Community Organizing

Happy Saturday,

As we march into the month with one whole week of 2022 behind us, I want to focus today’s blog on what we can learn from community organizers.

When I worked as the Program Director for a community-based arts organization called The Laundromat Project, my role was to support contemporary artists as they fostered meaningful connections with their neighbors via their art practice. We did this work in the quotidian spaces of New York City laundromats since so many neighbors convene there. My job was part curatorial, part art education, part administrative, and part community organizing.

While I studied Photography & Imaging in undergrad and Curatorial Practice in grad school, I didn’t have any experience with community organizing. I soon became more familiar and have since applied my community organizing lessons to just about every aspect of my life.

As I understood it, the role of a community organizer was to work themselves out of a job by following these steps:

Prepare to enter a community
Enter a community
Build trust in said community
Help connect community members around specific topics
Offer support to the community in the form of information sharing, training, advocacy, and coordination as the group learns to do it for themselves
Exit the community

Photo: Free art workshop organized by The Laundromat Project outside of The Laundry Room laundromat on 116th Street in Harlem, NY, September 2013.

So, what does community organizing have to do with being a mom?

Well, as mothers we:

Prepare for the arrival of our children
Enter our children’s lives
Foster trust with our children through love, consistency, boundary setting, physical and emotional presence, among other strategies
Teach our children how to take care of themselves
Exit the role of active mothering

We are ultimately supposed to work ourselves out of our jobs as logistical wizards, domestic goddesses, and problem solvers, and ascend to our seat as the Sages in their lives — the people they come to for wisdom and philosophical guidance.

This is how I see it anyway. 😂

Beyond following the steps above, how do we make this happen?

In order to work ourselves out of the job of active mothering, we have to give our kids space and independence to try things on their own; to figure out things even when finding the answer isn’t within reach. We must get comfortable with watching them struggle. We have to get used to the messiness of learning. And, we can’t rush to fix everything all the time. We need to be masters of imperfection.

I am still very much actively motherly and I’m in no rush to speed things up.

But, I do think often of this analogy of being the community organizer in our children’s lives.

Fostering trust while guiding and supporting them so they can eventually solve their own problems ultimately leads to the motherhood unemployment line, and that's a kind of unemployment I can get behind.

Have a great weekend!

Petrushka

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