Bill Kopsky: Arkansas Context & Organizing Strategy

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One of the great things about Arkansas is its diversity. We’re really more like five states in one than one state. The Delta is a lot like the Deep South – more of a plantation history and plantation culture still. The Ozarks are, in a lot of ways, more like Idaho in terms of mountaineer, libertarian, independence, scraping a living off the rocks of the hillside kind of people. And everywhere in between. You have an urban center in Little Rock that’s a small city still but has a really good urban feel to it. In northeast Arkansas, there’s large retirement communities from the upper Midwest, so there’s pockets of northeast Arkansas that are a lot more like Chicago or Missouri than they are the rest of the South. And if you go into southwest Arkansas, it’s a little more like Texas or Oklahoma.
People in Arkansas really don’t trust big things or things outside their community. It’s sort of that hillside dirt farmer who’s self-reliant, self-sufficient. They look at Little Rock as the big city. They don’t trust Little Rock, they sure as heck don’t trust anything outside the state. In traditional organizing, you go into a community, and you say, “I’m here to form a chapter of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel.”
And in Arkansas, when you do that, they smile at you, they wish you a good day and they move on. So what we had to do is we had to adjust. So what we do now, instead of forming chapters of the Panel, we form independent community groups. We go into a community; people tell us they have some issues.
“We want to help you form an organization to deal with that. You’re gonna name it. You’re gonna pick the leadership of it. You’re gonna pick the agenda of it. We’ll leave any time you ask us to leave. We’re here solely at your request. We’ve done this a few times and we might be able to help you make some shortcuts and be a little bit more effective a little faster.”
And that bargain with our communities has really worked because folks feel like they have the local control and the ownership of it, and they don’t feel like some big outside entity is pushing on it, but that’s fairly unique in the community organizing world.
The other thing that we do that’s different is, we had worked for years to try to build — our goal is to build sustainable community organizations, not to address this issue or that issue. We really want civic engagement over the long haul in these communities and really bring grassroots people to the table as powerful partners in the political process in those communities. And for a long time, we were addressing issues. People would call us and say, this bad thing was happening and could we come and help them? And we were doing that and we had a pretty good track record. We got a superfund site cleaned up. We got city council policy changed in this way, we got these improvements made at this school, that sort of thing. But those groups that we were working with on the sort of crisis-oriented organizing always fell apart, and they fell apart whether we were successful or not successful. They always fell apart and it wasn’t sustainable.
And so, we’ve started working in communities just to simply help them develop a plan for the community, and multi-issue from the very beginning, with the intention to be sustainable from the very beginning. And that model’s been really successful for us. It’s been a total sea change.

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