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SCOPE to rebuild impoverished US communities
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In August, the US acknowledged two political milestones: the one-year anniversary of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Watts.
A third civil disturbance offers lessons learned from the failures of 1965, and provides a blueprint for how we might begin to rebuild Ferguson and the many American communities that look like Ferguson. That third milestone is the 1992 unrest in South Los Angeles.
In the aftermath of the unrest, it became clear that government and private-sector responses would be woefully inadequate to the need. Grassroots community leaders working in LA’s lowest income communities had little option but to do for themselves. That’s when the organization I now lead, Strategic Concepts for Organizing & Policy Education (SCOPE), was founded.
For more than 20 years, LA community organizations like ours banded together with residents to elevate the voices of people of color and strengthen their power. We have forged strong alliances with labor and grassroots groups that advocate for people of color. We engage sophisticated “inside/outside strategies.”
As a result, community organizations in LA today are a force to be reckoned with. In the last 20 years, SCOPE has emerged as a local laboratory for LA. From day one, we were pushing the envelope.
We believe if you start by building a program for people with the most burdens, facing the greatest barriers, who come from the poorest communities, if you start there and build a program for those communities to succeed, then you have a program that will benefit everyone.
SCOPE’s 20-year-old jobs model does that. Our model couples entry-level jobs with job-training and apprenticeships to create real career pathways into good-paying union jobs in entertainment, health care and the green economy. These programs go the extra mile by providing paid on-the-job training, mentoring by experienced senior workers and tutoring to help pass certification exams and tests.
SCOPE pioneered a neighborhood-based precinct model to engage voters and turn out the vote. We have neighbors talk to neighbors on the phones and at their doors, because we know that’s the most effective way to mobilize voters.
We also invested in predictive dialing, an automated dialing program that allows us to reach an exponentially greater number of new and occasional voters. We do sustained engagement over time, during and between electoral cycles, because that’s what it takes to turn “new and occasional voters” to an “always voter.”
We call it “integrated voter engagement.” With it, SCOPE and our allies have won two recent, tide-turning initiatives. Proposition 30 generated US$9 billion for education and social services. Proposition 47 reclassified certain nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors, reversing decades of investment in prisons and redirecting resources to treatment and support.
There is still more work to be done. But we have made progress and we will continue.
Gloria Walton is president and CEO of Los Angeles-based Strategic Concepts in Organizing & Policy Education (SCOPE), which works on social and economic justice issues. Copyright: American Forum.
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