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Reflections on Democratic Education Organizing

A Continuing Dialogue by Jenny Whitcher, PhD
Director, Master of Social Change Program, Iliff School of Theology
Jenny WhitcherJenny Whitcher, PhD
5.03.15

All, I am enjoying this conversation and agitation around our collective work. In looking at the whole of the conversation there are three areas I will engage: 1) Critical hope versus fatalism, 2) Praxis examples of integrated relational organizing and agency-centered democracy, 3) Accepting the challenge. Frank, thank you for lifting up our work at Iliff in your email. I also appreciate Aaron's charge to Harry at the end of his email, it reminds me of an encounter with Greg Galuzzo, former ED of the Gamaliel Foundation, who told me, "[Universal] you cannot organize in higher education," at their weeklong organizing training eight years ago. I was sent to the training by my employer, the University of Denver, and myself and two colleagues were the only people representing educational institutions. Well, yes we can and are. I will share parts of my story here and let other colleagues speak for themselves, as there are many on this email thread who I consider democratic organizers and important agents of change in higher education and cultural organizations. 

I agree that there are many challenges to creating democratic education, professionals, and institutions. However, there is hope and I deny fatalistic thinking, perhaps because I cannot operate from such space and still look forward vocationally, but more importantly because there are too many signs of progress. One sign is a flat out refusal to participate in the existing anti-democratic structures of society particularly within the Millennial generation as noted by research focused on voting practices and Millennial efforts to create and imagine new ways of engaging within and outside of traditional institutions. I am currently researching the later around Vocations of Social Change within theological education nationally with colleague Trudy Hawkins Stringer of Vanderbilt Divinity School. 

I do not believe in universal generational identities. However, generational language can be useful in terms of understanding that in their youth and young adult years, each generation reverberates the call of the times due to their general mobility and freedom from more deeply entrenched social and economic structures such as marriage, family, career, and care of aging parents. This applies to youth and young adults who have systemic privilege, those who have pressures from systemic oppressions, and those who experience intersectional privilege and oppression. Generally, youth and young adults are in a life cycle where they are more readily able to respond to life with, "Why not?" or "What else?" This fluidity, freedom, and what some call idealism, is a trademark of the youth and young adult life cycle that allows each generation to amplify through their actions the call and response of the contemporary social context.

The following reflections refer to the Millennial generation, but as a megaphone for the call of our current context, and therefore include people from all ages. I work at a graduate theology school where the average age of all students is 42, and 33 within the Master's of Arts in Social Change degree program that I direct. I am in contact with students across degrees in courses I teach and through my role in the Office of Professional Formation which engages students from our three professional degrees in our Professional, Personal, and Spiritual Formation Curriculum. I am in relationship to local leaders within congregations, denominations, nonprofits, government agencies, labor organizations, and businesses through this Office and efforts to build a local organization of the IAF in Metro Denver/Colorado. These are the people and relational contexts that inform my reflections on praxis below.
Coming from critical hope that it is both possible and difficult to co-create democratic education, professionals, and institutions, here are a few key areas that need attention and serve as roadblocks to our efforts:

  1. An emphasis on teaching about democracy (i.e.: traditional academic approach to civics/governance), rather than practicing it (i.e.: democratic pedagogy; relational, broad-based organizing; building power/agency; creating free spaces; taking action; and co-creating public work, etc.). Early on in my teaching career I was amazed at how difficult it was to teach democratically--teach to my values. My primary struggle was to give up my ill-informed understanding of how power works (i.e.: power over --> power with/to), which influenced how I understood the nature of knowledge (i.e.: expert-owned --> co-created). I had to learn a confidence in my ability to facilitate a meaningful learning environment that did not depend on my prepared teaching notes, but rather a deeply internal confidence in my topical knowledge that allowed me to be flexible and responsive to the learning community of individuals within each course context--this includes integration of the knowledge of the whole room, not professor as expert. Initially it felt like giving up power, which is not a particularly enjoyable feeling early in one's teaching career. With more practice, it eventually felt like what it truly is: building power greater than the power/ability to act that one has on her/his own--therefore, it feels like gaining power rather than losing it. Nick Longo's work on Students as Colleagues was useful in my early pedagogical formation to this end as well as others like John Saltmarsh who articulate a collaborative democratic approach to engaged scholarship.
  2. A prevailing culture of scarcity and powerlessness. Here is where the Alinsky IAF tradition is very useful in terms of teaching about power as not zero-sum, but the ability to act. The IAF tradition identifies power in two forms: organized money and organized people. Harry and I (and others I am sure) have had critical conversations about the need to include culture as a third form of power. As individualist and scarcity cultures continue to pervade U.S.-American society, we desperately need to co-create new cultural worldviews and practices around the nature of power and how to build it--this goes back to point 1, we do so through practice and experiencing power differently. For example, students generally bemoan group projects, until they experience collaborative work as energizing, focused on the gifts of each individual that contribute uniquely to the collective effort (rather than each person taking an equal workload and type of work, with an unequal final product), creative (not regurgitation), and connected to a larger purpose (work that contributes to something meaningful, rather than a course assignment regurgitating textbooks destined for the recycling bin at the end of the term).
  3. A resistance to engaging personal/spiritual life publicly. Spirituality understood as a broad umbrella of common human experience focused on meaning making for self and other. There is too little healthy public conversation about how individual core values integrate and come up against our collective democratic values and how to engage a critically reflective process to challenge one's ascribed values and adjust/co-create new values based on relationships and life experience, which if reflected upon create new meaning-making worldviews. This particularly should emphasize meaningful relationships across difference and diversity within the context of community. People aspire to and do act on their values as informative to a deeper understanding of self interest, so this process and skill set is a precursor to action, and essential deep work necessary to identifying one's self interest and that of others as a base from which we take public action/agency together. Self interest as understood through an IAF (Alinsky, Chambers, Cortes) organizing lens, in the academy the best corollary may be "enlightened self interest”--focused on the intersection and connection between self and other. To give an example of what I do not mean: some might argue that conservative evangelicals or fundamentalists engage their spirituality publicly, but they do not do this in critical reflection of "other" and our collective democratic values. Their practice is to allow their personal values to trump collective values, which is not democratizing. We need to develop critically reflective practices for engaging spirituality/meaning-making in the diverse public sphere and within community/institutional contexts.
  4. A lack of public skills, and the teaching/practicing of ineffective skills to engage the "world as it is." I have chosen to focus on teaching and practicing skills from the IAF tradition of relational, broad-based organizing through an agency-centered lens as described in Harry's chart from a previous email in this thread. Much of this hinges on building public relationships, understanding self interest, power analysis, agitation/accountability, public evaluation/reflection, co-creation, and action/public work. This integration of agency-centered democracy and relational, broad-based organizing together develop public and political life for a democratic context. I challenge more communitarian skills (see "Community Service-Centered" column of Harry's chart), which emphasize service projects and volunteerism, which may meet basic needs of under-resourced nonprofits, but primarily function to make the volunteer feel good about "making a difference," with little/no reflection or engagement in structural/systemic change, democratic practice, or co-creation of agency for anyone involved. I also challenge mobilizing models (falling under both government columns in Harry's chart), which is the practice of many organizations or associations who appropriate "community organizing" language, and is issue-based rather than relational at the foundation and uses people as numbers to "win," which is not democratic, sustainable, agency-building, nor power-buliding. To Aaron's critique, yes, we absolutely need to develop effective and strategic public skills for the "world as it is," as we work toward "the world as it should be." 
  5. Isolationism and breaking of civic spirit. A critical need, both for ourselves and others, is preparation, support, and accountability for the experience of practicing counter-cultural democratic skills and the work of co-creating democratic education, professionals, and institutions. By its nature within the our current cultural context, this work is difficult and at times de-spiriting. We need the spiritual stamina and relational support and accountability to keep moving forward (this email thread included). Here is where the Millennials come back in as a heightened example of the call of our times. There is a group of us who are organizing nationally to build a community of roughly millennial-aged leadership within education and cultural organizations. The purpose of this community is to build democratic institutions by supporting and training ourselves (agency) to do this work from our often isolated locations. We first gathered at the Imagining America conference in Atlanta, September 2014, and have continued to connect monthly on a national call since then. We are preparing for another in-person gathering next fall. As professionals, we face tremendous resistance and we fear attrition and hopelessness, so we are intentionally building powerful relationships to sustain us in the work ahead. We have critical hope: We know the challenges because we continue to experience the personal and professional pain of operating within hierarchical/patriarchal, non-democratic institutions, so we hold each other in relationship and community--both providing support and accountability. We cannot imagine a future in the world as it is currently, so we have committed to each other and our common vision of ourselves as "the next generation of democratic institution builders"--the title of our recent concept paper. Several of those on this thread have been involved in this effort, including: Jamie Haft, Ben Fink, David Hoffman, and Cecilia Orphan. Let us know if you are interested in joining. Another half of you on the email thread have provided consultation and support of our work--Thank you.
  6. Integrated Agency- and Community-Centered Power: The final two columns of Harry's chart (community-centered power and agency-centered) are most powerful if they are integrated, rather than separate. To illustrate this point, respond to concerns raised in this email thread, and perhaps provide a lens of critical hope from "the margins" with a vision towards broader implications:
    We are building a local organization of the IAF (IAF-CO), please see attached "Who we are" document, which highlights our committed practice towards diversity, building democratic capacity within and across institutions, and power/agency to hold government accountable to the local people. The attached also gives an overview of our work/accomplishments thus far. 
IAF Lead Organizer Paul Turner has been working with the Colorado Education Association (CEA) in some of our most difficult, non-democratic school board districts whose elections are backed by big money including the Koch brothers: Brighton and Jefferson County--you may have heard about the later in the national news with students organizing to protest curricular decisions of the education board. An example of the impact of this democratizing work is that one of our IAF-CO colleagues was so effective as president of the Brighton Education Association that he was recently "promoted" to be president of the Jefferson County Education Association, an even more difficult political environment. Another IAF-CO CEA colleague was recently re-elected in a tight election. These leaders are learning and practicing relational organizing in order to create democratic capacities and reclaim public education in some of the most vitriol and devastating political environments in a state that operates as a petri dish for public education reform.

Iliff School of Theology has made a $5,000 commitment to the Sponsoring Committee of IAF-Colorado, we think this is the first time that a higher ed institution has come in as a founding co-sponsor member institution of a local IAF organization--I hope it is just the beginning of such collaborative organizing and public work. From my perspective, Iliff's commitment is based on two primary interests that relate to the framework of our email thread:

  1. The professional formation opportunity to teach students the theory and practice of relational organizing and democratic leadership. Our students go on to become leaders of congregations, denominations, nonprofits, government agencies, and businesses. This is an institutional commitment to building democratic institutions, good governance, and capacities reflective of our shared values.
  2. The diversity of institutions at the table and the opportunity to build broad-based relationships across congregations, denominations, educational institutions, labor associations, nonprofit organizations, businesses, etc. towards building power/agency to take effective action and do public work for social justice. This represents the praxis of two core institutional values: social justice and diversity.
Iliff as an example of efforts to co-create democratic education, professionals, and institutions: If we can do this work at Iliff, which is culturally and historically embedded within two of the most hierarchical, public, institutional structures of society, which also share historical commitments to the public good: higher education and the Church, then we can do it in other contexts. And if we do it well, there are important implications for professional and institutional democratization. 

Three years ago I re-developed the Master's of Arts in Social Change curriculum to include a Community Organizing course as a core degree requirement and re-fashioned the Internship Seminar to use organizing practices as assignments. These two courses follow one another in the curriculum (Spring, Summer). This past fall the institution announced a change to the degree program title and leadership. Students who had just been through the sequential Community Organizing course and Internship Seminar started organizing. They have done an excellent job of cooling down their hot anger to identify a root cause and take action. They engaged the institution and its leadership relationally, held them accountable to transparent communication moving forward, and co-created a new tradition of Community Meal & Conversation with co-sponsorship from Iliff's president. These gatherings are geared towards creating intentional community and structured conversation to address both the joys and issues within the institution. The students built support from being in relationship to Iliff's President who has a relational leadership style and attends regularly, along with students, staff, faculty, and trustees. Currently, this is the only "free space" at our institution that regularly convenes all of these institutional stakeholders. This process is at a transition point of learning how identify actionable issues and act together/do public work in response, in addition to the important practice of hearing and relating to one another. So far, the students have decided to keep their "Iliff Voices Matter" organizing effort separate from structural organization despite well-intentioned encouragement by some staff to become a student organization or for individual student leaders to run for student senate. The students have articulated their rationale not to associate as their understanding of structural power and the need to co-create public space that is not embedded within institutional power structures as a way to hold the institution accountable to its values through relationship, but not institutionalization. I hope they will see this as an opportunity for both/and, and that some of them will also run for student senate.

Faculty and staff have identified and shared with me the institutional cultural changes they are feeling and seeing as a result of the relational organizing work of students, IAF-CO presence (Iliff hosts most of our monthly Colorado Organizing Team meetings and quarterly, community-wide Institutes for Public Life), and the addition to organizing in the curriculum. One such staff member recently asked if I would co-lead a training for student senate, which has succumbed to the pitfalls of #1-5 above. The institution is investing in the development of a more powerful and institutionally, democratically engaged student senate. An example of Mike Miller's comment to encourage student engagement and energy, which sometimes includes facilitating it. Other conversations with faculty have focused on understanding such engagement as a method of worship. This requires some theological re-orientation for some to imagine worship as the authentic practice of Christianity, which includes a re-visioning of the nice, fuzzy, pastel clothed image of white Jesus petting a lamb, to imagine Jesus based on his practice as a relational organizer of the people, building power to engage the power structures of his time toward justice.

Leadership matters at all levels, and particularly at the top as many of us in higher ed know from experience. Iliff's president, Tom Wolfe, is instrumental in the cultural changes we are experiencing both directly and indirectly. There are two particular impacts of his presidency that come to mind in reflection of the framework of our email thread: 1) He practices and models relational leadership for others, 2) He actively supports "free space" and professional formation praxis both within and beyond our institutional context.

There are plenty of time-honored critiques and fears of "how long will this last?" that could be thrown into the mix of these examples, but there is a difference between a programmatic experience and the experience of living within the process of cultural change. We are experiencing cultural change, both institutionally and more broadly. People-powered democratization is the reverberating call and response of our time. 

I am truly grateful for the agitation of colleagues like yourselves who also struggle with the efficacy of our efforts. My contribution to the book Democracy's Education, was a reflection on my own purpose and efficacy after years of listening over coffee to frustrated and traumatized former students who upon graduation entered the "world as it is," which appropriates the language of democracy, theology, and justice to oppressive ends. These students did not experience agency, nor the democratic institutions or professional lives we prepared them for, and it wasn't just a let down, it was spirit-breaking--both for the alumni and me. These relational meetings with alumni were my call to arms to think differently about my work, which oriented my efforts around the five points listed in this email, among others. It was also a paradigm shift from programmatic to systemic analysis and practice. I practice locally, or "in the margins" as Aaron mentioned, as a strategic tactic to engage and build capacity for broader cultural democratic change, which includes education, professionals, and institutions.