A Traumatic Legacy of a Hard People - In order to understand my passion for social and economic justice, you have to understand how the trauma my father experienced trickled down to me.
My father was six years old - the oldest of five children - when his dad was killed in a coal mine explosion in West Virginia. My grandmother was a peasant girl recently immigrated from the farms of western Ukraine. She could neither read or speak much English when she was left with five young children to feed and raise on her own in the American Appalachia.
What my dad remembered about that time was not so much the loss of his father, but the trauma caused by the actions of the coal company. The coal company evicted my grandmother and her five children from the company house where they were living and cut off credit to the company store after my grandfather was killed.
The actions of the coal company left my father's family homeless. The union stepped in to help my grandmother get on her feet, making sure she received my grandfather's pension which she collected for the rest of her life. Her family and friends helped her move back to Western Pennsylvania and start over.
My father never forgot the callous disregard of the coal company. They took his father's life and tossed my dad and his family out on the streets because they were of no economic benefit. His mistrust for people and corporations in power is something I inherited.
Organizing is in My DNA - Western Pennsylvania where I grew up was a hotbed of union organizing. In the 1920's the miners of our area were on strike and the coal company brought in replacement workers. Knowing that their men would be killed if they tried to stop the replacement workers, the women organized. They marched to the coal field and attacked the replacement workers with shovels, kitchen knives and table salt to throw in their eyes. As you can see, I come from a tough, but hard-scrabble people.
I grew up in a place where workers and people banded together to counter the abuse of the powerful. When I moved away from home I was shocked to learn that there were factories and work sites that did not have a union. I guess you can say that organizing for justice is in my blood.
Learning to Organize - I enrolled in the VISTA program after graduating from college and they sent me to Baraboo, Wisconsin. It was there that I learned about the neighborhood organizing movement started by Saul Alinsky in Chicago. After Vista, I landed a position at the New England Training Center for Community Organizers (NETCO) where I learned the nuts and bolts of organizing while working in Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Ct; and Springfield MA. It was at NETCO that I was introduced to the "in your face" style of organizing to get results. I once followed a slum-lord's wife to her beauty parlor where I walked in and proceeded to hand flyers to all the staff and patrons explaining how the "slum-lord" made his living on the backs of the poor tenants. Needless to say - the landlord was not happy - but he began to meet with our group and agree to our demands to repair his properties.
Honing My Craft - I took a job as the head of a neighborhood community organization in Indianapolis and it was there that I really learned my craft. In fact, our organizing to combat crime was so successful that the U.S. News and World Report wrote about our achievement of reducing crime by 20% in our community.
Organizing for God's People - The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee hired me to lead the social justice work on behalf of the church. Much of the organizing took on a state-wide focus as we addressed issues of welfare reform, childcare, education, hunger, homelessness, job training and even drug abatement.
The Governor Tried to Fire Me - I once led a large protest over state government plans to cut welfare benefits for needy moms and kids. We said the cuts were short sighted and mean spirited. We gave the governor a bible to clear up his "mean spirit" in proposing the cuts. The governor wasn't too happy and called my boss, the Archbishop and demanded that I be fired. To his great credit, the Archbishop just laughed when he told me about the call and said "You're doing your job Mike. Keep it up."
A Victory Worth $628 Million - and Counting - I was the lead organizer for a five-year effort to create a Milwaukee Housing Trust Fund. We were a scrappy group and held an "action" a month throughout most of that period. And, we were creative. We released 100 helium balloons in the rotunda of City Hall, built an Igloo outside of the Mayor's home as a "plan B" if we didn't win a Housing Trust Fund, we had church members collect hundreds of keys that we delivered to the Mayor - to represent the hundreds of housing units needed in the city, and we did so much more. We finally won and to date, the Milwaukee Housing Trust Fund has invested $19.6 Million in housing which has leveraged over $628 Million in private investment and has created over 3,000 units of affordable housing. One city official called this campaign one of the "most impressive grass-roots campaigns" in recent city history.
Racial and Economic Segregation - I worked with the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee to engage urban and suburban congregations in a conversation on the issue of segregation in the region. We guided the partners through a multi-step education and relationship building process, seeking to better understand the structural causes of regional segregation, with the hope that deepened relationships and a better understanding of the underlying issues would eventually lead to a desire for change. As David Brooks, a New York Times columnists wrote: “You realize that coming together across race is not a neat two-step process: truth and reconciliation. It’s an emotionally complex, thousand-step process...”
My father was six years old - the oldest of five children - when his dad was killed in a coal mine explosion in West Virginia. My grandmother was a peasant girl recently immigrated from the farms of western Ukraine. She could neither read or speak much English when she was left with five young children to feed and raise on her own in the American Appalachia.
What my dad remembered about that time was not so much the loss of his father, but the trauma caused by the actions of the coal company. The coal company evicted my grandmother and her five children from the company house where they were living and cut off credit to the company store after my grandfather was killed.
The actions of the coal company left my father's family homeless. The union stepped in to help my grandmother get on her feet, making sure she received my grandfather's pension which she collected for the rest of her life. Her family and friends helped her move back to Western Pennsylvania and start over.
My father never forgot the callous disregard of the coal company. They took his father's life and tossed my dad and his family out on the streets because they were of no economic benefit. His mistrust for people and corporations in power is something I inherited.
Organizing is in My DNA - Western Pennsylvania where I grew up was a hotbed of union organizing. In the 1920's the miners of our area were on strike and the coal company brought in replacement workers. Knowing that their men would be killed if they tried to stop the replacement workers, the women organized. They marched to the coal field and attacked the replacement workers with shovels, kitchen knives and table salt to throw in their eyes. As you can see, I come from a tough, but hard-scrabble people.
I grew up in a place where workers and people banded together to counter the abuse of the powerful. When I moved away from home I was shocked to learn that there were factories and work sites that did not have a union. I guess you can say that organizing for justice is in my blood.
Learning to Organize - I enrolled in the VISTA program after graduating from college and they sent me to Baraboo, Wisconsin. It was there that I learned about the neighborhood organizing movement started by Saul Alinsky in Chicago. After Vista, I landed a position at the New England Training Center for Community Organizers (NETCO) where I learned the nuts and bolts of organizing while working in Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Ct; and Springfield MA. It was at NETCO that I was introduced to the "in your face" style of organizing to get results. I once followed a slum-lord's wife to her beauty parlor where I walked in and proceeded to hand flyers to all the staff and patrons explaining how the "slum-lord" made his living on the backs of the poor tenants. Needless to say - the landlord was not happy - but he began to meet with our group and agree to our demands to repair his properties.
Honing My Craft - I took a job as the head of a neighborhood community organization in Indianapolis and it was there that I really learned my craft. In fact, our organizing to combat crime was so successful that the U.S. News and World Report wrote about our achievement of reducing crime by 20% in our community.
Organizing for God's People - The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee hired me to lead the social justice work on behalf of the church. Much of the organizing took on a state-wide focus as we addressed issues of welfare reform, childcare, education, hunger, homelessness, job training and even drug abatement.
The Governor Tried to Fire Me - I once led a large protest over state government plans to cut welfare benefits for needy moms and kids. We said the cuts were short sighted and mean spirited. We gave the governor a bible to clear up his "mean spirit" in proposing the cuts. The governor wasn't too happy and called my boss, the Archbishop and demanded that I be fired. To his great credit, the Archbishop just laughed when he told me about the call and said "You're doing your job Mike. Keep it up."
A Victory Worth $628 Million - and Counting - I was the lead organizer for a five-year effort to create a Milwaukee Housing Trust Fund. We were a scrappy group and held an "action" a month throughout most of that period. And, we were creative. We released 100 helium balloons in the rotunda of City Hall, built an Igloo outside of the Mayor's home as a "plan B" if we didn't win a Housing Trust Fund, we had church members collect hundreds of keys that we delivered to the Mayor - to represent the hundreds of housing units needed in the city, and we did so much more. We finally won and to date, the Milwaukee Housing Trust Fund has invested $19.6 Million in housing which has leveraged over $628 Million in private investment and has created over 3,000 units of affordable housing. One city official called this campaign one of the "most impressive grass-roots campaigns" in recent city history.
Racial and Economic Segregation - I worked with the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee to engage urban and suburban congregations in a conversation on the issue of segregation in the region. We guided the partners through a multi-step education and relationship building process, seeking to better understand the structural causes of regional segregation, with the hope that deepened relationships and a better understanding of the underlying issues would eventually lead to a desire for change. As David Brooks, a New York Times columnists wrote: “You realize that coming together across race is not a neat two-step process: truth and reconciliation. It’s an emotionally complex, thousand-step process...”