On grass-roots organizing,
Rabben, Linda A.
I an isolated "holler" in northern Tennessee, Marie Cirillo, an ex-nun, has lived and worked with local people for twenty years. The rivers of the area are polluted by runoff from coal mines, and...
...Local people are building new structures of property holding, management, and governance...
...KFTC files and supports class-action lawsuits to change inequitable tax and mineral-rights laws...
...After eighteen months, KFTC had 225 members in thirty-five counties...
...Some of these grass-roots researchers are part of an international network, IRED (Innovations et Réseaux pour le Développement), with headquarters in Geneva...
...Many of the groups also make it possible for blacks, Hispanics, and whites to work together in areas where patterns of segregation used to keep them apart, to their mutual disadvantage...
...The rivers of the area are polluted by runoff from coal mines, and the people seem irrevocably poor...
...Across the state line in Kentucky, a group called the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition (KFTC) has been working for changes in tax laws, environmental policies, local governance, and legislative accountability for more than five years...
...For women in particular, the groups provide an important opportunity to use pent-up leadership skills...
...Cirillo believes, however, that when the powers-that-be down the road figure out the implications of the land trust, they will fight it...
...Far-right groups get media attention, but moderate, liberal, and left-wing groups easily outnumber them...
...q 234 • DISSENT...
...The land trust marks an important change in the social organization of the region...
...they represent the first step on the road to the exercise of local power, be it ever so modest...
...The land trust that Marie Cirillo works on fills a local political vacuum, and because of the community's isolation, the project has met little opposition so far...
...But with persistence, they do manage to influence state governments and business interests...
...We will miss her...
...Hope for the future, then, may be found out in the boondocks, where social movements and their leaders are growing up...
...This pattern continues throughout the U.S., as grass-roots groups challenge institutions that try to control them...
...In southern Minnesota, where erosion is a chronic problem, some of the insurance companies' new tenants destroyed conservation works that had been functioning for as long as fifty years...
...It began as a local voluntary organization, and its members soon discovered that other local groups were involved in similar issues...
...In the Midwest, the agricultural crisis has pushed farmers to join groups, sometimes for the first time...
...Formerly apathetic or poverty-stricken people have organized to fight the abuses of power that inevitably result...
...Their leaders get coopted by the political and economic establishment...
...Because they represent traditionally powerless people, they have only limited clout...
...Marie Cirillo's holler seems lost in time and chronic deprivation...
...less use of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers, diversification of crops as methods of preserving farm land, preventing erosion, and protecting groundwater...
...The issues they confront vary according to region...
...it now has more than 1,300 members in 65 counties, a paid staff, and support from thirty-five church groups and foundations...
...These three groups are very different from one another, but they have one thing in common: they embody local responses to problems that are happening all over the country...
...For example, the East Coast Farmworkers Support Network's first triumph after its founding in the early 1980s was to get a law through the North Carolina legislature outlawing slavery...
...In recent years, almost every article that appeared in Dissent first passed through her hands—and benefited immeasurably from her wide learning and her feeling for English prose...
...The Farm Labor Organizing Committee sponsored a seven-year national boycott of Campbell's products that finally won a favorable settlement for East Coast farmworkers...
...In each region, rich and powerful interests, often from outside, and their local representatives have managed to control decision making for years...
...This part of Appalachia is a kind of colony, because British coal companies own much of the land...
...But the groups keep emerging...
...It's very complex," she says...
...The history of grass-roots movements is full of small victories and decisive defeats...
...Crisis hot lines have sprung up to advise farmers about bankruptcy laws or help them cope with thoughts of suicide...
...The KFTC's three principal officers are women...
...Many of the groups fail because of the very lack of resources that made them organize in the first place...
...Repeated in many places by many people, such transformative projects can create conditions for changes whose implications we can only speculate about now...
...There are probably hundreds of such groups across the country...
...In 1985, for example, LSP began monitoring the land management practices of insurance companies, which have come into possession of billions of dollars' worth of foreclosed land throughout the Midwest...
...But for the past seven years, she and her neighbors have been developing a land trust, which amounts to an alternative form of local government in an area where incorporated towns are rare...
...In response, LSP publicized the evil effects of fencepost-to-fencepost planting and framed local and state legislation to protect conservation measures, many of which are already subsidized by local and state governments...
...It is difficult to assess the importance and impact of these groups in conventional terms...
...Along with her husband, Henry Pachter, who died in 1980, Hedwig was close to the magazine from its beginnings...
...The editors and friends of Dissent mourn the death of Hedwig Pachter...
...LSP is a small group whose members work on conservation issues and their political and economic implications...
...The groups publish newsletters, sponsor speakers, send delegations to the state legislature, come out in support of the "Save the Family Farm" bill now before Congress...
...LSP sponsors a conservation project for twenty-five farm families, designed to encourage more sustainable agricultural practices in the long term...
...The program stresses minimum tillage...
...When conventional political strategies don't work, they outflank the obstacles, mobilizing support for local initiatives through direct action...
...Almost a thousand miles north, the Land Stewardship Project (LSP) has its headquarters in Stillwater, Minnesota, near Minneapolis, and a project office in Lewiston, in southern Minnesota...
...In the South, white and black farmers get together to save their land, while Hispanic farmworkers organize cooperatives...
...SPRING • 1988 • 233 Notebook At a time when fewer and fewer people bother to vote, these grass-roots groups provide a different kind of leverage for people...
...In some cases, such as the land trust and the Land Stewardship Project, groups are creating alternative structures or programs that develop local resources independently, instead of spending energy fighting the effects of outside control...
...Marie Cirillo is over fifty now, and she expects to spend the rest of her working life 232 • DISSENT Notebook coping with the ramifications of this venture...
...In several areas, local groups have conducted participatory research, looking up deeds in county courthouses to find out who owns how much land...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
