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50 3 How I Started Organizing We asked the organizers how they got into organizing in the first place. What was the trigger that made them choose this line of work? For some, it was just how they grew up; organizing ran in the family. For others, it was the time they grew up in. In the 1960s and ’70s, change was in the air, and many young people were caught up in creating it. For many, the job as an organizer grew out of their own activism. It was the issues that brought them to the field. Some came to organizing young, some in college, and some only after years of doing something else. The answers are as varied as the people who gave them For some it was how they grew up; organizing ran in the family. I was born in the D.C. area. I lived for a year in the Catholic Worker House there. My parents are very political. My parents actually met when my dad, who is a lawyer, offered to defend my mother for free one time when she got arrested at the Pentagon back in the ’70s for an anti-war protest. So I grew up with politics and activism, very much focused on the anti-war movement with a very big emphasis on nonviolence as a practical tactic and philosophical underpinning of what I was working on. —Nicholas Graber-Grace I started to work on these issues in the community because in my family we have our history. My brother was in the university and he was a leader. We were in a very bad government [in Bolivia]. It wasn’t democratic; it was a military government. My brother was doing a meeting about the community—what can I help in the community, what can I do for a better life, what can I do for the poor? The government took my brother and put him in jail. My mother was very sad, and we were looking everyplace for my How I Started Organizing   51 brother. We thought maybe we could not find my brother any more because of the political issues, and we thought maybe he was dead. When I went to the police they said, “We don’t know what it is, we don’t know what it is.” My mother was very sad; we were trying every day. After that we found my brother but he was very, very sick. It had been a very traumatic experience for him. When he came outside my mother said, “You don’t have to do any more political activities. You have to stop.” My brother said, “No, Mom. We have to do it again, and more, because I have my experience. And we have to change this life because we need a better life for the poor.” So we started to work on political issues. —Alicia Ruiz I actually found out about organizing back in 1960. It might have been a little earlier. It might have been 1959, when the Freedom Riders came through Warren County [North Carolina]. My grandmother let me go with them to introduce them to folks. I was five or six, but I was that kind of kid who knew people. People knew me and liked me and expected me to do things. Even though I didn’t know that’s what you called it, I think that was my first encounter with organizing. —Sheila Kingsberry-Burt I’m in my later fifties now, so I was growing up during the Civil Rights Era. I went to college in ’64. I think between that as a backdrop and the riots in the cities in the mid-’60s, I felt particularly drawn to organizing as a way to understand a lot of what I saw going on around us. There was a lot of injustice and a lot of sense of communities up in arms. There was a need to help people really have a chance to become all they could be. —Ken Galdston For others, it was the times they grew up in; in the 1960s and ’70s, change was in the air. In the 1960s I got very intensely engaged in the anti-war movement and SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and really went about as far out as it could go. I was in the streets and got fairly crazy. I belonged to a collective. The war really was my focus because emotionally it was...

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