Chapter One, Community Building and Political Renewal

p. 3-39

• How to engage working Americans in low income communities politically?

• social capital: networks, norms, social trust that facilitate cooperation/coordination for mutual benefit

• “The main lesson to be learned is simple: a key to renewing American politics is to rebuild its foundations in the values and institutions that sustain community.”(x)

• fight for affordable housing, job training, and school reform (p. 3)

• a lot of progressive developments are from the east and west coasts

• faith-based community building can be effective

• Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) brings leaders together from different ethnic and socioeconomic groups to formulate action plans

• IAF isn’t concerned with abortion, gay rights, or prayer in school

• IAF: build housing, improve schools, job training programs, build parks and libraries

• no-nonsense, pragmatic approach

• Texas is becoming a non-white state & center for information technology and telecommunications technologies (Austin, Houston, Dallas)

• poor blacks and Hispanics need to become part of the new tech economy

• housing, education, employment and healthcare are more important issues than debates over abortion, gay rights, and prayer in school.

• Saul Alinksky founded AIF in Chicago in the 1930s

• project QUEST, innovative job training program

• built low-income housing in New York, worked with AFL/CIO to fight for a living wage bill for city workers paid by contractors

• white evangelicals are largely absent

• economic development, neighborhood improvement programs, combat poverty, promote solutions to economic and social development

• SEIU, community based approach

• 1. faith based organizing, 2. community development corporations, 3. unions.

• “They represent one of the nation’s best hopes for reinvigorating our democratic life and reconnection political institutions to the needs and aspirations of working people and their communities.”(9)

• our goal is to become racially inclusive with regards to politics but also to become more politically effective

• “Revitalizing American political life requires connecting it to community-based institutions and the values that sustain them. Since these institutions and the social fabric of many American communities, that is, their social capital, are so weak, democratic renewal requires community building. In other words, the two processes must be linked.”(11)

• need stable institutions of community life (15)

• need multiracial cooperation & effective power in the political arena

• local party organizations would penetrate a dense network of social organizations: fraternal associations, volunteer fire departments, Catholic parishes, and local business associations

• political campaigns would include marches/fairs where people socialized

• unions + churches + fraternal orders + veteran’s associations > impact on the Democratic Party

• TV: candidate centered, not party-centered elections

• “While political parties still play an important role in elections in nominating and fundraising vehicles, their local party organizations have atrophied as mobilizing vehicles.”(16, Dry Bones Rattling)

• The American legion helped create the GI Bill

• women’s clubs helped pass welfare legislation

• 1990s: decline in social capital

• civic life is essential to democratic life

• “Tocqueville, a French aristocrat, came to the USA in the 1830s to determine why American society supported a democratic form of government while his native France was so easily controlled by a central political authority. The key to democracy in America could be found in the set of social & political institutions-voluntary associations, town meetings,free press, churches that sustained cooperative activity & self government.”(17)

• individual well being connected to well being of the whole community

• today: decline in participation: parent/teacher, women’s clubs, fraternal organizations, Boy Scouts, Red Cross, league bowling

• small groups that provide support/caring have increased: Bible studies, Alcoholics Anonymous

• advocacy groups: National Organization For Women (NOW), Sierra Club, organizations of Hispanics, African Americans, and gays & lesbians, American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)

• the downside of advocacy groups like National Organization For Women (NOW) & Sierra Club is that few have active local chapters in which large numbers of people work together

• “Neither small groups nor national social movements, whatever their contributions, have helped to restore community foundations for democracy. If we want to revitalize democracy in America, then we need to find ways to build social capital at the level of local community institutions.”(19)

• building social capital: 1) start with institutions in communities, 2) develop leadership capacity of community members & cooperative ties, 3) strong local communities can be isolated. Thus broader identities & a commitment to the common good must be developed. Need to stretch social capital across communities especially those divided by race. 4) effective power requires creating institutions capable of intervening in politics & government

• Part One: care for one another within institutions, religion is one means of social connectedness, churches sponsor community activities, churches: stable institutional base for democracy

• YMCA, YWCA, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, schools: provide social services

• “a vision of social justice can inspire members of oppressed groups to action.”(21)

• “Rather than root politics in narrow religious teachings on controversial social issues, we need an approach that engages the community networks and religious traditions of congregations to inform an agenda that serves the more concrete needs of families and communities.”(22)

• Part two: persons are shaped by and oriented by their communities, in inner-cities social capital has deteriorated. Middle class blacks moved to suburbs, crime made people afraid to participate in community events, building social capital requires leadership,

• “The affluent have more of the individual resources, like money and education, that can substitute for a decline in social assets. If their public schools and community centers fail, the affluent can and do send their children to private schools and summer camps. The poor are left defenseless.”(25, Community Building, Political Renewal)

• Part Three: strategy to bring people together across communities, community life in USA is extremely segregated by race & class

• Catholics refused to allow black Protestants into their communities

• “Any effort to build social capital to revitalize democracy will require a strategy to confront this deep history of racism and racial conflict. Such a strategy is all the more important if greater democracy is to lead to concrete improvements in the quality of inner-city life.”(26, Community Building, Political Renewal)

• in what institutions can people of different races interact?

• religion could help cooperation, have to find common ground

• Part Four: communities need to be able to assert themselves politically, need more cooperation

• “American society has deeply rooted structures of inequality in its economic, social, and political systems. Efforts to harness social capital, especially for the purpose of bringing effective power to inner city communities, must confront the reality of oppression and inequality.”(29, Community Building, Political Renewal)

• community development corporations exclude community members, oops!

• need more local, participatory action

• IAF strategy: recruit citizens in stable community networks, encourages women to emerge as leaders, build affordable housing, improve local schools, fund libraries and health clinics, repair streets and infrastructure,develop job training programs, improve public safety, identify issues on which community members are prepared to act together, “never do for people what they can do for themselves.”(32)

• creating consensus across socioeconomic and racial lines

• independent, nonpartisan strategy: voter-registration & get out to vote drives, accountability nights: representatives must agree publicly to support certain initiatives

• there are no fundamental differences that cannot be bridged between groups

• relational organizing

• bottom-up organizing as opposed to top-down, hierarchy

• authority needs to be legitimate, inclusive and accountable (p.35)

• old time politics: voters connected to their community organizations

• advocacy groups: useful to middle and upper middle classes but not the working class

• old-politics: votes for jobs