ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES
February 5, 2004
Organizers of color seek
collaboration
Yawu Miller
Although Horace Small’s Union of Minority
Neighborhoods has hosted weekly gatherings for organizers of color,
the turnout was never as substantial as last week when more than
100 African American, Latino, Chinese and Cape Verdean organizers
packed a meeting room in the Harrison Ave. offices of the Chinese
Progressive Association.
But then, Small’s weekly sip-and-chew meetings lacked an
essential ingredient at last week’s gathering: cash. Although
the Hyams Foundation grant announced last week is for just $75,000,
it marks the first time in the city’s history that a major
funder has targeted organizers of color specifically.
The funds are to be used for a program called the Organizers of
Color Initiative, which will offer community organizers trainings
and networking events to better enable them to build their organizing
skills.
The program will be jointly administered by the Center to Support
Immigrant Organizing and the Union of Minority Neighborhoods.
“Although it’s not a lot of money, the Hyams Foundation
deserves a lot of credit for recognizing that organizers of color
are people with special needs,” Small said. “Many
of them work in organizations with executive directors who don’t
understand organizing. They work under tremendous pressure and
they do it on the cheap.”
Organizers earn salaries in the mid 20s while Boston’s median
household income is $39,000 a year. While organizing has never
paid well, it has long played a central role in Boston’s
black community’s struggle to gain power in Boston. The
Mass Senior Action Council is currently advertising a position
for an organizer — a position that requires previous experience
and a car — but is offering a salary in the low 30s.
“Somebody decided a long time ago that organizers aren’t
supposed to make money,” Small said. “They think that
if you work for people in need, you’re supposed to work
for nothing. For the level of work and the amount of work they
do, organizers need to be paid a living wage.”
While organizers have long labored for low pay, many elected officials,
including former state Rep. Mel King, state reps Byron Rushing
and Gloria Fox and City Councilor Chuck Turner worked as organizers
in the 1960s and ’70s before moving into politics.
But in the ’80s and ’90s, many community-based organizations
moved away from organizing and focused instead on providing services.
While there has been a renewed focus on community organizing,
people of color have been more on the margins of the movement.
Hyams Foundation Trustee Meizhu Lui said that many executive directors
of community-based organizations have skewed ideas about how best
to organize in communities of color.
“They think your job is to go out and tell the people what
they want,” she said. “You’re often told how
to organize, even though their organizing methods work better
in the white community.”
Organizers commonly complain that the directors of the agencies
they work for often dictate the scope of their organizing activities,
rather than allowing the neighborhood residents they are targeting
to develop their own agenda. The top-down model is at odds with
what many organizers say their work is about.
Lui said the initiative would give organizers the tools to better
negotiate with their bosses.
“We can come together and share ideas,” she said.
“We can talk about how organizers can get more power in
the organizations they work for.”
Lui said that organizers themselves need to network better and
build their own power base in order to advocate for improvements
to the profession like greater autonomy and higher pay.
“The most important part of this isn’t the skills,”
she told the gathering. “You have them. What organizers
of color need is their own power base. Hopefully, we can organize
that.”
Small, who has held a series of workshops on organizing, agreed.
“We’re going to be focussing on the networking aspect,”
he said. “Really building an organization of these organizers
who come from a broad diversity of backgrounds and classes and
meet so we can understand each other and try to create some commonalties.”
The organizers present in the room represented a broad cross section
of the non-profit field, from union organizers to organizers from
CDCs and immigrant groups. Although most were young, many were
middle-aged. Small said the turnout demonstrated a formidable
base of power.
“Those of us who were there in that room recognized the
power in that room,” Small said. “In a city that’s
predominantly minority, people understand the power we represent.”
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