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 6 The Strange career of chuck ridley Drug Abuse, Community Organizing, and “Government by Nonprofits” Chuck Ridley’s grandmother lived in Delray Beach when the only thing black folks could do there was harvest sugar cane. Every day, every black man and woman, fathers and mothers and uncles and cousins, went into those sugar cane fields to work all day under the hot sun. And every day, every one of those parents and grandparents brought their children into the fields with them, to play while the adults worked. There were snakes and rats and dogs and all kinds of flying, swooping, biting bugs in those fields, and sometimes the children got bit or stung or scared, but that is where the children played. One day Chuck Ridley’s grandmother saw a young child get bit by a snake. She saw the snake coming, and she yelled as loud as she could, but it didn’t matter. That day Chuck Ridley’s grandmother told everybody else, all the mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles, that she was staying home and not going into the fields. She told all those parents and grandparents to leave their children with her, and she would look after them at home. Every day after that, all the black folks in Delray Beach left their children with Chuck Ridley’s grandmother. Every day they brought her food from their kitchens, and firewood and old clothes, and sometimes money, for her to take care of their children. And Chuck Ridley’s grandmother raised a neighborhood.1 The southwest side of Delray Beach, Florida, might seem like an odd place to observe some of the latest developments in the continuing evolution of democracy. It is a pocket of poverty in the affluent Gold Coast, a neighborhood where most of the adults do not have a high school diploma and over half the children live in single-parent homes. The residents, primarily African Americans and recent Haitian and Mexican immigrants, represent over 80% of the people of color in the city as a whole.2 But the  The Next Form of Democracy sheer desperation of this community has in fact propelled its political innovations : since the traditional political process has served Southwest Delray so poorly, leaders and residents there have had even greater cause to work together in new ways. One of their innovations is part of a larger shift that is helping to reshape the relationship between citizens and government: the change in tactics by traditional community organizers. Since the time of Saul Alinsky, who first began mobilizing residents in 1940s Chicago, the practice of community organizing has diversified into a broad spectrum of strategies, including “faith-based organizing,” “consensus organizing,” and other variations.3 This dissemination was driven by the experimentation of local organizers, who reacted to changing conditions by modifying various aspects of their approach. The organizers themselves have also diversified, partly because people who were trained in the Alinsky tradition have gone on to serve as public officials, nonprofit directors, program officers at foundations, and in other roles. These leaders have adapted the skills and philosophies of traditional community organizing to fit the perspectives and needs of their new positions. Some of these organizers have reached an important threshold: rather than pressuring public officials to give citizens what they want, they have created arenas where citizens, decision-makers, and other stakeholders can sit down and make policy together. In some places, they have taken this a step further, establishing nonprofit organizations that oversee neighborhood decision-making and manage the delivery of most public services. Instead of always mobilizing citizens to affect the political process, these organizers are finding new ways to incorporate the process. These entities are practically governments in themselves; they are probably more autonomous and comprehensive than the structures for shared governance now emerging in schools (see Chapter 7) and neighborhood councils (Chapter 8). But, they also call out a long list of difficult new questions about accountability, power, and the purpose of community organizing. In Southwest Delray, a skilled, veteran community organizer named Chuck Ridley has been at the center of all of these changes. He is the heir to a family tradition of local leadership: his grandmother organized the first day care center in that part of the city, and his father was a prominent local pastor. He is an eloquent speaker and a tireless fundraiser, and the warmth of his personality allows him to connect with all kinds of people...

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