[COMM-ORG] query: has organizing gone national?
Discussion list for COMM-ORG
colist at comm-org.wisc.edu
Wed Jul 8 09:16:35 CDT 2009
[ed: thanks to Jane, Clayton, and Garry for continuing the discussion.
There are a number of potential new threads in this discussion, so
please alert me if you are picking up on those so I can start a new
subject line.]
From: Jane Beckett <jane_beckett at sbcglobal.net>
Amen to what Peter said. Also, there's a second (and also very
interesting) set of indicators to consider; it has to do with the
extent to which national work and local/state work involve tensions and
tradeoffs. For example, whether they are chapters or network affiliates,
local groups that are heavily involved in national campaigns must make
different choices than more locally-oriented organizations do about whom
to recruit as leaders, how much to prefer leaders that bring
constituencies with them into the organization, what to emphasize in
leadership training, how to structure the relationship between staff and
leadership, how to spend (limited) money, etc. If they're chapters
rather than affiliates, these may not even be their decisions to make.
Issues of ownership arise.
These tensions can be healthy and productive, or they can weaken either
the local infrastucture of the organization, or the national effort.
Difficult stuff, sometimes.
Jane Beckett
1178 S. Clinton Avenue
Oak Park, IL 60304
708-524-8004
**********************************
From: "Clayton Daughenbaugh" <claytonhd at xmission.com>
Mr. Dreier's points are well taken.
The initial insite about the need to build majorities is critical. Since
organizing relies on people as its primary source of power, building
national majority support is critical to ultimate effectiveness.
I'd like to add a couple of points to the list of items defining a national
organization: can a local affiliate gain national support for
local/regional issues of national import; is there a mechanism for bottom-up
communication regarding issue priorities and strategies. The fundamental
point being that a national organization, in order to be national, must
integrate its internal authority so that both the local and the national
levels influence its national direction.
As a long time Sierra Club leader I'd also like to take small issue with Mr.
Dreier's comment that:
"the Sierra Club has started to develop into more of a grassroots
orgnaization with both a strong national office and local chapters whose
members meet and help mount local campaigns and also work on national
campaigns, mostly around enviromental legislation. This transformation is
still in its early stages."
This has been fundamental to the structure of the Sierra Club for at least
as long as I've been involved (fifteen years). Over that period of time the
Club has paid gradually increasing attention to grassroots organizing
techniques. It's not a transformation that is taking place, but an
evolution.
--clayton daughenbaugh
*********************************
From: "Garry Hesser" <hesser at augsburg.edu>
Randy and Peter have called our attention to the breadth and scope of
organizing. As someone with a foot in both activism and the academy, I
found the recent op ed piece by Gregory Rodriguez to be something also
well worth reading and discussing, too. It was in the LA Times and
introduced me to Batista Schlesinger. Both Peter and Randy, as well as
this list serve, have continually invited and insisted on a continual
rethinking; Rodriguez and Schlesinger "thicken the soup" for me, too.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rodriguez29-2009jun29,0,193388.column
Maybe it is just aging, but Schlesinger makes a lot of sense to me when
she asks us to take a step back from politics and embrace the political
process and its complexity. What would her call for a "slow democracy"
mean to the organizing community? According to Rodriguez, she invites
us to a greater humility and embracing a healthy dose of doubt. This
invitation to continually rethink the world in its ever-changing
configurations reminded me of the conversation between Myles Horton and
Paulo Freire toward the end of their lives in We Make the Road by Walking.
Thanks, Randy and Peter, and thanks to Batista, Gregory, Myles and Paulo.
Garry
Garry Hesser
Sabo Professor, Citizenship & Learning [Sociology and Metro-Urban Studies]
Augsburg College
2211 Riverside Avenue
Mpls, MN 55454
612-330-1664
http://www.augsburg.edu/sociology/
On 7/7/2009 8:38 AM, Discussion list for COMM-ORG wrote:
> --------
> This is a COMM-ORG 'colist' message.
> All replies to this message come to COMM-ORG only.
> --------
>
> [ed: thanks to Peter for the reply. He also invites others to join the
> discussion.]
>
> From: "Peter Dreier" <dreier at oxy.edu>
>
> To respond to Randy's insight about national organizing by community
> organizing groups....
>
> One way to think about Randy's question is to re-read Karen Paget's 1990
> essay in American Prospect - "Citizen Organizing: Many Movements, No
> Majority."
> http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=citizen_organizing_many_movements_no_majority
>
> If we were writing that essay today, what parts would be the same? What
> parts would be different?
>
> There has long been "national" work among community organizing groups,
> but it is growing. Part of the response to Randy's question will depend
> on what we consider to be "community organizing."
>
> The national boycotts of grapes and lettuce in the 60s and 70s sponsored
> by the United Farm Workers were part of a labor struggle but utilized
> local community, student, and religious groups to mount a national
> campaign, and used many of the strategies and tactics we associate with
> community organizing. Books by Jacques Levy, Marshall Ganz and Randy
> Shaw describe the boycott, which was orchestrated from the UFW HQ in
> California but also had a life of its own.
>
> The civil rights movement of the 60s was, similarly, a national movement
> even though there was no single umbrella group coordinating it -- SNCC,
> NAACP, SCLC, and other groups were independent of each other but worked
> together on some local campaigns. There was some tension between these
> and other civil rights groups - in terms of fundraising, leadership,
> strategy, media coverage, etc - but together the participants in all of
> them thought of themselves as part of a national "movement".
>
> Among groups that do what most people think of as "community
> organizing," most of the national work has been done by relatively loose
> networks, not strong national organizations. . This was the case with
> NTIC/NPA's anti-redlining work in the 70s ,which helped get Congress to
> pass the CRA. NTIC was always more of a network than a national
> organizaiton with chapters. IAF has a national office it has always been
> a rather loose network of regional IAF groups that mostly join forces
> around training, but not around national campaigns. PICO is a hybrid
> that is evolving from a loose network to a national organization, but it
> still has the culture of a network whose local affiliates have no real
> mechanism for top-down/bottom-up decision-making. PICO's participation
> in the current immigrant rights campaign is a test of its capacity to
> work on a national level as part of a national coalition. Gamaliel is
> somewhat similar to PICO in this regard, except that it doesn't have
> enough affiliates around the country to be a truly "national"
> organization or to mount "national" campaigns.
>
> The Center for Community Change has been a force for bringing together
> local community gorups around some national campaigns, but these are
> issue-specific campaigns, not part of an ongoing national organization
> that strategizes how to build the national organization from one
> campaign to the next. US Action is more centralized that these other
> groups and has affiiated state chapters that can mount national lobbying
> campaigns, as they are doing around health care now.The Partnership for
> Working Families (PWF) is a national organization whose affiliates are
> 17 local or regional community-labor coalitions like LAANE in Los
> Angeles, CPI in San Diego, and others. It is relatively new and has yet
> to mount a national effort, although it has produced policy materials on
> federal issues.
>
> There are also loose networks of community organizing groups around
> environmental justice and other issues. In addition, the Sierra Club
> has started to develop into more of a grassroots orgnaization with both
> a strong national office and local chapters whose members meet and help
> mount local campaigns and also work on national campaigns, mostly around
> enviromental legislation. This transformation is still in its early stages.
>
> Within the community organizing world, ACORN is the most like a national
> organization with local and state chapters, and whose local and state
> chapters work on local and national campaigns simultaneously. John
> Atlas and I have written about ACORN as a "federated" organization,
> based on some of Theda Skocpol's writings about the importance of having
> national organizations with local chapters.
>
> ACORN is closest in structure to labor unions. Labor unions are
> obviously a good example of national organizations that have local
> chapters (called "locals") and state chapters, and have the capacity to
> mobilize campaigns on the same issue around the country and to
> strategize about how to target its national resources (staff, money,
> members, etc) to be most effective -- for example, by working on
> election campaigns in key "swing" states and Congressional districts.
> ACORN, too, has the capacity to do this on issue campaigns (ie predatory
> lending, living wages, affordable housing) and election campaigns, which
> is what makes it so effective;. Even though the strength of its local
> chapters is uneven, it can sometimes compensate for that unevenness by
> allocating national staff or shifting staff from one city to the other
> in the midst of a national campaign. Only a truly national organization
> can do this.
>
> In terms of thinking about national organizations and networks, some of
> the key indicators to look at are the following:
>
> 1. do members pay dues? if so, how are the dues allocated in terms of
> going to the local, state and natiional office?
> 2. does the national office do fundraising that helps support both the
> national organizaiton and state/local chapters/affiliates?
> 3. does the national office do research that helps support both national
> campaigns and campaigns at the state/local levels?
> 4. does the national office train its staff and leaders of national and
> state/local chapters,with the same training methods?
> 5. are local/state chapters working on the same campaigns simultaneously?
> 6. Does the national office have the capacity and authority to shift
> resources (staff, money, etc) to different states and cities as part of
> a national organizing campaign?
> 7. Are leaders of local/state chapters/affiliates part of an elected
> national governing body that helps decide on issues, campaigns, hiring,
> and allocation of resources?
> 8. Do members of the local community groups (or chapters/affiliates)
> consider themselves members of a national organization as well?
> 9. Does the organization have national leaders who speak for the
> national organization and are recognized as such by local affiliates and
> members?
>
> I'm sure there are other indicators. I just wrote this quickly to
> respond to Randy's question.
>
> Over the past few years, I've posted early drafts of two papers on this
> site that address some of these issues:
> http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers2009/dreier.htm
> http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers2005/dreier.htm
>
> My chapter, "Organizing for What?" in Marion Orr's edited book on
> community organizing also deals with some of these issues:
> http://reclaimingdemocracy.us/public/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/organizingforwhat.pdf
>
> My chapter in Greg Squires' edited book, Organizing Access to Capital,
> looks at the community reinvestment movement in terms of the factors
> that helped bring local organizations into national campaigns.
>
> I'm eager to see what others think.
>
> Peter Dreier
>
>
> On 7/6/2009 8:22 PM, Discussion list for COMM-ORG wrote:
>
>> --------
>> This is a COMM-ORG 'colist' message.
>> All replies to this message come to COMM-ORG only.
>> --------
>>
>> Hi COMM-ORG,
>>
>> I am very intrigued about things I am noticing out in the community
>> organizing world. I first noticed it over the past year with PICO's
>> push on national health care legislation. Now I am also noticing it on
>> ACORN's foreclosure campaign. And the Virginia Organizing Project is
>> now also working on national health care access issues.
>>
>> Now, I realize that a number of groups, particularly ACORN in my
>> experience, have always worked on national issues. But the promotion
>> and visibility of this national level work is unlike anything I have
>> seen in the 13 years I have been moderating this list. Is it just me,
>> or is something changing?
>>
>> Randy Stoecker
>> moderator/editor, COMM-ORG
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