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A Champion of Community Organizing

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“This is a party to celebrate the difference we’re going to make because of the difference we have made,” Dave Beckwith, the outgoing director of the Needmor Fund, told a room full of social justice activists–organizers, funders, and nonprofit leaders–at Alliance for Justice Dave Beckwith Somewhere in Washingtonlast week.

The crowd was gathered to honor Dave’s 30 years of community organizing work, 10 of them as a funder. It was also a party to celebrate the power of community organizing. For Dave, community organizing — which he defines as “self-advocacy” – is the most effective way to achieve social change.

Moving tributes

Many of the friends and colleagues who spoke at Dave’s celebration noted not only his unwavering support for organizing – standing up for the work of ACORN when it took courage to do so. They also honored his generous guidance as a funder.

Baldemar Velazquez –a former grantee of Dave’s and founder and president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) — spoke of the tragic and preventable deaths of at least four migrant tobacco workers in the summer of 2006 in North Carolina.  He described the model mentorship that Dave provided in that difficult time, inventing a way for the other workers to grieve their colleagues by taping a photo of the deceased on a chair and allowing everyone to say goodbye, one on one.

But who inspired Dave?

Chris Doby, of the Mott Foundation, took the mike and noted that Dave had inspired many, but she always wondered who’d inspired Dave. In answer, she then gave him a first edition of one of his most beloved books, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

NCRP’s Christine Reeves wrote that “hilarity engulfed the room, when one after another, friends joyfully cheered and amiably jeered Dave. They shared witty poems, old stories and moving insights. Some dedicated their time and finances to some of his causes.”

We asked attendees to pledge hours of service in honor of Dave.  The guests pledged a total of 520 hours, with the following breakdown:

  • 120 hours for supporting or participating in activities to support workers’ rights
  • 200 hours for supporting or participating in activities to support anti-poverty efforts
  • 70 hours for mentoring a young person in social justice work
  • 80 hours for participating in grassroots community actions such as protests or lobby days
  • 50 hours for supporting or participating in political campaigns

The gift of being a grantmaker 

In thanking everyone for the party, Dave shared his thoughts on the unique privilege of being a funder:

“It’s such a gift to give someone the opportunity to make a difference.”

As a funder, one of Dave’s legacies is his commitment to proving that community organizing works. Earlier this year, he told Bolder Advocacy:

“If you are considering organizing work, your foundation will be embarrassed by how ineffective other strategies are [compared with community organizing and advocacy] and you’ll be impressed by community organizing outcomes.”

 


Organizing is a Family Affair in Anacostia

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By Abby Weaver, Social Work Intern, Alliance for Justice

Last year marked nearly a quarter-century since the historic tenant management victory of Kenilworth Estates, located in Washington, D.C.

Kimi Gray in front of the Kenilworth Estates.

Kimi Gray in front of the Kenilworth Estates.

Kenilworth has the distinction of being one of the first neighborhoods in the nation where tenants assumed management of the public housing where they lived. The woman who led the effort was resident and community organizer Kimi Gray. Over the years, Gray tackled a number of different challenges affecting the Kenilworth Estates–a public housing development known for high drug use, rare trash pick-up, and low rates of education completion.

The community took a remarkable turnaround, however, when Gray helped her fellow tenants see the connections between these problems and how they, as the people who lived the reality, could make a change by working together. Coming from the community, Gray knew that the tenants would feel more empowered if they were able to control elements of the housing project, she suggested they pursue tenant management. One longtime resident and tenant manager, Gladys Roy, explained the value of having tenants manage their own housing: “I know what the problems are.  I live here, so I know them first hand.”  This statement illustrates why community organizing is such an important route for social change efforts.

A national model

The result of the tenant management program in Kenilworth was nothing short of phenomenal. Through education and trainings, tenants were able to buy the complex.  Through her ability to speak for those in her community, Gray succeeded in bringing national attention to problems in the run-down public housing units.

Eventually, the Reagan Administration took notice, making tenant management the cornerstone of its housing policy. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1987 allowed for similar empowerment models among other housing units nationwide.  Self-management of the housing projects seemed to make sense and improve conditions.

Sequnely Gray at a city council meeting.

Sequnely Gray at a city council meeting.

A new generation continues to organize

The power of Gray’s leadership has inspired subsequent generations. Carrying on her community organizing legacy is Gray’s granddaughter Sequnely Gray.  Sequnely Gray grew up witnessing the importance of speaking out about community concerns.

Following in her grandmother’s footsteps, she has been an advocate for her child’s education for several years. A single mother, she began organizing the parents from her child’s school in response to the threat of the school closing. For her, mobilizing fellow parents when education was in jeopardy just came naturally. The group Empower DC acknowledged her dedication and offered her a job as a fulltime organizer with the Childcare for All Campaign, a campaign that promotes awareness and use of the childcare subsidy voucher.

Sequnely currently motivates low-income mothers to get involved in sharing testimonials to decision makers in D.C., just as her grandmother did in order to get the attention of the president at the time.  She provides constituents with a better understanding of the way government works through workshops on government structure.  She values her constituents’ opinions and asks for regular qualitative feedback on meeting productivity.

Although her grandmother’s victory occurred 24 years ago, Sequnely still draws inspiration from the principles that motivated her grandmother’s efforts. She focuses on the need for education, community member empowerment, and evaluation of her impact.  Many organizers consider the unique elements of community organizing to be leadership development and empowerment of vulnerable populations. These elements are evident in the campaign that Sequnely leads.

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For more Resources for Evaluating Community Organizing visit our RECO compendium.

For more information on the basics of building and maintaining a constituency using a community organizing approach, refer to the RECO resource, The Community Tool Box.  To learn more on partnering with community leaders, read Chapter 4 of the document Getting Issues on the Public Agenda.

 

 

 

The Art of Coalitions: Building Teams of Rivals, Not Enemies

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Formerly LAANE’s Director of Training and Outreach, the Rev. William Smart is the new President and CEO of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

One of the most exciting and inspirational aspects of coalition building is seeing the success and victories that people get when they come together

Rev. William Smart spent nearly 10 years working at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

Rev. William Smart spent nearly 10 years working at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

for the common good of their community. The time and effort that can go into the work is nothing compared to the feeling of victory once the campaign has been won, and the people and community feel the victory themselves.

Rules for building a successful coalition

Unfortunately, groups that have never worked together are often times unwilling to do so because of longstanding suspicions or differences, so building coalitions around economic enhancement projects, political campaigns, religious events and community change is a very hard thing to do. However if you apply some strategy rules to the process you can build a great coalition.

First, you have to believe in what you are trying to build together – and also believe that it can be built. You can’t waste time fighting a cause that is not winnable.

Second, there must be a feeling that you can win together what you cannot win alone. If you don’t feel this, why do you need to go through the process and headaches of working together? The reason for creating a coalition is the power, resources and numbers that it brings out for a cause, showing that there is widespread support for it.

Finally, a good coalition makes room for self-interest. Each partner needs to know why everybody’s at the table: What are they looking for? Why do they want to be a part of this coalition? Answering these questions will help coalition partners feel comfortable with whom they are working and contribute to an environment of transparency — something that will be important as the campaign heats up.

Forging a partnership between labor and the community in Mississippi

Here’s an example of what I mean. In 2010 I went to Gulfport, Mississippi, to meet with members of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Building and Construction Trades Council. I was meeting with them to propose a community-labor partnership that would work to create jobs and make sure people from the local community got these jobs.

All this revolved around a prospective gasification plant being built in Moss Point, a nearby town. At the meeting I knew what would be the union’s self-interest. A building and construction trades council always has a bottom line — and that is how many jobs they can bring to their members, especially when those members are not working or, as many members of the trades say, “are on the bench.”

As we waited for all the people to arrive at the meeting, I nervously surveyed the room – which was full of Southern white men. I asked myself, What I have I gotten into?

Out of nowhere one of them blurted out, “Only good thing about America these days is Obama.”

Wow, I thought, did I just hear him right? Yes, these white Mississippians were extolling the African-American president of the United States of America. That helped me to understand quickly that we were on the same side, wanted the same things and that we could work the same way together to get them. Not only did these men embrace the ideal of a coalition but they clearly understood that it took the total community to help them get what they wanted — more jobs.

We went on to build a coalition that was represented by faith-based and labor organizations, educators, environmental organizations, and community groups. Each organization brought its knowledge, history, and values to the table. This small Mississippi town was educated about the values and virtues of the collective bargaining system, and how Community Workforce Agreements allow their sons and daughters to not just get jobs, but to develop careers. It was educated about environmental impacts, and what mitigations could be put in place to protect the town. While the community gained a greater understanding of unions, labor gained a greater understanding of the power of the community.

Many good things started happening. Working through the schools, the trades were able to start outreaching for prospective jobs training programs and the coalition began to understand the power it had through community benefits. Moss Point’s elected officials became interested in the work of the coalition. The coalition’s cohesiveness allowed it to deal with critical environmental issues together — and to ultimately decide that the plant posed too much of a threat to the community, given the amount of water it required to be being taken out of a local river each day.

The coalition, working together, realized that building a gasification plant was a bad idea for Moss Point, Mississippi. However, because its members developed trust in each other, it is now looking for a better and greener project with the help of Moss Point’s mayor. The project now has to be one that will create jobs for local residents, while protecting the environment. At the end of the day opposites ended up attracting, to create better opportunities for a community.

This article originally appeared on Frying Pan News and is reprinted with permission.

Medicaid Matters

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By Michael Seifert of the Equal Voice Network, a community-based organization in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. 

I am too old for this, I told myself, as the alarm chimed brightly at 3:25 a.m. I crawled out of bed, pulled on my yellow “Equal Voice” t-shirt, and my grey and green tennis shoes (the ones that make me look like I run faster than my speediest thoughts), and headed out the door.

Medicaid phylisI was joining 54 other people from Brownsville to make a 6-hour bus trip to Austin. There we planned to march on the capitol with about 3,000 others to urge the Governor of Texas to accept the Medicaid Expansion part of the Affordable Care Act.

All of us on the bus were members of the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network—10 community-based organizations committed to creating social change through civic engagement. We are funded and supported by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

Rick Perry has said that Texas can take care of its own poor people—and declined to expand Medicaid as required by the Affordable Care Act. Texas has 6.2 million uninsured people. Over a million of them are children. None of us are happy with the way Texas has taken care of its poor people.

That is an item worth fighting for, we had decided—thus this early-morning activity.

Delivering a simple but powerful message to lawmakers

Medicaid disabledWe arrived in Austin in due time, found our place in line, put on our yellow caps, and joined a sea of people from all across the state to make the long walk up Congress Avenue. I was delighted to see 50 or so folks in wheelchairs—over the years I have learned that disabled people are fearless when it comes to raising their voices.

And so we raised our voices—on the capitol steps and in the offices of elected officials. Our message was simple—Medicaid expansion will insure hundreds of thousands of Texans. If we refuse the expansion, the monies will go to another state which has acted on behalf of the uninsured, and has accepted the expansion, some place like New Mexico, or, God forbid, Arkansas.

Nearly half of the representatives in the Texas State House are new to their job. Many of the reps that we visited had no idea what we were talking about. But the organizers of the protest—Texas Well and Healthy—had done a great job, and the written material was clear and to the point—and well footnoted.

Tired but undaunted

It was a long day, and as 4 pm rolled around, our Brownsville contingent reboarded the bus. As we settled in for the ride home, I asked two of the younger people how their day had gone. Gabriela frowned a bit, and said, “Well, at one office we went to, the staff made fun of us. I guess we weren’t dressed up as nice as them. I don’t know, it was embarrassing.” I asked her whether, after that experience, she would participate in another one of these actions some day. She smiled and said, “Oh yeah, and the next time I am bringing more friends.”

There was a bit of a pause, and then Gabriela added, “You know, this wasn’t about me. It was about my mom and her getting insurance. That’s important to me.” She looked down at her phone and began texting someone.

I settled into my seat and thought for a bit about civic engagement and the young woman who was going to end up spending 12 hours on a smelly bus, who had spent three hours walking and standing around in a protest and who had been humiliated in the offices of an elected official.

I reached down and retied my shoes, for I was surrounded by fiery women, and I best be ready to keep up with them.

As for Rick Perry, he wears boots.

LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW TO ADVOCATE FOR HEALTH CARE IN YOUR STATE: Print this State Health Advocate To-Do List from Families USA via SparkAction

Michael wrote previously for Bolder Advocacy about efforts to obtain relief funds for chronic flooding in the community. This article originally appeared on Michael’s blog: http://alongsideaborder.blogspot.com/

 

5 New Evaluation Resources for Community Organizers

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As community organizing tactics change, so do ways to capture success. At AFJ, we want to help you stay up to date on all the developments in the field.

Organizers from the Washington Interfaith Network share tips on reflection in the current "Topic of Interest."

Organizers from the Washington Interfaith Network share tips on reflection in the current “Topic of Interest.”

That’s why we are sharing with you 5 new additions to our online library we call Resources for Evaluating Community OrganizingRECO. Nothing to do with organized crime. But it is about organized people and their power to improve communities when they work together for social and economic justice.

Evaluation Resources from the Field

The newest resources are:

Capturing Concepts, an excerpt from Promoting Community Change and Making it Happen in the Real World by Mark Homan, contains questions to ask during and after organizing actions.

CFJ Campaign Tools are worksheets that leaders can complete with their organizing group for evaluation and future planning.

Getting to Outcomes Indicators Guide: A Users Guide to a Revised Indicators Framework for Education Organizing focuses on new developments in relating community change to education reform.

Success Measures−Community Building and Organizing is an extensive checklist and processing guide to evaluate organizing in any setting.

They Said It Was Impossible:  How to Win Progressive Change When the Odds are Against Us shows how evaluation happens through a visual, descriptive narrative.

Why Reflecting on Organizing Actions Matters

But that’s not all! There is a new article discussing the role of reflection, Reflection and the Future of Organizing, that draws on interviews with three organizers. “Ongoing Reflection and Innovation” is one of the RECO Seven Core Components of Community Organizing. To compliment the article, we’ve selected the following reports about how the organizing field has changed, what it needs to be sustainable in the future and how reflection on the past is important for the future.

Building Bridges, Building Power: Developments in Institution-Based Community Organizing, Interfaith Funders

Vision for Change: A New Wave of Social Justice Leadership, Building Movement Project

Reflecting for Change: A Discussion on the Benefits of Reflection in Community Organizing, Alliance for Justice

Last Year’s 12 Best Organizing Moments

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We love this round up from the great folks at the New Organizing Institute of last year’s best moments in grassroots organizing. Each of these movements below gained significant momentum last year and we look forward to watching what they achieve this year to advance equality, opportunity, and justice.

What other moments would you add to this list? Tell us below in the comments section!

1. Love Wins

From the Supreme Court to the states the long fight for marriage equality took a big turn in 2014. Adding just this year Rhode Island, Delaware, Minnesota, California, Hawaii, Illinois, and New Mexico to the list of marriage equality states.

North Carolina's "Moral Mondays" movement has united progressive groups around a common agenda. Flickr: Grant Baldwin

North Carolina’s “Moral Mondays” movement has united progressive groups around a common agenda. Flickr: Grant Baldwin

2. Operation Butterfly

DREAMers fighting for immigration organized to put a face on immigration reform in what was called “Operation Butterfly.” United We Dream worked to reunite DREAMers with their parents who are trapped on the other side of the border. A powerful and amazing piece of organizing that landed them front page coverage on the New York Times and helped push comprehensive immigration reform through the Senate.

3. Moral Mondays in North Carolina

When right-wing legislators targeted voting rights, women, and families across the state with extreme legislation the people fought back — flooding the capitol and engaging in civil disobedience that drew national coverage to these attacks.

4. #StandWithWendy

Back brace and all, State Sen. Wendy Davis of Texas held the floor for 11 hours to delay an extreme piece of anti-choice legislation — creating a national moment and giving a spark to the movement for women’s rights.

5. Fast Food Strikes

In a series of nationwide strikes, workers have risen up and drawn national attention to the poor working conditions, pay, and benefits at fast food establishments across the country.

6. Dream Defenders Fight “Stand Your Ground”

For 31 days and 30 nights the Dream Defenders occupied the Florida state capitol demanding a special session from the Governor.

7. Filibuster Reform

What started as a slow drum beat from the Netroots in 2005 ended with the Senate acting to reform the filibuster this year — ending its use on presidential nominees.

8. Colorado Local Power Campaign

New Era Colorado’s campaign against Xcel energy went viral, raising almost $200,000 (with an initial goal of $40,000!) to fund their grassroots organizing around the creation of a local electric utility based on renewable energy.

9. Fast for Families

Faith, immigrant rights, and labor leaders fasted for immigration reform on the National Mall. They stayed out there every day and night, abstaining from all food — except water — to move the hearts and compassion of members of Congress to pass immigration reform with a path to citizenship.

 

Minimum Wage Fights

13 states will raise the minimum wage in 2014 thanks to last year’s organizing.

10. Minimum Wage Fights

Across the country workers stepped up to fight for a higher minimum wage with victories in Washington DC and SeaTac where the highest minimum wage in history of $15 was passed by the voters.

11. No More Names

Americans across the country banded together to hold accountable the members of Congress who refused to hold a vote on background checks. The nationwide bus tour culminated with the reading of the names of the 3,300 men, women, and children who have been killed by guns since the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut.

12. Forward on Climate

The #ForwardonClimate rally against the Keystone XL pipeline brought 35,000+ people to Washington DC to pressure the President. While no action has been taken yet on Keystone, the President did release his Climate Action Plan which included the first uniform, national limits on the amount of carbon pollution a future power plant can emit.

This article is a modified version of the original which appeared on Buzzfeed and is reprinted with permission from New Organizing Institute [http://neworganizing.com/]

Activists Paved the Way for the Victory Over Stop and Frisk

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On January 30, 2014, Mayor Bill De Blasio took an important step toward ending New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk police tactics. De Blasio’s announcement means the city will finally begin reforming the practice in accordance with a federal judge’s orders issued in a 2013 ruling.

Hugh Hogan

Hugh Hogan

In an op-ed last year, Hugh Hogan, executive director of New York City’s North Star Fund, argued that years of advocacy and organizing by community and civil rights groups paved the way for these developments.

“Had it not been for grassroots activists, and financial support from a few courageous foundations and many generous individuals, such a blatantly racist and discriminatory policy would still be in place.”

Hogan urged other funders to learn from the stop-and-frisk campaign that such advocacy efforts often take decades.

This victory offers an important lesson for donors and grant makers about how an investment in grass-roots activism and organizing—plus support for efforts to create a base of committed community members—can bring about much-needed change. But it will require them to focus on the long haul and think differently.

It is difficult to develop measurements that show the impact of this kind of activism and advocacy, even though such evaluation is popular in philanthropy right now. And it requires a willingness to speak candidly about sensitive issues and to challenge powerful institutions. This type of bravery is more often found on street corners than foundation boardrooms, but that needs to change.

The problems in New York started in the 1990s, after Mayor Rudy Giuliani adopted the “broken windows” policing policy built on the idea that “zero tolerance” for petty crimes would prevent more serious crimes. The idea of stop-and-frisk” was born of the same motivation—that police officers could deter crime by stopping and frisking anyone they believed, or were trained to believe, looked suspicious.

Racial profiling and the abuse of stop-and-frisk escalated significantly during the first decade of Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. Based on the police department’s own statistics, in 2011 alone there were nearly 700,000 stops—90 percent of which did not lead to a court summons or an arrest. Simply put, innocent people, most of them young men of color but also women of color, and people who are lesbian, gay, or transgender, were routinely stopped, questioned, harassed, and in some cases brutalized.

Groups like CAAAV, an advocacy group that organizes Asians, and Desis Rising Up and Moving, Justice Committee, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Picture the Homeless realized that action needed to be taken against police violence and racism. Many were smaller, untested groups—just the kind my organization, North Star Fund, regularly supports.

Over time, these groups joined together with other North Star Fund grantees, including Make the Road New York, Streetwise and Safe, and Bronx Defenders, as members of Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition of more than 60 groups committed to fighting discriminatory policing in New York City.

As a key supporter of these groups, I’ve had a close-up view over the past decade watching these groups and others pave the way for the campaign against stop-and-frisk.

They used “cop watches,” created know-your-rights murals, held community meetings, and made extensive efforts to visit people in their apartments and homes so they could persuade victims they would be safe telling their experiences of police brutality and racism. They formed alliances to get their stories out and build political support. They found victims who could share their stories at rallies, press conferences, and vigils and then gathered those who were wrongly arrested to wage a series of class-action lawsuits pursued by the Center for Constitutional Rights. And they pushed over many years for access to the data about stop-and-frisk.

Ultimately, their research and the experiences of their members laid the groundwork for a federal court to declare that the evidence New York police officers were systemically using race as the basis for stops was “overwhelming.”

Without years of organizing, this victory would not have been possible. Advocacy groups can’t buy this kind of support, as with a mailing list or a phone bank. It results from years of on-the-ground organizing with people who are directly affected by crime and the police tactics used to try to prevent it.

For philanthropists, the story must not end when the news media move on to the next big thing.

Looking at North Star Fund’s 35 years of financing social-justice projects in New York City, I’ve seen that big victories of the stop-and-frisk variety are often followed by a sense of complacency and a belief that “the work is done.”

That misimpression undermines long-term support for community organizing. Already the Bloomberg administration is appealing the federal court ruling that curtails the abuses of stop-and-frisk.

Most important, ending stop-and-frisk abuses is not a cure-all for discriminatory policing tactics. Communities United for Police Reform will need philanthropic support for a long time to keep advancing ideas that ensure that all citizens are treated fairly by the city’s police force.

Other nonprofits and donors can learn much by watching how Communities United for Police Reform brings together activists, advocates, lawyers, and researchers to promote change and to forge a more thoughtful approach to community safety in our great cities.

Several foundations have started much-needed efforts to lift men and boys of color out of poverty, to make our corrections system more just, and to expand alternatives to probation and incarceration.

Bringing an end to the abuses of stop-and-frisk is another way to extend that work. It advances our shared goals of ending racism, expanding opportunity, and creating a more equitable and fair society.

But we won’t make much progress on any effort to promote equality unless all of us in philanthropy learn to listen better to the people directly affected by injustices like stop-and-frisk. And we need to keep in mind that it’s often the grassroots activists we support who can provide the leadership, passion, and deep understanding of their communities to develop policies that move beyond a slick PowerPoint presentation to actually work well on the street.

While De Blasio’s move is being hailed as a victory, vigilance and continued advocacy by these activists will be necessary to hold the mayor and police department accountable to their promises.

Moral Mondays Kicks Off 2014 Campaign

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North Carolina's "Moral Mondays" movement has united progressive groups around a common agenda. Flickr: Grant Baldwin

North Carolina’s “Moral Mondays” movement has united progressive groups around a common agenda. Flickr: Grant Baldwin

Update: An estimated 80,000 people joined the rally.

On February 8, Moral Mondays— the movement that electrified North Carolina’s progressive community in 2013—holds its first major rally of the year.

Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and founder of the Moral Mondays movement, will lead a march in front of the state legislature in Raleigh.

The event continues the Moral Mondays’ campaign against laws passed by the North Carolina General Assembly last year weakening Medicaid, public education, reproductive justice, and voting rights.

In the Moral Mondays movement, Barber has created a powerful model for organizing across issue areas and constituencies. It’s a model that is also distinctly regional, embracing the moral high ground and invoking religion and prayer without alienating its members who may not be believers.

The movement is spreading to other Southern states where Republicans hold overwhelming power. For example, South Carolina has begun “Truthful Tuesdays” in the state capitol.

Learn  more about Moral Mondays: Moral Mondays: Using Fusion Politics to Counter Extreme Policies


Dr. Robert Ross Calls on Funders to Engage in Power Politics

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“We must find our way as a field to focus on scaling up solutions – and doing this requires us to engage in power politics.” The California Endowment’s president and CEO Dr. Robert K. Ross caught my attention with that clear and strong statement, a statement that is edgier than most from funders.

A meeting of the Youth Policy Justice Board, funded by TCE.

A meeting of the Youth Policy Justice Board, funded by TCE.

In a can’t-miss article in the Spring issue of the Stanford Social Innovation ReviewRoss makes the case that addressing long-term problems by mobilizing the community through organizing and advocacy is extremely effective.

“Philanthropy has to recognize that community power, voice, and advocacy are, to use a football analogy, the blocking and tackling of winning social change.”

Ross challenges those who would invest all their faith—and grant dollars—in the power of technological or social innovation to solve pressing problems:

“Innovation has been critical to economic and social progress since the invention of the wheel. But innovation isn’t everything. In fact, when it comes to addressing today’s urgent social problems, from education and public health to civil and human rights, innovation is overrated.”

Using concrete examples, Ross describes how TCE’s efforts to reform the juvenile justice system and “zero-tolerance” school discipline practices in Southern California led it to fund advocacy and community organizing. Achieving this kind of systemic reform and policy change required more than an innovative program:

“In the fight against zero-tolerance policies in California schools, innovative practices, data, and research were important. But social innovation without advocacy and organizing would have been in vain. It was the mobilization of the community, and in particular young people, that paved the way for the innovation to break through.

Funding advocacy and community organizing may not be as glamorous, neat, or tidy as supporting the next great program or organization. It’s difficult to capture the results in a glossy bar graph or pie chart, and it doesn’t necessarily lead to easy photo opportunities like stocking a neighborhood food bank.”

Go read the entire article, and don’t miss the call to action to “engage in power politics” in the last paragraph:

“We must find our way, as a field, to focus on scaling up solutions—and doing this requires us to engage in power politics. We need to help build the voice, engagement, and power of those living in the most distressed communities. We need to throw our weight behind long-term social change efforts and the movements for social justice. We are not just one killer app away from solving poverty, improving public education, or ending homelessness. As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass stated, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.’”

 Note: Alliance for Justice receives funding from TCE for Bolder Advocacy.

How Can Organizers Assess Their Movement Building Work?

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RECOhandsMovement building and other types of collaborations have become key strategies for community organizing campaigns.  Learning what’s working and not working and why in this type of work has its own challenges. “All the benefits of partnerships come with some heavy challenges that can be hard for an organization to navigate. Challenges could include partners not pulling their weight, differences in ideology and methods, mistrust, unequal power in the partnership and many more. Conducting periodic evaluations throughout a partnership’s lifespan can help an organization spot problem areas before they develop into bigger issues.”

Read more about organizing groups can learn more from their collaborative work in Angelia DiGuiseppe’s new report based on her literature review and interviews with organizers from Virginia Organizing, the Rural Community Alliance, and the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond on Bolder Advocacy’s Resources for Evaluating Community Organizing (RECO) website under Topic of Interest.

Assessing People Power—PowerCheck: A new tool for community organizing

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Climate March
The People’s Climate March in NYC on September 21, 2014
AP Photo/Jason DeCrow

Community organizing can be a complex process. One can only imagine what it took to bring together nearly 400,000 people to march in New York City on September 21 to call attention to climate change. The impact of such actions can be huge. Environmentalist Bill McKibben called this People’s Climate March “the day the climate movement came of age.”   Thousands of groups around the country organized their communities to make this demonstration happen.   Each group now has to think about where their current strengths are, what they should do next, and how sustainable their organization is.

To assess an organization’s power and sustainability, it’s important to understand its readiness to engage and empower constituents. Individuals and groups at the grassroots level are critical to solving social problems through collective action, including through movements and coalition work, but leaders must ensure they have the resources and infrastructure to support these efforts.

Bolder Advocacy has a way to determine an organization’s ability to engage in organizing—PowerCheck: a tool for assessing community organizing capacity. This brand new, free tool makes it easy for nonprofits, evaluators, and funders to assess capacity to engage in community organizing, plan successfully, and track progress over time.

Does the organization quickly mobilize significant numbers of people for its actions? Does it have a leadership ladder through which constituents can take more and more responsibility for campaigns? Is the group widely known in the community it serves? These are some of the important questions community organizers must ask and PowerCheck asks them. In an hour or less, whether you are a new organizer or an organizing veteran, PowerCheck can show you where and how you can focus resources and what types of partnerships you can seek out to strengthen your work and move forward.

Bolder Advocacy also provides two companion tools that can enhance the effectiveness of PowerCheck:

  • Resources for Evaluating Community Organizing (RECO): This tool is a compendium of resources related to evaluating community organizing. RECO connects you to case studies, tools and methodologies, and theoretical approaches to evaluation. This resource provides organizers with the latest examples and research of what is working and what is not in the practice of community organizing.
  • Advocacy Capacity Tool (ACT): This tool allows organizations to benchmark their advocacy skills, identify specific gaps and opportunities in their advocacy strategies, and efficiently focus resources to get the best results. Knowing your own capacity to advocate successfully is important in helping empower constituents to do the same.

So, does your community organizing effort have what it takes? Check your power with our new PowerCheck tool!

Organizing is a Family Affair in Anacostia

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By Abby Weaver, Social Work Intern, Alliance for Justice

Last year marked nearly a quarter-century since the historic tenant management victory of Kenilworth Estates, located in Washington, D.C.

Kimi Gray in front of the Kenilworth Estates.

Kimi Gray in front of the Kenilworth Estates.

Kenilworth has the distinction of being one of the first neighborhoods in the nation where tenants assumed management of the public housing where they lived. The woman who led the effort was resident and community organizer Kimi Gray. Over the years, Gray tackled a number of different challenges affecting the Kenilworth Estates–a public housing development known for high drug use, rare trash pick-up, and low rates of education completion.

The community took a remarkable turnaround, however, when Gray helped her fellow tenants see the connections between these problems and how they, as the people who lived the reality, could make a change by working together. Coming from the community, Gray knew that the tenants would feel more empowered if they were able to control elements of the housing project, she suggested they pursue tenant management. One longtime resident and tenant manager, Gladys Roy, explained the value of having tenants manage their own housing: “I know what the problems are.  I live here, so I know them first hand.”  This statement illustrates why community organizing is such an important route for social change efforts.

A national model

The result of the tenant management program in Kenilworth was nothing short of phenomenal. Through education and trainings, tenants were able to buy the complex.  Through her ability to speak for those in her community, Gray succeeded in bringing national attention to problems in the run-down public housing units.

Eventually, the Reagan Administration took notice, making tenant management the cornerstone of its housing policy. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1987 allowed for similar empowerment models among other housing units nationwide.  Self-management of the housing projects seemed to make sense and improve conditions.

Sequnely Gray at a city council meeting.

Sequnely Gray at a city council meeting.

A new generation continues to organize

The power of Gray’s leadership has inspired subsequent generations. Carrying on her community organizing legacy is Gray’s granddaughter Sequnely Gray.  Sequnely Gray grew up witnessing the importance of speaking out about community concerns.

Following in her grandmother’s footsteps, she has been an advocate for her child’s education for several years. A single mother, she began organizing the parents from her child’s school in response to the threat of the school closing. For her, mobilizing fellow parents when education was in jeopardy just came naturally. The group Empower DC acknowledged her dedication and offered her a job as a fulltime organizer with the Childcare for All Campaign, a campaign that promotes awareness and use of the childcare subsidy voucher.

Sequnely currently motivates low-income mothers to get involved in sharing testimonials to decision makers in D.C., just as her grandmother did in order to get the attention of the president at the time.  She provides constituents with a better understanding of the way government works through workshops on government structure.  She values her constituents’ opinions and asks for regular qualitative feedback on meeting productivity.

Although her grandmother’s victory occurred 24 years ago, Sequnely still draws inspiration from the principles that motivated her grandmother’s efforts. She focuses on the need for education, community member empowerment, and evaluation of her impact.  Many organizers consider the unique elements of community organizing to be leadership development and empowerment of vulnerable populations. These elements are evident in the campaign that Sequnely leads.

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For more Resources for Evaluating Community Organizing visit our RECO compendium.

For more information on the basics of building and maintaining a constituency using a community organizing approach, refer to the RECO resource, The Community Tool Box.  To learn more on partnering with community leaders, read Chapter 4 of the document Getting Issues on the Public Agenda.

 

 

 

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The Art of Coalitions: Building Teams of Rivals, Not Enemies

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Formerly LAANE’s Director of Training and Outreach, the Rev. William Smart is the new President and CEO of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

One of the most exciting and inspirational aspects of coalition building is seeing the success and victories that people get when they come together

Rev. William Smart spent nearly 10 years working at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

Rev. William Smart spent nearly 10 years working at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

for the common good of their community. The time and effort that can go into the work is nothing compared to the feeling of victory once the campaign has been won, and the people and community feel the victory themselves.

Rules for building a successful coalition

Unfortunately, groups that have never worked together are often times unwilling to do so because of longstanding suspicions or differences, so building coalitions around economic enhancement projects, political campaigns, religious events and community change is a very hard thing to do. However if you apply some strategy rules to the process you can build a great coalition.

First, you have to believe in what you are trying to build together – and also believe that it can be built. You can’t waste time fighting a cause that is not winnable.

Second, there must be a feeling that you can win together what you cannot win alone. If you don’t feel this, why do you need to go through the process and headaches of working together? The reason for creating a coalition is the power, resources and numbers that it brings out for a cause, showing that there is widespread support for it.

Finally, a good coalition makes room for self-interest. Each partner needs to know why everybody’s at the table: What are they looking for? Why do they want to be a part of this coalition? Answering these questions will help coalition partners feel comfortable with whom they are working and contribute to an environment of transparency — something that will be important as the campaign heats up.

Forging a partnership between labor and the community in Mississippi

Here’s an example of what I mean. In 2010 I went to Gulfport, Mississippi, to meet with members of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Building and Construction Trades Council. I was meeting with them to propose a community-labor partnership that would work to create jobs and make sure people from the local community got these jobs.

All this revolved around a prospective gasification plant being built in Moss Point, a nearby town. At the meeting I knew what would be the union’s self-interest. A building and construction trades council always has a bottom line — and that is how many jobs they can bring to their members, especially when those members are not working or, as many members of the trades say, “are on the bench.”

As we waited for all the people to arrive at the meeting, I nervously surveyed the room – which was full of Southern white men. I asked myself, What I have I gotten into?

Out of nowhere one of them blurted out, “Only good thing about America these days is Obama.”

Wow, I thought, did I just hear him right? Yes, these white Mississippians were extolling the African-American president of the United States of America. That helped me to understand quickly that we were on the same side, wanted the same things and that we could work the same way together to get them. Not only did these men embrace the ideal of a coalition but they clearly understood that it took the total community to help them get what they wanted — more jobs.

We went on to build a coalition that was represented by faith-based and labor organizations, educators, environmental organizations, and community groups. Each organization brought its knowledge, history, and values to the table. This small Mississippi town was educated about the values and virtues of the collective bargaining system, and how Community Workforce Agreements allow their sons and daughters to not just get jobs, but to develop careers. It was educated about environmental impacts, and what mitigations could be put in place to protect the town. While the community gained a greater understanding of unions, labor gained a greater understanding of the power of the community.

Many good things started happening. Working through the schools, the trades were able to start outreaching for prospective jobs training programs and the coalition began to understand the power it had through community benefits. Moss Point’s elected officials became interested in the work of the coalition. The coalition’s cohesiveness allowed it to deal with critical environmental issues together — and to ultimately decide that the plant posed too much of a threat to the community, given the amount of water it required to be being taken out of a local river each day.

The coalition, working together, realized that building a gasification plant was a bad idea for Moss Point, Mississippi. However, because its members developed trust in each other, it is now looking for a better and greener project with the help of Moss Point’s mayor. The project now has to be one that will create jobs for local residents, while protecting the environment. At the end of the day opposites ended up attracting, to create better opportunities for a community.

This article originally appeared on Frying Pan News and is reprinted with permission.

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Medicaid Matters

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By Michael Seifert of the Equal Voice Network, a community-based organization in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. 

I am too old for this, I told myself, as the alarm chimed brightly at 3:25 a.m. I crawled out of bed, pulled on my yellow “Equal Voice” t-shirt, and my grey and green tennis shoes (the ones that make me look like I run faster than my speediest thoughts), and headed out the door.

Medicaid phylisI was joining 54 other people from Brownsville to make a 6-hour bus trip to Austin. There we planned to march on the capitol with about 3,000 others to urge the Governor of Texas to accept the Medicaid Expansion part of the Affordable Care Act.

All of us on the bus were members of the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network—10 community-based organizations committed to creating social change through civic engagement. We are funded and supported by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

Rick Perry has said that Texas can take care of its own poor people—and declined to expand Medicaid as required by the Affordable Care Act. Texas has 6.2 million uninsured people. Over a million of them are children. None of us are happy with the way Texas has taken care of its poor people.

That is an item worth fighting for, we had decided—thus this early-morning activity.

Delivering a simple but powerful message to lawmakers

Medicaid disabledWe arrived in Austin in due time, found our place in line, put on our yellow caps, and joined a sea of people from all across the state to make the long walk up Congress Avenue. I was delighted to see 50 or so folks in wheelchairs—over the years I have learned that disabled people are fearless when it comes to raising their voices.

And so we raised our voices—on the capitol steps and in the offices of elected officials. Our message was simple—Medicaid expansion will insure hundreds of thousands of Texans. If we refuse the expansion, the monies will go to another state which has acted on behalf of the uninsured, and has accepted the expansion, some place like New Mexico, or, God forbid, Arkansas.

Nearly half of the representatives in the Texas State House are new to their job. Many of the reps that we visited had no idea what we were talking about. But the organizers of the protest—Texas Well and Healthy—had done a great job, and the written material was clear and to the point—and well footnoted.

Tired but undaunted

It was a long day, and as 4 pm rolled around, our Brownsville contingent reboarded the bus. As we settled in for the ride home, I asked two of the younger people how their day had gone. Gabriela frowned a bit, and said, “Well, at one office we went to, the staff made fun of us. I guess we weren’t dressed up as nice as them. I don’t know, it was embarrassing.” I asked her whether, after that experience, she would participate in another one of these actions some day. She smiled and said, “Oh yeah, and the next time I am bringing more friends.”

There was a bit of a pause, and then Gabriela added, “You know, this wasn’t about me. It was about my mom and her getting insurance. That’s important to me.” She looked down at her phone and began texting someone.

I settled into my seat and thought for a bit about civic engagement and the young woman who was going to end up spending 12 hours on a smelly bus, who had spent three hours walking and standing around in a protest and who had been humiliated in the offices of an elected official.

I reached down and retied my shoes, for I was surrounded by fiery women, and I best be ready to keep up with them.

As for Rick Perry, he wears boots.

LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW TO ADVOCATE FOR HEALTH CARE IN YOUR STATE: Print this State Health Advocate To-Do List from Families USA via SparkAction

Michael wrote previously for Bolder Advocacy about efforts to obtain relief funds for chronic flooding in the community. This article originally appeared on Michael’s blog: http://alongsideaborder.blogspot.com/

 

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5 New Evaluation Resources for Community Organizers

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As community organizing tactics change, so do ways to capture success. At AFJ, we want to help you stay up to date on all the developments in the field.

Organizers from the Washington Interfaith Network share tips on reflection in the current "Topic of Interest."

Organizers from the Washington Interfaith Network share tips on reflection in the current “Topic of Interest.”

That’s why we are sharing with you 5 new additions to our online library we call Resources for Evaluating Community OrganizingRECO. Nothing to do with organized crime. But it is about organized people and their power to improve communities when they work together for social and economic justice.

Evaluation Resources from the Field

The newest resources are:

Capturing Concepts, an excerpt from Promoting Community Change and Making it Happen in the Real World by Mark Homan, contains questions to ask during and after organizing actions.

CFJ Campaign Tools are worksheets that leaders can complete with their organizing group for evaluation and future planning.

Getting to Outcomes Indicators Guide: A Users Guide to a Revised Indicators Framework for Education Organizing focuses on new developments in relating community change to education reform.

Success Measures−Community Building and Organizing is an extensive checklist and processing guide to evaluate organizing in any setting.

They Said It Was Impossible:  How to Win Progressive Change When the Odds are Against Us shows how evaluation happens through a visual, descriptive narrative.

Why Reflecting on Organizing Actions Matters

But that’s not all! There is a new article discussing the role of reflection, Reflection and the Future of Organizing, that draws on interviews with three organizers. “Ongoing Reflection and Innovation” is one of the RECO Seven Core Components of Community Organizing. To compliment the article, we’ve selected the following reports about how the organizing field has changed, what it needs to be sustainable in the future and how reflection on the past is important for the future.

Building Bridges, Building Power: Developments in Institution-Based Community Organizing, Interfaith Funders

Vision for Change: A New Wave of Social Justice Leadership, Building Movement Project

Reflecting for Change: A Discussion on the Benefits of Reflection in Community Organizing, Alliance for Justice

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Last Year’s 12 Best Organizing Moments

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We love this round up from the great folks at the New Organizing Institute of last year’s best moments in grassroots organizing. Each of these movements below gained significant momentum last year and we look forward to watching what they achieve this year to advance equality, opportunity, and justice.

What other moments would you add to this list? Tell us below in the comments section!

1. Love Wins

From the Supreme Court to the states the long fight for marriage equality took a big turn in 2014. Adding just this year Rhode Island, Delaware, Minnesota, California, Hawaii, Illinois, and New Mexico to the list of marriage equality states.

North Carolina's "Moral Mondays" movement has united progressive groups around a common agenda. Flickr: Grant Baldwin

North Carolina’s “Moral Mondays” movement has united progressive groups around a common agenda. Flickr: Grant Baldwin

2. Operation Butterfly

DREAMers fighting for immigration organized to put a face on immigration reform in what was called “Operation Butterfly.” United We Dream worked to reunite DREAMers with their parents who are trapped on the other side of the border. A powerful and amazing piece of organizing that landed them front page coverage on the New York Times and helped push comprehensive immigration reform through the Senate.

3. Moral Mondays in North Carolina

When right-wing legislators targeted voting rights, women, and families across the state with extreme legislation the people fought back — flooding the capitol and engaging in civil disobedience that drew national coverage to these attacks.

4. #StandWithWendy

Back brace and all, State Sen. Wendy Davis of Texas held the floor for 11 hours to delay an extreme piece of anti-choice legislation — creating a national moment and giving a spark to the movement for women’s rights.

5. Fast Food Strikes

In a series of nationwide strikes, workers have risen up and drawn national attention to the poor working conditions, pay, and benefits at fast food establishments across the country.

6. Dream Defenders Fight “Stand Your Ground”

For 31 days and 30 nights the Dream Defenders occupied the Florida state capitol demanding a special session from the Governor.

7. Filibuster Reform

What started as a slow drum beat from the Netroots in 2005 ended with the Senate acting to reform the filibuster this year — ending its use on presidential nominees.

8. Colorado Local Power Campaign

New Era Colorado’s campaign against Xcel energy went viral, raising almost $200,000 (with an initial goal of $40,000!) to fund their grassroots organizing around the creation of a local electric utility based on renewable energy.

9. Fast for Families

Faith, immigrant rights, and labor leaders fasted for immigration reform on the National Mall. They stayed out there every day and night, abstaining from all food — except water — to move the hearts and compassion of members of Congress to pass immigration reform with a path to citizenship.

 

Minimum Wage Fights

13 states will raise the minimum wage in 2014 thanks to last year’s organizing.

10. Minimum Wage Fights

Across the country workers stepped up to fight for a higher minimum wage with victories in Washington DC and SeaTac where the highest minimum wage in history of $15 was passed by the voters.

11. No More Names

Americans across the country banded together to hold accountable the members of Congress who refused to hold a vote on background checks. The nationwide bus tour culminated with the reading of the names of the 3,300 men, women, and children who have been killed by guns since the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut.

12. Forward on Climate

The #ForwardonClimate rally against the Keystone XL pipeline brought 35,000+ people to Washington DC to pressure the President. While no action has been taken yet on Keystone, the President did release his Climate Action Plan which included the first uniform, national limits on the amount of carbon pollution a future power plant can emit.

This article is a modified version of the original which appeared on Buzzfeed and is reprinted with permission from New Organizing Institute [http://neworganizing.com/]

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Activists Paved the Way for the Victory Over Stop and Frisk

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On January 30, 2014, Mayor Bill De Blasio took an important step toward ending New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk police tactics. De Blasio’s announcement means the city will finally begin reforming the practice in accordance with a federal judge’s orders issued in a 2013 ruling.

Hugh Hogan

Hugh Hogan

In an op-ed last year, Hugh Hogan, executive director of New York City’s North Star Fund, argued that years of advocacy and organizing by community and civil rights groups paved the way for these developments.

“Had it not been for grassroots activists, and financial support from a few courageous foundations and many generous individuals, such a blatantly racist and discriminatory policy would still be in place.”

Hogan urged other funders to learn from the stop-and-frisk campaign that such advocacy efforts often take decades.

This victory offers an important lesson for donors and grant makers about how an investment in grass-roots activism and organizing—plus support for efforts to create a base of committed community members—can bring about much-needed change. But it will require them to focus on the long haul and think differently.

It is difficult to develop measurements that show the impact of this kind of activism and advocacy, even though such evaluation is popular in philanthropy right now. And it requires a willingness to speak candidly about sensitive issues and to challenge powerful institutions. This type of bravery is more often found on street corners than foundation boardrooms, but that needs to change.

The problems in New York started in the 1990s, after Mayor Rudy Giuliani adopted the “broken windows” policing policy built on the idea that “zero tolerance” for petty crimes would prevent more serious crimes. The idea of stop-and-frisk” was born of the same motivation—that police officers could deter crime by stopping and frisking anyone they believed, or were trained to believe, looked suspicious.

Racial profiling and the abuse of stop-and-frisk escalated significantly during the first decade of Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. Based on the police department’s own statistics, in 2011 alone there were nearly 700,000 stops—90 percent of which did not lead to a court summons or an arrest. Simply put, innocent people, most of them young men of color but also women of color, and people who are lesbian, gay, or transgender, were routinely stopped, questioned, harassed, and in some cases brutalized.

Groups like CAAAV, an advocacy group that organizes Asians, and Desis Rising Up and Moving, Justice Committee, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Picture the Homeless realized that action needed to be taken against police violence and racism. Many were smaller, untested groups—just the kind my organization, North Star Fund, regularly supports.

Over time, these groups joined together with other North Star Fund grantees, including Make the Road New York, Streetwise and Safe, and Bronx Defenders, as members of Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition of more than 60 groups committed to fighting discriminatory policing in New York City.

As a key supporter of these groups, I’ve had a close-up view over the past decade watching these groups and others pave the way for the campaign against stop-and-frisk.

They used “cop watches,” created know-your-rights murals, held community meetings, and made extensive efforts to visit people in their apartments and homes so they could persuade victims they would be safe telling their experiences of police brutality and racism. They formed alliances to get their stories out and build political support. They found victims who could share their stories at rallies, press conferences, and vigils and then gathered those who were wrongly arrested to wage a series of class-action lawsuits pursued by the Center for Constitutional Rights. And they pushed over many years for access to the data about stop-and-frisk.

Ultimately, their research and the experiences of their members laid the groundwork for a federal court to declare that the evidence New York police officers were systemically using race as the basis for stops was “overwhelming.”

Without years of organizing, this victory would not have been possible. Advocacy groups can’t buy this kind of support, as with a mailing list or a phone bank. It results from years of on-the-ground organizing with people who are directly affected by crime and the police tactics used to try to prevent it.

For philanthropists, the story must not end when the news media move on to the next big thing.

Looking at North Star Fund’s 35 years of financing social-justice projects in New York City, I’ve seen that big victories of the stop-and-frisk variety are often followed by a sense of complacency and a belief that “the work is done.”

That misimpression undermines long-term support for community organizing. Already the Bloomberg administration is appealing the federal court ruling that curtails the abuses of stop-and-frisk.

Most important, ending stop-and-frisk abuses is not a cure-all for discriminatory policing tactics. Communities United for Police Reform will need philanthropic support for a long time to keep advancing ideas that ensure that all citizens are treated fairly by the city’s police force.

Other nonprofits and donors can learn much by watching how Communities United for Police Reform brings together activists, advocates, lawyers, and researchers to promote change and to forge a more thoughtful approach to community safety in our great cities.

Several foundations have started much-needed efforts to lift men and boys of color out of poverty, to make our corrections system more just, and to expand alternatives to probation and incarceration.

Bringing an end to the abuses of stop-and-frisk is another way to extend that work. It advances our shared goals of ending racism, expanding opportunity, and creating a more equitable and fair society.

But we won’t make much progress on any effort to promote equality unless all of us in philanthropy learn to listen better to the people directly affected by injustices like stop-and-frisk. And we need to keep in mind that it’s often the grassroots activists we support who can provide the leadership, passion, and deep understanding of their communities to develop policies that move beyond a slick PowerPoint presentation to actually work well on the street.

While De Blasio’s move is being hailed as a victory, vigilance and continued advocacy by these activists will be necessary to hold the mayor and police department accountable to their promises.

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Moral Mondays Kicks Off 2014 Campaign

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North Carolina's "Moral Mondays" movement has united progressive groups around a common agenda. Flickr: Grant Baldwin

North Carolina’s “Moral Mondays” movement has united progressive groups around a common agenda. Flickr: Grant Baldwin

Update: An estimated 80,000 people joined the rally.

On February 8, Moral Mondays— the movement that electrified North Carolina’s progressive community in 2013—holds its first major rally of the year.

Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and founder of the Moral Mondays movement, will lead a march in front of the state legislature in Raleigh.

The event continues the Moral Mondays’ campaign against laws passed by the North Carolina General Assembly last year weakening Medicaid, public education, reproductive justice, and voting rights.

In the Moral Mondays movement, Barber has created a powerful model for organizing across issue areas and constituencies. It’s a model that is also distinctly regional, embracing the moral high ground and invoking religion and prayer without alienating its members who may not be believers.

The movement is spreading to other Southern states where Republicans hold overwhelming power. For example, South Carolina has begun “Truthful Tuesdays” in the state capitol.

Learn  more about Moral Mondays: Moral Mondays: Using Fusion Politics to Counter Extreme Policies

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Dr. Robert Ross Calls on Funders to Engage in Power Politics

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“We must find our way as a field to focus on scaling up solutions – and doing this requires us to engage in power politics.” The California Endowment’s president and CEO Dr. Robert K. Ross caught my attention with that clear and strong statement, a statement that is edgier than most from funders.

A meeting of the Youth Policy Justice Board, funded by TCE.

A meeting of the Youth Policy Justice Board, funded by TCE.

In a can’t-miss article in the Spring issue of the Stanford Social Innovation ReviewRoss makes the case that addressing long-term problems by mobilizing the community through organizing and advocacy is extremely effective.

“Philanthropy has to recognize that community power, voice, and advocacy are, to use a football analogy, the blocking and tackling of winning social change.”

Ross challenges those who would invest all their faith—and grant dollars—in the power of technological or social innovation to solve pressing problems:

“Innovation has been critical to economic and social progress since the invention of the wheel. But innovation isn’t everything. In fact, when it comes to addressing today’s urgent social problems, from education and public health to civil and human rights, innovation is overrated.”

Using concrete examples, Ross describes how TCE’s efforts to reform the juvenile justice system and “zero-tolerance” school discipline practices in Southern California led it to fund advocacy and community organizing. Achieving this kind of systemic reform and policy change required more than an innovative program:

“In the fight against zero-tolerance policies in California schools, innovative practices, data, and research were important. But social innovation without advocacy and organizing would have been in vain. It was the mobilization of the community, and in particular young people, that paved the way for the innovation to break through.

Funding advocacy and community organizing may not be as glamorous, neat, or tidy as supporting the next great program or organization. It’s difficult to capture the results in a glossy bar graph or pie chart, and it doesn’t necessarily lead to easy photo opportunities like stocking a neighborhood food bank.”

Go read the entire article, and don’t miss the call to action to “engage in power politics” in the last paragraph:

“We must find our way, as a field, to focus on scaling up solutions—and doing this requires us to engage in power politics. We need to help build the voice, engagement, and power of those living in the most distressed communities. We need to throw our weight behind long-term social change efforts and the movements for social justice. We are not just one killer app away from solving poverty, improving public education, or ending homelessness. As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass stated, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.’”

 Note: Alliance for Justice receives funding from TCE for Bolder Advocacy.

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How Can Organizers Assess Their Movement Building Work?

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RECOhandsMovement building and other types of collaborations have become key strategies for community organizing campaigns.  Learning what’s working and not working and why in this type of work has its own challenges. “All the benefits of partnerships come with some heavy challenges that can be hard for an organization to navigate. Challenges could include partners not pulling their weight, differences in ideology and methods, mistrust, unequal power in the partnership and many more. Conducting periodic evaluations throughout a partnership’s lifespan can help an organization spot problem areas before they develop into bigger issues.”

Read more about organizing groups can learn more from their collaborative work in Angelia DiGuiseppe’s new report based on her literature review and interviews with organizers from Virginia Organizing, the Rural Community Alliance, and the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond on Bolder Advocacy’s Resources for Evaluating Community Organizing (RECO) website under Topic of Interest.

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