For readers of The Field, to gather face to face
Organizing Against Home Foreclosures, Dane County.
As many of you know, we're in the early stages of organizing against home foreclosures. Below is the advice Al gave us via Kurt Squire. I've started the google map & will post the link to it here as well. Who else can pitch in to get this moving?
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Regarding your bigger set of questions: Yes, there are plenty of folks waiting to see what Obama will do and prioritize. I think this is the hour to find those that want to get ahead of him, even if it's not a majority of a local network.
I'm very fascinated by the idea of stopping home foreclosures from the bottom up. It's "Obama neutral" in that the candidate called for a 90 day moratorium on foreclosures while they attempt to solve the problem but Congress doesn't seem to be moving on that: that could lead to a perfect storm in which the Democratic Congress needs to be prodded on behalf of one of the president's stated priorities. But meanwhile, folks are getting kicked out of their homes.
Before a bank can foreclose upon a home it must advertise in a local newspaper alerting the public to that fact. (The Michigan GOP got into that legal trouble this fall when a party leader told the Michigan Messenger that they were clipping those foreclosure notices, making a list of the addresses, and were going to use them to challenge voters at the polls.)
One path may be - and it doesn't require anything more than a handful of people in its early stages - to clip all foreclosure notices, make a file on each address, put up a map of the city with pins representing each one, and you'll begin to see where they are most clustered, in what neighborhoods.
Then go visit these people - knock on the door, ask to speak to the head(s) of household, say you are a community organizer and you want to hear their stories and help stop the home from being foreclosed upon. Some folks will not want to talk (a lot of imposed shame on lack of economic success in this society) but some will. By listening to these people, the organizers develop a better grasp of what the issues are, exactly how the lending institutions preyed on these people, and eventually you will find the perfect family ready to fight this as part of an organized effort.
Then you vet the family (so as not to get into a Joe the Plumber situation) using Internet search and credit rating info (it costs about fifty bucks to get someone's credit history online). Once you have built a relationship with people you can ask more personal questions (have they ever been arrested? that sort of thing) and at some point you find the perfect poster family in a neighborhood where others also face foreclosures (and chances are other homes in the same place are under similar pressures and worried about it.)
Then begins the door-to-door phase: using voter lists, the phone book and other data, you determine a geographic area that you intend to organize, develop a single page piece of informational literature, and go door to door. This can in fact be accomplished by only one person, although easier if a small group does it. You go door to door and talk to all the neighbors as a fellow neighbor that is upset about how potential foreclosures in some houses will lower the property value of all the other homes. To tenants, you develop a slightly different rap.
It is by knocking on doors and listening to people you develop the most effective 'scripts' and talking points.
When you feel there is sufficient critical mass of concern in the neighborhood, you call a community meeting. You invite clergy and other community leaders (city counselor, state representative) to come or send staff if only to listen. If you get fifty people into a public meeting, that will generate a lot of buzz.
The eventual goal is to organize enough people concerned with it and educate everyone in the neighborhood that they have a self interest in stopping the Smith family home from being foreclosed upon. At some point somebody is going to suggest civil disobedience. When you have a core group of say 20 or more people ready to do that, you call in somebody, whether locally or from out of town, that knows how to train people to do that in a one-day session, and organize it.
Meanwhile, a committee from the neighborhood has started a dialogue with the local sheriff or agency that would be charged with carrying out the foreclosure (physically removing the people and their
furniture from the home) and learn how they do it, try to witness some foreclosures as they are happening, get them on video and show the video to others maybe even making it available to local tv news stations.
And then the big day comes when your poster family is going to be foreclosed upon. You have your trained group for nonviolent civil disobedience sitting on the front and back porches with well made "on message" signs and banners, maybe the yard has a bunch of big signs too. You have your secondary group of neighbors that are willing to stand and witness and maybe even protest, and your support people for the occupiers (with a lawyer or two and others bringing coffee or whatever, and folks working the press to get the local tv cameras and newspaper and radio reporters there), you have your own bloggers and independent video folks chronicling the event, and at some point the sheriff's deputies show up and they will have to make a decision: if they want to successfully evict the family, they have to arrest those twenty people on the steps in full public view.
Some sheriffs - in areas where they are elected - might simply decide not to do it. Others might turn around cryptically and leave with the implied threat they'll come back when nobody's there, but that's when you get the neighbors to organize shifts, a phone tree, a CB radio system for communications, a cell phone text alert list, so that when they come back people can quickly surround the house (even if the deputies get into the house they still need to get back out again with the furniture: well, hard to do if there are folks sitting on the porch or in the doorway).
If the sheriff then decides to arrest the blockaders, you've got a huge story on your hands, with potential to go national. Same if the sheriff - as happened recently in Cook County, Illinois - declares to
the press that he won't carry out the foreclosure. I believe if one local area does something like this it can spread
like wildfire to other areas and bring about the national crisis that visibly forces Congress to act in a way that empowers people to understand that they can change national policy without making a single long distance phone call to Washington or Congress.
Now, chances are good that if you embark on a plan like this, the final result will look somewhat different than the original plan: that's what happens when you organize and listen to people from below. There will be even better ideas and tactics developed by the folks. But starting out with a general idea of where one wants to take a
struggle is the first step in envisioning it enough to get people psyched to organize. At a certain point, the organizing takes on a force and velocity of its own and natural leaders surface beyond the original "outside agitators". Once it gets to that point it is a force that cannot be stopped.
===================================
Regarding your bigger set of questions: Yes, there are plenty of folks waiting to see what Obama will do and prioritize. I think this is the hour to find those that want to get ahead of him, even if it's not a majority of a local network.
I'm very fascinated by the idea of stopping home foreclosures from the bottom up. It's "Obama neutral" in that the candidate called for a 90 day moratorium on foreclosures while they attempt to solve the problem but Congress doesn't seem to be moving on that: that could lead to a perfect storm in which the Democratic Congress needs to be prodded on behalf of one of the president's stated priorities. But meanwhile, folks are getting kicked out of their homes.
Before a bank can foreclose upon a home it must advertise in a local newspaper alerting the public to that fact. (The Michigan GOP got into that legal trouble this fall when a party leader told the Michigan Messenger that they were clipping those foreclosure notices, making a list of the addresses, and were going to use them to challenge voters at the polls.)
One path may be - and it doesn't require anything more than a handful of people in its early stages - to clip all foreclosure notices, make a file on each address, put up a map of the city with pins representing each one, and you'll begin to see where they are most clustered, in what neighborhoods.
Then go visit these people - knock on the door, ask to speak to the head(s) of household, say you are a community organizer and you want to hear their stories and help stop the home from being foreclosed upon. Some folks will not want to talk (a lot of imposed shame on lack of economic success in this society) but some will. By listening to these people, the organizers develop a better grasp of what the issues are, exactly how the lending institutions preyed on these people, and eventually you will find the perfect family ready to fight this as part of an organized effort.
Then you vet the family (so as not to get into a Joe the Plumber situation) using Internet search and credit rating info (it costs about fifty bucks to get someone's credit history online). Once you have built a relationship with people you can ask more personal questions (have they ever been arrested? that sort of thing) and at some point you find the perfect poster family in a neighborhood where others also face foreclosures (and chances are other homes in the same place are under similar pressures and worried about it.)
Then begins the door-to-door phase: using voter lists, the phone book and other data, you determine a geographic area that you intend to organize, develop a single page piece of informational literature, and go door to door. This can in fact be accomplished by only one person, although easier if a small group does it. You go door to door and talk to all the neighbors as a fellow neighbor that is upset about how potential foreclosures in some houses will lower the property value of all the other homes. To tenants, you develop a slightly different rap.
It is by knocking on doors and listening to people you develop the most effective 'scripts' and talking points.
When you feel there is sufficient critical mass of concern in the neighborhood, you call a community meeting. You invite clergy and other community leaders (city counselor, state representative) to come or send staff if only to listen. If you get fifty people into a public meeting, that will generate a lot of buzz.
The eventual goal is to organize enough people concerned with it and educate everyone in the neighborhood that they have a self interest in stopping the Smith family home from being foreclosed upon. At some point somebody is going to suggest civil disobedience. When you have a core group of say 20 or more people ready to do that, you call in somebody, whether locally or from out of town, that knows how to train people to do that in a one-day session, and organize it.
Meanwhile, a committee from the neighborhood has started a dialogue with the local sheriff or agency that would be charged with carrying out the foreclosure (physically removing the people and their
furniture from the home) and learn how they do it, try to witness some foreclosures as they are happening, get them on video and show the video to others maybe even making it available to local tv news stations.
And then the big day comes when your poster family is going to be foreclosed upon. You have your trained group for nonviolent civil disobedience sitting on the front and back porches with well made "on message" signs and banners, maybe the yard has a bunch of big signs too. You have your secondary group of neighbors that are willing to stand and witness and maybe even protest, and your support people for the occupiers (with a lawyer or two and others bringing coffee or whatever, and folks working the press to get the local tv cameras and newspaper and radio reporters there), you have your own bloggers and independent video folks chronicling the event, and at some point the sheriff's deputies show up and they will have to make a decision: if they want to successfully evict the family, they have to arrest those twenty people on the steps in full public view.
Some sheriffs - in areas where they are elected - might simply decide not to do it. Others might turn around cryptically and leave with the implied threat they'll come back when nobody's there, but that's when you get the neighbors to organize shifts, a phone tree, a CB radio system for communications, a cell phone text alert list, so that when they come back people can quickly surround the house (even if the deputies get into the house they still need to get back out again with the furniture: well, hard to do if there are folks sitting on the porch or in the doorway).
If the sheriff then decides to arrest the blockaders, you've got a huge story on your hands, with potential to go national. Same if the sheriff - as happened recently in Cook County, Illinois - declares to
the press that he won't carry out the foreclosure. I believe if one local area does something like this it can spread
like wildfire to other areas and bring about the national crisis that visibly forces Congress to act in a way that empowers people to understand that they can change national policy without making a single long distance phone call to Washington or Congress.
Now, chances are good that if you embark on a plan like this, the final result will look somewhat different than the original plan: that's what happens when you organize and listen to people from below. There will be even better ideas and tactics developed by the folks. But starting out with a general idea of where one wants to take a
struggle is the first step in envisioning it enough to get people psyched to organize. At a certain point, the organizing takes on a force and velocity of its own and natural leaders surface beyond the original "outside agitators". Once it gets to that point it is a force that cannot be stopped.
Tags: county, dane, foreclosures, home, organize
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Constance Steinkuehler on
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The google map, with locations of Dane County home foreclosures, is linked below. I'm using WI State Journal to update it with publicly posted foreclosures. Talk about depressing...90 in Tuesday's paper alone. It makes me want to weep.
google map
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Permalink Reply by kurt squire on
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thanks for posting. I don't think that folks saw the post (I didn't and I'm the group leader and married to you). I'll send out an alert.
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Permalink Reply by Barbara on -
Constance, I just heard about this effort and looked at the map you are generating. WOW. Nothing like a visual of data to bring the message home! I'll be in touch with you about this. Barbara
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Very glad to have you on board, Barbara. Just give me a holler whenever. I'm not really managing it as much as nudging it along as best I can. And trying to play support person...
Barbara said:Constance, I just heard about this effort and looked at the map you are generating. WOW. Nothing like a visual of data to bring the message home! I'll be in touch with you about this. Barbara
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