Leadership Development for Strategic Change
By Richard L. Wood

On May 2, 2000, 3,000 people converged on the capital of California. They came – working-poor, working-class and middle-income folks, some 40 percent Latino, 40 percent white and 20 percent African American and Hmong – for an “action” sponsored by the Pacific Institute for Community Organization (PICO). They were loud, as they believed they had to be to turn around a state government that so far had refused to address the crisis in health care for uninsured Americans.

The event began with a reading from the book of Amos, the prophet who denounced an earlier time when the wealthy turned their backs on the poor. There were reports in English, Spanish and Hmong from families suffering the gnawing anxiety of living without medical coverage. Grassroots leaders from around the state presented a specific proposal for improving the funding to community health clinics and argued in favor of a legislative bill to provide medical insurance coverage to more of the 7.3 million uninsured residents of the state.

This event and related work by the PICO California Project and its allies during the ensuing months dramatically shifted the political dynamics surrounding health policy in California. Within months, it led to $50 million in additional funding for community health clinics and the easing of bureaucratic requirements that kept many eligible immigrant families uninsured. A year later, it led to the expansion of medical coverage to parents in working-poor families – despite a dramatic worsening of the state’s financial position. This work and similar efforts on other issues in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado, Arizona, Minnesota, Kentucky and Virginia have helped strengthen democratic participation in the United States in recent years. At the roots of this work, wherever it has been successful, lies a commitment to systematically developing participants’ capacity for public leadership.

The foundation of public efficacy: Leadership development for active citizenship

Before considering leadership development directly, let’s meet a few people involved in community organizing. Judy Reyes grew up in a working-class Hispanic family in California. When I first interviewed her in 1994, Ms. Reyes was a grassroots participant in community organizing in Oakland; she later became a professional staffperson for the California PICO Project. When asked how her experience in community organizing had affected her life, Ms. Reyes responded, “It’s made me feel more idealistic. It’s changed me from a cynic who got burned out and never knew how to be effective.”

Becoming a public leader represents a challenge for nearly anyone. For those from working-class backgrounds, from racial, ethnic or immigrant groups often marginalized in American public life, and for women, still greater obstacles to public leadership often loom. Ms. Reyes continued:

“It's really hard, especially for women. We don't get a lot of opportunities to be leaders in society. Just to call myself a leader is a huge thing. I take a great deal of pride in it because I've always had these abilities and I've tried to use them. But before I'd never found the place where they were valued. I was always shut out or shut down....Here, the more I put into this the more I got.”

Art Rose is another example of someone whose leadership skills have developed through this work. Ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, Reverend Rose brought significant skills to organizing when he got involved as a local pastor. But his use of those skills was constrained by the privatized model of ministry often expected of contemporary pastors. He has worked for ten years as a full-time community organizer, currently in Florida. He speaks of how he sees this work:
“What we're really doing is re weaving the fabric of society at a deeper level, offering a kind of hope to people who haven't had any hope in their lives…. As they get involved, they feel some hope and power for the first time in years.”

Rose’s work as an organizer also shows how leadership development occurs. In addition to learning specific skills – how to run a meeting, speak in public, listen to others’ concerns, etc. – leaders must also learn the discipline of understanding public policy alternatives.

Characteristic of this model of organizing, Reyes and Rose developed their leadership capacity not through leadership seminars, but in the context of vigorous engagement in democratic life. In community organizing, leadership trainings are not passive “civics” lessons to indoctrinate new citizens; rather, they take participants– new and old Americans, male and female, from all economic backgrounds and ethnic groups – and place them squarely in the flow of democratic participation. Within that flow and with stakes (such as healthcare insurance) that clearly matter, participants are motivated to learn the skills and take the risks of becoming public leaders.

Thus, in a few short years Cesar Portillo moved from being a working-poor immigrant from Mexico disconnected from public life, to being one of the two key leaders in front of 3,000 people at the statewide healthcare action in May 2000. That gathering even adopted his native tongue as a public language: He repeatedly asked “Se puede?” (Spanish for “can it be done?”) regarding his organization’s healthcare proposals – to which the crowd thundered back, “Si! Se puede!” Portillo acquired the skills and confidence to handle a crowd this way not from passive leadership training, but by leading, initially in small local actions and gradually moving up to the statewide arena.

A second characteristic of effective community organizing is that leadership development occurs within an explicit focus on building power within the organization. Leaders take this organizational power very seriously and use the public leverage it gives them to advocate and negotiate for policies that benefit poor, working-class, and middle-class communities. The more effective organizations do not use their power as a blunt weapon to beat up on public officials; rather, they use it to convince officials to act as their partners in promoting the well-being of their communities.

Economic elites exert their most powerful influence on public policy in the backstage settings dominated by lobbyists and political action committees. Because this influence is rooted primarily in campaign donations and expert knowledge that the wealthy can mobilize more easily than low- or middle-income people, democracy is deeply distorted. If community organizing continues to consolidate a voice in this arena, it may help to bring democratic pressure to bear in what is today a site of elite maneuvering at the heart of our democratic institutions.

A third characteristic of effective leadership is that it does not occur in a vacuum. Leaders develop most effectively within organizations that sustain them relationally and culturally. That is, leadership development occurs best when participants are linked to others who support them, challenge them and hold them accountable for their work. “Relational organizing” does this by building the organization up through one-to-one, individual contact. Furthermore, leaders develop best when the internal life of their organization is linked systematically to their own moral commitments. In America, this takes place most often in the context of religious faith. Thus, in faith-based organizing, many leaders have come to experience civic engagement as an integral dimension of their spiritual commitment rather than as extraneous or, at best, only vaguely related to it. Though of course not all participants see their political experience in this way, multiple respondents echoed the sentiment of leader Willie Mae Randerson from Pensacola, Fla.: “I find God in this work. I find God in church on Sunday mornin’, but I sure find God in the people I do this work with. And, whew, do I find God when we’ve got 200 people in a room, makin’ our leaders lead.”

In other kinds of organizing, labor union traditions, democratic populism, ethnic traditions, racial identity or other moral commitments may be more central than faith experience. In any case, organizations must work to connect their public engagement explicitly to these cultural traditions, so that leaders experience their work as meaningful. Constantly connecting practical organizing steps with the moral commitments and righteous anger of participants, their long-term vision and sophisticated political strategy produces the most capable leaders and effective organizations.

Conclusion

Effective leadership development does not just occur on its own. Rather, it requires expertise and systematic attention – the core work of professional organizers. Three distinctive qualities mark the best such work, in which leaders:

• gain the skills and orientations needed to be effective public leaders in the public arena while actively engaged in democratic life;
• do so by participating in organizations committed to building power and exerting it in favor of poor, working-class, and middle-class residents;
• are sustained in the organizing process through meaningful interpersonal relationships that connect the organizing to participants’ own deepest moral traditions.

Such work offers no easy answer for communities decimated by upheavals in the global economy. The skewed distribution of wealth in America continues to place disproportionate power in the hands of economic elites. At present, even the most effective leaders within community organizing cannot compete with the influence of those elites. But effective leadership from within strong grassroots organizations does offer reason for some abiding democratic hope that we can turn our cities, our economy and our government toward more humanely-defined ends.

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