"Who Knows, maybe you might be President".

Ginny: "Are you worried about your meeting tonight?"

Me: "Yeah, I'm a little nervous. I'm not a nervous person, but I don't feel like I'm ready and that the turnout might be a little low"

G: "You've read Obama's autobiography about his days community organizing right?"

Me: "Yeah, I read it back in 07 or 08, but didn't he - "

G: "Yeah, his first meeting sucked, but he still became President years later".

Chapter 8 of "Dreams from My Father" by Barack Obama talks about how his first organizing committee meeting in Chicago bombed. Although my inspiration to become an organizer existed long before knowing of Barack Hussein Obama, he is one of the perfect models to use in my creating a career as an organizer and  and learning from the experiences of an organizer new in town. The transition for Barack is similar to my transition in meeting leaders and members and convincing them of the power of organizing. But you have to get people into a room together so that they may understand that they share common problems and the answer lies in a common solution.

 

My first organizing in Houston bombed worse than Hiroshima and like Barack, I am assessing the mistakes and successes so that I may learn and grow from them. For weeks, I've doorknocked in 100-degree weather in the 3rd Ward & 5th Ward & Sunnyside neighborhoods of Houston on issues of parent involvement in the Public schools. Around the Cuney Housing Projects, I've registered men and women to vote and almost harassed them to attend this parents meeting where we could find out the issues that were effecting kids in HISD (Houston Independent School District).

I had spoke to or left messages for almost 40 people in the last week, confident that I would at least have a room of 20 Black and Brown parents concerned about the education their child was receiving and the neighborhoods surrounding the schools. I had met a women, Doris, whose son had followed the "school to prison pipeline" of dropping out and incarceration and wanted to work with us and other parents to ensure that HISD and throughout the city. 

On paper everything was coming into place. As many sportscasters will tell you, "games aren't played on paper". And as trite as that cliche may be, nothing usually goes as planned or as scheduled. In fact, nothing went as I would imagined.

So, in my first organized meeting in front of my Lead (read: supervisor) and volunteer organizer (read: unpaid intern), I bombed. Only 8 parents showed up and showed up with ideas. And while those parents were energetic, I had one crazy parent whose ideas had nothing to do with coming together and building partnerships but instead focused on having US TEACH KIDS HOW TO BUILD WIND TURBINES?! Luckily, my time working as an organizer at a Soup Kitchen in Detroit prepared me for people getting out of pocket. It took a lot, but eventually she came around to working with us and even offered to take me around to the neighborhood community meetings.

But I still feel a sense of distrust from the community and from many of the institutions that I speak with. I understand that people operate on self-interest and people want to see action, but I wonder if the association that the organization has had to ACORN and the actions of the few outweigh the good of the many.