Barack Obama's first job after graduating from Columbia University was working as a community organizer on the campus of The City College of New York for NYPIRG(New York Public Interest Research Group). His tenure was brief; perhaps three months, and he only makes passing mention of it in his book "The Audacity of Hope.""The Audacity of Hope." Yet, according to new articles the lessons learned in that brief period "would define his young life and help shape his political outlook."
As a project coordinator for NYPIRG on the City College of New York campus in Harlem for three months in 1985, Obama spent hours with students in the trailer that served as the group’s office just below 140th Street and Convent Avenue, giving lessons on how to organize rallies and letter-writing campaigns, how to speak to legislators and lobby for change in public policy.
Former colleagues recall a "fabulously intelligent" and confident young man who was intensely interested in the idea of creating political change from the ground up, an idea that would resurface years later in his meteoric political rise.
He stood apart from some of the more radical students on campus, they said, and believed strongly in working within the system.
"He had a seriousness of purpose," recalled Diana Mitsu Klos, then a school organizer working out of the CCNY office. "His tenure was brief but anyone who met him received a strong and lasting impression."
According to a Alison Kelley, a CCNY student who worked with him, when Obama came to work at CCNY "he didn’t seem unsure of himself, but he seemed unsure of where he belonged.". At first, he organized students to oppose apartheid and then to fight for higher-education funding. Later, his work addressed a host of environmental issues ranging from mass transit to compensation for victims of exposure to toxic waste.
Harlem, where CCNY is located, and other lower income, minority neighborhoods are hotbeds for environmental issues in New York City. It is here where the bus depots, recycling facilities and sewage treatment plants get located. They not only negatively impact the quality of life, but contribute to poor community health, particularly high asthma rates. A few years after Obama's time here, the environment justice group WE ACT, took root here to oppose construction of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant built over the Hudson River just a few blocks west of the CCNY campus.
...while Obama recognized the value of environmentalism as a flag around which to rally the students of City College, and apparently developed a genuine concern for the environmental problems he saw at play in his Harlem neighborhood, he seemed dissatisfied with the reflexive, ideological approach favored by many greens. Instead of focusing on environmental issues in isolation, Obama sought to join the dots, drawing students into energetic conversations about the way that air and water pollution was impacting on the health of the neighborhood’s low-income residents, or about the economic forces that underpinned the problems the students wanted to tackle. "I don’t think he’d have called himself an environmentalist per se," says Kelley. "He used to say that it was too narrow to look at things that way, because if you do you can’t see the whole picture - and if you can’t see the whole picture, you can’t bring about real change."
Obama learned important lessons through his experience at City College that would be later reinforced with his work in Chicago with Gregory Galluzo, an early mentor there. It isn't sufficient to focus on an issue, i.e. environmentalism. Community organizers need to discover what matters to the people who live and work in a community and tie those concerns to the issues at hand, be they the environment, education, health care, etc. It was through this understanding that Obama has grown and become America's first, true NATIONAL ORGANIZER.
Disclosure: The writer works as Director of Public Relations for The City College of New York.