Alumni Profiles Steve Williams People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) profile by Lindsay Imai What was your first involvement in Community Organizing? The summer of 1991 I went to Philadelphia to work with Empty the Shelters, an organization that had a summer program that teaches high school and college students about community organizing around issues of poverty and homelessness. We were teamed up with different groups that organized poor people- at first we just shadowed members of the organizations, but by the end of the summer, we were given tasks that we had to do on our own. I had been interested in issues of poverty before, but I knew that the service work that I had seen and been doing was not addressing the root causes of poverty. As an American Studies major I had read a lot about organizing, but I had never done it myself. From that summer on, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. What was your initial motivation? That first experience became a motivation to community organize. Up until that point, going to school at Stanford, I had only been exposed to one model for leadership. That model valued only credentials; the number of letters next a person's name determined how qualified they were to be leaders and how intelligent they were. That first summer, I was introduced to a model of leadership in which "ordinary" people provided much of the leadership, and innovative and creative solutions to complex issues. There were so many heroes and role models that summer. In terms of organizing style, that has changed over time for me. Initially my organizing style was influenced by SNCC, and Paulo Friere and Myles Horton, two education gurus. SNCC was able to effectively create alternative approaches to organizing in which ordinary people took leadership positions. They emphasized organizing work that was driven by community leaders, grass roots leadership. Friere and Horton approached universal questions from a sound and fundamental perspective. They provided space to allow people to use their own expertise. This stemmed out of their adult education program, where they put education in the context of peoples' lives: they tried to bring out what knowledge people already had and would make the activities relevant to peoples' work (like reading a worker's handbook or safety manual instead of a basic reading book that is used in grammar schools). Since then, I have come across new questions that these approaches do not address. I have seen some of the weaknesses of the these approaches and so I have gone beyond them. What has been your subsequent involvement in community organizing? After that summer in Philadelphia, I went back to Stanford where I started a branch of Empty the Shelters. We educated students about community organizing, as an alternative approach to making change. After I graduated I joined the Coalition of Homelessness and worked as a welfare rights organizer for a couple of years. And then I started a group called POWER, People Organizing to Win Employment Rights. How would you characterize your involvement? POWER represents a new way of organizing. We are organizing people of low or no income and trying to establish a base of power here. Unlike other organizing, we do not have many institutions of community that we can build upon. We differ from the Sal Alinksy model in that we try to address the political underpinnings of an issue. Alinsky was great at giving people the tools for change, but he never allowed them to reflect on what was going on. Having a political perspective, people are able to reflect on what is happening in their community in the greater picture. From there more effective strategies are developed to address what is happening. We are trying many different methods of information sharing and idea generating, to gain an understanding of how our struggle relates to greater political systems in place (i.e.: a film series in which we watch movies that are implicitly or explicitly about social injustice, that ultimately link our fight for employment rights etc. to other fights). Something that Alinsky did have to offer that we are missing is a cook book of methods of organizing. Not only do we need to have recipes for strategies and action, but we also need to analyze which foods are good and which foods are bad. What do you call your work, if not "community organizing"? I would definitely call it community organizing. How did you theorize about your work? What were your theories in action? There are no specific theories that I organize within. Recently I have looked for theories on organizing to advise my approach or give me a meaningful perspective to work from, but I haven't found one yet. I like to look to other countries for examples of organizing to learn about other approaches, successes, and failures. Because of a lot of ethnocentrism around the US we tend, and I know that I used to be guilty of this, to see the organizing and social justice movements in the US as the only valid ones that exist. A lot of the questions that organizers face are universal and the answers of other organizers in other parts of the world are very informative. Relevant case studies include South Africa and Cuba. I went to South Africa and at one of the conferences hundreds of thousands of community leaders and community organizing leaders gathered from all over the country. The potential and ability to organize there is incredible and provides us with examples that we can use to inform our work. In Cuba, more organized community building is happening and people are taking more control over their economy. I try to take lessons that organizing in these countries has to offer, but I am still in the process of diving exactly what those lessons and messages are. What barriers/challenges have you faced and continue to face now? Our major challenge has primarily been talking to enough people to establish our (POWER's) credibility and then to swim against the stream of information that teaches people about how the world works. For example, we are taught to believe that the world works in such a way that we have to depend on lawyers or students from Stanford for knowledge, leadership, change. Too many of these lawyers and students have entered communities and failed or betrayed them, that people are understandable reticent about joining. But, at the same time, there are many people who do stand up and bring others in. They provide so much insight- that is what sustains me. What has sustained you in your work/commitment? It is the people I work with that sustain me. Their passion and wisdom inspire me and sustain me in this work. I am also sustained by the fact that when they write history books, we will have been on the right side of history. We will have been some of the folks who were fighting for what is just and humane. Why do you choose organizing for your work? I want to make sure that ordinary people have the opportunity to do extraordinary things. It is the ordinary people who are going to change the world. I chose to organize around issues of poverty because it connects all marginalized people; people of color, those targets of sexism and homophobia. Things that you would think were unrelated (like a nuclear power plant moving to a neighborhood), have a base in poverty. What concerns do you have about community organizing as it is being practiced? Why haven't we made the changes that we have been fighting for so long to change? We have to change our strategy so that we can sustain the fight, so that people are prepared to ensure that after a win, we will not have to struggle all over again ten years later for those same gains. What happened that people began to perceive Affirmative Action as being unfair or unnecessary? Ultimately the struggle for a just society is a marathon and we are only preparing people for a 100 yard sprint. We don't have the endurance for that long run; we need to pace ourselves and plan for the marathon. Also, there are no institutions set up for collective learning and information sharing. Where do you think community organizing is shifting? As I said before, so much incredible organizing is being stripped away. Latest trends in community organizing focus on mobilizing community support to keep wins in place. We need to address root causes of this backlash, and create sustainable change.