CELI TAMAYO-LEE: ORGANIZING AS THEORY AND PRAXIS Field Organizer San Francisco Rising Community-Engaged Courses: Esther Madriz Diversity Scholars Number of years working with USF: 1 Organization Mission Statement: San Francisco Rising is a grassroots alliance that has united to make lasting change in San Francisco. Our members represent the rising majority of the city – low income and working class communities of color – who contribute to the wealth and unique beauty of this city but have not benefited from its prosperity. We have a longterm vision for the city and we are in it, together, for the long run. We are uniting African American, Latino, Chinese and Filipino communities and leaders from across the city to create a new, community-based political infrastructure capable of running sophisticated electoral operations each election cycle, and winning. Describe how you integrate USF students into the work of your organization. The work of our organization is to organize with immigrants, working-class people, and people of color to build up our collective consciousness and political power in San Francisco. USF students spent hours each week directly practicing all the elements of organizing. They called young San Franciscans, surveying them upon the issues that affect them most. They gathered petition signatures and conducted presentations for a measure that would create universal free tuition in California’s public state university system. They called City College union faculty to spread the word about the campaign. They tabled on campus to register their peers to vote locally.They supported events that facilitated Know Your Rights workshops and Direct Action trainings in the wake of the anti-immigrant policies being piped down from the federal government. They welcomed audience members during a city-wide, community-led mayoral forum. These activities were the building blocks to the long term arc of enfranchising our communities, whether it was through increasing access to higher education or increasing the electorate of young people of color. The students’ time and
energy multiplied our organizational reach and turned them into more action-oriented change makers. What social justice issues do students learn about through working with your organization? The design of the Esther Madriz Diversity Scholars program is the right formula for integrating theory and praxis. While students were studying how to become an organizer, how to form a strategy and campaign plan, they were helping build the College For All campaign. They learned about the history of public higher education in California, including the fact that it was free until the Reagan administration and a slew of neoliberal policies allowed wealthy citizens to pay less and less taxes. They studied the results of those events in the data: racial and class disparities, government spending on incarceration and war. This also set a stage for understanding the importance of registering their peers to vote, knowing that today, millenials make up one-third of California’s population and 7 out of 10 of them are people of color. These issues framed the potential for political power through grassroots PROFILES IN COMMUNITY-ENGAGED LEARNING 47