Road Test: NY Activists Create a New Poor People's Campaign

Bushwick, NY, February 2008. A protest against a negligent landlord. PHOTO: Make the Road New York

We are all familiar with the overplayed, frozen-in-time image of Martin Luther King Jr. expounding his dream for unity and equality at the nation's capitol. What gets less play is Dr. King's later Poor People's Campaign, which focused on economic justice for all poor Americans and included Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and poor whites. The campaign geared up to build a "multiracial army of the poor" who would converge in Washington, DC, and meet with government officials to demand jobs, unemployment insurance, a real minimum wage, and education for adults.

Because of King's assassination the campaign never realized its intended potential. But today in New York City, seeds of that dream are springing to life.

Make the Road New York, a Brooklyn-based, member-led community organization, recently held its first annual Community Assembly, where 600 members presented a several-policy platform to elected officials, unions, and other grassroots leaders. "It's not every day that poor people get to meet with two potential candidates for mayor," says Co-Executive Director Andrew Friedman, referring to the city council speaker and city comptroller, who were both present "to show solidarity and hear from members" on issues from education to immigration.

MRNY is the 2007 melding of two influential grassroots organizations, the Latin American Integration Center and Make the Road by Walking. Now with four branches in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island and a combined budget of $4 million, the new 4,000-member organization is a force to be reckoned with -- and it plays that way.

MRNY's mostly low-income, people-of-color and immigrant members make the news by publicly shaming slumlords for violating housing codes; taking legal action to ensure that pharmacies and hospitals properly serve limited-English-speaking New Yorkers; confronting the labor abuses of area retail employers; and walking door-to-door to urge thousands of immigrant neighbors to come out and vote.

Putting Organizing at the Center

The Bushwick office of Make the Road New York feels like a bustling community center. At noon, one member begins cooking the meal for an evening committee meeting. In the basement four members diligently prepare the inventory for the next day's weekly food pantry. And by 4 p.m. the front office floods with young people streaming in for after-school programs.

But MRNY is not a public service agency. "The organizing is the center of the work we do, and the services we provide," like access to Medicaid and legal help with eviction notices, "are in the service of the organizing we do," says Irene Tung,Director of Organizing, who oversees MRNY's housing and environmental justice campaigns with coalitions city- and statewide, as well as their LGBT rights and workplace justice campaigns.

While some services are available to the public, like English and computer classes, MRNY dedicates the bulk of its resources, including the expertise of eight staff lawyers, to active members "who are making it happen," says Friedman. So if a tenant organizer is facing eviction, MRNY will take up the fight, enabling her to remain active in her community work.

"Fundamentally, we're about building power through organizing," says Friedman.

To "make the road" by walking on it couldn't be a more fitting metaphor for an organization that has evolved into a multi-issue, full-service community center and organizing machine. The organization's focus areas have "sprouted organically," spurred by issues central to members' lives. MRNY didn't start out intending to create Bushwick's first adult literacy program, but "it fit the model" and was necessary to move forward on their primary goals.

Similarly, MRNY started GLOBE, Gays and Lesbians of Bushwick Empowered, the neighborhood's first gay advocacy group -- which addresses homophobia at five high schools, including two new schools that MRNY helped found -- because a youth member saw the need and wanted to organize it.

While organizers actively recruit new members through door-knocking and street outreach at check-cashing centers and hospitals, the organization's "tentacles" reach deep into the neighborhood, providing "lots of avenues for folks to come to us," says Friedman. Folks who would otherwise be isolated in the city -- at-home mothers and LGBTQ folks in Bushwick, Mexicans on Staten Island -- have joined the organization and transformed their families' lives.

MRNY is admired in New York City for its consensus-based, collective decision-making, an intensive process that builds strong, trusting relationships, leadership, and shared agreement among members.

Members fight to win, and their organizing model has led them to recent legislative victories. MRNY spearheaded the city's recently passed Safe Housing Act, legislation that requires landlords to begin repairing thousands of the city's most dangerous apartments per year. The other is legislation that gives tenants the right to sue landlords for harassment.

In ten years, Make the Road has "catalyzed $4 million in public investment for concrete, big-money change in low-income communities," says Friedman, including combating lead paint poisoning, the unchecked abuses of slumlords, and school closings; and helped unionize at ten workplaces, doubling the pay and creating benefits.

Works-in-progress include campaigns to end hazardous housing code violations that have led to an asthma "epidemic" in areas of Brooklyn, to implement rent regulation for what remains of the city's rent-stabilized units, and to provide necessary translation services at city agencies.

Confronting Oppression, Inside and Out

How does this large and growing, multi-ethnic group of activists conquer the institutional injustices that could potentially divide them? They become steadfast allies to each other. We're "trying to confront a million overlapping oppressions in one place," says Friedman. And "the stuff that people carry with them manifests itself," in the process, like occasional scuffles between African American and Latina members.

Because MRNY is "forthrightly committed to being a safe space for all members," Friedman says, the organization actively educates members about the roles of oppression. For instance, after male members harassed a transgender receptionist, the organization responded by reminding them of the organizationalprinciples they signed on to, and holding trainings for members and staff on homophobia.

While Make the Road has lost some members who "couldn't hang" with the organization's commitments, usually these confrontations help folks "move to a new place," Friedman says. And many experience "a level of gratitude" for not having to behave within the oppressive cultural norms expected in society.

MRNY aims not only to "vigilantly call people out on the bullshit," but to "bring them together around a common fight" says Tung. Staff organizers help the community "find the multiple intersections across each others' struggles," because no one is "just a tenant, parent or worker," she says.

At the Thursday evening meeting of BASTA!, the committee on housing and environmental justice, about 30 members convened the gathering with a boisterous chorus of revolutionary chants in Spanish while jamming with hand-held instruments. The evening's topic was, surprisingly, machismo in the home. Circled around a small table, the group preceded the popular-education-style discussion on domestic violence and women's household labor with each member lighting a candle in the name of powerful women in their lives.

People "find resonance and gravitate toward dialogue," says Friedman. Because they're in the same organization as the young people who were recently illegally arrested while walking to a funeral, undocumented immigrant men have come to see that they share similar experiences of police harassment; and older Puerto Rican women with concerns about neighborhood safety have begun thinking differently about policing.

So, Tung says, "We treat people as whole people, and they start to identify with each other as whole people, too." Thus, one African American woman who was primarily active in the weekly LGBT group became the main person to testify and speak to the press about the Safe Housing Act, and got quoted in the city's Spanish language newspapers.

This dialogue also influences organizing strategies. For instance, while working on a campaign to get interpreters and translated materials at the welfare center, Latino immigrant members might propose targeting the African American agency staff for their negligence. The members' approach might be to "get them in trouble with their nice white bosses," says Friedman. But staff organizers help the members have a conversation about the agency workers' heavy workload and the rigid rules they have to follow, and identify the real culprit -- the institution that needs to change.

The Next Frontier

According to a 2004 report by MRNY, nearly half of New York City households speak a language other than English at home and one quarter of residents are limited-English-proficient. Tung believes MRNY's work on language access is crucial to everything they do -- including building coalitions.

Especially in economically poor neighborhoods like Bushwick, language affects the ability of families to access public services and to effectively communicate on behalf of young people in schools. But it also affects the ability of these ethnically rich communities to recognize common cause for joint organizing. Tung recalls gathering Chinese and Latino immigrants for a tri-lingual coalition meeting on housing issues, where the participants realized that they face "the exact same problems, but hadn't ever spoken with each other."

While MRNY's work is "altering power dynamics more than ever before," Friedman knows they're not even close to the momentum they'll need to propel "bigger, systemic changes" at the state and national levels.

Make the Road is learning what it takes to build King's vision of an "army" that links poor people across language, ethnicity, age, gender identity, and immigration status. And they are certainly, as Friedman notes, "transforming the understanding in the city of what's possible for poor folks to achieve."

As they build on their successes, they'll need staunch allies in coalition with them. So their next frontier is movement-building -- throwing their weight behind the campaigns of other progressive grassroots organizations in the city and beyond. Listen for them as they come roaring down that road.