What We Believe

The People’s Circle Meeting
June, 2007

[Note: This document is intended to be a guide for how to conduct an egalitarian meeting, based on the experience of the New Orleans Survivor Council and POC meetings.]

Purpose: to conduct a meeting that is fair and equal so poor and working people can control their own organization and develop their own power

Equality: Everyone has equal voice and gets the same time to speak. No one can dominate the meeting. When a person is talking, everyone else is LISTENING, not talking, or agreeing, disagreeing or asking questions. Not even planning what he or she will say on his turn. When the group is large, we break into small groups (about 8 people) so everyone’s voice can be heard equally. We always sit in a circle so everyone can see and hear each other clearly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Genocide
May, 2007

We are in the middle of genocide of black people, people of African descent. This is not the sort of genocide that we have been alert to in the past, where millions of people are decimated over a relatively short period of time in a small geographic and political region. No. This genocide is moving along at a steady, relentless pace, moving faster and faster with many focal points. But make no mistake: there is a “systematic program of action intended to destroy a whole racial or national group” (Webster’s New World Dictionary). Hundreds of millions of people of African descent are being killed before our eyes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Creating Bottom-up Organizations: A Working Paper
April, 2007

Note: This paper is an introduction to our basic organizing theory and practice

Preface:

This paper is hoping to help describe and refine the working models we are creating to fight for and build a new and just world. It is based on what we’ve learned so far and what we want to share out of “bottom-up” organizing in New Orleans after Katrina. This organizing has not taken place in a historical vacuum, and we credit all those people whose struggles we’ve learned and benefited from, from Ella Baker (mentor and trainer of young “bottom-up” organizers during the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. during the 1960’s) and SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the “bottom-up” organizers of the 1960’s Southern Civil Rights Student Movement), to the sharecroppers’ unions of the 1930s and 1940s, to the classic revolutions and struggles in the last century, and to the centuries of struggles by our ancestors around the world. We present this working paper in the hope that with the help of many other people, we can also make a contribution to that ongoing journey. We ask that you lend your experience and ideas to this process.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Timeline of Organizing in New Orleans after Katrina
March, 2007

• August 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina misses New Orleans and people who were left in the city by the government heave a sigh of relief.
• August 30, 2005: waters rise, levees are destroyed, homes and people are washed away by violently rushing water. Approximately 6,000 people die within a few days, 100,000 are trapped in shelters or on roofs without food or water, shot at by police while trying to flee the waters, then loaded on buses and planes and shipped all over the country. These people were the poorest and darkest-skinned people in New Orleans.
• August 30, 2005: At a meeting of “The National Black Convergence” leadership group organized by Harry Belafonte, going on during the hurricane, Curtis Muhammad asked for an immediate and united response. The suggestion was tabled for a later date, missing the crucial opportunity to defend poor, black New Orleanians and to open a new militant chapter in the US struggle for justice.

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A Call for Dialog
December, 2006

Below is an excerpt from the full article.

From these experiences, and from a lifetime of movement activity beginning in the days of organizing in Mississippi in the early 60’s, we have found ourselves needing to rethink and re-evaluate how we understand the revolutionary movement and what its strategy should be. We are feeling frustrated with what is currently in place in our movement, and we’re looking for others who feel similarly frustrated to help figure out where we are and how we need to proceed. Mostly, we have questions, and we are asking you to help us find answers to them. We are inviting you into study and dialog on these questions. We’re looking for existing discussion on these topics, reading materials, and opinions. We’re not looking for academic debate, however; we want input from people who are ready to consider alternatives to the current movement paradigms.

Our questions are based on a commitment to egalitarianism, and to the concept of bottom-up leadership: that the folk, worldwide, who are most oppressed and cast aside by international capitalism must be looked to for leadership of the movement against it. The first step is study and dialog. The next will be the formation of a school to continue that study and to train organizers as we begin to develop some clarity on direction. We are asking you to consider these questions, send recommended readings, send opinions and your own questions, and most important, take the dialog to the grassroots people you are working with for their input.

Read the rest of this entry »
 

The People’s Circle Meeting
June, 2007

[Note: This document is intended to be a guide for how to conduct an egalitarian meeting, based on the experience of the New Orleans Survivor Council and POC meetings.]

Purpose: to conduct a meeting that is fair and equal so poor and working people can control their own organization and develop their own power

Equality: Everyone has equal voice and gets the same time to speak. No one can dominate the meeting. When a person is talking, everyone else is LISTENING, not talking, or agreeing, disagreeing or asking questions. Not even planning what he or she will say on his turn. When the group is large, we break into small groups (about 8 people) so everyone’s voice can be heard equally. We always sit in a circle so everyone can see and hear each other clearly.

Fairness: No person is more important than any other person. The meeting is planned so everyone who wants to come can come. Organizers help with transportation, food, childcare, assistance for elderly or disabled participants, etc., to eliminate any obstacles people may face in coming to the meeting.

Conduct of the Meeting:

Opening: We open with a cultural or spiritual offering to start off the meeting with unity, respect and love. It is especially good if children can do the opening by performing a song, poem or prayer. (Note: it is important to remember that not everyone has the same religious beliefs and practices. Not everyone is a Christian, for instance. Depending where the organization is, you may have Christians, Jews, Muslims, Rastafarians, spiritualists, and agnostics. The offering should respect all beliefs.)

Introductions: The Facilitator introduces him/herself and explains the history and principles of the group if there are newcomers. Each person in the circle introduces himself or herself briefly.

Reports: The Facilitator or another Organizer reports briefly on decisions made at the previous meeting. The Organizing Team and Committees report briefly on their activities since the last meeting. The Treasury Committee reports on the financial status.

Agenda: The Facilitator presents the agenda as planned by the Organizing Team. The first item on the agenda is often a thought-provoking question to put people in a positive and creative frame of mind. It is best if the agenda can be written on a blackboard or large paper so everyone can see it. The Facilitator then asks the assembled if they have other items to add to the agenda, and writes the additional items on the agenda. The first item is read off and discussion starts.

Participation: Everyone in the meeting has equal time to speak. For each topic, the group decides how long each person will have to speak (for example, 1 minute, 2 minutes, etc.) in each round. Once the topic or question is stated, whoever is ready to speak can start. The speaking then goes around the circle one by one. If a person is not ready to speak, they can pass. When the round is finished, anyone who passed has a chance to speak. If people want another round on the same topic and there is time, they go around again. The idea is NOT to respond to what someone else said, but just to say what you think.

Small groups: If 15 or more people are at the meeting, small groups should discuss each topic to give everyone more time to speak. Rounds are conducted in the small groups. One person in each group should report out their agreements and ideas to the whole group after each topic is discussed. To form small groups, simply have people count off and put the “ones” in a small circle, the “twos” in another small circle, etc. as needed.

Cross talk: Once everyone has spoken in the rounds, the group can agree on a time for cross talk (for example, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, etc.). During cross talk, the facilitator calls on people who raise their hands. In cross talk, people can ask each other questions to make sure they have understood each other, and people can agree or disagree with one another’s ideas. Some agenda items require cross talk and others do not. Normally cross talk is for important items, and normally it takes place in the whole group.

Finding agreements: As people are speaking, everyone is listening for agreements about plans. What does everyone seem to think is a good thing to do? Disagreements are fine, and can help us understand each other and learn, but we will not act on things we disagree on, so we are especially listening for places where we have unity.

Decision-making: We make decisions by consensus. We do not vote. We don’t have winners and losers. Whatever agreements we come to in our meeting, we plan how to carry them out. Whatever we do not agree about, we continue to discuss in another meeting and with one another between meetings. We move as one united force.

Ending the Meeting: When the agenda is finished or time is up, the Facilitator should review agreements, review tasks and who volunteered to do them, and state the time and place of the next meeting. Also, the Facilitator or another OT member should announce the time and place of the OT meetings and remind people that this is THEIR organization, and leadership is on a voluntary basis, and they are invited to be on the Organizing Team if they have the time and commitment to do so.

Finally, the meeting should end with a cultural or spiritual offering. One of the best ways to do this is for all to stand and sing a unifying song together. [Sometimes we modify the words to a familiar song. For example: “Hold my hand, while I run this race . . . Cause I don’t want to run this race ALONE” (instead of the traditional “in vain”). Or for “This Little Light of Mine” -- “ I’ve got the light of freedom or unity or justice.” And so forth.]

Jobs in the meeting:

Facilitating: To facilitate something means to make it go easily and smoothly. The person who chairs the meeting is called the facilitator. He or she is not the “leader” of the organization. His/her job is to enforce that the meeting is conducted in a fair, just and equal way. If we break into small groups, there is a facilitator in each group. The facilitator makes sure that everyone has equal chance to speak.

Note taking: Someone should volunteer at the beginning of each meeting to take careful notes and turn them in to the Organizing Team at the end of the meeting. If the group breaks into smaller groups, someone in each group needs to take notes. This does not need to be the same person each time, but someone on the Organizing Team should be responsible for typing and keeping all the notes. (Someone should take notes in Committee meetings and turn them in as well.)

Timekeeping: One person in the large group and in each small group should keep time when people are talking. When the agreed time limit is reached (for instance, 2 minutes per speaker), the timekeeper should give a signal so the speaker can finish their sentence and let the next person speak. In cross talk, the timekeeper should signal when the agreed time for cross talk has ended.

Sign-up: A member of the Organizing Team should send around a sign-up sheet at each meeting to get everyone’s name, community address, phone number and e-mail address if available. Make sure that any latecomers sign in as well.

Keeping the agenda: If there is a blackboard or large paper available, someone should volunteer to write agenda items, agreements and task volunteers on it so the Facilitator does not have to.

Organizers’ jobs in the meeting: All OT members should help the meeting run smoothly. They should set chairs in a circle and set out snacks before the meeting starts. During the meeting, they should make sure people are comfortable, greet latecomers quietly, sign them in, and help them to a seat in the circle, assist elderly or disabled persons, etc. They should enforce that the seats stay in a circle, and that people do not talk out of turn in the meeting, but they should do these tasks politely and respectfully. This is the people’s meeting! They may also need to facilitate if the meeting breaks into small groups. After the meeting, they should look out for people’s transportation needs if possible, chat with people in a friendly way, and encourage people to come to the next meeting.

Genocide
May, 2007

We are in the middle of genocide of black people, people of African descent. This is not the sort of genocide that we have been alert to in the past, where millions of people are decimated over a relatively short period of time in a small geographic and political region. No. This genocide is moving along at a steady, relentless pace, moving faster and faster with many focal points. But make no mistake: there is a “systematic program of action intended to destroy a whole racial or national group” (Webster’s New World Dictionary). Hundreds of millions of people of African descent are being killed before our eyes.

Everywhere on this planet the darker skinned people are the poorest, the least empowered politically and economically, the most reviled, the most feared. In the continents in which the disasters of slavery and colonialism were most intense for Africans, black people have been particularly devastated. Africa is now a continent in tragic ruin: AIDS is ravishing its people, orphaning its children, without much international response many of Africa’s governments have collapsed under the historical weight and destruction of colonial control and the tribal divisions used by that colonial system; tens of millions of Africans have died from disease, hunger, violence, and abject cruelty with little but a “tsk, tsk” from the rest of the world. IMF and World Bank policies have ensured that the natural resources of these African nations continue to benefit the colonial nations and never attend to the needs of its own people.

In the US, while the labor of enslaved Africans created the massive early wealth that allowed it to become the primary world power today, those black people who survived the massacres of the Middle Passage, slavery, and the post-reconstruction Jim Crow era went on to be permanently shoved to the bottom of the American barrel. The people who are descendents of Africans enslaved by the US have a huge prison population, the worst education and health care, systematic disenfranchisement from the vote, the highest unemployment, deep alienation from society, and constant harassment. These facts are greatly class-based, allowing a handful of middle class black Americans to succeed, to thinly cover the degraded reality of the vast majority of their dark-skinned brothers and sisters. The success of the black middle class in the US allows Americans, white, brown, yellow and black, to say, “So what’s wrong with the others? Why can’t they make it too?”

Former slaves have been fighting for their freedom against America from the beginning of the American slave trade to the present. The civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s was not a fight of mostly middle class blacks; it was a fight of primarily poor black folks; and it was a fight for freedom that ignited a movement in the US toward a moral and just society, a movement that was shut down early in its development, killed by US government intervention both overt and covert. Poor black people in the US and in the world have been dealt one massive blow after another and the pattern is clear.

So many white people and even many middle class black people truly believe that poor black people are incorrigible, that they have no potential for change, for uplift, for self-organization. That is certainly the repeated message of the corporate mass media. Those in power rely on this racist consensus to keep the society divided and in despair. Black people serve as an example of what happens to a people who do not toe the line.

Sadly, even many in the progressive community in the US—reformers, radicals, advocates, activists, service providers, and revolutionary theorists—rely on this consensus to justify the development and implementation of ideologies, programs and practices without any leadership and direction from the community that is supposed to be served, those who are in most need. There have been times in history where poor people did lead struggles for change, but even then too often those with class, race and/or gender privileges took the credit and power for themselves.

In New Orleans, after the natural devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the unnatural disaster of the governments’ policies to leave poor black people to die and then to remove the survivors and make it virtually impossible for them to return, the race hatred and revised methods of genocide in the US became clear for all to see. New Orleans went from a city that was 75% black to a city that is now 75% white. It had a large poor population and it is now overwhelmingly middle and upper class. The aid and relief money that came in for New Orleans primarily went to real estate development schemes, renovation of houses of the middle class and wealthy, and the growth of a social service infrastructure that gave handouts to hundreds of national organizations to gain wealth and power off the tragedy that is New Orleans. The money went to the corporations and the bureaucrats to line their wallets and bolster their prestige. Virtually no money has gone to the poor to rebuild their own lives.

For decent people who really do not want to see the genocide of black people, who want to live in a society that embraces decency, New Orleans seems incomprehensible. Hundreds of billions of aid dollars have been allocated, and not much is happening. Social service agencies can set up clinics and gut houses with the best of intentions. But without the participation of the poor themselves, without their leadership, ideas, and on-the-ground knowledge, no real change can happen. At best, these structures will be a poor fit with the people’s needs and priorities, and will create a set of missed opportunities. Systematic and society-wide distrust of the poor has brought real change in New Orleans to a standstill. Unfortunately, the piece that is New Orleans fits perfectly into the genocidal puzzle of US government policy for poor black people. Under this system, there is no place for poor black folks to go but down.

Facing the genocide internationally, facing the genocidal policies nationally, is a first step. Ridding ourselves of our learned fear of the black poor, opening our eyes to their ideas, organizations, hopes and dreams, can allow us to truly stand in solidarity and help to create a space for the poor themselves to lead the movement for change. This is a moral as well as a political call. Every great religion, every great body of spiritual and social thought, speaks to the need for support for our brethren with ‘the least,’ for seeing the humanity of the poor, the disenfranchised, the needy, the basic equality of all people. One thread in human history has been this desire for equality, for a humanistic and loving approach. We know there are other, more sinister and cynical approaches that are hegemonic today. For those who know that our planet cannot continue to exist unless we begin to systematically embrace each other and ensure our safe passage through our years here by caring for each other and our planet, we must answer the call to turn against genocide and the destruction of our world.

New Orleans Survivor Council
Contact: Curtis Muhammad
504-872-9591

Creating Bottom-up Organizations: A Working Paper
April, 2007

Note: This paper is an introduction to our basic organizing theory and practice

Preface:

This paper is hoping to help describe and refine the working models we are creating to fight for and build a new and just world. It is based on what we’ve learned so far and what we want to share out of “bottom-up” organizing in New Orleans after Katrina. This organizing has not taken place in a historical vacuum, and we credit all those people whose struggles we’ve learned and benefited from, from Ella Baker (mentor and trainer of young “bottom-up” organizers during the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. during the 1960’s) and SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the “bottom-up” organizers of the 1960’s Southern Civil Rights Student Movement), to the sharecroppers’ unions of the 1930s and 1940s, to the classic revolutions and struggles in the last century, and to the centuries of struggles by our ancestors around the world. We present this working paper in the hope that with the help of many other people, we can also make a contribution to that ongoing journey. We ask that you lend your experience and ideas to this process.

When the authors of this working paper talk about the “bottom,” we are referring to the roughly 80% of the world’s population that lives collectively on an average of $2 a day: poor (hard-working people who mostly live on the fringes of cities or in their ghettoes, and in rural areas) who are the most lacking in resources, health care, and formal education. Some work in various industries and sweatshops or on the land, some are unemployed, and some work in the so-called informal economy. They are the folk who live on steep mountainsides in constant danger from the next hard rain, who live in shantytowns where AIDS and tuberculosis are rampant, whose children die of malnutrition, diarrhea or malaria in ungodly numbers, whose youthful daughters are sold into prostitution, whose neighborhoods are victimized by drugs and gang violence. Pretty much everywhere you look in the world; they are also those with the darkest skin.

“Bottom” people are all over the world, but the writers of this document, the People’s Organizing Committee (POC), are in the U.S. POC now includes some “bottom” people, though when we started our work in New Orleans, we were almost exclusively not “bottom.” And all of us in POC, whether “bottom” or not, have been working directly for and with the people on the bottom in the U.S. In New Orleans, where we began, the “bottom” is organized through the New Orleans Survivor Council. The people we work for and with are reviewing this document to guide its further development along with you, the readers.

The vision of poor, black people on rooftops and floating in poisoned water in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina brought to us graphically the reality of how the current economic and political situation treats poor people everywhere. It challenged us to look carefully at the dynamics of the struggle of our people and to investigate the existing assumptions of who should lead it. We decided we must harvest the agenda and direction for responding to the aftermath of Katrina from those most impacted by it – the same poor, black, working people left in the city to die.

We consider ourselves revolutionary organizers. By that we mean that we have concluded that the status quo will never lift up that 80% or provide that 80% with a decent life because the status quo is permanently rooted in inequality by race, class and gender. We believe that the 80% needs to build a new and entirely different world, eventually eliminate the world of its current bosses and the structures those bosses have erected along the way. Most revolutionaries in the past have focused on defeating the old system through bringing regime change: having workers in charge instead of the rich, having black people overthrow whites, having women in power instead of men. Several of these movements actually succeeded in overthrowing governments, and began trying to build societies without exploitation and oppression. So far, those attempts at building a new world have failed, which is not really surprising given that these have been first attempts. Our feeling is that our information on the enemy and the need to defeat its empire is fairly well developed and must always be kept in mind, but the challenge of learning how to create a just and egalitarian world still lies before us. In our view, this will be a world created and led by the masses themselves.

The History:

Our first attempt to develop this “bottom-up” agenda described below began immediately after Katrina with calling together a coalition that came out of many years of organizing in New Orleans. Although most of the organizations involved did not have that constituency or membership, the decision made by the writers of this document was to begin the process by going to the “bottom.” We decided to look among the people most impacted, gather them, and ask them -- with equal voice -- to come up with solutions. We assumed that most of us would be happy to come to work with the people and would acknowledge that the agenda and leadership of the process should come from organizations comprised primarily of the people most impacted by Katrina, the people on the “bottom.” The same dark-skinned, poor and working black people we all saw on TV in the flood, at the Superdome and then scattered all across the country. We began to call this process “bottom-up organizing.”

(Attached to this paper is a timeline of the work to develop bottom-up organizing over the past year and a half. We would suggest the reader look at that timeline before reading the rest of this document).

The Purpose:

In the rest of this paper, we will try to allow you, the reader, to walk through the steps we have used in the New Orleans to begin to develop this thing we call “bottom-up organizing.” We hope that you will then help us analyze how to improve on it. We are particularly interested in those creative thinkers, workers and organizers who want to invest in and experiment with this process. The things we are doing are not presented as antagonistic to other types of organizing already being done. This is a particular body of work we are engaging in within the construct of human development at this period in history. We want to investigate collectively how theory and practice come together.

The conclusion we have come to through doing this work is that when the folk on the “bottom” come together on a principle of equal voice and egalitarian organization, they will make fair, just, and correct decisions about how to conduct the work of building a new world. All doors must stay open; we can’t have any space where the mass can’t enter, or where the “true” leadership is not mass. However, we are not romantics or delusional. We don’t think that the “bottom” will magically change the world into a paradise. We know that the conflict between the collective impulse and the selfish impulse exists there, too. We know that the enemy lurks in the background waiting to attack, and will. We know this will not be a short, easy, smooth or peaceful road. But our experience of the past year and a half, and standing on the shoulders of our brothers and sisters before us, tells us that there is genius among the poor waiting to be harvested to direct our movement; that those who are the most oppressed can understand and deal appropriately with all of the challenges as they arise, and that the reins of our movement should be in their hands.

Documentation of the Work

In this part of the paper, we will describe the steps we took in New Orleans to build the New Orleans Survivor Council (NOSC) and root it in the principles of “bottom-up”. Each organizing situation will have its own particularities. For example, in New Orleans, we had an onslaught of hundreds of volunteers, which is not likely to be the case in most organizing situations. We expect that people organizing in cities or rural areas, in the US or so-called “developing countries,” and so forth, will face different particular problems and needs. However, if we are sticking to the principles that those on the “bottom” should lead, of respecting the human drive to take care of the needs of humanity equitably, and of treating all of our people with fairness and humanity, we all may be able to use elements of the model developed in New Orleans.

Step 1: Door-to-door and house call to begin relationship building with the bottom

The first step taken in New Orleans was sending organizers and volunteers into the streets to meet and talk with as many poor and working black hurricane survivors as we could. The purpose in doing this was to begin building relationships, make some initial guesses about desire for involvement, and establish agreement for future communication with people who would then be invited to meet together in what was to become the New Orleans Survivor Council (NOSC). Simultaneously, the visits allowed us to obtain the people’s agenda about the issues and what solutions were needed.

Almost 6,000 visits were done (remember we had an outpouring of volunteers). We found that we were gathering very similar information from many people about what happened to them, how they were treated, and what obstacles faced them back home or in their efforts to return home. Even before the first meetings, we knew something about the consensus developing among the people about what they needed and wanted done. The visits were the source for developing the first agendas for the community’s initial meetings. Much of the information we received provided the basis for the people determining and prioritizing later legal actions to bring to address community issues.

In door-knocking, you mostly listen, to gain initial understanding of where the person is, what they’re thinking about, and their desire for involvement. After that, you identify some of the things you heard before. You then tell them about a meeting where other people with these same concerns are getting together to discuss the situation community members are in and how to get out of it. You try to secure a commitment to be there and you deal with problems or reasons for not coming, trying to make it possible for the person to attend. You ask if you can contact the person in the future, and write down contact information. When you’re leaving, you may leave a flier as a reminder of the meeting, but the door-to-door is not introduced by a piece of paper.

This is a description of the first time you knock on a person’s door. After that, when someone is expressing interest, coming to meetings, or doing some work, you follow-up with house calls. In these house calls, you plan to sit and spend time with the person, build a relationship with them and help them get more involved in the work, a committee, etc. Building relationships is the key to developing people socially and creating an ongoing organization with stability, where people feel they can rely on each other. You also, periodically, conduct follow-up house calls with people who have not been as involved, after certain community victories or certain new development related to the concerns they have communicated.

It is real important to constantly reflect on the new relationships you are developing, understand where your relationships are, and be deliberate about growing them when opportunities for growth present themselves.

By January of 2006, the first meeting of what was to become the NOSC was held in New Orleans. Several hundred residents attended, despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of the poor black community was back in the city. Even before the first meeting of the NOSC, their organizers were already assisting New Orleans residents who they had begun building relationships with to address issues in their community.

NOSC residents directed the filing of a lawsuit to stop evictions of displaced renters without notice. They directed the development of a report on conditions related to laborers and other workers in their community by having volunteers who wanted to help their community find community members and ask them to contribute their testimonials. Similarly, they directed the development of a report on conditions related to members of their community dealing with incarceration during the Katrina disaster.

However, because the residents had no organizational identity for their community and for their work, credit for the reports and the lawsuit was almost exclusively given to the attorneys who were working for the residents and the organizations those attorneys belonged to or to the advocacy organizations who partnered with the residents. Organizers were able to talk about these efforts and successes by the residents in the house visits and also have it serve as an example of the need for residents to develop their own organization so that they could give more direction and supervision to their solutions. Even the disorganized resident successes were useful in feeding a desire and need for the community to get together and develop organization. Planning those first initial meetings for the community is very important.

Step 2: creating a safe space for people to meet

Before the first meeting of what was to become the NOSC was convened, their organizers, who were mainly young people, had to think carefully about how to conduct it in a “bottom-up” fashion. The method chosen came from “story circle,” a meeting model which community elders had been using in other contexts for years. The fundamental principle of the story circle process is egalitarianism, or treating everyone equally and fairly and ensuring everyone’s equal voice. This requires several elements:

1. Make sure everyone has equal access to the meeting itself. This means preparing the meeting in a way that takes obstacles into account and deals with them. So, for instance, each meeting should have childcare available, so people with children can come. It should have food, so people don’t have to worry about cooking. These measures particularly help to remove obstacles that would otherwise stand in the way of women participating, and we have found that women have taken the lead in much of this organizing. Transportation should be organized so those without access to it are enabled to come to the meetings. Chairs should be set in a circle so everyone will be able to see everyone else’s face.
2. Take measures to assure equal voice in the meeting. Estimate the number of people expected, choose and (if necessary) train enough facilitator teams, which include facilitators, timekeepers or monitors, and note-takers. The role of the facilitator team is to make sure everyone gets an equal chance to speak, create the agenda, understand the process and participate; to keep to the agenda and help the meeting run smoothly; to monitor that the rules are being followed; to call on people during cross talk, and then help to gather the agreements that have come out of the discussion. The facilitator team also assists in getting disagreements tabled for further discussion between meetings or at other meetings. The role of women is important here. Most meeting facilitators from among the grassroots in New Orleans have been women. We have come to feel that participants (normally accustomed to male leaders and spokesmen of organizations) take the group as a seriously rooted group when women, too, are taking visible leadership roles.
3. Begin the meeting in a way that invites everyone and makes everyone comfortable. We always start our meetings with a cultural or spiritual offering from someone in the circle. When possible, it is great to organize some children to present a song or poem. Or the offering could be as simple as a prayer to invite the spirit into the circle. This can also be a good time to present a thought-provoking prompt and do one round of reflection on it. (For example, at one meeting, the prompt was, “If we woke up tomorrow morning and the whole government was dead, and we had all the money and resources we needed, what would we do?”)
4. The meeting usually starts with reports on the work that has happened since the last meeting: committee reports, organizer reports, etc.
5. Following reports, the agenda is set by taking suggestions from the floor.
6. If the group is larger than 15 people, break it into smaller groups to consider each of the agenda items.
7. The method of discussion is equal time for each person. We would have a timekeeper, who would time each speaker for the length of time agreed upon by the room (two minutes, for example), and give a signal when that time was up, at which point the speaker would finish his/her sentence and stop talking. While one person is speaking, the others are listening – not responding, interrupting, asking questions or thinking about what they’ll say when it’s their turn. Listening is the most important thing going on in the meeting. If a person “passes” their turn, they are offered an opportunity to say what they think after the round is finished and before the next round begins. Each prompt or agenda item is taken separately and all opinions put on the floor in this way.
8. Once everyone has said what they needed to say, cross talk occurs for the time agreed upon by the room. Cross talk is more like a traditional meeting, in which the facilitator calls on people as they raise hands. However, the goal is not debate, but to work toward everyone having clarity about each other’s contributions.
9. If the meeting has broken into smaller groups, these groups come together once all agenda items have been addressed and report back. Common agreements are now listed and plans made to carry them out. The facilitator helps guide the discussion to breaking the plans down into assignments, and asks for volunteers to take on the assignments.
10. The meeting closes with another cultural offering, most often with everyone standing, holding hands and singing together.

The above is an outline of how the NOSC conducts its meetings. We share it not because we feel it is perfect or the “only way.” The main thing is to develop meetings in a way that honors the principles of equal voice, harvesting the agreements and moving on them, and of making decisions by consensus rather than by vote. We are not trying to engage in debate and create winners and losers. We are trying to move forward on those things people can have consensus on at the moment. By the same token, we are not trying to ignore or paper over differences and disagreements, merely to continue talking about them until there is agreement to accept or reject a particular idea by the group as a whole. Whatever meeting methods and styles achieve these purposes would be fine.

In line with these principles, the NOSC decided to form a leadership committee. Previous to this, the entire group had been meeting weekly and found it too frequent a schedule. However, they felt they needed someone meeting weekly to keep the work going, to be a link between what happened in the meetings and the people doing the work. They decided not to have traditional elected officers, but rather volunteers for a leadership or organizing team, and that the door always stays open to anyone who wants to be in that group and do that work. Meetings of the leadership team are conducted in the same style, and it has become a consistent working group of pretty much the same people each week. This meeting has also been used for skills/technology transfer, including facilitation training, bookkeeping, managing volunteers, and organizing staff, etc.

(Please see the Story Circle Model in the appendix for a more detailed description of the method we have based our meetings on.)

Step 3: The Work

This is not so much a “step” as a brief report. The work is circular; that is, the community meets and decides on solutions to problems and identifies teams or committees from the community to move on the solutions. Work is assigned to a committee, organizers build relationships between community meetings (phone and house calls for existing relationships, door-knocking for new relationships, leafleting for anybody you miss) to help build the committees, and the next community meeting; committees do the assigned work, develop proposal for additional work and new solutions, committees bring reports and proposals back to the community meeting, etc.

In the very early days, the NOSC asked itself the question, “What do people need to come home to New Orleans?” They agreed upon four needs: a place to live, a place to send children to school, a place to take people when they are sick, and a job. The issue of the safety of the levees was always in people’s minds, but, more recently, sound levees around poor black communities have also been noted as a basic requirement for people to feel safe enough to come home, so it has become a fifth need.

Within these five needs, the NOSC realized that the hundreds of volunteers at their disposal could mainly help initially with the first, and to some degree the second. They decided to prioritize the gutting, cleaning and rebuilding of homes according to the principle of most need. As house calls created a list of people who wanted help with their homes, priority was to be given, first, to elderly and disabled people with no insurance or resources, second, to single parents, and third, to other residents going from people without resources to people with some resources. Initially, the NOSC focused on low-income homeowners because they were the first members of the community to return in large numbers. Subsequently, the NOSC began to also focus on public housing residents and then renters. (Volunteers also gutted, repaired and helped reopen schools and meeting places.) Once again, the decision-making was based upon an egalitarian principle.

Following the same principle; the NOSC made and carried out decisions to reopen public housing, help people get trailers to live in while their houses were worked on, clean up two schools for reopening, reopen one school, develop a reconstruction project, create a “technology transfer” program (i.e. teaching survivors all the information and skills organizers had at their disposal, from meeting facilitation to grant writing to computer skills), and reach out to immigrant workers brought into Louisiana in slave conditions to begin to create unity with them. Committees were setup to do various aspects of this work. Part of the goal of the technology transfer program was to develop the skills among poor and working black people to be able to account for and manage any money raised for this work directly through their own NOSC instead of some other groups.

In many of these initiatives, questions came up that challenged the egalitarian principle. For instance, at one point it was suggested to help rebuild the home of a man who had worked very hard for the NOSC rebuilding other homes, but did not fit the priority criteria because he had some insurance and resources. In another example, some people initially questioned uniting with guest workers because those workers were taking jobs previously held by black workers until Katrina gave employers an excuse to fire them. A few people wanted to set up the leadership committee in a traditional hierarchy and be bossy. In each case, the group decided in favor of the original principle. In each case, opportunism was rejected by consensus.

Step 4: Developing Across Neighborhood Boundaries

The NOSC was first conceived of by organizers as a space for the community of poor and working darker people displaced from the New Orleans area and in the New Orleans area to come together to plan and direct the recovery, reconstruction, and rebuilding of their lives and community. The organizers began their first relationship building in one of the neighborhoods that was most devastated during the Katrina catastrophe. As a result, the residents that began to participate in the NOSC were low-income homeowners from the Lower Ninth Ward.

Some months after the NOSC began its work, public housing residents who were returning to the city on their own and taking their homes, or who were returning to the city on vouchers, began to participate in their NOSC. Quickly, public housing residents decided that they wanted their own committee to deal with the struggle to reoccupy public housing. Organizers began to assist them, and a new organization was born that named itself Residents of Public Housing (ROPH).

This new space had two interesting aspects about it. One, though it was a space specifically for public housing residents to come together to address their issues of return, it brought together residents across all the different public housing developments. Second, though it was autonomous to the broader NOSC, residents of ROPH maintained a relationship to the NOSC of reporting about its efforts, relying on and participating in the Reconstruction and Media Committees of the NOSC to achieve some of the solutions that ROPH determined for their neighborhoods, and of recognizing the NOSC as their broader community space.

By comparison, soon after the beginning of the Katrina tragedy, poor and working darker people from various locations outside the U.S. were shipped into New Orleans as a part of current day U.S. slave trade. NOSC organizers began an effort of developing relationships with the new residents, understanding that they were members of the NOSC community. However, language and cultural differences ( ) contributed to this effort needing assistance from new organizers who were more familiar with the language and culture of these new residents.

NOSC organizers called for assistance with organizing these new members of the NOSC community. These new organizers ended up nurturing the development of an immigrant organization independent of the NOSC, with the organizers also meeting separately from the NOSC organizers. The result was organizational isolation of the new from the old poor and working darker people.

To say the least, the effort to connect these two groups has been a much more gargantuan task than maintaining connectivity between ROPH and the NOSC. We started the process with dialog and rebuilding relationships between the organizers doing “bottom up” within both neighborhoods. Our second step was to extend invitation in both neighborhoods to send delegations to each other’s meetings. Meetings between the two groups led to work between the two groups, which seems to be leading towards recognition that we are people catching hell. NOSC members have united with immigrants to get back passports that had been taken from them, and have helped bail day laborers out of jail. Immigrants, in turn, have been helping to reconstruct the home of an elderly, black NOSC member. Both groups are now calling for unity and considering a space for developing that unity.

Step 5: Developing Internationally

While initially, the NOSC formed during trauma to respond to urgent needs, and it continues to do so, people have begun to think in broader terms about the meaning of their work. Developing unity between homeowners, renters and public housing residents, for example, broke down previous barriers. Meeting with, supporting, and being supported by immigrant guest workers broke down further barriers, and people began to see the struggle as unity against a broader system of slavery. They began to see that many of the problems of the “bottom” in New Orleans are shared by poor people all over the world.

This process eventually led to a trip to Venezuela, to meet with the Communal Councils there. The Venezuelan government, just after Katrina, had offered to send resources to help the recovery, but this move was blocked by the US government. So in early 2007, a delegation of organizers and members of the NOSC and ROPH went to Venezuela to appeal directly for those resources. They met with the Communal Councils and saw the work those groups are doing in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas and elsewhere. With members of the Councils, they met with government officials to make their requests for support. They decided to try to build a sister-city relationship between the NOSC and the Caracas Communal Councils. The process of developing international unity between those on the bottom in both countries was begun.

Conclusion: Moving Toward Developing an International Organizing School

What we have learned from putting one foot in front of the other in New Orleans is that a mass, collective, consensus-based organizing process built on a foundation of egalitarian principle has shown great potential as a beacon for the future. By defending an active space where people could begin to see themselves as the legitimate governance of their own lives and future, we’ve seen the collective take the high ground on each issue that came before it. We are convinced that the folk on the “bottom” have, collectively, the genius needed to figure out how to run society; that those of us who have had the opportunity to learn about history and to develop various skills have the responsibility to put that knowledge and those skills at the service of the people, and help them learn to lead the decision making process. In this way, through practice, experience in the struggle, trial and error, we will work towards understanding how to build a future egalitarian society and begin building it.

Although there is much more still to learn than what we have learned so far, we feel that we have a precious embryo in our hands. We want help in nurturing and developing it. We are planning to begin an international school for organizers in the hopes of learning from the struggles in New Orleans and around the world – landless struggles in South America, the Communal Council movement in Venezuela, the campesinos in Oaxaca, and other struggles on other continents – and in the hopes of creating connections between those struggles so we can begin to move together to create the future. We invite you to help in this process, if you find yourself in fundamental agreement with the idea of “bottom-up.”

People’s Organizing Committee

A Timeline of Organizing in New Orleans after Katrina
March, 2007

• August 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina misses New Orleans and people who were left in the city by the government heave a sigh of relief.
• August 30, 2005: waters rise, levees are destroyed, homes and people are washed away by violently rushing water. Approximately 6,000 people die within a few days, 100,000 are trapped in shelters or on roofs without food or water, shot at by police while trying to flee the waters, then loaded on buses and planes and shipped all over the country. These people were the poorest and darkest-skinned people in New Orleans.
• August 30, 2005: At a meeting of “The National Black Convergence” leadership group organized by Harry Belafonte, going on during the hurricane, Curtis Muhammad asked for an immediate and united response. The suggestion was tabled for a later date, missing the crucial opportunity to defend poor, black New Orleanians and to open a new militant chapter in the US struggle for justice.
• A few New Orleans organizers from Community Labor United set up a communication center in Jackson, Mississippi because it was not possible to be in New Orleans yet. One week after the office was set up, it was broken into and the computer and files were stolen. The office was inside a 12 foot iron fence with an alarm system and shared grounds with a church, a school, a Young People’s Project office and a youth training center: none of these other institutions were touched. The intruders climbed a telephone pole and cut the main electricity to the compound in order to disable the alarm. It looked like a professional job.
• September 8: a group of people from the Community Labor United network met and concluded that the movement to respond to the travesty should be led by the poor, working class black people who were hit hardest by it. Two sectors of the movement, the nationalists and the internationalists, began to develop a coalition on a verbal agreement to follow the leadership of poor black people. A name was chosen: People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition.
• October: At the second meeting of the coalition, which took place in South Carolina, a small group of activists representing national organizations attempted to take over the coalition.
• October through January: PHRF sent Curtis on a national speaking tour, exposing the victimization of poor black New Orleanians and announcing the campaign for the right of return led by the survivors themselves. The money began pouring in: working people, poor people, unions, progressive organizations, all were deeply moved by the victimization of black people in New Orleans and responded generously. The coalition planned its first big event for December 9 and 10: a Survivor’s Assembly and a March for the Right of Return.
• The strategy for the Survivor’s Assembly was that survivors would be brought from all over the country to the Assembly, and would take the reins of the organization from the Interim Coordinating Committee (ICC) (that had been set up temporarily to facilitate the passage of resources raised on the backs of the suffering of the poor). Allied groups in many cities began finding and organizing Katrina evacuees.
• Early December: it became obvious about a week before the assembly that there was not agreement in this coalition. $200,000 was spent to get survivors there, but the planning committee held back the agenda until a week before the event. When they unveiled it, it was clear that the only role for the survivors was to sit and listen. Some forces within PHRF began to demonize bottom-up ideas and the story circle model for meetings.
• A struggle developed around the voice and leadership of the survivors in their own struggle. In the end, survivors did not take over the organization, and the rally the following day was dominated by spokespeople for various left and nationalist organizations. An attempt was being made to permanently put the leadership of the coalition into the hands of activists from national organizations. That weekend exposed the reality that they were not committed to follow the leadership of poor black folks.
• December-January: Vanguard Public Foundation, which had been handling the money raised for PHRF, made it clear that their understanding was that our work was to give out aid and do social service work, and announced that they would not pay out money for organizing. This was in spite of the fact that the money was clearly raised for organizing poor people, NOT for aid and social service work. Other foundations joined Vanguard’s position and suggested that bottom-up organizing was a problem, that this was too big for poor people to lead and handle the funds. PHRF had to set up a separate fund for organizing.
• January 2006: Curtis Muhammad, heading the organizing committee, hired a staff of young, committed people, dedicated to following the leadership of poor black people, and put volunteers on the streets to find survivors and listen to their stories. This grassroots organizing followed the traditions of Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Paulo Friere’s popular education and organizing work (which has influenced Movimento Sin Terra). The New Orleans Survivor Council (NOSC) was established out of this work.
• January: a delegation from PHRF, including Curtis Muhammad, went to the World Social Forum in Venezuela, gave a workshop on the travesty in New Orleans, and were very impressed with the young social workers and their organizing in the housing developments in Caracas. An outside attempt was made to shut down the PHRF workshop on bottom-up organizing before it took place.
• The NOSC set down principles for its work. In the midst of trauma, people put aside selfish concerns to fight injustice. They said that in order for people to come home, they would need four things: a place to live, a place to send their children to school, a place to go when they got sick, and a job. They set up set up an egalitarian system to prioritize requests: those in the most need would get first priority in the rebuilding effort. First help would go to elderly and disabled without resources, then single parents without resources, then other homeowners without insurance, and finally everyone else.
• March: because at first most volunteers were middle class white youth, an effort was made to recruit black students to come for spring break. Well over a thousand responded during the month of March, organized by a new network called Katrina on the Ground. Residents took heart from this response of children who looked like their own, and were inspired to take more initiative.
• March-April: while this was happening, the PHRF temporary coordinators, the ICC, was moving PHRF in a different direction (they began maneuvering to take over PHRF and the people’s resources). Most people on it represented organizations that aspired to leadership of the movement. They were impatient with the slow work of building leadership among the people at the bottom and anxious to lead a national campaign, affect local and national elections, and get international attention. They became irritated at the young organizers, out there talking to the Survivor Council members, teaching them organizing skills, explaining the work to the hundreds of youthful volunteers and putting them on the streets in the service of the Survivor Council.
• mid-April: the Survivor Council began to ask questions about the money PHRF had raised in their names (mainly from Curtis Muhammad’s speaking tour, over one million US dollars), and began to request oversight over that money. Overnight, the young organizers were accused of insubordination and fired. PHRF’s ICC deserted the Survivor Council and left 60 high school volunteers in the city without guidance, kept control of the remaining $800,000 raised in the name of survivors, and began organizing around its program of influencing the upcoming mayoral election and preparing for an international tribunal.
• mid-April: the day after being fired, the young organizers decided to continue working without salaries. Curtis Muhammad threw his lot in with them, and promised to raise money to help them keep doing “bottom-up” organizing. The group re-named itself the People’s Organizing Committee (POC) and continued its work with survivors and volunteers, asking the Survivor Council to supervise them and act as their employer if money could be raised to sustain them.
• May – August: POC coordinated a large and complex summer volunteer project. Hundreds of volunteers supported the work of the Survivor Council, gutting homes and doing door-to-door organizing, and discussing what they were learning. The work expanded to include organizing in the trailer parks where survivors were still living, working with immigrant workers who had been brought in to take jobs formerly held by Katrina evacuees, public housing residents, parents trying to open a school, and allying with a grassroots oriented legal group, and an environmental committee.
• August 29: on the anniversary of Katrina, residents attempted to take empty FEMA trailers from a lot; Curtis Muhammad was arrested for trespassing (charges were later dropped when many residents attended court).
• September: a new group of organizers replaced the original group, who went back to work and school. All the areas of work continued, though with far fewer volunteers because young people were back in school.
• Fall: 150 students from Spellman College and Morehouse University came to New Orleans to volunteer for a week with POC and the Survivor Council. They were blitzed by organizers from PHRF, Common Ground, ACORN and the Mayor’s Office to stop working with us and instead work with their groupings.
• October: Curtis Muhammad, on a visit to New York to raise money, was told that a move was afoot among foundations not to provide funding for POC or Survivor Council initiatives.
• September – December: Survivor Council in New Orleans consolidated its own leadership group. Public housing residents formed an organization within the Survivor Council and worked toward reopening developments that the government had slated for demolition. POC organizers and immigrant organizers formally joined forces and resources.
• January – February: Residents of Public Housing reoccupy units in a public housing project. Survivor Council organizers join forces with immigrant guest workers to attempt a citizen’s arrest of a slave trafficker. High school volunteers are threatened with arrest for helping to clean up public housing apartments. The Survivor Council sets as a priority developing plans and resources to build a section of world-class levee around the Lower Ninth Ward as a demonstration project.
• February: A group of students at Brooklyn College, responding to a speech by one of the bottom-up organizers, began organizing a trip to work with the Survivor Council as volunteers. PHRF recruited them away by offering to cover all their travel expenses.
• February: members of the Survivor Council, POC and Residents of Public Housing go to Venzuela to appeal for support for building the levee (taking control of public housing) and maintaining and training organizers.
• March, 2007: A member of the Survivor Council e-mailed a letter to some list serves and individuals criticizing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s lack of willingness to file criminal anti-slavery charges on behalf of guest worker immigrants. The e-mail account used to send the letter was flagged and shut down 24 hours later with no explanation.