Shifting the balance of power

Steve Dubb talks to Caroline Murray about her work with the Alliance to Develop Power. The charity works at the grassroots in deprived communities in Springfield, Massachusetts, creating co-operatively owned and community-led housing and developing worker-owned enterprises

How did you get involved with community organising?
I grew up in the 1970s. My family experienced an interesting dynamic where our class identity shifted a number of times, due to marriage, divorce, foreclosure and bankruptcy. I went from hanging out at the country club pool to relying on food stamps and living with extended family. So I grew up knowing that something was very, very wrong with how our economy worked. I understood from a very young age how fragile the middle class was.

I went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst when an education at a state university was still relatively affordable and grants were readily available for low-income students like me. I became involved in student organising, the anti-apartheid movement, and was elected to student government. And there I learned there was a career called ‘community organising’. For me, working in organising and community economic development – people power and economic power – is the continuation of my life and my life’s work and has become my calling.

How did you get involved in ADP and how it has developed as an organisation over time?
I went to work as the executive director of ADP in 1993. At that time it was a very small nonprofit advocacy organisation, but I had a vision of creating a new kind of membership-based organisation that was rooted in building power. At that time, ADP was a single-issue organisation and was part of an incredibly important national fight to save hundreds of thousands of families from displacement because of laws allowing private developers to convert their publicly financed affordable apartment complexes to market rate apartments or tear them down and put up a strip mall and make windfall profits.

ADP was part of a national campaign to win new legislation to stop these landlords from profiting off the backs of low and moderate income tenants and the taxpayer while at the same time create new financing mechanisms to keep the housing permanently affordable.

While most of our allies around the country went on to find non-profit housing developers to purchase the apartment complexes, we latched upon a novel idea – why not buy them ourselves as membership-based, democratically governed corporations? Here was an opportunity to convert ownership of the housing to the people who lived there and develop long-lasting leadership. We could keep it permanently affordable for generations to come. We could stop capital flight by controlling the money that flows in and out. And we could alter the relations of power between landlord and tenant.

I believed then and I still believe today that we need to think big and be aspirational in our goals as we work towards truly transformational change. We need to do this among ourselves, with our neighbours, and in our society as a whole. Changing the dynamics of ownership and decision-making really became the foundation of my work.

How did the first housing co-operative came about?
The first buyout campaign took seven years to win and the others took about four. We also lost a few, including the apartment complex where I lived. My rent for a two-bedroom apartment went from $568 a month to $1,400 a month overnight. It was an intense period and we bought out about 1,200 units of housing, making it the largest block of tenant controlled housing in the United States.

ADP members also saved about 4,000 more apartments as affordable by working with the existing landlord when we couldn’t convince them to sell. It is far too complicated to get into all the details. But the most important thing is the understanding that everyday people do extraordinary things every day. Of course, you also need resources, a strategic plan, tactics that make sense, a number cruncher, but nothing gets done without community leaders and community organisers who understand power.

You see the same thing at Occupy today. It is one thing to win policies and that of course is important. But what we really need to be thinking about is fundamental restructuring of the systems that perpetuate inequity. We need to be talking and taking action in order to reshape and change the dynamics of power.

How did ADP manage to forge the community economy it has helped create?
The essence of community organising is to work with people at the grassroots level to build power, identity problems, and win solutions. There are methodologies for doing that – outreach and listening to the community, developing leaders, identifying a campaign etc.

We created a model that takes that one step further. We wanted one outcome of a campaign to be the creation of a membership controlled alternative economic institution that would control wealth and assets. So rather than simply trying to keep rents affordable or fix the broken toilets, we would seek to purchase the property so the toilets would never break again and the rents would remain affordable for generations. And by converting major properties into tenant ownership then the community would control millions of dollars of real estate. You can use the surplus funds you control to benefit the commons. I always say: ‘The way you ask a question determines the answer.’ And so, we started asking different questions. How do you meet an unmet need in the community? How do you capture a surplus and expand the commons?

I remember one of our first budgeting meetings after a successful buyout. We were reviewing the operating budget and got down to the landscaping line item. One of the members said, ‘why don’t we pay ourselves to mow the lawn?’ And it was like a lightening bolt hit. In that moment, all the questions changed and an infinite number of possibilities became clear. And so we decided to create a landscaping business. Then we added up all of the money the community now controlled through these large apartment complexes and met with the president of a local bank. We told him we would move our money, millions of dollars in cash flow, into his bank if he financed the start up of our company. And we were off to the races.

At some point, we realised that we had a captive market and we could create a new ‘community economy’ that served this market, filled unmet needs in the community – both in terms of the services provided but also in terms of creating living wage jobs – and generated a surplus that could fund organising. And so we created and expanded the businesses that served captive markets: i.e., landscaping, snow removal, painting, cleaning and construction. But it is important to note that these businesses also came out of our supported organising campaigns. And so we organised workers on construction sites who were experiencing wage theft and won back millions of dollars that had been stolen from workers. At the same time, those workers founded the worker centre and became leaders in the construction arm of the business.

The bottom line is to build people power and economic power. I think of this work as creating the world as it should be and modelling what sustainability really is. It is living out what people call the triple bottom line and actually understanding that our actions can drive the economy rather than having the economy control us. And, as my mentor Julie Graham taught me, it means striving to achieve equilibrium – balance —in a community economy that is ever-expanding and interconnected.

One area of challenge for co-ops is the issue of scale. Scale can boost organisational capacity, but can also mean larger organisations that may become disconnected from the communities they serve. How did ADP negotiate these tensions?
One of the challenges in the movement as a whole is the issue of moving from opposition to governance. If you look at any social movement – people are protesting, but the goal is to govern. Governance is a different skill set, and acting in a way that is in opposition to our existing free market economy and rugged individualism is not easy. It requires constant attention. Creating a world view, acting on principles, engaging in training, and recognising the interconnections among people are all-important. It is a constant process. There are challenges in all movements to do that.

If I were to critique the existing co-op movement, I would say: one, they are often in silos, not focused on the larger structural inequities of society; and two, they are apolitical and focused very much on their own workplace. We have to push ourselves to think and act bigger. For anyone who is participating in a co-op, we have to constantly challenge each other on how to build beyond that.

It is a constant struggle. The movement is acting in opposition to the existing world view. It is challenging both personally and organisationally. If you don’t focus on your world view work or true vision of an equitable society, you can become very inwardly focused, which doesn’t address the larger issues.

ADP, like most non-profits, has been the recipient of philanthropic support from a foundation. Famously, Andrea Smith edited a volume entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. How did ADP seek to negotiate the challenges of what Smith has called the ‘non-profit industrial complex’?
That is a very important question. Foundations are crucially important to our work. There are a lot of good people and amazing family foundations out there that are committed to fundamental change — change that is equitable and rooted in the dignity of the human spirit.

However, we’ve got to find ways to fund our own work. One of the things I am most proud of from my time at ADP was our ability to create a permanent stream of internally generated revenue. A substantial portion of the organisation’s revenue has been generated internally through membership dues and subsidiary businesses. The surplus generated from the businesses was invested back into the organising work, which gave the organisation a tremendous amount of freedom and allowed it to take some risks that maybe it couldn’t if were 100% foundation dependent.

The structure of non-profits is actually quite limiting to organisations in our movement. It is quite difficult to create income generating streams or subsidiary co-operative businesses. There are all kinds of regulations about which way the money flows that can easily trip up good people doing good work.

Another problem is non-profits are excluded from many traditional financing mechanisms because they lack the ability to provide guarantees for the loans. We need to find new models – whether it is benefit-corporations that expand corporate accountability so they are required to make decisions that are good for society, not just their shareholders — or co-ops, or even traditional limited liability companies governed by structures that balance the needs of the individual, community, business and the environment.

We also need to think about throwing off the non-profit yoke that is on all of us. This doesn’t mean becoming a purely for-profit entity; it means running socially responsible businesses that invest in the commons.

In my work now, I’m organising young people. There is some amazing creativity. The millennial generation is faced with a whole new paradigm – the traditional dream of our children having a better life than we did is no longer true. Student debt, which is now higher than credit card debt, has a stranglehold on young people and the unemployment rate for young people coming out of college is very high, so they have no choice but to come up with new ideas.

I think this young generation is going to forge a new path for all of us. They are entrepreneurial and innovative and keep in mind issues of equity and social justice in new ways, but not the traditional ways that I was raised in.

Co-ops are enjoying new visibility in the United States, in part due to growing frustration with ‘business as usual’. What steps does the co-op movement need to take to build on this new visibility and take advantage of the moment?
I think the co-op movement is growing and expanding as we speak, but it is a pretty insular movement and it is somewhat inaccessible. Making sure it is inclusive of low-income people and to people from ethnic minorities is crucially important as is addressing issues of equity. The economic crisis is nothing new to many people. We need to make sure these institutions in the new economy are not only inclusive of people who have been hurt most but led by them.

Sometimes people become very focused on their own co-op business, and we really need to politicise the cooperative movement and get people who are committed to changing the relationship between worker and owner to also engage in broader world view work and engage in politics. Get out of the silo of their business. Get out of the silo of their own work place or business and thinking of themselves as just working with co-ops and thinking of themselves as apart of a broader new economy movement.

I would say a third thing is that we need to de-mystify business creation. We are the experts. People can figure things out if we have the tools.

What are the top priorities of the U.S. community organising movement going forward?
It is impossible to pick one or two. When I think about my work, I think about making sure that it is transformational for the people who are involved in the community and for society as a whole. We need to be organising for structural change, really changing the institutions that perpetuate inequity.

And we should be thinking big. Certainly we need to achieve small victories in that long march but we have to be aspirational. And right now in this moment we have that opportunity to get out of our issue silos or traditional constituencies and build a real movement that makes our economy work for everyone.

Along those lines we need to figure out ways to rein in the stranglehold that money and lobbyists have over our democracy. We have to change the dynamics of the power that the big banks and corporations have in our government and our economy and really get into the hearts and minds of everyday people so that we can take back our democracy and put people before profits.

How much is enough? How much is too much? I think all of that is on the table as we work out what is this new economy looks like.

• For more information on the Alliance to Develop Power, go to www.a-dp.org.
• Caroline Murray was executive director of the Alliance to Develop Power from 1993 to 2011 and is now organising director of Rebuild the Dream.