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Community Organizing and the Economic Crisis
Yossef Ben-Meir
In recent days, Federal Reserve Chairman
Ben Bernanke and this year’s Nobel Prize winner in
economics Paul Krugman expressed support for a fiscal
stimulus package in the face of the economic crisis.
The United States Government’s deliberate use of the
fiscal tool to jump-start economic activity and growth
and reverse decline is the legacy of the New Deal and
President Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression, and
is a key part of the Keynesian paradigm-shift in modern
economics.
To help get the country out of the current economic
morass, Senator Barack Obama supports strategic public
infrastructural investment, and using a “scalpel” on the
federal budget for its precision in spending reduction.
On the other hand, Senator John McCain stated his desire
for an across the board spending freeze - which is to
apply a “hatchet” to the budget and implies that all
forms of government spending is a culprit in continued
economic downturn.
The question is, then: What kinds of programs, through
increased federal funding, can result in expeditiously
implemented public projects that generate dispersed
benefits, increase employment, and push back against the
alarming economic problems and fears becoming reality?
An answer is: Programs that incorporate community
organizing and development because they catalyze
sustained economic recovery. This is when local
people who live in proximity to each other create and
benefit from development initiatives that they also
together conceive.
Projects community groups pursue when given the
opportunity reflect their varied interests, their local
situation, and most pressing needs. It may be
establishing an irrigation canal, road, school, clinic,
community center, or cooperative. It can be, for
example, a small business, a training center, pubic
health initiative, planting trees, and youth and women’s
programs. It could involve manufacturing,
agriculture, improving the environment, and innovative
combinations of all of the above.
Public investment in locally-driven projects directly
and most immediately impacts local populations and their
organizations. Jobs are created and income is
generated at the local level as projects are
implemented, which involves labor, materials, and
action. Local control, ownership, and benefits
encourage the ongoing functioning of community projects.
Development management and other capacity areas of local
people, government, and civil society are invested in
with the idea that local groups work together and carry
forward development and renewal. Decision-making
skills of individuals, groups, and institutions are
improved through collaborative experiences, and risk is
inherently shared. The conditions for an
increasingly diversified and adapting economy are put in
place.
How can the federal government’s fiscal stimulus achieve
locally-determined and managed infrastructure and human
development? First, consider that public
infrastructure projects of this kind are determined
during local participatory planning meetings, which
local “facilitators” help organize. AmeriCorps and
other community volunteers, for example, are throughout
the country and can be great facilitators of community
dialogue and assessments of their opportunities.
University-community partnerships have university
students working with communities, finding out their
needs, and helping to implement projects to address
them. Local governments can identify viable
development opportunities in their area for long-term,
multi-sectoral growth. A well-reformed White House
faith-based initiative can also potentially be a greater
catalyst for community-based public-good projects.
In this approach to federal government’s fiscal-induced
stimulus, two main areas need to be supported: 1)
training university students, volunteers, and local
citizens, including the retired, in community-wide
planning approaches and organizing for development; and
2) implementing projects that local people and groups
decide are most important to them and involve
partnerships. Economic stimulus in the form of
community investments creates the short and long-term
outcomes needed to help get people and the nation out of
economic decline (with an immediate injection of money
and new productive work) and onto a path of
transformational bottom-up growth. It also seems
to be a warranted approach and pay-back to the people
considering the stunning national cost of the bank
bailouts.
Public infrastructure at the community level also gets
people and families more heavily involved and
contributive towards economic recovery. When the
stimulus is directly on their behalf and targets
communities’ self-described priorities for development,
it elicits people’s energy, ideas, and dedication - and
helps the stimulus to succeed.
Yossef Ben-Meir has practiced and researched community
development for 18 years and is currently president of
the High Atlas Foundation, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to community development in Morocco.
Yossef Ben-Meir
Albquerque, New Mexico, October 21, 2008
Tel. (646) 285-7444
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