People's Organizing Committee

Creating Bottom-up Organizations: a Working Paper
Note: This paper is an introduction to the basic organizing theory and practice of the People’s Organizing Committee of the New Orleans Survivor Council
July 1, 2008

This paper is hoping to help describe and refine the working models we are creating to fight for and build a new and just world. It is based on what we’ve learned so far and what we want to share out of “bottom-up” organizing in New Orleans after Katrina. This organizing has not taken place in a historical vacuum, and we credit all those people whose struggles we’ve learned and benefited from, from Ella Baker (mentor and trainer of young “bottom-up” organizers during the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. during the 1960’s) and SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the “bottom-up” organizers of the 1960’s Southern Civil Rights Student Movement), to the sharecroppers’ unions of the 1930s and 1940s, to the classic revolutions and struggles in the last century, and to the centuries of struggles by our ancestors around the world. We present this working paper in the hope that with the help of many other people, we can also make a contribution to that ongoing journey. We ask that you lend your experience and ideas to this process.

When the authors of this working paper talk about the “bottom,” we are referring to the roughly 80% of the world’s population that lives collectively on an average of $2 a day: poor, hard-working people who mostly live on the fringes of cities or in their ghettoes, and in rural areas, who are the most lacking in resources, health care, and formal education. Some work in various industries and sweatshops or on the land, some are unemployed, and some work in the so-called informal economy. They are the folk who live on steep mountainsides in constant danger from the next hard rain, who live in shantytowns where AIDS and tuberculosis are rampant, whose children die of malnutrition, diarrhea or malaria in ungodly numbers, whose youthful daughters are sold into prostitution, whose neighborhoods are victimized by drugs and gang violence. Pretty much everywhere you look in the world; they are also those with the darkest skin.

Bottom people are all over the world, but the writers of this document, the People’s Organizing Committee (POC), are a group of organizers that began our work with the bottom in the U.S. POC is an organization created to assist those catching the most hell with grouping themselves together to attack the problems they face in a collective and unified way. POC is not an exclusively bottom organization. It is a space to which all people can come that are willing to work for and submit themselves to the direction and leadership of the bottom. All of us in POC, whether from the bottom or not, have been working directly for and with the people on the bottom. In New Orleans, where we began, the bottom is organized through the New Orleans Survivor Council (NOSC). NOSC has reviewed this document to guide its development. Now we offer the same opportunity to you, the readers.

The vision of poor, black people on rooftops and floating in poisoned water in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina brought to us graphically the reality of how the current economic and political situation treats poor people everywhere. It challenged us to look carefully at the dynamics of the struggle of our people and to investigate the existing assumptions of who should lead it. We decided we must harvest the agenda and direction for responding to the aftermath of Katrina from those most impacted by it – the same poor, black, working people left in the city to die.

We consider ourselves revolutionary organizers. By that we mean that we have concluded that the status quo will never lift up that 80% or provide that 80% with a decent life because the status quo is permanently invested in maintaining inequalities of race, class, and gender. We believe that the 80% needs to build a new and entirely different world, eventually eliminate the world’s current bosses and the structures those bosses have erected along the way. Most revolutionaries in the past have focused on defeating the old system through bringing regime change: having workers in charge instead of the rich, having black people overthrow whites, having women in power instead of men. Several of these movements actually succeeded in overthrowing governments, and began trying to build societies without exploitation and oppression. So far, those attempts at building a new world have failed. Our feeling is that our information on the enemy and the need to defeat its empire is fairly well developed and must always be kept in mind. But the challenge of learning how to create a just and egalitarian world still lies before us. In our view, this will be a world created and led by the masses themselves.

Our first attempt to develop the agenda described below began immediately after Katrina with calling together a coalition that came out of many years of organizing in New Orleans. Although most of the organizations involved did not have that constituency or membership, the decision made by the writers of this document was to begin the process by going to the bottom. We decided to look among the people most impacted, gather them, and ask them -- with equal voice -- to come up with solutions. We assumed that most of the people and organizations in the “movement” would be happy to come to work with the people and would acknowledge that the agenda and leadership of the process should come from organizations comprised primarily of the people most impacted by Katrina, the people on the bottom: the same dark-skinned, poor and working black people we all saw on TV in the flood, at the Superdome and then scattered across the country. We began to call this process “bottom-up organizing.”

(See Appendix 1a, which is a timeline of the work to develop bottom-up organizing in New Orleans. We would suggest the reader look at that timeline before reading the rest of this document.)

In the rest of this paper, we will try to allow you, the reader to walk through the steps we have used in the New Orleans to begin to develop this thing we call “bottom-up organizing.” We hope that you will then help us analyze how to improve on it. We are particularly interested in those creative thinkers, workers and organizers who want to invest in and experiment with this process. The things we are doing are not presented as antagonistic to other types of organizing already being done. This is a particular body of work we are engaging in within the construct of human development at this period in history. We want to investigate collectively how theory and practice come together.

What we have observed through doing this work is that when the folk on the bottom come together on a principle of equal voice and egalitarian organization, they will make fair, just, and correct decisions about how to conduct the work of building a new world. All doors must stay open; we can’t have any space where the mass can’t enter, or where the “true” leadership is not mass. However, we are not romantics or delusional. We don’t think that the bottom will magically change the world into a paradise. We know that the conflict between the collective impulse and the selfish impulse exists there, too. We know that the enemy lurks in the background waiting to attack, and will. We know this will not be a short, easy, smooth or peaceful road. But our experience of the past year and a half, and standing on the shoulders of our brothers and sisters before us, tells us that there is genius among the poor waiting to be harvested to direct our movement; that those who are the most oppressed can understand and deal appropriately with all of the challenges has they arise, and that the reins of our movement should be in their hands.

In this part of the paper, we will describe the steps we took in New Orleans to build the New Orleans Survivor Council (NOSC) and root it in the principles of bottom-up. Each organizing situation will have its own particularities. For example, in New Orleans, we had an onslaught of hundreds of volunteers, which is not likely to be the case in most organizing situations. We expect that people organizing in cities or rural areas, in the US or so-called developing countries, and so forth, will face different particular problems and needs. However, if we are sticking to the principles that those on the bottom should lead, of respecting the human drive to take care of the needs of humanity equitably, and of treating all of our people with fairness and humanity, we all may be able to use elements of the model developed in New Orleans.

Step 1: Door-to-door and house call to begin relationship building with the bottom

The first step taken in New Orleans was sending organizers and volunteers into the streets to meet and talk with as many poor and working black hurricane survivors as we could. The purpose in doing this was to begin building relationships, make some initial guesses about desire for involvement, and establish agreement for future communication with people who would then be invited to meet together in what was to become the New Orleans Survivor Council (NOSC). Simultaneously, the visits allowed us to obtain the people’s agenda about the issues and what solutions were needed.

Almost 6,000 visits were done (remember we had an outpouring of volunteers). We found that we were gathering very similar information from many people about what happened to them, how they were treated, and what obstacles faced them back home or in their efforts to return home. Even before the first meetings, we knew something about the consensus developing among the people about what they needed and wanted done. The visits were the source for developing the first agendas for the community’s initial meetings. Much of the information we received provided the basis for the people determining and prioritizing later legal actions to bring to address community issues.

In door-knocking, you mostly listen to gain initial understanding of where the person is, what they are thinking about, and their desire for involvement. After that, you identify some of the things you have also heard from others. You then tell them about a meeting where others with these same concerns are getting together to discuss the situation community members are in and how to get out of it. You try to secure a commitment to be there and you deal with problems or reasons for not coming (transportation, child care, scheduling conflicts, disagreement, etc.), trying to make it possible for the person to attend. You ask if you can contact the person in the future, and write down contact information. When you’re leaving, you may leave a flier as a reminder of the meeting, but the door-to-door is not introduced by a piece of paper.

This describes the first time you knock on a person’s door. After that, when someone is expressing interest, coming to meetings, or doing some work, you follow up with house calls. In these house calls, you plan to sit and spend time with the person, build a relationship with them and help them get more involved in the work, a committee, etc. Building relationships is the key to developing people socially and creating an ongoing organization with stability, where people feel they can rely on each other. You also, periodically, conduct follow-up house calls with people who have not been as involved, after certain community victories or new developments related to the concerns they have communicated.

It is really important to constantly reflect on the new relationships you are developing, understand where your relationships are, and be deliberate about growing them when opportunities for growth present themselves.

As a result of the work described above, by January of 2006, the first meeting of what was to become the NOSC was held in New Orleans. Several hundred residents attended, despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of the poor black community was back in the city. Even before the first meeting of the NOSC, their organizers were assisting residents with whom they had begun building relationships to address issues in their community.

NOSC residents directed the filing of a lawsuit to stop evictions of displaced renters without notice. They directed the development of a report on conditions related to laborers and other workers in their community by having volunteers find community members and ask them to contribute their testimonials. Similarly, they directed the development of a report on conditions related to members of their community dealing with incarceration during the Katrina disaster.

However, because the residents had no organizational identity for their community and for their work, credit for the reports and the lawsuit was almost exclusively given to the attorneys who were working for the residents and the organizations those attorneys belonged to or to the advocacy organizations that partnered with the residents. Organizers were able to talk about these efforts and successes by the residents during
house visits and also have it serve as an example of the need for residents to develop their own organization so that they could give more direction and supervision to their solutions. Even the disorganized resident successes were useful in feeding a desire and need for the community to get together and develop organization. Planning those first initial meetings for the community is very important.

Before the first meeting of what was to become the NOSC was convened, their organizers, who were mainly young people, had to think carefully about how to conduct it in a “bottom-up” fashion. The method chosen came from “story circle,” a meeting model which community elders had been using in other contexts for years. The fundamental principle of the story circle process (also called “people’s circle”) is egalitarianism, or treating everyone equally and fairly and ensuring everyone’s equal voice. This requires several elements:

1)	Make sure everyone has equal access to the meeting itself. This means preparing the meeting in a way that takes obstacles into account and deals with them. So, for instance, each meeting should have childcare available, so people with children can come. It should have food, so people don’t have to worry about cooking. These measures particularly help to remove obstacles that would otherwise stand in the way of women participating, and we have found that women have taken the lead in much of this organizing. Transportation should be organized so those without access to it are enabled to come to the meetings. Chairs should be set in a circle so everyone will be able to see everyone else’s face.

2)	Take measures to assure equal voice in the meeting. Estimate the number of people expected, choose and (if necessary) train enough facilitator teams, which include facilitators, timekeepers and note-takers. The role of the facilitator team is to make sure everyone gets an equal chance to speak, create the agenda, understand the process and participate; to keep to the agenda and help the meeting run smoothly, to monitor that the rules are being followed, to call on people during cross talk, and then help to gather the agreements that have come out of the discussion. The facilitator team also assists in getting disagreements tabled for further discussion between meetings or at other meetings. The role of women is important here. Most meeting facilitators from among the grassroots in New Orleans have been women. We have come to feel that participants (normally accustomed to male leaders and spokesmen of organizations) take the group as a seriously rooted group when women, too, are taking visible leadership roles.

3)	Begin the meeting in a way that invites everyone and makes everyone comfortable. We always start our meetings with a cultural or spiritual offering from someone in the circle. When possible, it is great to organize some children to present a song or poem. Or the offering could be as simple as a prayer to invite the spirit into the circle. This can also be a good time to present a *thought-provoking prompt* and do one round of reflection on it. (For example, at one meeting, the prompt was, “If we woke up tomorrow morning and the whole government was dead, and we had all the money and resources we needed, what would we do?”)

4)	The meeting usually starts with reports on the work that has happened since the last meeting: committee reports, organizer reports, etc.

5)	Following reports, the agenda is set by taking suggestions from the floor.

6)	If the group is larger than 15 people, break it into smaller groups to consider each of the agenda items.

7)	The method of discussion is equal time for each person. A timekeeper assists in assuring this by timing each speaker for the length of time agreed upon by the room (two minutes, for example), and clap hands or make a sign when that time was up, at which point the speaker finishes his/her sentence and stops talking. While one person is speaking, the others are listening – not responding, interrupting, asking questions or thinking about what they’ll say when it’s their turn. Listening is the most important thing going on in the meeting. If a person “passes” their turn, they are offered an opportunity to say what they think after the round is finished and before the next round begins. Each prompt or agenda item is taken separately and all opinions put on the floor in this way.

8)	Once everyone has said what they needed to say, cross talk occurs for the time agreed upon by the room. Cross talk is more like a traditional meeting, in which the facilitator calls on people as they raise hands. However, the goal is not debate, but to work toward everyone having clarity about each other’s contributions.

9)	If the meeting has broken into smaller groups, these groups come together once all agenda items have been addressed and report back. Common agreements are now listed and plans made to carry them out. The facilitator helps guide the discussion to breaking the plans down into assignments, and asks for volunteers to take on the assignments.

10)	The meeting closes with another cultural offering, most often with everyone standing, holding hands and singing together.

(Note: The NOSC conducts its meetings using this model. The terms “people’s circle” and “story circle” are used interchangeably. See Appendix 2, the People’s Circle document, to get a more detailed description of the method.)

We are sharing this process not because we feel it is perfect or the “only way.” The main thing is to develop meetings in a way that honors the principles of equal voice, harvesting the agreements and moving on them, and of making decisions by consensus rather than by vote. We are not trying to engage in debate and create winners and losers. We are trying to move forward on those things people have consensus on at the moment. By the same token, we are not trying to ignore or paper over differences and disagreements, merely to continue talking about them until there is agreement to accept or reject a particular idea by the group as a whole. Whatever meeting methods and styles achieve these purposes would be fine.

In line with these principles, the NOSC decided to form a leadership committee. Previous to this, the entire group had been meeting weekly and found it too frequent a schedule. However, they felt they needed someone meeting weekly to keep the work going, to be a link between what happened in the meetings and the people doing the work. They decided not to have traditional elected officers, but rather volunteers for a leadership or organizing team, and the door always stays open to anyone who wants to be in that group and do that work. Meetings of the leadership team are conducted in the same style, and it became a consistent working group of pretty much the same people each week. This meeting has also been used for skills/technology transfer, including facilitation training, bookkeeping, managing volunteers, organizing staff, etc.

This is not so much a “step” as a brief report. The work is circular: that is, the community meets and decides on solutions to problems and identifies teams or committees from the community to move on the solutions. Work is assigned to a committee, organizers build relationships between community meetings to help build the committees (phone and house calls for existing relationships, door-knocking for new relationships, leafleting for anybody you miss); committees do the assigned work, develop proposals for additional work and new solutions, and bring reports and proposals back to the next community meeting.

In the very early days, the NOSC asked itself the question, “What do people need in order to come home?” Residents agreed upon four needs: a place to live, a place to send children to school, a place to take people when they are sick, and a job. The issue of the safety of the levees was always in people’s minds, but more recently, sound levees around poor black communities have also been noted as a basic requirement for people to feel safe enough to come home, so it has become a fifth need.

Within these five needs, the NOSC realized that the hundreds of volunteers at their disposal could mainly help initially with the first (housing), and to some degree the second (education). They decided to prioritize the gutting, cleaning and rebuilding of homes according to the principle of most need. As house calls created a list of people who wanted help with their homes, priority was to be given, first, to elderly and disabled people with no insurance or resources, second, to single parents, and third, to other residents going from people without resources to people with some resources. Initially, the NOSC focused on low-income homeowners because they were the first members of the community to return in large numbers. Subsequently, the NOSC began to also focus on public housing residents and then renters. Volunteers also gutted, repaired and helped reopen schools and meeting places. Once again, the decision-making was based upon an egalitarian principle.

Following the same principle; the NOSC made and carried out decisions to reopen public housing, help people get trailers to live in while their houses were worked on, clean up two schools for reopening, reopen one school, develop a reconstruction skills training project, create a “technology transfer” program (i.e. teaching survivors all the information and skills organizers had at their disposal, from meeting facilitation to grant writing to computer skills), and reach out to immigrant workers brought into Louisiana in slave conditions to begin to create unity with them. Committees were set up to do various aspects of this work. Part of the goal of the technology transfer program was to develop the skills among poor and working black people to be able to account for and manage any money raised for this work directly through their own NOSC.

In many of these initiatives, questions came up that challenged the egalitarian principle. For instance, at one point it was suggested to help rebuild the home of a