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By
Mike Evans, Community Organizer, Michigan Organizing Project
Kalamazoo, MI
W orking
on the Michigan Organizing Project (MOP) campaign for an Affordable
Housing Trust Fund in Kalamazoo, Mich., I’ve come to a deeper
understanding of the classic Iron Rule of organizing: “never
do for others what they can do for themselves.”
Grassroots leaders must not only select the organizing issues, those
leaders must also be directly involved in each phase of the organizing
campaign from developing strategy to directly confronting targets.
There is always the temptation to take shortcuts, using already
experienced leaders or looking for the best research, the best information,
to win the argument with our opponents. But when our organizations
fail to involve the people most directly affected by problems (usually
the poorest and most pressured people) in the fight for a
solution, we fail to build the very power we will need in future
battles!
When MOP held an issues assembly in January 2003 to select three
core issues for the year, housing was a surprising first choice.
There are many, many ways to cut a housing issue but MOP decided
to begin developing the housing issue ”cut” by
talking to people with the most severe housing problem of all -
the homeless.
MOP uses an institutional organizing model and one of our member
institutions is Ministry with Community, a homeless service
center.
One-on -one conversations with the homeless members of the Ministry
quickly revealed that most of them work and almost all had some
source of monthly income. The one-on-ones also showed that despite
hard work and regular income, the homeless cannot afford the market
cost of rental housing so they spend most of their money living
in motels for as many days as possible between paychecks.
With our information, the issue cut was simple: an affordable
housing trust fund to pay for the construction of at least
1,000 affordable housing units by the year 2010.
Weekly strategy meetings were then held to identify targets, pick
tactics and to rehearse public testimony. Homeless leaders decided
to first approach the Kalamazoo City Commission and they testified
twice about their personal fear and desperation. The direct testimony
was so powerful, that a special session of the Commission was scheduled
to review funding for housing programs in the 2004 budget.
Knowing that we needed specific public commitments from elected
officials, we then scheduled an accountability meeting at an inner
city church and invited the Mayor and City Commissioners. Homeless
leaders helped plan, rehearse and conduct that meeting which was
dubbed the Housing Summit.
It takes power to move public officials to attend uncomfortable
accountability meetings and I think we acheived this power through
using these grasssroots leaders.
Five officials, including the mayor, came to the housing summit.
Three leaders presented personal testimony, the most powerful of
which was delivered by Michael Kilbourne, a homeless restaurant
cook.
“We are standing up and defending our lives and our very existence
here and now! We are living out the very injustice we're fighting
against. For as long as the problem exists, we’re not
letting up! We’re not letting up!” Kilbourne said at
the meeting.
Only someone like Kilbourne could speak so powerfully on this issue
because he lives it everyday. Sometimes it takes a bit of reflection
to realize sometimes the best strategy is to go back to the basics
of organizing, and to make sure to use the grassroots leaders every
step of the way.
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