Can challenging inaction challenge power? A challenge for community organisers
THE job of community organiser is never one where you can say ‘I know the exact procedures for doing this job well now’. It entails working with people, in all their inexhaustible uniqueness, and people encountering others, a recipe for unpredictability. Nonetheless, after the first few months of using Root Solutions Listening Matters, to listen, start dialogue, and spur action, you reach a certain general stance on the job.
You are still reflecting, and still learning every day, but you settle on a certain philosophy and approach. On key questions such as how not to crowd out action by residents, and what to do concerning disagreements between residents, you have answers. So the Post Graduate certificate in Community Organising at the University of Brighton, has re-opened questions for me that I had thought I had come to some sort of conclusion about.
One article I read made me question whether some of the participation I have encouraged was worthwhile. I have never warned people away from certain ways they can get involved that they choose. But maybe I should worry about the meetings they end up at. Participation is not valuable for people who do not control of the agenda, have little influence on decisions, and who see no concrete actions flowing from these meetings, Marilyn Taylor says. If our job is to shift power, then I’m failing if that’s where they go to participate.
On the flipside, Taylor concedes that, by starting to get involved, even in an inadequate meeting, people are still on a path to becoming ‘ active subjects’. This has got me thinking about the form that participation takes, and what makes meetings more or less rewarding for residents, something I now want to research.
The importance of focusing on one-to-one listenings and small house meetings, as we do, where people have the chance to have their say, and feel listened to and involved, is underlined by Taylor when she says reforms “that devolve power without changing the participants fail to produce more responsive policies”. Sitting passively in a big meeting isn’t going to cut it. But, that said, she also says improved local democracy is unlikely without “effective countervailing power” — in other words, big crowds that cannot be ignored.
How to square this circle, then? I believe that RSLM is a good tool for changing participants, but as to whether it succeeds in shifting power is another question.
Residents must negotiate ‘invited spaces’ where authorities set the agenda and clearly have more power than them, and might also encounter more powerful residents. Will I have failed if residents are not trying to wrest control of agendas, or seeking changes outside the official channels?
Taylor, writing about the community organising programme, argues that that by focusing on the local level, we will fail to build countervailing power. I’d question, however, whether equipping existing parts of civic society to better challenge the Government, shifts power, leaving those not already involved excluded. During the residential we saw a brilliant example of such an approach, with a video of Alinsky challenging some First Nation people to challenge the federal Government of Canada.
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Alinksy: a clear plan, rejects other suggestions[/caption]
Alinsky had a clear plan in his mind on how to build power, and any other alternative suggestions from the people he was there to organise were dismissed, and rudely. This made me feel very uncomfortable. As aware as I am of the challenges of using RSLM to build effective new power bases, I do not see how you can shift power by exerting power over others.
Course leader Juliet Millican’s lecture on Alinsky highlighted the dangers and benefits of the alternative to Alinsky’s more clear-cut method for building new powerful organisations with governance structures: a ‘networking’ approach. This sounded more like the fruits of my labours: a looser, more informal, horizontal form of organisation, which has not had governance imposed on it. The lack of hierarchy means achieving things is more of a challenge, but the advantage is that power is more dispersed and people do not look to others to take things forward.
THE ALTERNATIVE to rallying people into action, of attending to what people say, and “exposing the contradictions” therein, as Margaret Ledwith puts it, came out in the lecture on Freire the following day. I recognised the rationalisations of residents Ledwith mentions, such as saying that it’s “the youth” who are “ causing all [the] problems”. Alinksy might in this situation try to focus the resident on the true culprit, central Government perhaps. But I suspect that getting people to think, rather than telling people they are wrong, is more likely to work.
This said, the “mutual, reciprocal, open form of relating” involved in a Freirean exchange is likely to be fraught with difficulty. Wearing a badge, catching someone in their home, means that we might make residents feel more vulnerable and less powerful than us, making a mutual exchange a challenge to achieve. This is particularly the case on my estate, where trust in any form of authority is at rock bottom levels. It is a challenge, yes; but vital.
The general approach of getting people to do their own analysis of their situation is the right one. This is in stark contrast to Alinsky telling people what the source of their problems is. Our role is to get people to work this out for themselves. We do not dictate to people that they can only focus on the local. If they want to look more widely, they can. Indeed, Re:Generate chief executive Stephen Kearney said that RSLM can help people to make the links between the local and the societal, something that is not explicitly in our training, but isn’t precluded by the method.
We spoke about our legacy at the residential. I thought that having got people entering into dialogue to discuss what needs changing, in an area where few people knew their neighbours, and where many had given up on anything getting better, is a good in itself. But should I not be satisfied until power is shifted?
What do you think of what I am saying?
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