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Community organizing at the "margins of the margins:" Safeguarding spaces

 

At the heart of organizing at the "margins of the margins" in the culture-centered approach (CCA) is the building and securing of spaces for participation of those who have been erased from discursive registers.

 This process of building trust is both tenuous and fragmented, one which has to be held closely through communicative processes that create security. Security for the community, for the members at the "margins of the margins" who negotiate multiple layers of oppressions daily.

Because of the historic uses of power that have erased and continue to erase community voices while simultaneously co-opting them to serve dominant agendas, community members at the "margins of the margins" are often skeptical of academics and non-governmental organizations coming into communities to extract stories and participatory articulations that fit their pre-configured agendas. 

For community members at the "margins of the margins," professional and middle class people often come into communities to fulfill their own pre-configured agendas. For these professional classes, communities exist as passive recipients of solutions. This process of turning communities into passive recipients simultaneously creates money making mechanisms that support and sustain the administrative bureaucratic functions of NGOs. 

The NGO-ization of social change therefore is a continual process of erasure of community agency and community sovereignty.

For the CCA, the co-creation of voice infrastructures at the "margins of the margins" turns to the careful labour of listening to build spaces of trust. 

Being critically aware of power and its workings, especially of its co-optive potential means that community spaces have to be safeguarded, closely attending to community voice in determining the strategies to pursue, whether to pursue relationships with NGOs at all, whom to invite to partner with if indeed such partnerships are useful to communities, and the steps to put into place so community voice isn't erased or co-opted. Communities establish mechanisms of accountability through which they hold academics and NGOs to account.

This also means that the process of decision-making in the hands of communities continually and closely evaluates the question of community sovereignty when considering relationships with NGOs.  NGOs that threaten community sovereignty are harmful to the process of building community voice and community leadership in social change. Such NGOs often see community sovereignty as threat, even as they use the rhetoric of community engagement. It is vital that such NGOs be identified and resisted as they threaten the authentic participation of community members at the "margins of the margins." If the state supports such NGOs through public funding, community organizing mobilizes to defund the professional consolidation of power and control. The transformative power of community organizing resists the NGO-ization of social change.

Organizations that support community voice will be embedded in an ethic of listening, will know how and when to step back, and will most vitally respect community agency in the determination and implementation of community-led solutions. 

It is for those at the "margins of the margins" to continually evaluate the many organizations that reach out to them, clearly delineating the terms in which they will engage organizations, and the continual processes of evaluation they will subject academics and NGOs to. The process of accountability thus shifts to the voices of communities at the "margins of the margins," working to transforming the communicative inequalities that play out in social change. For structural transformations to work, the power of social change must always be centered in the participation of communities at the "margins of the margins."

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