Project day and moving on

Our last (official) day of PA was May 11, with a little bit of wrap-up the following week. Although I was feeling tons of doubts about whether our students would even show up for our project (re: senioritis in Narnia), it came together amazingly! Our students, while select, were excited to share their project with the peers. Their project included lots of cake and decorations to attract students to their booth, where they had students sign a drug-free poster to hang in the lobby of their high school. In addition, each student explained to the camera why they live drug-free (inspired by the touching drug-use confessionals during their panel). The video will hopefully be shown at a "huddle" where students peer educate on various topics.

Needless to say, I was very proud of my students. I knew they could bring it together (this is how it always happens!), and despite their continually spotty attendance record (they didn't make it to the PA summit the previous day), I could tell that they were invested in the final product, if not their relationships with us.

At the end of the day, though, I still have those doubts in my mind. I didn't get to see the whole project, which may have aggravated this feeling, but I'm still very skeptical if the gross time devoted to "relationship building" within the PA curriculum really made an impact on the students at all. I don't feel any stronger of a relationship with them now, and I certainly don't know if 18 or 19 year olds really want a relationship with their coaches.

Further, we did not get to finish and air the video. This is the second year in a row where my project has gotten finished, but not quite implemented. It's frustrating to say the least, and at times I could hardly contain my frustration with how apathetic and unorganized my school was compared to other PA groups.

My other commitments have thus brought me to a strange impasse. I will be very busy next year, and unsure if I will have the time to be a good PA coach. Further, I'm not entirely sure that I will have the money to continue to volunteer ( I may need to find a "real job."). PA can be frustrating to say the least, and at times, it seems like it's hardly worth the effort.

At the same time, it can be so rewarding. I've almost thought about going the other direction and increasing my award hours for PA by doing something extra, such as helping run a student newspaper at the school. This would be more work, but also more money, and would make my PA efforts more effective.

PA has brought me so much satisfaction and taught me so much about myself - in fact, it has made me question what my role in the world truly is on more than one occasion. I would hate to see it go, but at the same time, I question my effectiveness in the position. I've decided to come back in the fall, but the decision weighs very heavily on me.

We'll see what happens, but as for what is, I will let it be. Let be the pride for my students, the insecurities about their experiences, and the future. Like I said at the beginning of this blog, the biggest heartache of PA is learning what I can and can't change. But it is also the biggest reward.

Mobilizing vs. Organizing revelation

Over the course of planning our PA conference this year, I had the pleasure of having dinner with the father of the PA movement, Dennis Donovan, who is currently a professor and organizer extraordinaire at Augsburg College. He opened my eyes to the international scope of the PA movement, and it's potential to change the institution of democracy both here and abroad.
(He also inspired me to blog about PA, based on the awesome Augsburg blog, Democracy U, which you should check out!).

At the PA conference, I presented a talk on the role of politics and media on community organizing, and how they can be used as resources. While speaking with him about it, we talked about what's wrong with democracy. I know, don't get started, right? From raging intellectuals convinced that democracy is an ethnocentric excuse to impose some sort of American imperialism on the world, to the regular blue-collar American that can see his vote squashed by the 1-percenter trash-talking politicians that are supposed to represent him, democracy is a tricky issue. I must admit that I, myself, have often felt that the use of the words "politics" and "democracy"  in PA reeked of the kind of WWII propaganda that brought young men to the front lines in the 40s and the picket lines during Vietnam.

I used to be really involved in politics - while a liberal moderate, I used to scoff at people who "weren't interested" in politics. How could you not be interested in the policies that shape and affect your every societal interaction? I really believed that good policies were like science - that if you were really smart, you could create a fix-all and change the whole system in one fell swoop.

Around the same time I became disenchanted with politics, community organizing really started to "click" for me. I think Dennis Donovan framed it nicely in his discussion of tangible democracy: its a difference of mobilizing vs. organizing.

As Donovan pointed out, political mobilizers give you a ready-made cause to subscribe to. They appeal to your self-interest, and encourage you to insert it into their agenda, without allowing you to shape it. (Although, the Obama campaign frequently calls me and asks for "advice" on the direction of the campaign. I love you and your community organizing background, my man Barack, but I ain't fooled.)

By the middle of May, I realized that I'm no longer interested in policies. They are based on mobilizing tactics, and ultimately, they mop up the water without turning off the tap - they treat the symptoms of a disease that plagues our institutions, but is rooted in the structure of our society itself. I truly believe that top-down changes don't work, and that systemic change must originate organically in the community.

This may seem obvious, but I have always been interested in politics (the traditional use of the word, not the PA use), and further, believed that organizing and mobilizing were not mutually exclusive. I never considered politics something to "believe" in, just something to be "involved in." That is, until I didn't believe it any more.

Also, did you catch that use of passive voice up there? Notice how "believe" is active and "to be involved" is passive? Yeah, I'm an editor. But I think it reinforces my point.

While I think that organizers are fighting the good fight (never going back!), I still take issue with some of the PA pillars. I think mobilizers have one point - people need something concrete to believe in before they can believe in themselves.

I do truly think that although the idea of building a project from a foundation of relationships is great, PA projects are not houses. They do not form linearly. I think that projects need to be a core of the process all along. I know it's doesn't tickle the teleological corners of the soul. But it works, and a good coach could implement the PA concepts throughout a project. The project mobilizes students, yes, but in a way that allows them an actionable piece of it along the way.

While I think that changes should come from an organizing perspective, I do think that mobilizing is a talent that has a place in PA. What that place is, I don't know. Maybe I'm jaded, but I would definitely add "mobilizing" to my list of doubts that need to be explored within the PA model.

Social Justice at DU

Because life, including PA, has been so crazy lately, I have a bit of catching up to do - so this post will be back-tracking a bit to an event a few weeks ago.

Until this year, I had never been able to implement community organizing in its fullest capacity outside of PA. That changed during what was perhaps the most exciting week of my life in early May, during an event hosted by Occupy DU and organized by a good friend, entitled "DU Stereotype?."

The event was in response to a party that occurred earlier this year at my university, themed "Cowboys and Indians." The party received a lot of push-back from the Native Student Alliance, and the Native American community as a whole. In response, the university staged a public apology between the Native Student Alliance and the Greek community.

Although there was apparently mediation and conflict-resolution between the two groups involved, that was not apparent to the DU community, and the public apology served to be more divisive than reconciliatory for students that were not directly involved.  It seemed, even to me, that the conflict should have been resolved in a way that involved the two student groups working together to craft an understanding of Native identities and oppressions.

The discussion hosted by Occupy initially appeared to be a venting session for "minority" communities at DU.  A friend (who works at the super-awesome Kellogg Family Foundation) and I, who are both passionate about social justice, had been dialouging about the direction of the DU attitude and both agreed that it would be unlikely that any moderates would attend the event the way it was currently being organized (with partisan hosting and no structure).

With the help of one of my co-coaches from last year, my friend and I helped Occupy use Town Hall Meeting strategies (such as recording people's ideas, creating rules for discussion, acknowledging that dialogue is only the first step to identifying self-interest, and providing room for written reflection) to move along the discussion.

The discussion was a huge success - the turn-out was huge and the conversation was productive, fostering an interest in further growth of Native culture and stereotyping. I, as well as the others involved in planning it, definitely learned a lot about "real" community organizing in our own communities - with the high stakes that come along with it.

I truly felt like it was possible, for the first time, for me to actually identify "community partners" and come together with our resources. I knew each of these people from different sources, and yet brought them together to create community impact. Occupy has gone on to host several successful discussions since!

Even some of my most critically anarchist Occupy friends agreed that it was productive - all around, I felt that THIS was what it was to be a real Pioneer. I finally felt proud to be a DU student. 

It also, however, brought some doubts to my mind about what it really means to stereotype, and how important "cultural capital" can be in community organizing. Many of the questions posed during the discussion were questions that had been burning in my own mind. 

Recently in a class, I overheard a girl sitting behind me tell her friend, "I want to be a teacher in underserved areas, like with Teach for America, so I'm learning Spanish." 

This statement immediately infuriated me - how dare she assume that "low income" equated with "Spanish-speaking"? How did she expect to assist her students when she came in with so many obvious pre-conceptions? If I know anything about being around students, I knew that they could see right through your expectations. 

I came home ready to spread my indignation all across facebook - only to find quite the contradictory opinion. 

An established social - justice advocate around DU, and a fellow PA coach were having a discussion via facebook comments regarding the same topic that had infuriated me. The status read:

 "90ish% of DPS students are of an ethnic race, while 90ish% of their teachers are caucasian. Disappointing is maybe the appropriate word I am looking for."

(See the DPS statistics)

With the comments: 

definitely disappointing. Having gone through the TFA (Teach for America) process, most of those interviewing for TFA were caucasian´s too. Even funnier is that they were all greek. Im not trying to devalue the greek system but how can someone from that background connect with urban kids?

She responded: 

what i hate most about it is that I AM ONE OF THEM! lol. i want to be a good teacher and work in these communities (like the rest of DPS teachers) but what can we do? we can't change our race or ethnicity... we can't all work in cherry creek either, nor do we want to... i just wish there were something i could do about it...'

Me too, I thought. In truth, I would say that my race has been my BIGGEST challenge in the PA process, not just because my students stereotype me or I stereotype them, but because I don't serve as a symbol of what they hope to accomplish by any means. I care about them, but at the end of the day, I wonder if I'm the right person for the job, with the same doubts as the commentors above. 

However, my question then stands: Who is that symbol? Who is the mobilizer, and do we need one? The PA answer is, No. But is the PA answer always the answer? 

Truth be told, my answer is once again a resounding "No." The PA answer is not the only answer, as I hope to attest to in another blog post. But I have struggled to find a mobilizer that my kids can relate to. 

Martin Luther King Jr. seemed too overdone - he, and his struggles, no longer seemed "real" to my students when we tried to get them to come out to the MLK day walk.  Trayvon Martin quickly became too much of a martyr - who did nothing but spark unmediated "hot anger" that seemed inactionable. Activists like Natalie Warne seemed glorified and unattainable, despite her similarities in age and race.  Even Terrance Roberts, a young activist in from their community, seemed to be beating a dead horse. 

At the end of the day, there seems to be no compensating for the "race gap" and all the privileges and oppression that go with it. I felt it looking around the room at Occupy, and I felt it in the classroom. 

Conversations like the one at Occupy give me hope that some day, this won't matter. We are the generation that will fix it. But where does that leave us concerned white, heterosexual folks, except for as "allies"? 

Maybe an ally is all that I can be - but boy, when I have a good day of coaching do I hope for more. I wish I knew when that would be achievable!

Community panel

Today was a special event in the PA timeline - our community panel!

The community panel is a way for the PA students, who've worked all year on their project, to make it public - that is, to articulate their passion to those who it will impact. In our case, this was mostly others who worked at CCSEL with us and Narnian school administrators.

As usual, I was in doubt over whether it would come together - a few minutes before class started, we had only two students, nervous and confused, who hadn't worked on their project all week. One, *Tom*, was a student who had been with us along - the rock who we could depend on to be there every week. The other was vocal, but a bit of a loose cannon who missed class a lot. I ran through what I could with them, but there was so much - I knew I was overwhelming them.

When the bell rang, a TON (a Narnian ton is about 10 people) of students came pouring in - some we'd never even had in class! There were also administrators that we hadn't invited on the panel. Typical day in Narnia there.

The excitement was much different than I had experienced in my previous years coaching - where students had simply seemed frustrated, these students seemed much more excited, though much less invested. I tried to serve the role of reassuring the students (and realized how much more confident I was coaching this year in the process of doing so - I wasn't as nervous as they were, for once!).

Although Tom did most of the talking, we were able to get a word from a lot of students (although some were a bit TOO honest about their past and present drug use). The highlight for me was that MY one-to-one mentee, the quiet and most dedicated student who SWORE he wouldn't speak at the panel, contributed!

All around, despite the fantastical oddities (candid drug references, random students stealing our food, and my co-coaching consuming a face-full of wet lettuce), it was an utterly successful, if Narnian day!

Introduction

I'm going to catch you up on a slew of thoughts I've been having about PA and life in general this week, but from here on out, I'll stick to 3 posts a week: a reflective post, a connecting-PA-to-my-life post, and a recap of the week at PA post.

Here is the reflection this week, in the form of an introduction to the kind of work I do with Public Achievement (PA). Public Achievement is a program that incorporates aspects of the Saul Alinsky Community Organizing Model, based on his books Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals. Although there are other community organizing models, which I hope to explore in a future post, the Alinsky model is the one that made "community organizing" the buzz word that brought Barack Obama to the White House. 

The model involves coaches (college students like me) in high schools, where we go through four stages: relationship-building, issue identification, community-based research and project implementation. The goal is to create a space for students to discover their power to create tangible change in their community. That includes open discussions about social justice issues like privilege and oppression, as well as certain key activities like one-to-ones, world as it is - world as it should be, world cafes, and others from the PA handbook.  

I know - it's a lot of vocabulary to swallow at once. And honestly, it can feel that way for everyone involved. But under all that abstraction, there is something really magical about watching people work together (more on the magic to come). 

This year, I've been working at a high school that has been through a lot in a short time. The school was shut down due to a fervor of gang violence that swept Denver during the 1990s, and continued in that neighborhood - leading to poor grades and test scores as the least of their problems. Now, they've reopened and been building their programs for about five years. Needless to say, though, they are still lacking a lot in terms of infrastructure, and GPAs and graduation rates are a constant struggle.

Unlike most PA classrooms, ours doesn't actually have a teacher present, which has created a special role for us as far as enforcing attendance and dealing with other disciplinary situations. The school definitely has a unique culture that has required some acclimation - leading us to often refer to it as Narnia, the magical land of The Lion,the Witch and the Wardrobe. Just like Narnia, our school seems to operate on it's own time, and it often feels as though we are outsiders that simply fell through the wrong wardrobe. However, hopefully, we'll make our way in our own right. 

For simplicity's sake, I'll refer to our school as Narnia for the rest of the blog, as well as changing students names to protect them from internet fame (or infamy). 

That's probably all you have the patience to read - but hopefully you'll start to gather the landscape and historical "scrolls" of Narnia through the rest of the blog. 

Peace, 

Anita