Community Organizing and Urban Education XII: Locating a Target

[To read the entire series, go here.]

A key term in the neo-Alinsky community organizing toolbox is “target.” Fundamentally, in this model, if you don’t know what (or preferably who) your target is, then you can’t really act in a coherent way.

A target is “the institution or person who can make the change you want.”

Imagine, for example, that you are a leader in a local action group that wants to get sports re-funded in your district. The first thing you need to do is find out who makes that funding decision. And this involves not only figuring out how power works in your district, but also the different ways that sports teams might get funded within that system. For example, the superintendent might have the power to shift some funds to the sports teams. In other districts, the school board might need to decide. And the amount of money involved would be important, too. The smaller the amount of money, the lower on the totem pole the decision will probably be made. And generally you want to go for the weakest link, the target that it will be easiest to influence.

Figuring out the target is crucial, because once you figure out how the decision you want is made, you can start figuring out what might influence the person or institution that makes the decision. To act, you need to understand what motivates your target: its interests, fears, powers, etc.

Another example: About a year ago, a local conservative radio personality made a pretty repugnant statement about latinos in our city. So one or more groups decided to try to get this personality removed. They protested, and picketed in front of the radio station, and (as usual) basically had little or no impact. In this case, they knew in general terms who their target was (the radio station), but they don’t seem to have done much analysis of the internal power structure of the station, or even of its interests and concerns in more general institutional terms.

Around this time, a local organizer came to my class and used this case as an example. He asked the class what a radio station cared the most about, and after some prodding they gave him the answer he was looking for: money (although I thought some of their other answers were good, too). He then informed the class that the largest advertiser for this radio station was a local car dealership. He speculated: what if instead of doing yet another picket line, this group had targeted the car dealership? They could have first met with the owner of the dealership. If the dealership refused to pull its ads, they could have moved to the development of some creative actions. They could have sent fifty people a day to test-drive new cars, or to picket outside the dealership with signs declaring that it supported hate speech, until, hopefully, the owner caved.

In this specific case, this organizer was talking about what is sometimes called a “secondary target.” A secondary target is some powerful group or institution that can influence the target. The car dealership couldn’t make the decision to pull the personality, but had pretty impressive influence over the station’s management.

The point is not that this organizer was right or wrong. What’s important is that his process of analysis fits right within the neo-Alinsky tradition I’m talking about, here.

Another thing about a target is that, in most cases, it is helpful to pick a person rather than a group or institution. In this model, you want to generate some outrage about the actions the target has taken in its public role. And it’s easier to get pissed off at an actual person. It’s hard to get mad at the legislature as a group, for example. It’s too abstract. The speaker of the Assembly who is blocking your plan is easier to be upset at. But sometimes you are stuck attacking an abstraction rather than an actual individual. And sometimes it isn’t better to have an actual person. Every organizing campaign is unique.

The amount of power your group has will affect both the issue you choose to address (see this earlier post) and the target this issue requires you to influence. For example, as I have noted earlier, the organization I work most closely with is based in Milwaukee. We don’t have the power, alone, to really affect the legislature, especially since the key votes we need are Republican, and there aren’t a lot of Republicans we can directly affect. So this really limits our ability to work on school funding issues.

A couple more examples.

First let’s talk about the Iraq war for a moment. I was in Madison some months ago, and I drove by a group of three people waving signs against the Iraq war quite energetically on a streetcorner in the middle of campus. Now, I’m sure they felt much better about themselves after they did this. But I doubt that Madison is a hotbed of Iraq war support. And I doubt that a couple of signs are going to effect anyone that much anyway. Furthermore, the fact is that most of the nation doesn’t support the war anymore already.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against sign waving or big marches etc. And I’m sure they have some effect, especially if you can get a lot of people out in them. And there are many different ways to approach any problem. But it may be helpful to look at the Iraq war problem (e.g., in my opinion, how we can get out of it) from a neo-Alinsky perspective.

There is actually at least one group taking this approach. The group Americans Against Escalation in Iraq is sponsoring an Iraq Summer, in their words, “targeting 31 members of Congress and 10 Senators to bring a safe end to the war in Iraq.” They have tried to figure out which lawmakers are most likely to change their minds about the war, and they have put their $$ into influencing these lawmakers by threatening their interests. They have figured out who can make the change they want, and they are focusing their resources on the individuals who can make it.

Second, let’s talk about NCATE’s decision to drop “social justice” from its list of “dispositions.” I have to admit, I’m not really up on the details of this controversy, but let’s look at it from a neo-Alinsky perspective anyway. To start with, who is the “target”? This isn’t clear to me, but it might be Arthur Wise, the president, or it might be the people (or key persons) on the task force that Jim Horn said was looking at this issue. Or it might be “NCATE” more generally.

You might say, well, it’s not really fair to target individuals on a task force or Arthur Wise. They’re just doing their jobs. And they may be your friends. From a neo-Alinsky perspective, however, this answer is part of the problem. In taking on particular roles, they have inserted themselves into the public space in a particular way and they should be held accountable for their public roles. Part of what organizing does is transform roles people would like to keep somewhat “private” into more public stances. And it’s not personal. Or, at least, it’s not supposed to be. Remember, “no permanent enemies, no permanent friends.” (I’ll speak in more detail about “public” and “private” from this perspective in a later post.)

Once you have chosen a target, you need to think about the specific interests and motivations and fears of the target as you have framed it. For example, one of NCATE’s key interests as an institution is to have universities that are interested in being accredited. What if a number of universities were willing to sign a letter refusing to re-accredit with NCATE unless the disposition were added back? What if a group of powerful professors at key institutions were willing to sign such a letter? Of course, what you can do depends on the particular resources your organization (or potential organization?) has.

You may discover that you just plain don’t have the right set of resources to effectively influence the person or institution you would most like to target. If this is the case, maybe it’s time to face reality. Maybe it’s time to switch your issue and pick another target.

In any case, if you are going to act, it is almost always helpful to figure out who the key targets are (or might be) and what motivates them, regardless of the set of strategies you will eventually end up using.

Community Organizing and Urban Education: The Series

Aaron Schutz's webpage: http://educationaction.org

The series has been relocated to my webpage.

Community Organizing and Urban Education VIII: Fracturing Across Lines of Race and Class

[To read the entire series, go here.]

In my limited experience in Milwaukee with MOVE--a congregational organizing group that work with the Gamaliel Foundation which operates nationally and internationally—the larger institutionalized community organizing groups have significant issues with race and class that they don’t deal with effectively. (Later I’ll talk about how intermediary organizations like Gamaliel work with local groups). From what I have read elsewhere, this reluctance to focus specifically on race and class in favor of more pragmatic and general visions of “self interest” and coalition building is a problem with mainline community organizing groups more generally. This has apparently led to the development of new groups outside of the larger national groups that deal more directly with issues of racial identity, nationalism etc.

In its early days, MOVE was primarily made up of inner-city churches and the participants were mostly people of color. Shortly before I joined, the group decided that if they were going to have enough power to really make a difference, they were going to need to expand their membership to include churches outside the central city. Many mostly white middle-class churches joined.

What happened then is probably pretty predictable. As the whites came in, the people of color began voting with their feet.

One key problem is that middle-class, white professionals have a fundamentally different discursive style than lower-income people of color. While this issue seems to be one more of class than of race, it is important to understand that being middle-class and black on the edge of the central city places one in a much more financially and culturally marginal position than is common among middle-class professionals, as Patillo-McCoy, among others, has pointed out. So even though, as I noted earlier, it’s true that most members of congregational organizing groups come from middle-class mainline churches, what it means to be middle class, and how that links to particular discursive and cultural practices is much more complex than this observation might indicate.

A couple of stories.

For a while I attended the mostly white and mostly upper-middle-class (in culture if not in $$) Unitarian church in the city, and we mobilized a number of Unitarians to attend a talking session with some local school-board members. A number of black churches also sent members, and participants of color significantly outnumbered the number of whites. This larger groups broke up into smaller dialogue groups to come up with issue to present to the whole meeting. As I walked around, I noted that nearly all of the groups ended up having a Unitarian as their note-taker and facilitator. So when the groups presented back, most of the presenters were whites. Afterwards, predictably, the whites wondered aloud why the people of color didn’t participate as much as the whites, and the whites complained that they didn’t want to take over.

This is an incredibly common outcome when priveliged whites and less priveliged people of color come together in dialogue. As Eric H. F. Law puts it in a wonderful little book, people with privelige assume that their voice ought to count, and just naturally jump in to get heard. People with less power are less likely to make that assumption. Then the powerful wonder, “why don’t ‘those people’ talk?” And the less powerful don’t feel welcomed and they don’t come back.

There is surprisingly little in the literature about how to deal with the inevitable power differentials that emerge when priveliged whites and less priveliged people of color come together in dialogue. Many solutions involve highly trained facilitators or intensive training, but community organizing groups are much too fluid and resource limited to allow this to happen in most cases. Law came up with a process that seems to work for groups engaged in cross-cultural dialogue, but it seems to me and to other organizers I’ve talked with to be too cubersome to work in action oriented settings like community organizing meetings.

The point is not that nothing works. Instead, I am beginning to think (and others better informed about this issue may correct me) that it may simply be too dificult to find procedures that will allow equal dialogue in such settings without prohibitive amounts of educational and facilitational superstructure. The fact is that even though I know all of this, I often find myself butting in and interrupting as the white male that I am. I have real trouble even training myself out of this.

There is some evidence from classrooms and elsewhere, however, that people with less power tend to feel more empowered if they are representatives of external groups. (Of course, this idea fits quite well with more general organizing perspectives on collective power). In MOVE. I have recommended a number of times that we try to recreate spaces where there aren’t many priveliged whites, where inner-city folks can build their own sense of collective identity and then send representatives to meetings with the surrounding white churches. I have heard that there are other examples of organizations with a “black caucus” or “inner-city caucus”, but I haven’t had time to seek them out. For a range of reasons, this hasn’t happened in MOVE.

Although I haven’t been to many large MOVE events recently, I remember a couple of years ago going to training meetings and noticing that the number of participants of color was falling quickly. At one point, I heard a powerful black pastor trying explain to a group of mostly whites why “his people” weren’t coming, which also involved a lecture about the different ways his community was structured, but it didn’t seem like others really heard what he was trying to say (and I’m sure I didn’t totally get it either).

This brings us back to the Gamaliel Foundation’s reluctance to deal with these issues directly. They apparently don’t want to “get into it.” In classic Alinsky form (although there is evidence that Alinsky was more savvy than some of his followers) they try to overcome these issues simply by finding common areas of interest that will allow different groups to come together. I vividly remember a meeting where the head of the Gamaliel Foundation stood in front of a large group of members berating us for our inability to get as many people out as MOVE had done in its early days. At no point did he point out that most of his audience was white, in contrast to the early days when almost everyone would have been black.

Astonishing.

Community Organizing and Urban Education III: The Limits of Churches as Representatives of Impoverished Communities

[To read the entire series, go here.]

In the last installment of this series I explained why most of the largest community organizing groups in America are made up of coalitions of churches. Here I discuss why churches can be problematic representatives of communities, especially impoverished ones. Again, I think it is important for educators to understand the tensions involved in different approaches to community organizing because, despite their limits, they represent one of the most promising avenues for supporting struggling urban schools.

I want to emphasize that I am still very much a learner in the arena of religious sociology. I would welcome corrections from readers.

Much like schools, churches in America are extremely segregated by race and class. Unlike schools, however, church segregation is less a result of geographical boundaries than of the character of individual churches themselves. For our purposes, it is helpful to focus on two groups of churches: mostly middle-class, mid-sized mainline congregations and (especially among African Americans) usually smaller, mostly working-class Pentecostal/Holiness (often storefront) churches.

In general, congregational organizing groups are made up in large part of mainline churches. Why is this the case?

First, from a religious standpoint mainline churches are more likely to see broad, mundane social concerns as a part of their responsibility as (mostly) Christian people. In America, it is in these churches that a “liberation theology” focused on issues like educational reform makes the most coherent sense. In fact, the class and education level of the pastor and of the congregation is directly related to the likelihood that a congregation will participate in traditional social justice activities.

In the Pentecostal/Holiness, or “sanctified” tradition, the focus seems to be more on engaging directly with the holy spirit in one’s life. These churches are “in the world but not of it.” It is important to emphasize, as McRoberts and Sanders do, that the sanctified tradition is in many ways just as interested in social justice and in the creation of an egalitarian society as are mainline churches. But they seem more likely to focus on engaging individuals in religious transformation and on direct services more directly related to religious actualization as opposed to concrete action for systematic social change. It is also usually the case that these churches have fewer resources to expend on non-church functions.

Second, the dominance of a middle-class discourse is, to some extent, a self-perpetuating phenomenon. People who “belong” in the congregational organizing group I work with, MOVE, speak a certain way and, despite important differences, often worship in a particular way. While progressive whites may sometimes be uncomfortable with more expressive mainline African American and other traditions, these are not as alien as the practices of sanctified churches. In general, a poor person without much education is going to quickly feel out of place within a context dominated by those with at least the basics of familiarity with the dominant discourse. Even less privileged members of participating mainline congregations may feel uncomfortable in this setting.

As you can see, these differences are much more complex than simple distinctions between “conservative” and “liberal” can capture.

The class segregation of congregational organizing groups is often difficult for outsiders to detect. In part this is because churches are increasingly unlikely to draw from identifiable geographic areas. Many inner-city churches, for example, have mostly middle-class congregations that live nowhere near the actual church, and there are still white congregations (think of Catholics tied to historic churches) who worship in areas where the racial and class composition has shifted. Thus, the location of a church often says little or nothing about especially the class make-up of congregants.

Even insiders generally seem unaware of the extent to which an organization like MOVE represents a fairly narrow segment of the population. At a MOVE Education Committee meeting this week, for example, an African American reverend suggested that we survey members of our congregations to get a sense of the kind of changes parents face in the public schools. I had to tell him that we’d actually tried this a few years ago (with the same intention), and had discovered that almost none of the congregation members surveyed had children attending the most struggling schools in the city. Apparently, they have enough cultural and social capital to negotiate the intricacies of the schooling bureaucracy to get their kids in better schools.

In general, then, congregational groups represent a range of segments of the middle-class, including relatively few of those who are actually suffering the most from the effects of poverty and geographical segregation. You will not usually find a single mother working a second shift job for $7.00 an hour at a MOVE planning meeting (although she may come to a rally or a large public meeting). And even if you do, it is not likely that she will return next time. Interestingly, these class issues are rarely noted, in my experience, in writings about congregational organizing.

Of course, this raises important questions about how much even congregational organizing groups based mostly in the inner city actually “represent” these communities.

There is more to be said about the problematic ways class and race intersect in congregation-based community organizing. Here, I have focused on social class. In a later post I will examine how class issues can intersect with issues of race to produce destructive patterns of racial exclusion in congregational groups like MOVE.

Community Organizing and Urban Education, Part I: Introducing MOVE

[To read the entire series, go here.]

For the last six years or so, I have worked with a local community organizing group on their Education Committee. MOVE (a pseudonym) is now one of a number of allied organizations in Wisconsin, and operates under the umbrella of the Gamaliel Foundation,which has local chapters in many different states (the other large organizing groups in America are the IAF, PICO, and ACORN). MOVE currently has 37 different congregations as members with a wide range of Christian and even a few non-Christian groups. (image)

I didn’t know anything about community organizing when I came to Milwaukee. But I had been studying a range of different theories of agency and democratic social action, and I was increasingly unsatisfied with what I found. At the same time as I was visiting the Unitarian church, looking for a community to join, I heard about MOVE, and was one of the people that encouraged the Unitarians to join. Soon after, I attended Gamaliel’s week-long leader training, where we were taught some basic concepts and language relevant to organizing. (I was yelled at and managed to completely embarrass myself). And I was hooked. This seemed like a potential avenue for actually fighting for social change instead of just chatting about it, and it also seemed to provide an opportunity to reach across Milwaukee’s sharp racial and class divide.

While I have been part of MOVE we have worked to increase the number of low class-size schools supported by the state in Milwaukee (we were quite successful). We fought against efforts to eliminate parents’ rights to bus their children to non-neighborhood schools (almost single-handedly, MOVE forced the district to maintain these). And we worked on an effort to insure adequate funding for all schools (as I will describe later, this was a miserable—and predictable—failure). Currently we have shifted our focus a little and are working to improve health servMilwaukee Milwauk Public Schools (MPS). Just last week, we were instrumental in getting the state Department of Health and Family Services to put 27 new nurses in MPS schools (a three million dollar commitment), succeeding where a range of other groups have largely failed in their efforts over the last few years.

I plan to use this blog as an opportunity to write about my experience in MOVE: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I am writing as a researcher and as a participant, but it is important to emphasize that I have never made any effort to systematically conduct research on MOVE. These will be my personal reflections, drawing both on my experiences and on my broad reading about organizing.

In no particular order, topics I plan to discuss over the next few months include:

• Why churches? A different vision the church/state relationship
  
• How are organizing groups organized?
• Racial tensions (or, “white people can’t shut up”)
  
• Leadership training
  
• The language and key practices
  
• The ideal vs. the reality
  
• A different kind of democracy (or, “is this really democracy?”)
  
• What scholars can contribute
  
• Cutting an issue
  
• How to cut the wrong issue
  

For those who are interested, some key texts about organizing in general and organizing for educational change in specific include:

• Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals. (The classic work about organizing from the iconoclastic organizer. Nearly all major organizing groups in America have emerged out of the Alinsky tradition.)
  
• Warren, Dry Bones Rattling. (A nice overview of how organizing has developed from Alinsky’s day.)
  
• Shirley, Community Organizing for Urban School Reform. (Even after ten years, still the best book on school-focused organizing.)
  
• Chambers, Roots for Radicals. (A more contemplative book by one of Alinsky’s key apprentices, now head of the national organization Alinsky founded, the IAF [Industrial Areas Foundation].)
  
• Ginwright, Noguera, and Cammarota (Eds.), Beyond Resistance. (Just published, and the first significant book on youth organizing.)
  
• Anyon, Radical Possibilities. (An extended argument about the importance of community action and broader economic change for effective school reform.)