Cold Fire and other inspirational texts

I've just finished a book called Cold Fire, about the work of Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) organizer Ernesto Cortes and the IAF philosophy. Very, very interesting. The IAF's primary role is to teach people to organize/be organizers... they've been incredibly effective. They work primarily through churches and church-affiliated organizations. It's helpful for me to think about the link that the author, Mary Beth Rogers, sees (and Cortes articulates) between faith - in this case, Catholic/Christian faith - and the work that these organizations do.

Equally interesting - maybe even more - are the ideas about building structure and motivating people here. I don't want to mis-summarize them because I'm still thinking about them - and they're pretty complicated (in a straightforward way). But several things seem relevant:
*this model is a lot about conversation - talking to people, learning about their interests, working from those. This echoes Alinsky's principle of appealing to peoples' self-interest, of course (because Alinsky was the founder of the IAF, so this extends out from his ideas...)
*this model is also about teaching/education. We can do teaching and education - that *is* what we do. Here, the organizations that Cortes and others work with are educating about some pretty basic, humanitarian needs -- like clean water, drainage, and the like. What we're advocating for is not nearly as important at a survival level... it's not AIDS research, as we always say around the writing program. (Or, as Ed Katz said in a presentation on Gen Ed at EMU, "It's just college.") Not to say it's not important, but...

More, too ... but I need to ponder some more. I also need to ponder the connections between this book and Politics the Wellstone Way, which I also read last week and found quite useful. There are some *very* useful tools in that book that I think are SO important - like a chart for articulating 'your message,' 'what your opponents are saying about you,' 'what you are saying about your opponents' ... all of this makes me wonder what "our message" is. I have to remember that I'm working at the local level, though - certainly, on our campuses we have a message. Grassroots. Grassroots. That's what we know best, those local contexts - and that's where we can be most effective. I am interested in learning more about what NCTE is doing, too, of course - and I can do that, as well. But my focus is local. Mantra: local local local.

Speaking of NCTE, a little kvell here: Nora was one of 200 national winners of the NCTE Promising Young Writers Awards. Pretty cool! And the week before, she and her partner James were state champs in one of their Science Olympiad events (Food Science). What a smartie!