Michigan Org.docx

Michigan Organizing Project
Program Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]

[PRAYING]
JOHN MUSICK: I started with Michigan Organizing Project
actually as part of a
faith journey that my wife and I took together. We started doing
just get out in the
neighborhood and knock on doors and that kind of organizing in
Minnesota in the
early 70s. But about the mid-80's, we were starting to kind of
rethink who we are
as people.
That was the time when I was rethinking my approach to social
change and
realizing that it really comes out of my conviction as a
committed Christian and
that it's my Christian beliefs, my belief in Jesus Christ and the
Gospel that really
motivates me to commit my life to this kind of change. And,
with my academic
experience and my previous organizing experience, I was able
to then develop
an organization, which became Michigan Organizing Project,
which allows
people of faith to act on those values that they have.
I started to sort of understand myself and the world in 1961-62.
I was coming out
of high school, going to college; thinking about was going on in
the world around
me. And, of course, what was happening in my hometown of
Milwaukee was a
huge movement of African American people struggling for
equality and justice.
I think also got involved in voter registration in the south in

Alabama. And again
saw enormous structural injustice, there wasn't anything about
these people or
anything to do with their problems, it was the system that was
oppressing them.
And, so I came back home after that experience back to
Milwaukee and all of the
sudden saw things in a whole different light. You know, I'd
always known that
there were black schools and there were white schools. I never
quite understood,
I just thought oh, well, that's the way they want to live or
something.
But I started to see the ways in which the Milwaukee public
schools were
systemically at fault for keeping poor and black kids in the less
successful
schools and letting the more elite kids at fringes of the city you
know prosper in
those schools. So I got involved in school integration in
Milwaukee.
And then I started thinking about academically pursuing some
of those same
questions, and eventually ended up in a social work sociology
doctoral program
at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc. 1

And in that, did more study along that area and then pursued a
doctoral
dissertation, on the effects of segregation in the neighbors in
Detroit, Cleveland,
and Milwaukee and how those kinds of systematic injustices
were causing some
of the tension and the violence that was occurring in all three of
those cities at
that time.
We started in Muskegon, which is a fairly small city—it's only
about 40,000
people—but with the idea that Western Michigan was the area
that we wanted to

impact. And that was partly because it's reputed to be probably
the most
conservative part of Michigan, an area where, you know, most
of the office
holders, etc. subscribe to more of a everybody help them self,
pull yourself up
from your bootstraps kind of notion, and we figured if we could
bring a different
frame to Western Michigan, that we would help move the whole
state of Michigan
in a more progressive direction.
But then we also knew that the big city in the area is Grand
Rapids. So after
proving a model that worked quite well in Muskegon for about
five years we then
started to explore the possibility of doing something similar in
Grand Rapids.
And once that had been going four for five years, we knew the
other major
population center of Western Michigan was Kalamazoo.
Kalamazoo is a somewhat unique place. I think that one of the
things that sets is
apart is that—the city and the county as a whole have a sense of
themselves of
being compassionate, caring and progressive in many ways.
They like to see
themselves leading rather than following. And that extends into
many areas of
life. But caring for the less fortunate is certainly among right at
the top. And, so, I
think the people of Kalamazoo want to see themselves as
leading rather than
following is kind of coming up with the best most positive, the
most creative

approaches to meeting human need.
For anyone who is going to do this kind of work as a social
change agent, I think
one of the most important things is to understand the difference
between
systemic problems and systemic injustices versus individual
pathology or
individual difficulties. Our society is so oriented toward the
individual, an
individual doing things on their own, that it's often very
difficult for people to
understand that there are systems that put people at a great
disadvantage or in
some cases make it impossible for them to succeed.
Our model of change starts with the listening process, the house
meeting. We
actually have leaders in each of our congregation who reach out
to their
networks, mostly within their own congregation, on occasion,
they'll invite people
from outside the congregation - listen - to an actual house
meeting in their own
home. And they will then start with a gathering around values
usually based in
the Holy Scripture. So usually, they'll start with reflection on
the Bible, what the
Bible is saying that we need to be doing as people of faith
related to other people
who are less fortunate.

So we start with that kind of values frame and then we start
talking about what is
actually happening in certain key areas—employment,
healthcare, housing, etc.
And then we think about well what do we see happening and
employment, and
Kalamazoo right now. People will offer various opinions. And
then we'll say how
does that compare with what we think should be happening
based on the values

we talked about. And then where we see the biggest gaps
between reality and
what should be happening, we name that as an issue for MOP to
work on. And
then that becomes the basis for our issue task forces to do their
research and
then define a campaign.
Out of that, issue task forces come together and research to find
within a broad
area of concern what specifically is impacting people in our
community and what
possibilities there are for making change in that area. Once we
identify that, then
we go about various ways of amassing some power to change in
that particular
area. And that will be anything from a one-on-one meeting with
let's say a county
commissioner or a city commissioner to a maybe a small group
where people
from a church call their representative in and try to move him or
her toward our
viewpoint. And then it culminates once a year in our big - what
we call our
Nehemiah Action Assembly. And that's where after a year or
sometimes in the
case of homelessness, several years of research and advocacy,
we have a very
specific proposal for change to put forward.
Then have specific public policy decision makers, usually
elected officials but
sometimes appointed and sometimes private business people,
have them come
up and state specifically what they're willing to do in
relationship to our proposals.

We find that over a period of time, if we stay consistent, stay
focused, and keep
showing that we can bring hundreds - and we're usually talking
600 to a
thousand people - that most public officials at least move
toward if not agreeing,
at least negotiating toward a compromise that we can live with.
Our current campaigns are first of all housing for the homeless.
We initiated a
small housing assistance fund, which essentially has been in
place since 2006
and each year puts a number of people who are homeless into
their own home.
Another thing is immigration. Probably most people know that
during 2010, there
was an effort several times during the year to get Pres. Obama
and our
Congress to do something about reforming our immigration
system in a
comprehensive way. That did not happen. So our current work
then is to help
immigrants, especially the most vulnerable, the undocumented,
figure out how to
navigate through our society and live since for most of them,
returning to their
country of origin is not an option.
The third area is workers' rights. I think everybody knows right
now our economy
is in very dire straits and Michigan is one of the worst places in
the country. So
we have increasing numbers of people who are absolutely
desperate
economically and are looking for any kind of job under almost

any circumstances.
And so under that kind of situation, naturally, you have,
unfortunately,
unscrupulous employers who are willing to exploit their
workforce in a number of
ways. And, so, we are pressing the city of Kalamazoo to enact a
city ordinance
that would actually make such behavior criminal.

Another area is barriers to employment for people with previous
criminal records.
Again because of the way our system, our judicial and law
enforcement systems
work, certain groups of people, particularly African Americans
and Hispanics are
much more likely to be arrested, convicted and sent to jail than
white people are
for the same offense. So, we have many, many more people of
color ending up
with these criminal records and therefore unable to get even the
most minimal
job.
The fifth area is health care and we have taken a fairly narrow
perspective on
that, and that is specifically dental care for the poor in
Kalamazoo County. And
so we have recently gotten a new mobile clinic that goes around
to all the
schools and does preventive and restorative work for children.
We made some
changes but a lot more are needed.
Allison, do you want to start off and just in a brief few
sentences kind of your
reaction to what you got out of last night where you think that
leads us?
ALLISON: I was excited about what he had to say. I think that
it's really relevant.
Like saying you know big government is the problem and that's
their whole
narrative and they've energized people around that, they're
moving people
around that, they just won mid-term like elections around that.

Every tea party action, every that side action has to do with that
big government
is the problem, it always goes back to that, so it's really solid no
matter where it is
in the country. All they have to do is have the name and then
the narrative
sentence that goes with it and like it all pulls together. But we
don't have anything
like that. Like we don't have a narrative. So, he talked about the
importance of
developing a cohesive narrative for everybody who is doing this
work and
connecting all the local projects back to that and getting
everybody on the same
page as far as what that is, you know, what is the problem, what
is the analysis,
what's the solution.
MOP needs to figure out what our MOP narrative is because
right now we don't
really have one. We really need to figure out what our story is
and then be able to
put that out there and connect all of our campaigns back to that.
And what that's
looking like at the national level with George's analysis is like
it's corporate
power, corporate greed sort of thing is what's ruining the
country and the most
clear example of that is the banks. And so maybe that is the
focal point that we
focus on, maybe that is the enemy that can be named that people
can get angry
at and move together towards because no matter what campaign
you're working
on, the banks crashing the economy has something to do with

that. It has to do
with immigration because now the economy is like totally
screwed up so
immigration reform has no chance of passing.

It has to do with housing for the homeless, obviously
foreclosures and mortgages
and everything else, and all of those things. So, maybe that's the
direction that
we could go with that as well, whether it be through another
aspect of the
housing campaign, or whether it be through, you know, just
connecting
everything we’re doing, back to that bigger picture.
JOHN MUSICK: Well the theoretical background of this is that
we live in a
democratic society. Things happen in a Democratic society
according to who
holds power. According to the democratic ideal—of course,
everybody has equal
power—they come together. So if you have more power—more
people together,
then you know you write the agenda for federal, state, local
government, school
board, whatever.
Unfortunately, money has gotten into the mix and so it's now
more and more that
the more money you have, the more you are going to write the
agenda. And we
think that's a fundamental perversion of what our democracy is
about. So our
fundamental theoretical framework is that we need to build
enough people with
enough organization and enough information that we can
counteract the effects
of concentrated money through people and organization and
knowledge and
information.

One of the things that we need to do in order to create that kind
of power is we
need to get enough people together on a common agenda. You
know, it's one
thing to bring a thousand people into a room together, but it's a
whole other thing
to have them all focused on a certain agenda and be able to put
that forward in a
cohesive, coherent manner. So, that's the genius of organizing is
to find that
common link, that common agenda.
This man and his wife both worked at a restaurant. She was a
waitress. He was
a maintenance person. He worked anywhere from 40 to 60 hours
a week for an
entire year and never was paid at all. And the employer kept
saying to him, “Well,
you know, I'm a little short this week, next week, I'll pay you.”
And, meanwhile, of
course his wife was working and she was a waitress and she was
making you
know a decent salary.
And of course he was undocumented and didn't want to
complain. It just went on
and on and on, you know for an entire year. And, finally after a
year, his wife,
unfortunately, was injured on the job and at that point, was
fired.
Now, that's against the law. She was fired. The employer did
not have workman's
compensation, which is also against the law. But, of course,
they're both
undocumented, so they just went on down the road. So, he was

owed $22,000
and she had a worker's compensation case. So they came to us
and so we were
able first of all to get an attorney to take up her worker's
compensation. And, he,
the employer then had to pay for her injuries but not her lost

wages.
We then took up the case of the man who had never been paid at
all. And it was
one of those sort of partial victories where we finally got the
employer to admit
that he owed this guy some money, but instead of 22,000. He
got a $5,000
check. He got less than a quarter of what was owed to him.
The workplace violations have come up particularly with the
Hispanic population
because I think even prior to the current recession, there's just
been an
understanding that a good portion of these people are
undocumented and
therefore have very few rights, very threatened with being
reported to
immigration authorities. And, so, even in a good economy, they
could be
exploited almost at will. And, so, as the economy of course has
gotten worse
and there are more people out at the door willing to work under
any
circumstances, that has just intensified.
We’re trying to enable workers who are deprived of proper
wages to get the pay
they have coming and to change the relationship between the
employer to an
employee to one where rights are being respected. So, we
mostly get people
who come in and say you know I worked for so and so and I did
this and that and
I was supposed to get paid such a wage, and either I didn't get
paid at all or I got

paid less than I was supposed to get paid. In those kinds of
situations, we
initially call the employer and see if there is some mitigating
factor, maybe it was
a misunderstanding or something. And, occasionally we find it
was a
misunderstanding, as soon as we call, the employer says oh,
okay, fine, and
send the check and you know it's taken care of.
Most often though it is something where the employer really is
trying to exploit
this worker. So, we have a number of options. One is that
sometimes we can get
the employer to come in and sit down and talk with the worker
and work out
some kind of a compromise or a deal or something. We also
have the option of
taking it to the Michigan Department of Labor Wage and Hour
Division, which will
investigate and if there's proper documentation, etc., issue a
ruling that you know
the employee should be paid. There's a lot of problems with that
whole system.
In general, I would say that the best case scenario, the absolute
best—you file
the complaint, that it takes two to three months and then usually
the employer
negotiates a settlement, which is usually a percentage of what
was owed.
There's no downside to the unscrupulous employer at all. So,
our wage theft
ordinance, anti-wage theft ordinance would first of all make it a
criminal offense,
which means it's a public record.

Secondly, it's enforced locally and the enforcement mechanism
that we have is
very, very similar to a traffic offense. You get a ticket, either
you come forward
and contest it or you simply pay up a fine and the money that
was owed. So, we
feel that this going to be a much greater deterrent to the
unscrupulous employer

and it's going to give the employee much better return on the
complaint that they
made.
Employment barriers happen to be the issue that came to the
fore in the North
Side area of Kalamazoo. When the North Side Association for
Community
Development, one of our partners in this effort, surveyed their
neighborhood,
they were told overwhelmingly that was the issue.
A major private employer in the Kalamazoo area went back and
kind of went
back through their employment files and discovered people that
had fell in these
20, 30 years in their past and that had been working for the
company for 10
years and they were summarily fired because they found that 20,
30, 40 years
ago somebody had done something perhaps as a teenager.
When we confronted the issue of people not being able to get
access to
employment, initially actually we thought the solution was
going to be to let
people expunge their criminal records through a legal process so
it'd be taken off
their record and they wouldn't have to talk about it anymore.
We discovered,
unfortunately, to do that would require a change of state law
and that the
legislature in Michigan in a totally different place. They if
anything are trying to

more penalties on ex-offenders than, rather than alleviate that
situation.
We realized that one of the reasons they don't get in the process
is that
especially in this economy, every time there's a job opening, the
interviewer is
probably going to have a hundred or more applications for every
position, and it's
just human nature to try to reduce your workload and one of the
ways you do that
is you flip through and if everybody has got a criminal record
and you know
they're going to be too much of a hassle for you, you get rid of
them.
So, we realized that if we could get that question on criminal
history off the
application, we could at least make it more likely that the ex-
offender is going to
be able to get into a relationship where she or he can explain
what happened
and perhaps show that they have a good history since being
released from
prison and that perhaps the offense for which they were
convicted or sentenced
to prison has little if any relationship to the position they're
applying for.
We took that question to the city commission elections last year
at this time in
September, October of 2009. And were very persistent in
talking to city
commissioners. Got two of them to make this a sort of cause
that they were
willing to run on.

Once the elections happened, one of the first things that they
brought up with the
city administration was let's look at how we go about hiring.
And, through those
various kinds of meetings and various public hearings that we
attended with the
city commission, we kept this on their agenda for another
several months and

then March of this year, the city manager announced that they
would no longer
ask about criminal history.
The main reason we decided to apply for a Lifeline grant was
that we—we had
severe cutbacks in all of our other sources of funding. Normal
sources of funding
are three. One is the churches that make up Michigan
Organizing Project all pay
dues. And, so, but you know as their budgets are shrinking and
they're less able
or less willing to pay dues or certainly not to increase their dues
to our
organization.
A second one is individuals and to some extent businesses. So,
again, we need
more and more individuals who are willing to give at least once
a year and
hopefully on a sustaining basis. And, again, we have the same
problem—as they
have cut back further, they have less to give to us.
And then the third one is charitable foundations. So, again, as
their investments
are less profitable, they're cutting back. And, so, we're having
to make staff
cutbacks, we're having to do more work with fewer people. And,
so, it causes
stress at every level. You know, people are having to work
harder, longer and in

a more hostile environment in some cases.
So, it's—it is definitely a challenge. And, of course, when we
see the overall
political values of our system seeming to go more toward you
know individuals
having to seek their own best welfare and less concern about
helping the least
fortunate. Of course, it makes it even more difficult to operate
in that kind of sort
of cultural environment as well.
In various conversations, we realized that the Lifeline—which
we thought of
initially as meeting only immediate needs of people—that they
were taking a
broader perspective and understanding that we need to get at
some of the
underlying sources of the problem, too. So, as they started to
understand for
instance that isn't just getting a bed for somebody and a meal
and a warm coat,
but actually enabling them to have their own place to live that
they started to
understand that funding an organization like ours was also
within the purview of
what they do.
We are now able to maintain a full-time staff person to do the
worker rights work.
So, we have a young man who works full-time out there with
workers who are
being exploited in some way or other and seek redress of those
situations and
that would have had to have been cut at least in half and maybe
entirely if

Lifeline had not come through.
I think it's important for human service professionals in all
areas to try to impact
public policy. It's the public policy makers who decide what
resources they will
have to deliver their services. Whether you're a teacher, whether
you're a
counselor, whether you're providing a direct financial
assistance, all of those

involve money and other resources that are controlled by people
in the legislative
area.
I'm 67 years old. I've been doing this kind of work since I was
in my early 20s. I'm
looking back on a career and knowing that the vast majority of
my career is
behind me. I have a limited number of years to do this. I'm
elated, I feel very
privileged that I've been able to do this kind of work and live a
good life doing it.
I'm also very, very excited because I think young people are
very much up to the
challenge and I think are going to take us into, to new heights in
this area of
endeavor that people of my generation never did.
We have to be able to come back and say the common good is
something we all
need to pursue; we all need to be working together on it. And
our institutions,
including our government, need to be pursuing the common
good, not individual
good.
I believe that the resources that we have in this community can
be better used
and better marshaled and put together in a way to lead us into
the kind of
community we really have the potential to be. And I think MOP

can play a major
role in showing, in helping people organize themselves in a way
to realize their
hope for the kind of community that we would be, which is
leading in the entire
state of Michigan in terms of how do we come together as a
community, not just
of the affluent and the better off, but everybody in this
community being able to
live a life of dignity and eventual prosperity.
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