Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City: Somerville, MA

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments T he people who contributed most to identifying and defining the issues in this book are the actively engaged residents of Somerville, massachusetts, a city with a long and compelling history, where the challenges are great and the collective drive to create a thriving and diverse community is strong and vibrant. in that sense, this study is an example of community-based research. over more than two decades, students in my sociology classes at Tufts University took part in community learning projects in a variety of Somerville organizations. Gradually, the work they did and the community co-teachers and active residents with whom they worked drew me more and more into the life of the city as both a researcher and a scholar-activist. in the hope that i have not left someone out, i thank the following people who helped shape my thinking for this book: Nelson Salazar, Alex Pirie, Franklin Dalembert, Warren Goldstein-Gelb, Danny leBlanc, lisa Brukilacchio , Jack Connolly, Jim Green, marty martinez, matt mclaughlin, luis Anthony morales, mark Neidergang, ellin reisner, Bill roache, Ben echevarria , melissa mcWhinney, Tom Bent, Fred Berman, regina Bertholdo, Walter Pero, victor DoCouto, Adam Dash, Consuelo Perez, Teresa Cardoso, and Patricia montes. my academic colleagues and my writing group helped me to frame the concerns of Somerville residents in relation to larger conceptual questions about civic and political engagement and shared governance and what scholars in the field are calling “social citizenship.” Thanks go especially to Sarah Sobieraj, Paula Aymer, Frinde maher, laura miller, viii Acknowledgments Peter levine, Jeff Berry, Carmen Sirianni, Anna Sandoval, Chris Bobel, Julie Nelson, and ryan Centner. Also useful were conversations with several faculty and staff members involved in the work of Tufts University’s Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, as well as the monthly meetings of the Civic engagement research Group, which culminated in my 2007 co-edited volume with Kent Portney, Acting Civically: From Urban Neighborhoods to Higher Education (New england University Press/Tufts University Press, 2007). Papers that i presented at the annual meetings of the Association for research on Nonprofit organizations and voluntary Action (ArNovA) in 2009, 2010, and 2011 and the Urban Affairs Association in 2009 provided opportunities for critical commentary from fellow panelists and audience members. Swapna maruri, my undergraduate research assistant, made substantial contributions to the research. John liBassi, my department’s staff assistant, got the final manuscript into shape for submission to the publisher during a busy week in the semester. i am grateful to them. like most research projects, this one is rooted in an aspect of my personal story—in this case, linked to my abiding interest in socioeconomic and other inequalities. Ultimately, then, i must also thank all those people (whom i will refrain from attempting to name) who have played pivotal roles over my three decades of writing and teaching and acting around those issues. i told my own class story in an essay published in a 2003 edited volume called Our Studies, Ourselves: Sociologists’ Lives and Work (oxford University Press, 2003). readers familiar with my first book, Women of the Upper Class (Temple University Press, 1984), and my second, Money for Change: Social Movement Philanthropy at Haymarket People’s Fund (Temple University Press, 1995), may not see the connections between those books and this study. For me the link is clear: What i always want to understand is how people on the inside establish and hold on to power and how those outside challenge and struggle and sometimes are able to reorganize power. The women from old-wealth backgrounds whom i interviewed for my 1984 book had every intention of holding fast to their privileged class position, even if it meant losing ground in gender terms. in vivid contrast, wealthy donors at the Haymarket Fund acted to counter, even demolish, their own class position as they gave up their inherited wealth and generated income to support progressive social movement work, with the contention “Giving to others what belongs to you is charity. Giving to others what belongs to them is social justice” (quoted in ostrander 1995: 62). The research for this current book about Somerville, like the research for the Haymarket book, has made me see that the questions of who holds power and how and why they hold it are complex in yet another way. Those who still hold power in Somerville Acknowledgments ix proudly claim a working-class...