SEIU President Bessie Cannon leads march for organizing rights in Chicago Loop, August 1997.
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BECAUSE STUFF DOESN’T JUST HAPPEN
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Many people think that “stuff just happens.” What makes organizers different is we know it is people who make stuff happen: organized people, acting strategically. Organizers, whether volunteer or paid staff, are people determined to bring folks together; usually the people who are sick and tired of having stuff done to them, who want to take the wheel and make change rather than get run over by the rich and greedy.
ACORN march, Washington DC 1994.
Why Does it Seem Like Humans are Hellbent On Our Own Destruction?
Look at racial injustice, climate change, the very immediate challenge to our own democracy. Is it some quirk of human nature that makes us try to destroy ourselves?
Or is it the powerful—currently the few, not the many—who are willing to divide us by any means at their disposal (often using race)? These few are willing to destroy the planet with their own greed, even if it means eliminating voting rights and democracy itself.
Chicago Acorn sign during Big Box Living Wage campaign, 2006.
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THAT’S WHERE OG COMES IN
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Organizing Graffiti doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but we do claim to know a thing or two about building power for the many. To turn things around, it will take all of us doing some work with our own networks of friends, neighbors, co-workers, church members, relatives, or others, building organizations, both large and small, from the ground up. We know something about how to start on that project today, any day, and make some progress.
Helen Miller, VP SEIU880, leads march into the capitol in Springfield, demanding $6/hr in 1996. Image by David Kamba
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AND WE INVITE YOU TO STAND ON OUR SHOULDERS AS WELL
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All we have are stories that show how organizers and their organizations were able to turn around seemingly impossible, insurmountable problems confronting working people in their communities, their workplaces, and in their government. We hope our website shows why and how things happen. What you do with it is up to you.
Action Now sit-in at Cook County Board Presidents' office for the Foreclosure Mediation program, 2010.
Image by Aileen Kelleher
A simple way to begin is to join an organization, a union, or reach out to a handful of your friends or coworkers to talk about what you might do together. Start with the good folks, the ones with a sense of humor, the ones who know how to listen rather than do all the talking, the ones who don’t think they know everything. Get them together, and see what you come up with.
Along the way, if you can get some ideas or energy or inspiration from these stories, great. If not, we hope you’ll enjoy reading some of these stories anyway. Within these stories and articles, videos and photos, we hope you will find something informative, entertaining, humorous, poignant, and useful.
For our part, we’re just handing some stories on to our friends, giving them a boost up on our shoulders, and urging them to utilize these words and their own ideas to help us all learn how to build the better world that we humans have always had a right to.
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ORGANIZE FOR POWER
We’re staking our claim: we believe we can win, if this next generation of organizers does better than we did.
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