Smart opinion piece by Michael Gecan in the NY Daily News.

... Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to start an impeachment inquiry is the first step toward a possible congressional indictment of the president. It can also be seen as an attempt to diagnose whether or not the country needs constitutional chemotherapy. 

Twenty years after the first living-wage law was passed in Baltimore, the campaign’s lead organizer warns that the model has been watered down.  This prescient  piece written by Jonathan Lange in 2014 for the Nation is an even more urgent read NOW.  

The past few weeks has seen a drastic escalation in violence on the streets of Hong Kong. On Tuesday night, a police officer aimed a shotgun at protesters who had gathered outside a police station, while a car launched fireworks into the crowd. 
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Days earlier, the police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at protesters trying to reach the Chinese government’s office. 

​And the week before, following a protest of 430,000 people, vigilante thugs, dressed in white and carrying bamboo sticks, beat up democracy protesters at a train station.  

The rest here:  A smart piece by former IAF organizer Amanda Tattersall on Hong Kong protests.

After word spread that Sister Christine Stephens had passed away, I tried explaining who she was to a friend who had never met her.  Words tumbled out - “formidable, smart, compassionate, thoughtful, a towering figure, someone who had to be reckoned with by friend and foe, impossible to ignore, zeroed in on what mattered".  

“She was all that,” I said, “and more.”  “She relished a fight, and even picked some, but never with the intent of humiliating an adversary much less punching down to weakness.”

Keisha Krumm speaks at a news conference at City Hall in 2015 at which Nationstar Mortgage announced it would contribute $30.5 million to help Sherman Park homeowners recover from the foreclosure crisis. Photo courtesy of Common Ground.
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Milwaukee is a city that does not strengthen the hand of the poor. It seems, instead, to be satisfied with kind gestures of charity toward the symptoms of unfairness. Pope Pius XI said, “Charity will never be true charity unless it takes justice into account…. Let no one attempt with small gifts of charity to exempt themselves from the great duties imposed by justice.”

My over eight years in Milwaukee as Common Ground’s Executive Director and Lead Organizer has been dedicated to building justice with and for those left behind in this city. Common Ground has created controversy and tension, including pushing big banks and billionaires to recalculate their civic interest in broader terms. I am proud that we have had the moral courage to demand more than just charity for neighborhoods, education, health care, and housing.    Keisha Krumm's Full Op Ed in Urban Milwaukee here.
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Keisha Krumm has been organizing over 17 years with the IAF, including 8.5 years as the Lead Organizer for Common Ground, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She can be reached kmkrumm@gmail.com
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From the Washington Post:
One person who recognizes this disparity is Mike Gecan, senior organizer at Metro Industrial Areas Foundation based in Chicago. In something of a unique social experiment, Gecan is attempting to address obstacles faced by populations who are disadvantaged by residing in far-off areas of the map.  Opinion piece here.
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"Franklin D. Roosevelt is reported to have said about the need for a specific policy initiative, "Okay, you've convinced me. Now go out there and organize and create a constituency to make me do it." I fear that too many progressives are still caught up in the "convincing," when what we need now is the constituency-and people who are willing to think hard about how to create, sustain, and energize that constituency."   More from still timely piece in Boston Review.
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Miracle Workers

"The grand challenge that Arendt gave herself was the retrieval of the words most associated with politics—and therefore the words most ravaged through centuries of overuse and distortion."

Read the smart, timely piece here.

Over the course of my organizing career with IAF that spanned forty years I can’t recall a strategic idea worth pursuing or a tactic worth implementing that didn’t derive from relational meetings.  My recollections in many cases include the exact moment when the spark occurred:  The ashen face of a parent in Las Vegas describing the pimping of her child for sex; the tight jaw of a woman despondent over the number of children running loose after school in her neighborhood; the depression of a man whose year of government funded “job training” ended with no job in sight; an immigrant describing his ordeal crossing the border.
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“Power before program” is one of IAF Co-Director Ernie Cortes’ signature organizing mantras.  Implicit in his exhortation is adoption of IAF’s methodological innovations - first and foremost relational meetings, one to one, that are practices for building power.  Strategic, tactical and methodological innovations circle back on one another in a virtuous circle.  Where the power of IAF citizen organizations is successfully exercised, business as usual is disrupted as public space opens for more citizen leaders to impact public life with fresh initiatives, energy and action.  Troubled democracies everywhere need more of this. Their survival may depend on it.

In a year when countless political campaigns are “staffing up”, recruiting volunteers, and raising money, Central Texas Interfaith is doing the same, but with a different focus: aggressively building a broad and diverse collective of 500 leaders. Over the next 7 months, CTI will attempt to double its base of core leaders at its congregations, schools, unions, and social service organizations to fight for families and the issues affecting them: affordable housing, workforce development, living wages, local control, immigration, safe neighborhoods, and healthcare. Simply put, the goal of our “500 LEADERS CAMPAIGN” is to build the largest non-partisan, broad-based political organization in Central Texas.  Full story here.
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This blog is an attempt to convince community leaders and organizers that writing can be another tool in their power toolbox. It offers examples and suggestions on how to write both artfully and effectively. I have been a publisher for over thirty years and a community leader and organizer for almost fifty years, so the combination of these two topics is a natural for me, as in this piece.

Opinion piece in the Chicago Sun Times.
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We desperately need to reinvent the way we think and talk about problem-solving in America today

See books by Michael Gecan HERE.
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Democratic Faith, led by Frank C. Pierson, Jr. and ACTA Publications, led by Gregory F. Augustine Pierce, are teaming up to encourage Industrial Areas Foundation network (IAF) writing and communications.  We share a conviction that writing, publishing and broadly communicating stories by and about IAF leaders, organizers and allies is of vital importance right now.  To that end we call your attention to a series of community organizing booklets published by ACTA that are premier learning resources for anyone interested in building and/or supporting citizen organizing. 

Pierce and Pierson have decades of experience as professional IAF organizers dating back to the early 1970’s. We have renewed our relationship based on a shared commitment to add value to IAF organizing.

When you purchase books on the ACTA website and use coupon code DEMFAITH at final checkout, you will receive a 10% discount on your order, and ACTA Publications will donate 20% of your order total to Dem Faith and the IAF.
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Thousands of people fleeing situations of murder, rape and gang violence in Central America come to this country seeking asylum. They expect and ought to expect that they will receive a fair hearing. But they are greeted with gimmicks meant to circumvent the law in order to discourage them from pursuing their claims of asylum: people’s children are arbitrarily taken from them; people are told that they must wait in Mexico until their cases are heard; border patrol agents were even instructed by the president himself to lie to judges and say that they are unable to process more cases because they are overwhelmed (their supervisors instructed these same agents to ignore the president).

One might be tempted to say that the administration is administering a policy of terrorism to discourage people from seeking asylum. Terrorism is a political tool. Its aim is to achieve a political aim. It entails perpetrating indiscriminate acts of violence against civilians to create a level of terror that leads to capitulation.

By Frank C. Pierson, Jr., Editor and Publisher, www.democraticfaith.com

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Kaz (my wife) and I visited Ambos Nogales - twin cities on the Mexican/US  border - a couple weeks ago.  We support a cross border tennis program for youngsters and wanted to experience its activities first hand.  Of course we both had seen pictures of the towering slatted metal fence dressed out with concertina wire snaking through the Nogales twin cities but were still unprepared for the reality.  

A tiny % of American citizens will ever share our first hand experience because the vast majority will never go there.  Most, for now, will view the attempt at border militarization from a distance through a political lens.  That’s too bad.  First hand they might gain some insight into why US border policy is broken. 

Let's end it so others don't feel like 'caged animals', former inmate says.

Story by IAF Organizer Nafeesah Goldsmith
In 2006, when I was 26 years old, I was placed in solitary confinement at New Jersey State Prison for 60 days.

I was locked in my cell for 23 hours a day, sometimes 24 hours, depending on the mood of the officers or if there was a lockdown at the prison. Our showers -- which we were supposed to receive every day -- were subject to the officers’ whims as well. Sometimes, I didn’t get a shower for days.  More here.
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Bob Connolly is a community leader, trainer, and organizer whose company has helped religious and community organizations raise over a billion dollars during the past thirty-plus years. In this addition to ACTA’s popular community organizing series, he points out: “Money is an expression of our values—an expression of what we believe in, what is important to us, our self-interest. I often tell people in my workshops: If you want to know what you really believe in, look in your checkbook. If you want to know what people value, don’t listen too much to what they say; trust and respect what they do—particularly with whatever money they have.”
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For community organizations, especially, money provides independence. No one from the “outside” can set the agenda for an organization that can raise hard money.
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Download print-version of flyer with order form below:

The very way we tend to think and talk about the decline of people’s institutions has crippled our ability to wrestle with the causes of the decline of our democracy, to assess the consequences for our communities and our country, and, most importantly, to apply the cures required to make our nation whole and healthy again. Thus begins Mike Gecan, the co-director of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation and one of the most profound theorists and successful practitioners of grass-roots community organizing in the country, in this unique and compelling look at what is going on in America right now.  Buy it here from ACTA Publications.

Edward T. Chambers, “Big Ed” as the chronicler of modern populist history, Studs Terkel called him, was the successor of Saul Alinsky as the Executive Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation. Ed was the one who moved IAF from a collective of gadfly organizers who came and went, gathering around Alinsky, into a profession. Ed insisted on, and raised the money so that organizers could make professional wages and support their families.  Ed, with great resistance from Alinsky but with support from Dick Harmon, Mike Gecan, Ernesto Cortes, and Arnie Graf of the IAF staff, created the Alinsky Institute and began to conduct 10-Day National Trainings as a place to teach organizers and institutional leaders the philosophy and methodology of Institutional Organizing. IAF National Training was the place where the young organizer Barack Obama, then affiliated with another organizing network, came in 1988 to receive training. Edward T. Chambers, more than another single person is responsible for creation of the profession of organizing.

He was my first organizing mentor. Prior to my joining the collective of IAF organizers, while working with the United Woodcutters in Mississippi, I would meet with Ed three to four times a year. Ed was not a touchy-feely guy. He was gruff and irreverent and sometimes his brusque, gruff and irreverent manner got in the way of his political judgement. 

​David Brooks's article "A Nation of Weavers" points to social isolation as the root cause of the social crisis America faces and the personal suffering many endure. His constructive response is to reweave the social fabric from the ground up. Brooks is right on both counts, but important lessons must be learned from how previous generations addressed the same problem.
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Brooks sees "hyperindividualism" and a fragilised social fabric as new phenomenon. They are not. They are a constitutive feature of the modern world that commentators have lamented since the eighteenth century. For example, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, shared Brooks's concerns.

As did socialists and conservative reformers through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some pointed to capitalism as the cause, with its demand that each puts their self-interest above that of the common good. Others to an emphasis on individual autonomy that sees throwing off social obligations as the basis of freedom and, in doing so, refuses the reality that each of us is constituted through our relations with others.

An opinion piece by Frank Pierson in the Arizona Daily Star
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By Michael Gecan
 A friend in a very blue part of the country recently sent me an email describing his experience with much younger progressives singing the praises of rising political stars Beto O’Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

​His very basic question — “What have they done?” — is met with stony silence and barely restrained frustration. The message in their silence is implicit: You’re too old to understand that matching words with deeds doesn’t matter, accomplishments don’t matter. What matters is who they are — young, hip, fresh, unencumbered – and how they talk.

Some thoughts on disco-era blackface

Brown v. Board of Education was Reconstruction, redux. As the freedom struggle (finally) got Brown enforced, a generation of Southern whites had the experience, for the first time in their lifetimes, of encountering black people in “their” institutions in a posture of social equality.
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​The shift in power for whites was destabilizing, threatening, unpleasant; even at the "open-minded" end of the white-opinion spectrum, it was "weird.”
It was also reminiscent.

One of the oldest techniques that people in power use when faced with a profound and unresolved challenge, or an outright defeat, is to declare victory and exit.
Nixon did it at the end of Vietnam. George W. Bush did it in Iraq. And Mayor de Blasio — through his outgoing deputy mayor in charge of housing, Alicia Glen — did it last week in the midst of the ongoing homelessness and NYCHA debacles.  Opinion piece in NY Daily News.