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Lisa
Gallegos (Stanford, '96)
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Center
for Third World Organizing (CTWO), Queer Youth
Leadership Project (QYLP), and the Environmental
and Economic Justice Project (EEJP)
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profile by
Lisa Gallegos and Masum Momaya
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"It's
not about motivation, it's about survival. I'm a woman
of color, this work is not a 'choice' for me. The
choice to work in the larger social and economic
justice field is a luxury."
Lisa Gallegos (American
Studies '96) at 23 has a wealth of experience as a community
organizer. Born in Lincoln Heights, a barrio in Los Angeles,
she was raised by parents who were activists in the Chicano
Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Thus began Lisa's process of
politicization. Her belief in and commitment to community
organizing as a tool for social change crystallized in 1993
when she participated in President Clinton's Summer of
Service, along with 1500 other young people. Ironically,
this experience confirmed her belief that direct service
only provides band-aid remedies to social and economic
injustice. Just as important, her analysis also expanded
beyond nationalist politics, convincing her that young
people have much to teach others and the world about the
intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and
class.
Lisa's first organizing
experience came at Stanford, forming a multi-racial
coalition to fight the anti-immigrant measure, Proposition
187. Most of the students involved realized the need for a
more long-term, cohesive base of activists and formed RAGE
(Resistance Action orGanizing (later Grassroots) Education),
a multi-racial, multi-issue organization. RAGE worked on
issues around the Contract on America, Chiapas, produced
Stanford's first Disorientation Guide, and helped the
efforts of HERE Local 2850 with their boycott against the
anti-union Stanford Park Hotel. These experiences gave her
the opportunity to explore some fundamental questions of
community organizing: what should come first-- recruiting
new members or picking the issue? What does a model of
non-hierarchical, consensus-based decision-making look like
and how is it created? Is it possible to be a multi-issue
organization? How is this operationalized?
Upon graduating from
Stanford, Lisa received the John Gardner Fellowship through
the Haas Center. Through this, she wanted to work with a
multi-issue, multi-racial community-based organization which
was doing both organizer training and organizing. She was
just beginning to explore the different models of community
organizing but didn't have the institutional support
networks nor contacts to do so. She chose to work at The
Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO) in Oakland,
considered to be one of the nations' premier organizing
centers for activists of color. On her first assignment, she
worked with one of CTWO's allies, Californians for Justice
(CFJ). As lead precinct organizer, she ran and supervised
the San Francisco component of a statewide electoral field
campaign. The short-term goal was to defeat Proposition 209,
with a long-term goal of building power in low-income and
people of color communities. Through this work Lisa learned
the differences between electoral field campaigns, public
education campaigns, and issue-based organizing.
After her work at CFJ,
Lisa worked as an organizer for the Budget Equity Strategy
Team (BEST), a campaign for race and gender equity within
the California State Budget through grassroots policy
development. CTWO's model provides organizer training in
"CRAFT": Contact, Research, Action, Fundraising, and
Training. Here, Lisa learned how to identify and develop an
issue into a workable and winnable campaign, using tools
that help you do so in a strategic, focused, and systematic
way. She also learned how to do an effective direct action,
targeting individuals and institutions to meet demands for
institutional change.
During this same time
period, apart from her work with CTWO, Lisa also developed
the Queer Youth Leadership Project (QYLP), which sought to
offer young people a vision of peer-led social change work
rooted in the belief that leadership development of young
people must happen within the larger context of social
change work in their communities, addressing issues relevant
to their own lives. This project aimed to create a model of
community organizing that pushed and expanded the juncture
between traditional community organizing and leadership
development. She and her peers (other young organizers)
believe that while many community organizations and
organizing models profess to give constituents
decision-making power, often, the reality is that a paid
organizer makes most of the important strategic decisions.
Furthermore, Queer issues are usually invisible or
superficially additive and young people are often times
simply plugged in for labor.
Through her work with
CTWO, Lisa met and went on to work for Just Economics, which
works with local, state and national community and labor
organizations to demystify economics and to integrate
economic thinking and education into their strategies and
organizing campaigns.
As of our conversation,
Lisa had just accepted a job with the Environmental and
Economic Justice Project (EEJP), a project of AGENDA in Los
Angeles. This organization works to build the capacity of
grassroots organizations in communities of color working on
economic and environmental justice issues through community
organizer training and campaign and organizational
development assistance.
When asked about the
contributions of theory to her work, Lisa clarified that she
learned the hands-on skills of organizing by DOING
organizing and that she learned how to be a critical thinker
in academia. Through some of her courses, she was able to
reframe larger debates, question norms and most importantly,
learn to trust her own voice, heart, head and analysis.
Academia did not teach her "how" to fight for social and
economic justice, but it did give her a framework for
thinking about why. In this process, she has been able to
explore her own ideology. She feels that Community
Organizing best fits with her beliefs because she sees it as
the most egalitarian approach to institutional change and
the only model whose larger goal is to build power for those
people directly impacted the issues at hand.
Lisa has identified some
barriers and challenges through the course of her work.
Along with the issue of constituents' limited role in
organizational and campaign development and the lack of
meaningful roles for young people-- wages for organizers are
barely a living wage within a work culture that can lead to
early burnout. Also of concern are a lack of mechanisms and
outlets for open and honest critique within the field. She
feels that this creates a climate of silence and fear,
especially for many young organizers. Ultimately, she
believes that this stifles an honest critique and dialogue
essential to community organizing and the larger fight for
social and economic justice.
Through all of these
challenges, Lisa believes that support from her friends that
share her vision for change sustains and inspires her. She
also turns to her spirituality and relationship with God and
her family for strength. Also, she points to a sense of
humor as an important part of her work and laments the fact
that it couldn't be reflected in this "serious" profile.
Ultimately, she says that love is what her work is all about
and she gives and receives much of this. When I asked her
"Are you in the right place?" she responded without
hesitation "Absolutely."
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