Running to win: victory in the clean power campaign

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it.

-          1 Corinthians 9:24

I love long-distance running. Ever since I started doing cross country during my junior year of high school in the mountains of central Pennsylvania, running has been one of the ways that I reconnect with the earth and my body. However, I occasionally run competitively as well, and that’s a different kind of running. I watch my pace more, put my head down as I ascend hills, and always save just a bit of extra energy for the “kick” in the last 400 meters.

I often compare long-distance running to organizing for social change. They’re both endurance sports, so don’t get involved unless you’re willing to commit a substantial amount of personal time, emotional energy, and physical activity to the point of exhaustion. Once you’ve gone on for a while, the fastest way home is just keep running. Victories usually come in the form of personal records, not headline-making races.

However, I recently saw a huge victory that made headlines in all the news outlets in Chicago. The Chicago Clean Power Coalition has been working to shut down or clean up Crawford and Fisk coal-fired power plants for 10 years. The group includes the environmental groups, student organizations, labor unions, and community based organizations. Bridgeport Alliance, the neighborhood group that my neighbors and I started with the help of the South Side network SOUL, officially joined the coalition as soon as we settled on a name last December.

I learned about Fisk power plant last July when a couple of Sierra Club organizers came to my near South Side church.  I learned about how Fisk and Crawford put deadly levels of particulate matter into the one of the most densely populated areas in the country—and Fisk was only about a mile away from my doorstep. I checked out the peer-reviewed articles from Harvard, and, having been sufficiently convinced of its evil, I started gathering petitions and going to actions.

Bridgeport organizing really kicked into gear when a Green Corps organizer was assigned to the neighborhood. Soon we had a visible base out in the streets, bars, and coffee shops and we were collecting signatures and photo-petitions challenging Chicago and corporate leaders to put people over their profits. Clean power came to mean more than only green energy but also a more transparent, inclusive decision-making process. Through these efforts, Bridgeport Alliance was born and was turning dozens of people to events.

It was an incredibly exciting autumn for me. Soon it became clear that we were part of marathon relay team, and we were running the last leg of the race. Today the Chicago Sun-Times broke the story about how Mayor Emmanuel and Midwest Generation had reached an agreement to shut down Fisk by December 31^st of this year. Victory.

Of course, like long-distance running, after a victory, we can’t simply stop. That invites cramps, so runners need to run a cool-down. And then we still have miles to run to stay on track for our training regimen.  Too often our elected officials claim victory prematurely, and their constituents settle back only see the problem continue. Many community organizations accepted donations from Midwest Generation essentially as hush money, but that funding will disappear without a good community benefits agreement. And of course we still have hundreds of acres of contaminated industrial property in our backyard.

Though we still have a lot of work to do, a victory gives me some time to reflect on the race. The campaign has had a profound effect on me. Because of the neighborhood outreach we did, I fell in love with Bridgeport and committed to living there for another three years as I study theology at Chicago Theological Seminary. This victory wets my appetite to continue organizing my neighbors so that we can keep our unresponsive local government accountable.

I’ll be thinking about these things when I run the Shamrock Shuffle on March 25. I’ll be running for a prize.

On power and repentance: community organizing during Lent

“Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing”

-          Joel 2:12-13

“We want to see our values in the world today. And how do we do that?” asked the trainer.

“By building power!” we responded.

“And what is power?” asked the trainer.

“The ability to act!” we responded.

“And what are the two sources of power?”

“Organized people and organized money!”

“How do we organize people?”

“Through their self-interest!”

This was an exchange that I participated in several times throughout last week at Cedar Lake, Indiana. It was probably the most intense training I’d ever done, a sort of community organizing boot camp. We came from all over the upper Midwest, and while we worked on a variety of campaigns—shutting down dirty coal power plants, fighting foreclosure of homes, divestment from the big banks—we did share a common goal that week.

We wanted to learn to build power.

The ironic part is that as I do my one-on-one meetings to identify my neighbors’ self-interest (more on that methodology here), I have ashes on my forehead. While I cut issues and do power-analyses, I contemplate my own mortality. As I plan effective meetings with my partners in the newly formed Bridgeport Alliance, I practice self-denial and penitence.

Like the season of advent, Lent is a Christian liturgical season of preparation, fasting, and penitence. It seems like an unlikely counterpoint to the community organizing that my neighbors and I are currently doing on the near South Side of Chicago. Often in organizing we tap into our anger about how the world around us is so different than the one we want desperately to see, but Lent is about seeking humility as we approach the immanent suffering of the cross of Christ.

However, Lent is also a season of repentance, or better said, metanoia, the Greek term that appears in the New Testament and for which English has no perfect, exact translation. I’ve heard that the concept goes beyond the guilt and self-correction that often goes along with repentance. Metanoia is more like a reorientation of one’s heart and mind, but it also requires action. It requires the changing of old habits so that we can begin the long sanctification process which, at least as far as I can tell, has no end.

If we look at Lent as a season of metanoia and sanctification, then really organizing for power in my South Side neighborhood is an appropriate response to the imposition of ashes. Towards what end are my neighbors and I oriented? Is this same end that the residents of the metaphorical Clout Street?

Methodists’ ancestor is faith, John Wesley, stressed how while Christians must be disciplined in our quest for personal holiness, we must also always be just as disciplined in our quest for social holiness.

I learned some things about that discipline at that powerful training in Indiana last week. After all, if I will return to the dust anyway, what will I lose by running the race to win the prize (1 Cor. 9:24)?

On the contrary, we have a pretty good shot at winning.

The Politics and (Clean) Power of Coalition

The public action, for me at least, was actually quite a diappointment. My roommate canceled at really the last moment, leaving me to represent Trinity House. Then I noticed it was still drizzling after the explosive thunderstorms of the previous night. 30 minutes later I discovered that those same storms had knocked out the electricity of the man whom I was to meet at the L stop. The alarm of this man, also named Joe, was thus disabled, which extended his beauty sleep until I called him while watching the trains go past. Joe commented that traffic was in the Loop was worse than normal (as a rule I avoid driving downtown), so we had only five minutes when we passed by Daley Plaza. But we still had to park. Joe told me to just go, take his sign along with mine, and he would join me at City Hall.

I walked hurriedly by the ominous brown-tinted windows of the Daley Center, trying to dodge raindrops and suit-clad lawyers. Wait, did I fail to mention that I had never been to City Hall before? Crap! I entered into the classical revivalist building and was greeted by "office of the mayor" signs. This was the place, all right. Following the sound of cheering coming from somewhere through the stairwell, I finally got the hallway where over 100 people, most dressed in green shirts, hooted and hollered for the aldermen who were introducing the ordinance. And then it ended. I waited around, signed in, got a t-shirt, and then checked my watch. It was going to be late day at the office. Oi.

Why do we do this again?

"This" referring to attending planning meetings, writing op-eds, knocking on doors, and occasionally attending public actions. Essentially, community organizing. Seriously, after a frustration like Thursday morning, why do we try to organize for change?

Well, we all have our reasons. That's called self-interest.

To give a brief lesson on organizing (get a longer one by checking the Midwest Academy's "Organizing for Social Change"), it pretty much begins with identifying one's self-interest. That does not mean that one is interested in only oneself, or selfishness. A mother's self-interest in a community policing program could be keeping her children safe when they play on the playground. Of course, that safe self-interest in a mother's children's safety might also persuade her to support the failed war on drugs, which has not really made the streets safer but has needlessly locked up an awful lot of African-American men (and spend billions of tax-dollar money). The next lesson in organizing might have to be "framing" the issue...

My self-interest that drove me to City Hall on Thursday was the health of my adopted home neighborhood. Fisk Power Plant in Pilsen, just across the river from my home Bridgeport, has been linked to about 40 deaths annually from the particulate matter that it spews every day. Apparently, a coalition of national and community groups has been organizing to clean up Fisk and its sister plant, Crawford, just a bit south and west, for years. The plants had been grandfathered past the Clean Air Act regulations of the 1970's with the condition that they eventually get up to snuff. But they never did.

What about the other groups that were represented in that hallway? Well, that's the tricky part. Some were expected: the Sierra Club, which recruited me at my church, Greenpeace, and a smattering local green organizations. But then there were the labor unions. And that's where the story gets interesting. SEIU and the Steelworkers both supported the ordinance. Why? Green jobs would likely be new opportunities to organize workers. And that's where the electrical workers get angry. Closing Fisk and Crawford would mean the loss of over about 200 jobs taken by IBEW-represented members. The ordinance would provide funding for transferring of jobs and retraining, but everyone knows that it's not the same as keeping one good job.

As a quasi-labor organizer, this fascinates me and fills me with dread at the same time. There are some real power players involved here, including Midwest Generation, which owns the dirty plants, several powerful labor unions, several more community and environmental groups, and of course, "dose guys" we voted into City Hall. It thrills me to part of such a showdown.

However, it pains me to see unions fight each other when collective bargaining is being cut all over the United States and "right-to-work" legislation is rearing its ugly head. The cruelest cut is how unions sometimes back policies that destroy communities. In this case, it is IBEW that supports the maintenance of out-of-date coal power plants that are poisoning my neighbors (and likely yours truly, but on a lesser scale). Another example is in West Virginia where the Mineworkers were advocating for strip mining Blair Mountain, where one of the great labor conflicts in the United States took place a century ago. Far too often business style unions support actions that alienate them from the local community and from the larger public.

Unfortunately, what I see in my near South Side neighborhood is the creation of a false dichotomy; choose between good, union jobs or clean air for breathing. I am an organizer for a worker justice group, so I am well aware of what the loss of even more jobs means. But I am also a neighbor, so I see people have asthma attacks too. There must be a way that these two identities, these two forms of self-interest, can work together to create a cleaner, safer, and more prosperous South Side. That's why I waited in the rain for a sleeping man and why I showed up to my office 2 hours later than I usually do.

I support the Chicago Clean Power Ordinance. I hope that many others--union, environmentalist, alderman, Bridgeporter--do the same.