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RP&E Reflections 2003: Accountability Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 10, No. 1
Where Do We Go From Here?
“We Must All be Accountable in a Grassroots Movement”
By Penn Loh
In 1992, I was a twenty-something graduate student at UC Berkeley who
had just joined a student of color environmental justice group,
Nindakin, which was an affiliate of the Southwest Network for
Environmental and Economic Justice. As a member, I often felt out of
place. Not only was I not in my home community (Boston), but I was at
an elite university with all its privileges. As a group, we also
struggled over our role, par- ticularly one question: Are we fighting
our own oppression within the university or are we using our resources
to support local community groups? More than a decade later, I work for
a community-based EJ group, Alternatives for Community &
Environment (ACE), and those questions persist. During my seven years
at ACE, the group has grown from an intermediary organization providing
legal and technical support to grassroots groups in Boston to a group
that is also organizing communities directly, nurturing youth
leadership, building coalitions, and planning to establish a grassroots
membership. We are neither a grassroots group nor an intermediary; we
are both. I realize now that the divide between “grassroots” and
“intermediary” is just a reflection of the root injustices—racism,
classism, sexism—that we are fighting against. An intermediary is an
intermediary because it has some form of power that the grassroots
doesn’t and feels some responsibility to share it. For me, the guiding
light for resolving these tensions comes from Dana Alston’s words at
the First People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit: “We
Speak for Ourselves.” In that statement, she challenged us to build a
movement led by those most affected—a goal that is easy to say, but
hard to do. If we are a movement led by people struggling locally, then
how do we build power and use it to achieve broader change regionally,
nationally, and internationally?
At ACE, through an ongoing study group with our youth, staff, board,
and community leaders, we’ve started to tackle these questions. We
agreed that a “movement” has lots of people, each with a shared
analysis of what’s wrong. Like flowing streams of water, we’re headed
in the same direction, but not necessarily in a coordinated manner. A
movement hits critical mass when people can identify with it and take
part, yet without necessarily belonging to a group. We concluded that
the EJ Movement is still in its infancy, not yet a mass movement but
with the potential to be one. With the help of the Environmental and
Economic Justice Project (which is based out of the organizing group
AGENDA in South Los Angeles), ACE determined that we needed to build
power of sufficient scope and scale to achieve systemic change. This
discussion has helped us draft a five-year strategic plan that defines
our role in the movement. ACE sees itself as part of a movement that is
building power from the bottom up, with strong grassroots organizations
connected through networks and a broad base of leadership that is
representative of, and accountable to, our communities.
ACE’S staff has community organizers born and raised in the
neighborhood along with lawyers and other professionals from inside and
outside the community, white and of color. Yet, none of us has license
to speak for the community. As staff, we are accountable to the youth,
residents, and community groups we work with. Our constituents
currently make decisions about strategy and overall direction as
members of our project and campaign committees and our board of
directors. As we move to a membership structure, all decisions will
flow from our members, who will also elect a majority of our board. Our
job in supporting the grassroots is to continually develop leaders who
in turn nurture others to follow them. EJ organizations from across the
country have agreed that the EJ agenda must be set by those most
directly affected and that our first priority is to strengthen the
grassroots base. At Summit 11, we went a step further with the
“Principles of Working Together,” which sets a code of conduct to
ensure the integrity of grassroots leadership while working with all
sectors of the movement. The challenge now is to put our shared
principles into practice by strengthening grassroots organizations.
Change happens through collective action, not through an individual
savior or charismatic leader. We must make ourselves replaceable and
restrain personal glorification.
We must actively combat internalized racism and classism and put into
practice meaningful democratic participation. As Gandhi said, we must
be the change we wish to see in the world.
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