Editorial column

Seeing community organizing globally gives us lessons for today

Cameron Conner provided columns on community organizing in several countries working as a Watson Fellow in the past year. He continues to reflect on his experiences and the power of community organizing in an upcoming series of columns.

After a year working with organizers in Spain, England, South Africa, the Philippines and Peru, I returned in mid-August to a country that appeared to be tearing itself apart. I had spent a year trying to understand spaces where people felt like they had power and a vision for the future. Now, I was faced with making sense of the anger, distrust and growing fault lines in my own country.

The election showed that something fundamental is shifting in the United States. Frustration with the status quo, distrust of public institutions, and a sense of being both stuck and powerless has emerged as the pervasive feeling across many demographics.

The lesson of my work with organizers was, "It doesn't have to be this way."

From community members in the Philippines celebrating the construction of 2,000 new homes for the Urban Poor Alliance to assemblies of nurses, teachers and parent-leaders in the United Kingdom taking on directors in the National Health Society, I found that where people had agency, they had hope.

Even though anger, resentment and distrust seemed to be on the rise in every country I visited, I found the best antidote where people felt like they had the power to hold their public institutions and officials accountable and that they were living out values of civic virtue and cooperation by organizing.

People with this type of power saw themselves as entitled to demand a say in their society. These were citizens who had begun to lay their hands on the levers of power that a constitutional democracy puts at their disposal.

I seek to reflect on the lessons gathered from organizers across the globe and to apply them to the new political context we now face. I seek to make sense of the world through a new narrative that chronicles how people in the last 75 years gained power, lost it and forgot why it matters. From the stories I heard, what is the common thread that can guide us forward?

At the heart of this narrative is a central argument that the challenges we face will not be solved by finding and electing better leaders. They will be solved by investing in the peoples' ability to once again build enough power to hold their representatives accountable and ensure our interests are the ones driving the agenda. Our problems will be solved by us becoming better citizens.

I am able to explore these ideas in my work as a visiting fellow and professor of the practice through June at Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University.  We exist at the crux of a great experiment.

Abraham Lincoln, facing a parallel inflection point in American history, once distilled the nature of this challenge in a conversation with his secretary John Hay: "The central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity upon us of proving that popular government is not an absurdity... If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves."

We face a similar challenge today, with the same stakes.

In upcoming columns, I will explore 1) How did we get here? The story of why we, the people, gave up our power. 2) Where should we go? Democracy is a tool worth saving. What then must we do and how do we get there?

The work ahead of us is to restore faith in the conviction that our human ability for self-government is not absurd. This will not be done by finding and electing to office a Messiah who will lead us out of the wilderness. Rather, it will be by teaching ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs.

Cameron Conner
Editorial Columnist