Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Community organizers

So here is my OMG from today's class:

OMG they don't know why or how "community organizer" became such a loaded term! Ok, one person knew that Obama considered himself a community organizer. But no one remembered that Sarah Palin disparaged them. Where were they?!?!?! Just 5 months ago, right? Sheltered? Inattentive? Selective? Or maybe Palin's comment didn't have that much play except among those of us who got offended. Hmmmm.

But today was a good class. We discussed "Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History..." with questions like these:

  • Let’s call Philip Vera Cruz a community organizer. A loaded term, I know. So let’s reload it. How do you think Philip Vera Cruz would define “community organizer”? Think in terms of knowledge, qualities, skills and other factors that you think are important.

I also asked about his lessons in leadership and coalition building and participation. Most importantly, I threw all sorts of current events into the mix: harassment of day laborers, "illegal immigrants," the stimulus package, majority rules, bi-partisan "compromise", driving while brown. What does Philip Vera Cruz's personal history have to tell us about these issues? Got a lot of participation! And my favorite, we got some disagreement and surfaced some prejudice. Teachable moments! Yeah!

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