Going Public — This Week's Insight
“On issue after issue, in agency after agency, affecting scores of communities, our organized teams of leaders learned what it was like when a focused government actually wanted to respond to focused citizens.”
- Mike Gecan, Going Public: An Organizer's Guide to to Citizen Action
Most of the stories in this chapter are about the relationship between the New York IAF organizations and Rudy Giuliani during his time as mayor of New York.Whatever you think about the later years of his political career, these stories about his years as mayor are pretty interesting.
Gecan points to the rough edges of how the relationship began, but one thing that is really interesting is that the New York IAF organizations asked both Giuliani and David Dinkins, during the 1989 mayoral election campaign, to commit to conducting an individual relational meeting with fifteen leaders from the IAF organizations. If you read our post about relational meetings, you know that this is the core of the work that IAF organizations do: they build relationships. Giuliani did these meetings, an unusual commitment for a public official. Yet he then ‘disappeared’ and did not come to the organizations’ public accountability event.
Overall, Gecan describes a relationship full of tension, contradictions, some progress, some conflict, and, according to Gecan, a public relationship that produced some positive results for the IAF leaders and their communities.
In an essay for The Good Society in 2003, Harry Boyte makes the following point about how Gecan talks about relationships with public officials in Going Public: “...there is a good deal of evidence that political leaders who develop respectful, productive if tension filled relationships with citizen groups are better in their own roles.” This certainly seems to be the case in the IAF relationship with Giuliani.
What struck me about this chapter was the importance of something called "research actions." If you're new to community organizing, this will be both familiar and new at the same time.
A research action is
- a public action
- to learn something
- in a semi-public space
- with others in community who share common cause about an issue
In a job, a research action is like a team meeting with another department, a client, or a vendor – to learn something new about an objective you want to accomplish. SO this is not a “new” concept per se – what is “new” is the idea of doing research actions in a public space (community) with others (those who you are organizing with).
I learned about research actions with NJ Together, so will share an example here.
In April 2018, Jyl and I joined a few other leaders on a research action in Newark, NJ to meet with the education policy director at Education Law Center ("ELC"). We were (mostly) parent leaders simply trying to learn more about education funding. The previous month - in March 2018, the ELC had published a report called "Understanding Adjustment Aid in New Jersey School Funding: A Case Study of Jersey City".
A member of our team (not me) had had the chutzpah to reach out to the ELC to request a meeting. We went to Newark, met an expert on school funding in real life, and learned - for the first time - about "banked cap." Exactly one week later, I posted an explainer about banked cap on Civic Parent (Jersey City Funding Crisis: Banked Cap, Explained). The next month, in May 2018, we showed up at the Board of Education meeting to both publicly share what Banked Cap was and also advocate that it be used in that year's budget.
Advocating for $3.5 million began with a research meeting. And a research meeting is a great example of a building block of community organizing where we can encounter ambiguity in real life and anchor around the facts together as organizers with shared interests in tackling a common issue. The point, as Gecan has made in earlier chapters, is to learn, through relationships, and create a foundation for reciprocity and eventually victory. The ELC meeting was not a meeting with a public elected official but those examples abound to (e.g. research meetings with the Superintendent, the Mayor, Council members).
A research meeting is
- planned
- has an internal agenda and set of objectives upfront (e.g. "what do we hope to learn?")
- Has an intentional debrief afterwards ("what did we learn here? What do we now do with this information?")
In organizing, we are always moving forward. Together, in shared consensus mode. We encounter the ambiguity and we are not self-indulgent in this work; there is always a practical sense of: what does victory look like, and how do we achieve it together?
This Week's Action
