Mobilising the Mission

I'm currently having a Burrito in a mexican cafe in the heart of the Mission district. The Mission is the historical heart of San Francisco's organizing movements. Home to a very large latino population the Mission remains a vibrant, multi-cultural neighbourhood battling several decades of gentrification and spiralling real estate prices.

I met with Erika Katske - the Executive Director of the San Francisco Organizing Project this morning.

www.sfop.org

Erika has over 20 years of experience in organizing and provided a clear overview of the model adopted by SFOP. Somewhat different to Make the Road in New York as they tend to base their organizing activities around faith based congregations as a basis for community mobilisation. They key for their organizing model is tapping into communities which already exist- where emotional ties are stronger. Congregational communities bound by a common value system are therefore ideal settings to develop a notion of community organizing. It appears faith activity is more radically focused on issues of social justice in the US, with many supporting their own leadership programmes to train community leaders to work on campaigns for change.

Erika has invited me on a bus trip to Sacramento tomorrow along with about 30 community leaders from San Francisco to join about 1,000 community leaders from across the state to campaign about forthcoming budget cuts- which by all accounts sound quite severe. I really want to utilise the time on the bus to talk to various community leaders to understand their motivation for getting involved and understand how organizing works in practice.

I'm off to the Jewish Community Center this afternoon to hear more about their work. Even though I'm here for 3 weeks I really do feel I am only going to scratch the surface in terms of all of the community networks that exist.