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DUDLEY COCKE, Director, Roadside Theater in Appalachia
DENISE COLLAZO, Executive Director, San Francisco Organizing Project (SFOP) of the Pacific Institute on Community Organizing
RICHARD DELEON, Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies; Founder and Former Director, Public Research Institute at San Francisco State University
GRACE DYRNESS, Associate Director, Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California
DAVID LEE, Executive Director, San Francisco Chinese American Voter Education Committee
VERA MIAO, Project Director, Funders' Collaborative on Youth Organizing
GASPER RIVERA-SALGADO, Assistant Professor in Sociology, American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California
Moderated by CRAIG MCGARVEY, Former Director, Civic Culture Program, The James Irvine Foundation
Craig McGarvey: Notwithstanding what we know to be true from our researchers and our pollsters and our commentators about the unraveling of American social fabric and civil life in recent decades, there are promising, vital and various models of civic participation that are blossoming in our communities all across the country. These efforts in democratic participation are involving historically disenfranchised populations - low income people, young people, people of color and from ethnic backgrounds, newcomers to the country - bringing them together in collective problem solving so they may educate themselves and one another, and build relationships with people from unlike backgrounds as they make things better in their communities.
Democracy & Discourse
Richard DeLeon: By now all of you know what the problem is that we're facing and the reason why most of us are here: the long-term, steady decline in political participation and voter turnout, what Robert Putman has called the continuing disappearance and erosion of social capital in this country in terms of social and political trust and civic engagement. The largest "party" in this country today is the party of nonvoters. But I think it's wrong to confine analysis to the level of individual citizens or blame them or shame them and to imagine that somehow a solution is going to evolve out of some kind of change of mind or heart at that level.
I want to talk about a book that takes a different tack toward explaining and approaching the problem of how to achieve civic renewal and higher levels of civic engagement and, ultimately, citizenship, in a more classical sense: Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg's Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. The American citizenry - especially the working class, people of color and youth - has been clinically demobilized as an effective mass-based, collective force in U.S. politics. National ruling elites no longer need to justify their actions to a mass public or seek the consent of the governed to legitimate and finance radical policy innovations at home and what I take to be imperialistic adventures abroad. Up to and just after World War II, there was a sense that government wasn't going to function as a government effectively without the support of the mass citizenry. Contrast that with President Bush's appeal to his concept of American patriotism after 9/11. He said, essentially, Live your lives and hug your children, and then, consume, consume, consume, keep the economy strong, and leave the fighting to us.
Combined with continuing privatization of government functions and the shrinking to the public sphere, collectivized popular democracy has been transformed into "individualized personal democracy" by redefinition of citizens as mere consumers, customers, clients or service recipients; and by the localized and depoliticized forms of community service, volunteer action and civic engagement. Citizens in our current form of democracy in this country are no longer needed. Political parties have turned into instruments for running candidates entered into campaigns, money-driven and media-focused, rather than what they once did: aggregate interests and diversities and collectively mobilize voters and citizens into politics. Public opinion now is almost universally accepted as whatever the latest poll tells us is an aggregate of individual opinions gathered and then summarized in the press. It's not a conception of the public opinion that one associates with more classical democratic thinking: that an opinion doesn't become public until it passes through an intense conversation and discourse involving many different individuals who share their points of view about some issue of common concern.
Samuel Popkin and Michael Dimock wrote a piece titled "Political Knowledge and Citizen Competence," in which they conclude, "The dominant feature of nonvoting in America is lack of knowledge about government and politics, not distrust of government, lack of interest in politics, lack of media exposure to politics or feelings of inefficacy, not only results from a lack of knowledge about what government is doing and where parties and candidates stand, not from a knowledgeable rejection of government or parties or lack of trust in government." A Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard survey in 1996 that found only one-third of U.S. respondents knew the name of their representative in the House of Representatives. Half knew the party of their representative.
I looked at some analysis of data collected by Putnam and his Harvard associates of 40 communities: only 21 percent of citizens knew the names of both of their U.S. senators. In cities like Cincinnati and Birmingham and Atlanta and Chicago, that goes down to 12 percent. This political ignorance can be disabling when it comes to fueling participation in politics. Our winner-take-all electoral system has certainly, over the last 20 or 30 years, produced an almost complete lack parties of the sort that would attract interest and engage citizens. The Center for Voting and Democracy released the report "Monopoly Politics 2002," in which they had projected the outcomes of 330 House races a month or two before the election and had 100 percent accuracy, based on the level of competition in each of these districts and the number of terms the representative had served. They have just released their projected winners for 2004 congressional races; they've made projections for 350. That leaves 85 districts in which some semblance of real competition exists. One of the authors of this "Monopoly Politics 2004" report suggests your vote is really wasted in 350 of these districts. Incumbents and those who occupy positions of power have incentive to buy into what, in effect, are incumbency protection plans rather than take the riskier move of trying to mobilize that 50 percent-plus of the eligible electorate left out and ignored. This is a self-reinforcing system that discourages collective political mobilization and bars access to millions.
How do you break out of this self-reinforcing system? Theorist Sheldon Wolin talks about a "political moment." He shares his fear that the despot is not required to be heroic but simply administer a society of stunted individuals who have embraced lives emptied of political responsibility. The hope he has comes out of a view that democracy is not a viable permanent form of government; it really is a moment that happens infrequently and that can change and break up the system to allow possibility for change, and this potential of a democratic moment represents the restorative power of democracy. Individuals who concert their powers for low-income housing, worker ownership of factories, better health care, safer water and a thousand other concerns of ordinary lives are experiencing a democratic moment in contributing to the discovery, care and tending of the commonality of shared concerns.
The one community I know best, San Francisco, gives hope for the future revival of political life and civic engagement. Compared with the other communities in the national norm, San Franciscans are the most politically active and civically engaged, the most politically tolerant in their welcoming of immigrants and appreciation of diversity, and by far the most secular and liberal in their political ideology. In San Francisco, 48 percent (and 18 percent of non-citizens) knew the names of both U.S. senators. How did San Francisco get there? Fred Wirt coined the word "hyperpluralism" to talk about San Francisco. It's a city of incredible diversity, multiple and overlapping forms of social creed, race and ethnicity and gender and sexual identity and political ideology, fractured into so many different, highly politically mobilized facets of political life - a tremendous problem to overcome, in terms of going from some state of fission to one of fusion and creating of a more collectivized form of politics. San Francisco is moving in that direction. The example that points in the direction of that political evolution is the 1999 mayoral race in which gay activist Tom Ammiano was in a runoff against the city's first African-American mayor, Willie Brown. Many outside observers thought that was really a remarkable event in American politics. Locally, nobody really remarked on that aspect. It was really a matter of issues of land use and displacement of the dot-com revolution, affordable housing.
Audience Member: You might have a great degree of expression of politics and concern, but then there might be factionalism, deadlocking.
DeLeon: With that kind of diversity represented in the public arena, the price you pay is to create complications in governance. It takes longer to thrash out all of the disagreements, to build bridges, to create the sense of public legitimacy that allows policy to go forward. That is a price people in San Francisco have been willing to pay.
Audience Member: Technology has been used to bring about some of this non-participation - the media, the polls, surveys. Can it also be used to increase participation in the political process?
DeLeon: Gary Selnow's Electronic Whistle-Stops makes an in-depth study of the possibilities of new technology as an alternative, expanding public space in which citizens can get together to begin to achieve some of these results. The danger is these technologies also allow very finely specialized groups and subcultures and sub-sub-sub-sub-communities of interest that can further fragment and shatter. In San Francisco, in terms of creating this kind of public space and cyberspace, one example is SF Politics. It's a political discussion board. It brings together people in cyberspace - people talking about common issues. You can see that classic concept of public opinion evolving through discourse. There's a lot of chaff, but there's lots of wheat in there.
Audience Member: When you refer to San Francisco, it's relatively small geographically, especially compared to the places like Atlanta and L.A. It's pedestrian and neighborhood-oriented. If sprawl and things like that do play a role, how do we redevelop our places to promote public life?
DeLeon: San Francisco, among large cities, is only second to New York in its population density - 16,000 per square mile. The issue of land use is critical. Cities have in this country significant powers over land use, in terms of zoning and planning. San Francisco, in the last 30 years particularly, has just been almost in continuous strife around land use issues. More than any large U.S. city, San Franciscans have asserted their will against the unregulated forces of capitalism and the market in setting limits and specifications on how land can be used. These movements have inspired coalitions and alignments across many of these fragmented identity and special interest groups.
Faith and Community Organizing
Grace Dyrness: As soon as we think about religion, we think about examples of bonding social capital where it becomes exclusionary and keeps others out but continues to build within, and we have seen cases of that in politics in recent years. In this faith-based initiative age, we think about is religion as going to pick up the pieces that the government is dropping and provide the social service and safety net for people, whether or not religious institutions have the capacity to do that. Yet you can also be thinking about those that are just concerned about saving souls. Religious institutions, in fact, are creating a way for their members to engage in community issues, create social change and transform neighborhoods.
Immanuel Presbyterian Church, right in the busy financial district of Los Angeles, has long been a bastion of white Presbyterian activity in the city, but the demographic changes in the neighborhood have changed its color and its impact. The pastor currently is Reverend Frank Alton, brought here by the concern of members to have someone who could speak Spanish and reach out to the Latino community surrounding the church. Having spent many years in Mexico, Reverend Alton has introduced some Catholic Latino rituals into this congregation: the traditional Posada at Christmas and Via Cruces at Easter. His initial purpose in introducing these rituals to this Protestant congregation was to enhance the cultural self-esteem of immigrants. La Posada is a tradition where people walk from house to house, re-enacting the story of Joseph and Mary, until finally they come to a house that offers hospitality to them. Frank uses the Posada as a means for bringing in people from the neighborhood who watch the familiar processions and are drawn to them as a way of connecting with home; it also serves as a means of uniting the members of the congregation who come from diverse backgrounds. He also uses these rituals as a way of getting his white congregants out onto the streets of the neighborhood. This is his way of bridging the social capital of the community.
Another way religious congregations engage in civic activities is by joining forces and coalitions that leverage resources around a common cause. Faith Communities for Families and Children is a coalition that has come together to advocate for at risk in the juvenile justice system of California, particularly Los Angeles. Something happens when priests, rabbis and pastors show up together in a courtroom, and when they see that things begin to happen. There is incredible power in the unity across groups. Eugene Williams' coalition, Los Angeles Metropolitan Churches, has small- to medium-sized African-American congregations coming together to work to change the prison system. Among the issues: the phone calls that prison inmates can make home have to be collect calls, and the charges are so huge that families have quit accepting the collect calls because the bills are outrageous. Taxes on these phone calls are going into some kind of fund for the governor to use at his discretion. They're lobbying that not only they remove that tax on those calls for inmates who can now no longer connect with the one source that keeps them together, but also that the funds in that government account should go back into the communities to help work on prison reform issues. Congregations build the capacity of members through workshops, training programs, and by putting them into leadership positions within the congregation and the coalition. They also support the economic fabric of the community, increasingly holding banks, corporations and employers accountable for labor practices and decisions that affect the area. All over Los Angeles, churches are forming economic development corporations in greater numbers than we have ever seen them, particularly among immigrant groups.
Religious institutions have been working for a long time, caring for the disenfranchised, feeding the homeless, providing shelter and meeting other needs. This is definitely something that has been a tradition, and yet it needs to continue, because people are left without a safety net. Religion brings order out of chaos and provides structure and meaning for people. Churches, synagogues, mosques and temples often respond to needs of the community as soon as they arise. Congregations are connected to the people in ways that few institutions are, and they stay in communities even when others leave. The Muslim Women's League has started teaching women the Koran so that they can defend themselves against the kind of discrimination of their rights as women, because the Koran protects them in many ways, and they are ignorant about that. Now these women are working with other groups to look at the issues of domestic violence and abuse across ethnic lines.
Leaders of congregations are often sophisticated visionaries within their communities. Providing social services is not enough for many of those religious leaders. Inevitably, this had led them to advocate for social justice, since in their perspective, unjust structures and policies must be changed. Religious institutions can be powerful forces for change, especially when crossing these faith, class, race and other divides. This is true within individual congregations, and also especially when organizing through coalitions. The Burmese community has been doing that for several years: Muslims, Buddhists and Christians working together in order to move their own agenda forward. Finally, congregations often have members that are connected to public and private stakeholders and can move things forward, such as passing resolutions at the L.A. City Council against the war in Iraq. When you see a bunch of clergy standing in that assembly room, who represent a whole bunch of voters, then things happen.
Does religion play a role in motivating people toward civic participation? Yes. While some religious institutions do not encourage involvement in what might be considered worldly pursuits instead of spiritual pursuits, on the whole our research has shown an increase in civic participation. These groups are increasingly aware that working together with other groups bridging the racial religious and social divides can have a greater impact in the transformation of society.
The Arts
Dudley Cocke: I'm from the central Appalachian coal fields, where southern West Virginia, east Kentucky, southwest Virginia, and upper east Tennessee back up on one another in the Cumberland Mountains. We are gathered here above Market Street this morning, Homo sapiens, the story-telling animals. As a species, language is our chief selective advantage, and the stories we tell ourselves and others define what is possible in our individual and collective lives. Without our stories, how will we know it's us? And without hearing the stories of others, how will we know who they are? The arts and humanities practiced democratically are the are the sin qua non, the irreducible ingredient of civil society. If our civil society is presently at risk, then so must be our arts and humanities.
The arts and humanities have put themselves between a rock and a hard place which prevents them from reaching, in a meaningful way, the majority of Americans. The rock: Now 80 percent of the audience for the not-for-profit performing arts is the wealthiest 15 percent of the population. And the hard place: In our popular culture, the arts and humanities are edited to make money. As I came here to California from the hills of Appalachia, I was thinking about the president of CBS in Los Angeles who is bent on starting a new reality show based on the "Beverly Hillbillies." He started a "hickhunt" to find the right family to turn the cameras on down in Beverly Hills. Obviously, we're talking to him about that.
There is a pocket of possibility between this rock of elitism and this hard place of venal numbness: a third arts and humanities sector, mostly overlooked or dismissed by our institutions, where resilience resides, where democratic promise exists - the unincorporated sector of non-professional humanists and artists. The millions of Americans who sing in choirs; who write poetry, plays, memoirs and fiction; who dance; who avidly study history and literature; who craft meaning and beauty with their hands and eyes.
I'm a member of a 27-year-old traveling theater company, a merry, sometimes depressed band of thespians whose core activity is conceptualizing, writing, staging and touring plays. None of us were trained in our craft by the academy. We studied theater in our church services, sitting around telling stories, recounting family and community histories, swapping tall tales and jokes, singing and playing music with our kids and neighbors. One of our long-standing collaborators is the African-American theater company Junebug Productions, based in New Orleans. One of our co-creations, "Junebug/Jack," is about the historical and present-day relationships between black and white working-class Southerners. As we toured the United States, we wanted black and white working-class people to attend our play. The problem is that black and white working-class people don't typically go out together, or separately, for that matter, to the theater. Our solution? Ask the sponsors of "Junebug/ Jack" in each community (it's a musical) to pull together a group of singers from the different quarters of their community: from the white Methodist church, from AME Zion Church, from the women's chorus, from the integrated public high school singing group. Maybe three or four from each said yes. We sent them the music several months in advance, and they selected a choral director. When I got there, about a week before the production, I would stage them in and give them lines and do all the blocking. Out of support for their family and friends, all sorts of new people came to that play. There were three or four times more people at the show than usual. It was a play of six, and now maybe it had a cast of 20, so it really began to fill the stage. Their contribution to the music was terrific, because there are wonderful singers in every community.
The presence of the broader community added to the vibrancy of the whole affair. There was great artistic exchange as people from these four groups got together around their common passion for singing. It wasn't about, "Now we're going to be integrated." They were there to sing. Relationships naturally formed. People became friends across social lines that otherwise would have divided them. If there's enough interest in the community, which was often the case, we'll offer to help such a community continue, over a multi-year period, building these relationships. People want to participate and contribute, not just watch and consume. Once the community is engaged, then the collective task becomes to maintain an open place in the process for the unexpected and sometimes controversial aspects of local life to appear.
Ethnic Media
David Lee: I'm with the Chinese American Voter Education Committee, a non-profit non-partisan organization started in 1975 to register Chinese Americans to vote in Chinatown. I've been with the organization about ten years and we've since moved and worked in the area of ethnic media. Why ethnic media? In San Francisco, where the population of the city is roughly one-third Asian American, ethnic media - particularly Chinese language media - has enormous impact on civic participation and politics.
Chinese newspapers can trace their history in Chinatown back over 120 years. Their heyday has been since 1949, when many Chinese newspapers were started in Chinatown to focus on the geo-political split between Taiwan and China. Chinese news media has grown enormously, to encompass about five or six daily Chinese language newspapers, a number of television news programs that run nightly. That growth has been fueled largely by the marketplace as major corporations have recognized the power of this media to reach consumers and dollars. Sing Tao Daily has now become quite a multi-media organization with radio stations and newspapers in San Francisco, with a circulation of 60,000 daily.
News coverage has shifted from largely homeland news to local news and coverage of local civic issues. Newspapers have even endorsed candidates for local office and have become, in the mayor's race in San Francisco, among the most eagerly sought endorsements. About 18 percent of all city voters now are Chinese Americans; the majority of those, some 70 percent, are foreign-born; as many as 60 percent get their news exclusively from Chinese newspapers and television.
The Chinese media has been extremely important in shaping civic discourse in the community. Three issues in the last decade illustrate this. About 1998, a huge controversy was brought about by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) over the sale of live animals for food in Chinatown - frogs, turtles. It had to do with how animals were kept in the stores prior to being butchered or sold live. The issue ignited a firestorm of controversy in the Chinese language media. It was largely missed by the Chronicle and mainstream media. Many in the community felt that even though they were not consumers of live animals for food (I can assure you the majority of Chinese Americans don't consume live animals for dinner; they shop at Safeway or anywhere else), this was seen as a civil rights issue: a group coming into Chinatown telling us how we could practice our traditions. Hundreds if not thousands of Chinese-American immigrants - first generation, second generation, some who have been in the city for 50 years who had never participated in a protest or a march - showed up at these hearings, largely fueled by coverage in the Chinese language newspapers. The controversy also pointed some interesting differences, such as the selling of a live frog versus the cooking of a live crab at Fisherman's Wharf. One is seen as acceptable, the other not. Not a single supervisor touched this issue, which is saying a lot.
The second issue that we looked at was the central freeway in 1997, fueled again by Chinese language coverage. Chinese Americans put this on the ballot and came out and voted in large numbers and passed the ballot measure, to a lot of people's surprise. Finally, the issue that we've been following is the case of Wen Ho Lee. Essentially he was seen as guilty for much of the coverage in The New York Times and all the national papers. But the Chinese language World Journal and Sing Tao covered the issue daily and kept the issue alive in the Chinese community and played a huge role in fundraising for his legal defense fund, getting letters written to congresspeople.
The Democratic Party or Republican Party had no role in these three cases of mass political mobilization in the Chinese community. That may speak to the idea of the irrelevance of the parties to new forms of mobilization and, perhaps, may also point to the role of ethnic media, in this case Chinese media, as a powerful agent for that. The question then becomes, as we look forward, how ethnic media, given the insularity of that coverage - because obviously you can't know what they are writing about if you don't read Chinese, yet they're covering issues that affect everybody in the city and in the region - how you open up that media to broaden its perspectives and coverage to include views and viewpoint from other communities.
Audience Member: We're addressing a lot of these issues to San Francisco. Daly City has 75 percent Asian population now. Is there a difference in how these suburbanites use this media? Also, I was reading about voting participation rates with the different ethnic groups. Even the third-generation Asians have a lower voting rate. How do you reach out to those people who may not be reading the Chinese paper?
Lee: San Francisco politics is a kind of black hole - it sucks you in. Once you get into the framework of San Francisco politics, it's very hard to get up. That's what's happened to ethnic media, particularly Chinese media, because they've reached a threshold of power now that they're in the political arena, and they're going to have to begin to behave as political actors. Take the Bay Guardian: You're going to see more of that type of activist journalism in the Chinese media. Ethnic media around the Bay takes different forms. Local coverage is not as intense, the coverage of county-wide issues. Just as the Chronicle's coverage is probably very different in the East Bay edition versus the South Bay edition or versus the San Francisco edition, you'll find the same regional differences in Daly City's ethnic media versus San Francisco's.
With regard to the language population, there is a major cleavage between the American-born second/third generation. On many college campuses - particularly Berkeley and UCLA, where you've got 35 percent Chinese Americans, many of them second generation/third generation - voter participation amongst that group has been amongst the lowest. We have very low participation rates amongst 18-24 year olds across the board. Why is it different with the immigrant population in San Francisco? It has a lot to do with San Francisco, more than something we can generalize across that demographic. San Francisco is a very polarized place, politically, and the way the media and the community are responding here is going to be very different than how the very same demographic participates 20 miles south.
Audience Member: Even though San Francisco is a political circus, many of the ethnic communities are extremely well informed in their newspapers, TV and radio. Often I watch - being second generation, having third generation kids - the 8:00 Cantonese news or the Mandarin news, Taiwan or CCTV, because I will see foreign, international coverage that I don't get on the American newscasts. People will increasingly feel that their fates for their children being educated here or going back and forth or their doing business or having family and relatives everywhere, that as this phenomena - someone coined it "ampersand American." We don't have to be a minority; we don't have to have a hyphen; we don't have to have a complex. You can function fully in two or more cultures and be a bridge and contribute to all of them.
Audience Member: I'm beginning to hear models that exacerbate differences and lead to no problem solving. I was hoping that the tenor would be more encouraging than this. If this is the reality, thank you. But can we look for a better, more positive trend?
Cocke: One example I gave was Junebug Productions, the African-American theater company, and we worked in communities, nationally, and it was a very positive thing. But it takes time to undo racism and the social lines in a community - years. One always has to keep pushing the door back open, because it has a tendency to close. You have to allow space for the controversial and the unpopular in a community in local life to appear. It's the sum of all those particular stories that give the positive picture. One more example that relates to the gay community in San Francisco: Montana had an odious law that penalized gay Montanans. Any kind of association was subject to imprisonment. We began working on that issue through performances that talked about different identities. Across Montana, people to begin telling stories about their lives. Over several years of people sharing their stories - not just gay people, but community people coming together - a whole new sense of the bigger Montanan story around this issue emerged, and from that came organizing and a number of marches. People lost their jobs. It was hard - social change is hard, and people suffer when you go up against authority - but the end result was this law was overturned by the legislature.
DeLeon: You really can't take a shortcut. One approach to building consensus in community problem-solving ability is to invite all the participants as they enter a room to do that - to leave their interests and their identities at the door and then work together to seek some kind of common values and goals. The problem with that is, I've found it often leads to very innocuous embracing of democratic creed and general values that don't really deal with the reality of difference and diversity in communities. What looks like making things more difficult and problematic, by bringing in all this diversity and actually going through a period of conflict and confrontation is a necessary stage. I use the term annealing: you heat up steel or glass and then slowly cool it down, it tempers and strengthens into a harder, more durable form. That's what's going on in San Francisco.
Audience Member: I want to hear about ways people have engaged young people in their efforts to be more civically engaged.
Dyrness: At the Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights in San Diego, young people have banded together around the issue of this ability to move into college and can be counted as a citizen, as a resident of California. They're organizing around that as a kind of central right. A formal organization has evolved, Coalition of Student Activists. There is also a younger group of 14 and 15 year-olds going from parish to parish to talk to the people and say, "You can get involved and you have to know your rights."
Lee: Youth in Chinatown and throughout the city have been involved in registering their parents to vote and getting people registered to vote at INS ceremonies. A lot, through this initial entry into politics, want to become interns and campaign workers and educated into the electoral process. That is something the Latino community has done well: groom and produce a political class who not only run for office but the technicians people who know how to fundraise, shape messages, who grassroots organize. More Asians and Chinese Americans are looking at that as a respectable way of earning a living.
Cocke: With the arts there is not really a good look taken at youth in the arts from a broad national perspective. They are in a very tight situation in my experience and yet, with all of their energy, they are moving forward as artists. I'm not just talking about kids thinking of becoming professional. A lot of them do it at night; or if they have to practice or rehearse during the day, they have night jobs. In my case, I'm here because of youth: Appalshop, of which Roadside Theater is one part, began in 1969 as a War on Poverty program. It was to train youth and give them a head start in the media industry. When the government pulled out their money one year and a half later, this was the only federal project that survived because it was the only project that did anything. The kids had fresh films, and there were several filmmakers of fair national repute who sent a little money to keep it going.
Organizing Youth
Vera Miao: The Funders' Collaborative on Youth Organizing is focused on efforts engaging young people, primarily under the age of 20, the majority of which actually are not voters, by law. I went to this dictionary to try to get a sense of what we mean by citizen. Citizen is defined as: A person owing allegiance to and entitled to the protection of a sovereign state. And the definition of democracy: A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system usually involving periodically held free elections.
Youth of color are one of the fastest growing prison populations in the U.S. Our country is a global leader in our willingness to convict young people to the death penalty. Combine that with all of the things that we have been talking about - decreasing family and community support, a real government pull-back, and community withdrawal from resourcing public education - you can argue convincingly that our young citizens are actually not being protected by their sovereign state. Couple that with the idea that young people under the age of 18 are not allowed to vote in these periodically held elections, you really have to beg the question: What is this sort of quasi-citizenship status that we confer to our young people in the U.S.?
The contradiction comes into play when we see that young people deemed adult enough to be tried convicted and imprisoned on par with adults. On one level, young people, especially under the age of 18, don't have the skills and ability to be conferred for the power of voting and determining who is representing their interests in our democracy. At the same time, they are old enough to have to take particular kinds of responsibility for actions that they may or may not be in the lead of.
Many turn to community service as the main venue in which young people should and are being civically engaged. I believe community service has value and merit. Some studies suggest as many as 70 percent of young people in the U.S. are engaged in some level of community service. We could argue what the motivations are for being involved in the community service projects; one end could be just to have stronger and better college and job applications. Another end might be that local efforts that you are personally involved with seem to yield more immediate returns. But the particular kinds of work that I want to talk about, that low-income youth are doing around the country, are not necessarily engaging in the systems and institutions of the status quo as they exist now. They're practicing democratic ideals by trying to hold these systems and institutions accountable and transform those systems and institutions to be more supportive to them, their families and their communities.
Our focus is on local, statewide and regional grassroots community organizing efforts whose leadership and constituency are low income and are youths under the age of 20 - young people in the middle and high school age ranges that are bucking limiting expectations placed on them, by developing leadership skills and applying them to group efforts to build collective power. Almost 100 groups around the country that we deem as youth organizing efforts are engaging thousands of young people under the age of 20 in leadership development for community organizing. It is a boom time, and there are a lot more organizations grappling with this question of "What about youth?"
We've been able to see in the last few years from these efforts policy change, systemic change, institutional change. In Ohio, a statewide housing and homeless advocacy group with a youth organizing project was able to secure passage of a law guaranteeing educational access to homeless children and youth. Efforts around the country in Portland, Oregon, in Oakland, California, and in Boston, Massachusetts, pressured transit authorities to provide free or discounted public transportation passes to allow young people in poor communities to get to school or attend after-school education programs. In the South Bronx, a youth organizing effort was able to get the in-house school of a juvenile detention facility transferred to the authority of the Board of Education, which insured that detainees within the facility were able to go to school and thereby obtain a high school diploma. A landmark ballot initiative in Oakland set aside an additional $72 million in funding over 12 years for youth development programs to be administered by a committee of youth and adult community members.
Youth organizing groups work in key issue areas. A good number are multi-issue in the sense that they allow members to determine what issues to focus on within their campaigns. But they are overwhelmingly working on public education reform, criminal justice system reform; and, especially in California, making the connection between schools not jail, books not bars, looking to support public education as opposed to the buildup of a profitable industry around prison development and use. Many groups are doing environmental justice work.
Youth organizing groups use local issues and wage local campaigns, but they do that as stepping stones to a broader vision for socio-economic justice, taking local efforts to scale, over time. They operate from a place of urgency, which actually says that youth organizing groups are leaders today. They're not the future leaders of tomorrow when they transition into adulthood; they have the capacity to lead efforts for community transformation now, as young people. These efforts are based on youth/adult partnerships, but the critical point of these partnerships is working to support the development and exercise of youth leadership. Youth organizing groups deeply embrace political education, helping young people and their members to build critical and analytical skills about the personally felt experiences of racism, sexism, homophobia, and how those are connected to deeper social and structural inequities. Because of this, it's not surprising that youth organizing groups are often extremely multi-racial, multi-ethnic, young people who identify in different ways in terms of a sexual orientation continuum - more sensitive and enthusiastic about difference than many adult counterpart organizations.
The unincorporated sector of arts and humanities plays a big role in youth organizing groups. Arts and cultural programming and events and strategies are critical to their work, both for outreach, for the expression of young people's views on life, expressions of dissent, and oftentimes just for fun and joy, which retains young people in the picture. At the end of the day, youth organizing groups are striving to effectively balance individual development and personal transformation with larger, broader social and community transformations. It's a fairly large agenda, but the youth organizing groups at their core never break apart the personal from the political.
The U.S. census estimates that there are over 100 million people under the age of 24. That constitutes about 35 percent, roughly, of the total U.S. population. They are either primed to make their mark on the world or will be growing into that potential in the next few years. If even a portion of that 100 million turn their energy, talents, skills and leaderships to efforts to actively practicing the ideals of democracy, can you imagine what a healthy, vigorous civil society that would be? On the flip side, if we don't turn our time, energy and resources to that endeavor can you imagine what an unhealthy and pale civil society it would be?
Community Organizing Through Congregations
Denise Collazo: I'm speaking from the perspective of a member of the national staff of the Pacific Institute for Community Organization (PICO), made up of 18 organizations, including 350 congregations throughout the state of California representing over half of the Assembly and Senate districts. We are predominantly low- and moderate-income members of the communities that we represent. Our membership are Latino, Filipino, Chinese, Hmong, Caucasian, African American and cut across a broad array of denominations in California. Nationally, we represent 95 cities in 12 states and include over 1 million families.
We began an effort several years ago, listening to people in their communities and their congregations about their major concerns. One was lack of access to health care, long waits people had in public hospitals, long treks to get to their doctor. We began research to uncover the challenges people have in getting quality health care that is culturally competent and appropriate. In one neighborhood, we discovered a community clinic with staff that could serve the community, but most members of the community didn't know the clinic was there. So we embarked on a public education campaign to let people know the clinic was there. At the same time, the city was contemplating closing the clinic due to cuts in budget. Our congregation, Corpus Christi Catholic Parish, began to put pressure on the city and the Department of Public Health and the University of California to continue to invest in this important center. At one point it was deemed that the clinic would close. The community put together a funeral procession where the Catholic priest led the community members in a march to decry the fact that this clinic was closing. He used the Christian image of Lazarus, how Lazarus had died but could still be called back to life. The clinic was kept open. We worked to hire staff that was bilingual in Chinese and Spanish to better meet the needs of the community.
At the same time, our statewide effort was working on expanding the Healthy Families insurance program for children. We were working on changing Medi-Cal in a way that allows more people to stay on Medi-Cal, and on trying to get funding for clinics. What was happening on a statewide level was mingling closely with what was happening locally. We sponsored a press conference in front of this clinic in San Francisco with Senator John Burton and then-Supervisor Mark Leno, and we participated in an effort where we faxed 5,000 faxes to Tommy Thompson's office in Washington. (That kept their fax kind of busy for a period of several weeks.) We were able to get the federal government to approve California's waiver that would allow us to include parents in the Healthy Families. We got the legislature to approve this change. In the end, the governor line item vetoed the funding. So California had to give $500 million back to the federal government because we weren't able to use it. This year, on a statewide level, we're continuing to work to include parents in Healthy Families through a piece of legislation that will have an HMO tax that would give us matching money to keep that federal money in that state.
We are bridging social capital by bringing people together from diverse parts of the state and putting them in a room together and having them solve problems together. We're also focused on the development of leaders over time. Some of our leaders are leading 5,000-person rallies in the capital where we bring in legislators and decision makers to agree to our requests. What we're doing in faith-based community organizing is truly investing in people and in their ability to lead.
Part of what we do as community and grass roots citizens organizations is provide political cover for legislators and decision makers. We give them the courage and backing they need to truly lead. When Tommy Thompson got 5,000 handwritten letters faxed to his office, it gave him what he needed to pass our waiver. That's important, because many times politicians need help. Some want to do the right thing but do not feel that what we're proposing is politically viable. When you bring 3,000 people together at a large gathering and you show clergy and leadership from across the state, it begins to give them the courage to step up and do what needs to be done.
We have a fairly broad decision-making process; we bring together 200 to 300 people on a Saturday morning in some part of the state where we do training and teaching about specific public policy proposals, and then that group will make a decision to move forward or how to move forward. Those people are there representing hundreds of people in their local congregations throughout the state. The fact that we are then able to have real change that people can point to - people can drive around that neighborhood and see the clinic open and know that Medi-Cal has been changed so that 300,000 more families can continue to stay on Medi-Cal because we changed the certification process so people don't get kicked off every three months - is important.
The last thing that makes our work distinctive is the particular prophetic role that congregations play in our communities. We're giving them a way to stand and speak truth to power. This is how we have been able to bring thousands and thousands of Californians into pretty complicated public policy debate about health care and about the state budget. This is a way of bringing the voice of everyday citizens into the debate that so often leaves them out.
Engaging Immigrants
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado: Immigrants are very misunderstood political actors. (I'm going to make my comments in regards to Mexican immigrants especially.) The Latino political elite views Mexican immigrants, the first generation, as a not very viable power base, because they complain that they're too connected and too concerned with their communities of origin. The complaint is that their eyes are focused on Mexico. On the other side, in Mexico, during a recent debate in the congress about the right to vote abroad for Mexicans, legislators said, "Why should we give the right to vote to Mexicans abroad? They're too American; they don't care about Mexico anymore." They even complain that they don't even speak Spanish anymore. To me, this is a very paradoxical view. People, especially political actors, are confused about the political agenda of the first generation of immigrants. Are they here to stay and do they care about what's happening here? Or are they too focused in their communities of origin?
This is the story of all the waves of immigrants arriving to the United States. Remember the comments of Benjamin Franklin with regards to the German immigrants: Those people are going to never incorporate into the American system. That was said also about Irish, Italian, Eastern European Jewish and, more recently, Latinos and Asian immigrants.
I've been focusing and working together with hometown associations of Mexican, Salvadorian and Guatemalan immigrants. These hometown associations are voluntary civic organizations, through which immigrants have developed what I call a bi-national political agenda. First, these associations are sort of the welcoming committee for the newcomers. Immigration, contrary to what we're told by politicians, is not a chaotic process. Our southern border is not out of control. Immigration is so orderly that now the labor market between Mexico and the United States is truly one unique labor market. There's demands for jobs and workers willing to do those jobs. And there's no way that any policy to close the border is going to change that situation. People claim that immigrants come to the states with the highest welfare checks. What usually happens is that immigrants use their immigrant social networks to know about where to go, get access to jobs and get to know the environment to which they are arriving. So these hometown associations have a very important role in terms of allowing the newcomers to become incorporated in this new environment. But also these hometown associations channel a tremendous amount of money to home communities on the other side of the border, not only in the form of family remittances individual immigrants send to spouses, parents, children on the other side of the border that they need to support. Increasingly these immigrants organized around hometown associations send tremendous amount of money in community remittances - money that goes to funding public works projects in their communities of origin. Between the United States and Mexico, there is about $8-10 billion a year flowing across the border. This money is very important for Mexico; it's almost the third source of foreign money; it's become the first source of money for smaller countries like El Salvador.
More and more the debate is focusing around what to do about these immigrants. Citizenship is usually viewed as a contract; some people view it as a marriage. It is an individual with a nation, and you have to be loyal to that nation. There's no way that a citizen can have dual loyalty. When you become a naturalized U.S. citizen, you swear that you're going to cut completely off all your ties and allegiances to a foreign country. In actuality, that's not the way immigrants live. They have families, parents, and they have a strong relationship with their communities of origin. Of course they care about the future of those communities. But also, and especially this is the case for Mexicans, who come here to really stay for long periods of time, if you interview and you talk to immigrants, they would tell that in the beginning they thought about coming, saving some money and going back. Over and over that doesn't happen. They end up living here in the long term, having children and developing families and, therefore, they have a stake in the future of their local community.
One of the impacts of these hometown associations is that they're challenging some prevalent notions about citizenship and political participation. Usually, citizenship is thought of as a political community with set boundaries, and citizenship is the marker of membership: who belongs, who's an insider of that political community, and who has the rights and obligations to participate in this specific political community. What happens if your political community transcends the national borders, transcends the sense of locality? How can you develop effective ways to participate in the community where you work, where you live, but also the community where your parents and the other half of your family live and work? This is especially important for California, because California is by far the state that gets most of these flows of immigration.
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers