I'm Not Organizing Sox

When I was in California, last week, I took some time to read Barak Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which gave me some more sense of who the guy is. But what interested me more, in some ways, was his recounting of his 3-year experience as a community organizer in Chicago after he graduated from college.

I’ve been reading about community organizing since the 60’s, I’d say, and I always thought of it vaguely as something like organizing a labor union. Or maybe organizing anything—your children, the sox in your drawer. But I never really thought about the nitty gritty of it. That is, you try to organize workers, you already know what it is they have in common: they are workers and they are not management. You organize your children, and you have some previously established authority, as difficult as it may be to get them to follow your lead. You organize your sox in a drawer, they stay where they are put.

Organizing a community, by contrast, is quite different. It requires attempting to get people to figure out what their common interests might be when there is no previously-defined common interest, no community necessarily other than in your head; when you have no authority to do anything at all, and no one has any reason to go where you put them or to stay there once they’ve been put there. Probably more like the much-quoted job of herding cats when the cats didn't ask to be herded. And what interests me about this is that, after reading about Obama’s experience in Chicago, I realized that community organizing is what the Point Roberts Community Council is trying to do, even if it doesn’t necessarily think of it in those words.

At the last meeting, the ‘Council’ voted to change its name to the Point Roberts Community Association. The general rationale was that ‘Council’ sounded too much like an elected, representative group, and nobody had elected any of us to do anything and we represented people on the Point in only the vaguest of ways. So, now we’re an Association, which makes us something that anyone who lives in Point Roberts can join. We are choosing to associate with one another because we have some common interests. And because we have some common interests, we have the beginnings of a discrete community, even if, at the moment, it’s only the community of the Point Roberts Community Association. One common interest that this small community identified was a need to improve the Community Events sign on the main street. And, with some group work now completed, a new Community Events sign will soon appear. Results!

The next task, then, is to find out if other Point Roberts’ residents have other common interests and whether they and the community of the Association might join together and find some way to advance a common cause. It's baby steps, but I think I’m learning.