Progressive Community Organizing

Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World

Loretta Pyles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415813136, 9780415813136
• eBook ISBN: 9781136271502
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The second edition of Progressive Community Organizing offers a concise intellectual history of community organizing and social movements while also providing practical tools geared toward practitioner skill building. Drawing from social-constructionist, feminist and critical traditions, Progressive Community Organizing affirms the practice of issue framing and offers two innovative frameworks that will change the way students of organizing think about their work.

Progressive Community Organizing is ideal for both undergraduate and graduate courses focused on community theory and practice, community organizing, community development, and social change and service learning. The second edition presents new case studies, including those of a welfare rights organization and a youth-led LGBTQ organization. There are also new sections on the capabilities approach, queer theory, the Civil Rights movement, and the practices of self-inquiry and non-violent communication. Discussion of global justice has been expanded significantly and includes an account of a transnational action-research project in post-earthquake Haiti. Each chapter contains discussion questions, written and web resources, and a list of key terms; a full, free-access companion website is also available for the book.

Part I

Foundations of Community Organizing

1

Introduction

Critical thinking [is] the most important skill for the pursuit of freedom, equality and justice, and the greatest enemy of authoritarianism.

—Suzanne Pharr (1996, p. 17)

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ levees failed after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the people who were unable to evacuate New Orleans sought safety and higher ground as flooding ensued. During this desperate time, citizens offered each other support, taking care of their families and neighbors, while waiting for help from the government to arrive. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), whose authority had recently been diminished by shifting it from a freestanding governmental agency to one of many agencies under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, was conspicuously absent for days. Most of the people who needed resources at the time, such as water, food, and shelter, were low-income African American families who waited at the Superdome or at the New Orleans Convention Center. After several days of waiting, they were eventually bussed or flown out of the city to other parts of the country; many are still trying to get back, and many may never return home.

After this massive flood, people all over the globe began discussing the immediate and long-term material and social justice issues that Gulf Coast and evacuee communities were facing. As the waters receded, New Orleans citizens searched for loved ones—and answers. Evacuees attempted to find each other in shelters as well as to call, text message, and e-mail each other; they surfed the Internet for helpful information, wondering what the next steps were and whom to hold accountable. Faith-based and other relief organizations descended on New Orleans and evacuee communities to provide help where it seemed to be most needed. As citizens gradually reconnected with one another, they began to advocate collectively for levee board accountability, utility services, insurance payments, FEMA assistance, health-care services, and the right to return to public housing. They did this through informal means, as well as by starting new organizations and reviving dormant neighborhood associations. These resilient people were doing this work for myriad purposes and reasons, in some cases, just to preserve their own homes and to protect their previous quality of life. In other cases, it was to hold governmental entities such as the levee boards and the Army Corps of Engineers accountable for the vast devastation of almost an entire city. Still others became involved in order to redress the deep-seated local and global racial and economic injustices exposed in the inadequate hurricane response and rebuilding. Many people made connections between what was happening on the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans and what was happening globally. For example, exorbitant military spending in Iraq meant less money was being spent on domestic infrastructure projects like levees. Large multinational corporations were receiving governmental contracts to rebuild Iraq, while recovery funding for public infrastructure and social welfare safety nets in the Gulf Coast were not forthcoming. Numerous groups were and still are engaged in classical community organizing, community building, and activism—organizing people, getting information, identifying grievances, building on community strengths, confronting those in power who have the ability to make decisions, and creatively rebuilding communities. The situation on the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans was a galvanizing event that has served to marshal diverse citizens in unprecedented ways. Scholars have pointed out that in order to address injustice and engage in community organizing, citizens must feel that their way of life is being threatened (Kieffer, 1984), and such has been the case on the Gulf Coast.

Since the autumn of 2005, scholars and activists have researched and written about a variety of types and levels of community organizing activity in New Orleans.¹ Some of the courageous organizers had never been involved in their communities prior to Katrina, let alone engaged in progressive or grassroots direct-action organizing. Others are lifelong community leaders with a history of activism and organizing successes. Still others identify as part of an international solidarity movement for human rights and global justice. And so, to be sure, a wide spectrum of organizing experience has been a hallmark of the post-Katrina landscape. As an illustration, consider that experienced organizers from local and nationally known community organizations² have been working in New Orleans—All Congregations Together (ACT), Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Incite! Women of Color against Violence, and the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund. These groups, which consist of local citizens, activists, and professional organizers, are working to mobilize communities to effect change and achieve needed reforms for people in real time.

There are countless examples of inspired and effective community organizing campaigns in post-Katrina New Orleans. African American neighborhood members in the Lower Ninth Ward founded an organization called the Ninth Ward Empowerment Neighborhood Association (NENA) with the allied support of Mercy Corps, an international nongovernmental organization (NGO). Mercy Corps had previously worked primarily in countries other than the United States, but helped NENA gut a flooded church and begin a neighborhood association, with a focus on the community development and social welfare issues that will face them for years to come.³ NENA sponsored a powerful vigil near the site of the levee breakage in the Lower Ninth Ward after the storm, which brought important media attention to the issue. Another example is the Vietnamese older adults affiliated with a local faith-based community-development corporation, Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation, who became a powerful force when they descended on their targets at city hall after toxic trash from gutted-out homes was being illegally dumped in their neighborhood. The closure of the dump was a key victory for a coalition of faith-based groups in the city. Katrina has created a unique opportunity to build solidarity across racial and class divides because everyone in the community was affected at some level. Although citizens were not affected by the disaster equally, the conditions have provided an opening for citizens to understand their linked fates and how social problems affect everyone.

But most community organizing does not happen in the context of an event as highly publicized as Hurricane Katrina. Most injustices happen without media coverage; they are not in full view for the world to see on CNN or YouTube. In fact, most injustice is masked by a narrative that describes it otherwise. Consider the welfare discourse in the early years following the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which reduced the amount of time a person could receive public benefits and emphasized a “work first” philosophy (Kilty & Segal, 2003). Many politicians and media stated that welfare reform had been a success. The welfare rolls had been reduced by half, but many people knew another side to the story, particularly the people who are in need of public benefits and are living the reality of poverty in the United States. Some scholars and activists understood that many of the individuals receiving public benefits had no choice but to work $7.00-per-hour jobs and had little prospects for increasing their chances of making more money (Cancian, 2001). If the goal of the welfare reform policy had been to reduce the rolls, then indeed maybe it was a success, but the thinking person had to ask whether it was even the right goal in the first place: What about living-wage employment opportunities? What about adequate food, health care, child care, education, and housing? (Jones-DeWeever, 2005; Taliaferro, 2005). Who were the real beneficiaries of welfare reform? It is through the posing of such questions that the work of progressive community organizers begins.

Privatization, Globalization, and Resistance

The mid-1970s in the United States denotes the beginnings of the retrenchment of social welfare services, laying the foundation for comprehensive welfare reform (Mink, 1999 Quadagno, 1996). This new federalism has been marked by an emphasis on devolution and privatization (Karger & Stoesz, 2006). Responsibility for social welfare provision has been placed in the hands of states and local entities and, ultimately, in the hands of private contractors. Faith-based service providers, social service organizations, and informal citizen networks attempt to coordinate the human welfare needs of citizens with minimal assistance from the government. The idea of “cradle to grave” support for citizens, if it were ever achieved, sometimes seems like a fanciful dream.

These policies evolved from a philosophy of the political economy that emphasizes trickle-down economics, free-market capitalism, and social Darwinism (Karger & Stoesz, 2006). This philosophy is based on a “liberal” approach to the flows of capital, unrestricted by governmental interventions.⁴ During the 1980s and 1990s, these neoliberal free markets were ever expanding into global venues. This globalization has been referred to as the most significant restructuring of political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution (Mander, 1996). The term globalization is a complex and loaded term, and for some, it may refer to the increasing states of interconnectedness across the globe—cultural, environmental, and technological. For others, it is a distinctively economic term referring to cross-national economic transactions between corporations and governments (Streeten, 2001). These definitions are not unrelated, and both are relevant to the task at hand.

Multinational and other corporations from the global North, that is, “developed countries,” have for some time been expanding into new territory, or markets, in the “developing” global South. Unfortunately, when many of these corporations begin hiring local labor, it can often happen without attention to living wages or quality of life of vulnerable citizens and families (Streeten, 2001). Free-trade policies and structural adjustment programs have continued to defy attempts to protect workers’ wages and conditions worldwide. Studies have shown that such policies have had deleterious consequences for the environment and the quality of life of workers and poor people throughout the world (Lechner & Boli, 2004). These are the times in which organizers across the globe find themselves, and this is the larger context of this book.

The good news is that just like in New Orleans, there has been resistance to these seemingly insurmountable global and local forces. In the fall of 2011, a group of activists began occupying Wall Street and camping in Zuccotti Park in New York City in protest of corporate greed. The Occupy movement that spread throughout the United States and beyond is only a recent example of such resistance. For many, the Seattle protests of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999 signified the great strength and resistance of the global justice movement. Union workers, environmentalists, and social change activists from all over the world came together to resist these policies using a diverse range of tactics (Katsiaficas, 2004; Klein, 2002). In countries throughout the world, people who are living in a context of privatized or no services and corporate greed and irresponsibility, struggle daily for funding for affordable housing, the rights of immigrants, access to clean water, community mental health, reproductive justice, and other basic human needs. Activists throughout the world have been looking to grassroots struggles in Latin America and Asia for inspiration and guidance about how to resist policies and practices that are negatively affecting human rights. For example, after a major economic collapse in Argentina in 2001, multinational corporations pulled out of the country—literally overnight—boarding up workplaces and leaving workers without jobs. Workers took action and organized themselves, occupying the factories and winning the right to form cooperatives and keep the factories going. This National Movement of Recovered Factories has shown the world how the power of regular people working together can resist globalization and create an alternative model of business where all workers earn the same amount of money, eliminating a boss who is paid a grossly disproportionate wage compared to the workers. The last chapter of this book highlights and analyzes some of the early lessons learned from global justice movement building.

Capabilities Approach

But what kind of world are community organizers trying to create? What are they fighting for? Although organizers are often clear about what they are “against”—poverty, oppression, violence—it may not always be clear as to what they are “for.” To answer such questions, it is necessary to appeal to normative ethics and to lay the groundwork for a morality that can answer weighty questions about how the world “ought” to be. Such a framework can guide progressive organizers with a grounding, a vision of sorts, for their endeavors.

It is clear that creating a universal ethical conceptual framework is fraught with philosophical problems. Indeed, it is certainly brazen to claim to know what all people need everywhere, or how arrangements in the social world ought to be for everyone. Human societies are diverse with differing cultures, values, geographies, and political systems, as are individual personalities and abilities within societies. Nonetheless, in a world where there is such incredible marginalization and disparity, it seems reasonable to articulate a baseline of what is fundamentally necessary for any human to live well and to have choices. In essence, articulating a normative ethical framework is a necessary condition for acting in a world plagued by serious social problems.

A significant amount of social justice organizing in the U.S. grounds its normative ethical view in the values and rhetoric of the U.S. civil rights movement. Such approaches seek to ensure the physical safety and integrity of citizens, protect them from discrimination on the grounds of gender, ability, race, religion, national origin, age, and sexual orientation, and affirm political rights (Civil Rights Act, 1964). Other organizers draw from similar rights-based values and language, but instead draw from a more global language of human rights (Ife, 2001a). Human rights are considered the universal and inalienable privileges afforded to people to achieve their humanity regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, and so on. Human rights language can be employed as a rhetorical and legal strategy by people organizing in communities, such as the “right to peaceful assembly” or the “right to housing.” Human rights are also codified in such important documents as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various aspects of international law, including international conventions.

Amartya Sen (1999) and Martha Nussbaum (2000, 2011) have grappled with this complex moral terrain through their thinking about global economic and social development. They have developed an approach known as the capabilities approach. The view is premised on the idea that all human beings should live in societies that allow them to achieve their full human functioning ability. Key to such a view is that society should provide the conditions necessary to allow people “to do” and “to be.” Development of human society goes far beyond improving economic and material conditions; indeed, it means creating democratic conditions that allow people to experience freedom. The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) was developed to measure development in countries across the globe and was conceptually informed by the capabilities approach. The HDI is concerned not only with income or assets but also with education, political freedoms, and the like. Freedom is a core value of the capabilities approach;however, to be sure, humans are always free not to pursue their full human functioning, but the opportunities should be there.

Amartya Sen (1999) has proposed that there are five basic instrumental freedoms that are necessary to facilitate human development. They are political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. These are the kinds of freedoms that organizers advocate for—welfare benefits, accountability of politicians and CEOs, and a host of political rights. If these basic democratic facilities are not in place, then humans are not able to pursue their desires, and hence, they cannot flourish.

Table 1.1 articulates 10 central capabilities that Nussbaum (2011) asserts are necessary and interconnected conditions for achieving full human functioning. Whereas some of the capabilities focus on specific material outcomes such as health, shelter, and safety, others (Capabilities 4, 6, 7, and 10) affirm the importance of groups of individuals coming together to connect with one another and reflect on and advocate for the kinds of communities that they envision.

Table 1.1 Nussbaum’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Foundations of Community Organizing
• Part II: Tools for Community Organizing
• Part III: Enduring and Emergent Issues in Organizing
• References
• Index