Women in NPA-The Neighborhood Movement

By M. B. Camp

"What we have to do is reclaim America-reclaim the right to have a job, the right to decent interest rates, the right to have energy be something we can afford. We have to work together-the neighborhood groups, the women's movement, senior citizens groups; unions, civil rights groups. Each of us in our various groups have won some things but we're slipping. We have to identify issues we can work on together.'

Gail Cincotta spoke these words at a luncheon in the basement of St. Phillip Neri Church on 82nd and

Photo by M.B. Camp

St. Clair on Saturday, November 15. She is chairperson of National People's Action, a national network of community groups composed of approximately 80 percent women. She was in Cleveland to organize for for the Ohio Department of Energy hearings December 6 in Columbus, part of a national movement to address the problems of high utility rates. A group of 50 neighborhood movement leaders and community organizers heard Gail Cincotta describe how various groups in Chicago came together last October 13 on "Reclaim America Day" and are determined to continue working together on common issues.

The neighborhoods movement started in cities across the country when inner city residents began to observe a creeping deterioration of their communities. They began to organize around simple issues: getting a fire hydrant fixed; controlling stray dogs; rehabilitating abandoned homes in their neighborhoods. It became apparent that the problems were caused not by neighbors but by forces external to the neighborhoods. The federal government owned the abandoned homes, city services were not provided, insurance companies and banks practiced redlining. Neighborhood people realized they needed to band together and their numbers grew-from block clubs, to neighborhood organizations, to citywide coalitions.

In 1972 National People's Action was formed as the national umbrella organization for these community groups. Gail Cincotta is chairperson and the driving force behind NPA. She is president of the National Training and Information Center (NTIC) which conducts research on neighborhood issues and provides training for community leaders and organizers across the country. She was a member of the President's National Commission on Neighborhoods. At last year's 9th annual neighborhoods convention in Washington, D.C.,

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Cincotta brought over 2000 people to their feet, roaring "Neighborhoods First!! Neighborhoods First!!" The neighborhoods movement has become a way for low and moderate income people to gain control over, their lives and achieve a sense of dignity. Buckeye Woodland Community Congress started 6 years ago as Cleveland's first neighborhood group. Since then, other groups have sprung up: Union Miles Community Coalition; St. Clair Superior Coalition; 'Senior Citizens Coalition; and others.

Most of the people involved in community action are women-women of all colors, many of whom are housewives who have traditionally not been active in the women's movement. They are all vocal, dynamic, and angry. According to Cincotta, over 50 percent of the members and most of the top leadership of these groups are women. In Cleveland, women head all but one major community organization. They are leading a movement that requires action, demands and wins concrete change, and is tackling some of the biggest, most powerful institutions in this country.

"We have a community called Roseland on the west side of Chicago where they had about 1200 vacant HUD homes. We worked for six years straightening out HUD policy with court suits, regulation changes, and legislation. We got a HUD rehabilitation program and had the number down to about 200 abandoned homes. We worked on the insurance companies getting a development program and putting agents into the neighborhood, but when Wisconsin Steel laid off 6000 people, a good hunk of them lived in Roseland. People can't pay mortgages or afford homes, so we'll have another 1000 homes abandoned..

"Neighborhood groups need to work on their issues; women's groups still need to work on strictly women's issues, but there is a lot of cross-cutting. Women have lower incomes, energy prices are going up, jobs are threatened. I have a friend who works at EEOC in Chicago, and they're afraid they'll be shut down. The seniors were winning on some issues, but now they're talking of Social Security cuts. The unions are slipping when they lay off so many people. The gains that we all made will be gone unless we can pull together to form more of a movement.

"I think the neighborhoods movement has been very heavily a women's movement. I broke ground. Women that I didn't know and I were on the schools committee together. I had 6 kids, one had 3, one had 4, another had 3 and another 2. We worked on issues like getting 40 million dollars into the schools. One put together an arts and crafts fair, and a couple of us worked on housing issues. We could see results of what we did. You feel good about yourself, just getting out and knowing that you can effect some change.

"Now all of them aren't too active, but they have changed in the years. One woman went back to school and became a lawyer, one has a top job at EEOC in Chicago, two others are working, one had been on welfare and got herself together, and there's me. I see that kind of growth throughout the neighborhoods and it's usually overlooked-of how much neighborhood organizing was a part of the women's movement.

"A lot of my friends say, 'When are you going to quit this stuff and work on the ERA?' Well, I'm doing my thing over here, which is opening an avenue for all kinds of people, mostly women. Leadership is very much women in the neighborhoods. I think women know how to talk more and they haven't been told by their bosses to shut up. They're used to getting together and aren't afraid to complain about problems that affect their homes..

"I don't know how people don't get involved. You think you're doing your job by keeping your kids

clean and making sure they go to bed on time and get their vitamins. You think there's a professional out there who will make other things happen. Then you find out the school's overcrowded and the kids aren't learning to read and that if you don't do it no one else will.

"That's how I got started, and how a lot of women get started. You start seeing that the professionals you're paying don't know, don't care, or don't have the guts to do the job. You get angry and you stay angry. You know, I even wake up angry.

"We found out we could do only so much through the PTA. We worked with some organizers to form the May School United Committee. More people became concerned so we grew into an umbrella organization on the west side of Chicago. Then we put together the West Side Coalition which sponsored the First National Neighborhoods Conference. That grew into National People's Action and eventually the National Training and Information Center.

"We will be hitting harder on three issues: unemployment, energy, and interest rates. We launched our new organizing campaign with Reclaim America Day on October 13 in Chicago, where 1500 people protested at the American Banking Association's annual meeting. Unions, women's groups, senior citizens, neighborhood organizations and civil rights groups met at McCormack Place in Chicago.

"McCormack Place sits by itself on the beach, on public land. There are public docks alongside where you can rent cruise boats. We rented one and filled it with a high school marching band and about 75 other people. We planned to land and plant our Reclaim America flag. Jane Byrne, our mayor, was inside talking to the 15,000 bankers and saying how great they were for the city of Chicago. In the meantime she had given an executive order that no boat could dock on the public docks that day. We had the American flag, our band was playing the Star Spangled Banner, and they turned us away. They had two police boats telling our captain that he would never work again if he landed. We decided that we were the American boat people!

"Inside was the huge meeting of bankers. Jane Byrne and David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan

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Photo by M.B. Camp

Bank were their guest speakers. David Rockefeller said that the problem with this country is that there are too many regulations on banks and too many social service programs in this country-we should balance the budget by cutting social service programs!

"Outside you had the Chicago Police Department who were ordered not to let us in. They put paddy wagons and barricades in the center of the street. Almost one-half of our demonstrators were senior citizens, asking for equity, jobs and lower interest