I notice by the clock that our time is starting to run out. Let me thank all of the participants, both visible (with questions) and invisible (just hanging in!) for the opportunity to learn from what you are thinking and listen to your reactions to the work reported in “Global Grassroots.”

Much appreciated!

John might be the best one to respond here, since he wrote the excellent introduction to this Book Salon.

our organizers are from the 2 main tribes and we waited for a year after the post-election violence to begin our work finally in Nairobi, but this is less a problem than getting traction with resources, against the NGO-bi that is Nairobi, and moving the dead weight of governmental bureaucracy.

Just on the numbers if we could actually move the costs of remittances to only 5% (and our studies estimate that the real costs including conversion is above 20% and not the 10% that the World Bank pretends) we could allow more money to get into developing countries in this family-to-family and family-to-community method that would add to the development investment in these communities many fold over current AID investments. Traveling in Mexico or Vietnam, it is easy to see the houses in working communities that are being built by remittance contributions from families in the US and elsewhere.

The tragedy is the same as we find in any instance of theft. It is from lost opportunity. We have a leader in Vancouver with ACORN Canada who is from Korogocho where we organize in Nairobi. He uses Western Union and it can cost him $40 out of the $100 he wants to send his family once all costs are included. We have a partner in a great credit union in Vancouver who we tried to devise an alternative system with, and they believe it will be 3 years before they can even get to the problem.

Every year tens of billions of dollars are being diverted into Western Union, Moneygram and the banks of developed countries because governments are allowing this plain and simple robbery of the poor.

In a computer age transfers are trivial matters, but here technology is a tool of oppression.

I’m a huge believer in learning from others what is working and trying to adapt it to your own work. I know carry a movie camera wherever I go so that we can learn — and it’s a process! — to use YouTube better and connect to the video world that is moving people.

I wish I could figure out how to “Kony” up some of ACORN International’s campaigns!

Most of the carping was from the established, donor-based NGO community, which has a vested interest in being the broker for change and resources through their platforms.

Even if the Kony folks were way off base, we need another paradigm and we need stuff that hits home hard for young folks and the rest of the tired asses out there, so we get up and git!

There is a huge national campaign that needs to be waged in the USA around the infrastructure demands for water and sewerage that are part of the EPA compliance programs where billions and billions of dollars of long term bills are going to be coming due in community after community — i suspect that’s what you are referring to and we’re seeing it as part of the proposal in New Orleans where I live as well. I had a long and interesting meeting a couple of weeks ago with organizers in Pittsburgh with the Clean Rivers Campaign and had one of those “ah,ha” moments when I realized this wasn’t really an enviro-campaign, but a straight up utility cost and public works campaign with national impact.

They estimate that more than 700 communities around the country could be facing astronomical bills along these lines, and I bet the real dimensions of the issue are even broader and deeper than that.

Off line later let me know more about this…I think we are sitting on a game changer here!

It’s fascinating for me to follow mass actions in India where we work in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangaluru. The cultural reference points there are still back to the anti-colonial fight and the country’s independence, so some of the same tactics are still common today.

In Kenya our organizers recently got a hard lesson in new tactics in the megaslum. They had some volunteers make puppets which were going to lead the march and rally through Korogcho demanding the building of more primary schools for the almost 400,000 who live there. Just at the beginning of the march, a vigilante group had managed to catch a young man who had stolen a motor bike and beaten its owner, and were engaged in taking mob justice on this guy which collided with our puppets and the march. police mobilized by the chief then moved in force with all parties running for the hills and the puppets torn asunder and the campaign forced to regroup for another time in the future.

Hard to plan for stuff like that!

Not seeing a question this “refresh” I want to encourage any of you to think about community organizing on a global context and not just on the local scene. We need more attention paid!

Love for any of you to read and spread the word about “Global Grassroots: International Perspectives on Organizing.” Available directly via Social Policy Press (www.socialpolicy.org) or of course through Amazon, if you must, or your local independent bookseller who can also order directly.

I would love to keep the dialogue going!

hopefully my answers eventually caught up with these questions, bev?

the history of community organizing among the urban poor in both countries focused on building classic “peoples’ organizations” that were broadly representative and fearless in actions and campaigns for democracy in both of these countries. as branches that sprang from the main roots of community organizing I have been fascinated over the last decade or so as they have reached out to me and i have found them (Indonesia too!) how similar some of the organizational formations evolved — they were like ACORN without the dues system!

many have found ongoing contributions in civic life that have sprung from the democracy struggles.

agreed. generally the increasing autonomy of action in Latin America, partially fueled by the successful economies of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and for a long time the massive investments fueled by the petro-dollars of Venezuela, gives all of us working there huge hope. now that China is also a huge player in the region pushing at the US-heels, we also have to be smarter and more respectful.

the situation in Honduras where we work in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa though give us a lot of reasons to worry that the USA simply does not get it yet. the whole golopista coup has riven the country and the impact continues everywhere. our State Department was simply off the mark here, and unwilling to ever concede that we need to support a democratic process and not elite coups.

ironically the strategy not used enough yet in Cali is setting municipal and county-wide living wage standards, which any community can do. the victory several years ago in San Francisco was huge, but it has ever spread to Los Angeles or many of the smaller cities and bigger counties.

yes, it would take real resources to put it on the ballot and then to win, but the record of victory on these kinds of Living Wage measures is excellent.

needs to happen, and California needs to lead way, big brother!

amen! it’s daunting. and, yes, that’s part of the reason for the book and a lot of effort on the web, facebook, and so forth.

a good example is the difficulty in getting traction around our Remittance Justice Campaign where we are trying to unite all of our federated organizations with groups in the developed world of North America and Europe to win the ceiling on the cost of money transfers for migrant workers and immigrant families back to their home countries to the 5% that the World Bank and G-8 has claimed is also their goal. we have gotten support from many like Avaaz and others at some times, but where the work gets hard is that we have to win support in each of the countries to actually cap the fees and stop the predatory practices. Immigrants and migrants are almost stateless people and many countries realize that they can’t vote and don’t vote and essentially let the bank and Western Union, Moneygram and others, have their way with their money.

The media has gotten so they don’t know how to follow anything that’s at all complex, and something like remittances is just sort of “whatever” to them.

spread the word!

all of the organizers in ACORN International are natives of their local communities and speak the various languages and have the appropriate cultural connections to these communities.

in latin america interestingly almost all of the staff are women. in africa and india almost all of the organizers are men. in the czech republic it’s men and in italy a split with men in rome and women in sicily.

Having left in mid-2008 I was pretty much watching from the outside for two years until the existing management and leadership felt they were forced to pull the plug. My best guess, knowing and having worked with some many of them for decades, is that they must have been under terrible and excruciating pressure, and not been able to see a way out, or were just beaten down and exhausted and couldn’t imagine ever getting to the other side.

Part of it may have been, as John mentions, and I have speculated, that they were disoriented a bit by the Obama victory, the fact that he had been a community organizer, and that the organization had taken way too many for the team in registering new voters in record numbers for the 2008 election. I’m not saying they thought they were going to be sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom, but unlike an old, cynical street organizer like myself, they may have thought unrealistically that they would have some access and some input. When Obama turned tail and ran from them in the election and then threw them under the bus on the video-came, I think that sucked the soul out of some of the folks who had strategized a new role for ACORN and its members from his presidency. That was clearly never going to happen anyway, but to the degree some were betting heavily on that as a way to pull out of the spiral, it was clearly not going to occur.

Had I been there, perhaps foolishly, I would have simply hunkered down with the membership and kept going, which is what i did w/ all of the organizations where I was working throughout this terrible period. I think that was a choice too many were too tired and beaten and disappointed to be able to make. Instead they hoped that by saving a few of the pieces they might create some space in some cities around the country, and that’s the strategy they have pursued with uneven results, but certainly my huge hope and wishes for success.

I wouldn’t be holding out any hope of the Times getting the story right at this point. As you know better than most, they got caught in a web of rationalizations with their former Public Editor and a woe-is-me excuse pattern of claiming that they had too many reporters on the story with no one really driving it. Whatever that says for accountability! They seem to have decided in Murdoch like fashion to dig in their heels and pull the covers over their heads. After all the people hurt by ACORN going under were low-and-moderate income families, which is not exactly the Times demographic. The arc of justice is long though, so what goes around will come around here as well, and it’s already begun. It just make take a while to get there, but inevitably it will.

John, you may be right. I’m not sure. Amazingly your list of countries were all areas that we do not work in, so I hope you are right, but I’m not convinced.

Vietnam is a place the Organizers’ Forum has been. What an amazing country. I would recommend a visit to Hanoi for anyone.

Nonetheless, it was hard to see the “social services” safety net there in the constant embrace of a free market embrace of foreign direct investment and donor dollars that would make even the Chinese seem like fiscal conservatives.

I’m gathering you work in California, so god love you, cuz affordable housing is a huge issue in Cali (and the rest of the country!).

In the wake of the Great Recession and the continuing foreclosure crises (what modifications, President Obama!?!), I’ve had to really rethink decades of work that might have overemphasized home ownership and not done enough to open up affordable rental units, especially with the shrinkage of public housing. I wrote an earlier book “Citizen Wealth” that found that much of a lower income families asset based and income security was rooted in their homes, but now 25 years of progress, almost to the passage of CRA, perhaps the single most important community organizing victory of our generation, has been wiped out.

We have to do better, and don’t be surprised if affordable housing and rental conversions are the wave of the future. You could be a sharp, pointed edge of change. We need a plan and the organizations to embrace it!

big question! i actually — and this is part of what prompted me to bring out “Global Grassroots” — think we have really just begun. I’m not a big believer in institution-based community organizing because increasingly institutions are so deeply disregarded by low-and-moderate income families around the world — and just about everyone else. Luckily I think people still believe in themselves, their neighbors, and their community, which argues to me that we have hundreds of millions out there ready to organize if we can fashion an organizing model that we can prove works for them on a mass-basis.

let me give you an example that gives me great hope and excitement. I’ve been to Sicily several times in recent years. Sicily has a reputation, ok. mafia and all that, and the mafia is still a problem, so let’s not be naive, but here’s the exciting part. In Sicily there is an outbreak of activity building civic movements. They are very close to community organizations, but somewhat like ACORN was (and is in Canada elsewhere still) more political. In every community there are several civic movements and in Palermo and Catania there are a handful. I’ve spoken and done workshops for their federations across Sicily and they are solid folks trying to work on many levels. Add to the fact that in Sicily civic movements can access the ballot directly, independently of the parties, and if enough support has been built so that more than 5% of the vote can be garnered, then they can compete for power — and change — immediately. Great success story in Syracuse for example where they took over the city in less than a year — of course now they are asking for advice on how not to become what they were fighting against, but that’s part of power building too.

Keep in touch once this is over and we’ll be calling on you…website is http://www.acorninternational and i’m at chieforganizer@acorninternational.org

we’ll be counting on you!