So...What Is A Parallel Institution, Anyway?

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Wikimedia Commons, by Fuzheado (Andrew Lih).  Released Under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license

By Clarence Thompson

I thought I'd provide a bit more clarification regarding the Flying University Project. Specifically, what exactly is the Flying University Project and what are we trying to do with it? Our blog describes this Project as a "parallel institution." But not everyone may know what a parallel institution is, since it's a rather geeky term that comes from the theory and study of nonviolent resistance. We describe a parallel institution as "a local, small group of ordinary people who organize to provide needed services for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford."

That means that parallel institutions are community organizations. But they are a special kind of "community organization." When people in the United States use the term "community organization" nowadays, they usually think of a building in which paid employees of an "agency" provide "services" to "clients" who are usually not involved in creating or producing the "services". One particular feature of such "organizations" is that they are usually funded (paid for) by mysterious, unseen "donors" (like corporations, government agencies, or other people with great big money) instead of being supported by the contributions of the people who use the services of the organization.

Parallel institutions are a very different kind of organization. I'll use a definition created by a man named Marshall Ganz. He is a professor at Harvard University and he teaches people in oppressed communities how to organize themselves. He earned the right to teach because he learned to organize by participating in the 1960's Civil Rights struggle on behalf of African-Americans, and he also helped Cesar Chavez in organizing the United Farm Workers union.

Dr. Ganz describes "community organizations" thus: community organizations are arrangements between people who have the same interests who come together to pool their resources in order to achieve their interests. Examples of this are communities of immigrants who come together and chip in their financial resources to create their own credit union so they can have access to low-interest loans, or communities of poor people who can't afford health insurance, but who chip in their own resources so they can have a community doctor. The United Farm Workers union started out as this kind of community organization. A key characteristic of this kind of organization is that its members are the organization - that is, they are not clients being served by providers, but they are active participants in doing the work of the organization.

A second key characteristic of this kind of community organization is that it is built on relationships. One aspect of these relationships is that they are relationships of exchange. This is especially true of the relationship between the leaders of the organization and the other members of the organization (also known as the "constituency".) According to Dr. Ganz, leadership is "accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty." The leaders of an organization accept responsibility for helping their fellow members achieve a common purpose in difficult and dangerous times. What do the members get out of this exchange? They get to see how their collective action is able to meet their needs, and hopefully also deliver them from danger. In other words, they get to see how they can "turn the resources they have into the power they need to get the change they want." What do the leaders get out of it? They get the satisfaction of knowing that their labors were successful and not wasted effort, and they get to enjoy the triumph of their people - because the victory of the constituents is also the victory of the leaders.

So what does this have to do with the Flying University Project? Some of us have accepted the responsibility for teaching and providing instructional materials - that is, we have said, "Here we are - we volunteer to make ourselves available to teach and to write textbooks. We volunteer to put in the time and energy and resources to make ourselves the best teachers we can be during the time we have." Our specialty right now is teaching math, although we hope to expand our offerings. This is what we bring to the relationship of this particular community organization. But there are not that many of us, and we only have an hour a week to spend with our students. So we need our students to give something to this relationship also. We need students to be willing to put in the time needed to get good at math as they take advantage of our teaching and the books and homework we give them. And getting good at something takes time. Cognitive psychologists (smart people who study how students learn) have found that it takes daily time and practice to get really good at something. For instance, if you want to become an expert piano player, you need to spend 3 hours a day in deliberate practice, and you need to do this for 10 years in order to become an expert.

That leads to the question of how students should spend their time. Some might argue after all that they get enough schooling and homework just from going to school, and they don't see why they should have to do anything extra. But they might want to consider that the Portland Public Schools have the worst high school graduation rate of all large Oregon public school districts. Some of our elementary schools are in the bottom 5 percent of Oregon schools as far as academic performance. If you were asked to buy a ticket to fly on an airline whose pilots were as good at their jobs as the Portland Public Schools are in their jobs, would you fly on that airline?

Others might argue that kids already have lots of extra-curricular activities after school and therefore they don't have time for extra instruction and homework to help them get good at math. But consider for a minute what kinds of extra-curricular activities are marketed to children of color (especially Black children). We're constantly being steered toward spending our time in becoming really good athletes or entertainers. But consider the Bible verse that is quoted on the Flying University Project blog: "And let our people also learn to engage in good (or, beautiful) deeds to meet pressing needs, that they may not be unfruitful." - Titus 3:14. The purpose of education is that we might learn to engage in beautifully good work in order to meet pressing needs. This is how oppressed people gain the power they need to liberate themselves from oppression. So we need to ask ourselves what things people actually need - in other words, what sorts of things they simply can't live without. Do we need professional sports? I don't think so - after all, I have lived happily for many years without receiving my FDA recommended dietary allowance of basketball shows on TV. The same goes for entertainment - I have never suffered any bad health effects from not listening to any of the various forms of modern American pop music.  (Or country, or rap/hip-hop, or classic rock, or....)

But there are times when communities of color find that they need expert services from people who look like them, because they find that they can't trust many expert providers who are from the dominant culture.  For instance, if you are Black and you find that you are suffering from substandard dental care, you may search for a Black dentist - and you may find that dentists who are Black are as hard to find as teeth on a bird. This is a small example of how oppressed communities - such as communities of color - suffer when they have to rely on the services of a hostile dominant society that always manages to drop the ball in some small way in providing the services they say they can provide. What we need is to develop our communities - our communities - so that we have the power to take care of our own needs as a people and to thrive as a people in the midst of a difficult and dangerous world. This is what the Flying University Project is about. And to achieve our goal, we're all going to have to give up some blood, sweat and tears. The goal is worth the sacrifice. Let's do this.