So who are community organizers?
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The New York Times
September 7, 2008
Our Towns
Community Organizers Stung by Republican Barbs
By PETER APPLEBOME
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y.
So you’re just out of school, you’re idealistic, you want to do something having to do with government and public service. But you don’t really want to sit behind a desk and you would like to do something that seems connected to real life, tangible problems, struggling communities, maybe even, in a small way, positive change.
If you’re Peter Nagy, who is 24 and who graduated with two degrees from the University of Utah in 2005, you end up in the scruffy second-floor offices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, in Hempstead, one of Nassau County’s poorest communities. You might work with tenants’ groups worried about inadequate security or onerous rent increases, homeowners facing foreclosure or predatory lending practices, residents fighting luxury condos that they fear will force out working-class people, bus riders facing proposed cutbacks.
You expect long hours, low pay (starting salary $26,500) and the opportunity to practice a peculiarly American sort of activism: a job defined not by advocating for others but teaching them to advocate for themselves. You don’t expect what you do to loom large at a national political convention.
But then, you never know. So there he was last week, like thousands of his peers around the country who were in varying degrees of irritation as collateral damage in the political crossfire from the Republican National Convention. First former Gov. George E. Pataki, then former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and then the vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, all got their chance to imply that if Barack Obama had been a community organizer (a “bizarre left-wing appellative,” National Review Online reported) back in the 1980s, it probably was not a very good thing.
Mr. Nagy, a lanky Long Island native who spends his days meeting with mostly black and Latino residents and adding to an endless to-do list on a legal pad, seemed unfazed by it all. “I got the feeling they were denigrating any kind of work that people do in inner cities,” he said. “To the Republicans, that’s not their voters. So if they attempt to belittle work that goes on in the inner city, it doesn’t really matter to the people they’re trying to reach.”
Community organizing groups, of course, differ from one another. But, in fact, Acorn, the nation’s largest network, which represents 400,000 families in 110 cities, is quite clearly allied with issues and constituencies that are embraced more often by Democrats than Republicans. Unlike other groups that are strictly nonpartisan, its political action committee has endorsed Barack Obama.
Acorn has been criticized at times as being overly centered on protest and confrontation. And it’s facing an embarrassing embezzlement scandal involving the brother of the organization’s founder, Wade Rathke, a reminder that being a good government group doesn’t necessarily guarantee good self-government.
Still, it didn’t seem as if the festivities in St. Paul and Minneapolis had a huge impact on what was going on in the office Mr. Nagy shares with Ann Sullivan, 51, who has been building up Acorn’s Long Island network since the mid-1990s.
Mr. Nagy began Friday at Hempstead High School, meeting with officials about registering students to vote, then returned to his office with its décor of newspaper clippings taped to walls, posters reading “Fair Housing. It’s not an Option. It’s the Law,” the Acorn newspaper with the front-page headline “Foreclosure Fighters,” and slightly unexpected bumper stickers reading: “God is Good All the Time.”
He and Ms. Sullivan met with a Hempstead resident named Angela Davis, who has cerebral palsy and had worries about safety and services in her building. She lamented how hard it was to get residents to voice their concerns. “People are afraid to come forward,” she said. “They’re afraid they’re going to be evicted.”
Later there were meetings with tenants of a residence for the elderly about conditions there, and with other area residents facing foreclosure, and then time knocking on doors in nearby Westbury to try to generate interest in a meeting about foreclosure issues there.
“There are different kinds of power,” said Bertha Lewis, executive director of New York Acorn. “There’s electoral power. Movie stars have fame. Billionaires have money. Low- and moderate-income people have their numbers and every great movement for social justice — Nelson Mandela preaching against apartheid, civil rights — have all been led by community organizers who took action and held their elected officials accountable.”
By week’s end, community organizers around the country, not surprisingly, had organized to push back, with a Web site and public comments wondering just what’s so devious or marginal about what they do.
The site quotes John Raskin, founder of the Community Organizers of America and a community organizer on the West Side of Manhattan: “Maybe if everyone had more houses than they can count, we wouldn’t need community organizers. But I work with people who are getting evicted from their only home.”
Though they lean left, Acorn and groups like it often have combative relationships with whatever party is in power. Still, Thomas R. Suozzi, the Nassau County executive, a Democrat who has butted heads with Acorn over the years, said that while organizers and community groups can be a thorn in the side of public officials, that is the way the system is supposed to work.
“Their job is to take individual weaknesses and create organized strength to address systemic socioeconomic problems,” he said. “The fact that Republicans would mock what they do really points up their fundamental lack of understanding of what people who are jobless, on the brink of it or facing stagnant wages are up against today.”
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