Pulling the Dry Bones Together: A Roundtable

In August the Institute for Southern Studies sponsored a roundtable for leaders of community economic development organizations around the South. The participants spent a weekend in Atlanta discussing pressing issues, especially money, race and organizing. The following are some of the highlights from 12 hours of tape.

Participants

Marvin D. Beaulieu: formerly with Southern Cooperative Development Fund, Inc., Lafayette, Louisiana. Marcus F. Bordelon: Human/Economic Appalachian Development Corporation, Berea, Kentucky. Michelle Flynn: Tennessee Network for Community Economic Development. James Grace: East Winston Community Development Corporation, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Cornelius J. Jones: Voice of Calvary Ministries, Jackson, Mississippi. Isaiah Madison: Institute for Southern Studies, Durham, North Carolina (publisher of Southern Exposure). Abdul Rasheed: North Carolina Community Development Initiative, Raleigh, North Carolina. Margarita Romo: Farmworker’s Self-Help, Inc., Dade City, Florida. James Sessions: Highlander Research and Education Center, New Market, Tennessee. Vernessa Taylor: Rural Opportunities Corporation, Durham, North Carolina. Mary Tyler: Area Relief Ministries, Jackson, Tennessee. Lillie Webb: Center for Community Development, Hancock County, Georgia. John Zippert: Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund at their Rural Training Center, Epes, Alabama.

 

Isaiah Madison:

There is a lot written about community economic development. They look at you and since you don’t measure up to the Fortune 500, they eliminate you. They say this is a dismal, disgusting failure. I wanted to tell you this and ask you if it’s true.

 

Vernessa Taylor:

I see a lot of what I call raggedy CDC [community development corporation] operations. They are doing great work, but they can’t stand up to scrutiny. We have to put community development organizations in a position in which their finances are impeccable. They have to understand how to raise money — not just from finances — but by becoming entrepreneur-minded and sustaining the programs.

 

John Zippert:

I’m not sure there is a CED [community economic development] movement, or if there is one, it really hasn’t become a movement in the sense of gathering enough people, the time of those people, the money of those people, and the kind of commitment that says this is a life and death struggle.

On one side I could be my greatest critic because we have not succeeded. On the other side I can bring you to 500 houses we’ve built. I can bring you to 15 credit unions with 8,000 people who’ve saved seven million dollars. But they’re still under all kinds of restrictions that don’t let them do what they really want to do. A person can get a housing subsidy on their income tax and sit there and block me and a group of community people from getting the housing subsidy to get decent houses.

I’m saying we haven’t disrupted enough. (laughter)

 

Mary Tyler:

About six years ago, I wrestled with how to get people in the community organized to speak out for what their needs were. I worked with statewide and local advocacy groups. I began hearing about community development corporations. I learned that when an organization comes into the community and says it’s going to organize, normally the people who work within that organization represent about 10 percent of the actual community. Ninety percent of the individuals in the community aren’t a part of that community organization. We created an organization that would organize the community. That means going to an individual and talking about your right versus your duty. It’s not your right to eat; it’s your duty to feed the family. It’s not your right to vote; it’s your duty to vote. It’s not your right to speak out; it’s your duty to speak out.

We develop people by educating them. And then after so many people have been educated, they are fed into the community organization. The end result is an educated people, and the community organization is ready to take them a step further. We really hit the grassroots. My caution here is that we need to stay focused on the fact that when you say “bottom up,” you don’t mean the 20 people who represent the unity among us. You must go to that other 80 percent.

 

Margarita Romo:

In our community, the first time that we began to organize, none of us knew what we could do about the situation except move people onto buses and stay away [to avoid immigration officials]. All those undocumented people came together. They used to meet out in the woods, build a little fire and talk about rights. We began to find out that we had the right to certain things, even as undocumented people. So we started building.

I didn’t know that I was an organizer. We realized that we had to educate ourselves. First it was food. When the border patrol came in, everybody went into hiding. We had to load up a truck with food and go from house to house. We were organized.

Today these people aren’t undocumented anymore, and they have groups in different communities. In our area of organizing, it’s gone from a simple thing of looking over your back and making sure you’re safe to coming to a place where now we know that we want to live like other folks — because farmworkers live 20 years less. We organized around that, and now we’ve got health care. So, in our community we found that we were organizing, but we didn’t know that’s what we were doing.

 

James Grace:

As I buy my suits and ties to wear to work and negotiate deals and talk with bankers, I realize that, at the bottom, what we are doing is not going to work unless you go back into the community and organize. I feel that in my soul. But I can’t get any money for it. I have managed to organize in the last five years — to the detriment of my organization. I am on that cusp of where I might fail because I dedicated our resources to doing that.

 

Abdul Rasheed:

One of the things that I’m advocating in North Carolina from my colleagues who are not of the African-American community, is to look in their own back yards first. If we could get our white colleagues, our Native-American colleagues to organize in their own communities, and then bring them to the table to join with African-American communities — if we could get the poor white community to come to the table in the same numbers as African Americans have historically — we then could join together and go forward. We could speak to racism and classism in a different way.

 

Michelle Flynn:

I want us to talk about the racism that pits community-based organizations against people like Legal Services or whatever agency is supposed to be working with them. And when dollars start flowing in, who is controlling those dollars, and what does that mean? As you know, those who hold the purse strings like to provide money for technical assistance and training, but the kind of money that is necessary to really help change communities is money for organizing. It’s never been there, but we shouldn’t stop talking about the need for that.

 

James Sessions:

In the mountains, there is a long, adversarial history with the government, going back to the revenuers [federal agents who broke up illegal whiskey stills]. Whoever the government is, it’s not us. It’s always somebody else, somewhere else — from federal government to state government. The state capital is far from the mountains except in the state of West Virginia. So you never have access to state government. An adversarial relationship with the government is no surprise at all to people in the mountains.

 

Lillie Webb:

I’ve been learning a lot of ways that we can use the resources that we have already. We don’t have to look to the commissioner and the mayor and the congresswoman and the president to do for us the kinds of things that we need to do for ourselves. It’s important for people to understand that you can’t rely on one visionary if the community is really going to change. If we’re going to be about changing community, it’s going to take everybody understanding what the plan is — taking part in the development of the plan — and what community means to them.

In terms of economic development in the past 25 years, our options were incinerators, landfills, and prisons. And we were thinking, what is it exactly you are saying to us? We’re only fit for garbage or to be locked away? It took a decision of the Supreme Court of Georgia to defeat a mega-dump landfill proposition in our community, and we thought we had won. But the company came back and wanted to buy the petitioners who’d been against the dump. Three of the six petitioners put the community’s interest above their own and turned away over $300,000 dollars. We mobilized around that issue of the environment, but instead of being reactive this time, we decided that we need to become pro-active. It’s time for us to hold the Constitution to what it says when it talks about our rights and our roles and our responsibilities — and so the community development was formed.

 

Mary Tyler:

We formed a statewide organization to address the issues around the Community Reinvestment Act and banking. We talked about issues around income. How do you, in fact, redline [section off certain areas from private capital based on race, class, or income] around income? Poor folks are a part of your community, are a part of your banking establishment. They cash checks with you. They make deposits with you. Some of the local banks can throw some crumbs if a group gets strong enough in a rural area — it might throw some technical assistance funds, might throw some very small investment funds — so they can write on their report that they did a good thing. Deep down they’re the devil.

 

James Grace:

There is no information about poor and disadvantaged people that can be utilized to legitimate some of the stuff we are trying to do. I can’t even get proper data to justify building a hot dog stand in my community of 27,000 people. People will say it won’t work. There are not enough people. I know that is a lie. But I can’t prove it on paper.

 

Isaiah Madison:

I think this illustrates one of the serious problems that we’re dealing with. We’re riding other people’s train. The question is, when are we going to get off of this train of dealing with the agendas of too many folks in the community making too many demands? I want us to work and move together on these issues. What CJ Jones and I call pulling the dry bones together.

 

Margarita Romo:

I don’t remember in all the time that I have been working with my community —and it’s 23 years — I don’t remember ever sitting around the table with Mexicans — Hispanics — talking about their problems. I’m feeling that right now, and I’m about to cry because I feel like that really does make a difference in what you are trying to do when you are isolated. I know that we have gone through the process of getting more educated, changing our community. I know that we are a respected entity there, even though they don’t like us. They know what we’ve done, and we’ve shown them that we’re not people that just get old clothes and beans and rice. That we also have a mouth and we can speak. And yes, we’re putting a lot of money out there. Why can’t we get some of it back?

 

Marvin Beaulieu:

That’s the reason we did a bank. There were people on our board who said, “Why do you want to become a bank and become just like the devil?” But in my mind we were going to be fighting with the banks till we were blue in the face. Banks are so critical. It has now been documented that a lot of the urban problems we have are because of policies of the banks — the disinvestment — a lot of it is race-based. If you look at the banking industry, it is a white, male industry, almost 95 percent, and they are not very responsive.

 

Marcus Bordelon:

On that issue, HEAD [Human/Economic Appalachian Development Corporation] is a bank, too. It’s a low-income people’s bank. Banks traditionally say poor people won’t pay money back. So we have a housing loan fund. We have a business loan fund and a credit union to serve low-income people only. We’re proving the banks wrong in the mountains.

 

James Sessions:

Community organizing is somewhat different from mobilizing behind one issue or organizing bankers or mobilizing the capital or what have you. Community organizing isn’t just organizing professionals or institutions or advocacy groups, but it means organizing a community to control its resources and control its development.

 

John Zippert:

Insuring and requiring a democratic process from the very beginning in these organizations is very important. I am talking about one person one vote, the whole cooperative idea, open membership. When a few people get some information, or somehow as a result of your process, the bank says, “We’re going to help two or three people become successful so we can show them as a model to the community,” there is a problem. They may move away. They may have no interest.

After some development occurs in communities, then a lot of people say, “Well, we no longer need to be troubled with organizing. We no longer need to be troubled with an educational process. We no longer need to reach out to people who didn’t catch on the first time or who didn’t grab.” Those are people who we still need to reach out to. And I think that’s where some of our failures have been.

We do impose some principles, standards, constraints. The Federation will get to a point where we say, “We will work with you if you want to continue going in this kind of democratic, cooperative economic development context. If you don’t, we might hook you up with some other people, but we’re not going to go down a road different from one that we feel will work for you.” That may be imposing some things on the community. This is what we do, and it’s worked to some extent.

 

Abdul Rasheed:

We are trying to support individuals who are committed to a community, committed to putting individuals and communities in a stronger position, committed to helping individuals gain assets so that they can hire more of the people in that community — in that neighborhood — to improve and control their quality of life.

The way that traditional economic development works is that generally they’re looking to maximize profits. So, if the best opportunity to maximize profits is in your neighborhood today, then that’s where they are going to invest. If the best opportunity to maximize profits is in Korea tomorrow, then they will move their business to Korea.

In a CED context, we’re trying to invest in individuals who have a long-term commitment to the community. They aren’t going anywhere. They have roots there. They’re committed fully to that community, and their ultimate goal is not to maximize profits. It’s to try to build human and community assets in such a way that people can control their quality of life. It must be long-term, and it must be focused on building healthy communities as opposed to this notion of just making people rich for the sake of being rich.

 

James Grace:

One of the by-products of what they’re talking about in this whole CED movement is going to be wealth. Because, number one, we start out claiming that we’re going to try to create jobs and opportunities for the people in the community. Now we expect them to stay marginalized. That’s the conflict going out of this. You all might as well get used to talking about money, because the issue’s going to come up — money and opportunity.

 

C.J. Jones:

Back in 1977 we had four young people go to medical school. Three of those young people are living and working in health care in poor neighborhoods. One has moved to Kansas City and is a heart specialist making gobs of money.

 

Abdul Rasheed:

Big Money. That’s right. That’s the risk.

 

C.J. Jones:

The risk, I mean everything we do, there’s a risk in it, but I have to glorify in those three.

 

Also participating in the Roundtable discussions:

Barbara Banks: Appalachian Community Fund; community artist-in-residence, Garrard County, Kentucky. Edward Dixon: formerly with Natchitoches Economic Development Corporation, Natchitiches, Louisiana. Beth Spence: Harts Community Development in Harts, West Virginia; Rural Programs for Covenant House. E. Lynn Stacey: Business Innovation Center, Mobile, Alabama. Institute for Southern Studies staff in attendance: Pat Arnow, Alease Alston, Bob Hall, Mary Lee Kerr, Ron Nixon, Lorraine Strauss, and Sharon Ugochukwu.