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Community Organizing: IAF in Texas
The following is an interview conducted by Roundtable secretary, Rev. Philip J. Murnion with Fordham University professor of sociology, Mark R. Warren, author of Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2001.Q. What got you interested in community organizing?
A. I'm from a working class Catholic community. My father was a union activist, old-time Democratic party person, very progressive minded. He had been a teamster all of his work life and was always very interested in politics. My mother is an Italian-American Catholic who was very involved in her parish and oriented toward helping other people and community life.
At first I wasn’t very happy at college. I thought I’d go out and try to make a difference in the world, which got me interested in organizing. I was also influenced by the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement. My father had supported the antiwar movement and civil rights; we talked a lot about it in the house. My mother’s involvement in care for people through the church and my father’s involvement in organizing come together in my interest in congregation-based organizing.
| My mother’s involvement in care for people through the church and my father’s involvement in organizing come together in my interest in congregation-based organizing. |
As a Ph.D. student at Harvard, I read scholarly accounts of the decline of American democracy and the decline of urban life. When it came time to decide on a dissertation project, I thought that rather than another analysis of what was wrong—why are the unions in decline, why is the democratic party no longer very strong in working class communities—I might identify efforts that seem to be reversing some of these declines. I was looking for an effort at getting people involved in politics in a way that makes a real difference to their families and communities, reaching people across racial lines, and making a difference in inner-city communities. I knew the work of Saul Alinsky on community organizing. From what I knew about the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) work in Texas, under the leadership of Ernie Cortez, it appeared to be the most successful effort. In Texas, it offered an opportunity to explore an effort that had gone beyond the local level and was influencing politics at the state level, with a view to larger arenas.
Q. Early in your book, you use the term “social capital” to describe what community organizing can help provide. What is social capital?
A. Organizing efforts link community institutions and people to our political system around their community values, mainly of faith but not only that. In the past when communities were pretty strong we had ways of doing that. Maybe they were not always the best ways of taking care of people’s concerns—urban political machines and things like that—but they really connected communities to a political system and made it at least somewhat responsive to the needs of families and communities. If you jump to the 1990s, communities are pretty weak. Many institutions have suffered decline; even within neighborhoods people don't know each other well, they’re not taking care of each other’s families and children. It’s a more individualized existence; people are spread out. So if you want to reconnect communities to politics again, you have to deal with the issue of community decline.
Scholars use the term “social capital” to refer to the kind of connections among people that can be resources for them to take action. That action can be overseeing the raising of children or it can be in the political arena. I argue that community organizing is rebuilding a social capital that has declined in a lot of our communities and it does so in a way that reconnects communities to political action.
Q. What's the special contribution of community organizing to the production of social capital? How it is distinct from issue-advocacy organizations or protest organizations?
| Scholars use the term “social capital” to refer to the kind of connections among people that can be resources for them to take action. |
A. A lot of issue-organizing and advocacy brings people together in a way that doesn't specifically try to build community-based institutions or strengthen them or build long-term connections among people. You end up with either just an advocacy group based in the state capital or in Washington that advocates for other people rather than organizing them to participate. When people do come together around issues, the relationships don’t last very long because the only thing that holds them together is the issue.
In community organizing people are brought together on the basis of faith values, on their connections in communities. The attempt is to strengthen the connections that could deal with any kind of issue that may come along. It’s a very different and more stable kind of organizing.
Q. The term you use in the book, a term used by the IAF about its organizing, is that it is “relational.” What does that mean?
A. The IAF organizers try to bring people together on the basis of their relationships with each other in institutions or in communities rather than around a common interest. They don't come in saying: “We are going to try to stop the building of this gas storage tank in your neighborhood. Let's all get together. Who is interested?” Instead they say: “Let's have a conversation about what the strengths of this community are, what its problems are, try to find what are the concerns of the people who actually live here, who has some interest and energy in actually doing something about these problems, what part would they be interested in working on.” The issues are not set. People are brought together to talk about what they have in common, what they believe in, what their concerns are in families, what their religious faith suggests they should be doing to strengthen their communities. On that basis, issues are selected and addressed.
Q. This sounds different from the phrase, attributed to Saul Alinsky, that the goal is to “rub raw the sores of discontent.” Was there a shift from Alinsky to the current organizing? Or is the phrase still apt?
A. There was definitely a shift. I’m not sure Alinsky was doing relational organizing. Surely he wasn’t doing it in the way the IAF now does. Alinsky might have been more utilitarian in his approach to religious and other institutions. They were sources of money and people that could be brought into a combative situation with local power holders to win around issues.
What the IAF is now trying to do is much more nuanced, complex. Certainly the organizers need to find out the sources of discontent, exposing the kinds of things that arouse people’s anger. IAF uses the term “cold anger,” not to get people angry but to get them concerned in a strong way, and then coldly calculating what could be done to improve communities. There is conflict but also an attempt to build relationships even with local power holders. It is not just a question of confronting them at meetings. It's also a question of building long-term relationships with city, county, and state officials and other kinds of people.
Q. Some people charge that the organizers actually bring the issues. Why else would the organizations in so many places be working on the same issue at the same time? What do you think?
| The attempt is to strengthen the connections that could deal with any kind of issue that may come along. |
A. The reality is quite a bit of back and forth. On the one hand, the organizers bring the experience of the network, its successes and failures, the kinds of issues that have arisen in other places; that’s part of the mix. On the other hand, leaders in congregations and communities bring their concerns and their energies, their local knowledge about what might work or not work or how things need to be changed in the local area.
In San Antonio, COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service) and the Metro Alliance organizations launched Project Quest, an innovative job-training program I discuss at length in the book. In Texas and the Southwest you see lots of Quest-like job projects. Why? Partly it happens because the organizers and the leaders at statewide meetings talk about these projects with leaders from other areas. “Here is a program we had a lot of success with. Maybe you should think about it in your local area.”
I don't think that everything is decided by local leaders deciding on their own what they are interested in doing. But I don't at all think that the organizers come in with a specific agenda that leaders have to follow. It’s the dynamic between the two that makes for a very productive relationship.
Q. You consider the dynamic between authority and participation to be central to IAF organizing. What is the authority, the participation, and the dynamic between the two?
A. In IAF community organizing there is a professional organizer, whose job is to recruit and train local leaders. We have hardly any other institutions organized in that way. Most organizations have executive directors, project managers, or people whose job is to run issue campaigns or administer an organization. In community organizations, the main paid staff job is to recruit trained leaders: these leaders are supposed to make decisions for the organization.
Potentially it can generate a lot of participation because someone is paid to recruit new participants constantly, and to help train and develop them to become political and public leaders for their communities. Within that mechanism you have both participation and authority.
You have people like organizers who have authority in an organization, professionals, experienced leaders recognized as such, who understand the principles of organizing, which they are there to teach. That's an authoritative position to some extent.
Q. The principles themselves enjoy a considerable authority. What are some of the unchallengeable principles?
A. They are the basis upon which the groups come together. We do institutional organizing, relational organizing, not protest work primarily, not issue organizing, primarily. I say primarily, because once you select an issue and start to organize around it, you may protest at some point along the way. IAF also uses the term “broad-based” because it attempts to be multiracial, multifaith, to be as broadly participatory as the community in which it works. For example, we don't just organize black people even if IAF is working in an area where the population might be 90 percent black. We are not a raced-based organization; that's another principle. We don't endorse candidates for office, so we are not partisan. These are the kinds of principles that cannot really be challenged.
Q. Another dyad in your analysis is “bonding and bridging.” Would you say a word about what bonding means, what bridging means, and how important for you bridging is to the success of IAF?
A. I think the combined ability of bonding and bridging is critical and unusual in American politics. By “bonding social capital,” I mean bringing people together who are more or less alike. It's the kind of social capital among friends, extended family within a neighborhood, within a parish. These people share important things in common. By strengthening those bonds, organizing strengthens social capital. A lot of this already exists, but organizing brings it into the public arena or into political action. Relational organizing involves strengthening the bonds.
“Bridging social capital” refers to creating social connections among people who are different from each other in important ways in American society. It could be interfaith—bringing people together across religious lines; multiracial—bringing people together across racial lines; multiclass—building organizations in metropolitan areas with participants from poor inner-city communities, mainly of color, and participants from more affluent, whiter suburban areas. You are creating a kind of social capital through the organization that is often wholly new. More than bonding, the organizations are really building bridges.
| Bridging “social capital” refers to creating social connections among people who are different from each other in important ways in American society. |
Bridges give people a much broader base of power from which to act in their community. They also create broader horizons. People are not limited to their own viewpoint. All of a sudden they are connecting with people who are different from them and think differently. They can start talking from the perspective of the metropolitan area as a whole. This can be a tremendously powerful form of social capital. It's harder to build because you are forced to address some very profound differences between people, but when you do it you can create a much more powerful organization.
Q. The other dyad is “interest and values.” It is commonly said that organizing links people around their self-interests. In the sixties and seventies some organizers were disappointed when people who had organized around self-interests showed little concern, once their own needs were met, for others who had the same needs. Values may have spurred the organizers; self-interest the organized. Has the IAF been able to achieve a better balance?
A. I think so. Some people might get involved in an attempt to build affordable housing in the neighborhood because of a strong self-interest, say, getting a house. You also have people getting involved who care about improving the community. They want to be public leaders for a variety of reasons, not particularly to get a house for themselves. They come with their values. Maybe they feel their religion has called them to act for social justice. People come in on different levels. The organization itself represents a mix of values and interests. Probably the people who stay reflect a combination of the two. If you just want a house, you might get involved for a while, then drop out.
Q. Is there an attempt to redefine “interest,” helping people realize that what happens to others is of importance to them?
A. Definitely that is the goal. I think the notion of “self-interest properly understood” goes back to DeToqueville, who wrote about American democracy in the nineteenth century. He had the idea that through participation in civic associations people learn to develop “self-interest properly understood”—that the betterment of my life is intimately tied up with the betterment of my whole community. It is a wider view: you are not forgetting about your own interest, but you are seeing it much more tied to how everybody else is doing and your relationship to them.
If you put self-interest and values together you broaden the notion. You can also ground values in the realities of life, for sometimes values can get very esoteric or you may become extremist around your values. The IAF combination both broadens the notion of self-interest and grounds people’s values in a discussion of what the values mean for families and communities practically.
Q. You make a strong point about religious institutions being essential to community organizing. It seems to refute the view that religion is part of the problem because of its segregating tendency. You see religion, with its mobilizing capacity and value orientation, as part of the solution. Are you arguing for new respect for the role of religion and religious institutions?
A. Yes. You can see it in the bonding and bridging idea. Religious institutions are by far the strongest institutions bonding social capital in the country. That can be a problem; religion can divide people. But people can’t participate fully in politics unless they have a strong, nurturing environment. It is right out of Catholic social thought, the idea that the parish should be a place where people can develop and grow and find solidarity to become active together. They aren't just any bonding force; people are coming together around very long and deep religious traditions and beliefs. There is renewed respect for people’s religious faith and traditions, as important not only to their lives but also to democracy.
Q. You describe community organizing as being especially at home in Catholic parishes. What is it about them that is so compatible?
A. A couple of things illuminate the IAF strategy for connecting faith institutions to political action. If we were to contrast Hispanic Catholic parishes, say, to black Protestant congregations, both would have various kinds of strengths and weaknesses in the bonding of social capital. But because Catholic parishes are still largely geographically based, the leaders that emerge and become active are leaders who, for the most part, live in the communities. This provides a basis for reaching out—through them—to the social networks in the parish and community. Self-interest is much stronger regarding lack of housing or a rise in crime because more of the people live on those streets. In the Protestant congregation, people are more spread out, coming from different parts of the city. That has its benefits. Yet, if you are trying to organize around community concerns, it is easily possible that well over half of the congregation don't live in the community. Their social ties in that neighborhood are much less.
| Catholic social thought has focused on economic issues and the community as a whole |
Then you have a question of faith and its connections to politics. I would argue that almost any faith, or let me stay within Christian denominations, have within them the call to act for social justice or the call to act for public good. But how that call and how that tradition has actually been put into effect in the United States conditions vary. Catholic social thought has focused on economic issues and the community as a whole. Contrast that with the black tradition, at least the part of the tradition that developed from the civil rights movement. There you have a faith that interacts with politics more of as a kind of liberation from oppression and has mainly taken a race-oriented approach. This is a very powerful tradition, but IAF organizing is not so much oriented toward civil rights issues. It is multiracial and organized around broader economic issues. For black Protestants to get involved in IAF, and there are many who have, it takes a re-orientation regarding how faith calls people to practice politics.
Q. You also give new support to the role of authority within the Catholic community—the authority of church teaching, of bishops and pastors—as an important ingredient. Is that true?
A. In American life now there is a fear of authority; authority is bad. We don't want authority because in the past it has been asserted in ways unaccountable or exclusive. The authority of the “white man” excluded people of color and women from meaningful participation in society. I argue that authority is important to community, that you can't have political leadership without some form of authority. Authority is not all bad. In the real world not everybody is going to be involved equally or share everything equally. There are going to be authoritative relationships that could be a good thing. Leadership involves people coming together and making decisions, then having people who can carry them out with some authority. The questions should be whether that authority is accountable, whether it has been democratically decided upon, whether it is authentic. These are the appropriate questions, not whether we should have any authority.
Q. “Democratically decided upon” doesn't fit the authority of the Catholic parish, in terms of the pastor or the bishop, yet their authority is important.
A. I'm speaking of the public ground. Within particular institutions authority is not all democratically decided upon. I think we need to allow social institutions to develop their own practices.
Q. In the book you argue that there is some advantage in the fact that pastors are not democratically chosen, that it gives them a certain freedom to step back and let the laypeople take the leadership within the organization.
A. In community organizing there are a lot of advantages to the authority of the parish priest. One is the willingness of parishioners to follow his leadership. If the priest encourages people to support the effort, they are likely to respond. Also the priest's position is pretty secure, because the priest is appointed by the bishop, not elected by the parishioners. The pastor may decide that while he is going to support this IAF effort, he doesn’t have to be involved himself. He’s quite happy to let lay leaders take the ball.
If you turn to a black Protestant congregation where the minister is appointed by a governing board, he may feel that he has to keep on top of everything and stay directly involved in the IAF effort. That's demanding a lot more. It is complicated because it's not just about the authority relationship. Black congregations have been so central to black community life that often black ministers have been the only political leaders of their community.
| People at the primary level see their involvement as personal development. They feel that they are growing tremendously as persons through this. They are learning to become public leaders. |
Q. Pastors often feel that they can't ask anything more of people, who are so busy with their personal lives, yet community organizing is extremely demanding. What motivates people to get and stay involved?
A. The IAF describes different levels of involvement: tertiary, secondary, and primary leaders. Everyone involved is a leader, but tertiary leaders attend only large public meetings or get involved for a while in a particular issue, then fall back. Secondary leaders are more consistently involved over time. Primary leaders serve on executive committees or steering committees and are heavily involved over a long period of time.
If you ask secondary and primary leaders about their involvement, you find that they are much more interested in the organizing as a way of bringing forward their faith beliefs or other values—for family, for community, that kind of thing. This is part of what it means for them to be a person of faith, to be a member of the community. They have self-interest; they are interested in the issues; they want the organizations to make a difference. People will talk about how their neighbors have been able to get jobs, are getting job training, or are getting better jobs.
People at the primary level see their involvement as personal development. They feel that they are growing tremendously as persons through this. They are learning to become public leaders. They like the power that comes with that, but they also like that kind of life. They are challenged and like to be. Not everybody does. People who stay are interested in going to training sessions or conferences or ”ten-day training” or seminars (these are held all the time in the Southwest) where they are stimulated by new ideas. Some describe it as “the college education that they never got” in any other way.
Q. In your book you state that the genius of community organizing is that it is a leadership development process. Some critics insist that it actually draws potential leaders away from the parish, away from political office, and away from other areas where they might exercise leadership. What do you say to that critique?
A. Ideally, parish and community organization work in a symbiotic relationship. As you strengthen a congregation or a parish and develop lay leadership for a whole range of ministries, you create a much bigger pool out of which leaders can emerge for the public work of IAF organizations. You also develop a broader and deeper mobilizing capacity to support that public work. If the public work is successful—if affordable housing is built, if schools are improved, if people's economic circumstances are improved, if crime is reduced—then those communities become healthier and more hospitable places for the parish to thrive. Tension can also develop between the two. There is only a certain pool of leaders, who are needed to build church ministries as well as to do the public work of the organization. How you handle the relationship between the two can be fraught with problems. The emphasis that organizers or their networks place on parish development or building institutions might vary. In Texas a lot of attention is paid to parish development.
Q. But even apart from the church leadership, people involved in community organizing will not then get involved in running for office. Does organizing hold people back from themselves becoming political leaders?
A. On the one hand yes, I found that by and large leaders, people who become leaders within IAF organizations don't tend to move on to run for public office or to get involved particularly in electoral politics. In the organizing culture people’s primary work is supposed to be within the organization. There is a very strong effort to keep people in the organizations,
| Ideally, parish and community organization work in a symbiotic relationship. As you strengthen a congregation or a parish and develop lay leadership for a whole range of ministries, you create a much bigger pool out of which leaders can emerge for the public work of IAF organizations |
leaving them less time for other organizations, particularly electoral politics. Since the organizations are trying to remain non-partisan people who move on to electoral politics are not going to be able to be leaders within the organizations; the lines are going to become too blurred. It would also cast a shadow on the organization, giving the impression that these organizations are stepping-stones to political office.
Q. Is there something about the leadership of Ernie Cortez, who is central to the Texas story, that bears noting?
A. I think so. Leaders in the IAF in Texas or the Southwest enjoy many exciting and challenging opportunities. In part this is because they operate at the state and regional level, but also because of the style of Ernie Cortez. Cortez emphasizes the relational style and personal development and brings to regional meetings leading national experts.
I think he was also central to the development of organizing strategy after Saul Alinsky died. I think he has added the “softer” style to Alinsky’s “hard” style. His style can still be confrontational but also be very nurturing. He had the idea and the personal character to combine the two and to offer that as a model for people and for organizers to emulate.
I should also mention that Cortez also credits the contributions made to organizing strategy by priests with whom he worked in Texas and Los Angeles.
Q. IAF focuses on what one would call the “social” issues, not what some call the “cultural” issues like abortion, which you describe as “divisive” or “controversial.” Would you say that the more diverse the membership, the less the community organization can be too particular in professing a specific faith when it gathers together?
A. I think there are two ways an organization can deal with that. Either it attempts to have an expression of faith that is extremely broad, without much reference to specific traditions upon which people are divided, or people can express their faith out of their own tradition and insist that other people respect that. They are listening, sharing, learning about another faith, and sharing in that tradition without being part of it. I've seen the organizations in Texas do both. There is a fear that some particular expressions of faith can become too divisive. Some Catholic or Protestant congregations in groups that include synagogues, for example, don't feel they can pray properly without invoking Jesus repeatedly. How much particularity is acceptable depends on whether it is clear that the minister recognizes there are people in the group who aren't Christians.
Q. In inter-religious organizations, the local religious communities can't address all their issues through community organizing. Black Protestants can't focus on race and Catholics can't mobilize the organization around abortion or other such issues. They have to find other ways to do those things, right?
A. Yes, and they do. This institutional form of organizing respects the authenticity and the independence of the individual institution. A black minister, for example, might be involved in an interracial effort to build a job-training program in Dallas and also participate as a member of the NAACP in civil rights suits. The IAF organizations, at least in theory, have tried to be clear that this is not the end all and be all of participation in politics. This is not the full way that people of faith may need to express their faith relationship to many political issues, certainly the cultural issues.
Take another issue, Catholic education. IAF in Texas is working on many school issues, but for public, not Catholics schools. If you care about parish schools, you have to lobby or build those institutions separately.
Q. I can’t end this interview with asking about the importance of the local bishops and Catholic Campaign for Human Development on community organizing.
A. Both the financial support from CCHD and the authoritative stand taken by priests or bishops on support of organizing were enormously important. It created a situation in which a parish priest or Catholics in a diocese felt that this is part of what it means to be Catholic here.
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