Community Organizing Isn’t About Optimism, It’s About Work

On a cool night in September, Joe Loonam found himself sleeping on the sidewalk outside of a park in downtown Manhattan. Or, maybe sleeping isn’t the right word. He was resting, in between checking on others, passing out water bottles and additional blankets. But when the sprinkler system of City Hall Park — the well-maintained greenery surrounding the Mayor’s office and city council–went off, Joe and his companions’ sleeping bags were doused in icy water, and then everyone was awake.
Joe is the housing campaign coordinator for VOCAL-NY, a grassroots organization that supports community-based actions on a number of key issues around the state of New York, such as HIV/AIDS justice, mass incarceration, and homelessness. On September 25th, Joe and VOCAL made up one of the dozen advocacy groups who supported the reinstatement of an annual “sleep out” to demand action in New York City’s housing and homelessness crisis.
The once-yearly action began with homeless activists and advocates in 1985 but was suspended by those who had high hopes after Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s election in 2013. “This is an older action we were-hashing because of [our] real disappointment with the DeBlasio administration,” Joe said. Activists had planned for the DeBlasio administration to follow through on their comprehensive housing and homelessness reforms, but things had not gone at all according to plan. According to reporting by Gothamist, the city’s housing crisis has reached unprecedented heights since DeBlasio took office, despite the millions of dollars that continually flow to his two housing reform plans, ‘Housing 2.0’ and ‘Turning the Tide’. For Joe Loonam, a life of community activism wasn’t exactly in his plans, either.
“If you had told me when I was a kid that I would be doing this” Joe said, “I would’ve quit right then and there”. Although Joe has been involved in community organizing since he was 16 years old, he wasn’t always drawn to a life of social involvement and community action. In fact, for a large part of his teenage years, Joe had essentially called it quits on society. His life plan was relatively simple: “I was gonna go into the wild and die at a young age”.
Like many teens growing up in Brooklyn in the Mid-2000s, Joe was painfully disenchanted with the notion of “society”. He was more interested in naturalism than he was in his teachers and friends, not to mention in local politics. But according to James Nash, a longtime friend of Joe’s, he always had a knack for taking himself lightly — even at 15. “Joe is like a charismatic nerd…he has this amazing sense of humor” says Nash, meaning that Joe was the kind of kid who might err to the “nerd” side of the social spectrum, if it weren’t for his un-ironic skill at selecting graphic T-shirts, his un-beatable wit, and the fact that, even if you did call him a nerd, he wouldn’t care at all. Joe also has an almost uncanny skill for examining his logic and proving himself wrong if need be. Joe’s dad describes him as “a very serious person who also happens to be very funny”. He says that Joe is the type of person who “takes on things with tremendous purpose and passion, but laughs at himself for it”.
It was in this fashion that a young Joe sought to leave the city behind and enter into a life of un-interrupted naturalism. Joe explained, “I went on a wilderness trip with this program called Outward Bound” which is advertised as the premier immersive outdoorsmanship experience for youth and adults alike. After several weeks lugging his belongings through the wilderness, Joe emerged, probably covered in pine-needles, with the singular understanding that he was “a terrible survivalist”. So, back to the city he went, where he became involved in community organizing at the age of 16 by interning with Community Voices Heard, a member-led organization addressing race and income inequality in New York City.
Joe went on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Community Organizing and the History of Social Movements from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusets. While the switch from dying in the woods to working with grassroots campaigns was un-predicted by Joe himself, in the context of his childhood in Bay Ridge, it made sense.
Both of Joe’s parents work in the civil service sector. Joe’s mom dedicated much of her career to the New York Foundation, which provides grants to community organizers and activists throughout the city. Joe’s father recently retired after 35 years of teaching English for the New York City Department of Education. To celebrate, Joe and his dad took a road trip to the Grand Canyon, with stops including a “Hot Air Balloon Festival” in New Mexico along the way. This legacy of service and action is by no means lost on Joe. As a kid growing up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Joe instinctively imagined himself in positions of civil service. “I probably wanted to be a construction worker, or a police officer at some point. I definitely wanted to be a teacher, because like 90% of the adults in my life were teachers”. But it wasn’t until Joseph started working in community organizing that he realized what his parent’s work entailed.
Today, Joe is involved in grassroots actions across New York State. In addition to coordinating actions in New York city, Joe regularly travels to Albany to organize and participate in protests at the state legislature. For someone who spends around forty hours a week fighting the ‘good fight,’ Joe is surprisingly not idealistic. He sees his work as part of fulfilling “an obligation that everybody has to invest in positive things in their own lives and in their communities”. He isnt all that interested in philosophizing over the state of the world, either. To Joe, the issues facing New York City are relatively simple, and so are their solutions — and that’s what drives him to do the work he does every day. When he isn’t working, Joe likes to hang out in his hometown of Bay Ridge, shoot darts, read and take martial arts classes at the community center. In a lot of ways, Joe is like the begrudging superhero that we all need. He’s aware that we are all going to die, but he finds meaning in doing the work to stay alive.
That’s part of what drew Joe into organizing. To Joe, it was one field of work that was not “always about stumbling over your own narcissism”. He says that even in the work that he does as an anti-gentrification housing advocate, it is important to not get gratuitous with yourself. “There’s a lot of stuff in this world that bigger and more important than me…if [visibility or progress] becomes enough to satisfy you, you’ll never get anything done”. When asked what his experience was as a social organizer, Joe said: “the work I do right now isn’t strictly social organizing”. To Joe, it is important to remember that “Social organizing is a very specific set of practices…organizing isn’t about everything”. Instead, Joe defines his job as “asking people to do things…to take part in direct actions”. On his part, it is important for Joe to “ be willing to do those same things that I ask others to do. If I’m asking someone to do something that may be unsafe or uncomfortable, I’m going to do it with them”.
That’s why, on an uncomfortably cold morning in late September, after being awakened by the City Hall Park sprinklers, Joe did his best to ensure everyone’s safety and arranged rides home for people who had been drenched. Then, Joe and the rest of the advocates moved their beds from the sidewalks and benches outside of City Hall Park to the Mayor’s doorstep — the stairs in front of City Hall. To Joe and the others, this action was far more than symbolic of the city government’s failure. It was a question of life or death.
One week after the “sleep-out,” the brutal consequences of the city’s housing crisis made national news. “Four people were killed in Chinatown because of this housing crisis and because of the administration’s inaction in addressing it,” Joe said. Community and political motivation, Joe says, needs “to come from a sense that this is something people need to do”. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, 61,674 people spent the night in New York City Shelters as of August 2019. According to Gothamist, this number is a 64% increase from 2009, when the figure was 10,374. In 1985, when the sleep-out began, that number was as low as 3,178. Working as closely as Joe does with this issue, it is hard to imagine him as being optimistic. But against all odds, he is. “My hope is in the day to day basis, the day to day actions,” says Joe. And despite the onslaught of disappointing and dangerous political leaders in our city, state, and country, Joe finds his hope in the communities and individuals he works with. To Joe, New York City is “a great testament to human kindness and ingenuity…it is the greatest hope for all humankind on earth”. It is also his home.
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