Grassroots Support for the Employee Free Choice Act Grows

All over America, workers and folks who believe in workers’ rights and economic fairness are stepping up to counter corporate America’s increasingly desperate efforts to maintain their destructive stranglehold on our economy and our lives. They have lied over and over ad nauseam about the Employee Free Choice Act.

Read updates about this issue, which is vital to organizing and our democracy, by clicking here:
http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/03/25/grassroots-support-for-the-employee-free-choice-act-grows/

Jim

New Website "Organizers for America": Community Organizer Job Bank

Organizers for America is a free service to community organizations, unions and allied groups seeking to hire community organizers and related positions.

Employers can list jobs, internships and volunteer positions (please no partisan political jobs). Job seekers can search the listings and post resumes.

If you have any questions about this service, call 301-270-0640 or visit the website National Organizers Alliance, which provides this site as a service to organizing groups. NOA, of which I am a member, is an excellent resource for and about organizing.

Funding Community Organizing

Funding Community Organizing
Social Change through Civic Participation

Grantmakers who fund community organizing say it’s the best option when you want to promote civic engagement and support lasting solutions to a community’s problems. Yet many funders, concerned about the ability to measure its impact and effectiveness, hesitate to take up community organizing as a strategy. In this guide, funders and organizers discuss what makes community organizing unique and uniquely effective, how to manage grantee relationships over time, understanding the value of process, and the grantmaker’s special role in fostering change.

Download this handy guide at:
www.grantcraft.org

The Spencerian

Hit up my buddy Ben Kirby's blog, The Spencerian, for outstanding political commentary. Ben and I also had a blast debating about the Fairness Doctrine at the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club this week. Check out Ben's blog for all the media links.
http://warnerkirby.blogs.com/spencerian/2008/11/unfair-advantage-jim-barrens-schools-me-on-the-fairness-doctrine-at-tiger-bay.html

A Vulture Retires

I'm a hopeless gadget-freak. Any kind of electronic or computer-related toy seduces me with its wizardry and potential for endless, mindless, exploration.

So last Sunday I was driving through Vero Beach and noticed a Circuit City store that was going out of business. Now I know that I've blogged here in the past about the anti-employee policies of Circuit City. Not too long ago, in a supposedly cost-savings measure, the company fired a bunch of senior employees, then invited them to re-apply for their jobs at lower wages. A real cold thing to do. So when I saw the "Going Out of Business" sign I figured I'd help them by participating in their demise.

But then I got inside the store and saw the workers. These people were soon to be added to the 10 million unemployed Americans. I began to feel guilty. I wished many of them good luck in the future. I didn't buy any toys.

Yesterday, back home in St. Petersburg, too thick-headed to have learned my lesson, I was again wooed by my eternal curse to go into a Sound Advice store that was also going out of business. I survey the carnage of strewn boxes of merchandise and depressed employees. I felt like a witness to a train wreck. I felt like I do when I'm driving down the road and I can't resist staring at the accident in the other lane. I felt like a vulture picking over the bones of a dead animal. I quickly headed to my car.

So what have I learned? I've learned that we are all in for a long stretch of store closings and business failures in our communities. I've learned that my petty consumerism is a curse. I've learned that going out of business sales are not about catching a few bargains and finding new toys. I've learned that they are about human misery and families that are hurting. And I've learned that I can't participate in the carnage.

Jim

"The power of the people united through community organizing"

Good morning COMM-ORG,

It is a rare opportunity to bear witness to the power of community organizing. Seldom in this country's history have we seen the craft reach the heights of its potential--the Civil Rights Movement, the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act and, maybe arguably, one or two other times. But last night I witnessed, as an adult when I can truly appreciate it, the power of the people united through community organizing. I, perhaps like many of you, are still in a bit of a shock. Regardless of the extent to which we may or may not agree with President-elect Obama politically (from either side of the political spectrum), we must appreciate the historic election of someone whose own lifetime began under the disenfranchisement of African Americans. Less than half a century ago Barack Obama would have had difficulty even trying to vote in the southern United States. I am also the parent of a 16 year old multi-racial (including African American) daughter. She could not bear the ambiguity of the early returns, and could not sleep once the result was decided. I remain, this morning, overwhelmed by the momentousness of this election.

As we dissect what happened, I hope we appreciate how the lessons of community organizing, which include fundraising, and its leadership by a 47 year old community organizer who perhaps finally figured out how to organize, brought about this historic result. My congratulations and thanks go out to ACORN and all the other community organizers who put into play, in magnificent form, time-honored community organizing practices to register voters and organize against voter suppression. It is a new morning in the United States and, for the moment, it belongs to community organizing.

Randy Stoecker
moderator/editor, COMM-ORG
rstoecker@wisc.edu

From the COMM-ORG website, comm-org.wisc.edu:
"COMM-ORG was founded in 1995 by Wendy Plotkin and is now moderated and edited by Randy Stoecker. It's mission is to link academics and activists, and theory and practice, toward the goal of improving community organizing and its related crafts. The project is supported by the University of Wisconsin Department of Rural Sociology and the University of Wisconsin Extension Center for Community and Economic Development. Everything here is free and accessible."

Hope Won.