Streetwise for Book Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and Education Reform in the Bronx

Chapter Three. Organizing the Organizations

Chapter Three Organizing the Organizations The Alinskyite Tool Kit This chapter focuses on the nuts and bolts, or the tool kit, inspired by Saul Alinsky. Contemporary Alinsky-inspired social change organizations, such as the Industrial Areas and Gamaliel (a Chicago-based network of congregation-based community organizing groups) foundations, have developed practices and frameworks quite different from those espoused by Alinsky in the 1950s and 1960s.1 Further, even when social change organizations agree on what Alinsky principles or “rules of organizing” are, they can implement these principles in varying ways. Still, it remains possible to articulate what an archetypal Alinskyite tool kit looks like. There are also much greater differences between the Alinskyite and Freirean tool kits than among variations of them. Such categories are necessary in order to develop a framework of cultural practices in action so that such practices do not simply exist in the abstract, and so that there is evidence for the link between tool kits and political strategies in my later analysis. The case studies in this chapter suggest that the Alinskyite tool kit helps education organizing groups to build strong organizations and large bases of support, often in short periods of time. While the Bronx chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) accomplished this with a narrative of martyrdom and sacrifice, the Northwest Bronx Clergy and Community Coalition (NWBCCC) did it with intensive, Organizing the Organizations: The Alinskyite Tool Kit 47 hands-on leadership apprenticeships.These organizations excelled in breadth and speed. However, they suffered a bit when it came to depth and sustainability in their leadership development, with this tradeoff being much more apparent in ACORN Bronx than in the NWBCCC. Further, their tool kits fostered quite a bit of interaction between organizers and leaders, but less interaction among leaders themselves. The Alinskyite Category In the present study, the Alinskyite category is defined by its emphasis on three factors: (1) activities and protocols that relate directly to organization campaigns, especially recruitment of new members to the social change organization (SCO); (2) a focus on developing the organization as a whole, especially its coffers and reputation as an SCO, rather than the varying interests and skills of individuals within them; and (3) leadership development with the organizer as a guide. In two books (1946, 1971), Alinsky outlined a specific set of rules for community organizing. These rules include“The first step in community organization is community disorganization”(1971,116),disrupting existing patterns of interaction to mobilize neighborhood residents into citizen participation, and focusing on winnable issues. The rules emphasize practical organization building rather than social movement building per se.At least in the popular imagination, one would hazard to guess that the reigning images of social movements are those of the 1960s civil rights bus boycotts or more recent lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered pride parades, where individuals join, and sometimes exit, a group of people united by a specific goal or cause. By contrast, the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) is of- ficially a federation of dues-paying religious congregations and community organizations with their own organizers.Although the IAF has changed considerably since Alinsky’s time, this characteristic fits well within the Alinskyite category. Other community organizations following the Alinsky model, which tend to mobilize individuals rather than existing institutions, still tend to have dues systems, as well as well-defined bylaws, and official nonprofit organizational status filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Further along these pragmatic lines, the category’s organizational political ideology is conspicuous via its determined absence. Alinsky urged organizers to stay away from political ideologies (though that might strike some as itself ideological).2 He was careful to criticize liberals as well as conservatives and “cited as his intellectual forerunners Jefferson, Paine, 48 Chapter Three Lincoln, and Gandhi, as well as Hannibal and Machiavelli” (Delgado 1986, 21). In keeping with Alinsky’s refusal to identify with a specified political ideology, no particular issue is guaranteed to be addressed by an Alinskydescendant community organization. Instead, local constituents choose issues, and the respective campaigns focus on aims from housing repairs from slumlords to minimum wage increases. Since 1983, there have also been more campaigns on education reform; such campaigns accelerated in the mid-1990s. Still, Alinsky’s writings also show that education and leadership development remain important aspects of organizing as a whole. For...