Where to start:

There are some books where you can skip the preface and still get the meaning of the book, but Going Public is not one of those books. 

The Preface introduces you to Gecan as a person. Then, the Introduction introduces you to power organizations, mostly with stories. It’s worth getting to know Gecan and the power he's pointing to, because it's a frame you may not be familiar with. Most of us didn't learn this in school.

As a community organizer, Gecan helped leaders - ordinary people willing to listen, learn, and act together in community - build the Nehemiah housing program in East Brooklyn. We open with this frame mostly to point to what community organizing -what Gecan is pointing to in this book - is capable of. Check out this segment form CBS Sunday Morning - it’s a story worth sharing:

The Importance of Stories & Self-Interest

To understand organizing, you need to first understand the people with whom you are relating and working. Who is it by your side, as you gather in your PTA to fight to save a sports program? Who is sitting next to you on a Tuesday night after work at your neighborhood association, as you talk about a local zoning issue that may impact traffic in you neighborhood? Who is next to you in the circle of folding chairs in the church basement, after Sunday service, when you gather to learn how to address homelessness or hunger or affordable housing? 

Second, to get to know those people, you need to know their stories and what is most important to them. We do this in organizing: you need to understand their self-interest. What exactly made them take the morning off work to attend the PTA meeting? Why are they at the neighborhood meeting after work, when they could be sitting at home watching TV? Why are they staying after Sunday service when they could be visiting family on the weekend? 

Curiosity about who is sitting next to you is a key ingredient of organizing; if you don’t have this desire to learn, this willingness to relate, then it’s not going to work. But, on the flip side, if you’re game to learn about the other person’s story, then a world of potential to build power around common cause awaits.

What is organizing, and what is an organizer? 

In the Introduction, Gecan describes his work as an organizer this way: “I encourage, coach, and agitate citizens to play their rightful roles and  claim their rightful places in the public arena of our nation.”  He is trying to distinguish here the work of an organizer from other kinds of public work. In the Preface, he says what an organizer is not: “Not a consultant...Not a facilitator. Not an adviser. Not a service provider or do-gooder. Not an ideologue. Not a political operative. Not a pundit. Not a progressive. Not an activist.” 

Organizing Power

Gecan talks a good deal about power in the Preface and throughout the book, and we will be talking about some of the ways to understand the kind of power that organizing can build. 

In the Introduction, Gecan describes organizations such as Jersey City Together as “power organizations” (p. 7), noting that it sometimes is difficult for people to understand what these organizations are and what they do.  Power organizations help people to build relationships with one another, thereby building power, and in turn building the ability to make change in their communities. 

And, because we want this series to be rooted in real people, engaging in real change, in a real city, we are opening with this story: Jersey City Together, a Metro IAF Affiliates that formed years after Gecan wrote his book, did what countless naysayers could never happen. 

This Week's Action