Organizers often focus in action on getting a large number of people in the room to confront someone in authority, the assumption that only a show of great numbers will convince someone in authority (say an elected official) that the group has the power to lead the authority to do what the group wants.

In this week’s Torah portion, we have the story of Judah approaching his brother Joseph, a great authority in Egypt.  In looking at this story (of someone without power approaching someone with great power), some rabbis explain that HOW he approaches him matters.  So I reflect that HOW we approach someone in power matters.  If we do it in a way that is “prayerful,” honest, and connected with our truth, we might be in a better position to gain what we and our community want.

We are praying to some omnipotent God who may or may not grant our wish, like some magic fairy.  We are recognizing our own power and our own truth and speaking it out loud.  Only in speaking it out loud can we learn and then know what the truth is.  Telling our story out loud is part of that process.  When we say in public what is in our hearts, then might connect with a power way beyond our numbers.  This may be what Abraham Joshua Heschel meant when he said, during a civil rights march that he was “praying with his feet.”  In the action, in the march, we find ...   more »

.  “Michael Jacoby Brown’s Building Powerful Community Organizations is a splendid “how to” book on community organizing.   I used it this semester in my community organizing class at the University of Connecticut, and the students found it tremendously helpful and highly accessible.”

-- Professor Robert Fisher, University of Connecticut

From Vol 16 (1), 2008, by Mitchell Kahn, MSW, Ramapo College of New Jersey, VP and Director of Organizing, New Jersey Tenants Organization. (excerpts):

“This no nonsense, user-friendly guidebook is replete with sound organizing advice…The book is creatively designed to actively engage the reader with the material being presented…There is a lot to chew on her, and a reader new to organizing might feel overwhelmed by this soup to nuts approach, but the book’s nicely illustrated, jargon-free, pragmatic and skilled pedagogical format makes it a wonderful textbook for teaching community organizing.”

As a teenager, I remember standing in front of the Alabama State Capitol Building, with a line of blue shirted state troopers guarding the doors, in a crowd of thousands, at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march.  I had taken a bus down from New York where I grew up and slept on the floor between the pews of a Black church in Montgomery.

Last week I walked along Back River Road in Dover, New Hampshire with a friend and our eight year old daughters, knocking on doors for Barack Obama.  Hard to believe the headlines today, and see a Black family as the first family.  It brought tears to my eyes, as I am sure it did to many. 

It is real. I know it took an amazing amount of hard work.  It took people believing, hoping, and being willing to work together for something they all knew would make a difference.  Now Barack Obama is President. Or come January 20, 2009, he will be.  Now our real work begins: to make the hope a reality.  As they say, freedom is a constant struggle. 

It is not politically cool or correct to admit hearing such comments, but canvassing for Barack Obama yesterday in Dover, New Hampshire, I found a 70 something New Hampshire native hauling a trailer. He told me he voted for Bush the first time, but this time, “I’m voting for the colored guy.”  Voting behavior always amazes me, how different people will vote for all sorts of reasons.  This guy mostly seemed pissed off at the current administration.  It was hardly a statistically significant sample, but somehow it gave me hope, to hear this guy, mincing no words, just making it clear how he was voting.  I guess I will see in about 9 days how many people are like him.

I was canvassing with my eight year old daughter, walking up and down Back River Road.  Everytime I do this, it gives me hope, and a good perspective on America.  Old fashioned politics in a high tech world.  It still makes sense to go door to door and talk to people face to face.

This Sunday, MICAH, the organization in Framingham, MA, I organize, will hold a voter registration drive in some of the Town’s precincts that don’t have the voting strength of the more affluent precincts.  It is a common American tale.  Those without less free time, less money and less formal education tend to vote less often than those with more of the above.  Part of our answer are events like the one we will hold this Sunday at St. Tarcisius Church.  Lots of food, free T-shirts, and hopefully more registered voters at the end of the day than at the beginning.  We were glad to have this article in the Boston Globe, thanks to a contact my wife made at work with an interpreter who free-lances as a Globe stringer in Framingham.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/09/25/voter_sign_up_takes_aim_at_new_citizens_low_income_groups/