Planting the Seeds of Justice

With rare exception, the fight against injustice is a slow, incremental process--sometimes glacially slow. And injustice often pushes back.

"We certainly are in a situation now where we are on the losing side," says Peter Kuhns ’98, a field organizer for ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now). For him, the fight is about empowering low-income communities to seek their own justice.

The fight can be daunting, Kuhns acknowledges, but in the same breath he describes his job as "very satisfying".

"Certainly progress is being made, but we are not anywhere near where we would like to be, which is to have a major portion of our country organized," Kuhns says. "It is an ongoing process."

Process is a word Kuhns almost clings to.

"You have to look at what the larger picture is," he says, giving advice to anyone who may want to join a similar effort. "It’s about the process, not about one victory we may or may not get."

He has been with ACORN for almost 4 years now, working sometimes 50 to 60 hours a week, often including Saturdays. As a field organizer, Kuhns’s job is to go into low-income neighborhoods and help create a movement from within.

As the name ACORN implies, the organization plants a seed in a community, then depends on those living there to make something grow. It is an effort Kuhns says he is committed to.

"Self-sufficiency is our goal," says Kuhns. "The larger goals is building power for low-income people, so they have a voice in the decisions that are made about their lives."

Kuhns works in Los Angeles, one of the newer chapters. ACORN has been in LA for about 6 years, he says.

"It is daunting. It is overwhelming and inspiring at the same time," Kuhns explains. "Part of helping to combat a feeling of desperation is being part of a national organization…We have won some major changes."

ACORN is a grassroots organization started 32 years ago in Little Rock, Arkansas. Then, a group of welfare mothers began pushing for access to better jobs with fairer wages. Today it purports to be have a membership of 125,000, with 500 neighborhood chapters in 40 cities across the country. Its aim is to organize low-income communities so they can fight for changes that will benefit them.

The theory behind ACORN was not new to Kuhns when he joined. He had learned about these same principles, which he calls "social change theory", while at Pomona College. In his words, "the key principles are having the people effected by the problem leading the fight for change, and feeling ownership. Building a democratic organization that is going to continue to push for those changes."

Kuhns says he first developed a sense that he wanted to "help fight injustice and level the playing field" for disadvantaged communities when he was growing up in Iowa City, Iowa. He was raised in a middle-class neighborhood, but began working with low-income individuals at a nonprofit center in town--in Iowa City, low-income meant "mostly people of color," Kuhns says.

The work was rewarding, he adds, but he wanted to affect change at a deeper level.

As he prepared to choose a college, he looked westward to Los Angeles. He had a desire to live in a more diverse community than the one in which he grew up.

"I always wanted to work in a diverse community. I’m happier that way. Iowa City is pretty homogenous…mostly white, mostly middle-class."

He enrolled at Pomona College, a smaller school than he had originally hoped to attend. It was only later, he says, he realized the school’s size was an advantage since it afforded him a chance to develop more meaningful relationships with his professors and fellow students who would have a profound effect on his life.

Sitting in the middle of Claremont, the immediate neighborhood surrounding Pomona College is not much different than the Kuhns’s Iowa City. Seeking to get out into a more diverse community, he volunteered to work with Pomona Partners, a program brings college students into schools in the city of Pomona.

That city, which gave the college its namesake when it was first established there, has a far larger minority community and many more disadvantaged neighborhoods than does Claremont.

On campus, Kuhns joined like-minded students in a campaign to create a diversity requirement as part of the college’s core curriculum, and he protested against state Proposition 209, which ended many affirmative action programs in California’s public colleges and universities.

"I had teachers that encouraged me to be active," Kuhns says, including some with backgrounds in union organizing. "Real change, fundamentally, comes from organizing, pushing from the outside, and agitating."

He learned about ACORN through a campus-recruiting program. Kuhns did not join the group right out of college, however, first taking a part-time job at a substance abuse treatment center for kids in Pomona.

He found himself attracted to ACORN, finding it the closest thing to putting the theory he learned in college into practice. "This really was a pure building of a movement for social and economic justice, which is really what I wanted to do."

The first campaign he worked on with ACORN was in Watts, a city long synonymous with "poor, disadvantaged and minority." The effort was to get alleyways in certain areas cleaned up and closed off to through traffic.

"The strategy to winning was direct action: inviting city administrators out on a tour, bringing the media out, asking, ‘When are you going to fix this?’ and shoving a microphone in their face," says Kuhns.

In spite of the tactics, and the seemingly harmless request, the campaign was not a complete success.

"You don’t always win," Kuhns says. "The most important thing is the process, showing people they have power and have a voice. Having people feel like they have a seat at the table in making decision that affect their lives.

"I think there a lot of people doing great work in this field. I wish there were more."
Indeed, it takes many hands on the glacier to start it back in the right direction.

-Gary Scott