In this, the first episode, I talk to Keisha Krumm and Mike Gecan about what is community organizing, what it involves, and why it matters.  Community organizing can also be referred to as broad-based organizing, institution-based organizing, faith-based organizing, or neighborhood organizing. Keisha and Mike prefer just to talk about organizing as the work of enabling people to come together to build power to effect democratic change where they live and work. As you will hear, boundaries between labor and community organizing and between movement building and community building work are fluid. What is constant is the need for relationally driven, bottom up forms of democratic politics.

Guests:

Keisha Krumm and Mike Gecan are two very experienced organizers with the Industrial Areas Foundation. Keisha recently became lead organizer with Greater Cleveland Congregations having been an organizer in Milwaukee for a number of years before that. And Mike has been an organizer for over forty years, written extensively on organizing, and done much to shape its contemporary practice. They each tell something of their story at the beginning of the episode.

Resources for Going Deeper:

Saul Alinsky. Reveille for Radicals (various editions), Chapter 11;

Luke Bretherton, "The origins of organizing: an intellectual history," Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Chapter 1;

Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (London: Continuum, 2005); 

Lee Staples, “‘Power to the People’ Basic Organizing Philosophy and Goals,” Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing, 3rd edn (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 1-14, 21-35;

Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (New York: Nation Books, 2017), 251-284.

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• For readings to download relevant to or discussed in an episode visit: https://ormondcenter.com/listen-organize-act-podcast

This episode discusses why and how listening is the beginning point of democratic organizing and the role of the one-to-one or relational meeting in that work. The first part is a discussion with Lina Jamoul about what is a one to one, what it involves, and how it differs from other ways of engaging with people in democratic politics.  In the second part I talk to Arnie Graf to reflect further on some of the tensions and issues that arise in doing one-to-one’s.

Guests:

Lina Jamoul is Executive Director of the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees. Arnie Graf began organizing work as part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and then went on to work with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) for over forty years. More recently he worked with the British Labour Party to develop the insights of organizing for local party politics in the UK. Arnie recently published a book narrating all this work entitled: "Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime of Organizing" (ACTA, 2020).

Resources for Going Deeper:

Edward Chambers with Michael Cowan, "The Relational Meeting,"  Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice (New York: Continuum, 2004), Chapter 2;

Jeffrey Stout, “Face-to-Face Meetings,” Blessed are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), Chapter 12.

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• For readings to download relevant to or discussed in an episode visit: https://ormondcenter.com/listen-organize-act-podcast

In this episode I examine the second key tool organizing uses for listening, building relationships, and effecting change: the house meeting. As a form of democratic politics that begins with listening and is attentive to the experience, conditions, and stories of people where they live and work, organizing needs practices for listening well. Along with the one-to-one discussed in the previous episode, the house meeting is just such a practice and the other basic tool of community organizing. So in this episode I discuss the history of the house meeting, what it is and why it matters, how to do it, some of the issues and problems that often come up when facilitating a house meeting, how it feeds into building power, and how it contrasts with other approaches to listening and engaging people in democratic politics such as focus groups. 

Guests

Tim McManus has been with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) for over thirteen years now, organizing in Dallas and Phoenix before becoming the Lead Organizer for Communities Organized for Power in Action (COPA), the IAF affiliate on the Central Coast of California. He is currently building a new IAF organization in California’s Central Valley.  Before becoming an organizer, he was a high school teacher.

Maria Elena Manzo was born in Mexico and came to the US aged 14. She was a farmworker, going back and forth to Mexico until she was 30 after which she was able to settle in California. She has been a leader with COPA for almost 20 years and currently works as program manager for Mujeres en Acción.

Resources for Going Deeper

Gabriel Thompson, “The Mexican Problem,” America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), Chapter 5;

Aaron Schutz and Mike Miller, “Fred Ross and the House-Meeting Approach,” People Power: The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky (Nashville: University of Vanderbilt Press, 2015), Chapter 8. 

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• For readings to download relevant to or discussed in an episode visit: https://ormondcenter.com/listen-organize-act-podcast

This episode discusses power, defined simply as the ability to act. It focuses on the relationship between power and democratic politics, the distinction between "power over" or unilateral power and "power with" or relational power, and questions such as who has power, how should it be analyzed, is anyone really powerless, the nature of self-interest, and how does organizing build power to effect change.

Guests

Robert Hoo is the Lead Organizer and Executive Director for One LA-IAF. He has fifteen years of organizing experience with the Industrial Areas Foundation in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Sacramento. And before that served as an AmeriCorps member in Connecticut.

Ben Gordon is senior organizer with Metro IAF which he joined in 2016. He currently works with the IAF organizations in Boston, Connecticut, Milwaukee, as well as several labor union partners. Prior to joining Metro IAF, he was Director of Organizing for the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA), a 200,000-member affiliate of the public employees union (AFSCME). He began his professional organizing career in 1987 with the Southern Region of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union organizing clothing factory workers in the Southeast.

Resources for Going Deeper

Frederick Douglas, “West India Emancipation” (1857). A key statement of the importance of power in radical democratic politics. Available online: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress/ 

Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” Discussed in this and other episodes.  Available online: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1965-bayard-rustin-protest-politics-future-civil-rights-movement-0/ 

Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975). Considered a classic, this book gives an account of the urban planner Robert Moses. Organizers consistently refer to this book as a detailed and very revealing case study in how to gain power even when you don’t hold an official or elected post, how power operates institutionally, how to get things done, and how to analyze power;

Saul Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Vintage, 1970). Another case studies in how power is built up and wielded effectively, this time in a non-state focused form of politics, that of union organizing; 

The distinction between “power with” and “power over” originates with Mary Parker Follett, Creative Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930 [1924]); 

Hannah Arendt also sketched a conception of relational power in her essay “On Violence.” See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2006 [1963]), 105–98; 

Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). A reading of the New Testament and the ministry of Jesus as exemplifying creative, non-violent resistance and the use of relational power to bring change; 

Amy Allen, “Feminist Perspectives on Power,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on-line), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-power/

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• For readings to download relevant to or discussed in an episode visit: https://ormondcenter.com/listen-organize-act-podcast

This episode discusses the nature and purpose of leadership in organizing, how it is defined and understood, who are leaders, the difference between leaders and organizers, and what their respective roles are in the shared work of organizing. The understanding and practice of leadership in organizing is very different to that put forward in most leadership training programs, institutes, and business schools. It is counter cultural and embodies a deep wisdom about leadership that can be applied in many if not most institutional settings, particularly in congregational ones.

Guests

Elizabeth Valdez has nearly 40 years of organizing experience. Having begun her work as an organizer in El Paso on the US-Mexico border, she has since organized in the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, and now Houston where she is the lead organizer of The Metropolitan Organization, the IAF affiliate there. She is a senior organizer with the West/SouthWest IAF and has pioneered work to address infrastructure, employment, housing, and medical needs in the region.

Bishop Douglas Miles has over 50 years of experience combining congregational ministry with leadership in addressing community needs of one kind or another.  This work began with setting up the first homeless shelter with accommodations for women and their children in Baltimore in the early 1970s and has continued on with innovative initiatives to address addiction, educational needs, and starting an alternative juvenile sentencing program. He co-founded Baltimore’s Interfaith Alliance and was a key leader in the development of BUILD, the IAF affiliate in Baltimore, of which he has twice been its Co-Chair.  And as a leader, he has trained many organizers. In his day job, he has built up and pastored large and thriving churches in Baltimore and Memphis.

Resources for Going Deeper

Jeffrey Stout, “The Authority to Lead,” Blessed are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), Chapter 8;

Noelle McAfee, “Relationship and Power: An Interview with Ernesto Cortes, Jr. (1993),” in People Power: The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky, eds. Aaron Schutz and Mike Miller (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), 226-234;

Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Workers Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), see especially pp. 3-21;

Joan Minieri and Paul Getsos, “Developing Leaders from All Walks of Life,” Tools for Radical Democracy: How to Organize for Power in Your Community (San Francisco: John Wiley & Son, 2007), Chapter Five. Includes an overview of leadership styles, a case study of developing a leader, and worksheets for organizers to use when training and developing leaders.

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• For readings to download relevant to or discussed in an episode visit: https://ormondcenter.com/listen-organize-act-podcast

Building on the previous episodes on power and leadership, in this episode I examine the place of institutions in organizing, discussing what is an institution, what makes for a healthy institution, how and why institutions are central to the kind of place-based, relationally driven democratic politics organizing undertakes, and why without them the individual is left naked before the power of the market and the state. Also reflected on is a key rule of organizing, which is that all organizing is in the first instance disorganizing.

Guests

Martin Trimble is Co-Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF).  He is directly responsible for the IAF’s organizing work east of the Mississippi River. He has organized for 25 years with IAF affiliates in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington D.C., Virginia, and North Carolina.  Prior to organizing with the IAF, Martin was the founding director of Opportunity Finance Network which supports and provides standards for financial institutions that invest in affordable housing and community development work nationwide.

Rev Patrick O’Connor grew up and received his theological education in the West Indies. He is currently the lead pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, a multicultural congregation in the Presbytery of New York City. He has served this congregation since 1992. Under his leadership, First Presbyterian is involved in the development of the “Tree of Life” a $74 million dollar affordable “mixed income” housing development that includes a community space and a health care facility. His leadership extends beyond the congregation to the Presbytery of New York City and the General Assembly of his denomination.  And he is Co-Chair of the Metro IAF Leadership team, Chairman of Queens Power, a Director of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, and Chairman of First Jamaica Community and Urban Development Corporation and a member of the board of Trustee for the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Resources for Going Deeper

Michael Gecan, Effective Organizing for Congregational Renewal (Skokie, IL: ACTA Publications, 2008). Good introduction to organizing and how to use organizing as part of congregational development and institutional renewal;

Harry Boyte, Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert (New York: Kettering Foundation, 2009). A clear-eyed reflection on how to re-imagine institutions that serve the needs of their members, build up the ability of people to act together to achieve public work, and the need to dethrone what Boyte calls “the cult of the expert.” Free to download: https://www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/product-downloads/Civic_Agency_Cult_Expert.pdf

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Marion Boyars Publishers, 2001);

Sheldon Wolin, “Contract and Birthright,” The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution.(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), Chapter 8;

Hugh Heclo, On Thinking Institutionally (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011);

Lee Staples, “‘Keeping it all together: Organizational Development and Maintenance,” Roots to Power: A Manual For Grassroots Organizing, 3rd edn (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 221-263.

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• For readings to download relevant to or discussed in an episode visit: https://ormondcenter.com/listen-organize-act-podcast

This episode focuses on popular education, discussing what it is and why it’s key to good democratic organizing with Ernesto Cortes, Jr. Alongside organized money, organized people, and organized action, building power to effect change requires organized knowledge. Organized knowledge generates the frameworks of analysis and understanding through which to re-narrate and reimagine the world, destabilizing the dominant scripts and ideas that legitimate oppression. But rather than be driven by ideological concerns, popular education as an approach to organizing knowledge begins with addressing and seeking to solve real problems people face where they live and work. This entails informal, self-organized forms of learning.  Another way to frame popular education is as a grounded approach to addressing the epistemic or knowledge-based dimensions of injustice and creating policies that put people before top-down programs of social engineering (whether of the left or the right).

Guest

Ernesto Cortes, Jr. is currently National Co-Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation and executive director of its West / Southwest regional network. Beginning in the United Farmworker Movement, he has been organizing in one form or another for nearly half a century, helping to organize or initiate innumerable organizing efforts and campaigns. The organizing work he did in San Antonia in the 1970s in many ways set the template for community organizing coalitions in the IAF thereafter. The fruits of his work have been much studied and he has been recognized with numerous awards and academic fellowships, including a MacArther Fellowship in 1984, a Heinz Award in public policy in 1999, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Princeton University in 2009.

Resources for Going Deeper

Saul Alinsky, “Popular Education,” Reveille for Radicals (various editions), Ch. 9;

Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: the Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle(University of California Press, 1995), Ch. 3. Details the organizing and popular educational work of Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Myles Horton in the formation of the civil rights movement;

Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (Temple University Press, 1990);

Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Presskill, Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice (Jossey-Bass, 2008), see especially Chapters 4 & 5;

Michael Oakshott, “Political Education,” The Voice of Liberal Learning (Yale University Press, 1989), 159-188. 

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• For readings to download relevant to or discussed in an episode visit: https://ormondcenter.com/listen-organize-act-podcast

This episode discusses the positive and negative ways money and politics connect and the means to organize money through politics so it serves human flourishing. Democratic politics has always involved a struggle to ensure money serves people rather than people serving money. The paradox is that, to do so, democratic politics necessities not just organizing people, but also organizing, or better, re-organizing money. The conversation in this episode about organizing money has two sides to it. The first is how to hold dominant centers of economic power - whether in the market or the state - accountable for the use and distribution of that power. The second is how to fundraise to pay for the work of doing democratic politics in ways that are independent of patronage by either the state or the wealthy. This second aspect of the discussion focuses on the difference between 'hard' money that is raised from members, and 'soft' money that comes from grants and foundations, and the tensions between them.

Guests

Janet Hirsch is a leader with the IAF affiliate One LA through her participation in her synagogue, Temple Isaiah where she is the Vice President of Social Justice and sits on the Executive Committee of the Temple Isaiah Board.  She has been involved in One LA for over 12 years, leading campaigns on public education, immigration reform, increasing access to mental health services, the expansion of the California earned income tax credit, and most recently, a Covid-19 equity vaccination pilot in South Los Angeles.  Janet was born in Zimbabwe but has lived in Los Angeles since 1987.

Joe Rubio is a senior organizer with the West/Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation and supervises IAF Projects in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas where he has organized around public education, workforce training, and immigration. He also leads a regional effort called Recognizing the Stranger, which is developing immigrant leadership in 19 metropolitan areas in the Western US. He has been with the IAF since 1992, working in San Antonio, El Paso, and Arizona and now lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Resources for Going Deeper

Julie Nelson, Economics for Humans (University of Chicago Press, 2006);

Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017);

Sarah Lange, “Crafting an Effective Fundraising Strategy for Community-Based Organizations (CBOs),” Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing, 3rd edn (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 400-415;

Kim Klein, Fundraising for Social Change, 6th edn (Jossey-Bass, 2011);

Luke Bretherton, “Economy,” Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Eerdmans, 2019). A theological analysis of the issues discussed.

• For more information & relevant updates follow me on Twitter: @WestLondonMan
• For readings to download relevant to or discussed in an episode visit: https://ormondcenter.com/listen-organize-act-podcast