Getting Ready

Last official day at the office; departing Monday evening. The Needmor books have arrived at Chuck Hirt's in Slovakia, along with Joe Szakos books (the excellent We Make Change, which profiles organizers, what we do and why), and it's getting pretty much inevitable. Thinking about what I want to learn from this trip, as well as what I want to teach.

To learn, I think, what's the essence, the unchangeable center - this is what separates organizing from all the other stuff you could do. To further explore the edges of that, the frontiers, where the work is different - and it's always different - but the essence is in place.

I've written about this before, and I've worked closer to the boundaries. At the Center for Community Change I specialised, for a while, in community development organizations and service agencies who had a commitment to organizing, and I've visited folks in Canada and Australia whose work is very different from what I'm used to.

The trick here is not to fall back on slogans or ideology or simple formula's. The key is to find what I once called the Soul Test. Here's the intro to something that Randy Stoecker (of the excellent website http://comm-org.wisc.edu) wrote together:

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: SOUL AND SUBSTANCE
Dave Beckwith and Randy Stoecker

The Soul Test

The Soul of Organizing is people. An organizer might be paid or work as a volunteer. The group could start as part of a master plan hatched in a smoke filled room or out of a 'spontaneous' community reaction to a crisis like a toxic waste dump. They might base their work on house by house prayer groups or cells of clandestine conspirators. the ultimate goal could be the preservation of the Hopi language and culture or the overthrow of the real estate tax based system for financing public education. Organizers can differ on strategy, tactics, even on what seem to be base values. However, all organizers believe in people, in the ability of regular folks to guide their lives, to speak for themselves, to learn the world and how to make it work better.
The Soul of Organizing creates a lot of problems. The people that have the power now tend to misunderstand when others want to share that power. There are usually forces or people that benefit from the imbalance of power: politicians don't always want to hear from the victims of their help; bureaucrats that 'know best' would rather see their clients as abstract concepts than real, live, complicated beings with opinions on how they want to be helped. Business has its own dynamic, and profit, and especially the short term bottom line kind can be an all too visible hand. The Soul of Organizing says to these folks "STOP"!! We want a say in this! We're people, too, and you WILL listen to us!
The soul of organizing creates a litmus test, too. It is not our purpose to create a hard and fast definition - although we offer some guidelines. Generally, whenever folks get together for mutual aid, common support, planning for the future and to make a point, that's great, and we'll share the name, "organizing". Everyone who cares to use the term, though, is open to the Soul Test. Does this work include people, does it ennoble them, does it allow people with a problem to participate in its solution, does it make room for them at the decision making table, and does it actually lead to an improvement in their lives?
We urge caution in applying the test, especially when the powerful--the White, the moneyed, the politically connected--apply the test to the powerless. Most variations from the 'pure' are the result of folks' understanding of what's possible and what's important. If you don't have to lie down on a park bench at night, don't be too quick to judge the choices made by those who do.
For those in the struggle, though, the Soul Test can help build better organizations. We will have some suggestions on how to use it later.