Rules for Radicals Remixed: An Interview with Mike Gecan and Amy Totsch of the IAF
Map of Vacant Housing in Chicago’s North Lawndale and Back of the Yards Neighborhoods
Today’s post originates from some reading and reflection I have been doing on community organizing and the ways in which it can (and cannot) help strengthen democracy in America. I am in learning mode on this topic. I’ll also admit to skepticism about some of what passes for community organizing. All too often, national funders and advocates presume their issues are the most relevant and the ones locals should take up. Even if community organizers succeed in getting national actors to take a backseat, their threat list still reads suspiciously like the outsiders are driving.
But I am curious about what bona fide, bottom up community organizing looks like and what it can accomplish. One of my tutors on these questions has been Mike Gecan, the author of Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Civic Action. Mike is a longtime community organizer and national network leader for the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF).
The IAF was founded in 1940 by Saul Alinsky to help organize the predominantly Slavic enclaves in the rough-and-tumble Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago. Alinsky later codified his methods in his landmark 1971 book, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. It is still widely read as an old school but nonetheless powerful handbook for grassroots organizers. Indeed, as of this posting, Alinsky’s primer is ranked #2 in Amazon’s “Bestsellers in Political Advocacy.”
I recently caught up with Mike and his colleague Amy Totsch. Amy leads United Power for Action and Justice, IAF’s present-day Chicago affiliate. I wanted to learn more about the organization’s work and how it has evolved from Alinsky’s day to our own. The following interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity, touches on several themes:
Why and how the IAF makes a point of organizing through local member institutions.
The ways in which the IAF weaves radical and conservative elements into its work.
The IAF’s belief in the need for dis-organizing as well as organizing in civil society.
The growing frustration the IAF and its members experience with government.
How United Power holds its multiracial coalition of member institutions together.
The reasons that the IAF keeps philanthropy at arms length – and vice versa.
Daniel: To get us started, Mike, could you please tell us about the overall mission of IAF as a national network, and Amy, that of the local affiliate you lead in Chicago?
Mike: We think of the Industrial Areas Foundation as a platform that stimulates, creates, supports, and encourages effective organizing. It's not meant to be a powerful institution unto itself. It's meant to be a resource for existing affiliates and to help organize new ones.
That translates into a couple of specific things. One is our ability to attract, train, and support top flight IAF organizers like Amy Totsch. The work of those organizers, in turn, is to be talent scouts. They go out into a community, a city, or county and find the respected, trusted leaders in the area. They are almost always there, but they have to be found, engaged, trained, supported, and, at times, agitated.
Amy: United Power for Action and Justice works across Cook County, in Chicago and the suburban areas. Within that jurisdiction, we're focused on leveraging, building, wielding, and sustaining power through institutions. United Power was founded in 1997. We currently have 38 member institutions that include churches, mosques, synagogues, and nonprofits. They are spread throughout Cook County, with a resurgence and concentration on the South and West sides. People often associate us with our issue campaigns. But that's an outcome of the power that we build and where we want to aim it. Primarily, our organization is about building broad-based power through institutions that bring together people who are representative of the jurisdiction that we're organizing.
Daniel: What does it take for an institution to become a member of an IAF affiliate? Why do you keep the focus on institutions instead of organizing individuals directly?
Amy: It starts with our power orientation. We know power comes in two forms, organized people and organized money. And that's what institutions have–what, in a sense, they are. They organize people and money around a set of values and often, like many of our member institutions, in a particular place. For an institution to join United Power, it takes some money. They pay member dues. That is the primary source of funding for our organization and the majority of our affiliates.
It also takes people. They have to have a team and leaders who are locally rooted in the institution, have an appetite for creating change, and see the need to relate to other institutions. They are interested in building power together to try and make something happen–whatever it turns out to be. Also, institutions are around for the long haul. They provide continuity. The organizing is not about any one leader, or loose affiliations of them.
Daniel: I’ll confess that reading Mike’s book, my previous conversations with him, and talking with you now have changed my impressions of IAF. I had assumed, given how your charismatic founder, Saul Alinsky, titled his book, Rules for Radicals, and the activism that drives so much community organizing, that IAF was a progressive network. But you focus on work in particular places, on the issues most relevant to people living in them, not on national causes. You have a realistic, even gritty perspective on political power. You insist on the autonomy and importance of the social sector, what Mike calls the relational sector, remaining separate from and challenging actors in the public and private sectors. You harbor no illusions about the capacity or responsiveness of local and state government agencies. You make a point of working through institutions, many of which are religious. All this has small “c” conservative connotations in my mind. Am I missing something here?
Mike: I would say it's a mixed approach. We still think it's radical to believe that people can be agents in their communities and can operate effectively vis-a-vis their mayors and governors and banks and financial institutions. It's what Bernard Crick talked about in his In Defense of Politics. We believe in the affirmative individual, that most people, most of the time, will do the right thing if given the opportunity. Not all people. Some are bad eggs. Not everybody all the time. We all mess up. But most people most of the time will do the right thing. We see organizing as giving people the opportunity to operate effectively in the public arena and to do right by their families and communities.
I've been at this a long time, but my day yesterday was typical. It was a series of individual meetings with leaders in Jersey City, working with New Jersey Together, our affiliate there, to find, train, agitate and support the leaders in that community. They're in this incredible dynamic of development and gentrification that's threatening to overwhelm them. We think the belief that such a group can make a difference remains radical.
Another belief is that, as Amy said, institutions are fundamental and critical to people's growth and development, to their spirits and to their communities. And that doesn't mean just supporting all the institutions that already exist. Some of them are dead. Some of them should be dropped or avoided. But the vital ones need to be engaged and supported. And we need to create new ones. United Power is just such an institution in the ecosystem of Cook County. East Brooklyn Congregations is the same in New York. I don't know if it's radical in the ideological sense, but it is radical in the sense that these fundamental beliefs we think are important are countercultural now in many camps.
Amy: Our work and coalitions are continuing to evolve. Take North Lawndale, one of the neighborhoods we're working in. It is where Dr. King went and lived when he was trying to draw attention to the slum conditions in the west side of the city. Now we're focused on an effort there with ten member institutions. Many of them aren't the traditional institutions that we used to work with decades ago when United Power was founded. There are only two churches among the member institutions involved. We have a homeowner's association created by one of our members. We also have some schools, a safety net hospital, a couple of nonprofit developers, and a few social service agencies involved. There's definitely a shift, but we are still about finding new ways to create and support these institutions.
Daniel: Your approach to organizing through community-based institutions brings to mind Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” produced by the entrepreneurial spirit in capitalism.
Mike: We always talk about how organizing is also about disorganizing and reorganizing. Everybody wants to reorganize, but nobody wants to disorganize. That is the hard part. On Saturday, I was in a black church in DC. Like so many churches in the country, they are struggling and trying to figure out, post-COVID, how they are going to operate differently now that the old patterns have been broken or disrupted. So we're working with a lot of churches in Prince George's County and Brooklyn and DC and other places, talking with them about converting their sites, facilities, and parking lots into new affordable housing.
We’ve done it with a wonderful church, Emory United Methodist Church in DC. Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in DC is creating another kind of new configuration for the next generation of that congregation’s life. The congregations that do that are going to have a real shot at thriving, expanding, and growing. The ones that don't are going to be disorganized by the new patterns that have been established.
To take another example, in one of our cities, the school system has lost a lot of its students. They have many school buildings that are nearly empty. Something's got to change here. You can't run a building meant for 2,000 students with 200 kids. So we met with the deputy chancellor recently and said, what if we identified schools that could be repurposed as affordable homes and apartments for the people in that community and as a downsized school facility so the community doesn't feel like it's being victimized? Our organization would sponsor this and could even ask for it. The chancellor looked at us and said, “Thank God, you just saved me three years of hell!” We haven’t done it yet, but I think we will. It’s an example of how these institutions need to be rethought.
Daniel: Amy, how has IAF’s work in Chicago changed since its founding in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in 1940? Imagine an early IAF organizer traveling through time to a meeting you are organizing today. What would be different? What would be the same?
Amy: I've actually been spending quite a bit of time in Back of the Yards lately! It’s one of the four neighborhoods we're focusing on in our biggest campaign, Reclaiming Chicago. Our goal is to build 2,000 single family affordable homes on the south and west sides. The population and Back of the Yards at its height in the 1930s was 87,000. Today, it's 43,628. It’s one of the many neighborhoods that have bled population, both physically, and with the violence that has impacted the neighborhood.
Another obvious shift is in the demographics. In the 1930s, the neighborhood was largely white. The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council was founded and built through the white ethnic immigrant communities and the Catholic Church, which was the major institution at the time. Now, the neighborhood is 62% Latino, and then there's a significant black population at its south end; about 23% of the neighborhood is black. The Catholic Church has just closed three big churches in the neighborhood and is combining them into one. It’s an example of what we were talking about, the disorganization of institutions.
Another striking thing is the challenged condition of the neighborhood. Take all the city-owned vacant land, which is what we're targeting. It's really stunning how much of it is concentrated in one area. The institutions we're working with include a Catholic-based social service agency, Precious Blood Ministries, led by Father David Kelly. He's got an incredible team of leaders there. It is located and rooted in the Black part of the neighborhood, though it works across constituencies. We also have The Resurrection Project, which is another member organization of ours, one that largely though not exclusively has operated in the Latino part of the neighborhood.
And so working with and through those two institutions in Back of the Yards, and focusing on this one area, there's about 200 city-owned vacant lots that we're trying to tackle–the amount of vacant land is just stunning. I will share a map so you can see the extent of it. [Note: see screenshot at the top of the post.] What we are trying to do is match the land with the needs of the people that live in the neighborhood, and are part of the institutions. How can we flip it so that the land is serving what is actually needed in the neighborhood–and that the neighborhood can improve at a large scale that will have an impact?
Daniel: You are rallying a multiracial coalition of institutions on these issues. How do you navigate the dilemmas and difficulties related to questions of race in your work together?
Amy: It’s essential that within our association, we have a habit, pattern, and practice of sitting down and relating to one another across all of our differences. This means learning about each other and from each other–where we come from, what shapes us, what our interests are. That’s what we coalesce around: how do we find and then align on common interests, and then organize and build and wield the power so that we can have impact together, and share power together? That's the focus. How do we do that in a way that is both representative of who we are and the interests that our membership represents?
Mike: We have to imagine how to rebuild these places, because the government isn't doing it. And the market isn't doing it. Over the last 25 years, more and more, that's been the case. We can't rely on government to do much. In fact, it's an obstacle. So we have to take on quasi-governance functions. Designing the new housing. Coming up with the idea of new public schools to complement existing ones. Creating a mental health ecosystem in our cities where they don't exist. We're struggling with that in New York right now. I know, Amy, you are in Chicago as well. We'd rather not have to do that. But if we waited for the government to do it, we'd be waiting forever.
Daniel: So the standard playbook of looking for the government to solve big problems like the ones you’re tackling presumes a level of agility, capacity, and foresight in government that, in a lot of places, including many of the ones you're working in, is now simply lacking.
Mike: Yes, for example in one of our states, we met with the governor a couple times and had a robust agenda. The meetings were interesting, but whatever, nothing happened. I mean nothing! Then late one night, one of the governor's top people calls me. I’ve known him for many years. He says to me, “I owe you this call, but you can never tell anyone I called you, right? We just want you to know that nobody’s against [the local IAF affiliate]. No one's out to get you. No one's really undermining you. It's not about you. We're just dysfunctional. We can't do anything.” So I told him, “Well, I'm not sure whether to feel better or worse. I guess I feel better in that it's not personal to our organization. But I feel worse, because, well, now what?” I mean what could we do with that? But I appreciated the call, even if it was a cry of pain on his part. At least then we knew what we were dealing with.
Daniel: I’m curious about philanthropic funding for your work. To what extent have you found it helpful and accessible–and if not, why not?
Amy: At the affiliate level, United Power has not had a lot of philanthropic support. I don't think our philanthropic support has ever been more than 20% of our annual operating budget. Largely because we’ve always had a really strong dues base, and that has been essential to our continuing operation. Our focus is on who owns the organization: our member institutions, and they have been the primary driver and focus.
With our Reclaiming Chicago campaign, our member organizations have raised their own money to start to build the homes, and that's been critical. It has allowed us to begin to enact this vision. We are not waiting for the city to come around or for the state to put in its money to get started. It took philanthropies and financial institutions willing to think and invest creatively, not just in the usual ways they have worked to build traditional affordable housing, but to think with us and help us build homes at scale, and help create wealth and equity for the families that will purchase the homes, largely black and brown families on the South and West sides of the city. It could be transformative. We need more thinking like this—alongside and with us and our member institutions.
Daniel: What about at the national level, MIke?
Mike: As Amy mentioned, we always emphasize local dues. And the reason is for the ownership among the leaders. It can't be your organization if you don't pay for it, or if somebody else pays for most of it. A lot of groups try to finesse that. We don’t. We put dues upfront. If we can't generate a dues base, we don't get started in a place. We just tell people, it's not going to work. And if people say well, we could raise this money from X, Y or Z Foundation. We say that's fine. But the primary source of money has to be your money. The philanthropic money can complement that, but it can't be the bread and butter.
Just last week, I was talking to a major foundation here in New York about a new effort in the South Bronx. I wanted to raise money to bring organizers in to rebuild our effort and institutional base there. The foundation said we want to know your outcomes on housing and on school safety. I said, look, we don't have an organization yet. I'm asking for money to build an organization that will inevitably get involved in those areas over time. They said, just give us some outcomes and we can proceed. I said, I can't give you outcomes!
This is a classic tension we have with foundations. They want programs before power. And they want to fund programs, but they either don’t understand or don't believe that you first need a power base to get the kind of programmatic or or issue impact they want at scale.
Then there have been pleasent surprises. Mackenzie Scott reached out to us through her consulting firm and made a major donation to our work. That came out of nowhere. The Walton Family Foundation has also been a supporter. What resonates with them is our commitment to institutions and our not being easily pigeon-holed in one ideological camp. But those are exceptions. Most foundations don't appreciate our relational power building.
Daniel: That is a good stopping point. Thank you Mike and Amy for your time today, and for all the great work that you and your colleagues at IAF, its affiliates, and their member institutions are doing.
