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Monograph Menu
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Director's Foreword
Table of Contents
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgements
Abstract
Prologue
Introduction
Navigating Health Futures
Valuing Conditions
Crafting Conditions
Perceiving Dynamic Conditions
Reorienting Public Health Work
Transforming Conditions
Reflecting on Public. Health. Work.
Glossary
References
About the Author
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Crafting Conditions

From Broad Street to East Brooklyn: Choosing a Future

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The story of East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC) stands in contrast to that of John Snow and our reading of his contribution. First, it has no single public health hero. Instead, it has multiple heroes in the Arendtian sense: people whose “courage and even boldness are already present in leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is” (Arendt, 1958:186). It is a story of people with a strong sense of place--East Brooklyn, New York--and of time--not a single moment, but rather a long time horizon. Their view extended backward, tying the present to the past, as well as forward, envisioning a healthier future toward which multiple EBC actors consciously navigated. Intent on transforming adverse living conditions for all, their plight was shared, and so was their power. Their journey, as described below, was not an easy one nor will it ever be truly complete. Instead of persuading a city council to remove one pump handle temporarily, EBC’s is a prolonged and arduous endeavor, with high stakes and long odds.

The John Snow story is a public health classic. If we take to heart the idea that health action is about improving adverse conditions and expanding the freedoms that make it possible for all people to be healthy, then the EBC story could become a classic as well—even though the word “health” does not appear in the narrative. The word public, however, is front and center: the public and its abundant power.

Michael Gecan, a veteran organizer and longtime ally of East Brooklyn residents, offers a unique vantage point on this intricate case history. The following extended quotation does  more than recount the facts, in sequence, of the events that unfolded. It also  conveys—through first person narrative—the remarkable passion and insider’s perspective that make this story worthy of our attention.19

In the spring of 1978, East Brooklyn was the South Bronx minus the presidential motorcades. It was a place of stunning devastation, glaring needs. Gunfire crackled every night. There was fire, abandonment, and rubble. In the words of one visitor, Boston's Mayor White, it looked like “the beginning of the end of civilization.” The leaders that met with Ed Chambers {current director of the Industrial Areas Foundation} that day were eager, even desperate, to do something, anything, now.

Chambers heard the leaders out. Then he told them precisely what they did not want to hear. Forget the issues. Don't pick a galvanizing cause. Avoid charismatic leadership. Instead, he urged them to take the time to recruit more local congregations and associations in the area, so that they would begin to reflect the racial and religious diversity in a community of nearly a quarter of a million people. He preached financial independence that began with each and every member institution, no matter how poor and pressed, shelling out significant yearly dues to the fledgling organization. Only after the local leaders and institutions committed their money—dues money, hard money—should they pursue softer foundation funding. He set a high target: $250,000 in money raised and money pledged. And he insisted that they never seek government funding for their core budget. Finally, he challenged them to take the time to learn about power and how it really works and to focus more on the growth and development of local leaders.

Chambers hammered away: recruit institutions; find allies; pay dues; train leaders; don't do for others what they can do for themselves. Some in the group grumbled. How could they ask their followers to pay dues to an organization that wasn't ready to address issues? Chambers answered their questions with another question: how could they ask people for tithes and offerings to support their local congregations? Because they believed in what they were preaching and teaching. Because people, no matter how poor, always found ways to pay for what they truly valued. And when they paid for it with their own hard-earned money, not the government's, not some foundation's, they owned it. And ownership—of a home, a congregation, an organization, a nation—encouraged participation and responsibility, accountability and commitment.

The activists squirmed, fumed, and rebelled. Without an issue or cause or crisis, no one would act, no one would move, and no one would work. You have to “prove” to people that success is possible before asking them to join, pay dues, or attend training. Chambers conceded that that was the conventional wisdom in the progressive and radical worlds. But in this case the conventional wisdom was dead wrong. Loose groupings of interested individuals didn't have a prayer of addressing major crises—housing, crime, schools, jobs, and others. Each crisis was, at bottom, a power crisis. The power of the mob, the power of drug lords, the power of corrupt borough machines, and the inertia of the police bureaucracy could only be challenged by another, deeper institutional power.

Unconvinced, unsatisfied, a few people stalked out or didn't return. But the majority of the leaders reluctantly went along. As one leader later said, “Well, we'd tried just about everything else—model cities, poverty programs, causes for this, causes for that. None of it worked. So we didn't have much to lose.” Except time. Ed Chambers spent 18 months working long distance with the mature and intelligent leaders of what would become East Brooklyn Congregations. They recruited twenty local institutions. They raised, to their complete surprise, nearly $250,000 in dues and grants. They sent hundreds of leaders through local training sessions and fifty through the IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation) ten-day training. They ran meetings that started on time and ended on time and lasted one hour. They did all of this work themselves, without a paid staff person, in one of the nation's poorest communities, at the very worst of times, while buildings continued to burn and bullets continued to fly.

This period devoted to building a powerful and durable base—what we in the IAF called the sponsoring committee phase—is what most other organizations, parties, agencies, movements, unions, and civic associations tend to forget, skip, or give short shrift. But it's precisely during these months and years that a community can begin to develop new depth and new breadth, can sort out the majority of hard and persistent workers from the small minority of loudmouths, can tap into talent already present but usually overlooked, and can engage allies and supporters waiting in the wings but not knowing how best to contribute. It's right here, in this gestation phase, that a new culture of public life and public action and clear accountability can begin to form and spread.

In the nearly twenty-three years since, some of the same leaders who sat in a church basement and skeptically eyed the six-foot-five, 250-pound IAF director when he first preached the fundamentals of power organizing have used that power to transform their community. They pressed the city to replace three thousand missing street signs, stop signs, and one-way signs—to put the area, quite literally, back on the map. They negotiated with the Parks Department to upgrade every park and playground. They leaned on the Transit Authority to renovate the subway and el stations. They made sure that lots were cleaned, streets swept, and drug locations raided. They identified the need for two new primary health centers—and had them built. They pressured the Board of Education to build two new high schools—smaller, safer, more responsive to parent and student needs—and co-sponsored them. They increased the registration and turnout of voters, in spite of a series of dreadful and uncompetitive elections. They rekindled a spirit of the possible in a place that had grown dark with cynicism and despair. And—most visibly-they designed and built nearly three thousand new, affordable single-family homes.

An organization with a core budget of $300,000 dollars a year, a staff of four, and a modest headquarters in a local apartment complex halted two decades of burning, deterioration, and abandonment by building a critical mass of owner occupied town houses and generating a chain reaction of other neighborhood improvements. EBC built on every large parcel and abandoned block in the area—140 vacant acres. The market value of the housing built now exceeds $400 million.

The group succeeded in large part because its leaders creatively applied the lessons absorbed during the sponsoring committee phase to the challenge of rebuilding a wasteland with homes affordable to working families making as little as twenty thousand dollars a year. Instead of beginning by asking governments for funding, the leaders of EBC first raised $8 million of no-interest revolving construction financing from their own church bodies—The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. They would never have the chutzpah to approach their bishops for million-dollar loans if they hadn't decided to pay their own dues and generate their own core budget and discipline themselves to avoid government largesse.

They pushed this principle further. Instead of asking for the most public subsidy available from the City of New York, they asked for the least amount of subsidy that any group requested—a no interest, ten-thousand-dollar-per-home second mortgage with lien. In fact, when the EBC leaders, primarily African-American and Hispanic, poor and working poor, approached the city's housing commissioner with their request, he said that he would provide more than they asked for—twenty-five thousand dollars per house to each buyer. A truly bizarre negotiation then ensued, with the EBC leaders demanding less, in the form of loan, and the city offering more, in the form of a grant. The city officials began to whine, “Why, we give the Rockefeller Partnership housing program twenty-five thousand dollars. How would it look if we gave you less?” This logjam dissolved when the EBC leaders threatened to tell the New York Times about this silliness.

Then they pushed it further still. When Ed Chambers and I recommended a down payment of thirty-five hundred dollars on a home then costing fifty thousand dollars, the leader said no. They voted for a higher down payment of five thousand dollars so that they didn't experience a repeat of the dreadful FHA scandal, in which homes were nearly given to families who felt little or no sense of ownership and often treated their properties as if they still belong to the government, not to them. As a friend of mine said when I told him the story, “They're smart. They're avoiding mental rental.”

From the start, these leaders never made the mistake of thinking that the housing program is more important than the power organization. The effort was not viewed as an opportunity to build a large bureaucracy. It wasn't a patronage program. It wasn't an avenue into the profitable world of housing management and consulting contracts. The two general managers hired to do this work—first the incomparable I. D. Robins, then the astonishingly effective Ron Waters—worked for EBC, not the other way around. They were expected to build homes with a minimum of staff, with modest overhead, and the lowest possible cost. The EBC Nehemiah effort was seen as an action of the organization, a measure of its power, and a test of its ability to pressure, push, and leverage its vision and will against sluggish housing agencies and bankrupt housing theories.

All of this flew in the face of those who fancy themselves experts in housing, urban development, and civic activism, then and now. One political leader said, “You'll never do this. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.” Another said, “Forget it. If you build them, no one will buy them. If they buy them, they won't maintain them. Many housing and foundation executives wondered, aloud, “But who's going to manage these people?” Our answer was that they were going to do what all other American home buyers do—manage themselves. We weren't about to do for others with they could do for themselves. (Gecan, 2002:1015)

If the EBC members had listened to the experts, they would never have developed power or the intent to use it. As “ordinary” citizens, they used practical knowledge (which includes but goes beyond expert, technical knowledge) to navigate the process of neighborhood transformation. They constructively channeled anger and dissatisfaction with the status quo into a vision of meaningful and extraordinary change. Not coincidentally, this was change that the experts had dismissed as impossible precisely because they themselves were unable to achieve it.

EBC’s members, with some prodding from Chambers, made a decision to step forward, to move into public life and begin a story of their own. In doing so, they moved from being spectators to participants—people willing to be held accountable instead of simply holding others accountable (Gecan, 2002; National Commission on Civic Renewal, 1998). In Arendt’s view, stepping forward, speaking out, and taking on this type of responsibility are the stuff of real courage. Boldness, however, is not all that matters. Arendt also recognized the inherent unpredictability of action, which for her, meant that it must be accompanied by the habits of promising and forgiving: two additional processes that open and enrich the public sphere (Arendt, 1958).

Another way of describing EBC’s venture is to recognize it as public work: “sustained, visible, serious effort by a diverse mix of ordinary people that creates things of lasting civic or public significance” (Center for Democracy and Citizenship, 2001). When guided by a clearly articulated constellation of values (i.e., a moral compass), this type of work builds public strength—the power of citizens to direct the course of change toward a negotiated set of conditions. And strength, Ed Chambers would agree, is the point. Not satisfied with a quick win that fades away, the people and organizations that do the public work of an EBC are engaged in something quite different: “digging very deep roots for something to be planted so that when the wind blows and the rain falls, the organization won’t be swept away” (Gecan, personal communication, 2003).

Like the Hawaiian schoolchildren, the EBC leaders are naming and protecting what they value, choosing a different future, steeling themselves for the work that is required to get there, and taking a long, broad view of their commonwealth. By their processes and by their achievements they are crafting more healthful conditions—which now include their own enhanced power to act. They are not just crossing problems off a long and ever-changing checklist.

This approach to public health work can be both exhilarating and exhausting, in part because it is constantly evolving. It entails apprenticeship, artistry, practice, technical mastery, continued vigilance, and progressive evolution. To excel at such a craft involves more than taking on tasks or doing piecework with the assumption that others, working in parallel, will do the same. It requires a commitment to the creative process, tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to act under uncertainty, awareness of human limitations, a refusal to scapegoat others, and a passion for serious learning (Schon and Rein, 1994). It demands that we continually strive to see the greater whole, without losing sight of the many particular part-whole relationships that often preoccupy our attention (Eoyang, 2001). It also implies acceptance of imperfect prototypes, knowing that they can be refined with the input of others. These prototypes, and the larger works that they inspire, in turn, must survive practical tests of sustainability and worth. Do others value them? Will they meet the tests of time? Can they withstand the forces of wind and weather?

To see the task of assuring healthful conditions as a public craft is to take a different view of public health work—one more aligned with the creative, iterative, public work of EBC, but also encompassing the more solitary and temporary interventions that Snow and other better-known “heroes” have devised. The following sections seek to explore and illuminate precisely that sort orientation.
 


19. This extended quotation is used with permission from Beacon Press.

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Page last reviewed: January 30, 2008
Page last modified: January 30, 2008

Content source: Division of Adult and Community Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion

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