Quick Take: The Universals

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

At my second day of work at a telemarketing call center in Chicago, I just up and left. I was too scared to tell them I quit. I just walked out. It was January 1990, and I was nineteen.

I spent a lot of time in the basement of People’s Action the summer before, working for my mom at the Chicago Electric Options Campaign (CEOC). People’s Action was a core member of the campaign and gave her a cubicle in the basement of their old one story office building. Despite growing up in a leftist and union family, I knew little about creating change myself.

At the CEOC, I learned proto-organizer skills: making gallons of coffee, using a mimeo machine, stuffing a mailing, making reminder calls, cleaning up after meetings. People’s Action (then still called the National Training and Information Center) needed someone to do data entry for the first five-year Neighborhood Lending Program study on a Kaypro computer (more on this below), and I answered the call. My desk was in NTIC’s bullpen of an office, with Gale Cincotta, Shel Trapp, and a motley crew of what I came to understand were organizers, like my mom at the time.

I really didn’t know what I was getting into. But I am hella glad I did.

My jobs up to this point included: babysitting my younger brothers in the afternoons and making dinner four nights a week when I was a high school senior in Oswego, New York, and a summer flipping burgers at Wendy’s (two things: the Super Bar rocked and…don’t eat the chili).

My journey toward becoming a professional organizer started when I walked back into the NTIC office after my very short lived career on the phones, and asked Anne-Marie Douglas, office manger and chief administrator, if they still needed someone to do whatever the hell I had done the previous summer.

I was hired, full-time at minimum wage. This was WAY more money than my fellow punk rockers were making, so I did the only sensible things. I got a bunch of tattoos and a couple of very large speakers.

I also started getting curious. What were these organizers doing? There were some pamphlets authored by Shel lying around the office. I read them. There were typewritten guides to winning CRA agreements. I read those too, along with the report I had worked on. I sat in meetings with Shel, Gale, and the rest of the staff and listened. To be sure, there was a lot of smoking and swearing, but there was a National People’s Action conference to plan. I jumped in.

Looking back 35 years later, I thank my lucky stars that I found my way to organizing.

You can too (minus the smoking!). George Goehl’s Fundamentals of Community Organizing (2024) is your new go-to for daily organizing affirmations. I felt grounded after reading it cover-to-cover, though I know I will be returning to it often. With only 48 pages, I am considering wallpapering my office with them or making them my new laptop slideshow. I haven’t considered a tattoo yet, but give me time.

Today what spoke to me was on the final page, where Goehl says: “You are not a passive observer, but an organizer. An organizer in one of the most consequential periods in human history. You are here to stir the pot. To take the crisis to those who created it. To transform hearts and minds on the way to transforming how the whole thing works.” Hell to the yes.

Tomorrow, another page will speak to me. Choose your own adventure, but pick this up right away.

Back to the Kaypro, I really did not understand the importance of this foundational reinvestment study at the time, though the author, Dr. Calvin Bradford, was kind and patient with me. Rebecca K. Marchiel’s terrific After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Regulation (2020) puts this all in context.

The fundamentals of organizing are on display in Marchiel’s story, as she digs into the relationships between race, financial deregulation, and community organizing. Here’s a fun game: read the Fundamentals of Community Organizing and highlight where the fundamentals show up in After Redlining. They’re all there.

Instructive for today’s organizers is the audacity that Shel, Gale, and many organizers and community leaders on Chicago’s westside (and then across the country) had in fighting redlining and trying to preserve multi-racial communities in the face of monumental political and economic forces. We need more of this audacity and ambition today (see page 19 of Fundamentals of Community Organizing: Get in Fights to Win).

As they dug into the root causes of redlining and disinvestment, these organizers found themselves in the vanguard of a movement that negotiated with presidents and Congress, passed national legislation, and won TRILLIONS of dollars for communities. No, they didn’t stop financial deregulation. But they damn well moved hundreds of thousands of people to build power and reclaim their dignity and communities in the face of crushing racial capitalism. And they did it by following the fundamentals of organizing.

Do yourself a favor and pick both of these books up, read them together, and organize your heart out.

Books reviewed:

Goehl, George. Fundamentals of Community Organizing. Self-published, 2024.

Marchiel, Rebecca K. After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Regulation. University of Chicago Press, 2020.