Resources for Popular Education
Tom Heaney
The adult education enterprise derives its legitimacy and value from the social and economic purposes which it serves. Human Resource Development, for example, can only be understood in relation to productivity and the demands of unfettered markets which it supports. Literacy education-we are told-develops self-reliant and fully contributing citizens, hence its importance to a well-functioning state. The cost of adult education-it is further argued-should be part of the overall costs of doing business or being a democracy. The search for resources, therefore, begins (and frequently ends) with the "cost center" served by the enterprise. Business underwrites HRD. State and federal governments do-or, most agree, should-support adult basic education. Strings are attached to such funding, as the saying goes, but fortunately the ties between program and funding resource are explicit and intended.
Popular education is a different case altogether. As with other forms of adult education, it too derives its value from the broader social agenda which it serves. But that agenda is democratic social change. Unlike "trickle-down" education in which the more highly educated bestow bits of knowledge on the unknowing, popular educators advocate what Myles Horton called the "percolator" theory of knowledge-knowledge which wells up from the bottom, from people reflecting on their experiences not merely to understand them, but to transform them. The aim of popular education is not adaptation to the demands of the workplace, but to reclaim work and the fruits of labor as a right. The aim of popular education is not facility with words, but a voice.
The term "popular education" comes to us primarily from the southern hemisphere where people who have been denied access to schools, universities, and most other resources have created their own centers of learning. In the United States, practitioners of popular education are principally those working in poor and working class neighborhoods. They work within community-based organizations with widespread popular support and participation in decision-making. Until recently, popular educators have had little connection with mainstream networks, associations, and institutions of adult education. Like all educators, popular educators serve a social purpose. That purpose is reformist, and at times revolutionary. Popular education envisions a yet-to-be-created social order-an order which, if realized, would challenge the legitimacy of "cost centers" currently funding mainstream adult education, principally business, industry, and the state. Hence, access to financial resources through these traditional donors presents special difficulties for popular educators.
The Dangers of Funding
Popular educators and the community-based organizations (CBOs) within which they work have experienced frustration in the rigged competition for public and private funds. When grants have been made available, the cost has often far outweighed the benefits. It is not surprising that grantors frequently place demands on those they fund which subvert any local agenda for change. Even private philanthropies such as United Way and other combined charities have been eager to stabilize and regularize community initiatives and use the leverage of funding to revise by-laws, force staff and board into adapting corporate models of organization, and play a role in the selection of board members. Many organizations-some of the most progressive and politically active among them-have simply said "no" to these heavy-handed efforts to control local initiatives.
Nonetheless, large, but short-lived federal programs have proven especially attractive to struggling and cash-starved community organizations, diverting their energy to activities marginal to their overall purpose, building a bond of dependency and disrupting the organization when the funds are no longer available. The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), for example, became the mainstay of thousands of CBOs in the late '70s, supporting staff and other expenses. When CETA funding was cut, a large number of those organizations withered and died.
More recently, the adult education funds provided by the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 through State Legalized Impact Assistance Grants (SLIAG) enabled many CBOs to double or triple their staffs, rent additional facilities and expand into other communities. In most instances, the increased overhead for such expansion required greater expenditures of time and resources than the compensation received. The mandatory SLIAG curriculum could not be reconciled with tenets of popular education and so organizations were divided, with the SLIAG staff now in the majority. The tail wagged the dog. Now that the SLIAG program is over, many CBOs are still trying to recoup their loses.
Beyond these obvious strings attached to funding, there are subtler pitfalls which await CBOs too eager to compromise local goals for short-term fiscal security. Most available funding, whether in the public or private sector, is for services, not social action. "Doing things for your clients" is the ticket to financial security-providing child care, counseling, even adult education as a service builds on a professionalized model of social change in which individuals are helped, not organized. Education for action is a different kind of activity all together. However, CBOs frequently get involved in providing services in order to support their other, more liberatory, activities, but in the end find they have become a social service agency. As such, they are able to help a few individuals escape their oppression, but incapable of changing the conditions which perpetuate oppression from generation to generation. The problem is that self-sustaining and fundable activities can quickly outgrow and eventually smother resource-poor popular education. Admittedly, a regularly paid staff is a boon for most CBOs, but it is a luxury which can erode voluntary action and participation, quickening the move to social service and away from organization and action. The history of community organizing is replete with examples of activist groups who fought to gain control over the day-to-day decisions affecting their lives, only to relinquish that control to the stabilizing influence of professional service providers.
Strategies that Work
Popular education is labor intensive work. Its primary resources are commitment and vision. Organizations dedicated to popular education can and must be built on volunteers. The WestTown Center for Education and Community Leadership occupies a storefront on a triangle of commercial streets. The neighborhood is predominantly Latino. Poverty and unemployment has eroded the financial base for this depressed inner city area, but it's the Center's aim to change that. People who come to the Center for the first time are frequently surprised to find that they are not only welcome as students, but are expected to be teachers as well. The WestTown Center's tremendous growth has been possible only because everyone contributes their skill and their knowledge. Except for two older-adult secretaries, there are no paid staff. The director, all the teachers, the coordinator of child care-about forty people in all-are volunteers. The budget for this program in which more than 1,000 community members participate annually is less than $25,000, most of which is used for rent, utilities, and supplies.
While all popular education programs feature volunteers as a prime resource, some also identify profitable activities related to their overall purpose which can help subsidize their organization. Universidad Popular, for example, moved beyond its primary constituents-Central and South American immigrants-to develop a highly successful Spanish language program for their Yuppie neighbors in the gentrifying Lakeview community. As students, these Anglos became fully integrated into the Universidad's program of popular education, they participated in fiestas, learned of the social and political issues affecting Hispanic immigrants, and became involved in local efforts to effect change. Not only did the Spanish classes raise funds for the program, but they also provided a forum for recruiting support of professionals who would assist in laying claim to the wider resources of the city.
Despite the dangers of public funding, many programs have been unable to survive without it. Two strategies for avoiding the pitfalls mentioned above have been most effective in dealing with governmental sponsors. First, by keeping the proportion of public funds in the overall budget low it is possible to significantly reduce the influence of outside funding agencies, as well as the crippling risk of the loss of a major funding source. A program might, for example, have two out of eight teachers provided by a local community college.
A second strategy has been to form an umbrella organization to serve as a buffer-channeling funds from public institutions. The Alternative Schools Network (ATN), which was formed originally to lobby for direct state funding of CBOs, now subcontracts with the City Colleges of Chicago for funds which it redistributes to twenty or more member organizations, most of which are engaged in popular education. The ASN insulates CBOs from the direct influence of the sponsoring agency and absorbs much of the crippling, bureaucratic "red tape" demanded by governmental accounting offices.
A Modest Role for Institution Based Educators
Adult educators working within more traditional institutions-colleges, universities, not for profit service centers-can provide modest resources for popular education, as long as their efforts neither coopt the community's agenda for action nor preempt the community's ability to act. Given the unreliability of public funding, especially in a depressed economy, and the potential for conflict between public institutions and those whose primary agenda is to increase their share of public resources and regain control over decisions now made for them by public institutions, it is important that professionals not encourage dependency either on themselves or on the institutions employing them. Instead, professional educators should promote and support indigenous resources within the community, helping local groups to build strong organizations under local control. Rather than create further dependency among already over-dependent people-this being the consequence of a service economy approach to community problem-solving-a first step might be to assist a newly emerging group with incorporation and attaining tax exempt status. Only with their legal status secured can community-based, popular educators hope to participate as an equal and independent partner in whatever collaboration follows.
A key area of collaboration is frequently the identification and appropriation of educational resources-books, materials, facilities and expertise-, some of which are undoubtedly available within the "open spaces" of dominant institutions of learning. Assistance in fund-raising (the most scarce resource of all) is especially valued by popular educators, as long as effort focuses on expanding the resources controlled by the community and emphasize those sources of funding whose guidelines are consistent with the "action" goals of the community. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, for example, has exercised leadership nationally in its support for "grass roots" organizing and political action.
Whenever possible, institutions and agency-based educators should seek to attain direct funding for the community group, rather than seek funding for themselves, even if the funds are ultimately to enable the "professional" educators to work with their popular educator conterparts. The community can then control the collaboration, using its grant funds to hire (or dismiss) technical and other assistants from the college, university, or other agency. Only if the community controls its own funds, can the community hope to hold on to its own agenda and be free to engage in action for social change. In fact, private and corporate foundations have been frequently more receptive to direct funding of community groups which are working in partnership with more traditional institutions.
In all, it might be that professional adult educators, despite their more stable and lucrative employment, have more to gain from such collaboration with popular educators than do the popular educators themselves. The richness of social purpose which informed the fledgling field of adult education in the early years of this century is alive and well and far more widespread than is apparent at national conferences and other gatherings of adult educators. There is an important and liberating lesson for the field as it now drifts closer to the paralyzing inertia of institutionalized schooling, credentializing, and mandatory education: adult education can make the difference. The words of Eduard Lindeman are embodied in the grass-roots efforts of popular educators: "Adult education will become an agency of progress if its short term goal of self-improvement can be made compatible with a long term, experimental but resolute policy of changing the social order."
Lifelong Learning
Contact: thea@chicago1.nl.edu
Entered: 20 Jun 95.
