Community Organizing

Lucky Obama! Before he tried to get the country organized, he spent a few years learning something about community organizing, which is to say, getting members of a community to learn to act in their own interests rather than to accept the role of victims or of passive recipients of whatever was being handed down by government or just offered to them by the status quo. Point Roberts may be a community in need of that kind of organizing. I think this because there is such a pervasive sense by people who live here full-time of being the victim of the county, state, and U.S. government. Unfortunately, I don’t have much sense of how to do that community organizing. Nor do my friends and neighbors, I fear, who probably don’t think that the community actually needs any organizing but instead think that the various levels of government need improved organizing.

This is occupying my thoughts because I attended this evening the monthly meeting of the Point Roberts Community Association, a new group that has been meeting for about nine months. Time for the baby to be born. But things are going a little slowly. The immediate object of our attention is the community events sign which we decided early this spring to replace because of its being in such a state of disrepair. Those of us going to these meetings (anywhere from 5 to 10 people) saw this as a relatively simple job that we could get done quickly and use as a kind of demonstration project to show our good intentions. This, we thought, might draw a larger membership.

People here are very suspicious of community groups because they work so poorly. There are doubtless many causes of this lack of sustained interest in the community as community, and I wish we could have a visit from a diagnostician—Hey, Obama! Where are you when I need you?-- but so far it is just flailing along, trying to find a formula that might work. It seems to me that if you have only 1700 people, you ought to be able to reach out to them in some meaningful way. But seeming isn’t doing.

So, we have gone over the sign design yet again tonight and I am promised by those actually constructing the actual sign that it will in fact be in place by October 15th. After that, we can put out a community questionnaire. The idea is to introduce the community to the new sign, a small attempt to improve the state of the community, and inquire of them what other things they think would improve the community: things that are, in fact, doable by the community itself. (It would, of course, improve the community to have a hospital, e.g., but that’s not going to happen.) Those answers, we expect, will lead us to a second project that will draw more community member participation. And with two projects, we can organize a community website to keep track of and to communicate information about these projects.

That’s the plan, anyway. Will it work? I’m trying to be optimistic, but I’m working from zero history and zero experience, so I am just trying to take it one meeting at a time. If the only thing we achieve (other than the sign) is getting to know each other better, that can’t be a bad thing. I'm prepared to take what I can get out of this adventure.