Reweaving the social fabric

More than 50 years ago, Saul Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), now the center of a national network of broad-based, multiethnic, interfaith organizations in primarily poor and moderate income communities. These organizations are renewing their local democracies: fostering the competence and confidence of ordinary citizens so that they can reorganize the relationships of power and politics and restructure the physical and civic infrastructure of their communities. The IAF approach to institutional change recognizes that problems such as poverty and unemployment are not simply matters of income. They are a crushing burden on the soul, and people who suffer under their weight often view themselves as incapable of participating in the civic culture and political community. This sense of self makes broad-based institutions extraordinarily difficult to create. But no transformation of the human spirit can proceed without the development of practical wisdom and meaningful collective action through the practice of collaborative politics.

True politics is not about polls, focus groups, and television ads. It is about engaging public discourse and initiating collective action guided by that discourse. In politics it is not enough to be right or to have a coherent position; one also must be reasonable, willing to make concessions, exercise judgment, and find terms that others can accept as well. So politics is about relationships that enable people to disagree, argue, interrupt, confront, and negotiate and, through this process of conversation and debate, to forge consensus or compromise that makes it possible for them to act. The practical wisdom revealed in politics is equivalent to good judgment and praxis-action that is both intentional and reflective. In praxis, the most important part of the action is the reflection and evaluation afterward. IAF organizations hold "actions"public dramas, with masses of ordinary people moving together on a particular issue, with a particular focus, and sometimes producing an unanticipated reaction. This reaction, in turn, provides the grist for the real teaching of politics and interpretation-how to appreciate the ensuing negotiations, challenge, argument, and political conversations.

In the IAF, political action combines the symbolism of active citizenship with real political efficacy, creating the opportunity to restructure schools, revitalize neighborhoods, create job-training programs, increase access to health care, or initiate flood-control programs.

In addition to tangible improvements in public services, such politics recreates and reorganizes the ways in which people, networks of relationships, and institutions operate: it builds real community. As social beings we are defined by our relationships to other people-family and kin, but also the less familiar people with whom we engage in the day-to-day business of living our lives in a complicated society. But when people lack the organizations that enable them to connect to real political power and participate effectively in public life, these social relationships disintegrate. We learn to act in ways that are not responsive to our community. There is no time and energy for collaboration, no reciprocity, no trust-in short, no social capital.

To reverse the current dissolution of community, we need to rebuild social capital, to reinvest in the institutions that enable people to learn, to develop leadership, and to build relationships, to become, in Jefferson's phrase, "participators in the affairs of government." What IAF has found is that when people learn through politics to work together, supporting one another's projects, a trust emerges that goes beyond the barriers of race, ethnicity, income, and geography: we have found that we can rebuild community by reconstructing democracy.

For decades, the city of San Antonio "managed" the demands of the poorer sections of the city by successfully splitting the population geographicallymaking secret deals with one neighborhood in order to prevent it from joining forces with others. The IAF developed an institution called Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) to provide an alternative strategy and an alternative public space. The idea was to give people in San Antonio the opportunity to have conversations away from the city government, to negotiate and deliberate with one another based on a larger framework of shared values, vision, and a commitment to agitation for change.

Like all IAF organizations, COPS is primarily a federation of congregations, connected to institutions of faith and agitated by their traditions. In this context, "faith" does not mean a particular system of religious beliefs, but a more general affirmation that life has meaning. As it turned out, the leaders in the congregations were also the leaders in the youth organizations, PTAs, and unions. And they began to agitate not only their fellow congregants, but their neighbors and co-workers. Congregations convey traditions that connect people in the present and hold them accountable to past and future generations. These institutions-churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples-are built on networks of family and neighborhood. Tragically, they are virtually the only institutions in society that are fundamentally concerned with the nature and well-being of families and communities.

The root of the word religion is re-ligare, which means to bind together that which is disconnected. The best elements in our religious traditions are inclusive-respecting diversity, and conveying a plurality of symbols that incorporate the experiences of diverse peoples. The mixed multitudes in Sinai and Pentecost are central to the Judeo-Christian traditions; they represent the constant incorporation of different traditions in our social and political fabric.

In the IAF, we teach people to understand the strains of controversy within our traditions and history-strains that must be managed, but are unlikely ever to be resolved. While repressing controversies can lead to war, acknowledging and welcoming them within a framework for debate helps us to temper conflict to a manageable level. In short, COPS provides a civic education, as well as a philosophic one, enabling people to conduct their lives effectively and to build and sustain their communities.

For 20 years, COPS has focused on developing a strategy to rebuild the infrastructure of its inner-city community. With its sister organization, the Metro Alliance, COPS has brought more than $800 million of streets, parks, housing, sidewalks, libraries, clinics, street lights, drainage, and other infrastructure to the poor neighborhoods of the inner city.

The federal government's Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program-instituted in 1974 to replace numerous federal categorical programs with a single, flexible grant to cities-has been a steady, though small and diminishing, source of funds for the redevelopment of inner cities across the country. COPS and the Metro Alliance have ensured that funds in San Antonio are used carefully and effectively, maximizing expenditures for durable capital improvements and minimizing the demands on CDBG for ongoing operating expenditures of city and private agencies. During the past two decades, only 3% of San Antonio's CDBG funds have been spent on administration and planning.

COPS leaders organize the annual CDBG process, in which residents of eligible neighborhoods meet in homes, schools, and churches to draw up lists of potential projects. The cost of the projects is always three or four times their neighborhood's CDBG allocation. So people begin their bargaining, trimming some projects and delaying others in exchange for mutual support. They proceed from house meetings concerned with one street or drainage issue, to neighborhood meetings proposing a package of projects, to meetings in each city council district to shape a proposal with the council member. Then, in collaboration with the council member, community leaders finalize the selection of the year's projects. COPS leaders have incorporated into the organization's collective culture the expertise not only to plan projects, but to negotiate and facilitate bargaining among neighborhoods. By leveraging both public and private moneys, IAF organizations in San Antonio have helped working families build more than 1,000 units of new housing, rehabilitate 2,600 existing ones, and purchase 1,300 more.

Beyond these new homes and infrastructure, however, the most important accomplishment of the IAF organizations is the development of nontraditional leaders in historically disenfranchised communities. IAF leaders begin their development in oneon-one conversations with a skilled organizer. These conversations represent an exchange of views, judgments, and commitments. IAF organizers see themselves as teachers, mentors, and agitators who constantly cultivate leadership for the organization. Their job is to teach people how to form relationships with other leaders and develop a network, a collective of relationships able to build the power to enable them to act. Leaders initially learn politics through conversation and negotiation with one another-as in the CDBG process. As they develop a broader vision of their self-interest, they begin to recognize their connections and their responsibilities to one another and to the community.

Organizing people around vision and values allows institutions to address specific concerns more effectively. Beginning with small winnable issues-fixing a streetlight, putting up a stop sign-they move carefully into larger problems-making a school a safe and civil place for children to learn; and then to still larger issues-setting an agenda for a municipal capital improvement budget, strategizing with corporate leaders and members of the city council on economic growth policies, developing new initiatives in job training, health care, and public education. When ordinary people become engaged and shift from being political spectators to being political agents, when they begin to play large, public roles, they develop confidence in their own competence.

Most people have an intuitive grasp of Lord Acton's dictum about the tendency of power to corrupt. To avoid appearing corrupted, they shy away from power. But powerlessness also corrupts-perhaps more pervasively than power itself. So IAF leaders learn quickly that understanding politics requires understanding power.

A central element of that understanding is that there are two kinds of power. Unilateral power tends to be coercive and domineering. It is the power of one party treating another as an object to be instructed and directed. Relational power is more complicated. Developed subjectto-subject, it is transformative, changing the nature of the situation and of the self, mastering the capacity to act, and the reciprocal capacity to allow oneself to be acted upon.

Relational power is both collectively effective and individually transformative. The potential of ordinary people fully emerges only when they are able to translate their self-interests in issues such as family, property, and education into the common good through an intermediary organization. Each of the IAF's victories is the fruit of the personal growth of thousands of leaders-housewives, clergy, bus drivers, secretaries, nurses, teachers-who have learned how to participate and negotiate with the business and political leaders and bureaucrats we normally think of as our society's decision makers. Living by the iron rule, "Never do for others what they can do for themselves," they have won their victories not by speaking for ordinary people but by teaching them how to speak, act, and engage in politics for themselves.

Reinvigorating urban life requires a new vision of civil society, appropriate to contemporary challenges. To be sure, government has an essential role to play in democratic renewal. After two decades of neglect, we need more public investment in housing, education, infrastructure, health care, and job training. But we also need to learn to think differently about the public sector and its relationship to the civic culture.

Government can no more create political entrepreneurship than it can create economic entrepreneurship. It cannot "empower" people, because power cannot be bestowed. Government can facilitate, encourage, and recognize grass-roots organizing and local initiatives with an institutional base rooted in people's imagination and values, but it cannot and should not create organization and initiatives. When the government funds local organizing, those "grass-roots" efforts will continue only so long as the public dollars continue to flow. And no organization funded by the government is going to be truly agitational about using public funds more effectively. (The government is not going to fund a revolution against its own status quo.) To ensure ownership of broad-based organizations by the community, those organizations must be self-supporting. The iron rule applies to institutions as well as to individuals.

To rebuild our society, we must rebuild our civic and political institutions. Under conditions of social fragmentation, it is a daunting challenge. People in modern industrial societies are atomized and disconnected from one another. And far too much of the American search for "fulfillment" is centered on the individual, encouraging utilitarian and narcissistic relationships. Such fragmentation leaves people increasingly less capable of forming a common purpose, much less of collaborating in its implementation.

The rehabilitation of our political and civic culture requires a new politics, with authentically democratic mediating institutions-teaching, mentoring, and building an organized constituency with the power and imagination to initiate change. It requires a public space in which ordinary people can learn and develop the skills of public life and create the institutions of a new democratic politics. With organized citizens and strong mediating institutions, our communities can address structural inequalities of the economy for themselves, restore health and integrity to our political process, mitigate the distortions created by organized concentrations of wealth, andin the end-reclaim the vision and promise of American life.

Ernesto Cortes, Jr., Is director of the Southwest Region of the Industrial Areas Foundation, Austin, Texas. This article is an abbreviated version of the Boston Review's adaptation of a chapter in Henry Cisneros's Interwoven Destinies: Cities and the Nation and is reprinted with permission.

Copyright Family Service America Mar/Apr 1997
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