Community Organizing: Not a frakkin' tea party

I live in Chicago.

My adopted city is one with a history of immigration, ethnic pride, migration, violence, politics, poverty, ambition, and working class values (with a little head breakin' and racial segregation thrown in for good measure.)

It's also a city that has always taken part in grassroots community organizing, the thing the GOP sneers at.

The thing about grassroots organizing is that it happens outside of power. It goes directly to the folks being impacted by bad policies, by inequity, by disenfranchisement and it helps them fight and work in their own best interests.

It's hard work helping people fight in their own best interest, especially when those in power say that the interests of Authority ARE the interests of everyone under Authority. It's hard to mobilize folks to go up against big institutions and work for reform and actually win, especially when those institutions pretty much depend on the bafflement of the communities they exploit or neglect.

Mainly, it's hard because community organizing does what government refuses to do or lacks the capacity to do.

The organization I work for was founded in the 19th century by 13 women meeting in someone's home. They saw women migrating to the city from Illinois farms with no way to navigate this new environment and so they vowed to do something about it. These women helped with housing and employment; they helped these women build community with one another and, later, they integrated their clubs long before most other women's clubs were comfortable with the idea. They went on to agitate for women's sufferage and then, during the Civil Rights movement, they helped organize south and north shore women for Wednesdays in Mississippi. In the 70s, these women helped mobilize other working women of Chicago to fight for sexual harrassment and gender discrimination laws that literally transformed the way thousands of working women were treated in this city.

I am, and we are, the product of community organizing by women. These were ordinary women, hidden women. Wives, daughters, secretaries and students - going up against political disenfranchisement, racism, and sexual discrimination - meeting in lunch rooms, living rooms, libraries, churches, and community centers, sharing their stories, identifying systemic problems and dedicating themselves to solving them. These were women writing letters, crashing city council meetings, rallying in plazas, and riding buses to help other women fight police violence and racial conflict.

Who benefits from community organizing?

Mostly poor people, working people, elderly people, children, people of color, people who don't usually have access to power and influence.

Who doesn't the GOP care about, if they're so ready to be contemptuous of community organizing?

Poor people, working people, elderly people, children, people of color, people who don't usually have access to power and influence.

Ideally, grassroots community organizing allows for the flattening of power. Maybe, just maybe, this is a clue into why the GOP hates it so much. For some reason, the GOP just doesn't like the idea of ordinary people taking up the mantle of changing their circumstances - or the idea of anyone helping them do so. Though they say they're the party of 'personal responsibility,' when a community decides to take responsibility for itself and mobilizes to fight for its own interests, they characterize the effort as lazy or irresponsible and feckless.

It's funny. They give a lot of lip service to Christian values. They spend a lot of time holding hands with (or kissing ass of) the Christian Right. To me, a woman who grew up in Sunday School and still remembers her lessons about the sermon on the mount, religious minded folks who express contempt for the poor and disenfranchised screams hypocrisy.

If you work as an organizer share your story here: what you do, who you fight for and what you're up against.

Tell the GOP, and other folks who hate the idea of fairness, exactly what community organizing is about.