For Release Sunday, April 19, 2009
Citiwire.net
Provided an historic boost by Barack Obama’s election, community organizing is enjoying a field day of new respect and popularity across America.
One signal: a big weave of new interest in the colleges. Enrollment has more than doubled in a year for his course on community organizing at Occidental college in Los Angeles, reports academician-writer Peter Dreier for Talking Points Memo Café. His students’ motivation?– “to make society more humane, fair, and environmentally sustainable.”
More and more students are moving out into real world community organizing jobs, even at miserably low pay–inspired, writes Sally Rimer in the New York Times, by the model of President Obama’s personal experience as an organizer on the streets of Chicago.
USA Today labels the new trend, “Millennials a Force for Change.” With jobs scarce and money tight, it notes, undergraduate and graduate students are volunteering as volunteers in causes ranging from HIV/AIDs prevention to recovery from Hurricane Katrina, from a variety of “green” causes to Habitat for Humanity. AmericaCorps applications increased by more than 20,000 from 2007 to 2008 and are expected to increase another 15-20,000 in 2009.
There are today, notes Dreier, many more opportunities and venues for community organizing than present in the 1960s and 1970s. Nonprofit organizations working in neighborhoods and communities throughout the nation have tripled in number and expanded in scope and scale. They’re active on every front from children’s programs to nutrition, from environmental sustainability, drug treatment to consumer issues, from housing to education. Rimer points out that organizing groups and networks are receiving record numbers of applications from local community groups and such networks as ACORN, Urban League affiliates, United Way funded organizations and a variety of faith-based organizations.
Most of these students find a way to connect their community organizing to their missions as students. Some enroll in Independent Study courses, regularly scheduled courses with “relevant” titles and subject matter, service learning programs or “centers” and “institutes” conferring undergraduate and graduate credit hours for work in the community, documented by term papers and theses. “Action research” is taking on a new meaning as students find opportunities for inquiry and research in issues and challenges facing urban and rural communities. In some cases, the connection is made by faculty also involved in community organizing.
Yet it’s fair to ask–is all this a sustainable trend or a kind of virile fad? Even with fewer opportunities to volunteer in the past, students have always been involved in community organizing at some level. As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s, I was arguably at the epicenter of momentous student activity. Anti-war, anti-draft, black power, feminist, environmental, and consumer movements daily filled the commons and the newspapers with lurid headlines, slogans and crises. In 1968, my sociology teacher located a grant to send 34 of us to the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. Some of us organized the McKinley Project, a volunteer effort to work with the most troubled high school in the Berkeley Unified School District.
The tenor and flavor of that era seems more ideologically shrill than today’s brand of community organizing. “Power to the people” had “anti-establishment” written all over it. The president of the United States was often the enemy, not an impulse to organize.
Today’s movement seems much more direct, less ideologically driven. It seems to boil down to serving, to making the world better, “to be the change we seek.”
Many undergraduates actually started their community missions in high school. Some follow the lead of parents or relatives who were student organizers in their day and may still be involved in community organizing. Blogs, facebooks, U-tubes, twitters, my space and other Internet tools are much more the tools and devices students use than earlier generations of student community organizers.
One wonders: how lasting will today’s movement be? If it provides meager or few incomes, what will be the economic sustainability? Will economic recovery send many of the “best and brightest” scurrying back to Wall Street to earn fast fortunes? (Certainly, the decade of greed in the 1980s all but muted the burst of campus-based community action we experienced in the 1960s and 1970s.)
And are other questions. Will rigid tenure criteria prompt prompt faculty interested in community organization to draw in their horns? Will the lure and luster of Barack Obama dim or dull as policy challenges become occasionally intractable?
We don’t know the answers. There is hope in increased congressional interest in youth service, symbolized by Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Serve America Act. And I believe there’s little doubt–future historians will see today’s robust wave of community organizing as a signal of renewed commitment, not just to the American nation but, through personal service, to some of its finest ideals.
Lenneal Henderson is Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Administration and Senior Fellow in the William Donald Schaefer Center for Public Policy at the University of Baltimore. His e-mail address is lennealh@cs.com.
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