Going Public — This Week's Insight
“We don’t see the value in practicing politics deductively….we know that we need to work inductively, through the process of individual meetings and house meetings, through the acquired habits of action and evaluation, and through the testing and retesting of ideas and strategies in cities and states, before we bring these matters to a border market and before our leaders can effectively play a broader role.”
- Mike Gecan, Going Public: An Organizer's Guide to to Citizen Action (pages 76)
This chapter is about a question that is often asked of local community power organizations: what are you doing at the national level? How can local and statewide organizing make a larger difference in national politics? The chapter details an effort to do this during the presidential election campaign between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Gecan outlines some of the creative strategies that Metro IAF used, including bringing a model Nehemiah Home to Madison Avenue in Manhattan for an action intended to get the attention of the presidential campaigns, an action that reflects the “chutzpah” of the chapter title. Reading the description of this action is well worth it.
Gecan notes that this effort to impact national politics was motivated both by conviction that the issues that were important to their leaders were also important nationally, and also by a deep frustration that neither of the major political parties was paying any attention to the needs and interests of people in cities (76-77).
Ultimately, the effort did not result in meetings with each of the presidential nominees, as the organization had hoped. Neither of the campaigns adopted the policies that IAF was interested in discussing with the candidates.
But those policies have had some impact on national politics. The two policies discussed in the chapter are the Nehemiah Homes projects of East Brooklyn Congregations in Brooklyn and similar projects in Baltimore, and the living wage campaign begun in the 1990s by the Baltimore organization, BUILD. The concept is simple, and is likely familiar: why should city workers, and workers for organizations that contract with the city, work in conditions where they are not paid a living wage? As Gecan notes, BUILD successfully worked in 1994 to attain the first local living wage ordinance in Baltimore, organizing bus drivers, janitors, and security guards who had been subject to uncertain hours and below poverty wages (78). Thirty years later, there are many living wage provisions at the local and state level throughout the country, bypassing national reluctance to change the minimum wage to reflect economic change.
In addition to policy influence, there are two really instructive aspects about about organizing at the local level.
First, it is essential training to live in a representative democracy. In Chapter 5 we are introduced to the idea that merit - what we’re taught in school matters for education, jobs, social status - does not actually matter as much as we may think it does. It’s something deeper and more fundamental - power analysis, connecting, investing in institutions that you can both believe in and act with - that actually matters. This is, in my view, what makes our system so exceptional - that we have the freedom to possess civic agency if we choose to go for it.
Second, local organizing is easier because you need less power to win. If you want to win at the national level you have to organize nationally, which means relating nationally - that’s a lot of work! And it’s good work if you can do it. For many of us, we do not have time to do that work and see the results play out…unless we want to organize to win on issues locally, where the timelines will be shorter, the targets smaller, the neighbors closer.
Organizing locally gives us space to learn, to flex our civic muscles imaginatively, to learn more about who you are and what you want to do as a member of a representative democracy, and more.
We are climatized to view politicians as the change agents. But when you dig into the idea of “having chutzpah,” and especially when you start to understand the public money, you realize that politicians are really just managers of a structural status quo that is very hard to change in the short-term. Politicians take lots of action because they are charged to do that - administratively, legislatively - but they are by definition boxed into tight constraints that are publicly outlined in budgets and statutes. We are seeing some of that play out in Jersey City, with BOE trustees who shared - in a civic space organized by Jersey City Parents United for Special Education Reform - that were hamstrung by the BOE attorney:
“The two school board trustees who attended Wednesday’s meeting, Tia Rezabala and Lorenzo Richardson, said trustees who wish to speak publicly about board actions they disagree with feel muzzled by threats of ethics complaints…
Rezabala said even frivolous complaints that the New Jersey School Ethics Commission dismisses can be detrimental, because board members can incur large legal costs. She referenced an Alloway school board member whose colleague complained about her personal Facebook posts regarding school taxes, and two Newark trustees saddled with attorney’s fees after the principal of a school they investigated for alleged racism filed complaints against them.
“We are elected by the people, and we want to be able to explain why a vote went some way, or why something is not happening,” Rezabala said. “We are unable to do so, unless we are with the full board. Even recently, with me and [Trustee] Matt [Schneider] putting out a statement [about Pecot’s arrest], we were scared, and we were just like, ‘We’ll just take the ethics violations as they come.’ We felt it was more important for us to explain where we stood.”
Rezabala asked if Mukherji would consider supporting Senate Bill S4091, legislation introduced by Republican Sen. Declan O’Scanlon Jr. in May. The bill states that no part of the New Jersey School Ethics Act “shall be construed to prohibit or limit a board member from speaking, including via social media, on a matter of public concern, such as a school-related matter.”
Politicians cannot always have chutzpah! They are by definition limited.
The civic sector is where the imaginative optionality exists to enact change, but you have to be willing to channel your inner “chutzpah.”
This Week's Action
3. Leave comments below if you've been reading along with us and have thoughts or reflections. Comments are moderated as is the norm on Civic Parent.
