we act political but we do not do party politics (when we put pressure on the decision-makers on social issues). Beyond this, however, do we consider ourselves voters in a campaign? Do we build on this tactic at all knowing that reluctant politicians will yield to us only when they feel threatened, when they are afraid of their voting base shrinking (or that the opportunists stand by us in the hope of acquiring new supporters)? Do we make different groups of stakeholders visible in a bigger demonstration? Do we think about asking coalition partners to emphasize how many people and how different principles they represent when we manage to build bridges between very different stakeholders? As civil society workers, can we encourage the historically underrepresented groups to live with their most basic political right? Could we organize trainings, talks, community events on the voting topic?

The stance Ágnes Vadai (Democratic Coalition, Hungary) took in a recent television debate was an eloquent example of the fact that several politicians would like to monopolize voters for party politics in Hungary when she asked her talking partner, Péter Juhász, why he talked about voting citizens and socio-political goals if he does not want to establish a party. Irrespective of whether Milla establishes a party or not, is that really the proper social setting when only parties can count with citizens as voters? Should the civil groups only distribute food, make some attempts with their petitions, and occasionally jump in front of a ministry, and they can be considered voters only when a political party addresses them?

Read it in Hungarian.

Who gains admission and who counts white? - Immigrants organize now and then (Part 2)

Source: minnesota.publicradio.org

As second-generation immigrants, the DREAMers had a family and financial background that enabled them to complete a high school or even a community college. They are the "cream" of the undocumented immigrants. Obviously, there are huge class differences among undocumented immigrants. Those immigrants who enter the country with a tourist or work visa, then overstay after the time of admission has expired, are often in better financial shape and better educated. Those, who by risking their lives, cross the border illegally, will try to get a job wherever it is possible without a work permit, for example, in the construction industry, in the service industry (in restaurants) or in agriculture. They may do manual labor or work for an acquaintance or for a family member, so for those who already got themselves on firm ground, and with the help of others, it is easier to remain invisible to the authorities. If their employee does not pay their wage, or deducts undeclared expenses from their wage, or binds them with debts or commits sexual assault against them, they may risk their stay if they file a complaint. The employees who abuse their workers benefit from the large flow of undocumented immigrant workers, who can replace those who complain, organize or unionize. (Read Part 1 here.)


Working-class undocumented immigrants organize: César Chávez and the non-violent movement of farmworkers and their unions

Huelga - Strike. Source: Tavaana

In 2009, approximately 2.5 to 3 million people worked in the American agriculture, and 72 percent of them were immigrants, with the majority being Mexican (IPC, NCFH). Their links to the U.S. are strong, some of them were born here. Their status can be manyfold. More than one million of them work undocumented (IPC). As a result of the strong agrilobby, federal laws that govern wages, overtime and benefits do not apply to farmworkers and they may be protected by state law (PCUN). Ultimately, the employer treats the illegal workers as they like. The U.S., in addition, allows 30 thousand people (3-5 percent of the agricultural workers) to legally work as a guest worker for less than a year in American agriculture. The growers, referring to the lack of a local workforce, can initiate their participation in the guest worker employment program after they cannot fill the jobs despite thorough job announcements. The H-2A visa, which provides legal status for these workers, theoretically provide some protection. For example, it determines that wages cannot be lower than the minimum wage, and it sets housing standards to some extent. However, because the workers are not in the position to change a workplace in case the employer does not meet legal obligations, and because by submitting a complaint they would risk their stay, or their possible renewal of employment in the next season, and because the state supervision of the implementation of this law is not comprehensive, abuse is not unusual. Many workers, in addition, arrive deeply in debt because they covered the transportation cost or paid recruiters for the opportunity to work. Transportation costs must be reimbursed by the employer for the worker if they completed at least half of the work contract period. As a result of the lack of proper protection, the workers are forced to stay despite unsatisfactory circumstances. It also happens that the employer avoids paying transportation costs back to the home country of the worker after their contract ends. On the other hand, those farmworkers who live in the country legally or without proper documents, or who may be citizens, are indirect subjects to the exploitative system: the employers, for the sake of greater profits, decide to employ those who they need to pay less (because, for example, they don't need to pay Social Security on the wages of the guestworker) (Working Immigrants).

In 1962, César Chávez started to organize among farmworkers. His parents immigrated from Mexico to Arizona, and he was born in 1927 in the U.S. His family lost their farm during the economic depression of the 1930s when he was a child and the impoverished family moved to California where they started to work as farmworkers. The situation of the Spanish-speaking population was in many aspects similar to the African-Americans living in the southern states. The education was segregated in many schools, it was forbidden to speak in Spanish, and the society fundamentally disdained people with Mexican origin. There were restaurants where only whites were served. Chávez worked as a farmworker, followed by two years in the military, then in 1952, he started to work for Fred Ross, a community organizer affiliated with Saul Alinsky, where he became the director of the organization in 1958. The Community Service Organization, however, did not commit itself to organize farmworkers, so Chávez quit his job in 1962 and started to organize with his allies.

Get out the vote campaign. Source: UFW

In 1960, in California a group of large-scale farmers emerged who carried out specialty crop and industrialized agricultural production. This system needed a lot of investment from different parties, especially because of the high number of dry regions, so stakeholders from banks, agricultural machinery and irrigation system production to the packing and transportation industry and wholesalers and retailers all had an interest in the maintenance of this agribusiness. As a result, the farmworkers, who were practically at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, had to represent power not only against the growers, but a well-extended and influential network of business stakeholders, who successfully drowned all their organizing initiatives in the last few decades. (2003: Dalton)

Chávez aimed for unionizing a huge number of workers so that they can collectively bargain with the growers and the employees hire the workers through the union. His movement protected the interests of the settled-down farmworkers, often against the miserable guestworkers brought from Mexico for seasonal work under the so-called Bracero program. Under this federal program, which ran between 1942-64, the avoidance of paying the minimum wage to guestworkers was not too difficult, therefore the growers could torpedo the organizing efforts of settled-down farmworkers through their easy access to the cheap labor of several thousands of guestworkers who were admitted to the country in the 1950-60s.

The overall strategy of Chávez used was that he first built a mass base of workers, who could then put substantial pressure on decision-makers. In 1962, he founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) with Dolores Huerta, where he offered modest benefits and support to members through a membership fee. However, the three-year long relationship building and recruitment went slowly, because NFWA hadn't had any victories which would have made the organization reliable to potential members. Finally, a 1965 strike gave impetus and helped the organization grow. A mainly Filipino workers' organization (AWOC) started a strike against grape growers in the Delano region in California and invited NFWA to join. As a result of the call and the three years of recruitment and relationship building, 1,200 families joined. A five-year strike started and the two organizations united to establish the United Farm Workers (UFW). In 1970, the grape growers in the Delano region, due to local, national and international pressure, signed a three-year contract with UFW, which brought enormous success to the movement. In 1968, U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy also joined one of their actions.

A crop duster is spraying pesticides,
while farm workers are working
in the field in 1969. Source: UFW

After this, the UFW started a new boycott against lettuce growers, while, after the expiration of the three-year contract, the Delano growers signed a new contract with another union making lesser demands. As a result of this, new strikes erupted in 1973, which were put down by the law enforcement by violent means. The UFW responded with another grape boycott and 17 million Americans boycotted Delano grapes. The UFW managed to cause huge profit losses to the grape business stakeholders from production to sales, which led to the enactment of a new law by the governor of California in 1975, which secured the right of farmworkers to unionize. Due to the pressure from the supermarkets, the growers did not oppose. The membership of the UFW had grown beyond 40,000 by the 1980s.

The growers, as a response, supported the campaign of an anti-union candidate in the 1982 governor's race in California, who won the election and repealed the union law. The UFW then started another boycott and launched a campaign against pesticides, which caused serious health problems to workers and their kids. In 1992, UFW activists managed to get the wage of grapepickers increased.

Chávez passed away in 1993. One of the campaigns of the UFW now is the enactment of the so-called AgJOBS Act, which would legalize the status of undocumented immigrants and open the path for them to permanent residency.


Viva La Causa: organizing principles of César Chávez

Activists demand wage increase
for tomato pickers in front of a
Taco Bell fast food restaurant.
Source: elenemigocomun.net

By the 1960s, the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement had been emerging. The Chicano Movement, which aimed for the elimination of discrimination against Mexican Americans, segregation at schools, economic exploitation, disdain of their culture and the need for meaningful political participation was strengthened by Chávez and his allies. The work of Chávez was based on the principles of non-violence, showed a strong religious pattern, and aimed for wide social cooperation. He thought the UFW would become strong against the agribusiness stakeholders if the members of the movement did not allow themselves to be pitted against one another along ethnicity and gender, and were able to build a wide support base.

Therefore, with women and Latino farmworkers, the movement had a lot of followers among students, the white middle-class, and the Latino working class. Chávez said, "If we nothing but farmworkers, we'd only have about 30 per cent of all the ideas that we have. There would be no cross-fertilization, no growing. It's beautiful to work with other groups, other ideas, and other customs." (2003: Dalton) This approach helped the movement gain national and international support in the frequently used boycott tactics.

Chávez went on hunger strikes and fasted several times throughout this lifetime. Masses and religious events closing the fasts meant a bonding among the members of the, ultimately, religious Mexican American movement. The first fasting took place in 1968 for the "purification of the union", when during the first five-year strike members started to lose faith in the non-violent tactics and started to become violent. The fasting was also a signal for the Catholic bishops, who were reluctant to stand by the poor and instead kept on acting as mediators between the workers and the growers. At the end of the 25-day fasting, Chávez organized a public mass, which was attended by more than 8,000 supporters, for example, by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, with whom he shared the communion. He went on a hunger strike against the Arizona law which banned strikes, and during the campaign against pesticides. The Catholicism of Chavez was rooted in liberation theology.

The UFW inspired and showed a perspective to several farmworker unions and organizations, for example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who conducted a successful boycott against Taco Bell (fast food restaurant) between 2002-2005 for wage increases for tomato pickers in Florida; or the PCUN Oregon's Farmworker Union, which built its membership base through providing legal services and then transformed into a union. Many of PCUN's founding members graduated from the Colegio César Chávez, a popular school, named after Chávez and founded to provide education to Mexican Americans. Chávez had primary education and throughout his life, he was a self-learner. Barack Obama dedicated a monument to Chávez this October in San Francisco.

The American middle class organizes: the Sanctuary Movement in support of undocumented immigrants

Forrás: share-elsalvador.org

But how can you avoid being caught in the web of ICE if you are undocumented? You try to remain invisible. You don't go to a doctor if you are sick, you don't enroll into a school in case you are particularly vulnerable, you try to be inconspicuous, especially to the authorities. If there is a chance, you try to get at least temporary permits. And you try to find those who will employ you without a permit. In case of better-off immigrants, this may be a family enterprise, in case of the more vulnerable, this may be employers who hire undocumented people to make some extra profit. Forced labor, being bound by debt or wage theft or being a victim of sex slavery may also hide the oppressed from the authorities. Civil society organizations which advocate on behalf of or with the immigrants without endangering their stay in the country play a very important role. And the support of the society is also needed, whose members can provide help in everyday life, and give support in case of emergency to make the circumstances of immigrants livable. Initiatives (such as the Rural Organizing Project in Oregon), which aim for establishing welcoming communities, are therefore of great importance.

A good example for the outstanding support of the middle class is the Sanctuary Movement, which was a critical response of a part of the American society to the U.S. foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s. In the 1980s, due to the massacres and civil war in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and in El Salvador almost one million people sought refuge in the U.S.

Despite the fact that the actual U.S. administration aided those leaders who supported the neoliberal economic policy and the access of the American capital to these countries and who are liable for the death of the hundreds of thousands of people, the Reagan administration substantially restricted the asylum seekers in gaining refugee status. Gradually, a segment of the society became more and more aware of the consequences of the American foreign policy, and some of them started to take responsibility.

The religious Sanctuary Movement started to emerge in 1980. Several denominations took account of their faith and principles and first started to provide legal and financial aid to Central American asylum seekers who managed to cross the border. Then in 1982, John Fife, a Presbyterian minister in Arizona, declared that the church of his congregation is a sanctuary, justified by Biblical traditions. The posted banners said: "This is a Sanctuary for the Oppressed of Central America. Immigration: do not profane the Sanctuary of God." (wikipedia) Inspired by this, by 1985, congregations, non-religious organizations, families with almost 500 member-sites joined the movement. Besides the Bible, the movement was inspired by the Underground Railroad, which was a network of safe houses from the southern states of the U.S. to Canada, where fleeing slaves found safe haven in the 19th century. The network was built by the activists of the Abolitionist Movement.

The immigration office cracked down on the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s. Several leaders were sued, and some of them were indicted on smuggling charges. The movement gained public support, and the trials incited public outrage and demonstrations. Social pressure contributed to the fact that the federal government provided temporary protected status to Central American asylum seekers in the Immigration Act of 1990. (wikipedia)

It is the business of all of us

In Portland, Sarah, a member of the Oregon New Sanctuary Movement, Sarah allowed me to stay with her. Sarah worked at a local organization in Santa Marta, El Salvador in the early 2000s, where she became politicized. She works with several organizations in Oregon, and she builds the local group of the Oregon New Sanctuary Movement and the welcoming community in Portland as an activist. She often travels back to visit friends in El Salvador, to gain energy and courage, but she knows that her job is in the U.S.; this is the country where she can do the most to support social movements and immigrant justice.

In El Salvador, she said, people seem more politicized or politically aware, and that political discourse is more common among a wide range of people. In the community where she lived in particular – largely because of its long and rich history of struggle during the 1979-1992 Civil War, but also out of necessity – organizing for basic rights and self-determination is much more integrated into communal life.

The political action, community organizing and organizing for social change start in our everyday life.

Read Part 1 here.

Further literature: Frederick John Dalton: The Moral Vision of César Chávez. Maryknoll, New York, 2003. Lynn Stephen: The Story of PCUN and the Farmworker Movement in Oregon. University of Oregon. Eugene, 2012. Ganz Marshall: Why David Sometimes Wins. In: David M. Messick and Roderick M. Kramer: The Psychology of Leadership. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005, pp. 209-238.
Documentary film: Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement - Part 2: The Struggle in the Fields. PBS Documentary, 1996.

Read it in Hungarian.

Who gains admission and who counts white? - Immigrants organize now and then (Part 1)

Strike! Source: UFW.

Back in August in Portland I committed a minor traffic infraction and unlucky me, there was a police officer on the spot who stopped me. I didn't have an international driver's license, he did not accept my Hungarian license, and he fined me. So I went to the local DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) in order to settle my status, and I did not have my immigration card on me, which would have verified that I was legally in the country. A few months earlier I had applied for the extension of my visa and carelessly, I did not attach the new card into my passport. Even though I was flaunting the printed email which proved the visa renewal process, in their eyes I could have been an undocumented immigrant.

In the U.S. it is not unusual that people in similar situations end up in detention facilities. In line with the continuously harshening immigration laws, in 2008, Secure Communities, a very controversial immigration program, started and this made the procedure with undocumented immigrants more severe. This whole issue made me think about whether any police officer would have let me go without checking my passport and my immigrant status if I had not been a white person with good English and a pretty decent appearance. This post is about immigrants and immigrant community organizers who put their body on the line risking even deportation to secure their rights.

Who gains admission and who counts white?

In 2010, 40.2 million immigrants lived in the U.S. (Pew), more than half of whom being Mexican. Significant numbers of people arrive also from China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam and South Korea, and from Central America (El Salvador, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala) (CIS).

11.2 million of them are estimated to be undocumented immigrants (2011: Pew), more than half of whom being Mexican (2011: Pew). Approximately 1 million of them arrive as a child with their parents (2011: Pew). Out of these 11.2 million people, 6-7 million cross the border illegally, through human smuggling (2006: Pew), another 4-6 million overstay their visa after the time of admission has expired (2011: CIS), and approximately 250-500,000 people enter using their Border Crossing Card which authorizes visits to the border areas for a set amount of time (2006: Pew).

In the last decade the number of deportations doubled, and the majority of the deported were Mexicans, 70 percent in 2009 (2011: Pew). In 2010, 400,000 people were deported (2011: CIS).

A Filipino on strike in 1966.
Source: Reuther

In the history of the U.S., where everybody is an immigrant (which is essentially true for Europe, too...), the state became concerned with determining eligibility for citizenship after it had broken free from the British hegemony. From 1790 until a little after the end of the American Civil War (1868), citizenship was designated to "free white persons" of "good moral character". "Whiteness" however, has always been a political category: in the beginning of the 20th century, for example, neither the Irish nor the Jews nor the Slavs were considered to be white.

The Fourteenth Amendment eventually proclaimed in 1868 that regardless of the race of the parents, their citizenship and place of birth, those who were born in the United States are entitled to become citizens, and this right was extended in 1870 to African-Americans who had formerly been slaves. This right to citizenship was, however, denied to Native Americans, some of whom first became citizens in 1890, until finally this right was extended to all Native Americans in 1924. Moreover, Chinese immigrants, who started to migrate to the U.S. at the second half of the 19th century, were excluded from the right to become citizens in 1882 (Chinese Exclusion Act). Racial discrimination in gaining citizenship was eventually abolished with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

There were practically no legal restrictions on immigration to the U.S. until 1875. People from different nations arrived in different periods with significantly different social and financial background (primarily, the Spanish, the English, the French, the Germans, the Dutch, people from other countries from Northwestern Europe, and the African slaves, then Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europeans, Italians, Greeks, Russians, and Asians, Latin-Americans, Africans). The connections between these nations and their prevailing power relations over the course of history made an impact on the American immigration legislation.

The first two immigration laws were the Page Act of 1875 followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted and banned the immigration of Chinese workers based on ethnicity. The ban was abolished only in 1943. The Immigration Act of 1924 essentially restricted the entry of Central and Eastern Europeans by limiting the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2 percent of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States (Canadians, Latin Americans and Caribbeans were exempt from the quota system). The national-origin quota was repealed in 1965, and the new law focused on skills and family connections in the U.S. This was a significant paradigm change compared to the overtly or covertly racist immigration legislation.

A new significant milestone in the changing attitude and policy of the government towards immigrants was the Illegal Immigration Act of 1996, which imposed stricter sanctions against immigrants unlawfully present in the country and extended the possibility of deportations. So far this law provides the basis for the current U.S. immigration policy.

Under procedure in a detention facility.
Source: findingdulcinea.com

At the same time, the U.S. granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants several times. In 1940, for example, during WWII for security reasons in order to control and oppress any activities aiming against the state or the prevailing state ideology, the status of several million people, mostly of European origin were legalized (Alien Registry Act of 1940). In 1986, the Reagan administration legalized the status of approximately 3 million people, mostly Latin-American and Asian immigrant farmworkers, and those who settled down in the U.S. before 1982. And now, the most recent beam of hope for young immigrants is the DREAM Act, which would open the avenue to gain citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are under the age of 30, graduated from high school and obtain a college degree or complete two years of military service within six years.

Who does NOT get caught in the control mechanism of the immigration office?

These measures were accompanied by a more severe border protection and immigration control mechanism, which were in line with national security measures after 2001. In 2005, for example, the federal government determined the process (Real ID Act) of how local DMVs issue a driver's license and other personal identification documents (until then the system was not centralized). As a result, every DMV in each state of the whole country needs to request the immigration documents in case of a non-American citizen (that's the reason why I was asked for my immigration card which I did not have on me), and are obliged to store and to some extent share the data of the clients with other authorities.

Source: cnn.com

The other recent measure in 2008 was the already mentioned Secure Communities program, which determines that data and fingerprints of arrestees are submitted not only to the FBI but also to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The automated system indicates to ICE when the detainee is an immigrant, where officers evaluate the case and can request further detention in case they want to start a procedure against the detainee. The officially declared aim of the program is to identify those detainees who are eligible for deportation according to current immigration laws, that is, those who were convicted of a crime, and to assess these cases based on the level of crime, and at the same time only to deport those who committed serious crimes such as homicide, robbery, kidnapping, major drug offenses, or those who impose a threat to national security. But despite Secure Communities’ stated priorities, many of the undocumented immigrants detained and deported via the program have never been convicted of any crime. The possibility of racial discrimination and an avenue to anti-immigrant sentiments are inherently encoded into the implementation of such a program, as it gives opportunity for law enforcement officers to pick and check "immigrant-like" people (Latin Americans, Asians).

While according to the statistics, in 2011, 26 percent of the deported people committed the above listed serious crimes, another 29 percent were deported for misdemeanors and lesser crimes, and another 26 percent were deported for not having committed any crime, but who were undocumented (IPC), and who were, for instance, arrested because of driving without a license, burned-out tail lights or speeding. Take the case of Emiliano Rojas, who was immediately asked for his immigration papers by the police officer in 2010 when he committed a minor traffic infraction. He did not have proper documents, so the police officer did not let him go away, saying that the car Emiliano had been driving was in the name of his father. When his father, Claudio, who was also undocumented, arrived to help his son out, both of them were arrested and detained.

This made me think that if any police officer had wanted to see my passport and had realized that I cannot prove my legal status on the spot, would have I gotten arrested? In that case, would he or she have found it suspicious that the car I was driving was not mine? Naturally, I would have been cleared within foreseeable time that I am legally in the country, and obviously nobody would have wanted to deport me, but the fair treatment, which everybody would deserve, saved me from getting in closer acquaintance with the American detention facilities. Not like the Rojas family, where the boy was let go after three months of detention, but the father was ordered to leave the country. Neither of them had any criminal record. Despite the sentence, Claudio, however, had decided to stay in the country with his family, until the ICE caught him two years later and imprisoned him again and ordered the deportation. The case became famous because Claudio started a hunger strike this August and the DREAM activists protested for him.

Lower-middle class undocumented immigrants organize: the DREAM activists

Source: cleveland.com

The DREAMers got their name after the bill known as the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, Education for Alien Minors). These young people have been living in the U.S. undocumented for many years, they once left the country of their birth with their immigrant parents. They grew up without proper documents, with the support of their family, they attended high school, they are firmly rooted in the U.S.

Currently, approximately one million children live undocumented in the U.S. The DREAM Act offers permanent residency to young people under the age of 30, which would later open a path for them to apply for citizenship. Those are eligible for the benefits who came before the age of 16 and have been living here for more than five consecutive years, and who within six years get a college degree, or complete at least two years at a college or complete a two-year military service.

The DREAMers, who started the movement in 2007, protested for Claudio Rojas because they knew that there are other people like him unjustly detained despite the fact that the ICE announced in June 2011 (Morton Memo, prosecutorial discretion) that "low-priority" undocumented immigrants who impose no threat to national security should be protected from detention or deportation. ICE requested to review their cases, and declared that they will not use their resources any further to deport these immigrants. In order to prove that ICE was not fulfilling its promise, and to collect evidence that that there are immigrants kept in detention facilities who would be eligible for the DREAM Act, the young immigrants launched an action: by pretending to be uninformed undocumented immigrants, they got themselves arrested in order to infiltrate the immigrant detention facilities and collect evidence about how many people are unjustly detained. Their action gained huge media coverage.

They demanded the release of Claudio Rojas and other immigrants in situations similar to his and requested that the deportation procedures of these immigrants be stopped. They sent video messages about themselves and their own stories, and about how the DREAM Act would change their lives. They published their personal stories on their website. The bill was introduced in 2001 and is awaiting the decision of Congress. The presidency of Barack Obama has not brought the expected breakthrough. Therefore, the DREAMers, exploiting media attention around the presidential election, organized sit-ins in many states, and demanded that President Obama should use his executive authority to cease the deportations of DREAM Act eligible youth, then protested at the National Democratic Convention. This August, as a reply to the organizing of the activists and under the pressure of the presidential election campaign, Obama introduced a "deferred action" (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) for DREAM Act eligible youth. The measure ceases deportation for two years for those, who are under the age of 31, came to the country before the age of 16, have been living here for at least five consecutive years, are in school, already graduated from high school or completed a two-year military service, and have no criminal records. They can apply for a work permit, but this is not a path to receive citizenship. These are the latest developments of the issue and the results of the presidential election will probably bring substantial changes.

Part 2 (next week)
Working-class undocumented immigrants organize: César Chávez and the non-violent movement of farmworkers and their unions

The American middle class organizes: the Sanctuary Movement in support of undocumented immigrants

Further literature: Walter A. Ewing: Opportunity and Exclusion: A Brief History of U.S. Immigration Policy. Immigration Policy Center, 2012.

Read it in Hungarian.

The last stop sign - Some comments about the Handbook on Citizen Participation

Roma people and their allies protest against
the Hungarian far-right party, Jobbik
in October 17, 2012. Source: BT

Why is it useful to talk about community organizing in Hungary in a social moment when there is an expanding, wide-based civil cooperation emerging? Why are we talking about community organizing as a novelty when there have been many dynamic organizing projects in Budapest and in the country? What is this if not community organizing?

Community organizing should not be confused with community development, even though there are overlaps in their roots and tools.(1) Coalition building, campaign coordination or activist coordination are organizing but not community organizing, although all of these methods are applied during community organizing. How can community organizing contribute with something new?

Well-developed organizing infrastructure!

In the process of community organizing, people who don't have a say in the decision-making processes organize for social change and to rearrange unfair power inequalities by establishing non-hierarchical citizen organizations - organizations in the structural sense not necessarily in the legal sense. Based on community organizing, the roots of social and economic injustice are sought in the unequal distribution of power and resources among social groups(2), therefore community members ultimately organize for a more equal redistribution of power and resources, through influencing the decision-making processes by democratic means. The North Star of community organizing is meaningful democracy, dignity, and collaboration with allied social groups.

Because community organizing traditionally embraces social justice (understood in line with human rights principles), in many cases, citizen groups are run and if possible led by the participation of socially excluded, oppressed people, but in all cases with those, who are directly affected by the issue. (That's why we don't consider the Hungarian Guard or the Better Future Civil Guard Association or the Tea Party as doing community organizing, because although these groups use community organizing methods, they do not embrace its principles.)

Through citizen participation, the fundamental aim is that excluded social classes and vulnerable groups (discriminated based on their ethnicity, gender, religion or economic status, sexual orientation, age or disability) attain enough power through democratic tactics to have an influence on decision makers.(3) Due to unbalanced power relations, confrontational tactics gain emphasis.

As a result, the group is represented by community members to the decision-makers and to the media; not by professionals, but by people who are generally excluded from participating in our democracy. In case of citizen groups of ethnic, gender or other kinds of minorities, the group is represented not only by those members of these minorities who belong to the elite or the educated middle-class. This is possible because in the process of community organizing, there is great emphasis on popular education, or education in order to increase the citizen toolbox of marginalized groups: peer-learning about social issues and the welfare system, internal trainings on how to talk to the media, role plays on how to meet a decision-maker, to name a few.

In this process, the role of a community organizer is to get to know the members of a community (a neighborhood, a congregation, an institution, or a group of people affected by the same issue, etc.), and, mostly through listening, learn the problems of the community, and identify and support those members, the so-called community leaders who are able to consider and act along community interests and participate in or coordinate the establishment of a democratic group. All in all, the community organizer facilitates or actively shapes the forming of the group, the implementation of pressure tactics, and the process of community learning and, together with the community leaders, nurtures the democratic development of the group. It is essential for a strong organizational structure and a dynamic and democratic expansion of the group that more and more members learn how to become community leaders.

Forms of coalition in community organizing

Citizen organizations can emerge in several contexts and all require a different strategy. In neighborhood-based community organizing, the organizer identifies community leaders and issues in neighborhoods, facilitates the group forming, works on the implementation of pressure tactics and the process of community learning, and then promotes collaboration between these newly-emerged neighborhood-based groups (see the work of Virginia Organizing or examples shared here and here). The community organizer does not start building from scratch: they rely on past or present initiatives, organizations, leaders or members of organizations, or on less elaborated organizational forms, any forms which have structure in the community. Naturally, the community organizer starts organizing upon the invitation or with the consent of some members of the neighborhood, the congregation, or an institution.

In congregation-based community organizing, the community organizer organizes socially inactive congregations into living and welcoming faith communities, or facilitates cross-denominational cooperation on a specific issue. This process is usually preceded by the pastor or some congregational members realizing that they are alienated both in practice and membership from people suffering social injustice. Or they decide to become (more) active around social justice issues, perhaps in cooperation with other congregations. The community organizer here facilitates the process of the faith community making a decision and elaborating an action plan on how their congregation could become more relevant for a socially excluded group, how they could involve them in the congregation, and how they could collaborate with them, if possible, on an egalitarian basis for social change. Or how they could support efforts in collaboration with other congregations (see the Back of the Yards or DART).

In institution-based community organizing, the process is similar again: the community organizer organizes institutions into a common platform around a specific issue, or organizes the members of the institution, or the marginalized groups linked up with the institution (see Chicago Coalition for the Homeless or the Back of the Yards).

When doing issue-based community organizing, the organizer organizes either a group of individuals who are directly affected by the same issue (housing, health care, immigration, etc.) but don't live in the same neighborhood, and they are not the members of the same institution or congregation. It can also mean organizing the collaboration of different types of groups (neighborhood-based, congregation-based, institution-based, issue-based; see examples from the Kentuckians For The Commonwealth here and here, where local people living in the vicinity of the coal mines, high school students, artists, NGOs, etc., are organized in order to have the mountain top removal banned in Appalachia; or Iowa CCI, around nurturing collaboration between farmers and immigrants).

As a result of this, community organizing can support the well-founded collaboration of a wide variety of social groups through a strong and democratic organizational structure, where the poor and oppressed groups can make their voices heard as resolutely and clearly as those civil actors who honestly represent their interests. And besides wanting to reach improvement in their neighborhood and their own life, they want to attain systemic changes, beyond development projects. Through linking the local and national level, community organizations, ideally, do not lose the connection with local issues and interests, and can keep proper balance between local, regional and national goals, while they can strategically use their power.

Some comments about the Handbook on Citizen Participation: "The Last Stop Sign"(4)

The Handbook on Citizen Participation: Community Organizing as a Tool of Enhancing Citizen Participation is one the few publications which talks about community organizing in the context of Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, it is crucial that it summarizes and introduces some of the initiatives in this region, and through these examples, gives a short overview of the basic principles of community organizing. As a result of this, and the work of the past years, more and more countries have become familiar with the methodology of community organizing. When, however, we try to read the publication with the eyes of an activist who does not know this type of community intervention, most of the case studies would reflect that community organizers' ambitions eventually end in the beautification of a city and city development projects. Six out of the nine citizen groups (and their community organizers) addressed the decision-makers with demands such as building a bridge between two neighborhoods instead of letting the decision-maker simply destroying the old one, introducing environmentally friendly and cheap garbage collection, solving a parking space issue, cleaning an alley, building a park and a playground, preserving a pedestrian area as opposed to a planned gas station, solving garbage delivery, and renovating a sports center and a bus stop. Three groups formed other types of demands such as improving the situation of the unemployed and the workers on public assistance, eliminating homelessness through the enactment of the right to housing and through a well-developed public housing system, and buying medical equipment for a village hospital.

Naturally, in the first set of examples, "small and winnable issues" were picked because citizens were expected to learn how to put pressure on decision makers and wins would encourage more citizen participation. However, based on these examples, it may seem as if community organizing was organizing "for its own sake", as if work went without any strategy or future perspectives, simply in order to encourage citizen participation (which, supposedly, was not the intention of the authors). Although it was made explicit that there was an attempt to reach out to low-income social classes and other vulnerable groups in more or less all the case studies, it is unclear in almost all of the examples, except those of the Hungarian Anti-Poverty Network (HAPN) and The City Is For All, how community organizers, through the issues that are selected, want to contribute to systemic social change and to rearrange unfair power inequalities, which would differentiate community organizing from community development. However, enhanced citizen participation per se does not necessarily lead to the rearrangement of unfair power relations. When we, in a new region, try to elaborate and make appealing the methodology of this community intervention form, it is helpful to make the principles of this methodology and its long-term potential for social change explicit.

It is given a huge emphasis in the tradition of community organizing that a new citizen group should start out with "a small and winnable" issue, rather than something with a blurred long-term vision which may cause controversy in the emerging group (see the community organizing strategy of Alinsky). This strategy is pretty conspicuous in this publication, too, through demands around issues such as garbage collection and delivery, a parking space problem, cleaning an alley, renovating a bus stop, etc. In the tradition of community organizing, it also is stressed that these issues are identified by the community (in a democratic manner). According to the argument, the experience of winning gives impetus to the development of the organization, and wins can enhance membership growth, which is essential for a bigger campaign.

These all seem logical, but it can be very misleading. Gary Delgado (American researcher, lecturer, activist, one of the founding members and organizers of ACORN) recollects a story in his article from 1998 (The Last Stop Sign), when a community organizer (organizer of the Industrial Areas Foundation established by Saul Alinsky) told him that in their organization in New Mexico, a state on the southern border of the U.S., they didn't address the immigration issue because it had never come up with the constituents. As the organizer was a white European-American man, while the constituency was Latino, Delgado is suggesting that the issue might not have been raised due to (an initial) lack of trust rooted in the differences between the origin of the organizer and the constituents, even though the issue obviously carries great relevance for the community. To what extent is the responsibility of the organizer to raise an issue,? asks Delgado, and replies with another example. The Californian authorities wanted to take away the child of a lesbian mother. The neighborhood organization embraced the issue because the director of the organization explained the significance of the case to the board. The director was a lesbian woman. So in this case the community organizer influenced the flow of events, and acted as a "bridge person" between the citizen group and the lesbian mother, or rather between the neighborhood and the LGBT issue, and helped members to understand and accept the relevance of an issue, which they may have rejected before.

Decision makers may retain their power by pitting oppressed groups against one another along ethnicity, gender, class, etc.: Roma people on welfare against low-income non-Roma, the housing poor against the homeless people, the religious against the gay, and in general, marginalized groups against the tax-paying middle-class, while, in fact, the state spends a tiny amount of their tax on welfare assistance. These controversial issues unavoidably come up during community organizing. Furthermore, because somebody is oppressed, it does not mean that they themselves do not exert oppression on someone else such as domestic violence or aggression against animals. For long-term social change, community organizers need to take up contradictory issues, and act as bridge persons and live up to the role of "Hermes, the interpreter".

Is it really an effective strategy when a new organization sticks to "small and winnable issues", fighting for a parking space or stop signs? In the last decade of community organizing, has the gap between small and winnable issues and big and significant social issues, in fact, been bridgeable? Does this really lead us to long-term social change? Delgado continues with these questions.

Right-wing grassroots efforts, which would close abortion clinics, would put gays and lesbians back into the closet, he says, have never organized for stop signs. These groups, he adds, supposedly know that "good organizing issues are deeply felt, controversial." Delgado does not want to deny traditional methods of community organizing: empowering grassroots community leaders, organizing a wide democratic base, or community learning through which marginalized people could prove that they can articulate their issues and they do not need anointed experts. He does not intend to dismiss real victories either: the improvement of public housing, school reform, tax reform. But he also says that community organizing often has "misconceived notions of "wins"" and "is almost completely separate from the parallel world of progressive activism" which, he thinks, achieved significant results (women's movement, gay and lesbian movement, immigrant movement, etc.).

The essence and merit of community organizing is the building of a community infrastructure, which can lay the foundations of a new movement, or can enhance an existing one (see the activities of National People's Action related to the Occupy Movement here or here). Naturally, the progressive activist movements, which Delgado was hailing, could not have evolved in their full potential without an existing community infrastructure, through which participants could mobilize one another. And therefore, it is essential that neighborhood groups fight for less spectacular, smaller issues, so that group identity can shape and citizen participation can become a familiar phenomenon. Accepting all this, it is important what Delgado in 1998 said that "if traditional CO [community organizing] is to become a force for change in the millennium and beyond, it must proactively address issues of race, class, gender, corporate concentration, and the complexities of a transnational economy."

Therefore, I believe, when we speak about community organizing, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe, where we now intend to elaborate the methodology of this community intervention form, it is crucial that the short-term and long-term potential of community organizing (local-regional-national collaboration, collaboration crossing ethnicity, gender, congregations, social classes, building out a community infrastructure which can contribute to an emerging movement), the principles of community organizing (organizing vulnerable groups in the name of social justice), the role of community leaders and leadership development, the significance of community learning and internal trainings, etc., are all well-explained and that case studies are presented in line with these, all done in a strategic framework.

In addition, it is also helpful to make a distinction between community organizing and community development, knowing that both community intervention methods can be effective strategy. Which one to choose depends on several factors: the composition of the community, the internal power dynamics, the relations with the decision-makers, whether or not the decision-maker is open to consider the interests of the most vulnerable groups on an issue, or if the power structure is so unbalanced that confrontation is essential, etc. Building a bridge or a road between two neighborhoods, or having a park, or a parking space, etc. can be both community development and community organizing. The action does not become community organizing simply because it enhances citizen participation (as that is the aim of community development, too) but because the bridge, the road, the park or the parking space are important for the group because, by getting these, they make a step towards the rearrangement of unjust power relations (so they are small and winnable issues, but they have a strategic meaning for the group): because the bridge or the road connects a low-income and a middle-class neighborhood, and the low-income people will have access to the middle-class neighborhood with all of its services; or because through organizing about the park or the parking space, through popular education, it becomes crystal clear for the citizen group that they did not have a park or parking space before because of the unequal distribution of resources. This revelation together with the victory will give impetus to the group and enhance the emergence of new issues and new struggles.

With the past of monarchies and dictatorships citizen participation, collaboration, and the practice of opening up to one another are undoubtedly crucial in the life of the new Central and Eastern European democracies. However, in the shadow of excluding nationalism, or decision-makers neglecting the interests of vulnerable groups, or economic exploitation or the growing far-right, we can be brave and impatient enough to identify bigger goals for long-term social change, without losing sight of the conscious organization development strategy of community organizing, for example, to stop the exploitation of poor workers through the mobilization of workers on public assistance, or the development of the public housing system through the mobilization of homeless people (the goals of HAPN and The City Is For All mentioned in the handbook).

And an American example - for the fans of organization theory...

Organizing communities on a local and national level is not easy. The model of the organization I spent my last year with is very instructive in this aspect. The neighborhood-based and institution-based community organizing models are applied hand-in-hand in several organizations, but in Virginia Organizing (VO), it is even more emphatic. VO has 12 chapters, in 12 different locations in the state of Virginia, which were selected mostly because they are regarded as strategic centers in the region or because there is a high proportion of low-income neighborhoods. Community organizers are based in these areas and they may be local or may have moved to the there upon the call of VO. There is usually one chapter in each location and members may be community leaders in their neighborhoods, may be members or leaders of other organizations, or they may simply come on behalf of their family.

In statewide campaigns (around issues such as health care, immigration, anti-discrimination, budget and tax reform, civic participation, ex-felons' right to vote, economic justice, etc.), the staff of Virginia Organizing builds the coalition with other NGOs. Campaigns at a local, city-level are, for example, job creation through state-funded weatherization programs, or the increased participation of people of color in City Council management positions.

-------------------------------

(1) Community development and community organizing may differ mostly in the sense that, while community development holds that social inequalities are fundamentally rooted in the lack of problem solving skills at a community level and lack of self-help mechanisms due to alienation, community organizing thinks that the root of injustice is the unequal distribution of power and resources. In community development, therefore, the emphasis is on strengthening relationship between the members of the community, utilizing community competences and common problem solving skills, while members try to get the support of the decision-maker and strive for consensus. On the other hand, community organizing holds that the solution is in the more just redistribution of power and resources, so community members collaborate in order to this through influencing the decision-making processes. Due to unbalanced power relations, confrontational tactics gain emphasis. (Jack Rothman (1995): A közösségi intervenció megközelítései)
(2) Community organizing is finding its roots, among others, in the women's movement, the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the settlement movement, and in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, the African-American Civil Rights Movement, and the Mexican-American Farmworkers' Movement. The methodology of community organizing was elaborated by Alinsky, which has been enriched by almost a century of experience.
(3) Naturally, organizing the middle class can be a strategic goal. Before his death, in 1972, Alinsky saw the potential in organizing the middle class. He thought in a consumer society that the middle class is miserably misled and is oppressed, and because of being a wide social stratum, it can be a good ally for a systemic social change (Playboy Interview, 1972). The ultimate goal, however, is the empowering of marginalized groups. When Alinsky in 1959 organized the Provisional Organization for Southwest Community in the Southwest Side of Chicago with a mainly white American constituency, his ultimate aim was to decrease racist tension in the neighborhood, to bridge the communication gap between the African-American and the white communities and bring about the process of African-Americans peacefully moving in the neighborhood. He, however, finally questioned this strategy. In addition, Iowa CCI organizes white farmers against factory farms on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Latino immigrant workers abused by their employers. The strategy of the organization is that, through common organizational membership, the gap between the two groups will narrow. When Rural Organizing Project talks about welcoming communities, organizing middle class neighborhoods becomes a goal in order to reach immigration justice.
(4) The title "The Last Stop Sign" is adopted from the article of Gary Delgado, quoted in the post. (Gary Delgado (1998): The Last Stop Sign, accessible online at: http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/102/stopsign.html)

Read it in Hungarian.

Next Monday: Who gains admission and who counts white? - Undocumented immigrants organize now and then.