Heroes of Peace, volume 3

The Iron Rule -- "Never do for others what they can do for themselves"

Ernesto Cortes is considered one of the most effective grassroots organizers in America today. His philosophy is straightforward, obvious, and incredibly difficult to implement, yet he has done it successfully for decades. Essentially this philosophy is as follows: the strength of humans can be found in their community bonds, while issues come and go the values of a community remain; family, life, liberty, equality, justice. An organizers job is not to lead people but to show them how to lead themselves, “people can not be empowered for power can not be bestowed”.
Primarily in his home community in San Antonio, Texas, and throughout America, Cortes has taught people how to enumerate their values based goals, decide on actions to achieve those goals, and through peaceful action cause those goals to be realized. Often confrontational behavior was required for disenfranchised communities to gain access to a system they had legal rights to, but never was violence utilized as a tool. Nor did he ever ask the government to provide for people more than the infrastructure to provide for themselves. Always living by the Iron Rule, Cortes taught people that through community people could build far more for themselves than could ever be provided for them.
To this day, Ernesto Cortes, jr. continues the fight for empowerment of individuals through community bonds. His success has made him an icon of the civil liberties community and the PeaceMaker movement. Ernesto Cortes is truly deserving of the title Hero of Peace.

These four principles, outlined by Cortes, define his theories.

There are no permanent enemies or permanent allies -- only permanent interests.
In politics and in business, there are situations in which the people you care about are going to be your adversaries. I am capable of working with business leaders on issues like education and long-term training, even if those leaders completely disagree with my strategies pertaining to living wages or union organizing. In order to succeed, you have to be able to have those kinds of complex relationships. You have to realize that this is not a war. It's not about destroying people. It's about negotiating settlements.

Never do for people what they can do for themselves.
Smart leaders know that what they're trying to do is develop people's capacity to act. Mentoring has got to be about getting them to understand their own interests and to develop a habit of inquiry so that they can move from being your protégés to being people who can be your mentors.

Don't lead -- develop other leaders.
What I'm trying to do is build something that is beyond anything that I can do as one person or as one leader. So the moment that I start leading an organization myself, that's my cue to walk away -- or else I'd become just another executive director. My job is to get out of the center of things. Because if I'm the one with all of the relationships, then once I go away, the organization collapses. I'm not here to serve as a charismatic leader. I'm an organizer.

Encourage confrontation.
The best managers understand that if everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.


Below are excerpts from interviews with Enresto Cortes .

Ernesto Cortes is a community organizer affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) and Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS).
Cortes is known primarily for his efforts in organizing COPS in San Antonio, Texas, though he also influenced the development of other IAF affiliates in Houston, El Paso, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and New York City. Cortes is currently the director of the Southwest Region of the IAF.
Cortes coordinates regional and national leadership schools that train grassroots leaders to develop community organizations based on access to political power, relationship building, and social justice initiatives. He has helped community members win water and sewage facility and other infrastructure improvements, election campaigns, and increased access to affordable housing.[1]
In 1984, he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, also known as a "genius grant." In addition, he received the prestigious H.J. Heinz Award for public policy in 1999.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto_Cortes

The first group that Cortés helped organize, Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), forced the city to make good on a sewer-and-drainage proposal that it had passed 30 years earlier -- but had never implemented in the poor neighborhoods that the proposal was intended to help. As a result, for years, residents of San Antonio's West Side had faced annual floods, which often took lives. In 1974, shortly after winning that battle, COPS pushed the city council to allocate $100 million (money that was supposed to be spent on these neighborhoods in the first place) to improve the infrastructure of San Antonio's poor neighborhoods. The city balked, and COPS came through with a protest reminiscent of Alinsky's old Chicago tactics: Hundreds of COPS leaders lined up in a downtown bank to change hundreds of dollars into pennies -- and then stood in line again to change them back into dollars. Meanwhile, other COPS leaders were in a local department store, trying on clothes and asking to be shown other items, but not buying anything. The demonstration brought much of the downtown area to a halt. Within days, city officials agreed to a meeting -- and eventually, they handed over the money.

When one woman asks him to explain how he "motivates" people to support a cause with actions as well as words, the storm rolls in. Cortés can scarcely conceal his impatience. "Perhaps I prejudge you unfairly," he begins, "but when I hear your question, what I think you're really saying is, 'How can I convince people to do what's good? How do I get them to do what's right? How do I get them to follow my agenda?' " He pauses, frowning. "That's not organizing. What I mean by organizing is getting you to recognize what's in your best interest. Getting you to recognize that you have a child, that you have a career and a life to lead, and that there are some things that are obstacles to the quality of your life. I need to get you to see how you can affect those things through relationships with other people. And it's only going to happen if you engage in some kind of struggle."
He pauses to let it all sink in. "We organize people not just around issues, but around their values," he says. "The issues fade, and people lose interest in them. But what they really care about remains: family, dignity, justice, and hope. We need power to protect what we value."
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/30/cortes.html?page=0%2C0

The Role of Government
Reinvigorating urban life requires a new vision of civil society, appropriate to contemporary challenges. To be sure, government has an essential role to play in democratic renewal. After two decades of neglect, we need more public investment in housing, education, infrastructure, health care, and job training. But we also
need to learn to think differently about the public sector and its relationship to the civic culture. Government can no more create political entrepreneurship than it can create economic entrepreneurship. It cannot "empower" people, because power
cannot be bestowed.
Government can facilitate, encourage, and recognize grassroots organizing and local initiatives with an institutional base rooted in people's imagination and values, but it cannot and should not create organizations and initiatives. When the government funds local organizing, those "grassroots" efforts will continue only so
long as the public dollars continue to flow. And no organization funded by the government is going to be truly agitational about using public funds more effectively. (The government is not going to fund a revolution against its own status quo.) To ensure ownership of broad-based organizations by the community, those organizations must be self-supporting. The Iron Rule applies to institutions as well as to individuals.
http://link.lanic.utexas.edu/~bennett/__cwd/Cortes-Reweaving.pdf

DANIEL: What are you reading? What do you think President Bush ought to be reading?

CORTES: I think he ought to read Charles Payne's I'VE GOT THE LIGHT OF FREEDOM. I don't think he will, but he ought to read it. It talks about the heroic struggles of the civil rights movement and the importance of civic culture. He ought to read parts of BAND OF BROTHERS by Joseph Ellis, about the people who made the American Revolution and Washington -- John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr, etc. -- and their essential politicalness, their relationality. They were willing to engage each other, confront each other, argue with each other, and maintain their relationships ... The president would be well-served to read that book. But he also ought to read THE POWER BROKER, Robert Caro's book about Robert Moses, because it's important for a president to understand how some of our problems in cities occur. It's no accident the kind of difficulties we have in New York City. They were man-made. Powerful forces and financial interests contributed to the decline. I think it's important for a president to understand the difficulties that ordinary people have. He needs to be much more connected to their struggles, to their pain, to what's going on. He also ought to have an appreciation for the importance of civic culture and civic institutions. It's important for him to understand the role unions and churches have played historically in the development of American political and social life. That's why I'd ask him to read those kinds of books.
DANIEL: Can the federal government help foster that through an office of faith-based and community initiatives?

CORTES: Well, I'm not sure that government can be effective in creating civic culture. Just as I might have some problems with the Cuban government organizing civic culture in Cuba -- because it then becomes governmental -- I have the same problem with the United States government doing the same thing. That's kind of an oxymoron -- that the government creates civic institutions. Those have to emerge [independent of government].

My sense of this faith-based initiative is [that it's] not to support the creation of civic institutions. It's, rather, to support those civic institutions that choose to deliver what were heretofore governmental services. That can distract those faith-based institutions that were involved in creating civic culture, so they say, "maybe there's no payoff in doing that, and what we ought to be doing is delivering services" -- which is not bad, in and of itself, but if people say, "we should not create civic institutions [because] that's not where the energy is," then I think we're making a big mistake as a country.

DANIEL: How do you see the connection between what happens on Sunday at Mass or a worship service and what happens in our civic culture the rest of the week?

CORTES: Ideally, the Mass or any worship service is a celebration of the work of the people -- that's what the concept of worship is all about. It's a way of coming together and celebrating our relationship with God, and recognizing that our God is a God of power -- and love, which means that presumably there's some responsibility, some challenge, and vision we take away from it that enables us to go out and do the work of the church, which is not just "church work." The work of the church is to bring about the vision and values of the kingdom -- justice, peace, concern for those who are strangers, those who are vulnerable, and to create the kind of community that enables that to happen. In the Hebrew tradition, it's the notion of justice at the gates of the city. In Christianity, it's Matthew 25: "I was a stranger, and you took me in." That means to make people a living part of the decision-making of the community. How do you do that? How do you create that kind of vibrant understanding of our responsibility to one another and to ourselves? How do we understand that we don't become human without being connected? That's the challenge of Sunday morning.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week427/perspectives.html#right



Peace to you and yours.