How to Spark a Social Movement: Thinking Outside the Box

Some "blue sky" thinking about how we could move from where we are after Craig's uplifting review of Arnie Duncan's career. Crossposted from Open Left.

What Would a Movement Organization Look Like?

Let's imagine, as concretely and pragmatically as possible, what a movement-sparking organization would look like in America. Despite its limitations, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee provides at least a starting place. SNCC had a central hub, but it looked across the South for locations where their cadre of organizers might be able to spark resistance. Like SNCC, then, our movement organization would have a central location, led by someone with a broad vision of possibilities for social change in America. Note, however, that most of what I describe could be mounted by a local organization as well.

I am assuming, as I did in Part I, that social movements are almost always sparked by local efforts. The success and vision of local efforts provide models for replication in other areas. When one local area makes the impossible possible--as King and SNCC did in Montgomery and Birmingham, or as the sit-in students did in North Carolina--leaders elsewhere begin to think differently. In a world of limited resources, a focus on the nation all at once seems unlikely to be effective. Another "March on Washington"? This wouldn't provide the kind of social disruption that Piven and Cloward argue is necessary to bring the system to the breaking point, to the point where some kind of change on the part of the establishment is unavoidable.

The paid staff of this organization would consist of a few--perhaps only one or two--creative and visionary organizers, an overall director, and perhaps one support staff person. These would be people with long experience in neighborhood organizing who have not become locked into the pre-set, narrow approaches of current organizing groups. They might include, for example, an experienced ACORN organizer who has become disillusioned and feels constricted by the standardized ACORN model. These people would be educators as much as actors, people with the capacity to inspire and connect deeply with individuals from many different walks of life. People like Ella Baker --likely less impressive, but also less ideological, less committed, for example, to enforcing their own vision of "real" democracy.

Sauron's All-Seeing Eye

The attention of central staff would sweep out across the nation, seeking out indications of cities where the beginnings of a movement might be sparked. When they found likely locations, they would do some initial investigation, seeing if there was enough support to provide a realistic toe-hold for a movement-sparking effort. Only cities where sufficient local organizational sponsorship and enough of a financial commitment to show that these organizations were willing to share in the risk (but not fully pay for it) would be on the final list.

Once one or more locations were chosen, this organization would begin to recruit widely for young volunteers (in their early 20s). It would ask for at least a year-long commitment and hope for two, offering only a small monthly stipend and room and board. Recruitment might include outreach to organizations like the Lutheran Volunteers . The recent national DART recruitment of new organizers also provides a useful model.

Staff would sift through applications looking for people who seem like they have the "fire in the belly" to work 14 hour days, packed four to a room in a communal apartment and the humility to listen instead of tell. Those with potential would be brought together at national training sessions and their numbers winnowed. Efforts would be made to balance middle-class and working-class youth, and of course diversity would be a key goal.

Then, for chosen city, a lead organizer and 10-15 volunteers (assuming some will drop out) would move into a large apartment together.

How to Start Organizing?

Teams of two or three students would each be given a particular low-income area to focus on. Instead of trying to recreate the wheel, these teams would each be based out of a community organizing group or church or other relevant organization in their area. At least part of their time would be spent serving the specific needs of that organization, although there would need to be clarity about exactly how much time they would be expected to give (this would create tensions, but that may be inevitable).

My own pastor, who co-chairs the jobs committee of our local congregational group, suggested an addition to this model: finding a young pastor--hopefully, in my opinion, from a charismatic tradition--to add to the mix. This person would recruit in the low-income pentecostal and holiness churches that, because of their focus on "faith not works," are left out of traditional progressive congregational organizing (which, for reasons I discuss here , focuses almost entirely on mainline middle-class churches). The goal of this pastor would be to find, if not pastors, at least congregation members willing to join the organization and spread the message among their members.

More generally, the job of volunteer organizers would be both simple and difficult. Their task would be to get to "know" that neighborhood better than the people who live there. They would go from door to door, barbershop to storefront church, speaking with people, developing relationships, sussing out local leaders. They would read old newspapers about the area and learn about the local elected officials and trace out local tensions and concerns.

They would seek to recruit people to join a local organization, and they would seek out local issues around which they could mobilize action and resistance. But they would not make the hard, quick sell of an ACORN organizer. (It would be helpful, here, to distinguish more carefully what I am doing from the ACORN model , but that must wait.) I could also imagine book clubs, video screenings and discussions, weekly dinners for talk and companionship, and more. Creative uses of new social technology would be part of this. In different ways organizers would seek to fan the flames of discontent at the same time as they fostered webs of interconnection. A core aspect of these efforts would include training in nonviolent action. And the volunteers would be given extensive freedom to experiment and make mistakes.

The aim would be to form long-term commitments, not short-term actions. The aim would be to foster local leadership and community.

Most importantly, the organizers would seek out those in the city who would be willing to put their lives on the line for their families and communities. While the volunteers would talk to many, they would aim to fine a cadre of, say, 50 individuals that could provide an example of a different way to assert their humanity in the face of a state that has lost any interest in their futures. Again, this is fundamentally different from the community organizing approach, which focuses on mobilizing large numbers and partly as a result is unable to engage in truly disruptive actions given the level of commitment they can generate in such groups.

The volunteers would also participate in weekly meetings with their peers to share experiences and ideas in addition to the natural sharing that would happen as a result of living together, planning meals, etc. And they would participate in reading groups to give them more depth in the ways people have thought about organizing, power, and social action.

In addition to walking the streets with the volunteers, the lead organizer would be meeting with established local leaders and leaders uncovered by the volunteers, seeking to map out possible movement issues and actions.

Sparking a Movement

Cadres should keep testing for disruptive protest possibilities. Watch for indications that people are ready for defiant challenges . . . . Adopt a stance that points toward political possibilities, that gives hope, and that encourages people to act on their grievances. . . .

Cadres should use mobilizing tactics to expand disruptive dissensus during times of turmoil. . . . Organizers should scour social contexts for unnotices opportunities for disruptive action. . . .

[And cadres] should lead. They should engage in "exemplary" actions (e.g., leading mass arrests) in order to exacerbate institutional disruptions.

--Piven and Cloward, 1993

At some point, the lead organizer, key local leaders, and the volunteers would decide it was time to take a risk. While they would have likely already engaged in more standard organizing efforts, they would move to more serious disruptive actions, drawing together the most committed members they had located. In contrast with the community organizing approach, these movement organizers may need to be willing to lead as well as facilitate. They will need to be at least willing to put their own bodies on the line and model the risk they want others to take. They must be ready to be arrested or teargassed or threatened.

The general aim with these actions would be to throw a (nonviolent) wrench into the status quo operation of oppressive organizations. The organization's leaders would keep a close eye on the wider response of less committed members of their organization and the wider public. They would seek to extend on efforts that successfully attracted outside participants. The goal would not be to simply get their own people to actions, but to change the tenor of life in the city, to wake some portion of the larger population up to new possibilities for social transformation.

And that's as far as I can go in terms of describing the organization.

But before I conclude, let me take a moment to say something more generally about the kinds of issues that are likely to spark a movement and the kind of work necessary to surface these issues.

Political Education: Need vs. Dignity and Justice as a Motivation for Action

You control our lives and so far you’ve treated us like slaves. You’re responsible for the health and welfare of our children but you’re not interested in how we live. . . . It’s time to treat us like human beings.

--Etta Horn, National Welfare Rights Organization , testimony before Congress, 1969

Belief in one’s dignity as a man or a woman is one of the strongest motivating factors; from it comes the refusal to be used or abused, the assertion that "I been pushed around too long, and I ain’t gonna be pushed around no more."

--Si Kahn, How People Get Power

Union organizers will tell you that strikes are much more likely to be sparked by an assault on workers' dignity than by cuts in pay. Rick Fantasia found, for example, that this kind of mistreatment is what produces the majority of wildcat strikes. Similarly, the nationwide struggle of the National Welfare Rights Organization in the 1970s was driven as much, if not more, by the the degrading treatment poor women experienced at welfare offices as by the needs of their families. In fact, when welfare shifted to standard cash awards, eliminating the humiliating discretion of social workers, mobilization fell even though this came at a time when cuts were made in the actual amounts poor women on welfare were getting.

People are not usually mobilized in large numbers for the long haul by abstractions of inequality, nor even around a sense of their own desperate need. People are mobilized by a sense of injustice, by a sense that they have been treated badly, that their core dignity has been tarnished by someone or some institution. They are also mobilized by a commitment to broader visions of justice, often arising out of religious convictions.

The jobs education issue, then, must become transformed from a question of need to a question of rights and injustice, to a refusal of the larger society to treat the unemployed like human beings. Perhaps most importantly, the jobless must be given opportunities to stop blaming themselves for their inability to find work.

Some of this learning would take place in the context of action. But it also seems to me that, as in the South during the civil rights movement, a movement-sparking effort would necessarily involve some level of ongoing political education. Hopelessness must become transformed into righteous anger for a movement to emerge. And this would be part of the task of the volunteers.

Of course, experienced adults don't want kids telling them what to think. Instead, in the tradition of Ella Baker and Myles Horton and Paulo Freire , the volunteers would need to create contexts in which people could discuss and read and watch and come to new understandings of themselves and the structure of the world around them.

(By the way, one of the limits of Baker and Horton's approach was their aversion to mass action and leader-driven organizing. Education cannot simply be in service of more education or individual action or small group engagement. Only a leader-based mass action led by a cadre of committed militants rooted in and driven by a vibrant grassroots constituency has much hope of sparking a social movement. And, in fact, there is extensive evidence that SNCC was hamstrung in many ways by its commitment to what I have argued elsewhere was Baker's essentially middle-class vision of collaboration and leaderless social action.)

Summing Up

I said at the start that I would try to envision a pragmatic approach to sparking a movement in this country. What I have written is meant as a contribution to a discussion, and I am not under the illusion that I have found "the answer" or even necessarily a particularly good answer.

However, I do believe the model I have described above has some pragmatic potential, at least as a discussion starter.

It would not, for example, require enormous amounts of funding. It would work just fine with only a couple of paid staff and a few "angel" donors. There simply isn't and likely will never be the kind of funding necessary to hire a large number of paid movement organizers.

In fact, the limits on paid staff might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. For a movement effort, you want organizers who are there because of the work, not the pay. And a paid staff creates a gulf between the organizers and the often (but not always) quite poor people they are trying to organize.

(Organizer positions, by the way, have generally been taken by the middle class. Ironically, those who get the "jobs" out of organizing the poor are usually not from poor backgrounds themselves. Perhaps we should not try to provide more than a small number of the most creative and effective organizers "real" jobs. The middle class is perfectly capable of getting good jobs elsewhere. If they want to organize in poor communities, maybe they need to "volunteer". See some initial thoughts about this tension here .)

By focusing on youth as organizers (although some older adults might also be volunteers), the model is less likely to get trapped in old ways of thinking about how organizing "should" be done. At the same time, the guidance of a lead organizer and other local organizers, can prevent them from going too far "off the rails."

This brings the challenge of turnover--but I'm willing to bet that enough of a core group would be willing to stay for two years to maintain continuity. And we are talking about sparking a movement, not building a long-term organization (although that would likely also be the result locally). If they can't pull it off in two years, they probably can't do it period. Maybe even a year is enough time to know.

Of course this raises important issues about how others will view the commitment of organizers, and about how to transition out in a productive manner that does not lead to the disollution of what the organizers have nurtured. I don't have a clear answer to this.

The model also brings with it the problem of "outsider" vs "insider" organizers and volunteers. Again, I'm don't really have a clear answer. Should the volunteers all be local? Should they all be from outside? I've framed my argument around "outsiders" but I'm actually inclined to argue for some combination.

In the end, however, the "who" is probably more important than the "where from." People who are willing to listen, who are willing to check their arrogance at the door and walk with humility can likely find acceptance over time. And in our disorganized, shifting poor urban communities, it is not clear to me how "insider" the insiders will likely be. Just because you grow up someplace doesn't mean you understand it. Even the insiders will need, in anthropological terms, to "make the familiar strange" if they are to revision what is possible in their cities and neighborhoods.

So that's my thought experiment.

Three Progressivisms: Trying to Find Logic in Silver's "Rationalist/Radical" Dichotomy

Crossposted and slightly edited from Open Left.

This is a belated follow-up to Paul Rosenberg and David Sirota’s critiques of Nate Silver’s “Rationalist vs. Radical” progressivism. The dichotomies Silver laid out include:

Rationalist vs. Radical

Empirical vs. Normative

Sees politics as a battle of ideas vs. Sees politics as a battle of wills

Technocratic vs. Populist

Prone to elitism vs. Prone to demagoguery

Prone to co-optation vs. Difficult to organize

Optimistic vs. Pessimistic

Conversational vs. Action Oriented

The ensuing discussion focused mostly on how progressives think, or frame the world. I want to look, instead, at something different and potentially more important: how progressives have historically conceptualized ACTION.

In ongoing historical work towards a book I’m calling Social Class, Social Action, and the Failure of Progressive Democracy, I argue that there are actually three distinct forms of progressivism, all drawing from different interrelated aspects of middle-class culture: Administrative, Collaborative, and Personalist progressives. As with any categorizations, these have their own problems, but I think reflect key historical realities.

Not only do Silver’s comparisons miss this three-fold complexity, but he also mixes in working-class models of social action as well.

Below I lay out these three different progressive camps, and then return to Silver’s dichotomy, adding in the working-class influence as well.

Administrative Progressivism

This is the model that mostly won the day in the bureaucracies of the world after the turn of the 20th century. This is an expert model—“we know more than you so we should tell you what to do.”

At best, the administrative progressives envisioned a paternal process of social change, as those few who know best create a better world for the ignorant masses. At worst they bought into the “scientific management” movement promoted by Taylor, in which workers became “hands” and middle-class managers became the “minds” of industrial work. Even Taylor, however, seemed to believe that this mind/hands model would end up being best for everyone—because it was the most efficient model, everyone would end up getting more for less.

Collaborative Progressives

This group drew from the models of progressive classrooms, professional associations, and the less hierarchical relationships between white-collar workers. They envisioned a society designed around the collaborative method, seeking a flat “democratic” society in which everyone could participate equally in the development of a better world.

John Dewey, the most sophisticated proponent, acknowledged that he couldn’t figure out how this would work—in fact he showed pretty conclusively in The Public and Its Problems that it couldn’t work. But he and other collaborative progressives were unwilling to give up on their essentially utopian visions. He kept hoping that even though no one had ever been able to solve the problem of how a local model of collaboration would provide a structure to organize an enormous society, someone might solve it in the future.

Why wouldn’t he and other collaborative progressives give up in the face of overwhelming evidence that their vision was unworkable?

The crucial problem was one of social lag. If they gave in to a vision of the world that assumed the existence of unending conflict was an inevitable part of human society at least for the foreseeable future, as unions and other working-class movements did, they would have to teach people social practices that would ill prepare them to achieve the kind of utopia they wanted. Teaching people in society to "fight" would point them away from the kinds of collaborative practices they valued, and actually make it more difficult (perhaps impossible) to ever achieve their utopia.

Thus, in their classrooms and elsewhere, they were willing to take the risk (for the working class, among others) that not teaching them to fight in solidarity as mass collectives would doom them to long term oppression.

Personalist Progressives

The personalists emerged out of the romantic stream of thought in America. Like collaborative progressives, they sought to develop egalitarian communities, but they were less interested in joint work and collective action. Instead, they sought to develop social contexts in which each individual engaged authentically with every other, and educational context that sought to foster individual expression to the fullest extent possible. The personalists also envisioned a society built on this model, but didn’t worry too much about the specifics. They hoped that social change would just “happen” if they created the right kind of persons. But they mostly didn’t sweat the details too much.

Where the collaborative progressives focused on the need for people to work together on joint projects, the personalists focused on the importance of allowing people to actualize their individuality within egalitarian communities.

In their education and in their social theory, the personalists focus on a world without charismatic leaders, without leaders at all in the sense that a working-class union or other standard action organization would understand them. Theirs is a view of individual actualization within a "beloved community"--a term used by SNCC in the south, taken up by SDS in the North, and drawn from one of the 1920s personalists, Randolph Bourne. Interestingly, these folks were not professors but independent intellectuals, as were the writers of the 1960s, for whom the key thinker was Paul Goodman. There are some fascinating similarities across these two eras that have not been fully explored.

This romantic vision emerged most powerfully in the 20th century in the 1920s in the work of the "young intellectuals": Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford (who was active in the 60s) and Waldo Frank. Mostly forgotten. Then it reemerged in the 1960s in the highly intellectual and anti-leader organizing models of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), for whom the key intellectual influences were Ella Baker and Paul Goodman.

The evidence of the impact of SNCC in the South is that it did have a somewhat transformative impact on what African Americans in some areas saw as "possible" for them, and did create a strong base for future organizing in some areas, but it did not (and was not supposed to) lead to mass action. In Birmingham, actually SNCC was reduced to begging Martin Luther King (who they disdained, and referred to as "the Lawd" in reference to their opposition to charismatic leaders) to "lead" people on marches. They didn't have the capacity to do so themselves. Importantly SNCC's effectiveness in pursuing its "beloved community" model largely resulted from their fairly sophisticated combination of collaborative and personalist visions.

In the North, in working-class white neighborhoods, SDS created the almost completely ineffectual ERAP organizations. These failed in large part because they were much more personalist and less “pragmatic” than SNCC, seeking to impose their leaderless vision on those they worked with. They had less of a focus on the pragmatics of joint action. Some groups could hardly ever get anything done--at one point according to Miller, they spent two days discussing whether they should take a day off and go to the beach. An iconic photograph shows one of their key "leaders" gazing intently into the lens, with everyone else falling asleep around her.

In fact, it is hard to imagine particularly effective, strictly personalist political movements. The communes of the counter-culture were probably the best examples of the social implications of personalism. It's no accident that personalists tend not to talk very concretely about social change. (At best, thinkers like Goodman embraced a kind of privileged anarchism, mostly evacuated of any socialist vision.)

Back to Silver

From the perspective I'm discussing, here, it seems clear that Silver is mixing different kinds of progressivism. For example, it is the personalists and not the collaborative or the administrative progressives that are “difficult to organize.” Other aspects of his dichotomy seem to refer to the administrative progressives. All progressives, for example, tend to be optimistic to a fault, although the administratives, of course, have little faith in “the people.”

From the way he frames his dichotomy, it seems like Silver is drawing from a particular interpretation of the experience of the 1960s. And his framing not only misunderstands the complexity of progressivism, it mixes in aspects of working-class culture as well. For example, no progressives ever saw politics as “a battle of wills.” Nor did the progressives ever try to “marshal an army” for social change as he later argues.

To some extent, Silver is mixing up the "personalist" progressives of the SDS and early SNCC era, and the later dogmatic leaders of the Black Power movement and groups like the Weathermen. It is informative to note that the Black Power movement was fundamentally (and explicitly) an urban working-class movement, and that it was the working-class that emerged as increasingly influential in the South (in the form of Deacons for Defense, for example). The early personalists were quite optimistic--they only became cynical later on, and that's when their strategic approach shifted--and many of them simply "dropped out."

And it also raises questions about what exactly Silver means by progressivism. In his discussion of his dichotomy, he equates Marxist perspectives with that of the progressives. But the progressives, as I understand them, have never really been Marxist. As fairly comfortable middle-class professionals, they have never had much interest in attacking capitalism directly. Were the Marxist ideologues who emerged late in the 1960s “progressives?” I don’t know the history of that aspect well enough to say, but I doubt it.

In this later post, he argues that he was actually talking about "populists" as his "radical" progressives, but that doesn't really capture the distinctions he laid out either. See Paul's detailed discussions of populism here and elsewhere.

Silver is mixing so much up in his analysis that I’m not really sure what he’s talking about.

If people are interested in a more nuanced discussion of intersections between different kinds of progressivism and working-class visions of action in the Civil Rights Movement, you can see this draft case study chapter from my book. Part of my goal in the case study is to show how these abstractions break down and become intertwined in unexpected ways as they play out in the real world.

Contesting Progressivism: Discretion as Oppression

[This is a follow-up to this earlier forum post. I know many blog members, especially, are caught up with AERA prep, and it’s pretty long (and, dense, yes, okay) anyway. But what the heck.]

A core value of progressive visions of democracy is flexibility in response to the shifting realities of life in a complex society. True democracy, progressives believed, required capacities for constant and fluid adjustment to the unpredictable contingencies of life in modern society. Dewey and others argued, for example, that the U.S. Constitution should be revisited over time and freely, democratically adapted to new conditions that would emerge over time. The slowness of cultural change in response to the much faster shifts of a quickly industrializing society was a key problem for progressives.

In a truly democratic society, the progressives imagined, collections of unique individuals would be engaged in a constant collaborative effort to create a better society in response to the shifting sands of social change.

From the perspective of progressivism, then, permanence of any kind—especially social structures like rules and cultural practices—was a barrier to the emergence of a truly democratic society. In fact, combating this “lag” was a core motivation for Dewey’s vision of democratic education.

When everyone in democratic associations like the ones they imagined is equal, it may be reasonable to see this as a vision of real freedom for all. However, in reality no social contexts are ever totally equal and, more problematically, most contexts where people meet each other across cultural and economic gulfs are quite unequal.

In unequal contexts, this vision of flexibility becomes something different. It becomes what middle-class professionals have long fought for: discretion for an elite with the individual and collective right (through their associations) to make relatively independent decisions that effect the lives of others with less power. To a large extent, in fact, one can equate the need for “professions” in the first place with this need for “professional judgment” in situations that cannot be predefined ahead of time. To the extent that bureaucrats embedded within larger organizations maintain some level of discretion, they can (and would generally like to) see themselves as “professionals” as well.

It is equally helpful to see the reduction of the “discretion” of professionals as one of the core aims of working-class and impoverished social movements. For example, unions have long fought to establish the “work rules” that so often bedevil middle-class professionals and bureaucrats who see them as unreasonable constraints. In their contracts, unions frequently seek to reduce the discretion of management, creating restrictions on what workers can and cannot be told to do, and these restrictions usually restrict workers’ own decision-making at the same time.

Flexibility, those on the bottom have long known, is rarely a gift. Instead, it is often a burden, a tool for oppression wielded by those who have more power. In fact, what professionals generally want in an unequal world are rules that restrict the power of those below them but that leave them with maximum discretion to respond “intelligently” to contingency. What workers have frequently sought are rules that reduce this discretion, sometimes by transferring authority for decisions to them, but more frequently by writing decisions “into stone” at least until the next contract.

(Teachers, caught, as they are, uncomfortably between the positions of “workers” and “professionals”, often struggle to negotiate this in their own union contracts.)

If there are no set rules then the conditions of labor and life end up in the hands of those with the power to decide at any point what should happen. From this perspective, such rules are real accomplishments to be defended at high cost, even when they may seem to have become outdated. Throwing rules open for deliberation raises the possibility that these accomplishments may be lost. In this context, an imperfect constitution, an imperfect affirmative action system, an imperfect labor contract all can seem much safer than unpredictable deliberative contexts in which control can easily be lost and in which new rules may unpredictably alter the balance of power that had cost so much to achieve. (Critical race theorists have made this point as well).

A good example of the ways social movements of the less powerful can often be interpreted at least partly as struggles against professional “discretion,” can be found in the early struggles over welfare laws in America.

In the early days of public “welfare,” a great deal of discretionary power was put into the hands of middle-class social workers. And these social workers would often make culturally and racially discriminatory assumptions about the lives of their “clients,” using their discretion to try to mandate changes in the direction of more “standard” middle class values. These judgments were often perceived by clients as insulting and demeaning, but those unwilling to conform might quickly find their families out on the street without support.

The welfare rights movement successfully fought to change this system. They demanded strict rules that would define ahead of time who was and was not eligible for benefits, removing nearly all decision-making power from those who had previously judged them from on high.

Of course, these strict rules created their own set of challenges, which, in part, led to the dismantling of the system and to a range of pernicious consequences (although these were frequently exaggerated and misdescribed by conservatives). Despite these limitations, the welfare rules achieved by welfare rights activists did represent a great advance over the conditions recipients had experienced previously. To some extent, in fact, these limitations were integral to the benefits the new system brought.

(New visions of flexible work-groups that harvest the creativity of low-level workers in the same manner that these structures harvest the skills of professionals have been attempted in a range of different businesses. Most of the evidence indicates, however, that the modernist hierarchical model remains the norm even when lip-service is given to this model.)

The only way one could imagine flexibility could becoming beneficial to the relatively powerless would be if one could guarantee the existence of durable institutional structures that could constantly represent their interests. But while power is a collective achievement for those on the bottom, it is located more in individuals at higher levels. It is difficult to see how these collectives with limited “attention” could keep track of the myriad decisions being made by diffuse numbers of bureaucrats and professionals at all levels of any bureaucracy. The only way to level the playing field, it seems, is the creation of rules that limit the amount of “attention” necessary to enforce equality.

(To some extent, perhaps it is helpful to see these collectives—community organizing groups, for example—as “individuals” in the sense that Dewey meant this. In this analogy, the set “rules” equate somewhat to the established “habits” of individual persons necessary to free their limited attention of their leaders for aspects of their life where conscious attention and adjustment is most necessary. You want to fight for rules, and then monitor their implementation instead of fighting for a dialogic process that you constantly have to spend enormous energy supporting (and fighting within)).

Ironically as a result of the progressives’ inability to solve the problem of inequality, then, their cherished vision of a fluid, democratic “planning society” seems to contain within it, almost inevitably, the seeds of an oppressive “expert determined” society. Truly collaborative “democracy” slips too easily away into middle-class “discrection.” (This is especially true, as I noted earlier, when progressives took it upon themselves to delimit who does and does not count as adequately prepared for equal participation in citizenship.)

Visions of democratic classrooms where children learn to have the power to coordinate themselves and to respond collaboratively to change and complexity thus misdescribe the true contours of our society. In fact, even in the most ideal examples, outside classrooms where there are no teachers to artificially equalize power, such an attitude inevitably ends up empowering some while disempowering others.

(It is, of course, true that some discretion is required for any organization to function. Thus, there is a constant tension in many bureaucratic organizations between the fight for discretion at the top and middle, and against discretion at the bottom. And to further complicate this issue, it is also true that reality is always too complex to operate on simple rules. This is why a key labor strategy has always been “work to rule,” where the rules are actually followed to the letter and everything completely shuts down. So there is always an “underlife” of creativity functioning beneath the rules—in a sense productively “contesting” them—so that any organization can function at all. In a sense, the creativity that new models of collaborative work-groups were supposed to generate has always been there, except that it has usually manifested as an odd kind of “resistance” that is actually the only thing that allows the machine to run in the first place. In the extreme model of a Taylorist scientific management bureaucracy, the stupid “hands” that are not supposed to think and are not paid to think are actually creatively and intelligently adjusting themselves and their environment in “secret.” And there is, in fact, some evidence that working-class students learn skills for this kind of underlife creativity and system-maintaining rule breaking as a part of the “working-class” rote education most of them receive. I’ve explored some of this here.)

Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing in Milwaukee: Community Organizing and Urban Education

[For other entries in this series, go here.]

I have been playing around with a way to frame the key challenges that seem to block the emergence of a robust ecology of community action organizations in my city, which is probably fairly similar in many ways to a range of mid-sized, segregated U.S. cities. I tried to get it on two typed pages, but ended up with three. Many of the basic issues won't seem particularly surprising to people familiar with organizing, and it repeats some points I've made before (as usual) but it seemed useful to put them all together.

Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing in Milwaukee

Note: these different dilemmas are deeply intertwined with each other.

1. Training
1. Organizations with their own training programs may be limited by the “dogma” of a restricted set of strategies.
2. At the same time, groups without their own training programs often end up either “recreating the wheel,” or picking up scattered training here and there.

RESULT: Robust cross-fertilization of ideas and strategies between different groups is limited, and new groups often lack coherent training.

2. Recruitment
1. Existing organizations sometimes compete for the same restricted categories of constituents (e.g., churches and unions), giving the impression of a shortage of possible recruits.
2. Some key organizations (e.g., ACORN) are essentially missing from the city, so that many residents are never approached at all.
3. Many identifiable groups with social justice interests (e.g., foster parents, child care workers) lack robust social action organizations, and thus have little or no collective power.
4. There are few existing efforts to recruit and form new organizations.

RESULT: Many constituencies are never organized, and many issue areas remain unaddressed, while existing groups run up against limits in their possible size and power.

3. Single vs. Multiple Issue Groups
1. Multiple issue groups can draw in a range of constituents with different interests. But these groups have limited “attention,” generally focusing on a single project at a time in each of their issue areas.

i. This means that, for example, in the area of health care for kids, dental care may get attention while vision care gets none.

ii. At the same time, prior “wins” can be lost as attention shifts to new campaigns.

2. Single issue groups have more limited recruitment possibilities than multiple issue groups. But a large number of such smaller groups have the potential to maintain a wider range of campaigns at the same time and may be able to maintain accountability better on past “wins” because of each group’s clear ongoing focus.
3. A robust process for bringing single and multiple issue groups together on different campaigns over time is lacking.

RESULT: Prior “wins” are sometimes not maintained and the number of issues addressed in the city are limited by our small number of organizations, despite the incredible need for action on a wide range of important challenges.

4. Service vs. Organizing
1. Organizers have generally found that it is a mistake to have social action groups directly involved in social service. Historically, doing “service” has tended to dilute efforts to confront power, and has also opened the service aspects of groups up to retaliation (e.g., “If you fight for more health services, I’ll shut down your clinic.”)
2. However, many of the poorest residents in our city need services of a range of different kinds before they will have extra time to participate in organizing.
3. Also, unless organizing groups can provide basic supports, like child care, meals, and stipends to partially reimburse residents for the cost of their participation, it is unlikely that they will get full participation from impoverished members.

RESULT: Organizing groups too often fail to successfully recruit and sustain a broad range of impoverished and/or overworked community members.

5. Funding
1. Social action is the only community function that cannot be funded by the government.
2. Financial support from constituents is a key measure of organizational sustainability, but the money available from low-income populations cannot fully sustain even small organizations.
3. The focus of foundations on project-based or initial seed funding forces organizations to constantly scramble for dollars and reduces organizations’ capacity for maintaining clear long-term focuses as foundation interests shift.
4. The need for funding to survive fallow periods forces many organizations to turn to funding for “service” or non-organizing “political” projects to maintain themselves, diluting their focus and reducing long-term growth and strength.
5. The need to acquire foundation or other donor funding creates resource barriers to entry for new organizations. This means many new organizations never emerge in the first place, or end up dissolving fairly quickly.

RESULT: Existing organizations struggle to survive, often losing a focus on organizing in favor of fundable service efforts, or shifting too quickly between issues in response to funder preference changes. At the same time, many new organizations never get the chance to emerge because of their lack of fundraising connections, knowledge, and skills.

Key Questions

• Training
• How can existing groups come together with emerging groups in contexts where their different visions can inform and challenge each other?
• In what ways can training be provided to help ongoing organizations look outside the “box” while bringing new organizations “up to speed” on the “basics”?

• Recruitment
• Single vs. Multiple Issue Groups
• What mechanisms can be developed for recruiting and forming new organizations without threatening the constituencies of existing groups?

• Funding
• How can the ongoing maintenance costs of existing organizations be reduced to allow these groups to survive and focus more on action than fund-raising?
• How can entry costs for new organizations be reduced to allow the emergence and survival of new collections of committed groups around key areas?

• Overall
• How could we develop overlapping answers to these questions, creating a synergy across different organizations and long-term, shared, institutional support for sustaining old and developing new organizing groups?

KEY SUGGESTION: A Milwaukee Organizing Retreat

In conversations, a number of key organizing leaders have expressed discouragement about the extent to which groups in Milwaukee work independently instead of as a collaborative team. They noted that the emergence of the (c)3 Table is a good sign, and have expressed interest in creating other contexts to explore ways to overcome these barriers.

One key suggestion was for a retreat that would bring the major organizing groups in Milwaukee together with other interested leaders to explore how to improve our ability to nurture organizing in Milwaukee. Such a retreat would focus on issues external to the day-to-day concerns of individual organizing groups and seek to create a roadmap for addressing these challenges.

For such a retreat to be successful, however, organizers and other over-worked local leaders would need to understand how participation would pragmatically serve their self-interests at the same time. For this reason, it seems likely that a retreat will only succeed if:

• It was co-sponsored by one or more significant funders of organizing in the city, and if
• Retreat participation was linked to potential new funding to support emerging plans.

Other possible solutions

• Co-location of organizing groups to share costs and allow cross-fertilization.
• Creation of an "incubator" where new and old groups can come together and support each other.
• Endowing basic infrastructure for groups (a building, training, recruitment, and basic support staff) but requiring groups to find support for themselves, allowing long-term support while retaining flexibility in organization development (and, where necessary, die-off).

Analysis Developed by: Aaron Schutz, Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, (414) 303-1395, Schutz@uwm.edu, www.educationaction.org.

FEBRUARY DISCUSSION FORUM: Empowerment and the Failure of Progressive Education

[Note: this summarizes and extends on an argument made in this forthcoming article and in a book I am currently revising. Related discussions can be found at educationaction.org]

Perhaps to most, probably to many, the conclusions which have been stated as to the conditions upon which depends the emergence of the Public from its eclipse will seem close to the denial of realizing the idea of a democratic public.

--John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

Fights for decent housing, economic security, health programs, and for many of these other social issues for which liberals profess their sympathy and support, are to the liberals simply intellectual affinities. . . . [I]t is not their children who are sick; it is not they who are working with the specter of unemployment hanging over their heads.

--Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

The field of education is often a decade or more behind intellectual developments in other fields. It is perhaps for this reason that the full impact of revisionist histories of progressivism (e.g., Fink, McGerr, Rauchway, Sinyai, Southern, Stromquist) has yet to emerge in our writings. It is important to understand, however, that the cumulative impact of this new work represents a fundamental challenge to the proponents of progressive democratic education. What these books show is the extent to which the progressives were trapped within the horizon of their own privileged experience. Collectively, with more or less sophistication, they developed a vision of a democratic society that expressed the utopian hopes of middle-class professional work-sites, families, intellectual dialogues, and social gatherings. Few had any significant experience with the less privileged. And even those who did, like Jane Addams, held tight to a vision of a democratic society where everyone would be able to collaborate intelligently and caringly with each other, where stark facts of unequal POWER would cease to rule.

From the perspective of turn-of-the 20^th Century progressives, those with less privilege and education appeared much like children, to be taken care of until they grew into full citizenship by internalizing the advanced practices of democratic engagement that grounded the dreams of privileged reformers (so did the upper class, but they had less influence there). On this point, thinkers as divergent as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey were essentially in agreement, even if Dewey had much more hope and respect for the less educated. Everyone had much to learn, but the ignorance and practical limitations of the lower classes in terms of their capacity for true democratic participation was a if not the crucial impediment to true democracy.

The progressives did accomplish much that was significant for the impoverished in America. But the key word is FOR. It is difficult to point to any significant accomplishments in actually empowering people who looked and spoke and acted differently than them.

Progressive educators today are the inheritors of the progressivism of yesterday. The focus of progressive education research is on making our classrooms places for holistic learning and collaborative engagement. And these are quite wonderful goals. But they have little or nothing to do with empowerment. The fact is that skills for collaborating with equals are only useful when one is working with equals.

(The progressive dream of our society as a room full of people from different places and experiences that all learn to work together and benefit from their unique capacities is increasingly proving to be just that: a dream. To his own chagrin, Robert Putnam of “Bowling Alone” fame found that relational “social capital” is built most effectively in places where people are similar, not where they are different—he sat on this data for quite a while to see if he could figure out how to interpret it differently, and he couldn’t. Research on power inequalities in classrooms indicates that one achieves some equality of participation not when you treat the less powerful like unique individuals but instead when you “empower” them as representatives of particular groups.)

The heroes education scholars look to are people who think and act like we do. We have generally failed to be self-critical enough to ask why we find particular approaches to democracy and inequality compelling. We look to Dewey, but almost completely avoid what Gramsci would call the “organic intellectuals” of labor movement and the field of community organizing.

The Civil Rights Movement is a perfect example. The collaborative, non-hierarchical visions of Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the similar vision of Myles Horton and the Highlander School are often held up as shining examples of democratic empowerment. Almost always obscured is the fact that the leaders of these groups represented the educated elite, mostly from the North. Further ignored is the fact that SNCC fell apart when indigenous working-class members began to assert themselves and their distinct cultural model of empowerment. It is at least arguable that many of the most effective actions of the Movement in the South emerged more out of these indigenous practices than from Baker and Robert Moses’s SNCC or Horton’s Highlander (see Hill).

Of course SNCC and Highlander were critically important. And Dewey was no ignoramus. Instead the key point is that these progressive visions are most useful as supplements to practices of collective empowerment that have been developed in contexts of inequality. Ironically, there is no real way to understand the real usefulness of these progressive visions until we can honestly bring them together with working-class and other models of empowerment on some level of equality. Each side, I believe (and there are more than two sides, here) has the potential to inform the other. But we can’t do this if we know little or nothing about the alternatives to progressivism that progressivism might inform.

Empowerment for those on the bottom is a collective and not an individual accomplishment. The problem is not a lack of knowledge. Even the most profound critical examination of oppressive social forces is not of much use if you don’t know what to do about what you have learned. (In fact, knowledge of this kind, by itself, is often quite disempowering.)

There is a paradox, here, of course. On the one hand we need to be more respectful to indigenous practices and ways of seeing. We need to seek out and value “organic intellectuals” who reflect the best and most effective practices of these communities. On the other hand, there is much too little happening to contest oppression and inequality in America. There are, in fact, skills that people in oppressed contexts need to learn if they are even going to begin to resist.

The problem with progressives was not that they wanted to teach people who needed to learn. The problem was that they tried to make “others” into mini-versions of themselves.

In the end, I think one useful criteria would be: what is the minimum that people need to learn for them to become empowered? What is the smallest intervention in someone else’s culture that we can make that will actually be effective? I am not under the illusion that these are easy questions to answer.

We know this, at least:

Many of our children grow up in cages; lie in bathtubs at night in fear of stray bullets; curl themselves into fetal balls from the gut-wrenching terror of post traumatic stress disorder; steel themselves from the pain of rotting teeth, wake coughing at night from treatable asthma; and tolerate school as long as they can with the full knowledge that it won’t do much for them just as it didn’t for their parents and neighbors.

These kids are not hopeless victims. They are often quite sophisticated in their analyses of their own conditions. But in most cases they also don’t really know what to do to change the futures they can see so clearly ahead of them.

So, a call to action:

1) Middle-class, professional education scholars should take some time to consider the possibility that we find progressive visions of education compelling because of who we culturally are as much as because of some inherent relevance in these theories and practices themselves. (Note: I include most scholars from working-class backgrounds in this broad call—success in any cultural milieu requires people to take on the characteristics valued there. Counter-intuitively, it may in fact be true that resisting middle-class ways of thinking is easier, in a pragmatic sense, for those of us who are the most thoroughly initiated into this culture in the first place. No one will ever accuse people like myself of not being able to play the academic game.)

2) Every once in a while, all of us should reflect on the fact that, regardless of how pissed off we are that we didn’t get much of a raise this year, we are some of the most privileged people ever to walk on this planet. In what ways does this privilege affect our work on a daily basis?

3) We should acknowledge that schools are usually places where less privileged parents feel unsafe and judged. Schools are not likely places for scholars, teachers, and working-class people to meet on any level of equality.

4) Education scholars whose work is not relevant to student and community empowerment should stop for a moment and justify to themselves why they have chosen the topics and focus they have. (You don’t need to justify this to someone else, just to yourself). Repeat as necessary.

5) Courses on the history and philosophy and sociology of education, at the least, should include works from the world of community and union organizing that reflect visions of education linked directly to collective empowerment from the perspective of impoverished and working-class people.

6) Graduate students should be encouraged to look beyond traditional visions of “learning” and “democratic education” to explore practices of empowerment focused on collective action. Ask them: “Who will this help and how?” “Maybe this will help kids do math better, but will that fact really help them much in their lives?” “Is education about ‘learning’ or about life success? And if it isn’t about life success, then why bother?” (Of course, it is possible to use mathematics education in empowering ways (see Moses). Again, in the end they need to justify it to themselves, not to established scholars, although established scholars may need to choose who they have the time to work with).

7) Scholars at top universities should explore innovative ways to find people who may not have great GRE scores but may have the experience and inner fortitude to produce unique and powerful work that can shift the field.

8) We should ditch the term “social justice.” Social justice is a goal, not a practice. You don’t teach social justice, you teach practices that will help you achieve social justice. Focusing on social justice often allows scholars to spin wonderful utopian visions of a beautiful world without thinking concretely about how it will be achieved.

9) The field of education as a whole should support a range of creative efforts that explore how more effective practices of student empowerment might be initiated in traditional public schools given the severe limitations such efforts will inevitably face. These efforts might include ways of concealing the teaching of practices of leadership and collective action within efforts that at least seem non-threatening to the powerful.

10) Scholars working in alternative education settings that can allow more radical efforts should explore ways for engaging students more directly in social action projects in ways that might educate them about how to resist power and oppression. (The fact is, students should be required in every school to master practices of community empowerment just as they are required to master mathematics).

11) Schools of education should find a way to integrate efforts to foster community empowerment into their offerings. Most important would be the development of new or adapted programs that ensure long-term student enrollment in these areas. Only when there is student enrollment that requires the hiring of professors with expertise in community organizing and engagement can we hope to escape the limitations of “faddism,” especially given the increasing economic pressures faced by most universities. This would require a fundamental rethinking of the “charge” of schools of education. It would involve a willingness to embrace challenges of “education” that emerge in the community and not just in schools. And it would necessarily include the acknowledgement that significant and durable school reform is unlikely to happen in impoverished areas unless these communities are empowered to demand, supervise, evaluate, and maintain these innovations.

12) Scholars interested in these issues in schools of education should join together with scholars in other fields with similar interests to form collaborative teams to share knowledge and develop multidisciplinary projects. (Other key areas would include: social work, public health, sociology, urban studies, communications, etc. I’m currently part of a team developing a Ph.D. in Public Health at my university, and the group has agreed—so far—to focus on knowledge of community empowerment as a key goal.)

Educating Citizens About Organizing: Beyond "Just Doing It" (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

[See the whole series here]

On October 6, 2007, the “Beyond Social Service” conference brought an extremely diverse group of approximately seventy Milwaukee residents together to learn about social action. The conference aimed to spread information about organizing more broadly in a city where ignorance about social action is a growing crisis.

Some organizers seem to believe that we don’t need educational separate from our ongoing campaigns for change. All we need, it has been implied, is more and better organizing. The problem is that funding for organizing is extremely limited, as is the visibility of organizing. In my experience organizing, by itself, isn’t necessarily educating that many people who aren’t already participating in it as key leaders. Those who “see” organizing happening, or its results, don’t necessarily really understand what’s happening to make it work. While we can “do” organizing better to overcome this a little, I don’t see the “just more of what we are already doing” response as adequate.

The “Beyond Social Service” effort represented the first time in many years that so many community organizing groups came together to address an educational challenge not directly connected to a specific campaign. For many reasons—limited resources primary among them—unless they are collaborating on a shared action campaign organizing groups in Milwaukee tend to stay in their own “corners.” The groups’ willingness to add this effort to their already crowded calendars indicates the importance they placed in the overall aims of the project

The conference was an initial experiment, embedded within broader concerns about how to help more people understand the potential of organizing for social change. From the beginning, conference organizers discussed the need for other approaches.

The key lesson we learned was that there is a deep hunger for information about how to organize for collective power in Milwaukee. This report seeks to answer questions about how we might adequately serve this hunger.

Summary of Lessons Learned

Organizer Burn-Out
Organizers are already overwhelmed with their duties in their individual organization. It is likely too much to expect them to add yet another “job” on top of the one they already have to support an effort not directly linked to their group’s goals. These challenges limited outreach and participation for the conference. To respond, broader educational efforts like the conference need:

1. To draw in people outside the already overworked organizer community.
2. To provide more dedicated funding for those putting in the work making sure this educational work is carried through, in whatever form.
3. To link educational efforts more closely to the self-interests of existing organizing groups

Other Possibilities for “Rebuilding the Tradition of Organizing” in Milwaukee
The experience of putting on the “Beyond Social Service” conference also pointed towards other ideas for rectifying the ignorance about community organizing that pervades our community.

1. If They Won’t Come to You, Go to Them
2. Create an Incubator for New Organizing Groups
3. Create a Federation of Organizing Groups in a Shared Building to Pool Resources
4. Develop Coherent Pathways for Leader and Organizer Education
5. Hold an Organizing Retreat in Milwaukee about “Rebuilding the Tradition”

To read the rest of this report, go here. This report is an abridged version of the one sent to funders and organizers.

Online Community Organizing Course: Publicly Available (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

This semester I have been teaching an online course: “Organizing for Social Action in Urban Communities.” I have posted the draft lectures for the entire course here, under a Creative Commons license, so that readers are free to use them they wish.

As I note in the “Overview”:

The course is NOT intended to teach students how to be a community organizer. They don't learn how to work with the media, or run a house meeting, nor other practical skills like that. Instead the course is designed to help students learn how to THINK like an organizer.

The actual lectures represent a first draft effort to figure out how to teach "community organizing" to students for whom this is really an alien perspective. The overall structure of the course has evolved in more than five years of teaching in a face-to-face format.

My only request is that if people do read and use this material they send me comments about their impressions and experiences. You are free to post comments to this announcement post. The course is a work in progress, and I will be updating it periodically with newer drafts.

4 Million Dollars and 24 New School Nurses: Beyond Pedagogy to Collective Power (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

To read the entire series, go here.

WINNING CONCESSIONS

Last week, in the just-passed Wisconsin State budget, a couple of lines give four million dollars (in new state and federal money) to the Milwaukee Public Schools for 24 school nurses.

Sometimes it’s hard to trace the influences behind policy changes. But in this case, I know for certain that these lines in the budget are a direct result of the work done by myself and a small number of leaders in Milwaukee’s MOVE congregational organizing group. It is because of MOVE and our work that thousands of the poorest students in Milwaukee will have health services that they did not have before.

BE LIKE ME?

Most of us spend a lot of time working with teachers, or writing articles. Few of us spend any time working to generate power to contest the forces that prevent our ideas and pedagogical advice from leading to significant change.

Some have misread or misheard me as arguing that everyone should do what “I” do, and that anything else is worthless. This isn’t my argument at all. Many of us do very important work, and I’m working, myself, on a book about Dewey and democratic theory. So I’d be a hypocrite if I said everyone should put their pens down and get out of schools and join organizing groups.

The problem is not that everyone needs to change. People have different skills and gifts. Teachers need to learn to teach, and we still need to think about how to teach better.

THE NEED TO CHANGE DIRECTION

The problem is that work on schools is almost ALL we do, and it is NOT ENOUGH. Our focus has remained so narrowly on teacher education that we constantly ignore the fact that pedagogical and administrative skills aren’t really the core problems facing inner-city children.

What have we really done to change the reality of inner-city public schools and, more importantly, the success of students coming out of these schools in the last four decades or so? Maybe we’ve kept things from getting worse. Have we made things better on any broad scale? The honest answer would have to be: NO.

For the vast majority of children in inner-city schools, WE HAVE FAILED. I’m not sure how anyone could honestly argue anything else.

Furthermore, in an article I published a couple of years ago, I showed that the field has developed NO effective models for bringing inner-city schools into any significant authentic interaction with impoverished communities. Except in relatively rare (and always tenuous) circumstances, the institution of schooling in America lacks any significant capacity for healthy community engagement. In other words, a focus on schooling as our only task inherently rules out any real collaboration with communities.

Baldly stated, however, without empowered communities, we will not be able to change schools.

Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

ORGANIZING AS ONE OPTION

Community organizing is one of a number of different strategies for generating community power and consensus in impoverished areas that are increasingly oppressed in America. Elsewhere I have discussed some of these other approaches, but organizing is the one I am most familiar with. So when I talk incessantly about organizing it’s not because it’s the only answer, but because it’s an effective answer that I know something about.

Community organizing is not about winning on individual issues. It is about generating durable POWER for communities that currently lack power.

Winning these 24 new school nurses for MPS schools represents the most significant effect my work has ever had on actual students in schools. Yet this specific win, by itself, is not the goal. The point is that we were able to get the State and the district to pay attention to MOVE. Success in one arena, in the ideal, builds a reputation for effectiveness that can support other efforts in the future. For example, we are moving forward to look at dental services in impoverished urban schools in Wisconsin. I am able to sit at tables with other stakeholders and work together on a campaign to improve dental services not because I am a professor or because I know much about teeth (I don’t) but because I am a representative of MOVE.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

Schools of education as institutions should start making community empowerment a part of their core charge, institutionally. It’s not enough for a few individual professors to do this on their own time.

There are all kinds of worries about what can happen when academics get involved in community activities. But the fact is that there is desperate need for more resources of all kinds in impoverished communities if they are going to gain any significant power at all to resist and act. At the least, scholars bring with them the capacity to read scholarship. As Oakes and Rogers and others have shown, this can be an extremely important contribution to community efforts. And there are other ways to participate.

But in the long term, to be helpful without being harmful, we need to bring real expertise about community engagement and action into our faculties—either by gaining that experience ourselves, or hiring people who have it.

And we need to get beyond our focus—our obsession—with teacher and administrator education as sufficient, in itself, as a path towards long-term improvement in the future life success of inner-city kids.

To be honest, I don’t think any of this will really happen on any significant scale.

It is possible, however, that the field of foundations—because of its interdisciplinary nature, its amorphous focus, and its concern with equity more broadly—may be one of the most promising places for change. In fact, as Dan Butin and I argued at AESA, community engagement as a scholarly arena and as a source of enrollment might actually provide one avenue for saving foundations in American education. But that’s for another post.

[P.S.: If we don’t learn more about how POWER works, and about how to influence the powerful, we can’t hope for much impact in the policy arena (NCLB?) either.]

Fixing the Community Organizing Funding Disaster (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

To read the entire series, go here.

Community organizing groups spend an inordinate amount of time grubbing after money—often fairly small amounts of money when seen from the perspective of large foundations. And organizing groups often have to tweak what they do in order to fulfil the requirements of a funder. Even more problematically, many organizing groups are forced to get funding for purely service oriented activities in order to survive over the long term. While I think organizing groups need to think more carefully and complexly about how they might embrace more service work in order to reach out to more marginalized populations more effectively, the kind of service funding these groups usually receive is mostly a hodgepodge of what happens to be “hot” at any moment.

It seems obvious that we need to fundamentally change the funding model for community organizing. But how? Here I want to talk about what are called “permanent endowments.” Permanent endowments are large chunks of money that are placed permanently in a fund out of which only a portion of the interest is spent every year. Such endowments provide a guaranteed level of operating funding for those organizations that have them.

Who usually has endowments? Looking across the web, you find the usual suspects: universities, private schools, churches, and museums. But there are a range of other groups that can have foundations, including professional organizations, recreational and other natural areas. I found a ballet group, a music festival, home for pregnant teens, a counseling center, and more.

What brings all these groups together is a sense that their existence and functions are permanent.

This, of course, raises some difficult issues when one comes to organizing. How can one assume that one organizing group or method is going to be the most effective over time? How does one decide “which” organizing group to fund, and how does one prevent an endowment from actually destroying the kind of creativity, flexibility, and radical challenge that organizing may require in order to stay “healthy”.

To cite an old example, many have argued that the reason that Martin Luther King and other new organizing groups were able to emerge in the South during the civil rights movement was ironically because many Southern states had banned the NAACP. This seems to have opened up space for new thinking and new organizations, and removed the suppression of risky action that the NAACP seems to have been perpetuating to some extent. More contemporaneously, I think it is accurate to say that a certain level of uncritical dogmatism and self-congratulatory thinking among the neo-Alinsky organizing groups that currently dominate the organizing “scene” may be hurting the emergence of new approaches.

But one would not need to fund individual organizing groups in order to relieve them from some of the burdens of fundraising and the potentially destructive force of current “fads” and program mandates from distant funding organizations. Instead one could fund a local institution designed specificially to support organizing groups—old ones and new ones. By being based in a building that it owned, this group could provide basics like office space, copy machines, phones, technology and tech support. It could have a grants officer on staff to help organizations target their appeals and reduce the burden of fundraising. It could provide multi-year internships (with benefits) to allow individual organizing groups to bring community members in and train them in organizing. It could provide child care and meals and have a van and money to pay drivers to pick people up and get them to meetings. It could provide small reimbursements to participants to make it at least a “neutral” cost for them to go to a meeting. It could have a shared receptionist, and be open from early in the morning to late at night. It could have a board of directors drawn from a wide range of local progressive organizing groups and a carefully drawn mandate that ensured that it was able to “boot” dying organizations and bring in promising new ones. And it would have a constitution designed to ensure it remained true to a broad set of progressive commitments.

Such an endowed umbrella organization would ensure, just like with museums, universities, and beloved parks, that organizing is here to stay, especially in small cities like Milwaukee, where organizing has long been on “life support.” Through its board, it would force local organizing groups to work together to some extent, despite whatever disagreements they might have. If the building was big enough, it might allow the emergence of some more creative experimental relationships between organizing and service groups which I am increasingly convinced are crucial. In fact, simply because it would (I think of necessity) provide child care and meals and small reimbursements to participants, it would already be involved in a kind of “service” that would make participation as much a reality for people struggling on the margins as for professionals and other middle class folks like myself.

Where would the money come from? Well, of course, I don’t know. But if it had a building and an institutional name, it might be appealing to some funder that usually gives out program grants that do not leave any permanent legacy in the community. I could imagine some rich progressive person who would love to have their name permanently on a building or permanently on the name of an institution whose job was to stick a thumb in the eye of privileged oppressors permanently.

How much money would it require? Well, after glancing around the Internet, it seems like a round number like 4% is about what you can expect to spend every year from an endowment while still maintaining it over time given inflation. So let’s go with that as a rule of thumb (see this for those who are interested). And let’s assume you need, say, 2 million dollars for a building (including renovation) in a not necessarily high-priced part of town. So then if you have an operating budget of $250,000 (which isn’t a lot if you have a few employees), you need an endowment of around 6 or 7 million dollars. Or a total of 8-10 million dollars.

This may seem like a lot of money to most of you (or me) but there are plenty of folks out there in our increasingly income unequal society for whom this isn’t really that much.

Carnegie made his name forever by creating libraries across the United States (and beyond). What if some funder decided to stop trying to fund an endless series of cool sounding projects, and instead said, “I want to provide a permanent base for organizing in a collection of cities in America.”

[For those of you who think I've totally gone "off the rails" of education policy, here . . . . Well, look. If you are going to get interested in education organizing based in the community and not in schools then suddenly you've got to ask a whole new set of questions. We're used to talking about public schools which seem obviously to be a public, government funded function (regardless of how poorly they are funded). But now we're talking about an intervention in education that can't take government funding at all.]