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EBOOK Community Projects As Social Activism From Direct Action To Direct Services Ebook PDF Version Download Full Chapter PDF Kindle
EBOOK Community Projects As Social Activism From Direct Action To Direct Services Ebook PDF Version Download Full Chapter PDF Kindle
Benjamin Shepard
New York City College of Technology,
City University of New York
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Shepard, Benjamin, 1969–
SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd.
B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Community practice as social activism : from direct action
Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 to direct services / Benjamin Shepard, New York City
India College of Technology, City University of New York. — First
Edition.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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❖
Brief Contents
Foreword xi
Steve Burghardt
Acknowledgments xiii
About the Author xv
5. Identifying Issues 43
6. Research as Action 48
9. Legal Strategies 89
Foreword xi
Steve Burghardt
Acknowledgments xiii
About the Author xv
5. Identifying Issues 43
The “Winnable Win” 44
Case Study: Jim Eigo and the ACT UP
Treatment and Data Committee 45
6. Research as Action 48
Participatory Action Research 49
Community Analysis Framework 51
Social Settlements and Community Projects 53
Case Study: David Crane and the “We Can’t Breathe” Campaign 54
The Advocate as Researcher 55
References 207
Index 226
❖
Foreword
I n a society with a dominant culture that prizes material comfort, celebrity and status
through acquisition (lux coffee grinders, Manolo Blanick shoes, power), trying to
understand why people do community organizing can be a puzzling task leading to a
mix of disbelief and condescension. “Oh, you do that? How nice that someone does
those things . . . ” For some, it’s cute to be a community organizer in your twenties—
how brave, how naïve! By your thirties, you’re immature—isn’t it time to get serious? In
your forties and fifties, you’ve got a character disorder. If you make it to your sixties,
of course, you get to be cute all over again. How brave, how demented!
In reality, condescension is the precarious perch for the frightened and alone,
those who underneath the fleeting pleasure of their latest purchase keep wondering
why they’re unfulfilled and—strangely, oddly, compellingly—unhappy. They might be
better off if they paused in their search for the latest trend and took a gander inside the
pages of Benjamin Shepard’s Community Projects as Social Activism: From Direct
Action to Direct Services. What Benjamin has done is special: He’s provided a set of rich
case studies—portraits—of organizers and why they do the uphill work of social justice
organizing. It’s the rare book that takes you inside campaigns that, while steeped in the
pain and marginality of fighting oppression, locates the joy, happiness, and love of
people finding common cause and common purpose together to make a better world.
As you’ll read here, people trade in friendship and support, not commodities and cash.
They grow rich in the security of their joint purpose and the trust that others fighting
the same fight will be there for them, too.
Read carefully, you see that social action has a therapeutic cleansing through the
work itself. It takes people out of the world of self-involvement and replaces it with a
self involved with lots of other “selves” in creating a more just world together. What a
relief! Equally important, Shepard provides ample evidence of how social workers who
organize can move from “case to cause” (when private troubles of individuals, whether
AIDS, homelessness, or environmental degradation become public issues requiring
collective action) and then back to “case” again, this time through better services that
are framed within a social justice paradigm rather than in distinction from it.
xi
xii ❖ COMMUNITY PROJECTS AS SOCIAL ACTIVISM
After you finish Shepard’s book, you may want to make your part of the world a
better place: Join a social movement of your choice. Get involved with the collective
and the communal. Dig in a community garden. Join a food bank. Show up at the next
march against racism or homophobia. As Benjamin has done here, give added texture
and provide voice as to what animates those who organize. It’s not about stuff. It’s not
about status. It’s about love.
Steve Burghardt
Silberman School of Social Work
Hunter College, City University of New York
❖
Acknowledgments
B ooks are not written as much as they are the product of years of collective
experience, collaboration, stories, conversations, and in this case engagements
between friends and colleagues, organizers, activists, teachers, students, mentors,
and others connecting worlds and community projects. Much of this story began
when I was assigned to teach community projects at Cal State Long Beach. There,
John Oliver engaged me in countless conversations about teaching organizing.
Between these chats, class preparations, and class time with students, the ideas and
experiences grew into a book proposal written for Kassie Graves at SAGE. The proj-
ect would not have happened if not for Graves’s patient support over the seven years
from initial proposal through completion and polishing of the manuscript. Others,
such as Steve Burkhart, offered constructive feedback and encouragement along the
way. Ian Landau helped me transcribe and edit many of the raw interviews used as
the basis for this story. And Peter Labella helped edit and polish the prose. The
Honorable Judith Kaye deserves great thanks for connecting me with the Red Hook
Community Court. Steve Duncombe, James Tracy, and Ron Hayduk offered con-
structive advice on ways to move the project forward. And Brennan Cavanaugh,
Peter Meitzler, Allan Clear, and other activists and photographers offered me per-
missions to use their wonderful photographs.
Yet, there would not be a story of community projects as social activism if it were
not for a generation of organizers who linked a theory of change with a model of prac-
tice. Countless activists sat for interviews before and during doctoral research. Their
ideas form the basis for this research: Panama Alba, Mark Andersen, Greg Berman,
Kate Barnhart, Jeane Bergman, Jay Blotcher, L. M. Bogad, Andrew Boyd, Brendon
Cavanaugh, Arthur Brazier, David Crane, Bill DiPaula, Tim Doody, William Etundi,
Donald Grove, Ron Hayduk, Jenny Heinz, Susan Howard, Keegan, Bob Kohler, Kate
Crane, Bonfire Madigan, Steve Quester, Karen Ramspacher, Matthew Roth, Ginny
Schubert, John Sellers, Eustacia Smith, David Solnit, Dean Spade, Starhawk, James
Tracy, Andy Velez, Randy Wicker, L. J. Wood, Susan Wright. This book would not be
possible without their support for these efforts. The research on AIDS, gardens, and
public space activism would not have been possible without the support of community
groups such as Time’s Up!, Occupy, and ACT UP!
I would like to thank all the activists involved with these communities, including
two of the youngest garden supporters in New York City, Dodi and Scarlett Shepard,
both of whom have spent years and years of weekend afternoons taking part in garden
xiii
xiv ❖ COMMUNITY PROJECTS AS SOCIAL ACTIVISM
work days, playing and hanging out in this public commons of our own imagination
and creation.
The work was made possible by the generous support of a PSC-CUNY 38
University Committee on Research Award, as well as the support of research archives,
including the ACT UP Oral History Project.
And finally, early pieces of the story were presented at annual conferences of the
Association of Humanist Sociology, the Mid Atlantic Consortium of Human Services,
and the National Organization of Human Services. Related journals, including
Humanity and Society, Working USA, Socialism and Democracy, Reflections: Narratives
of Professional Helping, Interface Journal, Social Justice in Context, as well as the Team
Colors’ book In the Middle of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary
Radical Currents in the United States, and the Council for Standards in Human Services
Education Monograph, Best Practices in Human Services, featured early excerpts. The
author gratefully acknowledges the work of the editors and these books and journals
and their permission to republish this material.
Over the years, this book’s framework has become the basis for my community
organizing classes. Thanks to the City University of New York Human Services
Department faculty and students for supporting this work, while furthering the links
between campus and community projects.
But most of all, thanks to Caroline for supporting me and the project through all
the years and moves, ups and downs, ebbs and flows of history, time, coasts, social
change, and date nights.
❖
About the Author
xv
Part I
❖
Theory,
Contexts, and
Understandings
1
1 ❖
On Community
Practice
C ommunity Projects as Social Activism is a book about the need for—and the ways
to achieve—social organization for a better life. Our world grows ever more pop-
ulous, new media platforms espouse their ability to connect us socially, and yet many
(or most) of us feel a sense of isolation—that we alone are enmeshed in our problems
and overcoming them rests only on our own shoulders. The focus of this book is the
creation of community, through
social organizing in the everyday
experience of life. This serves not
only to improve our own chances for
individual fulfillment and happiness,
but is also a way to improve the lives
of our communities, and ultimately
our world.
Some argue that organizing is
about labor movements and material
ends—but this is a narrow view. For
many, organizing is also about shift-
ing the mechanisms of everyday life,
challenging the regimes of the nor-
mal. Efforts as diverse as planting a
garden, cooking a meal, singing,
Community gardens, such the El Jardin del Paraiso in the Lower East
Side of Manhattan, are ideal spaces for community projects and surfing, or riding bikes together can
practices. Neighborhood members converged in the garden for a be seen as forms of social organizing.
memorial for legendary gardener Michael Shenker in the fall of 2010. Each helps us break out of isolation,
Working with the More Gardens Coalition, Shenker helped fashion while cementing new kinds of social
the organizing framework advanced throughout this book. relations based on care and affect,
Source: Photo by Brennan Cavanaugh rather than work. These approaches
2
On Community Practice ❖ 3
to community building serve as a tonic for a world of people bowling alone, a place
where alienating social relations, management, and social controls often dominate
(Ollman, 1977; Putnam, 2000). Community organizing, as we will see, encompasses a
very broad range of possibilities. Inviting friends over for a dinner party, meeting with
a group in a church basement, organizing a group bike-ride, an all-women’s surf after-
noon at a local beach, or a walk in the park with friends—each of these endeavors
involves some form of community organizing (CO). Adding in a commitment to
improving the world around us—mixing community projects and social organizing—
we can take a more active approach to our lives, striking a blow against the despair and
isolation that can overwhelm us. Rather than wait for the government to address our
problems and inevitably feeling let down, working together in community helps us feel
more connected and proactive, while at the same time helping others.
Let me cite a personal example. Recently I participated in the “Occupy Sandy”
relief efforts after Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast. Occupy Sandy organized relief
hubs all over the city, with neighbors offering each other food, assistance, and mutual
aid. “We must take care of each other or die” was one slogan of the movement. “Mutual
Aid, Not Charity” was another. People all over the city took part in the relief efforts,
bringing food, offering sweat equity.
My group, Time’s UP!, brought bicy-
cles to help transport food and sup-
plies from one part of the city to the
other when the subways and roads
broke down. Before one of our relief
rides, we joked, groaned, moaned,
hooked trailers up to our bikes and
set out for Clinton Avenue where
Occupy Sandy collaborated with the
Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew.
Riding over, we were greeted by peo-
ple on the street and welcomed
warmly as we arrived to pick up
more supplies. Signs all over the
church highlighted the importance A well-organized Occupy Sandy relief station.
of mutual aid and of gestures of con-
cern. However limited these gestures Source: Photo by author
might be, they speak to a greater point: There is very little point in letting what we
cannot do prevent us from doing what we can. The mutual aid of Occupy Sandy points
to a model of practice based on affect and care, not just contracted services.
Helping to break down barriers of isolation by creating a more community-based
activism has other benefits as well. Those who live in isolation from community have less
reason to stop themselves from doing shameful things. Shortly after the storm there was
another crisis, the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
A great hue and cry arose in the aftermath of the tragedy, with some arguing for stricter
gun control, while others felt that the issue was a failure of the mental health system.
4 ❖ PART I THEORY, CONTEXTS, AND UNDERSTANDINGS
In total, this framework offers the outline for a strategy of articulating a goal,
achieving power, and building a workable alternative model. Each of these steps is
highlighted through working case narratives, incorporating the words and stories of
the organizers themselves. Here, the focus is on both lived experiences and stories,
highlighting best practices in community organizing.
6 ❖ PART I THEORY, CONTEXTS, AND UNDERSTANDINGS
Sara Schulman, a veteran of the Lesbian Avengers and the AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power (ACT UP) describes her approach to organizing (Shepard, 2002a).
“I’ve always been interested in political movements that have concrete political goals,
that have issues for campaigns, that mobilize people, that create countercultures—
that stuff has attracted me,” she explains, describing her own activism. “The theory
is not complex. You have to have an idea that is winnable. You have to have a cam-
paign that is viable. And you have to follow every step of it. It’s quite easy.” Yet,
Schulman cautions, “If your goal is not winnable then you are in trouble. And if you
don’t have an idea of how to reach [your goal], you’ll never reach it. It sounds sim-
ple, but it’s very hard to get people to follow it.” While many movements face a
struggle to bridge a gap between political wanderlust and an effective approach to
create change, there are any number of current struggles that work from the ethos
Schulman describes. In this way, community organizing remains a vital approach to
fashioning alternative approaches to problems, framed around solutions and new
possibilities.
It is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer number of problems, large and
small, thrown at regular people in this period of late capitalism. A friend is kicked
out of her apartment, so a group of friends scrambles to help her find a new place. A
short-term problem is solved, yet the larger issue of homelessness, displacement, and
foreclosure remains. While organizers hope to do more than manage poverty while
leaving current oppressive structures in place, we cannot overlook everyday injus-
tices. Rather, organizing has long been recognized as a way of addressing such chal-
lenges. As the process takes shape, many find themselves split about where to begin.
Some push to address the bleeding, while others take more systematic approaches,
challenging a system that allows people to be poor and without housing. Others push
to handle both simultaneously. Each approach, from direct action to direct services,
has value.
Addressing endemic inequalities, community psychologist Bill Oswald turns to
the metaphor of a three-legged stool. Each leg represents an approach for intervention.
The first—remediation—involves fixing what is immediately broken, while ameliora-
tion addresses root causes, and capacity building strengthens networks of people. This
approach marks a shift from managing poverty to challenging the conditions that
create the harm (Totten, 2008).
Throughout the cases to follow, we consider examples of groups organizing for
power, building networks of support, fashioning alternative models, and sustaining
themselves through mutual aid and care. Rather than pine for changes in an uncertain
future, this book points to practical approaches to invention already shaping commu-
nity building, organizing, and policy formation. Hopefully, the organizing stories
found here open up spaces for more questions and opportunities for reflection. Which
best practices can be expanded and which have become outmoded? Which are appro-
priate to a given situation? What works and how can we get involved and do it? In
between theory and practice, such questions point to a flexible user friendly applica-
tion of knowledge to action in community organization.
On Community Practice ❖ 7
I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time
back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have
no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human
occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very
slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not
yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid
timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed
forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled
his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process
may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main
road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe—
not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few
steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been
cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more,
between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last
pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a
melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them—
cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also
piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and
son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too
busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites
so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles
of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken
the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their
smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if
they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes,
perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.
This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the
virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already
cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble
of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the
secondary bush.
After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the
hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the
country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact,
receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in
the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains,
where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its
abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have
the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working
for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were
accustomed to rule.
But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no
harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has
been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in
time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe
and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and
lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and
desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by
man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and
even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth
is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible,
impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black
occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and
come back to his starting point.
The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.
According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing
else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been
settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great
stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the
south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence
their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the
Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast,
to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied
African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of
population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth
could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on
the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however,
correct.
The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us
of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the
thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau,
instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks
and springs of the low country.
“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern
side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was
nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never
washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.
He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree
growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the
bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and
was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the
Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a still-
born child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the
valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which
was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of
Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In
course of time, the couple had many more children, and called
themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the
Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their
forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to
bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who
was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also
warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams,
for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to
have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest watering-
place; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”
The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is
somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I
extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by
Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my
results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?
Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the
supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other
people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself
by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short,
woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is
likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is
nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from
various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood,
ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and
representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia,
Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well
done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the
keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and
meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably)
would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the
scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures
were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial
deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded
by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely
be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that
they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably
unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.
The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the
Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru
valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the
travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their
descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with
its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible
at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent
to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie
within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly
the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a
point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive
Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.
Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they
had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health
conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the
African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled
by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil
spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to
assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish
districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.
This knowledge is crystallized in the
ancestral warning against settling in the
valleys and near the great waters, the
dwelling-places of disease and death. At the
same time, for security against the hostile
Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted
that every settlement must be not less than a
certain distance from the southern edge of the
plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the
present day. It is not such a bad one, and
certainly they are both safer and more
comfortable than the Makua, the recent
intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF
good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR
plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of
country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings
anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain,
especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a
Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the
most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly
spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with
the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.
The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during
the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings
or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a
veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts
only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists
merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone
have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening
the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but
ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood
or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in
two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If
the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s
upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely
against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle
of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece
horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.
It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few
inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course
cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the
owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding
out how the back door is fastened.