Democracy in Community Organizing
In my experience, democratic participation in community organizing groups generally involves a fairly limited range of members and/or leaders in decision-making. Decisions may be "agreed" upon in large public meetings by acclamation or approved by governance boards, but the real dialogues about alternatives and options usually take place in much smaller spaces before anything ever gets to a vote.
Those with experience with more sophisticated groups may have different experiences to report. But given the scrappy and underfunded nature of most groups, I'm willing to bet that my experience is the most common one. (Whether this is a real problem or not depends on the specifics of the decision and the resources available to generate useful, substantive dialogues, as I noted here.)
In recent years, congregational organizing groups have sought to use the "one-on-one" process to help leaders connect with their broader constituency. In the ideal, a group of leaders conducts one-on-one interviews with a large number of group members (or potential group members). At some point they are supposed to come together and share the kinds of issues and concerns that came up in their interviews. Then an issue gets chosen that fits with the interests elicited in these interviews. (I discuss the one-on-one process in my introduction to organizing course [scroll down].)
This is a fairly sophisticated approach. It allows a relatively small team to make decisions for the larger group after it figures out what that larger group most cares about.
In my experience, this process has a number of practical limitations, however.
First, the onerous nature of the one-on-one process (lots of time) means that a sufficient number may not be completed by leaders (who are, after all, volunteers) before a decision is made.
Second, the constituency of congregational organizing groups is usually significantly more privileged than the populations who most need social changes-so they may not be the best measure of what it is most important to work on.
Third, just because someone doesn't mention an issue doesn't mean that they wouldn't be excited about it if you could explain its importance to them in a clear manner.
Fourth, the reality of events on the ground may open up opportunities at particular moments that need to be taken advantage of quickly.
In many cases, small groups of leaders simply get together and talk about possible "targets" in the environment and choose an issue that then gets "acclaimed" in some formal setting.
Effective Democracy Requires Careful Planning
As I noted in an earlier post, democracy that is worth calling "democracy" is not easy to facilitate. Simply getting people together to vote, or getting people to discuss their concerns, is often not enough to produce a truly authentic democratic process. By authentic, I mean opportunities for citizens to explore their own interests and needs in a broadly inclusive context with enough information to have a good sense of the trade-offs involved in different decisions.
The Need For Expert Knowledge: The Case of Education
Education is a good example of a problem area that really requires some level of expert consultation. The results of efforts to fix schools are often counter-intuitive, and some problems have no clear solutions.
For example, people are often compelled by efforts to reduce violence in schools, but the most obvious solutions (metal detectors, security, etc.) actually tend to increase disorder. Furthermore, schools are already the safest places in many communities. The real problem is the preponderance of disfunctional school communities which limits student-teacher connection and prevents the emergence of a shared school culture of respect. But there are no simple ways to "force" schools to create caring communities.
Many aspects of education are like this. Many of the areas where one would like to intervene involve counter-intuitive efforts, or require intervention outside schools if you want any effect inside them. Education scholars have been trying for decades to improve pedagogy in inner-city areas, and haven't really had that much impact (although they almost certainly prevented things from getting worse). Many of the changes one would want to make require more money, which often means you need to go to the state legislature, which it beyond the power of most city-wide organizations.
Finding a good "issue" to work on around education, then, requires extensive knowledge about education reform, the myriad challenges facing poor children, and the workings of the state and city budget system. And you need to know this before you start looking around for a good issue.
Bringing Experts and Citizens Together
There are a range of different ways people have approached this problem. Myles Horton at the Highlander School was especially concerned about this issue.
One popular approach is helping people do their own research. This can happen by including them in fairly standard research seminars. And/or it can involve developing (often with local residents) tools to allow non-scholars to do local research, like "report-cards" that parents can use to judge schools. And there are other approaches.
I find many of the examples of this approach compelling. And I think that engaging in research is a way for local citizens to feel more empowered about the knowledge they are creating for themselves. It is also extremely time and resource intensive, however. Teaching people to be researchers is a relatively long term project. Furthermore, tools created for doing research necessarily narrow the focus of participants onto what the tool is designed to reveal. A school report card, for example, may obscure non-standard options for improving schools, like improving nutrition for breakfast, vision care for kids that can't learn, fighting to increase food stamp disbursements for hungry children, etc.
"Be like me!: I also always worry when scholars "discover" that the solution for non-scholars is to become scholars like them. It seems unlikely somehow that the core solution to citizen empowerment is going to turn out to involve just those skills that scholars already have, instead of forcing scholars to change the way they currently think about research in more radical ways (although transforming research strategies for non-scholars certainly involves some transformation).
When people spend a lot of time learning to be scholars, they are not spending time doing other things-like putting direct pressure on targets. Of course, doing the research for yourself can be a powerful educational process. If you have the time, and are willing to wait to actually address the problem. Maybe there are other ways to have a powerful educational experience without actually doing the research.
An Alternate Approach to Expert/Citizen Engagement
A different approach, that I have recommended we try in my organization would involve helping scholars transform their scholarly knowledge into forms more accessible and useful to everyday citizens. (I'd love to hear other examples of an effort like this).
1. Broadly Survey Key Stakeholders
I imagine that a group of core leaders (perhaps about ten) could begin by seeking out and interviewing a range of key stakeholders knowledgeable about education in their city. This could include school staff, elected officials, and parent groups. Given limited time and capacity, the group would need to choose carefully who would be contacted. Interviews would be used instead of written surveys so that leaders could probe for more information and ideas. Critical questions would be asked about the possibilities and barriers involved in making change in particular areas.
2. Hold a Planning Meeting to Winnow Down Ideas
Once this process was completed to the group's satisfaction, these leaders would come together to reduce the large number of ideas received down to a manageable number-perhaps 6-8. One or two "experts" might be included in this meeting to answer questions, but since most experts have knowledge in fairly narrow areas, this might not help much in some cases. The criteria for choosing issue candidates would be: 1) Pragmatic feasibility (does this group have the power to make this change); 2) Apparent effectiveness of the proposed change (how sure are we that this program or policy will actually have a significant impact on the lives of kids); 3) level of interest in the constituency of the organizing group (which, again, in some cases will be different than those the change would most serve).
3. Construct Research Briefs
For each of these issue finalists, in collaboration with scholars with experience gathering and reviewing scholarly literature, the group would seek to construct 1-2 page briefs about each issue. These briefs would lay out the plusses and minuses of each issue, focusing in on information that social action groups must most be concerned about. This would include: 1) a summary of the issue; 2) available data on the likely impact of the change; 3) proposed target or targets and the likelihood of getting these targets to "move;" 4) options for following up on the change if it were made so that the group could hold targets accountable (a key issue).
One critical component of such a brief would be a discussion of the multiple perspectives on a particular issue, and the research that seems to support or undermine these positions. This would allow participants to locate themselves around these issues without being forced to take a position pre-created by those who wrote the briefs. This draws from the Everyday Democracy model of citizen engagement.
The outline of the brief might look something like this:
Issue: The Proposed Change We Seek
Evidence About How This Change Would Help Children
Different Perspectives on This Issue
Target Who Could Make This Change and Our Ability to Influence the Target
Our Capacity to Monitor Progress of Change and Intervene if Progress Stopped
4. Hold an Issue Decision Conference
Equipped with these briefs, the organization would then make a real effort to get as many group members to an "Issue Decision Conference." At this conference, participants might be split up into small groups who would discuss and become "experts" on their particular issue brief. Then one might do what educators call a "jigsaw," where groups are broken up and reformed, so that members from each issue group are put together in new groups. In these new groups, pairs of issue "experts" would educate the rest of the group about their issue.
At this point, the conference might move to a consensus or voting process, perhaps by having people move physically into groups depending on their preferences, something like what happens in some political caucusing.
Out of this would hopefully emerge general agreement on pursuing one or another issue-or perhaps more than one issue if there was energy enough in the room to take this on. At the same time, a broad number of participants would be educated on a range of issues related to education. The dialogue would be informed about the facts and tensions about the issues they were planning to engage in, and would go into the process with a sense of what they decided not to do and why.
Note that "experts" would not even need to be in the room for a dialogue like this.
At this point, with some feeling of expertise, and a goal in terms of an issue, the group could do more research, especially focused on the relationships of those with power around this issue. Often, at this point, the key issue isn't knowledge about policy or effectiveness in the abstract, but down and dirty questions about the politics of the issue, the self-interests of those most involved, etc. A winnable issue is rarely the most efficient plan but the most pragmatically feasible plan. (Remember, we spend billions on prisons and they are incredibly inefficient. The goal is to support kids in some "doable" way, not to wait for the perfect solution to emerge.)
This process could be followed by a presentation at an organization's "public meeting." At this point, as large a group as possible could be educated about the issue and agreement could come by acclamation without any sense that the democratic process has been short-circuited.
Democracy as an Educational Process
Real democracy on complex issues is necessarily an educational process. Bringing people together to talk about their own understandings or to vote doesn't really serve anyone unless those people really have the knowledge they need to make good decisions. (In some cases, when you are talking with people who come from affected communities, they actually have a much better understanding of the issue than many experts. This was largely Horton's approach at Highlander. But in our global, complex, modern world this is likely less true today than it has been in the past.)
The important thing is to provide contexts in which citizens can gain some confidence that they have enough expertise about an issue to make informed choices. Experts should be "faded out" of the process in one way or another, so that the constituency of a group can make decisions without being pushed by scholars with their own agendas.
Connecting this process to community organizing takes it beyond the kinds of "popular education" that have long been celebrated in progressive circles. Becoming critically educated about the world is of limited use (and is often actually disempowering) when you have few strategies for actually doing something about what you discover.
Surely there are other ways to do this, but I hope this extended "think piece" helps re-affirm the fact that "authentic" democracy is often a challenging process to facilitate.
This process also has the benefit of trying to move people beyond knee-jerk opinions and decisions based on media-driven stereotypes, an issue that Paul Rosenberg has been discussing elsewhere on this blog. Engaging like this face-to-face in thoughtful dialogue about complex issues is likely one of the few ways that people can be led beyond these "gut level" judgments.
It may even be that conducting very LARGE numbers of local dialogues on something like the Everyday Democracy model is one way--however unlikely given the resources it would require--to solve the problem of democratic ignorance and stereotypical thinking that Lippmann and many after him have worried about more broadly. |
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