We must organize with community

by Derik Chica

Education workers organizing has been a phenomenon at critical points in history. From Paolo Freire in Brazil using teaching as a tool for liberation and organizing in order to eradicate illiteracy, to Mary McLeod Bethune fighting to advance Black American civil rights in education, to local OSSTF/FEESO members organizing in communities everyday, education workers are uniquely positioned to effectively organize for social and economic change. Our very public education system was developed by people working together, workers engaging in collective action, people forcing the government’s hand to support more children in society, and not just the rich few.

But organizing doesn’t begin with the hope that someone else will act. It begins with you. It begins with your colleagues, your communities. It begins with relationships, hopes, and collective empowerment. It begins with actions that place organizing at the forefront of what we do as a union and a progressive society. It begins in your workplace.

Between you, your colleagues, and the community, there are a plethora of issues faced in and around your workplace. Identifying these common issues, the individuals facing them, what has been done about them, and with whom, is the beginning of community organizing. You can then map where the individuals are inside and outside your workplace, chart their relationships, and begin planning relevant initiatives.

I have been community organizing for about 13 years, since I began my career as a teacher. In my schools, I saw a need to create spaces that could empower students and communities, including my own Latine* community, that have been disenfranchised. Being in the system, I felt a social responsibility to help organize advocacy and construct sustainable activism to help improve our public education system.

I will be sharing a couple of organizing anecdotes, campaign steps taken in each case, and personal insights, with the hope of providing concrete examples of what can be done for the diversity of workplaces and issues within the Ontario public education system. I hope these anecdotes help spark some ideas for you, the reader, and possibilities for our future.

Forming the Latin American Education Network

In 2011-2012 I co-founded the Latin American Education Network. My co-chair and I met with over 50 community organizations within and serving my Latine community. We constructed and coordinated an annual education forum where we brought together students and youth, parents, and community individuals (including education workers) to discuss the systemic barriers they faced, what the education system could do about it, and what we, as a community, could do to help. We collected that information, published it under the title, “Community voices, community action: Latin American Education Network 2013 Community Education Forum Report” (Matute & Chica, 2014) in Latin American Encounters, a peer-reviewed academic journal and presented it to the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB). We followed up via Community Advisory Committees and private meetings with senior administrative staff. We won multiple demands because we organized and worked collectively, despite internal disagreements in our community.

And there were disagreements. My Latine community is a diaspora from lands larger than a continent. We come from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, each with unique colonial and decolonial histories, and reasons for emigration. Some leaders have been serving our community for decades, thus, they may have interpersonal conflicts. Discussions around international politics require more care, but we all love our children here and want the best for them, that is what brought us together.

We mapped and charted our community, picking up varying levels of support along the way. Because of this community work, we established a strong working relationship with the TDSB and TCDSB, which garnered more support amongst community members. People came to monthly meetings to not only gather information, but to co-strategize and co-construct initiatives. We held separate focused spaces for parents and youth who were more directly impacted by systemic barriers and may have less navigational knowledge. We ensured our progress was always led by what parents and youth were telling us, platforming them as often as possible. We obtained funding from the school boards, supported the creation of a school board grant for our community, and received support from unions, including
OSSTF/FEESO.

The Latin American Education Network accomplished many of our original goals. Our collaborative wins included an end to streaming, removing police officers from being stationed in schools, the creation of a Spanish parent manual for the TCDSB, continued meetings with senior staff (including the director) in both English-speaking Toronto school boards, and greater funding for youth community initiatives. Our goals were not accomplished because a few of us met with the school board with demands. We won because we were organized, made decisions together, and empowered each other to demand what we deserved.

The cancellation of the School Resource Officer program

In 2017, the Toronto District School Board was the first school board in North America to cancel its School Resource Officer (SRO) program, where police officers were stationed at one or multiple schools. One of the reasons this occurred was because a significant number of students felt uncomfortable with police consistently being in their schools, and because of fundamental differences between our education system and our policing system. Regardless of personal opinions about this action, the win was the result of deep organizing within community and worker circles.

I was fortunate to participate in some of the organizing for this campaign and bear witness to much more organizing. It began with community coalitions being built. Various community organizations had already begun advocating for the need to cancel the SRO program, dating back decades. Education workers have been involved in this advocacy from the beginning. We are members of communities too, and often involved in various groups or organizations related to sports, parenting, religious affiliations, recreation, services, or our identities. We can, and were able to, tap into our membership in these groups to bring diverse coalitions advocating for a single issue: the cancellation of the SRO program. Black Lives Matter Toronto then led a disruptive action that called out the Director of the TDSB, who responded positively with the intent of learning.

Trustees were asked to cancel the program but, together with senior staff, responded with the need to first collect research. Focus groups with students and youth from various oppressed communities, facilitated by education workers and community leaders, were struck in an attempt to listen to the most marginalized voices. OSSTF Toronto’s Black, Indigenous, and Workers of Colour Committee held an educative panel with our president, a parent, a community organization led by an OSSTF/FEESO member, and a TDSB senior staff person. A TDSB student survey was done to gather mass data for an equity analysis. This equity-based research affirmed what community members had been saying all along: the SRO program was negatively impacting a significant number of TDSB students and needed to end.

Then came the vote. Trustees were mapped out and contacted by various members of communities, education workers, and their constituents. Delegations were made en masse. Education workers and the community showed up the day of the vote. The vote passed and a recess was called to celebrate.

When education workers and the community, which includes parents, work together, history can be made. Since this advocacy, lead organizers and advocates have liaised with national and
international activists for solidarity in their actions. The SRO cancellation did not occur in a vacuum. Organizing requires relationship building, decision making being shared, and disruptive actions sparking reflections and to be constructed upon. At its core it requires listening to the voices most marginalized by our systems, which includes workers. It is foundationally about educating each other so we are consistently learning and improving.

Think about your workplace, union, or political environment. How can you empower others and include them in decision making? How can you work through disagreements and come together on common issues? How can you construct initiatives that respond to disruptive actions by individuals or communities? How can you establish working relationships with communities and parents? How can you co-learn with parents and communities to exchange ideas and knowledge?

Relationships and hope

Relationships are central to organizing. As others have said before me, these relationships cannot be transactional but must be deep and meaningful. I still know I can call someone I organized with a decade ago, see what they’re up to, and attempt to organize together again. We know that we worked through differences of opinion to arrive at our common goals. We know that we attempt to build our movements to include more people who have been empowered by collective action. We appreciate and learn from the disruptive (and liberation-leading) activists before and in front of us who spark movements, often to the detriment to their own mental health. Without relationship building, activism is not sustainable, and organizing is not possible.

Bringing it back to our educational workplaces, we labour within an oppressive system that often disenfranchises workers. In conversations with colleagues, I am sure we have all witnessed learned helplessness. The feelings that things are getting worse and there is nothing we can do about it. The thought of leaving our jobs because of the impossible expectations and the undervaluing of our labour. The sadness that our students are the ones most severely impacted by all of this.

These similar feelings existed, and exist, in my Latin American community. They existed, and exist, in communities negatively impacted by police being stationed in schools. They often exist in many worker communities. Oppression produces these feelings that we can overcome, together, through hope. By organizing, with organizers, we can co-construct hope and breakthrough false masks of apathy.

Relationships build hope. Wins build hope. Rallies build hope. Feeling a part of a community builds hope. We can do all of this and more, but it means we must talk to one another about the issues we face, bring in parents and community for deeper relationship building, and take concrete steps towards acting collectively, which includes mapping, charting, structure tests, campaigns, and coalition building.

If you are a leader in some way, how can you leverage your leadership position to take concrete steps to organize? How can you bring people together to discuss issues affecting them and creatively bring in parents and community to share stories? What resources can you produce for local workplaces to organize themselves?

Concluding thoughts

In my experience through organizing initi­a­­ti­ves, including several since 2017, the system changes when workers (the “inside”) and community (the “outside”) work together on an issue. While this labelling of “inside-outside” could be challenged in multiple ways, the idea of education workers and community working together to achieve a goal has led to successful social movements in numerous places in both the USA and Canada. In Chicago, it even led to the election of their current mayor, who was a former organizer and teacher. I like to imagine our organizing together leading to the election of a provincial Premier for us. That is hope.

Over the past few years, OSSTF/FEESO has been heavily investing in organizing for our Federation. The union’s Strategic Action Plan invests in not only hiring Regional Organizers, but in supporting local participation in election and civic participation. It’s important for us to remember that organizers are not here to do the work for us. It is impossible for a few individuals to do all the work of organizing 60,000+ members. We will win only if we empower each other, engage where we can, and put time and work towards a common goal.

OSSTF/FEESO members can, through our elected representatives, access OSSTF/FEESO provincial resources, including financial ones, to do this work. Consider talking to your local executive about supports that exist.

Education workers building relationships and organizing with hope has been present at many critical points in history. The positive aspects of public education today did not come together as a random series of acts by the government, but by people working together to move a vision forward. The solution to Ontario’s publicly funded education system’s dire situation lies with each and every one of us.

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Derik Chica (he/him)
Teacher, District 12, Toronto

* The term “Latine” arose from Queer, gender non-binary, and feminist communities in Spanish speaking countries and has recently begun to be used in Canada in boards like the Toronto District School Board (https://callmelatine.wordpress.com/2020/12/14/an-open-letter-to-allies/)

WORKS CITED
Alexandra Arraiz Matute & Derik Chica. “Community voices, community action: Latin American Education Network 2013 Community Education Forum Report.” Latin American Encounters, vol. 2, 2014, pp. 25-39. https://www.academia.edu/12246318/Community_Voices_Community_Action_Latin_American_Education_Network_2013_Community_Education_Forum_Report