On October 6, 2007, the "Beyond Social Service" conference brought an extremely diverse group of approximately seventy Milwaukee residents together to learn about social action. The conference aimed to spread information about organizing more broadly in a city where ignorance about social action is a growing crisis.
Some organizers seem to believe that we don't need educational separate from our ongoing campaigns for change. All we need, it has been implied, is more and better organizing. The problem is that funding for organizing is extremely limited, as is the visibility of organizing. In my experience organizing, by itself, isn't necessarily educating that many people who aren't already participating in it as key leaders. Those who "see" organizing happening, or its results, don't necessarily really understand what's happening to make it work. While we can "do" organizing better to overcome this a little, I don't see the "just more of what we are already doing" response as adequate. [See EducationAction.org for a more detailed version of this report.]
The "Beyond Social Service" effort represented the first time in many years that so many community organizing groups came together to address an educational challenge not directly connected to a specific campaign. For many reasons--limited resources primary among them--unless they are collaborating on a shared action campaign organizing groups in Milwaukee tend to stay in their own "corners." The groups' willingness to add this effort to their already crowded calendars indicates the importance they placed in the overall aims of the project
The conference was an initial experiment, embedded within broader concerns about how to help more people understand the potential of organizing for social change. From the beginning, conference organizers discussed the need for other approaches.
The key lesson we learned was that there is a deep hunger for information about how to organize for collective power in Milwaukee. This report seeks to answer questions about how we might adequately serve this hunger.
Summary of Lessons Learned
Organizer Burn-Out
Organizers are already overwhelmed with their duties in their individual organization. It is likely too much to expect them to add yet another "job" on top of the one they already have to support an effort not directly linked to their group's goals. These challenges limited outreach and participation for the conference. To respond, broader educational efforts like the conference need:
1. To draw in people outside the already overworked organizer
community.
2. To provide more dedicated funding for those putting in the
work making sure this educational work is carried through,
in whatever form.
3. To link educational efforts more closely to the
self-interests of existing organizing groups
Other Possibilities for "Rebuilding the Tradition of Organizing" in Milwaukee
The experience of putting on the "Beyond Social Service" conference also pointed towards other ideas for rectifying the ignorance about community organizing that pervades our community.
1. If They Won't Come to You, Go to Them
2. Create an Incubator for New Organizing Groups
3. Create a Federation of Organizing Groups in a Shared
Building to Pool Resources
4. Develop Coherent Pathways for Leader and Organizer
Education
5. Hold an Organizing Retreat in Milwaukee about "Rebuilding
the Tradition"
The Problem: The Declining Tradition of Organizing in Milwaukee
Leaders in Milwaukee have long understood that, despite the best efforts of organizers and the emergence of new organizations, the tradition of organizing is on "life support" in our city.
One of the key challenges facing organizers is the rapidly decreasing number of residents and key leaders who have any real understanding of what "organizing" entails. For a wide range of reasons, when Milwaukeeans think about addressing the many challenges we face, they think in terms of "social service." They ask "how can we help people?" not "how can people come together to generate power?"
This is as much a "cultural" problem as an organizational one. Most people in Milwaukee don't even know what they don't know. When organizers try to talk to community leaders and residents about community organizing they are often met with blank stares and skepticism. The sense of hopelessness that pervades our city reflects, in part, a basic lack of knowledge about the effective strategies for collective action that have been developed over the last century or so in America. Without pragmatic tools for contesting intertwined crises of poverty, joblessness, incarceration, police relations, and more, real change seems an impossible dream.
This widespread ignorance is ironic in a city with a long history of collective resistance to oppression. Older residents remember marches led by Father Groppi and Vel Phillips, battles over school segregation and bilingual education, among other campaigns. But these social action traditions have weakened as activists of the 1960s have gotten older, burned out, or found "service" jobs in order to survive.
Over the last few decades, the city's community organizations have shifted their focus almost exclusively to social service. This shift accelerated during the 1980s when funding realities led a number of former organizing groups in Milwaukee, like ESHAC and the SDC, essentially to drop organizing and stress service. Some of these older groups eventually closed their doors entirely. Today, even those few employees who hold the title of "organizer" in the majority of Milwaukee's organizations aren't really trying to generate collective power to resist oppression.
As presenters emphasized in the "Beyond Social Service" conference, there is nothing wrong with service. Of course it remains critical. The problem is that "service" is almost all we do in this city anymore. Citizens and most leaders don't know how to conceptualize any other response to oppression, even though most of us really know, at one level or another, that service, by itself, is usually too little, too late.
Critically needed changes to the core institutions of our city, from the foster care system, to the schools, to the health care system, to the child care system are unlikely to occur unless those affected have the power to act collectively in their own interest and to hold these institutions accountable over the long term.
The Conference and Its Challenges
Fit into six hours on a Saturday, the conference was designed as an initial introduction for people who didn't know anything about organizing. In contrast with most training sessions sponsored by existing community organizing groups, the goal was not to teach actual skills, but instead to try to help people move beyond the "service" orientation that is so pervasive, today. We hoped to reach a range of people who didn't have many opportunities for exposure to these ideas: youth, workers in community-based organizations, members of churches that don't belong to congregational organizing groups, college students, and others. In its final form, the conference program was fit into six hours balanced between small-group discussions and large group presentations.
The evaluations of this conference were extremely positive. The intense interest people had in organizing was clear right from the beginning in the small groups. Trust seemed to build quickly, evidenced by people's willingness to engage passionately with each other and to put their own personal issues "on the table" in quite diverse contexts.
The central complaint of participants was a desire for more time in the conference and, despite presentations about opportunities for action from participating groups, more opportunities to actually take next steps after it ended
Time constraints on overworked organizers represented the key challenge for the conference. Participation in the planning and outreach process frequently seemed difficult to maintain. While attendance was quite good at the most crucial decision-making meetings, interim meetings to hammer out the details of the program and an outreach strategy were sparsely attended. Leaders from three organizations ended up doing most of the work for the conference. As a result, for example, outreach was quite limited, with only about half the number of participants we had hoped for. Only a single organization successfully recruited a large group, and the conference was almost cancelled. Funding was also a challenge, since individual organizations didn't want to endanger their own future requests by asking for support for this collaborative effort.
Lessons from the Conference Planning Process: Organizer Burn-Out
Organizers are already overwhelmed with their duties in their individual organization. It is likely too much to expect them to add yet another "job" on top of the one they already have to support an effort not directly linked to their group's goals. This indicates that broader educational efforts like the conference need to:
1. Draw in people outside the already overworked organizer
community.
2. Provide more dedicated funding for those putting in the
work making sure this educational work is carried
through, in whatever form.
3. Link educational efforts more closely to the
self-interests of existing organizing groups
4. Broaden the Planning Committee Membership
Our search for facilitators to lead cohort groups in the conference identified a number of ex-organizers in town who are in more service-related positions because of either burn-out or because they could not find an adequate position in organizing. At the same time, there are a range of leaders in different community organizations with little experience with but great interest in increasing the visibility of power organizing in Milwaukee. It may be possible to pull together members of these groups in addition to current organizers to help with the planning and implementation of this conference or other activities. These leaders may be more able and willing to volunteer time and energy, in part because their daily lives give them limited opportunity to work on organizing-related issues.
- Provide dedicated Funding for the Conference
As long as activities like the "Beyond Social Service" conference are merely add-ons to the already heavy work-load of organizing groups, they are unlikely to receive the kind of support they need. If the larger funding community agrees that broader efforts to disseminate the message of community organizing in this city are important, then dedicated funding may need to be provided to support activities like this. And this funding would need to be independent of any other funding requests made by individual organizing groups.
- Link the Conference More Closely to Organizations' Self-Interests
The one group that was successful in doing outreach succeeded because the conference was directly linked to its own organizational goals. If the conference is to be successful in the future, a larger number of organizations would need to use the conference in the same way. It seems clear that despite general agreement about the need for venues like this, without a more pragmatic reason for participation by overstressed organizing groups outreach efforts are unlikely to improve much next time.
Other Possibilities for "Rebuilding the Tradition of Organizing" in Milwaukee
The experience of putting on the "Beyond Social Service" conference also pointed towards other ideas for rectifying the ignorance about community organizing that pervades our community. These ideas emerged in committee discussions and interviews.
1. If They Won't Come to You, Go to Them
2. Create an Incubator for New Organizing Groups
3. Create a Federation of Organizing Groups in a Shared
Building to Pool Resources
4. Develop Coherent Pathways for Leader and Organizer
Education
5. Hold an Organizing Retreat in Milwaukee about "Rebuilding
the Tradition"
6. If They Won't Come to You, Go to Them
While those who attended the conference were extremely engaged in the new ideas they encountered, actually getting people there was a major challenge. One solution might be to take the "show on the road." Many professional groups and organizations have meetings where a training about organizing might be welcomed. However, this raises a number of significant challenges. It is likely that invited trainings would need to be condensed into a very limited time--from an hour and a half to at most three hours. How could we effectively help people who are used to thinking like service providers learn to think like organizers to some useful extent in such a brief time period? In the experience of the writer of this report, the "service" perspective is so deeply ingrained in most people that information about organizing is often reframed back into a "service" model. What, specifically, should be covered and what should be left out? Can something effective be presented in such a short time? And who, exactly, would do these presentations? These are questions that we would need to experiment with. (A report on an online discussion of this challenge can be accessed at educationaction.org/introductory-worksho p.html.)
Create an Incubator for New Organizing Groups
Just teaching people about organizing is not enough. This knowledge can easily lead to despair without avenues for putting this knowledge into action. While people can join existing organizing groups, these groups often do not address specific issues that may energize new leaders. For example, foster parents usually struggle in relative isolation with the challenges created by the limitations of our foster care system. And yet anyone who has met them knows that long-term foster parents represent some of the toughest, most thoughtful, and most committed people in our city. Similarly, child care workers scattered across the city, often running their own businesses and grappling with State bureaucracy, represent another pool of potential power. What would happen if groups like these were given the minimum resources necessary to begin their own organizing efforts? What kind of structure would be necessary to lower the barriers that prevent the emergence of more groups like these? What kind of support would be necessary to make sure that groups did not simply flare into existence and then disappear as we have seen happen so often in the past? What kind of support might encourage groups like these to form strong coalitions with others?
Create a Federation of Organizing Groups in a Shared Building to Pool Resources
Currently, community organizing groups work mostly independently of each other--"in their own corners" as more than one organizer said to the writer of this report. However, there are many examples in the service world where different community organizations have come together to pool resources and share a common building. Having different community organizing groups together in a common space governed by a federation raises the possibility of cross-fertilization across different approaches. Firms that are highly dependent on innovation have learned that the right architecture can prompt the emergence of vibrant informal links across those who are usually kept apart. Furthermore, a shared building with the right size and geography would make the "incubator" suggestion, above, more feasible by lowering the barriers to entry into organizing and providing ongoing support, mentoring, and modeling. For example, fledgling groups could be squeezed into offices in-between existing organizations, sharing photocopying and reception resources and rubbing elbows with more experienced leaders and organizers. One could imagine purchasing a building and providing it with an endowment, guaranteeing space for organizing innovation and support and reducing the amount of funding individual organizing groups would need to secure to continue their existence (especially during the inevitable fallow years). It seems possible that funders might find a building and an endowment like this quite attractive. The funders' name(s) could be permanently attached to an institution for permanently institutionalizing social action into the fabric of our city.
Develop Coherent Pathways for Leader and Organizer Education
From the beginning, committee members discussed the importance of figuring out how to build a coherent pathway for teaching community residents and leaders about organizing. While individual organizing groups have training programs to one extent or another, outside of these groups there are few opportunities for people to engage with the range of historical information, concepts, and practices that together provide the grounding for effective organizing. How, participants wondered, might we take advantage of currently existing educational institutions to develop a connected set of entry points and pathways for spreading understanding of organizing more broadly in this city? While there is interest in many of these educational organizations in creating such a, current efforts, where they exist, remain scattered and disconnected.
KEY SUGGESTION: Fund a Milwaukee Organizing Retreat
A number of planning participants expressed discouragement in our debriefing meeting about the extent to which organizing groups in Milwaukee work independently instead of as a collaborative team. Given the many questions raised by the wider conversation about how to expand understanding of and action around organizing in Milwaukee, participants expressed interest in creating a context for exploring ways to overcome these barriers.
One key suggestion was for a retreat that would bring the major organizing groups in Milwaukee together with other interested leaders to explore how to improve our ability to nurture organizing in Milwaukee. Such a retreat would focus on issues external to the day-to-day concerns of individual organizing groups and their campaigns and seek to create a roadmap for addressing these challenges.
The lesson of the conference planning effort, however, indicates clearly that for such a retreat to be successful organizers and other over-worked leaders would need to understand how participation would pragmatically serve their self-interests at the same time. For this reason, it seems likely that a retreat would likely only succeed if:
* It was co-sponsored by one or more significant funders of
organizing in the city, and if
* Retreat participation was linked to potential new funding
to support any plans that might come out of it.
Conclusion
We are at a crucial juncture in the history of organizing and broader social action in Milwaukee. The core challenges of poverty and violence and, more generally, a widespread sense of powerlessness are increasingly seen by residents of our most marginalized communities as unchangeable. People have little direct experience with effective strategies for challenging broad structural forces. Past fights against oppression have receded into the past as "history" while the leaders of the 1960s and the 1970s have become distant figures of myth, often even for those who participated with them.
Ignorance about how to act collectively for change creates a self-reinforcing cycle. As Saul Alinsky once said, when people don't believe there are any effective avenues for changing the world around them, they don't bother to think much about change. In other words, ignorance breeds apathy, and apathy breeds ignorance.
The hunger for information and effective action is there. This was clear across the broad spectrum of participants in the "Beyond Social Service" conference. But we need to figure out how to harness this hunger more effectively we need to break the cycle of ignorance and apathy that holds so many of us motionless in the face of oppression.
[Note: this is an abridged version of the report provided to funders and organizers.]