Is organizing democratic?

[colist at comm-org.wisc.edu]

[ed:  Genevieve and Nathan continue the conversation, replying to 
Richard and Margo's messages below.  And thanks to all for the 
fascinating, thoughtful, and important discussion.]

From: "Genevieve Borich" <email at genevieveclare.com>

I am actually doing my planning doctoral work on this as well.  I am calling
them informal planning networks.  See
www.genevieveclare.com/informalplanningnetworks.doc

I am trying to merge social network theory and planning theory.  

Great to know there are others out there interested in this sort of idea!

Genevieve Borich
University of Illinois Doctoral Candidate

********************************

From: Nathan Henderson James <nathanhj at gmail.com>


More good points here from Richard and Margo. Again, I should note that 
although I use "we" throughout my message in refering to ACORN, I am 
speaking only for myself and not for the organization. It should be 
pretty obvious, as Margo points out, that I do carry a strong ACORN bias.

Herein I Address Richard's Points:
I think Richard's examples point out the roll that "experts" can play 
within a campaign or within organizing. Both an issue-area expert such 
as an urban planner, and a skills-expert such as an organizer.

It seems to me that the roll of the skills-expert (henceforth 
"organizer") should be to impart as many of those skills as possible to 
the group/community's leadership and membership. Formal leadership 
development trainings are a part of this process, as is one-on-one 
conversations, assistance with developing agenda's, rollplays, 
discussions of "what ifs", and debreifs, among a host of other things. 
If the organizer is doing her job correctly, then these processes will 
build skills that members and leaders can use to direct their campaigns, 
speak for themselves and, in some stellar cases, be seen by the 
mainstream as the experts on a rage of issues.

Part of the job of the organizer is also to ensure that members are 
well-versed on the particulars of the issue(s) they are tackling. So 
workshops with "experts" are essential to imparting specific knowledge 
useful for shaping demands and campaign goals. Sacramento ACORN held a 
series of workshops a few years ago for its members and interested 
community members on the impact of sprawl on central cities and the need 
for the idea of "equity" to be a part of smart growth planning efforts. 
After that, a core group of ACORN leaders became the experts on equity 
and smart growth and pushed campaigns emphasizing that linkage.


Herein I Address Margo's Points:
The question raised by Margo is a bit different in focus, looking as it 
does on the relationship between who an organization claims to speak for 
and who it is ultimately accountable to. In so doing she also touches on 
funding issues and, in ACORN's case, the role that dues plays within the 
organization.

Certainly many groups have both a membership and a constituency. In 
community organizing (and hopefully labor organizing as well), the 
membership is a subset of the constituency. In ACORN's case, we see our 
constituency as low- and moderate-income generally, though in practice 
this is basically low-income blacks and Latinos/recent immigrants living 
in urban areas (as of this writing 99 in the US and 4 in Mexicao, Peru, 
and Canada).

ACORN claims to speak for low-income people generally, seeing ourselves 
as we do as a mass-based membership organizing, but we are directly 
accountable to our dues-paying members. This is due in some part to the 
fact that to be a decision-making member of the organization one needs 
to be current on one's dues and in some part to the fact that ACORN 
members generally see themselves as accountable to each other. Thus 
decisions are made by the people who show up, but among the people who 
show up the ones who are paying the freight for the organization call 
the shots.

Which brings me to the braoder question of dues. There are many 
different apporaches to dues within organizing. Unions and many 
community organizations see them as fundamental both to organization 
survival and organizational independence. ACORN sees both these things, 
but also sees something else. Dues-paying members are more commited to 
their organization, more willing to take leadership roles, more willing 
to do work, and have a stronger sense of ownership of the organization 
than people who participate without paying dues. (Generally speaking, of 
course.)

Thus ACORN asks members to begin paying dues immediately, seeing dues 
both as a means of maintainig independence and thus accountability to 
its members and as a sign of comittment on the part of the member to the 
organization.

I should note that while in the past ACORN has focused very closely on a 
specific definition of what makes a member in terms of willingness to 
pay dues, over the past year or so we have been making a concerted 
effort to broaden our definition so that we may involve more people in 
the life of the organization.

In large part this has been allowed by the advances in database and 
communcations technology so that the cost of communicating with our 
members is going down. Our labor-intensive organizing model of 
door-to-door contacts coupled with our generally small local operating 
budgets has long meant focusing scarce resources where it made the most 
sense: dues-paying members. We now have the luxury of working with 
people who aren't as willing or able to make a full dues commitment when 
we first talk to them by offering them the option of becoming either 
associate or provisional members in addition to full members.

We can now communicate with our members using e-mail, text messages, and 
robo calls, in addition to our retail neighborhood presence. We hope 
that getting interested people into our database and then following up 
using a variety of these communication techniques will allow us to do as 
Margo wishes: accept what people are able to do immediately and then, 
over time, win their commitment to full member status.

Overall, this discussion of membership recruitment, organizing model, 
resources and related issues is rare, at least to my knowledge. The only 
converstaion I can recall about this was one I had a few years ago with 
a Poli Sci prof about the "freeloader" question in organizational 
sustainability. But then maybe I'm not going to the right bars... 8-)

Nathan

-- 
Nathan Henderson-James
Performance Poet
Director, Strategic Writing and Research Department
ACORN Political Operations
510-213-1970 cell
nathanhj at gmail.com
nathanhj.livejournal.com
"I want to inject your blunt caustic observations between my toes so 
that some day my truth will kick someone's ass!"

>
>
> [ed:  Richard and Margo contribute to the discussion.]
>
> From:
> Richard Layman <rlaymandc at yahoo.com>
> Date:
> Sun, 8 Jan 2006 21:38:13 -0800 (PST)
> To:
> colist at comm-org.wisc.edu
>
> This is a tough question.  There is the issue advocacy-campaign piece 
> and the capacity building piece.  An organizer is likely to have a lot 
> of knowledge in what capacities are needed, how to deal with press, 
> etc.  "The people" are likely to have experiences, etc., but less 
> likely to be able to draw out the meta-lessons and learnings necessary 
> to (a.) build capacity and (b.) articulate succinctly how these 
> experiences relate to systemic and/or structural problems.
>
> At times it seems like an unsolvable dilemma.
>
> If I do go on to get a PhD in planning, one of the areas I want to 
> develop as one of my specializations is the idea of reconceptualizing 
> planning as a field of enabling citizen engagement, since land use 
> issues are amongst the issues most likely to engage citizens at the 
> local level.  At the same time, I believe in deliberative citizen 
> engagement.  All experiences are valuable, but all such experiences 
> are not necessarily relevant or apt to the situations that come before 
> us.  Knowledge is a good thing, and citizens do have some 
> responsibility in learning and exercising citizenly duties.  What I 
> endeavor to do with each planning exercise is to draw out 
> meta-learning and work to help people apply such learnings to other 
> situations that come up later.
>
> E.g., I work on urban revitalization issues.  Since most people in the 
> United States are imprinted (without recognizing or admitting such) 
> with a suburban development and land use paradigm that is 
> automobile-centric and automobile-dependent, when they apply this 
> paradigm to urban/center city issues, their solutions are likely to be 
> inappropriate.  It is my duty to explain why. (cf. Jonathan Kozol _The 
> Night is Dark and I am far from home_)
>
> E.g., Someone I know is trying to get our neighborhood planning board 
> (that's not exacttly the type of body that it is but it's close enough 
> for this example) to call for a downzoning and other for a decent size 
> of the city that's becoming "Downtown East," but her suggestions, such 
> as 100 feet separating commercial from residential, don't make sense 
> if you believe in mixed use a la Jane Jacobs (_Death and Life of Great 
> American Cities_), or in areas separated from residential by a railyard.
>
> So am I just supposed to step back and say "everybody's opinion is 
> equally valid?" or am I supposed to go over, once again, the 
> principles of urban design and successful center cities.  Basically, I 
> say the same stuff over and over and over again.  I'm okay with that 
> though...
> As a friend of mine said to me at dinner a couple weeks ago, "people 
> aren't empiricists."  Since I am, and I want evidence to support 
> assertions even as simple as "people are always running stop signs on 
> Fifth Street", people are often surprised when I ask for and seek 
> evidence supporting such statements.
>
> I am no expert on democracy.  But I do believe that representative 
> democracy is different from "consultative" democracy or treating 
> citizens as customers rather than as the owners of democracy ("We the 
> People...").  It might not be participatory democracy, but if we hold 
> that up as the ideal, and constantly work to build the capacities of 
> the people we work with (and they of us), all we can do is to keep 
> trying "to form a more perfect union."
>
> Richard Layman
> historic preservation and urban revitalization advocate
> Washington, DC
> http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com
>
> **************************************
>
> From: "Margo Menconi" <malyme at hotmail.com>
>
> Nathan said:
>
> >
> >2) Margo's quote from the evangelist is well-taken, but I'd like to
> >add a
> >dimension to it in light of the current discussion, which is that
> >most
> >groups that engage in "organizing" are also membership-based
> >organizations
> >and it is their members to whom they are ultimately accountable.
> >These
> >groups may or may not involve non-members in decision-making,
> >leadership
> >development and campaigns, but they must, almost by definition,
> >privilege
> >the voice of their members over the voice of non-members. In my
> >experience
> >ACORN falls very much in this mode of operation. As do most unions.
>
> Of course, Richard is with ACORN so he should support their modus 
> operandi.  On the other hand, it is interesting that they think they 
> are not there to help the neighborhood, per se (if I read you right), 
> but the membership.  So the membership, which is identified by paying 
> annual dues, is really who ACORN serves.  That's sort of elitist in my 
> mind.  I mean, usually we think of membership-based organizations as 
> being self-serving.  Examples of other types of membership-based 
> organizations are professional associations, membership-based clubs 
> (including country clubs), and the like.  Is that what ACORN is?  I 
> generally thought of it as serving a broader public.  But maybe, now 
> that you mention it, you are right.  But personally, I don't like it.  
> My understanding is that it basically comes down to money - ACORN 
> doesn't want to take "tainted" money that will make them serve outside 
> interests, so in order to raise the money they need, they require 
> membership fees.  And in order to make people feel like they are 
> getting something from their membership that others don't get, they 
> must ultimately serve the members, and not outsider - other non-member 
> community residents.
>
> I still don't like this model, however, and I think that there are 
> some people (I was, however briefly an ACORN organizer) who would get 
> involved through donation of personal time, and perhaps later on 
> become dues-paying members.  But they are never given that opportunity 
> unless they fork out the money upfront.  I don't like that.  
> Nevertheless, I do think ACORN does some effective work.
>
> Margo Menconi
>
> Silver Spring, MD
>
>
> colist at comm-org.wisc.edu wrote: