Open Conflict

Kalamazoo’s Historic Leadership Club vs. Community Organizing

Intensive community organizing efforts have been taking place in Kalamazoo for the past three or four years. The Michigan Organizing Project and the Kalamazoo Homeless Action Network have been formed by the poorest people in our city: undocumented immigrants and people who are homeless.

Local government officials, leaders of well-connected and well-financed non-profit organizations, community policy wonks, and the local newspaper’s editorial staff have not appreciated the involvement of these new groups.

The new groups don’t use the model that dominates decision-making in Kalamazoo. The community organizing model does not seek change by cultivating friendships and social relationships with the elite group of citizens who make most, if not all, of the public policy decisions in our community.

Kalamazoo’s leadership model requires anyone interested in community change to try to get included in the network of social policy decision-makers in Kalamazoo. But this is not the route taken by community organizing.

The community organizing approach directs people who see the need for community change to work to get to know – not the elite decision makers – but rather, more and more people who are suffering from the injustices in the community. Then, as people suffering from the social problems directly develop a network with each other, the next step is analyzing who has the power that keeps the inequities and social problems in place – and who has the power to begin to change this equilibrium of inequity.

Finally, the organizing approach means that the people suffering from the problem go directly to those who have the power and challenge them to make changes. This challenge for change is not based on friendship or insider trust. It is based on experience of the problem, the system of democratic government, and a theological and philosophical commitment to justice for all.

One tremendous contribution the community organizing model makes to our community conversation is that it can inject an element of reality into the discussion. Government officials and leaders of non-profit organizations are powerfully drawn to self-congratulation. Obviously, government officials and non-profit leaders who live in comfortable middle-class homes may lack some of the urgency of those who are homeless.

The community organizing approach has none of the suave ambiance of Kalamazoo’s dominant insider-based model. Community organizing doesn’t take place in the venerable plantation atmosphere of the Park Club or some conspicuously well-appointed office downtown. Community organizing meetings don’t begin with banter about fancy new cars or interesting vacations. The atmosphere is never elegant.

Local leaders who vet potential members of the clique through rituals of mutual appreciation and cultivation often find the community organizing efforts to be shocking, discordant, and outrageous. “Who are these ungrateful poor people? How dare they complain about inequities and injustices after all that we, the well-meaning elite, have tried to do for them?”

Local reactions to the efforts of MOP and KHAN have been intense. The intensity itself illustrates the need for these efforts. The anger and contempt of local responses remind me of factory owners’ responses to union organizing efforts and the responses of white elites in communities all across the country to the efforts of black civil rights organizers, and especially toward those who spoke of “black power.”

These two community organizing efforts and their many spokespeople have not done
everything perfectly, but there is no question in my mind that if we are to see a more just Kalamazoo in the future, extremely-low income people need to keep working, keep organizing. And we need MOP and KHAN to grow and gain strength, and to keep claiming the right to hold government officials and non-profit leaders accountable for changing the great injustices among us.

Thinking locally about justice

I have been working with homeless young men and women for the past 7 years at the Open Door and Next Door Shelters in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Over this seven-year partnership I have been learning about poverty and power in our community. There have been some real surprises.

We need more public dialogue on local suffering and injustice and on local decisions and practices. It is important to look at our life together as a community in terms of basic human need and equity.

I hope to contribute to this dialogue by sharing my observations and working out my thoughts on some of these subjects in this blog.

I believe there are people in local faith communities, in non-profit organizations that serve the poor, in local businesses and government offices who feel questions about justice and injustice are some of the most important questions in any time and in any community. I hope to encourage and contribute to our community conversation about these things.

We don't wrestle with these issues in a vacuum. The framework in which we wrestle with these issues is important. That framework involves several things for me. First, I was born seven years after the end of World War II. Photos and stories of the Holocaust on TV and in newspapers, magazines, and encyclopedias had a powerful influence on my thinking.

Another major influence during my childhood and youth was the emergence of the Civil Rights movement in our country. The Civil Rights movement turned a spotlight on injustice that was woven throughout the fabric of American life. This ferment also pushed into the forefront our country's practice of slavery.

These two elements of history -- the injustice toward the Jews and toward Americans with dark skin -- and how these injustices were accepted, affirmed, and promoted in society -- have shaped my sense of the importance of thinking about issues of justice and injustice in the life of one's community.

It is critical not to turn a blind eye to such things. It is essential and obligatory to listen to our neighbors.

Looking back at the powerful forces that first isolated the Jews, then led to systematic denigration, and finally to the murder of millions -- while life went on as usual for the bulk of German society -- we see that taking a careful look at our society's issues of justice is very important.

Seeing the lynching photos of small-town American citizens laughing in a mob beneath the body of an African American man hanging from a tree branch reminds me that we must not assume that common mores in a community are just.

Finally, I have been shaped by my experience in the Christian church, where I learned what still surprises me. The God described in the Bible is shown again and again to have a powerful concern for those who are a society's scapegoats, a deep alliance with the ones who do not have what human beings need to survive, a strong association with the cast out and rejected.

All these things have led me to believe that it is important to be alert and attentive to injustice in one's own time and place.