"Will Obama Inspire a New Generation of Organizers?"

[Discussion list for COMM-ORG]

[ed:  thanks to Aaron for the additional links.  The New York Times also 
had an article on Obama's organizing background yesterday.]

From: "Aaron Schutz" <schutz at uwm.edu>


FYI, with respect to Drier's article, readers might also be interested
in this blog post on Open Left

http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6111

discussing Obama's organizing approach during the campaign.  (It was
also reprinted at Black Agenda Report).

It is part of an ongoing series on "Core Dilemmas of Community
Organizing" (http://openleft.com/userDiary.do?personId=3384).  The
attached discussion is interesting as well. 

Note that this was a blog post and not a carefully researched article,
as evidenced by the updates at the end.

Aaron Schutz
Associate Professor & Chair
Dept. of Ed. Policy & Comm. Studies
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201
Office: (414) 229-4150
Fax: (414) 229-3700
Website: educationaction.org


Discussion list for COMM-ORG wrote:
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> From: "Peter Dreier" <dreier at oxy.edu>
>
>
> For those who might be interested....My article, "Will Obama Inspire a 
> New Generation of Organizers?" appears on the Dissent magazine website 
> (http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1215), and was posted on 
> both the Huffington Post website 
> (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/obamas-new-generation-of_b_110321.html) 
> and CommonDreams website 
> (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/01/10006)
> Will Obama Inspire a New Generation of Organizers?
> By Peter Dreier
>
> Americans are used to voting for presidential candidates with 
> backgrounds as lawyers, military officers, farmers, businessmen, and 
> career politicians, but this is the first time we've been asked to vote 
> for someone who has been a community organizer. Of course, Barack Obama 
> has also been a lawyer, a law professor, and an elected official, but 
> throughout this campaign he has frequently referred to the three years 
> he spent as a community organizer in Chicago in the mid-1980s as “the 
> best education I ever had.”
>
> This experience has influenced his presidential campaign. It may also 
> tell us something about how, if elected, he'll govern. But, perhaps most 
> important, there has not been a candidate since Bobby Kennedy and Eugene 
> McCarthy who has inspired so many young people to become involved in 
> public service and grassroots activism.
>
> Through his constant references to his own organizing experience, and 
> his persistent praise for organizers at every campaign stop, Obama is 
> helping recruit a new wave of idealistic young Americans who want to 
> bring about change. According to surveys and exit polls, interest in 
> politics and voter turnout among the millennial generation (18-29) has 
> increased dramatically this year. But Obama isn’t just catalyzing young 
> people to vote or volunteer for his campaign. Professors report that a 
> growing number of college students are taking courses in community 
> organizing and social activism. According to community organizing 
> groups, unions and environmental groups, the number of young people 
> seeking jobs as organizers has spiked in the past year in the wake of 
> Obama's candidacy.
>
> Whether or not he wins the race for the White House, Obama, through his 
> own example, has already dramatically increased the visibility of 
> grassroots organizing as a career path, as well as a way to give 
> ordinary people a sense of their own collective power to improve their 
> lives and bring about social change.
>
> Obama's Organizing Experience
>
> In 1985, at age 23, Obama was hired by the Developing Communities 
> Project, a coalition of churches on Chicago's South Side, to help 
> empower residents to win improved playgrounds, after-school programs, 
> job training, housing, and other concerns affecting a neighborhood hurt 
> by large-scale layoffs from the nearby steel mills and neglect by banks, 
> retail stores, and the local government. He knocked on doors and talked 
> to people in their kitchens, living rooms, and churches about the 
> problems they faced and why they needed to get involved to change things.
>
> As an organizer, Obama learned the skills of motivating and mobilizing 
> people who had little faith in their ability to make politicians, 
> corporations, and other powerful institutions accountable. Obama taught 
> low-income people how to analyze power relations, gain confidence in 
> their own leadership abilities, and work together.
>
> For example, he organized tenants in the troubled Altgelt Gardens public 
> housing project to push the city to remove dangerous asbestos in their 
> apartments, a campaign that he acknowledges resulted in only a partial 
> victory. After Obama helped organize a large mass meeting of angry 
> tenants, the city government started to test and seal asbestos in some 
> apartments, but ran out of money to complete the task.
>
> Obama often refers to the valuable lessons he learned working "in the 
> streets" of Chicago. "I've won some good fights and I've also lost some 
> fights," he said in a speech during the primary season, "because good 
> intentions are not enough, when not fortified with political will and 
> political power." (Recently, right wing publications, radio talk shows, 
> and bloggers, such as the National Review and the American Thinker, have 
> sought to discredit Obama as a “radical” by linking him to ACORN and 
> other community organizing groups.)
>
> The American Organizing Tradition
>
> The roots of community organizing go back to the nation's founding, 
> starting with the Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party. Visiting the 
> U.S. in the 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy 
> in America, was impressed by the outpouring of local voluntary 
> organizations that brought Americans together to solve problems, provide 
> a sense of community and public purpose, and tame the 
> hyper-individualism that Tocqueville considered a threat to democracy. 
> Every fight for social reform since then—from the abolition movement to 
> the labor movement's fight against sweatshops in the early 1900s to the 
> civil rights movement of the 1960s to the environment and feminist 
> movements of the past 40 years—has reflected elements of the self-help 
> spirit that Tocqueville observed.
>
> Historians trace modern community organizing to Jane Addams, who founded 
> Hull House in Chicago in the late 1800s and inspired the settlement 
> house movement. These activists—upper-class philanthropists, 
> middle-class reformers, and working-class radicals—organized immigrants 
> to clean up sweatshops and tenement slums, improve sanitation and public 
> health, and battle against child labor and crime.
>
> In the 1930s, another Chicagoan, Saul Alinsky, took community organizing 
> to the next level. He sought to create community-based "people's 
> organizations" to organize residents the way unions organized workers. 
> He drew on existing groups—particularly churches, block clubs, sports 
> leagues, and unions—to form the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council 
> in an effort to get the city to improve services to a working-class 
> neighborhood adjacent to meatpacking factories. Alinsky's books, 
> Reveille for Radicals (1945) and Rules for Radicals (1971), became the 
> bible for several generations of activists. including the civil rights 
> movement, the environmental movement, and many other reformers.
>
> There are currently at least 20,000 paid organizers in the United 
> States,according to Walter Davis, executive director of the National 
> Organizers Alliance. (Nobody knows for sure, since "organizer" is not an 
> occupation listed by the Census Bureau). They work for unions, community 
> groups, environmental organizations, women's and civil rights groups, 
> tenants organizations, and school reform efforts. Unlike traditional 
> social workers, organizers' orientation is not to "service" people as if 
> they were clients, but to encourage people to develop their own 
> abilities to mobilize others. They identify people with leadership 
> potential, recruit and train them, and help them build grassroots 
> organizations that can win victories that improve their communities and 
> workplaces. According to organizer Ernesto Cortes, they help people turn 
> their "hot" anger into "cold" anger—that is, disciplined and strategic 
> action.
>
> The past several decades has seen an explosion of community organizing 
> in every American city. There are now thousands of local groups that 
> mobilize people around a wide variety of problems. With the help of 
> trained organizers, neighbors have come together to pressure local 
> governments to install stop signs at dangerous intersections, force 
> slumlords to fix up their properties, challenge banks to end mortgage 
> discrimination (redlining) and predatory lending, improve conditions in 
> local parks and playgrounds, increase funding for public schools, clean 
> up toxic sites, stop police harassment, and open community health 
> clinics. A key tenet of community organizing is developing face to face 
> contact so people forge commitments to work together around shared 
> values. (The Internet has become a useful tool to connect people in 
> cyberspace and then bring them together in person).
>
> For years, critics viewed community organizing as too fragmented and 
> isolated, unable to translate local victories into a wider movement for 
> social justice. During the past decade, however, community organizing 
> groups forged links with labor unions, environmental organizations, 
> immigrant rights groups, women's groups, and others to build a stronger 
> multi-issue progressive movement. For example, the Los Angeles Alliance 
> for a New Economy (LAANE) has created a powerful coalition of unions, 
> environmental groups, community organizers, clergy, and immigrant rights 
> groups to change business and development practices in the nation's 
> second-largest city. At the national level, the Apollo Alliance – a 
> coalition of unions, community groups, and environmental groups like the 
> Sierra Club – is pushing for a major federal investment in "green" jobs 
> and energy-efficient technologies.
>
> Although most community organizing groups are rooted in local 
> neighborhoods, often drawing on religious congregations and block clubs, 
> there are now several national organizing networks with local 
> affiliates, enabling groups to address problems at the local, state, and 
> national level, sometimes even simultaneously. These groups include 
> ACORN, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), People in Communities 
> Organized (PICO), the Center for Community Change, National People's 
> Action, Direct Action Research and Training (DART), and the Gamaliel 
> Foundation (the network affiliated with the Developing Communities 
> Project that hired Obama). These networks as well as a growing number of 
> training centers for community organizers—such as the Midwest Academy in 
> Chicago, the Highlander Center in Tennessee, and a few dozen 
> universities that offer courses in community and labor organizing—have 
> helped recruit and train thousands of people into the organizing world 
> and strengthened the community organizing movement's political power.
>
> The "living wage" movement is an example of both coalition-building and 
> linking local and national organizing campaigns. In 1994, BUILD—a 
> partnership of a community organization and a local union—got Baltimore 
> to enact the first local law, requiring companies that have municipal 
> contracts and subsidies to pay its employees a "living wage" (a few 
> dollars above the federal minimum wage). Since then, more than 200 
> cities have adopted similar laws, helping lift many working families out 
> of poverty. Most of their victories grew out of coalitions between 
> community organizing groups, labor unions, and faith-based groups. These 
> coalitions have gotten more than 20 states to raise their minimum wages 
> above the federal level. These efforts helped build political momentum 
> for Congress' vote last year to raise the federal minimum wage for the 
> first time in a decade.
>
> Organizing and the Obama Campaign
>
> Although he didn't make community organizing a lifetime career—he left 
> Chicago to attend Harvard Law School—Obama often says that his 
> organizing experience has shaped his approach to politics. After law 
> school, Obama returned to Chicago to practice and teach law. But in the 
> mid-1990s, he also began contemplating running for office. In 1995, he 
> told a Chicago newspaper, "What if a politician were to see his job as 
> that of an organizer—as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not 
> sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before 
> them?" Since embarking on a political career, Obama hasn't forgotten the 
> lessons that he learned on the streets of Chicago.
>
> This is reflected in his campaign for president. Community organizers 
> distinguish themselves from traditional political campaign operatives 
> who approach voters as customers through direct mail, telemarketing, and 
> canvassing. Most political campaigns immediately put volunteers to work 
> on the "grunt" work of the campaign—making phone calls, handing out 
> leaflets, or walking door to door. According to Temo Figueroa -- Obama’s 
> national field director and a long-time union organizer—the Obama 
> campaign has been different. “When I came on board what attracted me was 
> his history as an organizer,” says Figueroa, who was working as AFSCME's 
> assistant political director. “At the time I wasn’t sure I was joining 
> the winning team. Most of us thought we were jumping on the little 
> engine that could. We were believers. We wanted something bigger than 
> ourselves. A movement.”
>
> Obama enlisted Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor who is one of the 
> country's leading organizing theorists and practitioners, to help train 
> organizers and volunteers as a key component of his presidential 
> campaign. Ganz was instrumental in shaping the volunteer training 
> experience.
>
> Many Obama campaign volunteers went through several days of intense 
> training sessions called "Camp Obama." The sessions were led by Ganz and 
> other experienced organizers, including Mike Kruglik, one of Obama's 
> organizing mentors in Chicago. Potential field organizers were given an 
> overview of the history of grassroots organizing techniques and the key 
> lessons of campaigns that have succeeded and failed.
>
> “Organizing combines the language of the heart as well as the head,” 
> Ganz says, reflecting on his experiences as an organizer with SNCC in 
> the civil rights movement and as a key architect of the United 
> Farmworkers’ early successes. Not surprisingly, compared with other 
> political operations, Obama's campaign has embodied many of the 
> characteristics of a social movement—a redemptive calling for a better 
> society, coupling individual and social transformation. This is due not 
> only to Obama's rhetorical style but also to his campaign’s enlistment 
> of hundreds of seasoned organizers from unions, community groups, 
> churches, peace, and environmental groups. They, in turn, have mobilized 
> thousands of volunteers—many of them neophytes in electoral 
> politics—into tightly knit, highly motivated and efficient teams. This 
> summer, the campaign created an “Obama Organizing Fellows” program to 
> recruit college students to become campaign staffers.
>
> This organizing effort has mobilized many first-time voters, including 
> an unprecedented number of young people and African Americans during the 
> primary season. Now that Obama is the presumed Democratic nominee, he 
> faces pressure to resort to more traditional electoral strategies, but 
> so far Obama and top campaign officials have continued to emphasize 
> grassroots organizing. It is evident in Obama's speeches, his continued 
> use of the UFW slogan, "Yes, we can/Si se puede," his emphasis on "hope" 
> and "change," and the growing number of experienced organizers drawn 
> into the campaign.
>
> Obama's stump speeches typically include references to America's 
> organizing tradition. "Nothing in this country worthwhile has ever 
> happened except when somebody somewhere was willing to hope," Obama 
> explained. "That is how workers won the right to organize against 
> violence and intimidation. That's how women won the right to vote. 
> That's how young people traveled south to march and to sit in and to be 
> beaten, and some went to jail and some died for freedom's cause." Change 
> comes about, Obama said, by "imagining, and then fighting for, and then 
> working for, what did not seem possible before."
>
> In town forums and living-room meetings, Obama says that "real change" 
> only comes about from the "bottom up," but that as president, he can 
> give voice to those organizing in their workplaces, communities, and 
> congregations around a positive vision for change. "That's leadership," 
> he says.
>
> Organizer-in-Chief?
>
> If elected president, will Obama's organizing background shape his 
> approach to governing?
>
> Obama can certainly learn valuable lessons from President Franklin 
> Roosevelt, who recognized that his ability to push New Deal legislation 
> through Congress depended on the pressure generated by protestors and 
> organizers. He once told a group of activists who sought his support for 
> legislation, "You've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it."
>
> As depression conditions worsened, and as grassroots worker and 
> community protests escalated throughout the country, Roosevelt became 
> more vocal, using his bully pulpit—in speeches and radio addresses—to 
> promote New Deal ideas. Labor and community organizers felt confident in 
> proclaiming, "FDR wants you to join the union." With Roosevelt setting 
> the tone, and with allies in Congress like Senator Robert Wagner, 
> grassroots activists won legislation guaranteeing workers' right to 
> organize, the minimum wage, family assistance for mothers, and the 
> 40-hour week.
>
> After his election in 1960, President John Kennedy encouraged baby 
> boomers to ask what they could do for their country. At the time, JFK 
> meant joining the Peace Corps and the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to 
> America) program. He could not have anticipated the wave of protest and 
> activism—around civil rights, Vietnam, and later feminism and the 
> environment—that animated the sixties and seventies.
>
> President Lyndon Johnson was initially no ally of the civil rights 
> movement. However, the willingness of activists to put their bodies on 
> the line against fists and fire hoses, along with their efforts to 
> register voters against overwhelming opposition, pricked Americans' 
> conscience. LBJ recognized that the nation's mood was changing. The 
> civil rights activism transformed Johnson from a reluctant advocate to a 
> powerful ally. LBJ's "Great Society" program—although criticized as too 
> tame by United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther and other 
> progressives—provided some community organizing positions with 
> anti-poverty agencies, job training groups, and legal services 
> organizations in urban and rural areas. Many of today's veteran 
> activists got their first taste of grassroots organizing in the 
> anti-poverty, civil rights, and farmworker movements.
>
> Now comes Obama, a one-time organizer, who consistently reminds 
> Americans of the importance of grassroots organizing. If he's elected 
> president, he knows that he will have to find a balance between working 
> inside the Beltway and encouraging Americans to organize and mobilize. 
> He understands that his ability to reform health care, tackle global 
> warming, and restore job security and decent wages will depend, in large 
> measure, on whether he can use his bully pulpit to mobilize public 
> opinion and encourage Americans to battle powerful corporate interests 
> and members of Congress who resist change.
>
> For example, talking about the need to forge a new energy policy, Obama 
> explained, "I know how hard it will be to bring about change. Exxon 
> Mobil made $11 billion this past quarter. They don't want to give up 
> their profits easily." Another major test will be whether he can help 
> push the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)—a significant reform of 
> America's outdated and business-oriented labor laws—through Congress 
> against almost unified business opposition. If passed, EFCA will help 
> trigger a new wave of organizing that will require enlisting thousands 
> of young organizers into the labor movement.
>
> If Obama wins the White House, progressives within his inner circle will 
> look for opportunities to encourage his organizing instincts to shape 
> how he governs the nation, whom he appoints to key positions, and which 
> policies to prioritize. Meanwhile, a new generation of volunteer 
> activists and paid organizers will be looking to join President Obama's 
> progressive crusade to change America. But if it appears that is veering 
> too far to the political center, they will—inspired in part by Obama's 
> own example, and perhaps with his covert support—mobilize to push him 
> (and Congress) to live up to his progressive promise.
> Peter Dreier is professor of politics and director of the Urban & 
> Environmental Policy program at Occidental College, where he teaches a 
> course on community organizing. He is coauthor of The Next Los Angeles: 
> The Struggle for a Livable City, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 
> 21st Century, and several other books.
> _____________________________________
> Peter Dreier
> Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics
> Chair, Urban & Environmental Policy Program
> Occidental College
> 1600 Campus Road
> Los Angeles, CA 90041
> Phone: (323) 259-2913
> FAX: (323) 259-2734
> Website: http://employees.oxy.edu/dreier
>
> "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great 
> moral crises maintain their neutrality" - Dante
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