Spark and Tinder
Oct 20th, 2003 by jimmoore
Two sugar maples west of town..
Community organizer Jenn Morazes, Bishop Arthur Walmsley,
cyber-organizer Kevin Jones, community organizer Marshall Gans, and
Bishop Jeffery Rowthorn, Saturday October 18, 2003 at Christ Church, Cambridge.
“Three organizers and two Bishops”
This weekend was beautiful in Massachusetts–the maples are flaming red,
the sky a darker shade of blue. A good time to gather a
group. At Christ Church on the Cambridge Common, a group
of Episcopalians and friends gathered together to explore how to add spark and
tinder to the global consciousness revolution that is rising to
challenge mindless globalization. I talked about the
web and organizing. The high point
of the weekend was a several hour session with Marshall Gans, a warm, ebulent, and profound community organizer who worked for 16 years with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers.
Marshall Gans’ main points:
(1) Time: You must change your relationship to time. Institutions
achieve stability by enacting cycles–the annual budget cycle, the
church year, the spring sales push. To make change you focus on
time as an arrow–you use time to make something happen that will
irrevocably change the status quo. You move from project time and
ordinary time to campaign time. Political campaigns embody this
deeply. The visualization of time as an arrow is in big wall
charts that plot what needs to happen in time.
(2) A simple goal that individuals can contribute to
directly: The United Farm Workers had grapes, the
revolutionaries in Boston had tea, and Gandhi had salt. A
movement needs a simple goal that all can focus on, that organization
can be created around, and where success can be achieved in measureable
terms. The group this weekend is taking a pledge to give 0.7% of
their earnings to the developing world–and to work to gain the same
level of contribution from churches and nations. The interesting
thing about this “grape” is that it raises all the related issues about
money and power and development and happiness. Some of the
toughest questions: Are people really made happy by development
aid? What does it go for, anyway? Doesn’t most development
aid just benefit the dictators and oligarcs and monopolists in
developing countries? Isn’t it mostly a tool of cynical foriegn policy
plans? So the discussion leads rapidly to more and more
questions, but good questions…
(3) Capability: When you focus on a goal and build a group and
linked relationships and networks and individual skills to accomplish
that goal, you build capability to address all the related
issues.
(4) Constituency: This capability–this community and
communion–becomes a constituency for change within the first world,
first superpower structures–and to the extent these structures allow
for democractic change, issues start to get addressed in the
mainstream.
For over five years supporting the farm workers was reduced to not
eating a grape today. But this simple campaign had complex
results. It helped create a movement among consumers, and it
exerted real economic pressure on the grape growers. Over time it
changed the discussion in state and federal governments, and led to new
laws and processes to protect farm workers.