Press

Youth seek job programs at Mass. Statehouse rally
Associated Press and Channel 7 TV News - 2/24/11

BOSTON -- Hundreds of young people converged on Beacon Hill Thursday to demand that funds for youth jobs programs in Massachusetts be kept intact despite the state's budget problems.

Members of the Youth Jobs Coalition called on the Massachusetts Legislature to include money for summer jobs programs in a supplemental budget for the fiscal year ending July 1, and to support Gov. Deval Patrick's request for $8.4 million for the next fiscal year.

Patrick told a large gathering of youth inside the Statehouse that he backed their efforts with state government, while also urging them to pressure the business community to provide employment opportunities. He told them they should visit chambers of commerce and other private sector groups to lobby for jobs.

"Turn and find an adult who can tell you where the business organizations are ... because we are all in this together," Patrick said. The governor later told reporters that he wasn't intending to criticize private businesses for not offering job enough opportunities, but was trying to remind the youth that the vast majority of jobs exist in the private sector, rather than the public sector.

Several of the young people at the rally said getting a job helped them stay out of trouble, stay in school and help their families make ends meet. "When I was young, I ran with the wrong crowd," said Anthony Fowler, 14, a freshman at Brockton High School.

State jobs funding helped him land a job as a summer counselor with the Boys and Girls Club of Brockton, Fowler said, and helped him turn his life in the right direction.

Jamiah Bailey, 21, of Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, said he now works as a youth mentor at the Bird Street Community Center and is also enrolled in a training program to learn the construction trade. He said he agreed with Patrick's assertion that both the public and private sectors should do more to provide youth jobs.

Teen’s hard work pays off
By Peter Gelzinis - Boston Herald - Sunday, February 27, 2011

Right now, Vanessa Ramirez says she wants to be either a lawyer or a chef.

I’m guessing if she doesn’t run for state rep or City Council 10 years from now, Vanessa definitely will be calling the shots for someone who does.

She stands about 5-foot-nothing and weighs maybe 95 pounds. But Thursday afternoon, this 16-year-old sophomore from Urban Science Academy buzzed around Copley Square, deftly assuming the role of field general for more than 1,000 teens who were gathering to march up to the State House.

They came from as nearby as the South End and as far away as Springfield to take over the Gardner Auditorium, urge their pols to fund two youth jobs bills now budgeted for $11.9 million... and await further instructions from Vanessa.

“We’ve been planning this rally for almost six months,” Vanessa said. “Kids need to work and the people on Beacon Hill need to hear our voices. Most of these kids who’ll march up Beacon Hill are in the same position as me. They work to help their families.

“When I was 13, I was homeless,” she recalled. “My mom, my sister and I, we lived in different shelters for almost two years. Once things stabilized and we were able to move into an apartment over in Jamaica Plain at Heath Street, I told my mother I was getting a job to help her out.”

Indeed, for the past two years, Vanessa has split the modest salary she’s earned as a teen counselor with Teen Empowerment with her mother, Julia, to help with the cost of medications and household expenses.

“Being able to give money that I make working after school or in the summer,” Vanessa said, “is my way of giving back for the life she gave me.”

They marched across the Common chanting, “Youth united will never be defeated,” one day after a raucous legion of union workers rallied at the foot of the State House stairs to stand in solidarity with their counterparts in Wisconsin.

Gov. Deval Patrick came to the Gardner Auditorium to sit next to Vanessa Ramirez and speak to a standing-room-only crowd he praised for having the energy and the commitment “to show up” and make their voices heard.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Patrick said, “but come back for goodness sake! Don’t make it one day. Come back and speak to your representatives.”

Jeffrey Sanchez, the man who represents Vanessa and her family, came in to sit behind Patrick. The energy in the auditorium was contagious. Two days later, Sanchez couldn’t say if the $12 million Patrick set aside for teen jobs would survive the budget meat grinder.

“You’ve got so many line items and each one has a constituency,” Sanchez said. “For me, funding jobs for kids is a piece of legislation that comes from the heart. I know what a job can do for a kid. I’ve seen how it can change lives.”

Vanessa Ramirez’s life has already been changed. And to watch her stage an impassioned assault on the State House is to understand she simply won’t take no for an answer.

For photos of the rally: http://bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1319663

Mass. faith leaders win commitments from Chairman Barney Frank, Federal Reserve Board to advance national campaign to keep families in their homes

Brockton Interfaith Community (BIC), Massachusetts Communities Action Network (MCAN), November 02, 2009

Last night, 600 community members from Brockton Interfaith Community (BIC), an affiliate of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network and PICO National Network, met with Chairman Barney Frank, Congressman Stephen Lynch, and representatives from the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Bank of Boston at a town hall meeting on the foreclosure crisis at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Brockton, MA.

At the meeting, Congressman Frank, who as chair of the House Financial Services Committee has been a pivotal leader in Congress in the government's response to the foreclosure and financial crisis, promised to push Treasury further on making needed improvements to the Making Home Affordable Program, embracing BIC's proposals to:

- stop the foreclosure process from proceeding while a loan modification request is pending;
- push for loan modifications that include principal reduction;
- make the Net Present Value formula publicly available, in order to create greater transparency in assessing current value of loans;
- make loan modifications extend over the life of the mortgage, not just five years;
- use TARP funds to help unemployed homeowners stay in their homes.

Chairman Frank also agreed to press federal regulators to extend CRA to all lending activities of banks.
In addition, Federal Reserve representative Sandra Braunstein promised to arrange a meeting between PICO, National People's Action (NPA) and Chairman Ben Bernanke to report back on the nine community hearings that PICO and NPA have held around the country since June.

Before the evening meeting, BIC faith leaders took representatives from the Federal Reserve Board, along with local elected officials, on a bus tour of the city which has ranked as one of the cities hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis in Massachusetts. Local residents who have lost their homes, or are in the process of foreclosure, offered testimony about the challenges they've faced in working with their banks to lower their payments.

To help families in the Boston metro area, a representative from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston promised to convene a meeting of banks, community groups, and non-profit loan counseling groups to discuss barriers to loan modifications and policy issues like investor owned loans with the hope of creating greater accountability by banks/servicers to getting these loan modifications done.
For more information about PICO's campaign to keep families in their homes, visit www.piconetwork.org/keepfamiliesinhomes

Media Coverage

"Brockton offers lesson in foreclosures; US officials tour city, see crisis up close," Boston Globe, Nov 2, 2009

"Brockton foreclosure crisis helps spark national solutions; Brockton shows feds pain caused by foreclosures," Enterprise News, Nov 2, 2009

"Bus tour highlights effect of foreclosure crisis in Brockton," New England Cable News, Nov. 2, 2009

"Fed to hold foreclosure meeting in Brockton," Boston Herald, Nov 1, 2009

WBUR, the NPR station of Boston and a local Brockton radio station, interviewed BIC leader Carol Delorey

Advocate: House budget hurts youth

By Benjamin Bell
Sunday, May 3, 2009 - Boston Herald

The state House of Representatives passed a budget Friday night that made drastic cuts in youth violence prevention programs, a move that has upset a key organization advocating for teenagers.

“If this ends up being the final budget, it will be devastating to teens and public safety,” said Lew Finfer, director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, a faith-based community improvement organization. “Without these programs, we are fearful there will be an increase in violence and school dropout rates.”

The cuts include eliminating the Department of Public Health Youth Violence Prevention Program, which funds 28 youth anti-violence programs around the state and affects 5,000 teenagers.Additionally, the Shannon Anti-Gang Violence Grant Program, which funds programs in 39 cities and towns and would affect police department and district attorney initiatives against gangs as well as intervention and prevention programs for at-risk youth, was cut by half.

Finfer called on legislators to “draw from rainy day funds, which would lessen cuts,” instead of drawing from youth prevention programs. “It’s raining out here in terms of hardship and budget cuts,” Finfer said in a statement.

He also said that through such cuts communities and their youth would face “increased crime” and “less opportunities.”
“Times are tough, but we feel a lot of people are willing to pay more taxes to save these vital programs for youths,” said Finfer.

April 12, 2009
Community Organizing Never Looked So Good

By SARA RIMER

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

QUINN RALLINS, 23, graduated magna cum laude last year from Morehouse College with a dual major in international studies and Spanish. This spring, Mr. Rallins is finishing his master’s degree in comparative social policy at Oxford. He has analyzed research for the Rand Corporation in England, led workshops in Malaysia for Amnesty International and founded an organization to help orphans in the Dominican Republic.

His next step? Top financial and technology companies and nonprofit groups have expressed interest in hiring him. Even in this economy, he has options.

But Mr. Rallins wants to be a community organizer — just like the world’s most famous one, Barack Obama.

Mr. Rallins says he hopes to win a job with PICO, a national faith-based organization. He is applying for a position in Brockton, Mass., an industrial city battered by the state’s highest foreclosure rate, the loss of most of its major manufacturing jobs and dwindling state resources. Starting annual salary is about $35,000.

“My mentor at Morehouse says that at the end of the day, it’s not about how much money you make, it’s about the lives you’ve impacted and the stories you have,” Mr. Rallins said.

He is not alone.

A job that has not been all that alluring to college graduates is in resurgence, according to leading community organizers and educators. Once thought of as a destination for lefty radicals committed to living lives of low pay, frustration and bitter burnout, community organizing is now seen by many young people an exciting career.

With their jobs, students envision helping communities address urgent issues — economics or the environment, education or social justice — while developing leadership skills. And these jobs, students say, can actually lead to ... well, you know.

“Community organizing has become cool,” said Marshall Ganz, who dropped out of Harvard in 1964 to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi and spent 16 years with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Of course, a tough economy helps attract people to professions they might not have otherwise considered, as does a crusading time when Wall Street has become a symbol of greed, arrogance and irresponsibility.

But the turnabout in popularity is still quite remarkable. Last fall, 200 people, the overwhelming majority of them in their 20s, applied for a single community organizing job at a PICO affiliate in San Diego County, said Stephanie Gut, a PICO director. The salary would be about $35,000 to $40,000, plus health benefits.

In the past, there might have been 25 to 30 applicants for a job that involves developing grass-roots leaders in church congregations to work on a variety of social issues, Ms. Gut said. Although a sagging economy may have had something to do with the number, it couldn’t account for all the interest.

Two years ago, 250 applied for 26 paid summer community organizing internships at the Center for Community Change in Washington. Last summer, there were 1,200 applicants for 65 paid internships and fellowships.

Colleges are also seeing more interest in courses along those lines. Peter Dreier, a politics professor at Occidental College, says he usually has 20 to 25 students in his community organizing class. So far, 42 students have registered for next fall.

“I haven’t become any more popular as a professor,” said Mr. Dreier, who directs the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental. “So the increased enrollment must have something to do with the political climate, student interest in organizing and the impact of Obama.”

Dr. Ganz, the veteran organizer, trained thousands of Obama campaign volunteers to organize communities and voters.

He sees the effect today. Three years ago, Dr. Ganz, who earned a doctorate in sociology and is now a lecturer at Harvard, taught 40 students in his community organizing class at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This year, 60 students are enrolled, with more wanting to get in. Three years ago, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, began using Dr. Ganz’s curriculum. It is now taught at the College of the Holy Cross, Providence College and Wellesley. And more institutions, like M.I.T. and Northwestern, are calling him.

Certainly, there is an Obama effect. Through his presidential campaign and in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama managed to glamorize and, more important, explain community organizing. He wrote about meeting with people in their homes and churches, listening to their stories, the failures and small victories.

“Before, you’d talk to young people about community organizing and they wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about,” said Susan Chinn, a longtime community organizer who started the internship program at the Center for Community Change. “Community-based organizations have not done a very good job of marketing this work to a broad swath of people across the country.”

But they now have had a presidential campaign full of free advertising, and they want to capitalize. “We tell them, ‘Obviously there’s a lot you can do with it,’ ” said Robert Fisher, who teaches community organizing at the graduate school of social work at the University of Connecticut, Hartford. “And now we have the punch line: ‘Now you can be president.’ ”

Mr. Rallins of Morehouse College grew up on Chicago’s South Side, where his father came of age in the Altgeld Gardens, the same housing project where Mr. Obama once worked as an organizer. And Mr. Rallins, who wrote about his ambition to persevere, achieve, serve and see the world in his essay, “The Audacity of Hunger,” seems well aware of the parallel and the potential.

Mr. Obama “said it was the best education he ever had,” Mr. Rallins said. “Young people, they’re looking for certain intangible skills. They see the experience Obama got from community organizing — his concern, the way he relates with everyday people.”

Mr. Rallins said he became committed to the job while working with other Morehouse students in New Orleans in the demolished Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina.

“That’s where my heart is right now,” Mr. Rallins said.

Indeed, many idealistic students were drawn to organizing well before Mr. Obama began his presidential campaign.

Andrew Golis was 19 and had just finished his freshman year at Harvard when he joined Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign in New Hampshire. “The Dean campaign, because of the war, and a lot of feelings of disillusionment, was attracting tons of young people,” said Mr. Golis, now 25 and the deputy publisher of the Talking Points Memo, an online news site. “Dean would run around saying, ‘You have the power, reclaim the country.’ ”

Karen Hicks, the campaign director for New Hampshire, was trying to figure out what to do with all the college students she had working for her, Mr. Golis said. She brought in Dr. Ganz. “Marshall taught us how to be organizers over a long weekend at some insanely hot yurt at a retreat center,” Mr. Golis said. “It was so cool. I was a 19-year-old idealistic kid — and he was coming with his history, his ability to talk about the inspirational side of politics.”

“Marshall doesn’t fit the baby boomer cliché — the ‘back when I was fighting the man, when I had long hair, when I was smoking pot,’ ” Mr. Golis said. “He’s telling a series of stories about himself, about the work that he’s doing.”

And unlike the 1960s, many of thesestudents don’t seem motivated by partisanship. Drea Chicas, 21, the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, is a graduating senior at Occidental, where she has taken Professor Dreier’s course and worked with teenage girls.

But politics? “That to me is just a distraction,” she said. “When I’m with my girls, that’s the last thing they have on their minds. They’ve seen their boys shot in their faces, violence against women. Democratic, Republican — that’s not even relevant.”

In fact, talking to many of these young adults, the drive to become an organizer is part of their faith. Josh Daneshforooz, a 24-year-old graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, is taking Dr. Ganz’s course on organizing at the Kennedy School, “because I saw those principles in action in the hugely successful Obama campaign,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

He wants to apply those principles, he said, to his group that he founded, the All Nations Education, a Christian group, organizing college students in the United States to help young people in the third world go to college.

Even as Dr. Ganz and others stir enthusiasm, the question becomes what will they do with all these newly interested organizers. Even as they emphasize that organizing can be a career, financing has always been tight and is not likely to improve as the recession drags on. For instance, PICO does not plan anytime soon to fill its job in San Diego that attracted 200 résumés.

Rylan Truman, 27, will graduate this spring with a master’s degree in social work, with a concentration in community organizing, from the school of social work in Hartford. “I would like to be able to organize parents in low-income jobs around their children’s schools,” she said.

But she doesn’t have a job.

“My graduating now is poor timing because of the economic situation,” she said. “A lot of community organizing jobs are the first to get cut.”

Even if these young adults became paid organizers, there is no guarantee that they will stick with it. They, like Mr. Obama, might eventually become frustrated about the lack of progress. After all, Mr. Obama himself left with few victories in his pocket, deciding that prospects for real change lay elsewhere.

At PICO, Quinn Rallins is being recruited by Lew Finfer, a community organizer in Boston who years ago tried to persuade Mr. Obama, then a Harvard law student, to return to organizing. They talked over coffee in Harvard Square. Mr. Obama said no; he wanted to return to Chicago and get into politics.

“I’m glad he had a plan,” Mr. Finfer said. “And I’m glad I wasn’t successful.”

He hopes he has better luck with Quinn Rallins. That final interview is Monday night in Brockton.

Community organizers are staple of democracy

Newsday September 11, 2008
by Lewis Finfer

Community organizing was mocked by Gov. Sarah Palin and Rudolph Giuliani in speeches to the Republican National Convention. Yet community organizers work for groups made up of countless average Americans like the PTA volunteer that Palin once was.

McCain defended his running mate's jab that a mayor is like a community organizer with responsibilities as a response to the denigration of her experience as a small-town mayor by the Obama campaign. But the senator added in a CBSinterview that Obama's experience is "very honorable."

That's a good thing, because last spring McCain said this about Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) in a speech in Selma, Ala.: "I've seen courage in action on many occasions in my life, but none any greater or used for any better purpose than the courage shown by John Lewis and the good people who marched for justice with him" during the civil rights movement. And Lewis was a community organizer.

Why is that kind of work ridiculous, Obama asked after the GOP convention. "They think that the lives of those folks who are struggling each and every day, that working with them to try to improve their lives is somehow not relevant to the presidency?"

I first got a glimmering of what community organizing was in 1968 in Rockville Centre. I was a high school senior and Martin Luther King Jr.had spoken in my hometown shortly before his assassination. This inspired me to think that our school should be doing something to help improve conditions in our town's black community. I went to the office of the Rockville Centre Economic Opportunity Council and soon was organizing to raise funds so that local people could attend the Poor People's Campaign's March on Washington.

I met others - whites, blacks, Christians, Jews - who were organizing to get the town to honor its commitment to spend part of its federal urban renewal funds on new housing to replace the rundown buildings it had demolished in the minority neighborhood. It took over a year to get this to happen.

I was learning as a 17-year-old that civil rights had to be fought for town by town all over the country, including mine. This required local organizing, which later became my profession. Now, almost four decades later, I'm still doing it.

"When I [Obama] got out of college as a young person, 24, 25 years old, I moved to Chicago and worked with churches, who were dealing with steel plants that had closed in their neighborhoods, to set up job training programs for the unemployed and after-school programs for youth ... community service work ... John McCain has been talking about putting country first and extolling the virtues of national service," Obama told ABC. "I would think that's what we want all our young people to do."

Having been a community organizer, Obama should be a good listener. He has gathered up stories and dreams, so he can empathize with the pain people feel and point toward how things could be different. He has had to think strategically how to get there in an incremental way. These are all key skills for a president.

The crucial requirement for successful community organizing is the ability to listen. Organizers have to draw out people's deeply-felt stories of pain and injustice and then to challenge them to do something about it in collaboration with others. Organizers must also know how to develop practical solutions that will give people concrete opportunities to improve their lives and communities. And they have to mobilize support for these proposals and constructively engage those with power in the public and private sectors in trying to solve these problems.

Conversations are the rituals of community organizing, and they are occurring one-on-one every day in coffee shops, living rooms, and congregations across America.

I have chosen to stay in community organizing all my life. I've been privileged to learn so many people's life stories and to work with them, sometimes to change laws or increase appropriations or change corporate practices - so that more of them had opportunities in their lives to write more hopeful stories.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt once told a group of representatives of community organizations, "You've heard me promise to do this, that and the other thing that you've asked for. Now go out and make me do it." That's as good a statement as any of the important role that community organizations and organizers play in a vital democracy.

BY LEWIS FINFER | Lewis Finfer is director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, a federation of community improvement organizations based largely in religious congregations. September 10, 2008 The way to make the case for John McCain should not be by tearing down the work of Barack Obama's early career, which is the hard work that thousands of community organizers are doing daily to make democracy more vital and improve our lives.

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-optruk5835969sep10,0,5310742.story

Community organizers fault comments at GOP gathering

By Irene Sege
Boston Globe Staff / September 6, 2008

In a basement conference room at the Codman Square Health Center yesterday morning, Lew Finfer did what he's been doing for almost four decades: community organizing. This time that meant leading a meeting of 20 representatives of grass-roots and nonprofit organizations from Dorchester and Mattapan to mobilize city residents against a ballot question that would abolish the state's personal income tax.

Finfer's profession took center stage at the Republican convention in St. Paul this week when Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the vice presidential nominee, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani mocked Democrat Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer in Chicago. "Community organizer," Guiliani shrugged. "What?" Palin likened her former job as mayor of an Anchorage suburb to being "sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."

With that, Palin and Giuliani ridiculed a tradition whose roots in this country reach back to the Boston Tea Party and organizers' successful efforts to persuade colonists to boycott tea to protest taxation without representation. ACORN, a nationwide network of community organizations, issued a statement condemning the GOP's "condescending remarks." Anti-Palin T-shirts emblazoned with "Jesus was a community organizer; Pontius Pilate was a governor" appeared for sale online almost immediately.

Community organizers in Boston and beyond have taken offense at the barbs from St. Paul.

"You get angry that somebody is disrespectful of what you've done all your life," said Finfer, director of the Massachusetts Community Action Network. "Community organizing is what the civil rights movement was. The key people were community organizers who worked for Martin Luther King Jr. and with him. Sarah Palin held up that her husband was a union member. Unions have organizers."

"Without organizers things don't happen," said Marvin Martin, 54, director of Dorchester's Greater Four Corners Action Coalition. "Ideas often come from the community. People who organize bring ideas to the legislators and work with them to pass it. If they don't understand that, I'm concerned with how they make decisions."

Marshall Ganz, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, sees an irony in Palin's remark. "The very politics that Palin and McCain have rooted their appeal in are the result of a social movement on the right, the conservative movement, which was organized by organizers, too," he said.

For Finfer, 57, the comments conjured memories. In 1991 a former intern recommended that Finfer recruit a Harvard Law School classmate who had been a community organizer in Chicago. The classmate's name was Barack Obama. The young law student came for an interview.

"He said, 'I learned a lot about organizing, but I'm interested in going back to Chicago and getting into politics,' " Finfer said. "I joke that I'm glad that I wasn't successful."

To Finfer and his colleagues, organizing entails reaching out to members of disenfranchised communities, learning about them and their issues, then mobilizing and empowering them to address those issues.

"The ability of a community to survive and understand its power and make changes happen is the responsibility of the community organization," said Dawn Nardi, 35, lead organizer with United Interfaith Action in Fall River.

While Finfer was meeting on the "Vote No on Question 1" campaign, community organizing of a different sort was occurring on Perrin Street in Roxbury. In a demonstration called by City Life/Vida Urbana, 50 people tried to block an eviction. Police arrested four protesters who chained themselves to a railing.

City Life organizer Stephen Meacham wasn't surprised by the Republicans' comments. "Community organizers by their very nature are organizing the grassroots against power," Meacham said, "and generally speaking power doesn't like that."

Mimi Ramos, director of Massachusetts ACORN, works 50 hours a week for a salary of $30,000. "They shouldn't be bashing other folks' hard work," she said. "I'm 26 years old. I'm a single mom from Boston. We've worked to raise the minimum wage, fight for health care for all, issues that affect low-income and moderate-income families who wouldn't be at the table without ACORN and other community organizations."

Mark Pedulla, manager of organizing and policy initiatives of the Hyde Square Task Force in Jamaica Plain, works on youth organizing. "Organizers stand with people at the most difficult moments of their lives, whether that's a job loss, an eviction, youth violence," he said.

Behind the comments of Palin and Giuliani is Obama himself and the attention to community organizing generated by his candidacy. "It's very emotional for me to hear him talk about being an organizer," said Nardi, the community organizer in Fall River.

Perhaps more important than the attention is Obama's use of grass-roots organizing. The Kennedy School's Ganz, whose resume includes community organizing in the civil rights and farm workers' movements, is helping Obama's campaign train workers in community organizing.

Ganz predicts Palin's comment will backfire. "One thing it's done is galvanize a reaction from grassroots organizers all over the country like I've never seen," he said. "These are the people who are going to organize the vote for Obama."

It all starts in community

By Lewis Finfer / Boston Herald Saturday, August 9, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com

In 1991, I met with Barack Obama while he was attending Harvard Law School to see if he was interested in continuing his work as a community organizer.

He told me then, “I want to build on what I learned in community organizing and I have a plan to return to Illinois and go into politics.”

Depending on how you see his candidacy, you may be thinking that either it’s fortunate he had that plan or why couldn’t I have done a better job in persuading him to stay in Massachusetts.

Obama has spoken many times during the campaign about the importance of what he learned during his three years of community organizing in Chicago during the 1980s. Let me tell you what he did as a community organizer and what community organizers do every day.

Listening is the key. Organizers engage residents of an area through one-to-one meetings. These are conversations to explore several areas of a person’s life. Then questions are asked about what a person is particularly worried about with where he or she lives or works and why, and whether there’s a story here. The last and most important part of this meeting is the community organizer proposing the next stop for the resident to do something about his or her concerns.

In his book, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama described these one-to-one meetings: “That the self interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinion people carried within them some central explanations of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.”

Research is essential. Community organizations look to move from a general problem like youth violence prevention to a specific realizable issue such as increasing funding for teen centers. This involves research meetings to find out what is being done now about a problem, what are the gaps, what are the best practices done on this elsewhere, how much does it cost, who has the money and who makes the decision.

Next comes the action phase. An example of action is organizing community meetings with a large gathering to show support for proposed solutions. These meetings need to have dramatic testimony of stories from people affected by the problem, sound research presented that backs up the proposed solutions the organization makes, and the ability to engage decision-makers in attending and considering making commitments.

Evaluation is difficult but crucial. Obama had the humility in his book to describe both an unsuccessful and successful action meeting. The first was a meeting on crime concerns, but only 11 residents showed up. Yes, organizers and organizations have meetings like that. He describes another action meeting dealing with asbestos present in a public housing development. The meeting had great attendance and got the Chicago Housing Authority director to take action.

I think his experience as a community organizer enables Barack Obama to listen well. He has gathered up stories and dreams so he can empathize with the pain people feel now and point toward how it can be different. He can think strategically how to get there in an incremental way.

However, if he is elected president, with the great power comes a distance from people. There’s a tendency of advisers not to feel the confidence to tell a president what needs to be done and when he might be going in the wrong direction. I hope Obama would find ways to continue to listen and initiate change month after month.

But just to make sure he does, I believe that the work of community leaders and organizers must continue if our country is to change for the better. President Franklin Roosevelt once told a group of representatives of supportive organizations, “You’ve heard me promise to do this, that and the other thing that you’ve asked for. Now go out and make me do it.”

If we do go out and organize, then we will enable many to write new stories filled with hope and opportunity.

Lewis Finfer has been a community organizer since 1970 and is director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network. He lives in Dorchester.

New fight over more children's health aid

Bush vows to veto plan to cover three million

By John Donnelly, Globe Staff | July 31, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The politically charged proposal to extend health insurance to more than 3 million poor and lower-income children nationally -- one of the most ambitious domestic health proposals to come through Congress in the last decade -- unfolded yesterday in the Senate under the shadow of a formal veto threat from President Bush.

But unlike previous debates pitting Democrats against Republicans, yesterday's floor action on the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, put many Republicans at odds with their president and other members of the party.

The Senate plan would expand children's health insurance by $35 billion over the next five years, while the House is expected to take up a competing proposal later in the week that could boost the initiative by $50 billion during the same time frame.

Bush, however, has vowed to veto either plan, saying that the new coverage would encourage people to leave their private insurers for a government-run program. The White House reiterated its opposition yes terday, condemning the Senate bill as essentially extending "a welfare benefit to middle-class households" earning up to $83,000 a year.

On the Senate floor yesterday, Senator Orrin G. Hatch -- an influential Utah Republican and one of two original cosponsors of the SCHIP bill that became law in 1997 -- said "mistakes" by the administration "have caused us a lot of problems here."

"We are trying to do what is right by our children, who are currently not being helped by our healthcare system," Hatch said. "If we cover children properly, we will save billions of dollars in the long run. Even if we didn't [save billions], we should still take care of these children."

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Jr., a Republican from Kentucky and a staunch White House ally, said that while the children's health insurance program has been a "tremendous success," the Senate legislation was far too generous.

"It will significantly increase taxes . . . and lead to a government-run health insurance," McConnell said. If senators allow states to add families with household incomes 400 percent above poverty levels, it would extend a federally funded benefit to those who can afford to pay for their own health insurance, he said.

The president backs a more modest increase of $5 billion for the health insurance plan over the next five years. But opponents say that as the number of uninsured children continues to climb, many states -- including Massachusetts -- would have to drop more of them from their programs.

Signed into law by President Clinton, SCHIP gives federal block grants to states, which then determine how to spend the money for health insurance on eligible children. Since then, the number of children covered by the plan has steadily increased -- 6.6 million children are now covered under the program, and the Senate proposal would add another 3.2 million. The House Plan would cover 4 million new children, but many of the 9 million children who currently do not have insurance still would not be covered.Continued...

Over the last decade, the children's health insurance initiative has "reduced the health disparities among children . . . in communities across the country," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who cosponsored the SCHIP legislation with Hatch in 1997. "This is a matter of enormous importance."

Kennedy added, "If we are interested in educating the children of this country, we have to make sure that children can hear the teacher, that children can see the blackboard."

Officials in Massachusetts, along with those in several states, are anxiously watching the political battle in Washington. The program ends on Sept. 30, giving the White House and lawmakers a deadline just two months away.

Massachusetts' universal health insurance plan depends on receiving funding from a variety of sources, including the SCHIP program. Last July, the state raised eligibility to children in families earning 300 percent of the poverty level, up from 200 percent. Currently, 90,500 children in Massachusetts are covered under the program.

In order to maintain its program and enroll more children who are eligible, the state forecasts it will need $277 million in fiscal year 2008 -- $61 million more than the fiscal 2007 allocation. While Massachusetts officials said they have no projections on the financial assistance from the Senate and House plans, Bush's proposal, by definition, would result in health insurance for fewer children.

The president's proposal would cap insurance at 200 percent of the poverty level.

"We're watching this as closely as we can," said Alison Kirchgasser, director of federal and national policy management at the state office of Medicaid, part of the Executive Office of Health and Human Services. "The state is committed to covering as many people as we can. SCHIP is very important."

The measure has largely been funded without controversy until the White House insisted it would reject the expansion in the last few months. The Senate, in particular, has had strong bipartisan support for expanding children's health insurance, but the Bush administration's opposition has created much tension among Republicans.

The Senate bill would be funded by a 61-cent increase on cigarette taxes; the House measure also relies on an increase in tobacco taxes.

Senator Elizabeth Dole, a North Carolina Republican, called the legislation "not only the right policy, but it's the right thing to do." Nevertheless, she said the cigarette tax increase to pay for it was all wrong, predicting that her home-state tobacco industry "may collapse altogether" if the Senate passes the bill.

Michelle C. Bucci, a visiting health policy fellow at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation policy institute, said the tobacco tax unfairly targets families most likely to take advantage of the SCHIP program. "Over 50 percent of smokers are poor and low-income, so this is essentially hurting the people we're trying to help," she said.

But Cindy Mann, executive director at the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University, said the child health insurance program is in dire need of expansion.

"We have 9 million uninsured children," she said. "What should happen is to take a program with a strong track record and strengthen it so that we can bring those 9 million uninsured children to as close to zero as possible."

Lew Finfer, director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, a federation of faith-based community organizations, said the focus now will be on Bush -- whether he vetoes legislation, and then whether each chamber of Congress would have the two-thirds majority needed to override it. "The deadline is coming up fast," Finfer said.

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com

With tug on tin ear, Patrick hears the call

By Michael Jonas | May 20, 2007 Boston Globe

After initially missing the boat on efforts to stem gang violence, Governor Deval Patrick has declared himself captain of the cause, an about-face that followed a campaign by city leaders and anti violence activists to get the new governor on board.

If timing is everything in politics, when it comes to the growing plague of urban violence, Governor Deval Patrick's couldn't have been worse.

Despite intense lobbying from a coalition of law enforcement and community leaders eager to see funding renewed for an $11 million antigang program, when Patrick unveiled his first budget in late February it included nary a nickel for the initiative begun last year by the Legislature to address the rising tide of gang violence.

Two days later, a triple shooting in Roxbury wounded two teenage males -- and the 1-year-old daughter of one of the young men. The following week, it was an 18-year-old woman killed in a shooting steps away from a Dorchester elementary school, where police leaders and teens were scheduled to meet hours later for a session aimed at boosting better police-community relations.

Then came days of headlines about a 22-year-old woman visiting from Kentucky who became the unintended murder victim in a shooting outside a late-night party on Dorchester's bullet-scarred Geneva Avenue.

The disconnect between the budget bust for antigang programs and the chaos on city streets stunned those on the front lines of antiviolence work.

"We were shocked," said Emmett Folgert, director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, in early March following the release of the governor's budget.

Last year's funding of the so-called Shannon grants, named for the late state senator Charlie Shannon, came in response to a major push by police chiefs, prosecutors, mayors, clergy and community-based organizations.

"This was a great team, and it worked," Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley said of the unusual alliance of law enforcement and community groups.

With the antigang grants zeroed out in the governor's budget, the team went back to work, prodding the administration to rethink the move and lobbying lawmakers to restore the funding, which the House did via a budget amendment adopted late last month. The Senate seemed poised to include the funding in its budget as well.

Then, 10 days ago, Patrick suddenly declared that the urban violence problem is so urgent it shouldn't wait until the budget process is complete next month. He proposed a supplemental budget plan, to take effect immediately upon passage, that includes the $11 million for Shannon grants, as well as $4 million for new police officers in Boston and other hard -hit communities.

Patrick acknowledged that his new administration had not fully appreciated the depth of support for the antigang initiative, which funded police departments and community-based programs to steer youth away from gang involvement.

Conversations with legislative leaders "helped me understand just how much support and energy there has been for the Shannon program," Patrick said in announcing the funding plan. The Legislature approved the new spending Monday.

The overall tin ear for politics that marked Patrick's early weeks in office has been well chronicled. That it seems to have included a failure to grasp the gravity of the crisis of urban violence was surprising, given his own rags-to-riches rise from the mean streets of Chicago's South Side.

But leaders of the coalition that battled to restore the antigang funding aren't looking back to point fingers now.

"We objected to something, he listened, he changed," said Folgert, the Dorchester Youth Collaborative director. "We think we have some kind of working relationship now."

"That migration came from the pressure we put forward," said the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, a leader of Boston's Ten Point Coalition. "The lesson we take away from that is that we're going to have to fight for what we know is important for our communities by having all hands on deck working for peace."

Lew Finfer, a veteran Boston community organizer who directs the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, a federation of six interfaith community groups, said it also shows leaders can be effective not only by leading but also by being willing to listen and change course.

"It's a win for everyone," Finfer said. "There's a dire problem going on in cities that needs resources, and people in power responded."

Michael Jonas is acting editor of CommonWealth magazine. He can be reached at jonas@globe.com.

Brockton mayor to target 'hot spots'

New strategy is launched

By Emily Sweeney, Globe Staff | February 15, 2007

BROCKTON -- In agreeing with the crime-fighting proposals put to him at a massive community meeting last week, Mayor James Harrington is backing a community policing strategy that will target the city's "hot spots."

Harrington also agreed to support a hefty increase in an after-school program that the meeting's organizers hope will help protect teenagers from the culture of violence that has led to a recent spate of murders.

A crowd of more than 500 gathered last week to discuss ways to stop violent crime and provide jobs to those in need.

The event -- held in St. Edith Stein Parish, the same church where mourners gathered after a 14-year-old from Brockton was gunned down in Dorchester on New Year's Day -- was organized by the Brockton Interfaith Community and Ministers of Color Urban Alliance. Members of the community group used the gathering to present to the mayor and police chief their concerns about the city's violence and how to stop it.

The meeting was the culmination of months of work: 25 lay leaders from seven congregations had been working on the proposals since September, after a rash of murders left three people dead in seven days.

And it was a key meeting for Harrington, who is up for reelection this fall and will have to campaign hard against Jass Stewart to keep his job. Stewart made history in 2005 as the city's first black candidate to run for mayor and earned 44 percent of the vote.

Members of the Brockton Interfaith Community took turns at the microphone, sharing their experiences with crime and posing questions to Harrington.

Frances Gibbs, a member of Messiah Baptist Church, told the standing-room-only crowd how her son and his best friend were gunned down in Brockton. The shooting left her son paralyzed and his friend dead.

"I see history repeating itself," said Gibbs. "I still see the killing of our babies in the streets of Brockton."

The Brockton Interfaith Community and the ministers alliance presented five proposals as questions to Harrington.

They asked, first, if the mayor would direct police to investigate the "hot spots" where a pattern of drug dealing, prostitution, or violence is evident -- and if the chief would meet with them in 45 days to discuss progress. The defined locations are Highland Street; Green Street; portions of Warren Avenue in the downtown area and to the south; and the corner of Warren Avenue and Pleasant Street.

Harrington said, "Yes.... This is what we want. You tell us" about the hot spots "and we'll work on it."

The group asked if the mayor and police chief would take the first steps toward a police "decentralization plan" that fits Brockton's geography and resources -- inspired by a similar plan in Providence -- and to meet again with the community group to plan the next steps on community policing strategies.

Harrington agreed to both. He and Police Chief William K. Conlon are scheduled to meet this week with the Providence police chief.

He agreed, too, to commit police officers to walking a beat, checking in on businesses and residents on a regular basis. "The police chief and myself have gone out and visited businesses in every neighborhood in the city," he said. "I've walked, with my staff, in neighborhoods where people think it's most dangerous and talked to kids. We'll continue that outreach, because that's where it's going to happen -- face-to-face talks to find out what it is we need to do to make those kids safe. So I'll be there, doing that with you."

Part of the community group strategy is to provide jobs as a way to keep the city's youth off the streets. Harrington agreed to a multipronged approach aimed "increasing youth summer jobs by 150 by 2008.

Harrington said he has sent out letters to 1,500 local businesses encouraging them to provide employment to teens this summer.

Finally, he agreed to support a $150,000 increase in funding for the 21st Century After School program, and to seek extra funding for after-school activities. He also said he is trying to raise money privately for church groups that provide youth activities after school.

The mayor, while generally in agreement with the group, seemed careful not to make any guarantees, and he stressed the importance of working together.

"This isn't about what I can do for you," he said. "It's what we can do together, in a partnership."

Emily Sweeney can be reached at esweeney@globe.com.

State's minimum wage hike kicks in
Workers upbeat; some firms worry

By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff | January 1, 2007

Zorely Allende's finances just got a little less tight.

Today, the state's minimum wage increases, and the pay of this single mother of two small children rises from $6.75 an hour to $7.50.

"Maybe I will be able to save now, so I can take a vacation," said Allende, 20, who is a cashier and cook at a McDonald's in Springfield . "I worked [every] week for as long as I can remember."

Allende is one of about 107,000 Massachusetts workers who will get a raise today, when the first phase of a minimum wage increase passed last summer begins. The hourly wages of the state's lowest-paid workers will jump again on Jan. 1, 2008, to $8 an hour, making Massachusetts' minimum wage among the highest in the nation.

On the basis of a 40-hour workweek, the workers will get a $1,560 bump this year, and $1,040 more next year.

"More and more working people are falling behind," said Noah Berger , executive director of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank that recommended the wage increase. "They can be working full time, without escaping poverty. By raising the minimum wage, we'll help to make sure everybody who is willing to work full time to try to support their family can at least earn a wage that allows them to escape poverty, and that sends an important message about the value of work."

But while workers such as Allende and their advocates hail the increase, some business owners worry that the wage increase will put Massachusetts businesses at a disadvantage.

"This is a particular problem for small businesses," said Jon Hurst , president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts. "I'm not going to tell you there aren't people who deserve a wage increase. But we've got to get smart and look at the effect it's having on our small businesses, and on consumers and families who [will be] paying higher prices."

In July, the state Legislature unanimously approved the minimum wage increase over Governor Mitt Romney's veto. Worker advocates had hoped lawmakers would also index future minimum wage increases to inflation, but they lost that battle.

The federal minimum wage, unchanged for 10 years, is $5.15 an hour, but that is likely to be raised by the incoming Democratic majority in Congress.

Allende lives in subsidized housing and qualifies for food stamps, but she said it is hard to give her children the things they need on the $198 a week she takes home.

"It is very, very difficult," she said, speaking by telephone through a translator for Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, the community advocacy group that also pushed for the minimum wage increase. "I can't support myself. I have to ask for money from my mother. And it's really hard work."

She said she had been working at the restaurant for two years, and had not received a pay increase. "I am excited I will finally get something," she said.

Matt Duncan will see a little more money in his paychecks, too. The Dracut high school student works four shifts a week at a Lowell Market Basket, bagging groceries for $6.75 an hour.His higher wages will make paying his car insurance premium less of a strain, he said."It definitely adds up," said the 16-year-old. "There are a few adults that work there, and [the increase is] good for them. My parents still pay for my stuff, but it's good for other employees who are on their own."

Hurst, however, said Duncan and other teenagers probably will suffer as a result of the minimum wage increase . Facing higher payroll costs, businesses will cut workers, retaining adults instead of teenagers, whom they consider less reliable and can work fewer hours, he said. Smaller businesses in particular will be at a competitive disadvantage, he said, especially when the state's minimum wage rises to $8 an hour next year."Big businesses with locations outside Massachusetts can take lower margins locally without raising prices," he said. "But if they're based here, and have higher costs here, they have one of two options: raise prices, or hire fewer people."

But Berger said Census data show that 80 percent of those who will be affected by this minimum wage increase are workers older than 20. He also said the minimum wage increase would eventually benefit local businesses."A higher minimum wage circulates more money into low-income communities, and they have more money to spend in local stores," he said. "It creates economic activity where we need it most."

And as happy as workers' advocates are at their wage increase victory, they see a huge amount of ground to make up, even after the increases.A minimum wage worker makes $13,500 annually. After today, that annual salary will be about $15,000.

Advocates say that is still an alarmingly low income, particularly in Massachusetts, where the cost of living is so high.

"These are still very low wage jobs that are hard to support families on," said Lew Finfer , director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, which lobbied for the pay increases. "When you move up the floor, that's good news for the people at the floor and just above it. But there are a lot of things that need to be done: raising wages [further] and improving education and training."

New Year adds extra jingle to minimum wage earners

By O’Ryan Johnson - Monday, January 1, 2007 - Boston Herald

From McDonald’s in Egelston Square to Burger King in Roslindale, Boston minimum wage earners are ringing in the New Year by jangling a little extra change in their pockets.

“It’s about time,” said Robert Frankin, 19, who works full time at the Seaver Street golden arches.

Franklin’s hourly pay will leap from $6.75 to $7.50, adding about $30 a week before taxes to his paycheck.

“I stay with my grandma and I pay rent,” he said. “It’s going to help pay the power bill, the gas bill. When I borrow her car I put gas in it so, it’s going to be good.”

At a Roslindale Burger King Pierre Salomon, 16, earns $7 an hour.
“I’ll probably buy a PS3, buy some sneakers, some clothes,” he said. “It’ll help with my phone bill. I have a cell phone.”

The pay raise passed last year by the state Legislature elevates the pay of more than 100,000 Bay State workers. The state’s minimum wage, which is now $6.75, will grow to $7.50 after today.

On Jan. 1, 2008, a second hike is planned that will boost minimum wage another .50, bringing the pay to $8 an hour.

The Massachusetts Communities Action Network says workers who make minimum wage will see an annual pay boost of more than $1,500. The group fought for the wage hike with several unions and community groups. The federal minimum wage has been $5.15 per hour since 1997.

Gov. Romney vetoed the minimum wage hike this summer after lawmakers approved it, but the Legislature unanimously overrode the veto in July.

- ojohnson@bostonherald.com

State wage hike arrives

By Laura Crimaldi - Sunday, December 31, 2006 - Boston Herald

More than 100,000 low-wage Bay State workers who toil in retail stores, factories and fast-food restaurants are about to get a wage hike in the new year that will increase their yearly income by more than $1,500.

“I think it’s long-awaited,” said Brenda Douyon, 19, of Mattapan, who gets paid $6.75 an hour as a trainee at Uno Chicago Grill in Kenmore Square. “I feel like it’s preposterous for someone to believe that a family can be raised on wage of $6.75, especially in Massachusetts, where the cost of living is incredibly high.”

Effective tomorrow, the state’s minimum wage will jump from $6.75 an hour to $7.50 an hour - giving some 107,000 workers an annual pay boost of $1,560, according to the Massachusetts Communities Action Network (MCAN), which fought for the wage hike with several unions and community groups. The minimum wage will increase again on Jan. 1, 2008, to $8, the highest state minimum wage level in the nation. The federal minimum wage has been $5.15 per hour since 1997.

“This is a major step toward making work pay,” said Carl Nilsson, campaign director for Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, a statewide advocacy group that represents low-income and working-class communities. “We’re looking at a raise of over $1,000 a year for thousands and thousands of struggling families across the state.”

Gov. Mitt Romney vetoed the minimum wage hike after lawmakers approved it July 6. The Legislature unanimously overrode the veto on July 31.

Lew Finfer, MCAN director, said a report by the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center shows the new minimum wage will also boost the pay for another 208,000 low-wage workers who earn slightly more than $7.50.

“It helps raise the floor, but it’s a pretty low floor,” he said.

Douyon, founder of the Boston-area youth chapter of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), said she hopes future minimum wage increases are tied to inflation.

“I think that it’s a victory for us,” she said. “Granted, it’s not indexed to inflation, which is what we wanted, but we defintiely made way.”

- lcrimaldi@bostonherald.com

BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL

January 1, 2007

And now, the good news

THE YEAR is fresh and new, full of possibility -- the very definition of optimism. Amidst a steady diet of war, corruption, official obtuseness, and despair, we like to take a moment on Jan. 1 for a palate-cleanser of brighter thoughts. Before auld achievements be forgot, here is a selection of items to put in the "win" column for 2006 on issues the Globe editorial page has been tracking:

A healthy new year

The most significant accomplishment of the 2006 legislative session was the law to achieve universal health care coverage for every Massachusetts citizen -- with a mandate that nearly every citizen carry the coverage, to help share the cost and risk. Already, 29,000 people have signed up for the plans, and keeping them open and affordable has to be at the top of the state's 2007 agenda, as well.

In other health matters, communities took tentative but meaningful steps to fight childhood obesity, discouraging sugary snacks and soft drinks in school vending machines, and raising awareness of harmful trans fats. Also, the Legislature passed a bill over Governor Romney's veto to legalize hypodermic needle sales without prescriptions, which should help reduce transmission of AIDS and hepatitis C among drug addicts.

Another important legislative victory was the increase in the state's minimum wage. Beginning today, over 100,000 minimum-wage workers will earn $7.50 an hour, up from $6.75. It's still not sufficient, but it is a statement that every worker is valued.

Anti-violence forum yields plan
Officials commit to conflict resolution, summer jobs programs

By ROB MARGETTA, Standard-Times staff writer November 16, 2006

NEW BEDFORD — About 600 people gathered in the basement of Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish at St. James last night as leaders of United Interfaith Action gave testimony about crime and violence in the community and asked civic leaders if they would commit to initiatives geared toward solving the problems.

"We look at our young people, who have to run a gauntlet of fear and intimidation just to get an education, and we say "No more,'" said Jack Livramento, co-chairman of the interfaith group. "We are here to tell our mayor, Scott W. Lang, our police chief, Ronald Teachman, and our deputy superintendent, Dr. Ronald Souza, that there is a new direction they need to lead us down."

The officials Mr. Livramento mentioned sat onstage, as speakers from the group — an interfaith coalition based around 15 churches in New Bedford and Fall River — expounded on the night's five main topics:

Cracking down on landlords who rent to criminals.
Bolstering community policing efforts.
Putting conflict resolution curriculum into schools.
Creating more summer jobs for teenagers.
Revitalizing branch libraries.

For each topic, two or three speakers talked about how the subject affected their lives or cited research the group had done. The city officials were then asked whether they would work with them on the matter.

While speaking of deadbeat landlords, Bruce Almeida, a member of Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, used 168 Bonney St. as an example of 27 "problem properties" the group had identified.
Since the current landlord bought the property, "There have been 147 calls to police, compared with only five calls in the previous four years," he said. "Isn't it time to do something about these problem properties? Shouldn't we remove these cancers from our society?"

Dorothy Lopes, a longtime member, offered a testimony on the effects of violence, saying she was a "close and dear friend" of Bernadette "Bunny" DePina, an active parishioner at Our Lady of the Assumption who was shot to death in her home in May.
"Such an act of inhumane violence cannot be accepted," she said.

Without much in the way of reservation, city officials in attendance agreed to the group's proposals, to overwhelming applause.
One such proposal asked Mayor Lang and Dr. Souza to commit $50,000 each toward creating conflict resolution programming this year and installing the curriculum at all schools within the next three to five years.
"When we brought these questions to the superintendent, Michael E. Longo, the answer came without hesitation," Dr. Souza said, adding that such curriculum is "almost a definite necessity."
Mayor Lang said he needs everyone at the meeting to "take a step further," by keeping children away from violent video games, music, television and movies.
"And that starts at home," he said.

The mayor and Chief Teachman also committed to helping promote a summer jobs program with the goal of placing 250 teenagers in jobs.
When presented with questions, the officials were only given the option of saying "yes" or "no," followed by a short explanation.

The only hesitant answer came from Chief Teachman when asked if he would release a community policing plan of strategy, resources, commitments and accountability. The chief said police resources aren't public information, and he wasn't comfortable with releasing information on them. But, when he said he would commit to the rest of the proposal, he was met with immediate applause.

Mr. Livramento said the community "came together to say 'Enough. We need a new direction,'" at the meeting, and thanked the gathered officials for their commitments.
"We will hold them to that 'Yes,'" he said.

OUR VIEW: Tonight's action is about setting goals

Editorial New Bedford Standard Times 11/15/06

One of New Bedford's more persuasive community organizations tonight will urge Mayor Scott W. Lang, Police Chief Ronald Teachman and Deputy School Superintendent Ronald Souza to commit to specific proposals to improve public safety.

In recent years, United Interfaith Action has been effective at holding public officials accountable on some of the most basic and pressing issues in the neighborhoods of New Bedford.

The organization, made up of several city churches of differing denominations, achieves its goals by researching solutions and setting deadlines for specific results.

The organization also is interested in working with community leaders to accomplish these goals.
In other words, it's not simply a "give me, give me" approach.

The group's membership cuts across class, language and religious lines.

In past years, it has drawn several hundred community people to each forum, which the group calls an "action."

People give personal testimony, and the forums include translation into Portuguese and Spanish for those who do not understand English.

Tonight's forum at 7 is open to the public, as always.

It will be held at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish at St. James Church, 233 County St.

About 500 people are expected. The carefully moderated event will be held to an hour and a half.

The mayor, police chief, deputy superintendent and other city leaders will be on hand to listen and speak about their plans for addressing the issues.

The UIA is asking for a substantial increase in the number of conflict-resolution programs in the city's classrooms.

It wants students to learn about nonviolence. New Bedford schools have existing programs.

It will be important for Dr. Souza to tell the community what has already been done in our schools and what can be done to make the city a model in teaching diplomacy, conflict resolution and the most effective strategies for avoiding violence.

The UIA also has made increasing summer jobs for youths a centerpiece of its anti-violence strategy.

Tonight, the group will ask the mayor to boost paying summer jobs for teenagers from 118 last summer to 250 next summer.

Creating summer jobs and internships, often with the help of state and federal grants, is one of the best ways to combat violence in the neighborhoods.

UIA should help bring together the groups that are working on this issue already.

Finally, UIA wants the city and Police Department to implement community policing.

UIA has researched it as practiced in other cities and wants to work with Chief Teachman to implement real community policing, not a watered-down form that we have seen in recent years.

A great deal of thought and organization goes into each of UIA's actions.

By identifying specific goals, UIA and the city has a much greater chance of seeing them accomplished.

Please consider attending tonight's forum to add your strength to this important agenda.

[MCAN was active in the coalition of community organizations and labor unions that won passage of the legislation in July to raise the minimum wage from $6.75 to $8.00 an hour.]

A life buoy for the poor

By Adrian Walker, Globe Columnist | June 19, 2006

If there is one thing Massachusetts politicians seem agreed on, at least publicly, it is that living here isn't easy, economically speaking.

The Democratic candidates for governor all seem to want to make an issue of the burden on the state's middle class.

On Saturday, I watched Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly give a speech in a field in Watertown, explaining that people on his street -- and streets just like it across Massachusetts -- are suffering because of policies that have harmed their economic interests.

I take Reilly at his word about the plight of the beleaguered middle class, for now. But there is another class of people who have a major stake in a vote that will take place this week in the Massachusetts House.

The state's minimum wage, currently $6.75 an hour , is likely to rise this year. The question seems to be how much it's going up. Last m onth, the Senate approved an increase to $8.25 an hour, with future increases tied to inflation.

The House will vote on a more modest boost, to $7.75 an hour. House leadership, beginning with Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, is said to be particularly lukewarm to the idea of indexing increases to the economy.

Governor Mitt Romney in the past has endorsed the notion of indexing. He has not taken a position on either of these bills, however , and he has abandoned more than one long-held belief since he set his sights on Washington.

If both proposed increases seem incremental, they are; if the issue itself seems minor, it is not. Some 90,000 workers would get a raise if the minimum went to $7.75 an hour, while 155,000 workers would see a boost if the minimum were raised to $8.25 . The difference between the two figures would mean an estimated $1,000 a year for low-wage workers.

Massachusetts is already significantly above the national minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. So are lots of other states, because making ends meet at that salary has become impossible in most of the country. This state's minimum wage was last raised in 1999, though that increase has failed to keep pace with inflation.

Not surprisingly, the business community isn't wild about the proposed increases, and especially dislikes the idea of indexing.

``The Legislature has tremendous power to grant tax breaks, which they have done for corporations and wealthy individuals," said Lew Finfer of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network , a nonprofit advocacy group that lobbies on issues affecting poorer residents.

``This is a chance to help lower-wage workers with those same powers the Legislature holds."

It is a sign of the times that economic issues such as health insurance and the minimum wage have garnered so much attention this year. In the elections of 1998 and even 2002, the fiscal health of the state and the people who live here was barely seen as worthy of debate.

True, there was anxiety about job loss even four years ago, but a certain financial whiz-turned-governor was going to reach out to corporate America and make it all better.

By now, concern for the economy and its impact on the state has grown considerably. But a question raised by the minimum-wage debate is how far that concern is going to reach. Yes, the middle class is getting squeezed, but if the middle class is hurting, people living at the edge of poverty can only be feeling that pain even more acutely.

The cliché is that minimum-wage jobs are predominantly held by high school juniors flipping burgers for spending money. This is not true. Many adults are trying, and mostly failing, to stay afloat on $6.75 an hour. Sometime this week, the House will decide whether to sign off on an incremental increase that won't upset anyone, or a boost that might significantly improve the standard of living for poor families. It shouldn't be that hard a decision. But it is never easy to know how far compassion reaches on Beacon Hill.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.

[MCAN worked in coalition with the Black Ministerial Alliance, Boston Ten Point Coalition, and Dorchester Youth Collaborative for passage of legislation on lessening witness intimidation by gangs, funding a State Witness Protection Program at $1.5 million, and $11 million for grants to cities for law enforcement and prevention strategies.]

Pressure builds to pass bill on gangs
House, Senate versions differ

By Stephanie Ebbert, Globe Staff | March 2, 2006 Boston Globe

Frustrated that an anticrime bill hasn't passed the Legislature, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly and local ministers are urging the House to take action and district attorneys pushing for the measure plan to meet today with House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi.

''I'm concerned that it's taken this long, candidly, to move on it," said Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, who lauded the Senate for producing a bill backed by ministers, politicians, and district attorneys. ''Really the question is: What's the House going to do?"

The House was expected to take up the bill this week but postponed a vote. The bill would create a statewide witness protection program, strengthen gun laws, and restrict the release of witnesses' grand jury testimony.

The bill is among several pieces of legislation that have been held up while legislative leaders try to work out a compromise on a healthcare bill.

But Kimberly Haberlin, a spokeswoman for DiMasi, said the House received the Senate's changes only last week and that the speaker requested and received additional information from the Senate on Tuesday. ''This is a top priority," she said.

The Senate passed a version of the bill last October, and in the interim both chambers agreed to fund partnerships in gang-violence prevention. In January, the House passed its own measure and the two chambers started trying to work out the language differences between the two without forming a conference committee.

''We've hoped that we would be able to work out the language differences because the intent of both bills was very similar. That didn't go anywhere," said Ann Dufresne, a spokeswoman for Senate President Robert Travaglini.

Last week, the Senate passed another version of the bill, increasing its funding for witness protection from $750,000 to $2 million.

The Black Ministerial Alliance, Massachusetts Communities Action Network, Boston Ten Point Coalition, and the Dorchester Youth Collaborative also called on the House to concur with the Senate version -- or to set a two-week deadline to negotiate a compromise measure.

''We're trying to come to some sort of amicable agreement between the House and Senate," said state Representative Stephen Canessa, the New Bedford Democrat who sponsored the original bill in the House.

In addition to the funding for witness protection, the competing House and Senate versions still differ in two key areas.

The Senate version calls for adopting the federal perjury standard. If a witness gives two widely inconsistent statements that cannot be rectified, he could face a charge of perjury per se -- a tougher standard to challenge in court than the standard in the House bill, which would allow for such inconsistent statements to be evidence of perjury that could be more easily challenged in court by the defense.

Both versions would restrict the release of grand jury transcripts, because prosecutors say gang members and their associates try to use the testimony to intimidate witnesses to persuade them not to testify at trial.

Prosecutors are rallying behind the Senate plan, saying it offers tougher provisions to help them win convictions. Some are expected to meet with DiMasi today.

Last week, Reilly wrote a letter to DiMasi urging the House to pass a measure that includes the tougher perjury standard. ''We must not only protect witnesses, but also hold them accountable," Reilly wrote. ''Too often, witnesses to crime avoid their duties by purposefully providing inconsistent statements, knowing both the investigation and prosecution will be hindered and they will not be held accountable."