Okay, let me get this right. There is a horrendous affordable housing shortage in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. According to Color of Change and human rights lawyer Bill Quigley, rents in New Orleans have gone up 45 percent, over 100,000 people have not yet returned to New Orleans, half of those who want to return make less than $20,000 a year, and 12,000 New Orleanians currently have no place to live. Now, in the face of this serious affordable-housing crisis, the city of New Orleans and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are planning to demolish 4,600 public housing units in the center of New Orleans.

Well, you might think that these public housing units must have been badly damaged by the hurricane and that they are only now getting around to bulldozing them.

But you would be wrong. Most of these units are in well-built structures, barely damaged by Katrina. Many of the units above the first floor were not affected by the flood waters. In fact, architects who have been taken on tours by UUA-UUSC partner The Advancement Project have testified that it would take minimal renovation for these buildings to provide decent housing.

While thousands of families are camped out in friends' living rooms, living in cramped trailers that FEMA is repossessing, or living in other cities waiting to go home, HUD wants to tear down solid brick buildings that would actually provide people with adequate housing.

Oh, and they want to do this before Christmas, apparently to make sure that the Katrina survivors in trailers and temporary houses get the point that "home for the holidays" most assuredly doesn't include them. HUD has said for the last year and a half that housing demolition orders for public housing take 100 days to review before approval. In the case of New Orleans public housing, they managed to speed it up a little. The review and approval took one day.

On the surface, HUD's stated goal to replace the the public-housing projects with affordable -housing units in mixed income areas could be a good strategy for affordable housing until you take a closer look at the numbers, and obstacles rooted in issues of race and class facing survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The new plan will demolish 4,600 units of affordable housing and rebuild 744. Rents have gone up 45 percent in New Orleans. Many of the African-American families who could raise the extra money for rent wouldn't be able to find landlords to rent to them. According to the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center, there has been pervasive racial discrimination in housing in New Orleans since Katrina. According to their report of April 2007, 57.5 percent of landlords discriminated against African-American renters.

The public housing residents have been fighting back for two years, trying to get the city council and HUD to come up with a better plan that would make maximum use of the resources that exist. Many UUA/UUSC Gulf Coast partners, such as People's Hurricane Relief Fund, C-3 Iberville, The Advancement Project, and the Women's Welfare Reform Project, are deeply involved in this struggle to stop the demolition of public housing. They are asking that the demolitions be halted so that a better -- and fairer -- plan can be put into place. The public housing units could be renovated easily and used as temporary housing for residents until new public-housing units are built.

Over 95 percent of the public-housing residents in New Orleans were low-income African Americans. HUD's goal should be to get low-income families back into decent housing in New Orleans as fast as possible. It's precisely low-income African-American families who face the twin obstacles of high rent and racial discrimination in the New Orleans housing market. If HUD moves forward with its plan to demolish the public-housing projects, it would be difficult not to conclude that their real goal is to keep low-income African Americans out of New Orleans.

Many groups are working hard to stop this travesty of justice as Christmas approaches. Please add your voice to theirs by clicking here to send an open letter to the New Orleans City Council.

Baseball is our national pastime, evoking long summer nights, the crack of bat meeting ball, shrewd attention to strategy over a long season, and an abiding sense of fair play. Here in Cambridge, Fenway Park’s diffuse glow in the sky can often be seen from UUSC's offices on long summer nights. Playgrounds and diamonds all across the country are lit with the joys and sorrows of players matching wits and abilities in competitions guided by rules and roles which have evolved over many decades.

Last week, we learned that players from every major league team, players whose achievements have inspired and thrilled fans for years, have been using performance-enhancing drugs for decades. Those very achievements, even of paragons like “Rocket” Roger Clemens and home-run champ Barry Bonds, are now questioned, the sport tarnished. Demands for ever more rigorous – and intrusive – drug testing are inevitable.

By coincidence, as the Mitchell Report on baseball was issued, we learned that evidence of the torture of prisoners in American custody was destroyed in what can only be described as a cover-up. The institution of baseball willfully turned its eyes away from obvious signs of abuse; the Central Intelligence Agency knowingly destroyed evidence that interrogators violated federal and international law prohibiting torture.

Baseball’s appalling “era of steroids” seems to parallel our country’s disgraceful “era of Guantánamo.” While producing the appearance of short-term gains – artificial home run records, a seemingly-secure homeland – these self-defeating actions seem to me to be deeply destructive in the long term, masking failure with the illusion of success.

Steroids produce artificial boosts to performance, but we know that the long-term effects of these drugs are devastating to the health and spirit of those who abuse them. Shamefully, abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib, engaging in illegal surveillance, sending people into an endless gulag of clandestine prisons, and invisible and unaccountable accusations also produce the appearance of short-term results.

But what will the long-term effects of these disgraceful acts be to the health and spirit of our country, to our moral standing in the world, to our culture and society? Are we truly securing our country by enraging and radicalizing millions of people who previously viewed America as the symbol of freedom, fairness, and the rule of law? How will future generations view the achievements of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds? How will the attitudes of tomorrow’s generation of major-league stars, today’s little leaguers, be forever changed?

The parallels only go so far, of course, because baseball and the security of our country are not really comparable: America was attacked, and the threat of terrorist attack is real. There is no doubt that resolving the crisis in baseball will be far easier than securing our homeland.

But just as true success in baseball cannot be won while violating its basic premises, true success in defeating terrorism cannot, and need not, come at the price of abandoning our nation’s core values of freedom, fairness, and the rule of law.

UUSC has no baseball program, though many of us are Red Sox fans. But we are doing everything we can to stand for civil liberties and to fight illegal and immoral practices like torture because, just as baseball must put its “era of steroids” behind it, so must our nation turn the page on our “era of Guantanámo.” We invite you to be a part of this movement.

What would you say about a U.S. law that leads to an incarceration rate that tips so heavily against one minority group that that single group comes to represent 85 percent of the total incarcerated under that law? What would you say if that minority group, African Americans, represents only 12 percent of the total population? What if you discovered that a shocking 96 percent of those prosecuted under that law were either black or Latino?

That law would be called draconian. It would be called racist. And those targeted by the law would be called people whose rights were violated.

Under federal sentencing laws passed in the mid-1980s, crack-cocaine offenders – mostly African American and Latino – have received harsher sentences than individuals convicted of powder-cocaine offenses. Under these same laws, standards for penalizing crack-cocaine offenses are 100 times more severe than they are for powder-cocaine offenses, and federal judges have no leeway to impose lighter sentences.

In a tremendous victory for racial justice, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Watson v. United States on December 10, 2007, that judges can ignore unjust sentencing guidelines that recommend harsher sentences for crack-cocaine offenses. Quickly following that decision, the United States Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to lighten punishments retroactively for crimes related to crack cocaine – calling the disparities “unwarranted.” These decisions should affect some 19,500 federal inmates.

Especially interesting for those in the human rights community, the Supreme Court issued its decision on International Human Rights Day. Dovetailing on my earlier blog post ("Human Rights Day As a Reminder"), I invite you to see this decision as a step towards resolving a pressing human rights issue in the United States – violations of racial antidiscrimination standards and equal rights.

In many respects, the international human rights movement hasn’t fully entered the American consciousness yet, in terms of knowing what rights we can claim as American citizens and what rights we can claim just by virtue of being human beings. There are so many overlaps and distinctions. Many of us don't know what human rights mean in the United States.

For instance, if we look at the situation of the disproportionate number of minorities, especially African Americans, who are incarcerated today in U.S. prisons, most people probably wouldn’t see that immediately as a human rights issue. We would probably label it first as a civil rights issue – and think of it as a way that racial inequality is expressing itself today as a more subtle form of Jim Crow justice.

When we think of federal agents making an impromptu raid on a manufacturing plant in Massachusetts to round up undocumented, mostly Hispanic immigrants and ship them to remote detention centers, we probably wouldn’t call it a human rights issue either. We would probably think of it first as falling somewhere at the intersection of domestic labor and immigration laws.

Today, as part of an effort to honor Human Rights Day, I represented UUSC at the ACLU-Massachusetts’s roundtable discussion on the U.S. government’s 2007 report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. State parties to the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), like the United States, are required to make periodic reports to the U.N. committee that contain a fair and honest assessment of the situation of racial discrimination in their country.

The United States’ 2007 report was basically a whitewash, saying racism is not a problem in the United States – which gave activists an opportunity to call the government out on its deplorable record on racial equality, given not just the Katrina disaster, but also the host of statistics out there on race and poverty in the U.S. and disproportionate rates of imprisonment and infant mortality, low levels of education, low levels of employment, lack of access to medical care, increased risk of being the victim of a violent crime, and lack of access to legal counsel among minorities... all of which points to national practices that systematically violate CERD's promise of equal rights.

This turned our discussion to how people whose rights have been violated and activists on a local level can draw on the powerful vocabulary of international human rights law to call for higher standards and better treatment. This could mean, for instance, in the case of a hostile school environment that contributes to high drop-out rates and low education levels among minorities, calling this a violation of the “Right to Dignity” as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It could also mean calling inferior medical treatment for minorities a violation of the "Right to Health" under UDHR, as well as a violation of CERD.

For all involved, Human Rights Day became an opportunity to further ground ourselves in the assurances of human rights law and encourage more people to frame their demands in terms of human rights – in order to strengthen their present claims as well as to strengthen the universal claim to human rights by everyone.

So, in keeping with the spirit of Human Rights Day, can I recommend that you take a minute to look through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights right now, and as an exercise, try to pick out which right in your opinion is most in need of defense in America today? Is it Article 5, torture? Article 9, arbitrary detention? Article 23, the right to work? Article 25, the right to a standard of living? Please post your picks. We'd like to hear them.

As a longtime employee of the Institutional Advancement Department (read “fundraising”) at UUSC, I’ve been asked many times to clarify the nature of our work and how it’s funded, especially when it comes to our humanitarian relief work. In a time of humanitarian crisis, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, people wonder why they should donate to UUSC over, say, the Red Cross or Oxfam or any one of a number of charities providing direct aid to people around the world.

I tell them that if they want their money to be used immediately, they should donate elsewhere. There are many fine organizations out there that are ready and willing to swoop into a disaster area on short notice to manage immediate relief efforts. However, if these donors want their money to be thoughtfully granted to grassroots UUSC partner programs located in areas of great need and administered by program officers sensitive to the needs and concerns of the local people in ways that promote longterm solutions to issues faced by marginalized populations, then they should give to UUSC.

Last month, while traveling in Indonesia and meeting some of the beneficiaries of the generosity of UUSC donors, I learned just how important this distinction is.

Indonesia is primarily a nation of Muslims -- in fact, it’s the largest Muslim nation in the world. The Aceh region, specifically, is under Islamic (sharia) law, making religion an important part of the everyday fabric of life there. The complexities of this environment make our partnerships with local grassroots organizations vital. Not only do they help us identify and support particularly vulnerable populations, they know the people they serve. They know the cultural issues that sometimes preclude some local populations from accessing – or even knowing about – options for aid and exercising their rights.

Over the course of a week spent with the Bedari delegation, meeting with representatives from such groups as Solidaritas Perempuan, LBH-APIK, Bungoeng Jeumpa, and the Center for Community Development and Education (CCDE), I learned that women in Indonesia and Pakistan face similar issues of: 1) not knowing their rights under either sharia or secular law, 2) not knowing how to access their rights, 3) encountering familial and/or cultural resistance to accessing their rights, and 4) widespread ignorance or misinformation on what rights sharia law actually grants to women.

I also learned that members of these partner organizations -- paid and volunteer, female and male -- spend a lot of time reaching out to communities and building trust so that people will feel able to share their problems and ask for help. Field representatives of both sexes are necessary. Women need to be active in their struggle for their rights, and women survivors often only feel comfortable confiding in other women.

Men need to stand in solidarity with women, and many men in local communities are more receptive to the message of women’s rights, especially in a religious context, when it’s delivered by other men. In this way, slowly but surely, our partner groups in Indonesia and Pakistan are fertilizing the ground in which the seeds of women’s rights may grow.

What's more, I heard complaints from several people about Western tendencies to march in and start giving orders, pointing out the speck in the other's eye while ignoring the plank in their own and running roughshod over cultural and religious sensibilities different from theirs. This is not unique to Indonesia or Pakistan. Look at American gunpoint “diplomacy” around the world these days, especially in Muslim areas. Are we truly making anything better? Are we creating lasting, positive change? Or are we merely making millions of people feel disempowered, controlled, and resentful of us? Are we actually sowing resistance to the ideals we purport to uphold? We need to ask ourselves these questions at all levels, lest we inflict more wounds than we heal.

My experience in Indonesia has deepened my conviction that although we, Americans, have the power to tell people what they need, what to do, and how to run things, doing so will never produce meaningful, beneficial, lasting change. If you share this view, if you believe that giving people the tools to help themselves is ultimately a better strategy than simply trying to fix their problems for them, then consider donating to UUSC.

 

Elliott Nsundu is the Coalition Against Water Privatization's local task force leader for the Kwa-Masiza Hostel in Vaal, Zone 20 -- an unofficial settlement 45 minutes outside of Johannesburg. There is no running water, sanitation, or electricity in Kwa-Masiza. Many of the residents are "retrenched" workers (laid off) from EastCo and Metal Works factory, who are suffering from work-related illnesses, particularly from the chemicals used in the factory.

Elliott spoke to us: "Twenty four hours without water -- for many days. How many hours in a year? Water trucks come by once per week -- you can only have 40 liters." Elliott and the community members who met with us told about their struggle to keep living at Kwa-Masiza. Originally it was a "hostel" organized as temporary housing, but with well-built buildings and a large park-like area surrounding the compound. The buildings are not shacks -- they are two to three stories high, built out of cement, have windows, and were built in the 1960s. But the utility services were shut off, and police were sent in to forcibly evict the residents. Many of the flats show the effects of this action -- broken windows, doors. The community resisted and have stayed.

The property changed hands from the government to private owners, who insisted that the residents pay 300 Rand per bed (many of the flats have three to four beds) per month to stay -- even without any utilities. The average salary is 800 rand per month (300 rand is approximately $43.) They refuse to pay until the conditions change. Elliott wants people in the United States to know how difficult it is, how dangerous for children, for the residents, for their health. There is no privacy for sanitation.

Says Elliott: "Hope? We have lost hope -- but we are still prepared to fight. We are slowly losing our trust in this government." It makes you think about the definition of hope -- if a person can continue to work day in and out to better the community, and others, despite police attacks and very difficult living conditions as Elliot does -- isn't that hope? Maybe it's stronger stuff than hope. Whatever it is, Elliott has it and South Africa will be better place because of people like him.

We were excited this morning because our partner, the Coalition Against Water Privatisation (CAWP), informed us that they were to get international news coverage of the water problem in Phiri (pronounced "pirri"), Soweto from Al-Jazeera. CAWP had been so successful in their awareness-raising campaigns and demonstrations that many people around South Africa now have their eyes on what will take place next week. Next week, a member of CAWP, Jennifer Makoatsane, and four other plaintiffs will take Johannesburg Water to the High Court to contest the installation of pre-paid water meters on their property.

This case against pre-paid meters and challenging the minimum monthly allowance of free water per household to poor families are possible because the South African constitution, ratified in 1996, is the most progressive constitution in the world. For example, it fully recognizes social, economic, and environmental rights. The human right to water is recognized in section 27 and is being used by the residents of Phiri to fight for enough water to meet their daily needs.

I had been to South Africa before, working for the South African Human Rights Commission in Cape Town, but I had not made it over to Joburg or Soweto and was eager to see the area. CAWP representatives picked us up from the guesthouse around 10 a.m. and drove us to Phiri, a Sotho (pronounced "sutu") area of Soweto. Under apartheid, people were not only separated into neighborhoods by "race" (chosen by the apartheid government) but also ethnicity within that given race. So "Blacks" were further divided into Sotho, Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa, etc. "Blood-mixing" of any sort was considered dangerous as it might undermine "White" purity, power, and dominance.

When we arrived in Phiri, we were welcomed by Jennifer and other members of the community. She took us into her home and showed us the difficulty of daily tasks without sufficient water, such as doing laundry or bathing. For even the poorest households, Johannesburg Water only provides 6 kl of water per household per month. For a large family like Jennifer's, this only allows the toilet to be flushed once every few days, and a bath for each member of a the household twice a month, and it leaves virtually nothing for laundry or food preparation.

She also sat down with us and talked about how CAWP and the upcoming trial had given her hope that maybe things might change – maybe the minimum monthly allowance would be increased to allow poor families such as hers to meet their daily needs and allow for adequate sanitation and a healthy living environment for her elderly mother, the four children living in the home, as well as the four adults.

Jennifer then led us around to meet other community members with similar water problems. All of the people we met were "makoko's" (meaning "granny's" in Sotho). They were all women over 70 who had lived most of their lives under apartheid and are still fighting for their rights under this new democracy. The makoko that made the greatest impression on me was Serafina. She is 71 years old and still as strong as ever. She spoke about her fight for access to water with a strength of conviction that was powerful for me, being about 40 years younger. She described bypassing the water meters because her pension could not pay for water and without sufficient water at her age, she could not survive. When the police came and told her she must not continue, she dared them to arrest her. The police left defeated, knowing that arresting a 71-year-old woman would create a martyr for the cause.

While I was listen to her sing and shout and swear and laugh, I hoped that I will have the strength to fight when I am her age. Although witnessing the deep suffering of others is emotionally exhausting, its also inspiring for me to know that the struggle continues and that I am a part of the fight for justice.

For some women, a scarf is a pretty piece of fabric, a fashion accessory. For others it's a symbol of religious devotion. However, for many women a scarf is a tool of oppression used against them in name of religious piety.

My colleague, Gretchen, and I spent a week in Aceh, Indonesia, with five Kashmiri representatives of Bedari, a volunteer organization working to further women's rights in Pakistan. Though the rights of Pakistani women are more severely curtailed in most cases than those of the Acehnese women, one notable difference is that the Acehnese Muslim women must cover their hair thoroughly or risk detention (and possibly caning) by sharia police, whereas women in Pakistani cities, at least, can often get away with minimal or no head covering.

I chose to dress modestly in Aceh, but, as a non-Muslim, I was not required to cover my hair (though as a redhead, I might have received significantly less attention if I had!). Two of our Pakistani women friends continued to wear their scarves, but one did not; as an obvious foreigner, she could also get away without covering her hair, and she preferred not to do so when given a choice. I didn't really think much about it until she and I were shopping for souvenirs at a shop in Banda Aceh, when I saw her examining a length of hot pink fabric embellished with metallic threads while searching for a gift for her mother. Thinking she was interested in scarves, I pointed out some pretty ones in a nearby display case.

"I don't give scarves as gifts," she said, explaining that she doesn't support the enforced wearing of headscarves and so refuses to give them to other women. And then I thought back to the evening of two days prior, when we had thrown Gretchen a surprise birthday party in the hotel and invited two of our friends from Solidaritas Perempuan. One of them had allowed me to try on her jilbab, hers a sort of tube of stretchy fabric rather than a folded square of fabric tied or pinned about the head. Laughing, we agreed that I resembled nothing so much as an eastern European peasant woman with it on. I wore it for five or ten minutes before deciding that it was way too hot and needed to come off.

Ah, but there's my Western, non-Muslim privilege: I can don or doff the scarf at will. I can laugh and joke about how silly I look with it on. Increasingly, the women of Aceh and Pakistan cannot. In fact, during our stay, sharia police rounded up 10 to 20 young women in Banda Aceh for insufficiently Islamic dress (judging from the Jakarta Post photo, they wore no jilbab, or wore short sleeves or tight jeans) and threatened them with caning. Even worse, it is becoming increasingly common for self-styled sharia enforcers in the more rural areas of Aceh to take it upon themselves to punish women for what they deem immodest dress, such as in one incident this July when, "In the name of sharia, and after saying a greeting, several youths claiming to be students of an Islamic boarding school in North Aceh tried to spray paint on the tight pants of several women," then returned the next day to attack the cafe owner who had resisted their raid. North Aceh has also seen incidents of sharia enforcers bursting into homes or hotel rooms to check whether women are covering their heads even in their own private spaces.

Personally, I think that the wearing of scarves or other modest dress is so much more spiritually significant when women have the right to choose it freely, without fear of coercion or punishment for refusing. Regardless, public space for Muslim women is shrinking in both Aceh and Pakistan, and the forced wearing of the headscarf is only one of the more visible manifestations of this restriction.

Our friends from Bedari warned the Acehnese groups we met that if they are not vigilant, Indonesia could go from being one of the most liberal of the Muslim nations to being one of the most restrictive, like Pakistan has become since the 1970s. I hope they take heed and are able to increase the voices and participation of women in both the public and private spheres.

May we all work to unravel the fabric of women's oppression instead of continuing to weave it.

On November 9, UUSC's Economic Justice Program staff attended three trainings at the 2007 “Nonprofit Workout,” whose theme this year was “The Ways We Lead: Creating Adaptive, Inclusive Organizations.”

In the afternoon, Johanna and I went our separate ways to different workshops, and the session I attended was called "Constituency Leadership Development: What, Why, and How."

This workshop was facilitated by the three co-directors of the Center to Support Immigrant Organizing (CSIO), Luz Rodriguez, Ann Philbin, and Kevin Whalen. CSIO is a Boston-based organization that works with individuals, groups, organizations, and communities dedicated to organizing immigrants around the various issues that affect them. CSIO provides training, organizational support, peer networking, and other capacity-building support in immigrant communities.

At the heart of CSIO's work is the concept of "constituency leadership development." What does that mean? Well, first CSIO defines the constituents of an organization as "the people whom the organization serves, individuals who come into the organization seeking assistance and members of the community whom the organization's work impacts." This includes immigrants, but it would also include low-wage workers, people of color, women, youth, and other marginalized groups within a community.

CSIO describes its philosophy and practices of constituency leadership development in a three-pager, and it's still a work in progress, but what it boils down to is that constituency leadership development is the "process of creating opportunities for people to exercise power and offer their experience, knowledge, and skills to the work of positive community change," based on the notion that "people who are affected by injustice know best how to overcome that injustice." However, this can only come about when people have ongoing experiences of their own value and importance -- including their collective power -- in contributing to social change, shifting out of a mode of powerlessness and passivity that can result from ongoing experiences of oppression.

As participants in the workshop, we also had a range of ideas about what leadership development can look like, from constituents educating each other about their rights, to being spokespeople on their own behalf, to taking ownership of the mission of the organization. It may also mean supporting people to use the experience they've developed through living their day-to-day struggles to think systemically about how to promote social change.

In the context of working with organizations, this process of leadership development means that constituents must have access to decision-making roles, including staff and board positions, and must be fully integrated into the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the work.

The concept of constituency leadership development is particularly useful to UUSC's Economic Justice Program because workers in the informal economy and in unregulated industries are facing tremendous abuses of their human rights, but also have the opportunity to exercise leadership to change those conditions through organizing and advocacy with our partner groups. Organizations like our workers' centers partners in the United States and the Kenya National Alliance of Street Vendors and Informal Traders (KENASVIT), are already actively practicing constituency leadership development.

Still, there are many challenges to implementing the model of constituency leadership development. There's the question of power-sharing, since an organization must allow space for recognition of the existing power dynamics inherent in its leadership structures, and be prepared to change them if they don't place constituents at the center of decision-making. Equally critical is the question of fear.

Low-wage workers often confront obstacles to organizing to protect their basic rights because of the risks they face -- they could lose wages, lose their jobs, be deported, or even be the victims of violence for exercising leadership in their workplaces and communities. In addition to making organizations more accountable to communities through constituency leadership development, we must also actively organize and advocate to hold corporations and governments accountable for their legal and moral obligations to uphold workers' rights.

On November 9, UUSC's Economic Justice Program staff attended three trainings at the 2007 “Nonprofit Workout,” whose theme this year was “The Ways We Lead: Creating Adaptive, Inclusive Organizations.”

The afternoon workshop I attended was called "System-wide Governance: A New Model for Creating Democratic Sustainable Grassroots Organizations."

This workshop presented a new model for nonprofit “governance." Governance is a tricky concept that most people associate with the primary role of the board of directors.

I was interested in this workshop because of some of the things I've witnessed in our partner work. Over the past three years, it's become clear that cultivating, training, and engaging a diverse, engaged leadership council (or board) has made a "make it or break it" difference in the long-term sustainability and success of some of our partner organizations.

Given the demands and precarious nature of labor rights work – especially cultivating leaders, processes, and infrastructure that are capable of supporting the growth of a long-term, resilient (and responsive!) labor rights movement – creating effective relationships among staff, board, members, and constituents is essential.

Over the years, UUSC's technical support to some of our partners has centered on strengthening this network of relationships. (Personally, as a board member of different organizations, I'm also fascinated by the variety of interpretations of the role of the board – in both the nonprofit and for-profit sector.)

The idea behind System-wide Governance is simple, but radical – and the perspective I took away from the workshop gave me food for thought to share with our partners, and in my own multiple roles as a board member, staff, and constituent!

Here's the gist:

System-Wide Governance is a model in which governance responsibility is shared across the organizational system among the key sectors of an organization – that is, members, staff, and board.

It is based upon principles of participatory democracy, self-determination, and genuine partnership and on community-level decision-making as the foundation of true democracy.

Critical organizational and strategic decisions are made together by active members, staff, and board. The types of decisions that are made in this way are those that determine key strategic directions or changes, long-term programmatic or organizational visions, new initiatives, political positions, and major policy and/or organizational decisions.

This approach was taken on to great success by one of UUSC's neighbors in Cambridge – Centro Presente – a member-driven, state-wide Latin American immigrant organization which strives to give their members voice and build community power.

Many successful programs and advocacy initiatives have come out of their work – including currently, the emergence of a worker center.

Ariel and I will be sharing these models with our partners as they work to build movements and programs that place member workers at the center.

To read more, check out:

"System-wide Governance for Community Engagement," by Maria Elena Letona and Judy Freiwirth. The Nonprofit Quarterly, Winter 2006.

"Engagement Governance for System-wide Decision-making," by Judy Freiwirth (check out p. 2 of the article for a useful diagram of this model), The Nonprofit Quarterly, Summer 2007.