Principles 5 страница

40 SETTING THE CONTEXT

This chapter has provided a perspective on how young people can best be assisted in identifying key issues in their lives and the means by which they can communicate their visions and goals for change to other youth, as well as to adults. A social and economic justice lens provides optimum perspective for bringing together disparate groups in search of a common understanding of their situation, helping them to create an agenda for action that is inclusive. Further, it highlights the complexities in achieving social justice in a society that has a long history of discrimination and that has essentially selected adults to decide which social issues are legitimate.

However, there is little question that we adults must be willing and able to confront and change the roles we play in disempowering youth. Unfor-tunately, this journey of self-discovery is painful and unsettling. Never-theless, as addressed in this chapter, there is no denying that youth are oppressed in this society, and that even the most understanding profes-sionals harbor attitudes and have behaviors that stem from adultism, even as we embrace the youth-led movement. Achievement of social and eco-nomic justice for youth will necessitate the involvement of adults as col-laborators and facilitators, as dictated by youth. Our failure to act in such an empowering and facilitative manner will bear bitter fruit in our society. In effect, adults will become (or continue to be) part of the problem facing youth, even if our intentions are honorable!

Overview of Community Organizing, Youth-Led Field, and Youth-Led Organizing

The United States is the most anti-youth soci-ety on earth. This is not because American youth suffer absolute deprivations worse than youth of other nations, though we fall far short of the standards of health care, housing, eco-nomic support, and opportunity afforded youth in similarly affluent Western coun-tries. What characterizes America’s singular hostility is that youth here are worse off rela-tive to adults than those of any other coun-try for which we have reliable information. —Males, Youth and Social Justice (2004)

Contextualizing youth-led community organizing is possible only when we learn about its origins. The emergence of an intervention such as youth-led community organizing is rarely an overnight occurrence. In fact, this ap-proach has deep historical roots and can be appreciated best only when we examine adult community organizing over the course of the twentieth century, as well as the development of the ‘‘youth-led’’ field dating back to the 1980s. A context of social and economic justice, we believe, helps us better understand and appreciate the emergence of youth-led community organizing, as noted in the previous chapter.

Having laid this groundwork, we now chronicle the growth of youth-led organizing since the mid-1990s. Without knowing this history, our under-standing of the current status of youth-led community organizing is severely limited. And while projecting into the future is, at best, a noble endeavor

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with no guarantees of accuracy, understanding the historical context in-creases the likelihood of our successfully identifying new trends, prospects, opportunities, and challenges.

Historical Overview of

Community Organization

It is important to note that the roots of community organizing for achieving social and economic justice reach deep into the social work profession, and the effort dates back to the settlement movement, although organizing certainly cannot be considered the exclusive domain of this profession (Weil 1996; Garvin and Cox 2001; Betten and Austin 1990; Fisher 1984; Ross 1955; Lane 1939; Steiner 1930). However, the debate about social reform versus individual treatment is well over 100 years old and parallels the history of the social work profession, persisting to this day in various arenas (Haynes 1998; Specht and Courtney 1995).

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of community organizing as a dis-tinct practice, with a set of theoretical concepts, principles, scholarship, and graduate-level courses of study in schools of social work across the United States (Lurie 1959, 1965). Probably more than any other profession, social work has adopted this practice alongside planning, program development, and human services management within the macro-practice arena (Weil 1996; Rothman 1995), and community organizing continues to be studied and learned in social work and other human service programs.

Nevertheless, community organizing is by no means restricted to prac-titioners who are formally educated or belong to any particular age group. Unlike planning, program development, and management, this practice has a long history of being democratic and within the reach of anyone and any organization wishing to bring about social change. Community organizing has been undertaken and embraced by numerous undervalued groups in this society, and excellent examples and scholarship can be found on how this method has addressed the concerns of women (Hyde, 1986, 1994, 1996, 2004; Weil 1986; Withorn 1984), women of color (Gutierrez and Lewis 1994), communities of color (Morales and Reyes 1998; Rivera and Erlich 1998), people with disabilities (Staples 1999; Checkoway and Norsman 1986), the elderly (Minkler 1997; McDermott 1989), and gays/lesbians (Wohlfeiler 1997; Tully, Craig, and Nugent 1994).

Indeed, most social work practice is not actively engaged in community organizing, and the majority of organizing efforts are not carried out by social work professionals. Organizing also is firmly planted in other arenas, including labor, agrarian reform, civil rights, welfare rights, neighborhood improvement, environmental justice, disability rights, the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) movement, immigrant rights, the wom-

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en’s movement, and social action efforts at the citywide, state, regional, national, and international levels. Quiroz-Martinez, Wu, and Zimmerman (2005), in their report Regeneration: Young People Shaping Environmental Justice, do a superb job of highlighting how the environmental justice move-ment has benefited from the infusion of young people. Thus, professional community organizing has a long and distinguished history within social work along with connections outside the profession, and all indications are that the influence of this means of social intervention will only grow in fu-ture years.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the degree and impact of var-ious forms of organizing was episodic, with periods of popular insurgency and social activism followed by periods of relative quiescence. For instance, the Progressive era that immediately preceded World War I featured a wide variety of organizing initiatives involving social settlements, agrarian re-form efforts, workers in the skilled trades, and the women’s suffrage move-ment. The war dramatically changed the sociopolitical context, generally retarding most organizing efforts; and the political economy of the ‘‘return to normalcy’’ that followed, 1918–1929, also was inhospitable for popular collective action (Garvin and Cox 2001; Fisher 2005).

The Great Depression ushered in a new era of social unrest that was animated by the labor organizing of the new Congress of Industrial Orga-nizations (CIO), by direct action through the Unemployed Councils of the Communist Party, and by Saul Alinsky’s first community organization in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago (Piven and Cloward 1977; Fisher 2005). World War II effectively eliminated or minimized the signifi-cance of progressive organizing initiatives in the United States, and the cold war period that followed had a distinct chilling effect on most forms of social action.

Then in the mid-1950s, the civil rights movement launched an unparal-leled period of activism and organizing that extended all the way through the 1960s (Piven and Cloward 1977). During this time, a broad array of constituency groups organized to assert their rights, including welfare re-cipients, farm workers, the elderly, women, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, prisoners, tenants, environmental activists, blacks, Chicanos, and Native Americans (Garvin and Cox 2001; Fisher 2005). Turf-based community organizing also began to gather momentum, as Alinsky started new projects in a number northern and Midwestern cities (Finks 1984). And most relevant to this present study, there was an explosion of student ac-tivism, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the civil rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the mid-1960s, and a host of groups mobilized against the Vietnam War (Gitlin 1989; Garvin and Cox 2001; Fisher 2005).

While fallout from the end of the war and the Watergate scandal dom-inated the national news in the early 1970s, federal funding for commu-nity organizing rapidly dried up, effectively ending many groups that

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were dependent on public dollars (Garvin and Cox 2001). A political backlash from large segments of the working and middle classes also led organizers to rethink their approaches and strategies that had focused ex-clusively on low-income people. George Wiley, director of the National Welfare Rights Organization, left to found the Movement for Economic Justice (MEJ), where he worked with colleagues to develop a ‘‘majority strategy’’ that was ‘‘aimed at uniting most Americans, black and white, poor and middle income, women and men, against the rich and powerful’’ (Boyte 1980, 53).

A number of ambitious new community organizing initiatives of un-precedented scale appeared. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1970, to organize low- and moderate-income people around a mix of neighborhood and economic justice issues. Over the next three and a half decades, ACORN moved rapidly to build organizations at the statewide, regional, and national levels. As this book was being written, there were 175, 000 family members in 850 chapters in seventy-five cities across the United States, plus cities in Canada, the Dominican Republic, and Peru. Other statewide efforts of note that attempted cross-class organizing included the Citizens Action League (CAL) in California; Massachusetts Fair Share; Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG); Carolina Action; Illinois Public Action Council; Ohio Public Interest Campaign; and Oregon Fair Share.

Saul Alinsky died in 1972, but his Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) continued his work during the 1970s, beginning a number of large-scale projects in cities across the United States, including Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), Communities Organized for Public Ser-vice (COPS) in San Antonio, Oakland Community Organization (OCO), and United Neighborhoods Organization (UNO) in Los Angeles. Other major organizing efforts spun off from the IAF, such as the Citizens Action Project (CAP) in Chicago, which in turn helped generate the Citizens Action or-ganizing network; National People’s Action (NPA), which by 2006 had organized 302 grassroots neighborhood groups based in thirty-eight states; and the Pacific Institute for Community Organization (PICO), currently working in 150 cities in seventeen states.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought forth sharp cutbacks in welfare-state programs, as a taxpayers’ revolt led to decreased government revenues at all levels. This decade also marked the start of a conservative era that lasted for twenty-five years and was ‘‘characterized by three central challenges: (a) the private marketplace and the practices of global corpo-rations dominate and permeate almost all areas of life; (b) issues become increasingly private and individual rather than public and social; and (c) people are increasingly isolated and less able to build community and social solidarity’’ (Fisher 2005, 48). This context hardly was fertile ground for community organizing. Indeed, many of the large statewide organizations founded in the 1970s were out of business by the mid-1980s.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AND YOUTH-LED FIELD

Nevertheless, the large organizing networks, such as ACORN, NPA, and PICO, have continued to grow while other associations and training and support centers have been created, including the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), the Direct Action and Research Training Center (DART), Gamaliel Foundation, Grassroots Leadership, Midwest Academy, National Housing Institute, National Organizers Alliance, ORGANIZE! Training Center (OTC), Organizing and Leadership Training Center (OLTC), Regional Council of Neighborhood Organizations (RCNO), Southern Em-powerment Project (SEP), and Western States Center (Delgado 1997). Dur-ing this time, the Industrial Areas Foundation also moved forward with such new organizing projects as Valley Interfaith in Texas, Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), and ONE LA-IAF in Los Angeles. Hundreds of smaller, independent grassroots organizations not aligned with any of the major networks also sprouted up across the country, and many com-munity development corporations now include an organizing component (Traynor 1993).

The past twenty-five years also have given rise to initiatives and inno-vations whereby community organizations have entered new arenas. For instance, ACORN now operates two radio stations, produces several pub-lications (including Social Policy), runs a housing corporation, administers a voter registration network, and helped spin off the Working Families Party in New York State, which is expanding into several other states as this book went to press. Indeed, many community organizations have entered the arena of electoral politics within the constraints of their corporate status. There also have been many attempts to build cooperation between commu-nity organizations and organized labor, as evidenced by the work of ACORN with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a number of suc-cessful community-labor coalitions, and Living Wage campaigns across the country (Simmons 2004).

Finally, there have been literally thousands of organizing efforts to address specific issues or bring constituents together based on a shared identity. An illustrative, but not exhaustive, list of issue-based organizing projects includes affordable housing, environmental justice, lending poli-cies, recreation, crime, utility rates, corporate responsibility, global capital, health care, public assistance, neighborhood improvement, tax reform, clean government, education, and employment (Staples 2004a, 5):

Still other organizations are formed by constituency subgroups as com-munities of identity along dimensions such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, immigrant status, religion, and physical or mental dis-ability. Examples might include a senior citizens’ group, a Vietnamese mu-tual assistance association, a lesbian/gay task force, or a social action or-ganization of disabled people. While such groups will have a geographic location and may work on a range of issues, their primary focus and raison d’etre link to their members’ shared characteristics of identity. Over the past several decades there has been explosive growth in identity

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organizing. Much of this can be attributed to the failure of many turf and issue organizations to adequately address the interests and concerns of constituency subgroups within their membership. Since constituency group members often experience discrimination most directly and pain-fully along these very dimensions, they have frequently felt the need to organize separately to effectively challenge the oppression that so pro-foundly impacts their lives. Identity politics has fueled the civil rights, women’s, LGBT, and disability rights (physical and mental) movements and continues to be a primary focus for grassroots organizing.

The youth-led organizing that this book examines most clearly falls un-der the category of identity organizing. Indeed, Williams (2003, 1) goes so far as to argue that youth organizing is no different from traditional forms of organizing, and he defines this approach simply as ‘‘a group of young people arranging themselves to change the status quo. ’’ However, youth have been involved in many of the large-scale organizing efforts of the twentieth century, especially the civil rights movement, and much of that long history has suffered the unwillingness of scholars to recognize youth’s contribu-tions to significant social change in this country. Nevertheless, with the exception of the student movement of the sixties (which was dominated by white, middle-class college students or recent graduates), young people seldom were in positions of leadership and responsibility in these organiz-ing efforts. At best, these community organizations included youth, but almost never was the agenda youth-driven nor were the groups youth-led. This theme will be revisited in the third section of this chapter, but first we turn our attention to the evolution of the youth-led field.

Historical Overview of the Youth-Led Field

As addressed in chapter 1, the term youth-led often is interchangeable with numerous other phrases, such as youth civic engagement, youth decision making, youth empowerment, youth leadership, and most notably, youth devel-opment. A historical review of youth development is beyond the goals of this chapter; however, the reader is advised to read the book Community Pro-grams to Promote Youth Development by Eccles and Gootman (2002) for an appreciation of the history and expansiveness of this paradigm. This evo-lutionary process has taken many years, if not decades, with no one timetable that applies to all processes.

Initially, a field may receive very little attention, and then, after an ex-tended period of time, its origins may be uncovered, validated, and studied. We believe that youth-led community organizing follows this evolutionary pattern, and only now are we starting to appreciate its origins and mani-festations. The authors believe that this historical context is of sufficient

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AND YOUTH-LED FIELD

importance to warrant attention in this volume, although an entire book, or even a series of publications on this subject, is very much in order.

If we hope to comprehend the present form of the youth-led movement and seek to help shape its future, it is essential that we understand its origins and evolution. This is no easy task, particularly for adults:

Some of the most significant and well-documented resources on youth action are less accessible than the ones you have on your book-shelves and bookmarked on your Web browser. [These inaccessible resources]. . . . tell an important story: our understanding of young people’s engagement is both deeper and broader than we often assume. Yet, much of what we ‘‘know’’ is hidden from view, either because the literature documenting it went out of print decades ago, or because it was learned by grass roots organizations with little capacity to share their lessons. (Two Decades 2002b, 11)

This assessment of the paucity of historical knowledge and understand-ing about the youth-led movement, and particularly about youth activism is very much on target, from our perspective. It underscores the need for developing a fuller and more in-depth appreciation of the history of youth organizing.

The birth of this social intervention has been traced to the 1980s and the emergence of the ‘‘prevention’’ field of practice. Blum (1988), in one of the earliest articles on youth development, articulated the four C’s of healthy youth: (1) competence in literacy and interpersonal skills; (2) connection to others by engaging in caring relationships; (3) character building by em-bracing individual responsibility and community service; and (4) confi-dence building through goal setting and achievement of goals. These points are manifest in virtually all definitions of youth development and have applicability to the youth-led movement.

There are few scholars who would disagree about the importance of youth development in influencing the youth-led field (Scheve, Perkins, and Mincemoyer 2006; Sherrod, Flanagan, and Youniss 2002). The youth-development paradigm also has evolved over the past decade or so (Del-gado 2002; Rauner 2000). Initially, this model significantly shifted how so-ciety viewed youth. No longer were youth viewed and portrayed as victims, perpetrators, empty vessels, or a potential market for commercial goods. The shift from a deficit to an asset perspective redefined youth as positive contributors to society, both in the present and for the future.

Advocates for a more contextualized and politicized view of youth de-velopment articulated a ‘‘positive youth development’’ stance (Granger 2002; Lerner et al. 2002). This perspective further accentuated the assets that all youth have and the importance for adults to facilitate youth capacity enhancement, rather than focusing on development exclusively. Develop-ment signifies the need to ‘‘put into place what is missing, ’’ while enhance-ment is predicated on the belief that much is in place and it needs only to be

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cultivated. Finally, those advocating a change agenda based on a founda-tion of social and economic justice introduced ‘‘community youth devel-opment’’ in order to emphasize these goals.

A conference on youth organizing embraced this important point (Youth

Organizing 1998, 4):

Organizers generally agreed that the model they envision and seek to facilitate is, as one youth organizer described it, ‘‘youth development with a difference. ’’ For these youth organizers, the optimal model is one in which youth function holistically both in terms of self improvement and community improvement. . . . Young people are viewed as key agents— as the activists—in their communities around issues that impact them directly.

LISTEN, Inc. (2003) traces the emergence of youth organizing to three important elements: (1) the legacy of traditional organizing methods em-phasizing the work of Saul Alinsky; (2) the progressive social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; and (3) the emergence of positive youth development. These three elements represent the key ideological, conceptual, and prac-tical foundation for what many consider much of youth organizing’s theory and practice.

The currency of community youth development has facilitated the rapid growth of youth organizing because this paradigm couches youth devel-opment within the broader context of community (Booth and Crouter 2001; Eccles and Gootman 2002; Gambone et al. 2006; Miao 2003; Villarruel et al. 2003a). Further, personal development often is a key component of youth-led community organizing. Development in one area (individual) cannot be maximized without development in the other area (community). In essence, youth cannot flourish and grow without consideration for their environ-ment or ecology (Massey 2001). Thus, it is best to view community youth de-velopment from a broad perspective that encompasses enhancing the power of youth to achieve social change. In the process of attaining social change, youth are able to enhance and develop competencies that facilitate their transition to adulthood, with a tool kit that makes them valuable members of a civic, democratic society (What Is the Impact 2002a).

As noted in chapter 1, the youth-led field also has evolved into a variety of streams emphasizing different social causes. This expansion has not weakened the field but, instead, has increased the attractiveness of this par-adigm, allowing various fields to claim youth-led organizing as their own. Social youth enterprises (Delgado 2004), health promotion (Delgado and Zhou in press), and research (Delgado 2006) have been the latest arenas for increased scholarship, and a number of new books on these subjects have been published. However, this field also can encompass media, transpor-tation, philanthropy, courts, recreation, and prevention. For example, Car-roll, Herbert, and Roy (1999) report on the role and value of youth-led violence prevention in the late 1990s. Thus, there are all kinds of indications

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AND YOUTH-LED FIELD

that the youth-led field will only continue to expand and mature in the coming decade; practitioners as well as scholars would do well to make note of this development.

We believe that the youth-led field can be conceptualized as evolving in parallel fashion with youth development. At times, these two fields are in-extricably intertwined, as when attention is paid to individual youth acqui-sition or enhancement of knowledge and competencies. In other cases, the fields view youth from separate perspectives emphasizing significantly different values and principles. One field (youth development) highlights positive community change, while the other (youth-led, especially, community organizing) stresses change in power distribution based on social and eco-nomic justice themes (YouthAction 1998). Both fields, as will be discussed in greater detail below, retain a focus on the individual; however, the youth-led approach never loses sight of the community and the role of oppressive forces in shaping the daily lives of youth and their families. Thus, the youth-led field embraces a broader domain for practice that makes it very at-tractive for and consistent with community organizing (Irby, Ferber, and Pittman 2001).

The success of a youth-led social intervention such as community orga-nizing has been achieved by its ability to ‘‘connect the dots between issues’’ (Young Wisdom Project 2004, 11):

Young people understand better than anyone else that if their families are suffering, they will suffer. By exploring the intersections of age with race, gender, class, disability and sexuality, many organizations have devel-oped a sophisticated analysis for how issues interact to impact their com-munities. As a result, many youth groups not only work to create power for youth in their communities, they also have the broader goal of com-munity empowerment.

Checkoway (1998), a strong advocate of involving youth in community development, identified five distinctive forums for youth participation:

(1) citizen action; (2) youth action; (3) youth development; (4) neighborhood development; and (5) neighborhood-based youth initiative. Citizen and youth action each feature youth initiating and organizing themselves for social change. Although both forums are based on empowerment principles, youth action places young people in a central decision-making role vis-a`-vis issues specific to them. Citizen action, in contrast, can have youth involved, but not necessarily in key decision-making roles, and the issues addressed may have broad appeal to all ages rather than being youth-specific.

The Forum for Youth Investment (2006) also has developed a Youth En-gagement Continuum with five stages: (1) youth services; (2) youth devel-opment; (3) youth leadership; (4) civic engagement; and (5) youth organiz-ing. A youth services approach ‘‘defines young people as clients, ’’ and ‘‘provides services to address individual problems and pathologies’’ with programming designed around treatment and prevention (3). The youth

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