The Unwinding by George Packer

Author:George Packer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

TAMMY THOMAS

In early 2008, a little over a year after Tammy lost her job at the factory, a man named Kirk Noden asked her to meet him for coffee. Noden was a professional organizer. He had grown up not far from Youngstown, gone to college at Kent State, and worked organizing neighborhoods in Chicago and Birmingham, England. When he returned from overseas in 2006 and came to Youngstown, he tried to do what he had done in other places, following the Saul Alinsky model of community organizing: round up the troops in your group, march down to city hall or the local developer’s office, and shake the tree to get resources for the neighborhood. That approach came out of an earlier era, the middle of the twentieth century, when power was more consolidated and centralized in the cities. After a year of trying, Noden realized that the model was irrelevant in Youngstown. There were no resources to be shaken loose. The tax base had collapsed. The mayor had very little power. Industry was a ghost of its former self. The centers of power were elsewhere—in some ways, they were spread around the globe. Youngstown was so damaged, beyond anything he had expected, that it forced Noden to think in a new way.

He consulted with the Wean Foundation—old steel money from Warren—which, unlike other elites and institutions, had moved beyond nostalgic illusion and was pursuing rather radical ideas for the resuscitation of the Valley. In the summer of 2007, Noden and Wean decided to start a new community organization, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, which would become the basis for a statewide effort to fight the causes of decline—the loss of jobs, inequities based on class and race—as well as the effects. All the large institutions in Youngstown were distrusted, because they had failed: industry, unions, banks, churches, every level of government. The only way to bring about change in the Valley was block by block.

Noden began looking for organizers to hire ahead of the formal launch in the spring of 2008. Joel Ratner, the president of Wean, told Noden about a woman he had met through her work at the Salvation Army, where she was leading workshops for single mothers in an internship funded by the foundation while pursuing her bachelor’s degree in sociology at Youngstown State. “You ought to meet her,” Ratner said. “She might be a gold mine.”

Noden got in touch, and he and Tammy arranged to meet one April afternoon at the Bob Evans restaurant near her house.

The first thing Tammy noticed as Noden drank his coffee was that this fresh-faced white guy looked like a thirteen-year-old (he was in his thirties). When he mentioned the possibility of a job at a new organization, she was skeptical. She still had a year to go for her degree, she was struggling in her classes, and to be honest, she was already a little disillusioned with the world of social services. There was so much infighting—they seemed to be about maintaining their existence instead of serving folks.

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