Linda Stout grew up poor in North Carolina as the daughter of a tenant farmer and a mill worker. As Stout worked to improve her community while struggling to make ends meet with low-wage work, she found that her contributions as a leader were often neglected because she looked and spoke differently than the educated, white, middle-class leadership of the '70s progressive movement. Rather than simply adapt and assimilate, Stout has worked to develop organizing styles that empower all people, regardless of background, and allow those in underserved communities to speak for themselves as they work for social change.
As the founder of the influential grassroots Piedmont Peace Project, and as founder and director of Spirit in Action, Stout has led the way in building a cross-class, multiracial social justice movement. She is the author of "Bridging the Class Divide and other Lessons for Grassroots Organizers," and is a nationally recognized organizing consultant and trainer. Stout was in Seattle in May to promote her new book, "Collective Visioning: How Groups Can Work Together For a Just and Sustainable Future."
A lot of us were excited and inspired to see Obama elected as president and understood his insistence that social movements, and not elected leaders, propel change. How well do you think, as a movement, we've measured up to that challenge?
I don't think we have. I took a leave to work on that campaign. I saw all the excitement, lots of young people, lots of people who had never organized in their lives. And they were left with nothing to do. We didn't take advantage of the moment.
Some say the lost opportunity was on Obama's side and that there was an apparatus that should have been mobilized. Others think that wasn't his role and it was us on the left that missed the opportunity. What do you think?
I think it's both. I truly believe corporations and money own the whole government system, and if we were to vote the most radical, progressive organizer tomorrow, they wouldn't be able to make the change we want because the control is really in the hands of huge, big, corporate money. And I also think a lot of people felt, "Oh, we've elected this person who's liberal and he's going to do this stuff for us and we can kind of sit back and let it happen." So, I don't totally blame him.
When we talk about the "social justice movement," there's this sort of assumption that there is a social justice movement.
That it exists, yeah. If we put it all together we might call it a movement. I tend to refer to it as "we," but we're not connected, and we're not working collaboratively, and we don't have collaborative messages. I think we have to if we're going to win. Groups are starting to understand that. But even as they come together, they're not doing the deeper work of building relationships and connections. They still work in competition around funding and who gets credit, rather than building trust so that we're all working toward the same goals.
As I understand your ideas around collective visioning, they come down to articulating a positive vision, working across differences in an intentional way, and tapping into the sort of spirituality that drives us in our work.
Well, I don't use the word "spiritual": I use the word "spirit." What I mean by that is the heart, the inspiration and deeply held values or beliefs that for some people are spiritual or religious. But for a lot of people, these are just human values and heart values. We have to find other ways to honor that part of ourselves, and bring that part forward and respect that in each other and allow everybody to be their whole selves. We had one network meeting where one young man, an extremely progressive activist and an incredible leader, actually started crying and said, "This is the first time I've felt safe to come out of the closet as a Christian."
So this brings me to a question. Lefties can be a pretty judgmental bunch.
Very.
How do we get them to stop that?
I don't know how to get them to stop. I remember going to this meeting after the Bush/Gore election that was stolen, and people were talking about why did those stupid people vote against their own best interest? And they were talking about Southerners, you know, my people. Poor Southern people. A lot of these folks talk about them being uneducated. I would say it's more that they're mis-educated and believe certain things that they're told.
I said to them, this group of people I was with, "I want to know how many of the people in this room -- not counting your families -- how many in this room have really good friends who are Republicans?" And no one raised their hand. "And how many in this room have friends who are conservatives?" No one raised their hand. And I said, "Well I have to tell you, I have really good friends who are Mormons, I have friends who are Republicans. But how can you have those conversations when all you do is critique those folks all the time?"
There are a lot of groups that are learning to shift culture and build these relationships and work deeply, and then they begin to realize, "Wow, our work is going faster, we're able to accomplish much more; while we're having fun, we're building deep relationships." So that's why I say, "Going slow in order to go fast," because so many of our grassroots organizations are working on such desperate issues that we feel we have to rush, rush, rush to save the world and we don't take time to do the relationship building, the healing [of] divisions, the visioning that it requires to do up front.
Well here's my question: Building trusting relationships across differences takes a willingness to step outside one's comfort zone. What motivates some groups to do this or keeps others from going in that direction?
I see a few things. One is that there were usually a couple folks, often older people, who were really afraid of change. And the group would not stand up and say, "Well, we have to lose a couple members in order to move forward, to make real change, to really embrace people." If you are not willing to let go of those folks, those two or three folks in the group who maybe agree with the values but aren't willing to change, then you're not going to be able to move forward with building an open and welcoming space. They may come back around, very often they do.
And the second thing is that, for groups who say that they're really working to be an anti-racist, anti-classist organization, the first thing I say is, "I want to look at your budget." Because if you don't have budget in there for -- depending on where you live -- transportation, for paying for people, for food, for child care, then you're not serious about diversity.
You have to actually take action to show that you truly are wanting this kind of change. You know people say, "Well, we invited them, but they didn't come." I've heard that so many times. There was this peace group, this white, middle-class peace group, and I went to their meeting to talk to them about the fact that they keep inviting people and they didn't come. And we went and it was a gated community, and you had to go through the guard, give your name and get permission to go into the place. And I said, "Well I can tell you right now why people aren't coming!"
Let me play devil's advocate here.
Okay.
Say I'm a middle-class guy, and I've got some issue that me and my community [are] concerned about and we've got resources, we've got political clout, and we know how to get things done. Why should we screw around working with all these poor people who don't have those assets?
Because you're not going to win without us.
Why?
Because I would say the majority of poor people hold progressive values. I mean poor white people in North Carolina were voting for Jesse Helms and they thought he was exactly the right [person]. And we began to organize them and ask questions like "Well, did you know how Jesse Helms votes?" We built this 8?