«In 1985, freshly graduated from Columbia University and working for a New York business consultant, Barack Obama decided to become a community organizer. Though he liked the idea, he didn't understand what the job involved, and his inquiries turned up few opportunities.
Then he got a call from Jerry Kellman, an organizer working on Chicago's far South Side for a community group based in the churches of the region, an expanse of white, black and Latino blue-collar neighborhoods that were reeling from the steel-mill closings. Kellman was looking for an organizer for the new Developing Communities Project (DCP), which would focus on black city neighborhoods.
Obama, only 24, struck board members as "awesome" and "extremely impressive," and they quickly hired him, at $13,000 a year, plus $2,000 for a car--a beat-up blue Honda Civic, which Obama drove for the next three years organizing more than twenty congregations to change their neighborhoods.
Despite some meaningful victories, the work of Obama--and hundreds of other organizers--did not transform the South Side or restore lost industries. But it did change the young man who became the junior senator from Illinois in 2004, and it provides clues to his worldview as he bids for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"I can't say we didn't make mistakes, that I knew what I was doing," Obama recalled three years ago to a boisterous convention of the still-active DCP. "Sometimes I called a meeting, and nobody showed up. Sometimes preachers said, 'Why should I listen to you?' Sometimes we tried to hold politicians accountable, and they didn't show up. I couldn't tell whether I got more out of it than this neighborhood."
But, he continued, "I grew up to be a man, right here, in this area. It's as a consequence of working with this organization and this community that I found my calling. There was something more than making money and getting a fancy degree. The measure of my life would be public service."»
in 'Obama Community Roots', artigo de David Moberg no The Nation
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