Fred Allebach is a member of the City of Sonoma’s Community Services and Environmental Commission, and an Advisory Committee member of the Sonoma Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Fred is a member of Sonoma Overlook Trail Stewards, as well as Sonoma Valley Housing Group and Transition Sonoma Valley.
NBOP is Coming to Town
Sunday, May 13th, El Verano School, Family Resource Center
In a very interesting two-hour presentation to community members and leaders, Davin Cardenas of the North Bay Organizing Project (NBOP), laid out some of the theoretical and practical underpinnings of community organizing. All text in italics in this piece represent my own comments. Plain text is an attempt at reportage on the meeting.
Silos and frayed social fabric
In a modern age where US individualism is ascendant, and unions, churches and schools are in decline as places to gather and discuss issues of common concern, how do we build stronger social fabric and social cohesion?
Many interested parties in Sonoma Valley have noted groups and people as being isolated in their own silos. What a bigger difference our values could make if we could all just pull together on common issues like housing, social justice, upstream investment, low wages, human-caused climate change etc.?
Faith-based roots of organizing
Cardenas pointed out that organizing comes from a faith-based tradition. The NBOP is associated with the Gamaliel group, of which Barack Obama was a community organizer. From the Gamaliel website: “Gamaliel was founded in 1986 to train community and faith leaders to build political power and create organizations that unite people of diverse faiths and races… Our mission is to empower ordinary people to effectively participate in the political, environmental, social and economic decisions affecting their lives. Gamaliel’s diverse members apply their faith and values to the pursuit of equal opportunity for all, shared abundance, and stronger, more prosperous communities.”
What organizing does, said Cardenas, is to create a process of waking up. For example, Moses challenged his people to reflect on the slavery they were living in, maybe they didn’t even know they were slaves, and to then shoot for the promised land. Cardenas likened organizing to a process of individual awakening. “We are comatose”, he said, focused on our individual adventures. We need to move “beyond the individual into the collective”, and build a table, or platform of institutions where the issues that animate us in common are brought to the fore.
Individual and community context
This is very similar to the Sustainable Sonoma initiative, of which the NBOP is an interested party. The NBOP will bring community activism and the voice of the little guy to that table. In the big picture, we have, as a society, become substantially out of balance between the “rights” of individuals, and the group, socio-cultural context from which all individuals spring. With this ascendance of individual prerogative, a large-scale, world-level tragedy of the commons has unfolded, where the aggregate effects of each to his own has left our social and environmental common ground in tatters. The notion that an invisible hand of aggregate material selfishness creates common good has proven to not work!
Origins of societal values
As far as organizing deriving from faith-based awakening, I have noticed a similarity myself. A reborn Christian proselytizing and an activist beckoning are quite similar in tone and urgency. Eric Hoffer has pointed this all out in his short book about mass movements, The True Believer. It’s one thing, however to be saved, to gain a level of purity, and simply save your own butt for eternity, and another to wake up to the structural injustice of hierarchical civilization. Thus, different branches of Christianity have evolved, one more selfish, one more socially conscious. If the social justice Jesus, sticking up for the little guy, is an early reflection of protesting the innate inequities of hierarchical civilization, then the metaphorical promised land is where all the little guys and slaves are not ground under the dictates of the world’s Pharaohs, or the 1% power structure. When humanity evolved from hunter gatherers to a sedentary, agricultural means of production, a necessary social stratification occurred. There are always more farmers and laborers than priests and officials. It is the inequities of this same civilizational class strata that we still struggle with. Organizing then, is the work of socially conscious faith traditions.
Power and control
The NBOP lecture continued with an analysis of power, what it is, who has it and why. A certain social stasis happens when members of society are encouraged to play along, and not rock the boat. This social control to conformity is what keeps status quo power arrangements in place. Inequality and fairness issues get swept under the rug.
In the US, this happens by a lot of invisible hand, trickle down, voodoo economics power and control. Since the beginning of civilization there has been major tension between the haves and the have nots, and ways to justify the inequity. Old time Kings promised rain and good crops, buy putting in a special word with the gods. The dynamics, tactics and strategies of power and control are well covered by Machiavelli. Lord Acton said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Power, in the lecture, was equated with the ability to act (activism). And beyond that, the ability to influence the power structure. One participant mentioned that status quo power is adept at setting up playpens (committees etc.) for concerned citizens to play in, but that these never undermine the powers that be, those that cause the structurally unjust power imbalances.
One participant objected to framing this all as us against them. Another said that power actors probably don’t get out of bed in the morning thinking of how they can do more wrong. Another person pointed out Sonoma Valley has a lot of non-profits, but not a lot of community organizing.
Values, what is at stake?
A discussion of values ensued. Having power implies responsibility to use it wisely. What values then amount to being “wise”, or “sustainable” etc.? Through our values, (that ultimately derive from traditional culture and a biological moral capacity), we work towards the world as we want it to be. It is through organizing that power is obtained and expressed. It is through organizing that changes can happen, as the organizers, or citizens, or the people, popularly demand it through methodical messaging that after a certain point, cannot be ignored.
Once power is obtained, comes the ability to make decisions. Decisions can be made to favor, generally, either the people or moneyed interests. Power has traditionally benefited the haves, and not the have nots. Organizing gives the have nots power.
Through organizing, the interests of regular people, with aspirational community values, can become primary. These interests unfold as an organic expression of the actors who bring them forth to the common table.
Interests
A practical process of organizing was then discussed. How to ascertain and delineate the interests of socially and environmentally conscious people? This was framed as a process of getting to know different community actors, building relationships, and getting to know what makes people tick. The discussion framed this as self- interest. Self-interest can be mostly selfish, competitive, invisible hand, survival of the fittest type stuff, or it can be framed as selfless communitarianism, or it can be a middle path of relational, mutual respect.
How to get to understand the self-interest of others? First of all is to be clear what your own stake in the game is; what are your interests? Know thyself, be able to communicate clearly who you are, where you came from, what your values are, and why you pull for this or that outcome.
Davin Cardenas honesty recapped his own personal story. “Know the story that made you who you are”, he said. “We are created by our own stories.” And so, by dialoguing with people around town, and by becoming articulate with your and others issues, a landscape of common issues starts to emerge. This is going to happen anyway, for people active in the community, but Cardenas proposed this a methodical way to open up the values of community members, to get them on the table, and apply them to the issues that emerge that call to be addressed.
Relationships are the basis of community action
The upshot: it is through relationships, and figuring out who people are, that we come to be able to work together. These relationships need to be cultivated. This is an organizing method. It’s networking. Face to face meetings are a tool, a way to gather information, an aspect of organizing. This social immersion with a variety of community actors is free, it does not have to cost money, maybe just a cup of coffee’s worth.
To engage in such face to face community exploration and dialogue takes courage and real curiosity. You have to want to know what makes people different from you tick. Real curiosity, for example, would be wanting to know who Sheriff Steve Freitas is? Go meet him, listen well, have an open mind, see outside your assumptions and your weltanschauung box. In a country increasingly divided by bubbles of like-minded people, having a broader view could be very adaptive.
And through such personal-level community engagement, actors may begin to see issues in a larger context, and discover social ties that then create real desire to show up and demonstrate strength in numbers for common values.
The interests and values are already in place
In terms of organizing Sonoma Valley, it is coming now, with all sorts of groups popping up to augment existing groups. There is an incipient social and environmental justice tide rising, to address existing, age-old issues, now kick-started by Trump resistance. Just what organized-issues will be in the Valley remains to be defined by the actors. Some issues are already well-defined and beginning to be addressed: growing poverty amidst tremendous wealth, unjust federal immigration policy, a housing crisis, low service sector wages, high transportation GHG impacts, and a gratuitous luxury development and tourism economy that does not serve the valley’s greatest needs.
The Sonoma Valley Fund, representing the non-profit and philanthropy community has produced the Hidden in Plain Sight study, with the back-up of a valley-specific Economic Development Board update. The Ecology Center is rolling out its Sustainable Sonoma initiative. A new Groundwater Sustainability Agency will be formed in June. Transition Sonoma Valley is focused on the nuts and bolts of local climate change actions. The First Congregational Church is working with the NBOP and has its forward-looking Earth Care Committee. Wine Water Watch has focused in the social and environmental costs of wine-hospitality tourism. A young cohort active in the Democratic Club is flexing its muscles on local issues. A Sonoma Valley Action Coalition has been formed to address Trump immigration policy. Jobs With Justice has been steadily plugging away on labor issues and raising the wage floor. And now the NBOP is working with the Sonoma Valley Housing Group, Transition, and others. These are just some groups I am aware of, that seem to be moving towards critical mass to influence local policies.
Representation
Currently, the values of a potential majority are not consistent with the degree of ability to affect change. “it is ridiculous that our values are not dominant”, said Cardenas. It’s not enough to sit out, complain and disengage.
The North Bay Organizing Project is starting to form policy platforms in the Sonoma and Petaluma valleys. The planks in these platforms remain to be defined by the actors who show up locally. Collective impact will emerge from the planks locals define. A power structure will be developed that can be brought to bear right here in Sonoma Valley, from the values and concerns we already have.
The NBOP can potentially organize the voices of the have nots, and disengaged idealists, so that the larger community conversation concerning the desired future of Sonoma and Sonoma Valley, may not only reflect the will of the existing power status quo, but also the values and desires of those who see the world in very different terms than those now in control.
To conclude, Cardenas said, the potential systemic changes the NBOP may bring should give the people, and the powers that be, a feeling of both fear and elation.
