Draw your own stick person

Joe Szakos, the Director of Virginia Organizing talks about the process of building relations with the community.

Why would the neighborhood eventually trust me? Why would the gates open?

Joe: Community organizers, especially in the U.S., are much like parachuters. They go where they are sent. Even though they prepare about the field in advance, they cannot be certain about where they will exactly land. In the beginning of my career, I started to organize in communities in the coalfields in eastern Kentucky. I was a mere youngster in their eyes, someone who could not understand the complexity of their problems. A key to organizing is to gain the trust and the respect of the community. Good organizing will happen only if you trust and respect them. You really need to love their company, with all its challenges. And you accept that building trust is a process.

Why did they eventually trust you?

Joe: Because their thoughts and feelings were important to me. Because first and foremost, I actively listened to them. But sooner or later they also became curious about me. At this point, active listening is not enough. We had to find common ground. I started to think over what are those stories of my life, what are those layers of my personality that people in these communities could relate to. I found two key ones: I like playing baseball and my grandfathers were immigrant coal miners. Our identity and personality have a lot of layers. Community organizing is also the art of relationship building. We emphasize different aspects of our own self to different people, aspects which they can relate to. If I want to gain the trust of an academician, we will probably sooner or later talk about my publications. This seems obvious, but it is not at all when you are in a totally different and unfamiliar environment, where even the vocabulary of the people is different.

What can be helpful in building relations?

Joe: You need to prepare in advance for the meetings with the community. Think over who you are. Are there any overlaps between the community members and yourself? Draw your own stick person and think over who you are in the eyes of the people living there. What are those things which create a bridge between you and them. You really need to know yourself. Why are you passionate about this profession? What is your personal story? Why does injustice make you upset? Be clear about your two-minute and your five-minute story. The narrative about our own life is a constantly changing, personal construction. Some memories occasionally come to the front, others gain a new interpretation. Learn from trying to observe yourself through the eye of the community. Reinterpret your narrative of your life in terms of community organizing.

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Mobilizing along self-interest

Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky organized communities for instance in the slums of Chicago between the 1930s and the 1970s. He worked with teenage gangs, low-income immigrant groups from Europe, excluded African-American communities and racist whites. He was passionate about organizing groups cheated by people in power. He enjoyed seeing how they gain back their human dignity, start to organize themselves, and realize they can have influence on the "big" political and business interests.

For most people, the functioning of a democratic state can be pretty complicated and incomprehensible. Decisions follow decisions, each having a huge impact on our lives, but many people can put up with the assumption that they are not in the position to influence how things work. Or their everyday struggle to make ends meet supersedes any other efforts. Legislators often seem to be distant, they listen only to those who are close to the fire. Due to the uneven distribution of power, communities with less capacity to advocate for themselves can easily become marginalized, which makes them subject to fraud, exploitation or oppression. One of the main tasks of a democratic state therefore would be to create space in the decision-making process for those social groups who need more effort to articulate their demands. In most cases, however, this happens only after putting pressure on the legislators.

But why would those who struggle for survival or assume they have no influence on how things work start to organize themselves? Alinsky says because it is their self-interest. So he traced those concrete, immediate and winnable issues which embittered the lives of most members of the neighborhood. And he wanted to track down those locals who can be allies in building a neighborhood organization. Because if the members of the community realize that together they have the power to influence the decisions on their lives, they will feel less marginalized.

For this Alinsky and his organizers needed to know the neighborhood like the palm of their hand. They started with data analysis: before the field work, they wanted to draw a preliminary profile of the neighborhood. They combed through census data, reports by local planning commissions, and public statistics, then they made an inventory of all the public institutions, associations, sport clubs, social agencies and  local businesses, etc. They carried out research on the history of the neighborhood and its people. They mapped power relations and the network of relationships. They started organizing only then. Obviously, by that point, they had several hypotheses of what the most crucial issues could be for the neighborhood, but they put these in brackets. They wanted to hear from the members what makes them angry. Alinsky's organizers built on people's self-interest.

After the research, they divided the neighborhood into smaller units and started canvassing. They conducted hundreds of interviews, with residents, shopkeepers, leaders of local civil society organizations, church leaders, or people active in other fields of public life. They took thorough notes on the behavior and social habits of the people. They visited new contacts other people mentioned. They used qualitative and quantitative research methods used in sociology and anthropology such as participatory observation, unstructured, semi-structured and in-depth interviews, statistical analyses, etc. At the end of the day they recorded voice reports on their conclusions. They wanted to draw a profile of the fears, sorrows, hopes and skills of people living in the neighborhood.

Area canvassing usually takes one or two months of intensive work. Within this period the community organizers get in touch with the whole neighborhood. Canvassing can happen through many different ways. Organizers can contact those who seemed interesting during the research phase, and they will suggest new contacts to talk to (this is the snowball method applied in sociology and anthropology). Organizers may have acquaintances from earlier and start tracing those networks. New opportunities can also come the their way through sheer coincidence.

Many organizations apply the more direct door knocking. Student volunteers or community organizers visit the members of the neighborhood in their homes, they knock on each and every door to try to identify the crucial issues for the community and make them open to cooperation. Building relations can be very tiring and may hold out little hope in the beginning. But there are communication techniques which make dismantling the walls easier. (For example: "What made you angry recently? "I don't know, leave me alone." "Your neighbor, Mary said that trash is not picked up. Is this a problem for you? What do you think should be done?)

Building trust is a process which starts from zero. Therefore in the beginning, rejection and suspicion are part of canvassing. One of Alinsky's most quoted story is how he infiltrated into one of Al Capone's mobs in Chicago. (At this point yet he worked as a young criminologist, not as a community organizer.) Through long weeks he hung around the headquarters of the mobsters, the Lexington Hotel in Chicago, and he was always dismissed by them. Then one night at the neighboring table, one of the professional assassins of Capone, Big Ed said: "Hey, you guys, did I ever tell you about the time I picked up that redhead in Detroit ?" The others moaned in chorus. "Oh, no... Do we have to hear that one again?" Big Ed got disappointed when Alinsky poked him and said: "Mr. Stash. I’d love to hear that story." The gangster's face lit up. "You would, kid? Here, pull up a chair."

Through these initial contacts and talks we can draw a profile of the concerns, skills and visions of the people living in the neighborhood. And through these methods, we can form more personal relations with those who seem reliable and pursue group interests. Through longer, personal conversations we can identify the concrete, immediate and winnable issues, in which many people have a self-interest and which can help mobilize the neighborhood. And we can identify those people who can lead on issues and become leaders. And we can determine the forces and resources which keep a community together, and which we can build on to organize the first neighborhood assembly.

(Source: Sanford D. Horwitt: Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky - His Life and Legacy. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989; Playboy Interview: Saul Alinsky - a candid conversation with the feisty radical organizer. Vol. 19. no. 3. - March, 1972; Saul D Alinsky: Rules for Radicals - A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Random House, New York, 1971)

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What is agitation? – interview with Edward Shurna

Ed Shurna, on the right.
Source: jesssteele.wordpress.com 

Edward Shurna is the Executive Director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. He has been organizing for 40 years in different neighborhoods of Chicago. This the synopsis of the interview made in April 2012 during my 3-week internship with the organization.





How did you become an organizer?
Ed: Social injustice has always upset me. I attended a Jesuit college, I wanted to become a priest. I believed that this world could be a better place. There I met Tom Gaudette and I understood through his work that people living in poverty primarily need social change, not charity. Tom was a Catholic Christian activist himself. He organized in Austin, in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago. In Austin in the 1960s, numerous houses were demolished during the Urban Renewal, which disrupted the life of many. Racism was pervasive, and conflict erupted into occasional violent clashes. Gaudette perceived that the people living in the neighborhoods had not looked at each other as enemies. Through his organizing, the neighborhood identified the important community issues, and achieved that the elected officials started to take responsibility. As a result, the school system, for instance, improved a lot in the neighborhood.

Becoming an organizer must have been a challenging shift from the religious way of thinking.
Ed: A whole new world opened up for me. Earlier I thought that the poor needed consolation and help. Since then I have realized that for a social change, we need to alter the array of power relations. The oppressed groups need to be able to articulate their demands in the public arena, i.e. in the media or to the legislators.

Tom Gaudette worked with Saul Alinsky. Have you met Alinsky in person?
Ed: Yes. He gave us a lecture on community organizing. When he entered the room, he looked around and said, “I am just wasting my fucking time with you”. Alinsky was infamous about his arrogance. I knew that he had just been provoking us. In spite of this, this style did not inspire me. But I admired him for the way he organized. Alinsky had some very influential allies in the Catholic Church who stood ready to support the oppressed groups in the public arena, even in risk of their own position.

What meant the biggest challenge for you at the beginning of your career?
Ed: To understand that even the most reasonable arguments can rarely convince legislators. Coming from a Lithuanian immigrant family, I had been listening throughout my childhood that we had to respect the laws of the United States. I needed time to understand that laws are something that man made up and we have the right to change it. So I started to argue for social change. I was nice and patient. I thought sensible arguments would sooner or later make their way to decision-makers who would eventually come round to our point of view. But I had to realize that accountability and self-interest accelerate their determination. What can a decision-maker be made accountable for? What is their self-interest to change the status quo? Obviously, this tactic sooner or later necessitates confrontation with people in power. At first glance, this may sound odd to a believer, but Christianity and confrontation are in close connection without question.

How was it when you first did your outreach and tried to build relations with a community?
Ed: Tough. In the beginning most of the people do not understand why you are there. They may find you suspicious. Anyways, how come an outsider thinks he can add to the struggle? Building trust is a process which in most cases starts from zero. You must understand this, otherwise you will feel hurt because you will most probably experience rejection for some time. You should not take criticism or hostile attitude personal. And as time passing by, we are learning those communication techniques which can help break down the walls – and accelerate trust-building a little bit. There are opinion leaders, informal and formal leaders in each and every neighborhood, we need to have them as well accept us.

What is agitation?
Ed: As a young organizer, I started in a majority African-American neighborhood in Chicago. An investor, the owner of a football team, was planning to build up a stadium there right in the middle of the neighborhood – without asking the community. This would have disrupted the people’s life there. So a neighborhood council had been set up and it started to get ahold of the investor. Letters followed letters, but no answers came back. The community had no experience in confrontation with the power, organizing a demonstration was a new idea, for instance. I needed to provoke them to start using new tactics. I agitated them. “How many letters do you want to write until you come round and see that you need to try something else?”, I asked. But they needed to reach the point when they come to say: “If again there is no answer to our letter, then we’ll go to the investor in person.” The thought eventually matured. They figured out to send a delegation of five members to the investor. I knew it was crucial at this point to show that a lot of people stood behind the issue. But I chose not to tell them to organize a mass demonstration. Instead I asked, “Why only five members? Much more people are affected by the issue. Why can’t any one of them go who wants to?” Eventually, 25 people gathered in front of the investor's office. They prayed. The community was strongly religious, this action fit their attitude, they felt comfortable and the media liked it. But the investor still did not want to talk to us. The action made the group more confident as they experienced the power of cooperation. They started seeking more and more opportunities to make their demands and express their dissatisfaction in a democratic way. They generated power. A few months later, 700 people showed up in front of the investor's house to push him to enter into negotiations. Decisions were made by the group, and my task was to make sure that the group comes across several different opinion and new ideas so that they can make an informed decision. I also ensured that the group becomes familiar with such ideas I do not necessarily agree with.

Did you win?
Ed: Yes. The stadium was not built in our neighborhood. And the community understood that if they wanted to change something, they have to do more things than they did before and have to do it differently. This is the result of agitation. And the community organizer comes to learn to enjoy risky games and to see a problem as an opportunity for a change and a conflict as a new challenge.

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What is this blog about?

Montgomery bus boycott, 1955.
Source: blackpast.org

Strong people don't need strong leaders. (Ella Baker)

In December 1955, in Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to obey a bus driver and did not give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. The African-American woman got arrested within a few hours. This outraged the African-American community and as a response, they started a boycott of the bus company. Four days later, Parks was found guilty by the court and fined $14. The injustice gave impetus to continue with the boycott, and as a result of mobilization, several thousands African-American people decided to find another means of transport than the buses of the company.

The boycott lasted until the end of 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses unconstitutional. The civil disobedience action became known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It brought one of the first victories of the African-American Civil Rights Movement and besides Parks, gave national recognition to an African-American Baptist minister, one of the organizers of the boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Launching and maintaining the boycott needed comprehensive agitation and coordinated organizing efforts in an environment where activism was a threat to life. The activists recruited supporters from the community, and helped organize alternative means of transport. They made arrangements for carpooling, while the African-American taxi drivers offered a ride for the price of a bus ticket. Others simply walked. More and more people joined the boycott, more and more people regarded the issue as their self-interest, and risked their job or a threat to their physical integrity.

Galvanized by the success of the action, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was established in order to coordinate further non-violent civil disobedience actions to achieve racial integration. The first employee of the SCLC was Ella Baker, whose primary goal was throughout her life to strengthen chapters, or as she called 'cells' and develop new leaders at a very grassroots level.

So the success of the movement took root in the sustained, thorough and tiresome efforts of the organizers who strengthened the African-American communities and made them aware of their own power, which, through cooperation, enabled them to change the oppressive laws and power relations. The emblematic and talented figures of the movement would not have enjoyed the support of hundreds of thousands without the work of these organizers.

But the community organizers did not start from zero either, they built on the fruits of the organizing efforts of the preceding decades and centuries. Rosa Parks's courage did not come out of thin air, she was a well-trained activist. Moreover, she was not the first one who openly opposed this form of segregation. Nine months earlier for example Claudette Colvin, a 15 year-old pregnant Afro-American girl was handcuffed and arrested in the same town, Montgomery, because she refused to give up her seat.

This story taken from the history of the African-American Civil Rights Movement shows that the actors of social change are not exclusively and not primarily the talented and charismatic leaders, but the people themselves, who, in an organized and coordinated manner, are able to question existing power relations and to effectively participate in the democratic dialogue about social change. And social change will be thoroughgoing when more and more oppressed people and interest groups are empowered and enabled through an organized representative group to present their demands in a democratic manner. But what kind of power and whose strength does the American community organizing tradition speak about?

In April 2012 I participated in a community organizing training for Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian and Slovaks in Chicago. The trainer asked us to define on a 10-point scale to what extent we want to seek power. It quickly turned out that all of us assign very different meanings to the concept of power and that the use of the word is not at all as straightforward in the Central and Eastern European context as it is in the American terminology. Most of the participants felt uncomfortable with associating themselves with having power. Some did not want power because people having power many times abuse it. Some felt they do not have enough knowledge to possess power. Some felt they already have enough power. The American trainers were astonished to a great extent to hear people not wanting more power as for them, as organizers, power is the ability to act (Saul Alinsky), the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change (Martin Luther King, Jr.), which concedes nothing without a demand (Frederick Douglass).

This made me more aware of the fact that if we want to strengthen communities with less power in Hungary or in Central and Eastern Europe and we want to build civil society organizations with wide community support, we do not only need to increase knowledge on the tradition of community organizing but we also need to adopt the terminology to our history and culture. Because in the community organizing literature, there are several concepts, which sound strange in our language and social context. The words power, oppression, leader, empowerment, agitation, cell, chapter, self-interest, demand, public arena are all expressions which we need to interpret relying on the American community organizing tradition stemming from the women's rights movement, the abolition movement and the labor movement, but we also need to find the roots of organizing in our own culture and history. One of the aim of this blog is to contribute to maturing these thoughts and to inspire a professional discourse on the theory and practice of community organizing.

A further aim of this blog is to expand the organizing literature available in the region by providing insight into the theory and practice of American community organizing. There is a great absence of literature in this field in Hungarian and those which exist often refer to community organizing as a synonym or alternative of community development. There is, however, a huge gap between the two approaches. Community development relies much on the cooperation between the government or the city council, and it encourages the use of state and business funds in order to develop the community. On the other hand, the primary aim of community organizing is to build an autonomous community which gained enough power to successfully enter the public arena.

Moreover, in Hungary community development, which has 50 years of tradition, seeks its roots in the Communist-Socialist state-led adult education programs. This again sharply differentiates community development from the community organizing approach. The latter is about the questioning of existing power relations and, in case of necessity, the confrontation with power, even by non-violent civil disobedience.

It is a good time to deepen discourse on community organizing in Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe because more and more organization refer to the implementation of the method, such as The City Is For All (AVM), the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU), or the Hungarian Anti-Poverty Network (HAPN). The number of people interested in the methodology are also increasing. The Civil College Foundation started a community organizing learning circle last year and just recently launched a US exchange program for Hungarian and other Central and Eastern Europeans interested in community organizing, in cooperation with the European Community Organizing Network (ECON). As a result of the Network, there have been community organizing programs running in e.g. Slovakia and Romania for a couple of years. Despite this, we cannot say that the methodology would have taken roots in this region.

Therefore, it would be now worth starting to discover the regional historic roots of organizing, involving the tradition of national and ethnic minorities and the churches, and to identify those pioneers who made sustained efforts to organize marginalized groups on democratic principles. Furthermore, there are a couple of examples from the last 20 years of civil society activities and movement traditions, which would certainly enrich the evolving discourse on organizing with valuable lessons learned.

This blog primarily seeks to address the Hungarian and Central and Eastern European audience, therefore the posts are also available in Hungarian.

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About me

Women Power. Source: redux.com

At the end of 2010 I participated at the Regional Conference of Dalit Women in Ahmedabad, India. I shared three days with dozens of Indian women, strong, dedicated women who have had a hard life. All of them came from remote villages of the country, all of them belonged to the group of "untouchables", the "outcastes", or in their recent name, the Dalits. The Dalits are still one of the most marginalized communities in India. All the participants were survivors of domestic violence or rape. Half of the first conference day was spent with introductions. These women, one after the other, proudly shared their personal stories about how they got strengthened and how they managed to abandon an oppressive, violent relationship and since then how they have been organizing in their neighborhoods against all forms of violence against women. They were leaders, people who focus on the interest of the community, support their fellows and use their talent for the benefit of the group.

Conversations, singing, thinking, planning went on for three days. By that time, for a couple of years, we had been working with the Minority Rights Group to support grassroots, community-based organizations, and for a year we had been building The City Is For All, the movement of homeless people and their allies. I came back with the experience that I would like to see more and more community-based organizations in Hungary and the region, which have a wide base, and through which those whose rights were abused can also accumulate knowledge, power and relational capital.

2012 is an exceptional year in my life: I have been learning community organizing in the U.S. with the support of an American community organizing organization, Virginia Organizing. I would like to share this learning process with as many people as possible. I address my posts most of all to the Hungarian and the Central and Eastern European audience. I will be writing about the different organizing styles, my practical experience, community organizers, my readings, and methods and strategy. My question is: how can we most efficiently support the proliferation of democratic organizations, which give back the power to marginalized groups?

Bernadett Sebály
sebaly . bernadett AT gmail . com

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