CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
George Ruhe for The New York Times
Rylan Truman is following a career path that has been lightly traveled: Community Organizer.
Sally Ryan for The New York Times
Quinn Rallins, whose father grew up in Altgeld Gardens, a public housing development in Chicago where Barack Obama was a community organizer. Mr. Rallins wants to do similar work in Brockton, Mass.
Obama for America, via European Pressphoto Agency
Barack Obama went from law school to lead a voter registration drive in Chicago.
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
Marshall Ganz leads a Harvard workshop.
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Drea Chicas wants to be a community organizer after she graduates college.
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
Patrick Hidalgo is taking Marshall Ganz's community organizing class at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
Josh Daneshforooz founded All Nations Education, which organizes students in the United States to help young people in the third world go to college.
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Margot Seigle, a graduating senior at Occidental College, works with children on math literacy in the Highland Park section of Los Angeles.
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.”
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.
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.
Post: TAKE A STAND à BE PERSUASIVE!
- Respond to the questions on the bottom of each AoW or post an original response. Use text evidence to support your response.
- Reply (comment) to a teammate's response Summarize the argument made then add your own thoughts and evidence. Finally, post a question to keep the conversation going. Use text evidence to support your response.
Answer any of the following questions:
- Would you be willing be a community organizer? Why or why not? What social issue is most important to you? Why?
- What is the most important factor in getting a job? Money? Helping others? Explain and support your response.
- What social issues affect Washington Heights? Support your response with facts and statistics.
