Community organizers help folks overcome poverty, powerlessness

Susan Hudgins wants you to know about neighborhood organizers.

She used to be one, and it royally irks her to hear the job sneered and jeered at as part of the presidential election campaign. It comes up because Democratic candidate Barack Obama has on his resume a stint as a neighborhood organizer in South Chicago.

Susan is retired and living with a rambunctious cat in a neat Hilton Head Island apartment. We were classmates in Leadership Hilton Head, and she has helped provide psychological services at the Volunteers in Medicine Clinic that serves uninsured local workers free.

Four decades ago, Susan was helping the poor inRoanoke, Va., get the aid the law provided. She taught them how to stand up for themselves and become responsible citizens.

She did it as part of a team that was busy organizing people who, by and large, felt so helpless they barely held up their own chins, let alone challenged authorities for their rights.

She worked with African Americans and third-generation Appalachian poor whites. She worked out of a Presbyterian inner-city community center, going into homes and neighborhoods to listen to people's problems.

Then she helped them see solutions and act on them. They went to county government offices and public meetings. They helped each other fill out paperwork, and organized and led meetings among themselves.

Susan helped people see that by unifying their voices, they had more power. She saw many blossom as individuals, and leaders.

"The underlying belief was that powerlessness was as much to blame for the plight of the poor as lack of money," Susan would write later in summarizing her experience. "That lack of money and powerlessness were a vicious cycle which could be broken by the poor acquiring power."

It was hard work, both physically and emotionally. It required dedication and courage. It was a meaningful, important, worthwhile job, which, for Susan in the late 1960s, paid $1.67 per hour.

Later, the Reagan-supporting, highly-successful businessman who chaired the board of her operation would testify before Congress that neighborhood organizations were fighting poverty in an efficient, cooperative, effective way.

Few want to talk about it, but Hilton Head and Bluffton have neighborhoods that need organizers. They need the private and public aid that might stem drug abuse, illiteracy and poverty.

I don't know if Obama was an effective neighborhood organizer. He'll have to stand on his own record.

But I do know that entire neighborhoods full of people need help -- even here, even today. And Susan's right. That's nothing to sneer at.