Justice at the Gates of the
City: A Model for Shared Prosperity
By
Ernesto Cortes, Jr.
In ancient
Equity
in the distribution of the costs and benefits of economic change (i.e., shared
prosperity) ultimately requires political institutions guided by a sense of
justice for all. Consequently, political
institutions and the moral vision that guides their development are important
issues in the debate on how to restore broadly shared prosperity in
America’s Growing Prosperity
Gap
During
the last twenty-five years, the economic security of virtually all families --
particularly those whose incomes depend upon work -- has been gradually eroded
by a combination of forces affecting the labor market and the economy.[2] Over the same period, these forces have also
generated enormous prosperity: corporate
profits have risen and the real wealth and assets of the top five percent of
the population have increased significantly.
Given the recent deterioration of our public life, the institutions that
control economic decision-making are now dominated by the interests of an
increasingly narrow band of people (i.e., the top 5% of wealth holders).
As a result, the mechanism that once enabled a reasonably equitable
distribution of the costs and benefits of economic change -- that is, a vibrant
public life connected to strong intermediate institutions -- no longer
exists. Consequently, those at the
bottom of the income distribution have been made to absorb a disproportionate
share of the costs of economic change without receiving any of the commensurate
benefits. One of the most important
causes of declining incomes and poverty among working Americans is this
inequity in the distribution of the benefits and costs of economic change.
If
we are serious about restoring broadly shared prosperity to the United States,
we must take action to reverse the deterioration of our public life and its
institutions, especially those community-based institutions (i.e., labor
unions, schools, churches and other voluntary associations) that were the
foundation of civic culture and historically have buffered working families
from the worst effects of a changing economy.
Only through the revitalization of such institutions can working people
acquire the power to negotiate with politicians, corporate leaders, and other
decision-makers and thereby restore the balance in power that enables
prosperity to be shared.
Triumph of the Market
Culture
The
changes in the economy are reflective of the broader changes in the rest of
society -- in institutions, families, politics and public discourse. A society that not very long ago cultivated
relationships, conversation and reasonably vibrant public forums, now
cultivates disconnected, self-absorbed, narcissistic individuals. More and more we are yielding to the
materialistic, self-centered values of a commercialized and commodified
society that has embraced the hegemony of the market imperialists. As a result, more and more of us are living
according to individual preferences, needs, and desires without any regard to
the common good.
The
market is an important institution; it generates wealth, allocates resources,
and engenders efficiency and innovation.
But the market -- despite its important societal roles -- has no regard
for, and is often inimical to, the common good. In other words, the market is amoral and
myopic; it is effective in the short run, but is often incapable of effectively
reflecting long-term values, visions and interests. The market left to itself
is incompetent in dealing with issues of equity with respect to the costs and
benefits of economic change. As Arthur Okun says, if given the chance
(if left unrestricted), “the tyranny of the dollar yardstick” will “sweep away
all other values and establish a vending machine society”. [3] This dimension of the market is why he argues
that although the market has its place, it must be
kept in its place. Unfortunately, the recent decline in incomes for working
people and the great prosperity experienced by a favored few are evidence that
the tyranny of the market has already taken hold.
In
his article “The New Society of Organizations”, Peter Drucker
paints a bleak future, devoid of community, in which multinational corporations
become the new Leviathan, conducting our public lives for us, standing as the
only entities capable of staving off Hobbes’s “war of all against all,” in
which life becomes “nasty, brutish and short.” Drucker finds himself unable to answer his own questions: “Who will take care of the Common Good? Who will define it?” [4] We must have answers to those questions if we
intend to reverse the trends of the last quarter century -- that is, if we intend to prevent the market culture from
continuing to grow at the expense of working families.
The Industrial Areas
Foundation (IAF)
Currently, both the state
and the market reflect the interests of the dominant culture, which seems
intent on squeezing out any space for a vibrant civic culture. The market has rendered human beings to
customers, and the state apparatus has reduced us to clients or service
recipients. Neither one has allowed any
space for the development of an active citizenship. Given the alternative between the
bureaucratic state apparatus or the market culture, ordinary people are left
without any institutional mechanism through which to understand and fight for
their interests, and therefore without any way to deal effectively and
collaboratively with the new economic forces currently wreaking havoc with their
lives.
Founded by Saul Alinsky
and currently directed by Ed Chambers, the IAF is the center of a national
network of broad-based, multi-ethnic, interfaith organizations in poor and
moderate income communities. These
organizations work to renew local democracy by fostering the competence and
confidence of ordinary citizens to reorganize the relationships of power and
politics and restructure the physical and civic infrastructure of their
communities. To that end, the IAF
provides leadership training for more than 40 organizations representing over
1,000 institutions and one million families, principally in New York, Texas,
California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nebraska, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland,
Tennessee, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.[5] The IAF also has a training relationship with
the Citizens Organizing Foundation of the United Kingdom.
Local IAF organizations, such as
Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, are funded by
the membership dues of community institutions, mainly churches and
schools. In some communities, however,
other voluntary associations are dues paying members, such as the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in Baltimore, Maryland. Dues pay for the salaries of senior
organizers, and a contract between each local organization and the IAF to train
and develop leadership. In addition,
funding for special projects, including regional seminars and the Alliance
School initiative, is provided by private foundations.
In short, the primary mission of the
IAF is to teach people to ask and to answer Drucker’s
questions about the common good. The IAF
organizations function as mini-universities where thousands of people learn how
to define their own interests and negotiate them intentionally with the
interests of others and thereby develop a more concrete understanding of the
common good. This understanding emerges
through ongoing negotiations that lead to collaborative action and thereby
generate empathy, trust, reciprocity, and solidarity.
More
specifically, the IAF teaches ordinary citizens to build broad-based
organizations to fill the vacuum left by the deterioration of the mediating
institutions of their communities -- families, neighborhoods, congregations,
local unions, local political parties, neighborhood schools, and other civic
associations. It teaches them to rebuild
damaged institutions, fashion new ones, and enter into the public relationships
of democratic politics. It teaches them
the skills of listening, respecting differences, arguing in good faith,
negotiating, compromising, and holding themselves and others accountable for
their commitments. In rebuilding civil
society, the IAF provides a potential model for stemming the seemingly inexorable
expansion of the market culture to ensure that the market culture, despite its
benefits, does not continue to grow at the expense of working families and of
the civil society that is requisite for a vigorous democratic culture.
One
of the most dangerous consequences of current trends in wages and incomes is
the deteriorating effect they have had on our social fabric. Due to the decline of the intermediate
institutions that historically have embodied this social fabric, there is much
misplaced anger, resentment and fear among working people, who are distracted
from their real difficulties by such issues as welfare and immigration. (Organizing in communities in the southwest,
the IAF has discovered that often these feelings are related to people’s sense
of powerlessness in the changing economy, as Harvard Professor Michael Sandel asserts in Democracy’s
Discontent.)[6] Further dividing different socioeconomic and
ethnic groups and polarizing the political system, elected officials and
candidates for public office exploit these misplaced sentiments by attacking
issues in isolation. Ultimately, voters
support mean-spirited, divisive initiatives without much forethought (e.g.,
Proposition 187 in California that denied illegal aliens certain public
services). This deterioration in civil
society makes it increasingly difficult to develop the unified political
constituency necessary to effectively address the current economic challenges
facing working families.
Politics, Community, and Organization
The IAF
recognizes that problems such as poverty and unemployment are not simply
matters of income. They are a crushing
burden on the soul, and people who suffer under their weight often view
themselves as incapable of participating in the civic culture and political
community. The kind of development that
enables a civic and political sense of self to emerge requires connecting
people to networks, relationships, and institutions that make collective action
possible and meaningful. Connecting
people in such a manner creates the conditions necessary for the development of
politics -- politics that is about listening, deliberation, narrative, and
engagement, which then leads to the development and transformation of the human
spirit.
The
development of such politics is going to require institutions that teach people
that politics is not about polls, focus groups, and television ads, but about
engaging in public discourse and initiating collective action guided by that
discourse. In politics, it is not enough
to be right or to have a coherent position; one also must be reasonable and
willing to make concessions, exercise judgment, and find terms that others can
accept as well. Politics is about
relationships that enable people to disagree, argue, interrupt, confront, and
negotiate, and, through this process of conversation and debate, to forge a
consensus or compromise that makes it possible for them to act. The practical wisdom revealed in politics is
the equivalent of good judgment and praxis--action that is both intentional and
reflective. In praxis, the most
important part of action is the reaction that provides the basis for the
evaluation and the sustained reflection.
The reflections provide the material for the telling, re-telling, and
reinterpretation of the story, which enables the story to endure and provide
the grist for continuous learning. As Hannah Arendt has said: “No remembrance remains secure unless it is
condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions, within which it
can further exercise itself.
Experience and even stories which grow out of what men do and endure, of
happenings and events, sink back into the futility inherent in the living words
and the living deed unless they are talked about over and over again.”[7]
In The Presence of the Past, Sheldon Wolin describes our birthright as our political identity.[8] Echoing Aristotle’s idea that we are
political beings--that a part of us emerges only
through participation in public life--Wolin
emphasizes our capacity to initiate action in collaboration with other human
beings. Such action often has an element
of public drama. But in the IAF,
political action is more than drama. It
combines the symbolism of active citizenship with real political efficacy,
creating the opportunity to
restructure schools, revitalize neighborhoods, create job training programs,
increase access to health care, or initiate flood control programs.
In addition
to tangible improvements in public services, such politics recreates and
reorganizes the ways in which people, networks of relationships, and
institutions operate: It builds real community.
But when people lack the organizations that enable them to connect to
real political power and participate effectively in public life, these social
relationships disintegrate. We learn to
act in ways that are not responsive to our community. There is neither time nor energy for
collaboration; there is no reciprocity, no trust--in short, no social capital.[9]
To reverse the
current dissolution of our community, we need to rebuild our civic culture by
investing in those institutions that enable people to learn, to develop
leadership, and to build relationships -- to become, in
Congregation and
University
The IAF
organizations are primarily a federation of associations, organizations, and
congregations -- that is, institutions of faith that are agitated by the
Judeo-Christian tradition and the values and vision of a free and open
society. In this context, “faith” does
not mean a particular system of religious beliefs, but a more profound
affirmation that life has meaning that is transcendent.
The root of
the word religion is “re-ligare”, which means to bind
together that which has become disconnected.
The best elements in our religious traditions are inclusive--respecting
diversity, and conveying a plurality of symbols that incorporate the experiences
of diverse peoples. Congregations convey
traditions that connect people in the present and hold them accountable to past
and future generations. These
institutions--churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples--are connected to
networks of families, neighborhoods, schools and other voluntary
associations. Unfortunately, they are
virtually the only institutions in society that are fundamentally concerned
with the nature and well-being of families and communities.
Religious
faith, history, and tradition are important because they embody the struggles
of those who have gone before--their struggles both to understand and to
act. Reflecting on these efforts, one
learns not to take oneself too seriously and to recognize the limits of what
can be accomplished in a lifetime or in a generation. Traditions -- to the extent that they are
meaningful and useful -- provide a framework for dealing with ambiguity, irony,
and tragedy.
Fundamentally,
IAF organizations are the “mini-universities” of their communities. Like universities, these broad-based
organizations provide arenas in which a wide variety of people with multiple
agendas and traditions can engage in constrained conflict, opening the
historical contradictions within and among our traditions to inquiry and
reflection.
Leadership
IAF leaders
-- ordinary people from all walks of life -- begin their development in
one-on-one conversations with a skilled organizer. These conversations represent an exchange of
views, judgments and commitments. IAF
organizers see themselves as teachers, mentors, and agitators who constantly
cultivate leadership for the organization.
Their job is to teach people how to form relationships with other
leaders and to develop a network -- a collective of relationships able to build
the power to enable them to act. Leaders
initially learn politics through conversation and negotiation with one
another. As they develop a broader
vision of their self-interest, they begin to recognize their connections and
their responsibilities to each other and to the community.
Organizing
people around vision and values allows institutions to address specific
concerns more effectively. Beginning
with small, winnable issues--fixing a streetlight, putting up a stop sign --
they move carefully into larger arenas -- making a school a safe and civil
place for children to learn. And then to still larger issues -- setting an agenda for a
municipal capital improvement budget, strategizing with corporate leaders and
members of the City Council on economic growth policies, developing new
initiatives in job training, health care, and public education. When ordinary people become engaged and shift
from political spectators to political agents, when they begin to play large
public roles, they develop confidence in their own competence.
Power and the Iron Rule
Most people
have an intuitive grasp of Lord Acton’s dictum about the tendency of power to
corrupt. To avoid appearing corrupted,
they shy away from power. But
powerlessness also corrupts--perhaps more pervasively than power itself. IAF leaders learn quickly that understanding
politics requires understanding power.
A central
element of that understanding is that there are two kinds of power. Unilateral power tends to be coercive and
domineering. It is the power of one
party treating another as an object to be instructed and directed. Relational power is more complicated. Developed subject-to-subject, it is
transformative, changing the nature of the situation and of the self. The IAF has spent 50 years teaching people to
develop such relational power, mastering the capacity to act, and the
reciprocal capacity to allow oneself to be acted upon.
Relational
power is both collectively effective and individually transformative. The potential of ordinary people fully
emerges only when they are able to translate their self-interests in issues
such as family, property, and education into the common good through an
intermediary organization. Each of the IAF’s victories is the fruit of the personal growth of
thousands of leaders--housewives, clergy, bus drivers, secretaries, nurses,
teachers--who have
learned from the IAF how to participate and negotiate with the
business and political leaders and bureaucrats we normally think of as our
society’s decision-makers.
Guided by
the Iron Rule, “Never do for others what they can do for themselves,” IAF organizations
have won their victories not by speaking for ordinary people but by teaching
them how to speak, act, and engage in politics for themselves.
At its
heart, managing change does not so much depend upon the physical capital of
tools and factories, the financial capital of money and assets, or even the
human capital of accumulated knowledge and skills, as it does upon the social
capital of communities. The capacity to
innovate, to re-adjust, and to maintain common efforts in the face of
uncertainty depends upon the trust and mutual commitment among those who do the
work of our society -- front-line workers, managers, entrepreneurs,
researchers, technicians, engineers, owners, shareholders, bondholders,
families, employers, teachers, bankers, and many others.
There is no
single “method” or “recipe” for dealing with the complexities of our new
economic world. That is why intermediary
institutions are so vital in devising strategies: Only through the real
conversations and relationships--the social capital--on which these
institutions are based can the interests of particular communities be
translated into real, effective action on behalf of working families. And certainly, the work of rebuilding
intermediary institutions through conversation and action is, indeed,
replicable.
The IAF Record
In
organizing communities around the well-being of families throughout the United
States, the leaders of the IAF have reached a number of conclusions about what
it will take to reduce inequality.[10] In particular, we believe that redistributing
resources to support individuals earlier in their lives is critical to
sustaining a civil society in this nation.[11] Our organizations have found that resources
invested in public education, after-school programs, preventive health care for
children, summer work experiences for adolescents, college scholarships and
similar strategies greatly improve the chances of those children when they
become adults. Decades of experience
have allowed our organizations to see the adults these children have
become. They are now leaders in their
community and in our organizations.
The
cornerstone in our efforts to support individuals earlier in their lives is the
Alliance Schools Initiative, which is a relatively recent strategy developed by
the leaders of the IAF. As described by
Frank Levy and Richard Murnane in Teaching the New Basic Skills, this
initiative is a strategy for increasing student achievement through the kind of
school restructuring that can only be created and sustained through the work of
a broad-based collective constituency of parents, teachers, administrators and
community leaders.[12]
Alliance Schools create a core
constituency of advocates that is able to build the relationships necessary to
change the culture of schools and the communities they serve. In Alliance Schools, parents, teachers,
school administrators, and other community leaders learn how to work together
to mobilize people and resources to carry out initiatives that improve their
schools and neighborhoods, such as after-school programs, in-school health
clinics, learning opportunities for adults, and innovative curriculums, to
mention only a few. These initiatives
support learning directly in a variety of ways but, most importantly, they
transform the attitudes and expectations of students, parents, teachers,
administrators, and entire communities.
In short, leaders (i.e., parents, teachers, administrators and concerned
community members) develop confidence in their ability to act together to bring
about positive change, which in turn creates higher expectations for success
among all school stakeholders, including students.
Relative to
schools of similar socioeconomic status that received equal amounts of
supplemental resources, not only has student attendance increased at the
Alliance Schools in
But for all the
strategies that we have tested and have found successful, the one strategy upon
which the success of all others depends is
organizing a broad-based constituency for change. Every successful IAF strategy, including the
Alliance Schools Initiative, is a testament to the power of a constituency
organized for change. Yet, organizing is
the strategy that most progressives talk about the least.
Imagine what
would happen if, in seventy-five congressional districts, each candidate
attended a meeting with 2,500 to 3,000 organized, registered voters - each
committed to turning out at least ten of their neighbors on election day. What if at those public meetings each
candidate was asked to make specific commitments to support several elements of
a carefully crafted human development agenda, a commitment to extended day
enrichment programs for all children, universal health care, a family wage,
long-term job training, affordable housing -- important elements in any serious
effort to reduce inequality and the decline of real wages. Imagine that the agenda had been forged
through a year-long process of house meetings, small group meetings in churches
and schools -- meetings where people’s private pain could be transformed into
public action. Imagine the new
leadership that would be developed through such a process. Imagine the dignity of working people and
their families as they collectively forged a powerful role in the governance of
their communities and their country. But
more importantly, imagine the trust, reciprocity, and solidarity that would
emerge -- and has emerged -- with this type of strategy. Imagine the revitalization of schools,
congregations, and communities as people take responsibility for the vitality
of these institutions. Imagine the hope
that would be engendered as people began to feel confident about the competence
of these institutions to solve their problems.
This campaign of conversation would have created a broad-based
constituency with ownership of the agenda, a constituency committed to doing
the public business and follow-up work necessary to hold the candidates
accountable for their commitments.
The IAF has
an organizing strategy for making this happen.
It is called “Sign Up, Take Charge”.
Sign Up, Take Charge is a voter education, registration and turn-out
strategy that mobilizes voters around a specific agenda and seeks commitments
of candidates in support of that agenda.
The Power of
Reinvigorated Social and Political Institutions
The organization
of a broad-based constituency for change is possible because the IAF has been
doing it on a smaller scale for over fifty years now. The IAF is now the center of a national
network of organizations that has produced real results. These results demonstrate the power of
reinvigorated social and political institutions and have become the core of a
renewed human and community development agenda:
Employment and Work: Long-term Job
Training Strategies: The organizations of the IAF have a
proven track record in devising innovative labor market strategies to combat
the seemingly intractable forces of the global economy. Much of the organizations’ work over the last
several years has focused on high skill/high wage training strategies first
developed by Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) and the Metro
Alliance in
These
initiatives have done much more than train and place hundreds of low-wage,
underemployed and unemployed people who otherwise would not have had an
opportunity for high skill/high wage careers.
More importantly, they have provided tangible justification for public
investment of time, money, and energy in an economic development strategy that
pays off for ordinary families. They
have demonstrated several important, though historically disputed, facts:
·
High-wage
opportunities exist in even traditionally low-wage urban sectors and
regions. Active, publicly supported
economic development efforts can find, exploit, and in some cases even create
these opportunities for the overall benefit of the community.
·
Low-wage,
underemployed workers can obtain high-wage, high-skill occupations given the
opportunity and support.
·
Long-term
investments justify their costs.
Professor Paul Osterman’s evaluation of
Project QUEST found that while participants required almost $11,000 each for
eighteen months of training,
they increased their earnings by $4,500 to $7,000 per year as a
result. In other words, Project QUEST returned its investment
within two to three years with the increased earnings of
·
The
high-skill/high-wage initiatives justify public investment in job training and
other labor market interventions at a time when such investment is under attack
from ideological conservatives who argue that the labor market will correct
itself if “left alone.” All the
initiatives report that businesses have approached them with training and
recruitment needs.
·
The
initiatives demonstrate the success of collaboration among community and
business leaders who often have been at odds.
In
·
The
initiatives serve as models of publicly driven economic development strategies
that provide benefits to communities and their families, the taxpayers at
large, and employer and business constituencies. As such, they provide important alternatives
to public economic development strategies that serve narrower interests, such
as tax abatements and public construction of entertainment facilities.
Living Wage Strategies: The IAF’s
a prime tourist destination. In the short run, the organizations have
convinced the city to contract with an independent economist for a cost-benefit
analysis of the hotel proposal. In the
future, COPS and the Metro Alliance will work to establish as city policy a
commitment to invest only in living wage
jobs. They have already persuaded the
San Antonio Independent School District School Board to declare a moratorium on
school district tax abatements.
The Alliance Schools: It is a familiar truism that the
best antipoverty strategy is an education strategy. It is also a fact that support for public
schools has weakened to previously unimaginable levels. As the leaders of the
Industrial Areas Foundation network of organizations developed their vision of
reforming public education (embodied in the 1990 paper “Communities of
Learners”), they came to understand the necessity of developing schools as
community institutions.[14] If schools were to prepare our children to
attain high levels of achievement, all stakeholders--teachers, parents,
community leaders, administrators, public officials--would have to be held
accountable for effective, directed collaboration. They connected these parties in the Alliance
Schools Initiative which, as described above, is a partnership committed to
fundamentally changing the way that schools and communities work together for
student achievement.
In 1993, the leaders’ broad-based, statewide
constituency brought the legislature into the partnership, which then set aside
$2 million for the Investment Capital Fund (ICF) and established an open grants
competition to fund schools committed to reform, local control, and local
accountability for results. In 1995, the
Legislature accorded the ICF permanent status in the Texas Education Code, and
in 1997, it increased funding for the ICF to $8 million for the biennium. With a membership of 140 schools--and a plan
to grow during the coming biennium--the Alliance Schools Initiative continues
to garner national, state and local acclaim for its success in making its
vision of schools as public institutions a reality.
To date, the record of the Alliance
Schools Initiative is impressive. From
1993 to 1996, twenty-five of the original twenty-seven Alliance Schools
experienced a 20.4 percent increase in the number of students passing every section of the Texas Assessment of
Academic Skills test (TAAS). In
addition, seventy-one of the eighty-nine Alliance Schools in
Citizenship: Many of the IAF organizations have begun to
implement strategies for engaging legal residents in citizenship; over 15,000
families have been connected to our organizations over the last two years. In
Taken
together, these concrete accomplishments (and numerous others not listed)
represent what is possible for ordinary citizens who have the opportunity to
work collaboratively with one another in the political arena. But for this to happen, we have to first go
about the business of rebuilding the institutions through which ordinary
citizens can practice true politics.
Because our political system has failed to address the concerns of
working families seriously and effectively, much of our adult population is
convinced that politics is largely irrelevant to their lives. And this alienation has impoverished public
discourse itself.
The Promise of a New
Democratic Politics
One of the most important causes of American
poverty, as stated earlier, is that working people are being asked to absorb a
disproportionate share of the costs of contemporary economic change without
receiving any of the commensurate benefits. A dynamic economy always imposes such
costs, and those who are the least powerful -- the least articulate, least
connected, least organized -- invariably bear an inordinate share of the
burden. When civic institutions fail to
buffer citizens from the market, the effects show up at the bottom line: Real
wages for most workers in the
Although the
theory of welfare economics implies that the winners (those who benefit from economic
change) are supposed to compensate those who bear the costs of that change so
that economic growth may continue, in simple terms, today’s winners are not
compensating the losers. Historically
the balance between the winners and the losers has been maintained somewhat
through the social safety net and, most importantly, the implicit social
compact that ensured wage and benefits increases during times of economic
prosperity. But recently wages have
stagnated or declined despite great prosperity, and what safety net existed has
been destroyed. Through their positions
of power and influence, the winners have developed the capacity to rationalize
and legitimize their greed in the name of the free market. They now completely control those
institutions charged with buffering families from the vagaries of the
economy. Consequently, it is imperative
that those who claim to be concerned about fairness, equity and stability begin
to operate in such a way as to facilitate genuine power sharing. And equally important, the least powerful
members of society must organize themselves and their allies to develop the
power necessary to persuade and negotiate with the winners for their fair share
of prosperity.
In order for
this kind of power-sharing to occur, we must create a public dialogue about
revitalizing and renewing our social and political institutions. Only within the context of such a public
conversation can we create the intermediary institutions that can serve as a
vehicle for teaching and organizing the less powerful.
The
rehabilitation of our political and civic culture requires a new politics, with
authentically democratic mediating institutions--teaching, mentoring, and
building an organized constituency with the power and imagination to initiate
change. The work of IAF is to establish
a public space in which ordinary people can learn and develop the skills of
public life, and to create the institutions of a new democratic politics. With organized citizens and strong mediating
institutions, our communities can address structural inequalities of the
economy for themselves, restore health and integrity to our political process,
mitigate the distortions created by organized concentrations of wealth, and--in
the end--reclaim the vision and promise of American life.
We must
resist the temptation to simply have all of the best policy ideas, without the
willingness to work for the realization of those ideas. Regarding the need for a specific policy
initiative, Franklin D. Roosevelt is reported to have said something like: Okay, you’ve convinced me ... Now go out
there and organize and create a constituency to make me do it. Unfortunately it seems that too many
progressives are still caught up in the “convincing,” when what we need now is
the constituency. What we need now are
people who are willing to think hard about how to create, sustain and energize
that constituency and connect it to institutions that will challenge and
consolidate the power of that constituency.
Hopefully, in this way we can restore the vision of the Old Testament
prophets in their cry for justice at the gates of the city.
[1]
Victor Matthews and Don C. Benjamin, Social World of Ancient
[2] An abundance of research has concluded that wage inequality today is higher than at any time since World War II. See, for example, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, “U.S. Earnings Levels and Earnings Inequality: A Review of Recent Trends and Proposed Explanations”, Journal of Economic Literature 30, (September 1992): pp. 1333-1381; and Janet L. Norwood, Widening Earnings Inequality: Why and Why Now, (Washington D.C.: Urban Institute, 1994).
[3] Arthur M. Okun, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff. (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1975, p. 119).
[4] Peter F. Drucker, “The New Society of Organizations”, Harvard Business Review, (September-October 1992): pp. 95-104.
[5]
The IAF is involved in developing broad-based institutions in urban and rural
as well as suburban areas in each of these states. In addition, the IAF is experimenting with
metropolitan strategies in
[6] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
[7] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), p. 222.
[8] Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
[9]
Social capital is the network of relationships not only among people (as
described by James Coleman in “Schools and Communities,”
[10]See
Ernesto Cortes, Jr., “What About Organizing,”
[11]See Ernesto Cortes, Jr., “Organizing Communities and Constituents for Change,” in Reinventing Early Care and Education: A Vision for a Quality System, ed. Sharon Lynn Kagan and Nancy E. Cohen (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996).
[12] Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy, Teaching the New Basic Skills. (New York: The Free Press, 1996).
[13] COPS leaders
pressured several local business owners to support and lobby the Mayor and the
City of
[14] Texas IAF Network, “The Texas IAF Vision for Public Schools: Communities of Learners,” 1990, unpublished.