on my mind lately... (part one)

I've done a poor job so far with this blogging thing. I hope to make it more of a habit and in order to get started, I'll share just briefly a few issues about which I've been thinking and praying a lot lately:


School of the Americas Watch / Effective grassroots organizing
This past weekend, I went back to the SOA Watch annual rally and vigil, and once again, it was a very inspiring experience. I wrote about it for the Sojourners blog last week; I wanted to express the importance of making political issues personal so I shared about my experience last spring in El Salvador, visiting with victims of the Salvadoran Civil War (the Salvadoran military was made up of many SOA grads that committed atrocities against their own people). I connected that spring pilgrimage with my experience at the SOAW vigil last year and this year. One of Michael's photos of the woman about whom I write was posted with the entry.

Last year, one of the most inspiring things to me about the vigil was being with 25,000 other people, many of them people of faith, who are passionate about the same things I was. Throughout college, I often felt somewhat on the margins in terms of my beliefs and passions, so being with so many others who shared them was incredibly encouraging. This year, I am totally surrounded by people of faith who share similar passions and lifestyle choices, so that part to me was not quite as impressive, although it was still energizing.
Sojourners had a table there and it was wonderful to be able to hand out magazines and share our work with vigil attendees. So many of them had great things to say about Sojourners; I hope to be able to draw on their words for inspiration on the days I am in the weeds of my work and not feeling as excited about it.
It was still incredibly moving to participate in the vigil procession where the names of several thousand victims of violence by SOA grads were read, and hang a white cross on the gates of Ft. Benning.
As an organizing intern for a national-level organization, this year I also spent a lot of time thinking about what effective grassroots organzing should look like in the 21st century. I think that SOAW does a pretty great job organizing a large-scale mobilization of people (with a very small national staff!) and does well both organizing at the grassroots level by having local chapters across the nation and also working from the top-down by doing policy work both in the U.S. and in Latin America. There are a few other examples I can think of effective local grassroots organizing that works nationally (the ONE campaign and Invisible Children come to mind)... but I am still trying to wrap my head around the most effective ways to get large numbers of people activated around issues in the new millenium.
The Obama campaign, with its innovative and incredibly effective community organizing for its campaign, may help shed some light on the issue, but I am not convinced that it was not just a special case at a unique time in history with high successes because of its simple and tangible goal of getting one man elected. I'd like to learn more about their organizing, though, and this article, I feel is a good place to start.
I believe that national organizing is really important, and I would love to study the Civil Rights Movement and various theories about what "the movement" should look like in the 2010s, but in terms of my own personal vocation, I have always felt more drawn to questions of how to create spaces for personal transformation and reconciliation, rather than spaces for national mobilization (I credit the Catholic Social Teaching principle of subsidiary for this interest). And I've also felt that it is crucial that "the movement" remain close to the people for whom its advocating... the Civil Rights Movement did this well and I think that the successes of the future are dependent upon this idea. A national anti-poverty movement must stay close to the places where the poor, the people of God, gather.
This article, in some ways, helps to express my thoughts about the issue. I'll close with one of it's intro paragraphs:

The coals of radical social change smolder here among the poor, the homeless and the destitute. As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our hope, our only hope, is to connect intimately with the daily injustices visited upon them. Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. Hand out bowls of soup. Coax the homeless into a shower. Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly cast out on city sidewalks, take their medications. Put your muscle behind organizing service workers. Go back into America's resegregated schools. Protest. Live simply. It is in the tangible, mundane and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others and defy authority that we will kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back. It is not Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who will save us. It is Dorothy Day.

I realize this was a pretty scattered, not very thorough set of thoughts. I'd love to talk more about it with anyone who is interested & would love to hear your feedback!