4049 Change the Power Structure in Your Community

Michael Gecan, Beacon Press author of Going Public and Industrial Areas Foundation Lead Organizer

I don't have to talk about the theory of how to change the power structures or power dynamics in communities - thank goodness. I can start by talking about the reality of those changed structures and dynamics.

Tonight, we could go to East Brooklyn, New York, and walk for hours up and down 145 blocks of new, affordable EBC Nehemiah homes - homes built because of the power and persistence of an IAF organization and its allies and supporters over the past 20 years. Nearly 3,000 families live in dignity and greater security because of those changed power dynamics.

We could visit workers in Baltimore who make a living wage because the IAF organization there invented, designed, and passed the nation's first living wage law. They raised the wages of thousands of people and kicked off the living wage movement in this country.

We could walk through the halls of the Bronx Leadership Academy - a new public high school in the South Bronx, a stone's throw from the Cross Bronx Expressway, created and supported by the IAF organization there, South Bronx Churches. Almost every student whop attends ends up graduating. And almost every graduate goes on to college. This is an extraordinary achievement in what was once the community presidents from both parties visited if they wanted to be seen as caring about urban problems.

We could walk through a construction site in Washington, D.C., where 150 more new Nehemiah homes are being built, or one in Baltimore, or one in the South Bronx.

We could wander through the blighted and abandoned streets of north Philadelphia, where the local IAF organization, Philadelphia Interfaith Action, is spearheading one of the largest and most ambitious urban revitalization efforts in the nation.

We could drink fresh water and use modern toilet facilities in the Rio Grande Valley. There the local IAF affiliate, Valley Interfaith, waged a successful battle to bring the most basic amenities of civilized life - water from a tap and working sewers - to the areas' colonias.

We could relax in parks in San Antonio and Lower Manhattan that only exist today because of the power of these organizations. We, or our children and grandchildren, could play in playgrounds and fields generated by these groups. Those same children could attend after-school programs funded by a public authority created by one of our organizations, schools improved because of increased parent participation organized locally, health facilities available to them either because then were built or preserved by our organizations.

We could cross safer streets, ride cleaner elevators, stand on renovated subway and elevated platforms - all because local people, through their organizations, profoundly changed the structure of power and the dynamics of power. They fought hard and won - real victories, tangible victories, fundamental changes.

Give me a week - and I could conduct a tour of this country unlike any other. I could show you sites of extraordinary physical and social beauty - the red brick of new homes as stunning as the red cliffs of Sedona, Arizona -- all formed and shaped by the power of organized people. That power flows as steadily and as relentlessly as the Colorado River.

And, what's more, I could introduce you to many of the pioneers and adventurers, the discoverers and inventors, the leaders and members, who have made the changes you could see with your own eyes and are pushing to make more.

What happened here? Or in all of these "heres" from Boston to LA, from Durham to Portland, from Chicago to El Paso`?

Did some charismatic leader emerge in each place and lead likeminded individuals on a great crusade? No.

Did a great university or institute, with all of its resources and doctorates, lend its prestige and its research to the resolution of these solution dilemmas? No.

Did a journalist or media personality uncover a scandal or controversy and bring it before the eyes of the region or the nation - triggering a major shift? No.

Did a senator or congressman, mayor or governor, president or cabinet secretary, use his or her bully pulpit to trumpet a cause? No.

Did some relentless and selfless lawyer sacrifice health and wealth to speak on behalf of these people and their issues? No.

Finally, did ordinary people - as the chattering upper classes like to call them -- somehow suddenly come together and spark in some extraordinary way? Were these isolated incidents of social spontaneous combustion, random lightning strikes? Events that cannot be predicted or repeated or learned from? No.

No. Something else happened here, and is happening tonight as we gather in this conference room in Boston, and will happen tomorrow morning and tomorrow night and through the days and months and years ahead. And that something does not quite fit into the established stereotypes of "social activism" or "social change" embedded deep in the psyches of those who consider themselves progressive in America today. Nor does it fit into the dismissive assumptions of "fringe behavior" or "radical agitation" by those who consider themselves conservatives in this country today. It is something other, different, richer, and more complicated than any stereotype or assumption or orthodoxy of either the left or the right.

I'm going to take the rest of my time tonight to try to describe that difference, that otherness, and that richness.

I have to say a little bit about myself right here. You should know two things: I am a practicing Roman Catholic and a life-long fan of the Chicago Cubs. If you're familiar with baseball at all, you know that a great hitter hits 330, and a very good hitter bats 300, and a decent hitter hits 280, and a below average or struggling player bats about 245.

Well, I'm a 245 Roman Catholic - on a team that has finished below 500 for many many years. All through my life, I have seen the great strength and potential and tradition of my church, as well as the disappointing performance and profound failure. It has given me and millions like me - education, health, support, guidance; in short, it has made a fuller life possible.

And it has damaged, even destroyed life and opportunity, at times. For me, the destruction was quite literal: a fire in a firetrap parochial grade school in Chicago that killed 92 of my classmates and three brave women religious. On a broader scale, the church that was often the anchor of so many families in our older cities often turned a blind eye and stood helplessly by as neighborhood after neighborhood fell prey to blockbusters, panic peddlers, arsonists and corrupt politicians. Millions of hardworking white, black, Hispanic families were fleeced, lost everything. Entire sections of once-great cities were left in devastation and in despair.

It didn't take this latest scandal to convince me that my church was mixed - great and remarkable at times, flawed and troubled at other times. I knew it in my bones, since I was a boy of 10. And yet, and yet, I cannot imagine life without this institution - not for me, for my family, for the larger communities. Even when my head says to get out, flee, drop it, my heart and gut say, "Stay and struggle. Try to contribute and improve it. Find another parish where a fuller religious life is possible."

Forgive the big leap here, but the people who have organized to make the changes I described at the start of my remarks are people who, in their bones and in their souls, need, want, hunger for, struggle with institutions. They attend them, work in them, pray for them, cry for them, and celebrate the great moments of their private and public lives in them.

Another way to put this is this: they are not - I am not - first and foremost individualists, although they are as individual and diverse and difficult in their differences and diversity as people can be.

Some of our greatest poetry and most challenging philosophical tracts speak of deep and transcendent individualism...

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea
Past the houses - past the headlands
Into deep Eternity -

Bred as we, among the mountains
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

Emily Dickinson, 1859

Or

Dispossess me of belief
Between life and me
Obtrude no symbolic forms

Let ME rise or fall alone...

Grant me this black, rich country
Uncertainty, labor, fear.
Do not steal the rewards of my mortality

A. R. Ammons

I love these poems and poets, and I appreciate the spirit they capture in their verse. In literature, noble isolation, profound inwardness, a focus on the self that leads to revelation and sometimes liberation - these are compelling and attractive qualities. But these are not the qualities that mattered, that made a difference in the thousands of leaders I have had the honor and pleasure to work with during my nearly 30 years as an organizer. The leaders who have changed the structure and dynamic of power in their public arenas have a very different spirit - and they have taught me the value of that spirit as much as I have taught some of them the universals and skills of organizing over the years.

These people are relational. They are members. They CONGREGATE. They walk or fall together. They extend their hands and wade in with others, not sail solitarily out. They are engaged in an exciting and sometimes exhausting process of organizing, disorganizing, and reorganizing - congregations, groups, teams, support systems; communities, cities, regions, and, potentially, if we are all fortunate, even a country.

Even if this tendency to relate, this habit of joining and participating weren't, as I believe it is, a deep human drive and need and appetite, it would still be a deep and critical political need.

The leaders who build the Nehemiah homes, and who start schools, and who walk along the East River of Manhattan in a park they built - they all live in the world as it is. And that world is a world of institutions - powerful and complex, indifferent and distracted, damaging and even overwhelming.

They didn't beat entrenched institutional power with loose individual opposition. They defended themselves and their families and their communities, and the best and greatest traditions of their country, by sustaining and supporting strong institutions that they still called their own - and by creating new and better institutions that could assist them in 4W enriching their larger public world.

The institution that most people can still call their own is still the local congregation.

And one example of a larger institution - an organization of congregations and labor locals and recovery groups and settlement houses and other entities - that people can call their own is what we in the IAF call the broad-based power organization.

When I was invited to give this talk - and I was honored by the invitation - I sent a note around to my fellow organizers in the IAF, in 20 states, in 60 or so organizations, and asked them to send me short vignettes of leaders and congregations in the Unitarian/Universalist world who have participated effectively in local organizing. I received many responses -from Oregon and Washington State, from Maryland and Massachusetts, and everyplace in between.

I'm just going to mention a few tonight and add a few of my own.

Right here in Boston, David Carl Olson is the pastor of a Unitarian/ Universalist congregation and the chairman of one of the newer IAF organizations called the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. Now I wish I could tell you that they had built thousands of homes already and changed the way power works and flows in this city and region.

But they haven't - not yet. But we are confident, after several years of struggle, that they will. And when they do, they will have Reverend Olson, among others, to thank. Reverend Olson has worked closely with one of IAF's finest senior organizers, Arnie Graf, to make the organization much more diverse. He has helped bring the group to life and has patiently worked through their early internal struggles. He has set the stage for a productive and effective future.

I've had the pleasure of meeting and working with Reverend Olson. Let me talk for a minute about one other leader I haven't met. When our organizer in our Montgomery County, Maryland, organization, AIM, took time off with his spouse after the birth of their son, Cathleen Becsckehazy, of the UU Church of Rockville, stepped right in. She coordinated a house meeting effort, coached people on how to turn people out for these important local listening sessions, helped identify leaders to support those who conducted the meetings, and was critical to a campaign that involved over 1,000 residents in 80 different house meetings.

I haven't said anything about a wonderful press conference or dramatic demonstration or intense negotiations. We have nothing against wonderful press conferences. in fact, we just had one last week in Washington, where we are forcing the mayor and the development community to invest $200 million in neighborhoods before they spend one penny on another costly baseball stadium and losing baseball team. And we have nothing against dramatic actions. We just had a great one in the South Bronx about two weeks ago, where 450 leaders gathered with a deputy mayor, four commissioners, five police precinct commanders, and others to push and press and pressure for the continued improvement of their still embattled community. And we are all for intense negotiations. We just had one Friday with the mayor's staff in Philadelphia, where we are trying to set the stage for the reconstruction of a shrinking and dying city on a scale we have never attempted before.

But in all the talk of press conferences, and confrontations, and other public actions, it is easy and natural to lose sight of the hard institutional work that has been done by all the Reverend Olsons and all the Cathleen Becskehazys and all the Lee Pardees of Brooklyn.

You also have two publishing houses and Skinner Books, my publisher, I'm proud to say, whose staff you should be proud of, that quietly select, edit and distribute books that most mainline presses won't touch. This is an enormous contribution to the intellectual and political life of the nation.

And you have a funder, the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Fund, that is one of the very few sources in the country for organizations like ours - organizations that seek to change the structure and dynamic of power in local and larger political arenas.

Your talent and money and resources - your institutional weight and your institutional strength - are playing major and vital roles in the organizing that is going on around the United States.

You are practicing something I tried to write about (even preach) - what I believe is really the toughest challenge to those who want to make lasting change in this world:

"....maintaining a conservative's belief in the value and necessity of stable institutions, along with a radical's understanding of the need for persistent agitation and reorganization. We are called to love, engage and uphold our most cherished institutions, while watching them, questioning them, and pressing them to change, all at the same time...

"The women and men who resist the temptation to choose one extreme or the other, or who don't just opt out, are every bit as important to the defense of this democracy, in times, of crisis and times of peace, as the dogged citizen soldiers (like my father his friends) who landed on Omaha Beach."

One reason I wrote my book, Going Public, is that I was growing increasingly annoyed by how little was written about the leaders and the organizations and actions that I was familiar with.

I tried to capture some of them - their maturity, courage, and humor -- and to describe in detail the plotting and scheming and risk-taking that led to their practical, concrete successes. The last well-known books about organizing were written by one of your previous Ware lecturers, Saul Alinsky, the founder of the IAF. Those books are 40 years old. And recent writing about organizing seemed either too theoretical - like a Cubist painting - or too pastel - like an Impressionist work. I couldn't even recognize our own organizations in some of these more recent texts. Organizing, when it's done well, is more like a Breughel canvas - full rich, outrageous, funny, over the top at times. I tried to capture those qualities as well.

It took me about 180 pages to accomplish this, with some very firm and capable editing from the good people at Beacon. I tried to communicate some of the great challenges inherent in our approach - some of the keys to the success that we have had so far. Here, in a very condensed form, are some items to keep in mind:

FIRST, IT TAKES TIME.
The start-up phase for one of our organizations can be as little as one year or as long as five. This is what we call the sponsoring committee - or formation - phase. Let me give you one example. In 1978, a small group of religious and lay leaders called our office in Chicago and asked if we would come to East Brooklyn and assist them. The IAF director then and now, Ed Chambers, flew to New York and toured the area and met with them. He was stunned by what he saw. East Brooklyn in 1978 was like the South Bronx in 1978 or like East Baltimore or parts of North Philadelphia or Camden New Jersey or Hartford Connecticut today- a place of intense devastation, abandonment, isolation and violence. In fact, a mayor's group visited the area at about the same time and the then-mayor of Boston, Mayor White, was quoted as saying, "I have seen the beginning of the end of civilization."

The leaders wanted the IAF to do something immediately, immediately, at once. Ed Chambers said that we wouldn't do any work on any of the glaring and pressing issues of the moment. His advice to them was to recruit 20 local congregations and associations; establish a firm financial foundation of dues and grants; and engage 50 leaders in intensive 10-day training and over 300 leaders in local trainings.

The activists in the crowd squirmed, reacted, stormed out. Others argued that they needed to identify an issue or a cause to "galvanize" the community. Still others said that the IAF and the fledgling local group had to win a few things to "prove" to others that it was for real.

Chambers held his ground and repeated his advice: recruit institutions, build a financial base, train your leaders. He argued that the community wasn't facing a housing crisis or drug crisis or crime crisis or some other crisis. At bottom, underneath all of these evident crises, was a deeper crisis: a power crisis.

The power of organized crime, the power of the drug lords, the power of corrupt borough machines, the power of indifferent city and corporate bureaucracies could only be effectively challenged by another, deeper, institutional form of power.

It took the leaders of East Brooklyn about two years to build their base. And what a base it was! When I arrived there, as lead organizer, in the fall of 1980, 1 found a team of talented leaders who had gotten to know and trust one another, who had been through much training and reflection, and who were financially secure. They had done all of this work on their own, with no staff on site, with Chambers in the area three days a month.

They took the time to build a lasting and durable power base. This is exactly the work that many good people, who are truly concerned about issues and concerns, skip, or forget, or short shrift, or even oppose. Don't make this mistake. It's precisely in the process of doing this institutional homework that a community can begin to develop new depth and new breadth, can sort out the majority of hard and persistent workers from the small minority of talkers or even loudmouths, and can engage potential allies and supporters in other sectors.

Another story about time: A year ago, a team of leaders from our Philadelphia group, PIA, had a very important meeting with the mayor, John Street, about a plan to rebuild and revitalize large sections of that troubled city. As we walked out, one of the leaders looked at me and shook her head and sighed when she said that it had taken ten long years to get to this point. I said, "Ten years is fast. We've gone from no leaders, no institutions, no money, no recognition, no power to, sitting at the center of local power and influencing the most important strategy in the modem history of the city. That's not so bad."

A third story: The EBC organization has built 2,900 new homes and totally transformed the area called "the beginning of the end of civilization." That's the good news. Here's the harder news: it took 20 years, and we are still building. But the organization had the firm foundation, the base, and the staying power to run a 20-year-action on blight, abandonment, and despair. It was - and still is - a powerful machine, but a machine with a soul.

SECOND, IT TAKES TRAINING.
The training is not in dogma or formula. The training is in the universals and skills of effective public life. We train leaders in the all-important art of individual meetings - one-to-one, face-to-face meetings with others. That's the most radical tool we use. And it's based on a radical belief: that the talent we need to revive our cities and counties is not somewhere else - in City Hall or Harvard or Honeywell International - but resides in the leaders who live and work and struggle in their own communities. But the only way to identify that talent and challenge those leaders and build a new base is to do individual meetings. The right relationship, as a major bank likes to advertise, IS everything. And the only way to start to build the right relationship is one to one and face to face.

We train people in the nature and uses of power. We challenge some of the slogans and aphorisms that so many of us learned and repeated without examining their implications. For example, "Knowledge is power." Not true. Power - organized people and organized money - is power. Not knowledge. Not doctorates. Not degrees. If knowledge were power, we would all go to Columbia University or NYU when we wanted to change the quality of our lives in New York. Instead, we go to City Hall, or Wall Street, or a major corporate neighbor in midtown.

"Small is beautiful." Not always. Small may be beautiful. But 1,000 new affordable homes are more beautiful than 10. And 5,000 new homes are more beautiful still. And a national housing policy that created millions of new affordable homes and apartments would be stunningly gorgeous.

"All politics is local." With all due respects to one of the great political figures from the Boston area, Tip O'Neill, this is not the case either. All politics starts locally - and needs a local base - but all effective politics demands that we reach beyond the local and confront enemies and seek allies from other parts of our cities and societies. Besides, if all politics had been local, then Tip O'Neill would never have played the critical role in the events that led to the threat of impeachment and eventual resignation of Richard Nixon.

We push people, in training, to get past slogans and aphorisms and to look in depth at the power realities in their communities and the larger world. We train people, and learn from them, how to do a power analysis of their community and city and region - a map to use when moving through the public arena. We prepare people to run effective meetings and to plan, execute, and evaluate successful and creative actions.

People love to learn, the way all of us loved to learn when we were very young - by putting our hands on the world around us and manipulating it and rearranging it. Several weeks ago, we had a major public action with the schools chancellor in New York. An hour before the action, 150 leaders packed into a church basement near City Hall for a briefing on the political developments and dynamics that were the context and backdrop for that day's action. There they were - working and poor New Yorkers, from all corners of the city, some taking a long lunch hour just to be there – intently focused on WHY we were acting, not just on the action itself. This is active, ongoing adult political education for everyone involved - the leaders, the organizers, the members.

In fact, we believe that people are attracted to our organizations - and yours, I would venture - not primarily or solely for the issue or the cause. They are attracted to the opportunity to continue to grow and develop as leaders and members and citizens. And they are attracted to the rare and wonderful mix of new public relationships with their fellow leaders. The issue - better schools in a city - is important. And winning is important. But learning and relating are, at the very least, as important. And no successful organization or congregation can grow and thrive without all three.

IT TAKES A TEAM - A LARGE EXTENDED TEAM OF LEADERS WHO OPERATED TOGETHER.

Individual charisma is one of the most overrated qualities of the modem era. It is not a creation, but is certainly a favored characteristic, of a completely out-of-control media-celebrity culture.

The great management guru, Peter Drucker, a favorite of mine, wrote this: "The one and only personality trait the effective leaders I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no “charisma” and little use either for the term or for what it signifies. The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers." That's why we emphasize and build large teams of leaders, many leaders with hundreds and even thousands of followers. That's whys two weeks ago, here in Boston, 1,300 GBIO leaders and members from 60 institutions packed into a meeting with the governor of the state to present to him the issues that people cared most about.

This may seem odd to say, but I am not here alone tonight. There is no "Mike Gecan, individual" in the public arena, at this lectern, in this room. I don't think of myself that way at all. The "me" that is here is a corporate me - a person in relationship with Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood and Reverend Mary Laney, with Irving Domenech and Carmellia Goffe, with Reverend Getty Cruz and Fr. John Doyle, with Arnie Graf and Cheri Andes, with the Beacon Press and the Veatch Fund and the Unitarian Universalist institutions and leaders that have done such wonderful work in our organizations all across the country.

Whatever I have to say tonight - what I think I know, what I think I have learned, what I am sharing with you -- has been informed by nearly 30 years of relationships with hundreds upon hundreds of leaders. In the public arena, on the rare occasions, like tonight, when I am not actually others, I am never alone. To forget this would be to become, quite literally, in the Greek sense, an idiot, someone outside of the walls of the town. Robert Penn Warren, my teacher in college, once wrote of the "murderous innocence of the American people." Trying to operate in the world as it is - as a worthy, well-informed, right-thinking, but private and powerless individual - is an exercise in suicidal innocence.

IT TAKES TREASURE - ORGANIZED MONEY.
People who consider themselves progressive or liberal have a bad habit of not taking organized money seriously enough. It's as if building a firm financial base
and raising funds and balancing a budget somehow sully the purity of the cause being championed. The conservatives love this habit of the liberals for two reasons. The first reason is that they take money VERY seriously and organize and leverage it in their own interests. The second reason is that progressives do them a favor when they don't. The success of EBC depended on the ability of the local congregations to pay dues ($500 to $7,500 per year) and secure grants to support their core organizational budget. The success of the Nehemiah housing effort depended on the extraordinary fact that EBC leaders raised an $8 million revolving nointerest construction fund for their housing effort. When the leaders first went to meet with skeptical and even hostile Mayor Koch, they walked into City Hall representing 40 congregations of organized people, capable of turning our 8,000 members; $8 million dollars in construction financing; and superb institutional allies like the late RC bishop Francis J. Mugavero and the New York Daily News. Now that's not the Chicago Cubs! That's more like last year's Anaheim Angels.

IT TAKES A STOMACH FOR TRADE-OFFS - FOR DEALS, QUID PRO QUOS, COMPROMISES, BOTH INTERNALLY AND EXTERNALLY.

When you are institutionally based, and broadly based, and truly diverse, it means that you are, inevitably, not dominated by the left or the right, that the majority of your members are moderates. For those who think they know what's right and what needs to be done and what all the answers are, there is frustration ahead. For those who think everything must happen right away, today, now, at once, they will find themselves tearing their hair. In this kind of organizing and this kind of organization, we practice - and here I'm going to try, with the help of one of the great writers of recent times, to resurrect and revive a dirty word - we practice POLITICS. Let me quote here from the great Bernard Crick:

"Politics is an activity - and this platitude must be brought to life: it is not a thing, like a natural object or a work of art, which could exist if individuals did not continue to act upon it. And it is a complex activity ... It may be a messy, mundane, inconclusive, tangled business, far removed from the passion for certainty and the fascination for world-shaking quests which afflict the totalitarian intellectual; but it does, at least, even in the worst of political circumstances, give a man some choice in what role to play, some variety of corporate experience, and some ability to call his soul his own...."

He wrote these words in 1962, still reflecting on the two great totalitarian attempts to destroy democracy and stifle human freedom.

"Organizing is politics, in the broadest sense. It gives women and men a choice in what role they want to play in their communities, cities, and country. It adds to the variety of corporate experience, so essential, I believe, to a fuller and richer and more effective public life. And it helps all those who participate to free themselves from those who try to reduce or commodify their spirits and souls - marketers, ideologues, the experts with all the answers, the political charlatans who seek to speak for us, even religious leaders who have lost their way. Organizing helps us call our souls our own, our neighborhoods our own, our cities our own, our nation our own."

FINALLY, IT TAKES ATTITUDE AND TENSION.
The word I love is chutzpah. You have to have some chutzpah if you are going to change the structure and dynamic of power anywhere. The very thought doing that is a threat to the powers that be. That's what I love about the word power and the silly and distorted form of that word -- "empowerment." When you say you are organizing for power to address a wide range of concerns, you are implying that all of the geniuses in the private and public sectors have not quite figured some things out. And you are warning them that you will. That's attitude. The only problem with having an attitude like that is that you had better be able to deliver some day. And there is tension involved, because it is not always win-win, and we are surely not "getting to yes" most of the time. We are getting to partial, provisional, temporary solutions. We are engaging in protracted and up-and-down struggles. We are winning 40% one day, regrouping, and going back for the next 20% the next time. We are living with the dislike and contempt of many of the power people we negotiate with. We are communicating that we could care less whether or not they like us or consider us good little "faith-based" boys and girls. We want recognition. We want respect. We want results.

Sure, it takes time, and treasure, and training; it takes a team and a stomach for trade-offs and tensions. But so does anything that is of any importance or value.

But with these keys, which are available to almost everyone, you can change the structure and dynamic of power in any community. You can change its face and its spirit. You can conduct your own tours - through canyons of better homes and better schools and safer streets and fuller lives - someday.

And you can experience something better than what the poet Robert Pinsky called “mere success.” You can experience moments of triumph.

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