| Archive: Issue 7 - Spring 2001 |
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Social
Capital & CyberPower in the African American Community: A
Case Study (page
3 of 4)
by Abdul Alkalimat and Kate Williams CATNeT—the Coalition to Access Technology and Networking in Toledo—formed as a collaboration between the University of Toledo’s Urban Affairs Center and a local subsidized housing agency related to the Catholic Church; this agency had won a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Neighborhood Networks grant to build labs at six apartment complexes. Stage Three: University In early 1998 a University of Toledo Africana Studies course called the Poverty Seminar invited Mrs. Hamilton to speak. The seminar was discussing the question of "ending poverty once and for all," and made a special effort to look for ways to use computers and the Internet to end poverty and to bring participants up to date on the Web, email, etc. The Murchison Center attracted students' interest as a site teaching computers in a low-income African American community. Soon after Mrs. Hamilton visited the seminar, the seminar organized a "Day of Dialogue" on "Ending Poverty versus Ending Welfare" and recruited center staff to host a lit table. More than 500 people attended three panel discussions held that day. The locations—a soup kitchen in the Black community, a local farm workers union in the Latino community, and the largest auditorium on campus—attracted a wide variety of people and helped to bond the organizers—the Africana Studies program—and the Murchison Center. Summing up the event, the seminar decided to approach the Murchison Center about a partnership. The seminar would start meeting at the center and in exchange would contribute some volunteer time to the center and its programs. While the students collected data about the community, the seminar helped the center in a number of ways. Most of these were summarized in a written letter of agreement between the director of Africana Studies and Deborah Hamilton:
Work on the accounts led to some work on grant proposals, and a university representative joined the board of the center. Data gathered and discussed in the seminar, together with the tutoring experience, led to a focus on mathematics and the proficiency tests. During this time, other programs of the center ended as staff departed for various reasons. Last to leave were two women who worked or had worked for other social agencies in Toledo. They were each also ministers, oriented towards professional status as social service providers. At the same time they were struggling to make ends meet. Their formality, visible in their dress and comportment, was different from that of the university volunteers. The people from campus were "fresh legs" and brought from the seminar process a sense of mission similar to the church founders. They aimed to partner with poor people rather than deliver services to them. The university group was also more diverse: Blacks, Asians, whites, multiple faiths, experience with national social movements against racism, AIDS, nuclear weapons, environmental pollution, and the death penalty. They were 1960’s, Gen-X, and hip-hop in personal style. Mrs. Hamilton saw the differences but embraced both approaches. The community research by the students turned up the fact that close to no local elementary students were passing the math proficiency tests, and everyone recognized that math skills are a ticket to high tech, high paying jobs, where African Americans are underrepresented. Moving past the original partnership, UT and the center launched a program of practice testing and tutoring, taking place in the center, the school, and on the university campus. A similarly oriented summer youth program followed. Most of the staff distanced themselves from the partnership without participating in any meetings before they left the center, but Mrs. Hamilton continued to hold the university volunteers in high regard, because of the focus on computers, the resources coming into the center, and the education she was getting along the way. One component of this was a group trip to the Black Radical Congress in Chicago, which was her first exposure to Black Power, to a movement. The Black Radical Congress gathered together Black academics and social activists to rally African Americans who were critical of the mainstream efforts of elected officials and the conservative orientation of the Million Man March, which opted for atonement rather than activism to change state policy. The main tool used by the BRC in creating this counterpublic has been and continues to be the Internet via listservs discussions involving 15,000 subscribers. The university's seminar approach carried over into program management. Work was evaluated in meetings that included staff, volunteers and parents. For instance, after discussing various approaches to discipline, the group developed an axiom: "Discipline is a result of engagement." In other words, policing kids who are not interested in an activity was not effective. The kids had to be drawn into an activity that would absorb their attention, the way video games did at home or learning Powerpoint did at the center. This would have to involve reasoning with children and making a convincing case for whatever activity was at hand. Both administration and programming at the center was changing, but not only as a result of the university involvement. Bishop Murchison was pressing on with building a new center across the alley from the old one, and it was finished in June 1999. Bishop Murchison invited the director of Africana Studies to give the keynote address at the grand opening, a gathering of more than 300 people in front of and inside the new center. Bishop had designed the facility with a distinct room for a computer lab, and small grants finally came in to allow the center to fill the lab with eight new computers. Slightly used computers were donated by UT, as was volunteer time and a student worker who kept the PCs up and networked. The center also hired three part-timers at wages lower than the earlier staff: two Africana Studies graduate students and a computer-savvy father from the neighborhood who had joined the practice proficiency testing. In August 1999 the board acknowledged the changes when it added the phrase "community based cyberpower" to the mission statement and added strengthening the nearby school PTO to the center's goals and objectives. Over the next year the board voted in three people who came out of the work, one from UT and two grandmothers. Fifteen hours a week of computer classes, tutoring in the schools, and practice math tests became the programming. The number of people served monthly climbed steadily from roughly 55 to more than 250 by early 2000. Parents—predominately grandmothers raising grandchildren—were recruited into the tutoring/testing activities and began to help make decisions and implement programs. Several of them had computers or wanted computers, and an electronic discussion list was implemented via the online service eGroups. With a free electronic discussion list via Egroups.com and two donated computers placed temporarily at grandmother's homes, four people from campus and four from the community were able to stay in touch and make decisions. An average of 62 messages were posted per month. One third of the messages came from the non-university list members, who were not accustomed to typing or to broadcasting their ideas. A breakthrough came when one grandmother succeeded in using Egroups to assign out tasks for a barbeque. This was done from her home without any direct assistance from others. The center's computer classes ranged from elementary-Adult Basic Computing-to advanced, particularly when a new UT course, The Black Church, set a requirement that students build a web page for a local church. Cyberchurch, as it came to be called, evolved into a mainstay offering at the center. One of the students stepped forward to teach it. This did not come without struggle. Board members representing local agencies within the government bureaucracy kept aloof from the center. One expressed strong disagreement with the center's programs. Elements at King School became defensive about new forces in the PTO and attempted to steal the PTO election. A controversy broke out over a passage in a report published by the center, a passage that one grandmother ultimately labeled a "wake up call:" Year after year … the King Cougars win the city basketball tournament. Last year the team was undefeated, 28-0. Also last
year, no 4th or 6th grade King student passed all five proficiency
tests. Nine percent of 4th graders and 7 percent of 6th graders
passed the math test. A crisis came in spring 2000 when the CDBG grant proposal was 20 minutes late and as a result, rejected. The center's testimony before the city council—delivered by the director of Africana Studies—did not change matters. The center drew strong approval from longtime liaison workers at CDBG, who had read the detailed monthly reports and saw the center's tremendous growth trajectory. New people were brought onto the board and are at work raising funds. As of now, the watchword at the center is "sustainability," both in terms of funding and in terms of people. The university forces brought a movement mentality to the center that supplanted the professional orientation of stage two. The state edged out the tight group of ideological St. James Church leaders of stage one. The future goal is to move firmly into a stage four, where the broader community itself is in the driver's seat at the Murchison Community Center. At that point St. James Baptist Church, the state, and the university, will all have to move into new supporting roles. The center is now an island of connectivity in the community; as it moves forward it will be poised to become just one station on the modern underground railroad, one node on a network into the information society promised land. Analysis The historical narrative of the Murchison Center is summed up in Table 3.
As noted above, this pattern of social capital is highly suggestive of a broader pattern that has been repeated at various stages of Black community development and the freedom struggle. Innovation takes place based on initiatives generated within the Black community. The state steps in, either to stop what is new or to reconfigure it in line with agency specifications and funding requirements. This process suggests a process of spontaneity followed by institutional cooptation. For instance, in 1964 the Mississippi Summer Project initiated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) started a network of "Freedom Schools" to intervene in the early childhood development of poor children. In 1965 the federal government took this project as inspiration for a federal program called Operation Head Start. In this case a state bureaucracy replaced a movement. Several scholars have studied the intervention of the state to block the new tactics of the 1960s civil rights movement. Doug McAdam found that the state was not interested in advancing the movement but in preserving "public order." (45) Piven and Cloward found that "in the wake of the student sit-ins and the freedom rides the Kennedy administration attempted to divert the civil rights forces from tactics of confrontation to the building of a Black electoral presence in the South." (46) The difference in the case of the Murchison Center is the continuity of leadership. Throughout the history of the Murchison Center, continuity insuring the stability and growth of the center has rested on its founder, Bishop Murchison, and its founding institution the church, which has supported the third continuity in the form of Mrs. Deborah Hamilton. Mrs. Hamilton has been executive director, mostly without pay, since 1994. Bishop Murchison has attended 94 of the 107 recorded board meetings. Attendance
at meetings is a solidly documented empirical indicator of social
capital. Putnam bases his social capital argument on a decline
in attendance: In table 4 we present data on attendance at board meetings from 1992 to 2000. Note that although not all 1993 and 1994 board meeting minutes were available, complete data on board membership for that period was. Table 4. Social Capital: Attendance at Board Meetings by Institutional Affiliation, 1992-2000, as Percent of Total
The mission statement of an organization is a good indicator of its ideology. Table 5 below reviews changes to the center's mission statement over the three stages of its history. As noted above, the first statement reflects church language along with the grassroots slogan of "Awareness, Education, and Outreach." The second statement speaks the language of bureaucracy, but the slogan "Knowledge is Power," also adopted during stage two, expresses the orientation of Bishop Murchison and St. James Church, reflecting the historic Black commitment to education and to struggle. Stage three brought a new concept from the technologically oriented poverty seminar: community-based cyberpower.
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