Where is the Love?

Where is the love?

“How hard is it to dish out soup at food shelters?” As a devout community organizer, I’m sick and tired of my profession being disrespected. Comments like these are all too common whenever I attempt to assert my community organizing credentials to people from more “prestigious” fields. I can admit, community organizing is arguably one of the most misunderstood fields today. As a matter of fact, many people probably do not realize it’s a field. Unlike more prominent professions such as medicine, law, business, education, and athletics to name a few, community organizers humbly labor away in the dark unknowns of the world.

My professional passion combined with persistently being dissed leads me to write this column. Do I have a chip on my shoulder? Heck yeah I have a chip on my shoulder! Many community organizers are underpaid, overworked, and still manage to win impressive victories for the little man, not to mention keeping the wheels of democracy turning. Is a thank you too much to ask for? Apparently yes. Let’s just stop for a moment and think about all of the different ways that community organizers make both your life and democracy better: You like having a living wage? How about affordable housing? As a minority, I LOVE having civil rights. Oh, and who doesn’t like holding powerful figures accountable? Well, if you like all of that stuff, the lions’ share of the credit goes to those community organizers who apparently enjoy spending their time dishing out soup at the local homeless shelter (although there is nothing wrong with that).

How did I get involved in this field? Well, it was in my blood. My father is very active in community affairs and he is the one who introduced me to the field. At first, I shrugged of his efforts to convert me to be a community organizer because I was interested in more scholarly pursuits at the time, like studying the ladies. However, one day my dad gave me the famous community organizer Saul Alinky’s book Rules for Radicals. This book opened my eyes to the potential of community organizing, but the most appealing aspect of organizing is the ability to have an immediate impact to help people. Unlike pursuing a career in law, government, or business I wouldn’t have to work several years before I would be in a position to make a real difference. Not only that, but I was good at it, really good at it.

In high school, I decided to try my hand at this craft by founding and organizing a group called Others’ First. Others’ First sought to organize students for volunteering in nursing homes, hospitals, Ronald McDonald House, food shelters, ect. Within two years we had about 50 students involved in volunteering in the local community. Then in college, I founded and organized a group called People Opposing Prejudice. This group sought to minimize campus prejudice’s through relationship building across ethnic, religious, and gender lines. This effort had about 20 student organizations with POP who worked together in an effort to fight prejudice. Moreover, as a result of these works I won throngs of awards and scholarships that confirmed to me that I had a gift for organizing.

Looking back, it is befitting I chose an underdog field in which to invest my life’s work. As a native Wisconsinite, I am used to being dissed. From our sports (how many straight college football bowl games have the Badgers won again?) to our culture (you haven’t lived until you tossed a cow chip or two) to our beer (it’s Milwaukee’s BEST not Milwaukee’s BEAST) to our people (fat is beautiful too!) to our politicians (I still contend that Fighting Bob Lafollette is the best U.S. senator of all time) we have habitually been insulted, teased, overlooked, mocked, underestimated, and virtually the butt of every rural, redneck joke.

So what is community organizing anyway? Let’s begin with a quote from the father of modern community organizing, Saul David Alinsky, to better appreciate our clout: “It is not the fault of the legislators that they must listen to the twenty million who are organized, for those are the loudest and, with minor exceptions, the only voices in America.” Community organizing in the broadest sense is changing the world by engaging diverse swaths of people who share common values, interests, and goals so that they can have a powerful voice in shaping the future of their community. On a day to day level, community organizers are charged with building relationships with local leaders in order to bring together community institutions such as churches, block clubs, labor unions, youth groups, neighborhood associations, and parent groups to address common issues such as improving schools, lowering crime, establishing affordable housing, having better land use, ect. Organizers bring these community institutions together by building local power groups called citizen’s organizations. These citizen’s organizations systematically build their power up by winning the issues that concern their community. Sometimes issues are won through relationship building with elected officials, but usually issues are won by force.

Where do these community organizers work? Believe it or not, there are actually many job opportunities in the field of community organizing. The largest community organizing networks in America are the Industrial Areas Foundation (www.industrialareasfoundation.org), Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (www.acorn.org), Direct Action and Research Training Center (www.thedartcenter.org), the National Organizers Alliance (www.noacentral.org), the Center for Third World Organizing (www.ctwo.org) and the Gamaliel Foundation (www.gamaliel.org), this last organization is where Sen. Barack Obama made his mark as a community organizer. These are just a few of the employment opportunities in the field, but as you can see, like any reputable profession, there are serious career opportunities in well established organizations.

Over the course of the coming months I will show community organizing its long overdue love. The field of community organizing is filled with significant contributions towards the advancement of democracy, freedom, and human rights. Some of our achievements are well known (Gandhi and Marin Luther King Jr. ring a bell anybody) and some are not so well known (thank you, Kodak, for being the case study of how to beat big business). Well, there is a lot to cover, but I’m honored to be your guide into this mysterious and marvelous world.