A Portrait of a Community Organizer

When I was 21, I found myself with some spare time and a yearning for meaningful activity to supplement my weekends of binge drinking and Simpsons-watching. To make a long story short, I eventually found myself on the board of a local organization called Peace for the Streets by Kids from the Streets (or PSKS, since that’s such a mouthful). The aim was to improve the lives of homeless kids.

Nominally, I was a volunteer. In reality, I spent a lot of time just hanging out with the kids who constantly rotated through. (One of the few times that I actually performed a service were when I helped feed a large group.)

PSKS changed my life. I’ve had a hard life, but my life was puppies and roses compared to the stories I heard there. Only two individuals had a childhood that did not involve near-constant abuse and neglect; one of these was a Christian who had taken Jesus’ commandment to serve the helpless to heart and so was living amongst the homeless kids, ministering to them.

I’d like to think that I helped somehow too, that by treating each of them as individuals with real hopes and dreams, I acted as an alternative to the persistent beat-down they had suffered from every other person in their life.

But my importance was minimal compared to the woman who ran the place. Elaine had built it with the help of a strong core of homeless kids (thus the name) and kept it running the same way. One of the reasons I rarely had anything to do was that she could rarely stop long enough to delegate a complete task to me. As soon as a new kid showed up – which seemed to happen at least once a week – she would befriend them, learn as much as she could about them and why they were on the streets, and then set to work figuring out what she could do for them. Several times, parents were tentatively contacted for negotiations about runaways; she had enough experience with runaways to know when they were telling the truth about their treatment at the hands of their parents. I think I heard of one reunion in the year or so I was there. A flurry of phone calls back and forth would then be required to find this new person safe housing and any other aid s/he might need.

Meanwhile, the kids would perform activities for a set amount of money. These weren’t silly activities – they couldn’t get money for cleaning the toilet, for instance. Cash was saved for those who engaged with the community through forums or lobbying visits to the state capitol. This didn’t work for everyone. There were more than enough kids who weren’t interested and came only for the occasional free food or free socks and then left.

But those who kept coming, who showed an effort, were rewarded with as much help as Elaine could give them, plus her hard-won affections. She knew just when to be hard with these hard kids, and also when to nurture them. They needed discipline and love, two things that had been horribly lacking in most of their lives. She yelled at them for disturbing the center’s neighbors with loud antics and discarded needles, but she also tried to get the ones who needed it off of heroin. She got them jobs, got angry with them for not showing up to them, and then tried to solve their pragmatic difficulties in getting to work on time when they were living in a squat and had no car. She worked to get them transitional housing in spite of the long waitlists and did her best to make sure they followed the rules so they didn’t get kicked out.

On top of all this, she foster-parented several kids at a time. She let others stay with her for a few nights when they had nowhere else (or nowhere good) to go.

She fundraised as best she could. Being on the board, seeing the numbers that held the whole operation up, I was amazed.

She ran a small alternative school for the kids who hadn’t been able to finish high school because they had severe learning disabilities or had been kicked out of their own family’s homes for being homosexual.

And she, like me, watched many of the kids that we’d come to know and love die. Heroin overdoses, car accidents, suicides, violence. Many simply vanished, either traveling through the rest of the country or victimized by a john or an unchecked disease or another street kid or any of the other multitude of things that could be fatal to a homeless person.

Those deaths were what drove me away. I couldn’t bear these losses, and eventually left.

As far as I know, Elaine is still there, still fighting to help just one more kid…. I know also that even this description of her work leaves out many of the things she did because I either didn’t know about them or don’t remember them.

So yes, when someone attempts to malign community organizers like Elaine, I do get a little upset.

In fact, I am not ashamed to say: it pisses me off.

I have no doubt that there are some community organizers who do not actually help the communities they purport to. But to then sling mud at every community organizer as the Republicans so gleefully did – and yes, claiming this kind of work entails NO responsibilities is not just attacking Obama – is beyond awful. Community organizing requires a huge variety of skills, including administrative and many of the kinds of skills that I would expect a President to have. Those who suggest otherwise clearly have never seen the work, the tenacity, the ingenuity, the passion that go into serving one’s community in such a way.

On top of that, it forces an intimacy with the common people that absolutely no political position I have ever heard of does. The fact that his community organizing work would have a huge impact on Barack Obama, to the point that he still talks about it so many years later, means to me that he did work hard at it. Perhaps in the beginning, he walked in with the idea that it might help his political career, but I can’t imagine any but the coldest hearts remaining unmoved by the things he would have seen there. Perhaps I am being naive, or perhaps I see something in this presidential candidate that I have never seen in any other candidate in my lifetime, a true impulse to help his country rather than just raising himself.

And I don’t doubt that his work actually did something, against the odds. I don’t doubt that he helped people find jobs as much as he could, that he helped them keep their homes as much as he could. It is easy to stand on the outside and criticize the work community organizers do, but seeing it from the inside as I did, I was able to see what stood in the way. Uncaring communities, uncaring officials, heartless bureaucracies (wait, *gasp* aren’t liberals supposed to love bureaucracy?), and even, yes, the bad habits of the people themselves – the obstacles were apparently endless. So to willingly engage in such a Sisyphean task, only to be told that it isn’t a “real job,” that your daily slog through the molasses of improving others’ lives for a small salary and rare pats on the back doesn’t matter at all, is the most heartless, elitist thing I can imagine.

Per A Slant Truth’s suggestion.