HOME
The Miami Workers Center:
Lifting Up Leadership
website: http://www.miamiworkerscenter.org/
"I think the perception of our Circle of Consciousness is that it's like coming to some kind of church. It's a space that's consistent. People come because they like being in an intellectual space, they like to be intellectually stimulated. I think part of it is that people feel like they were robbed when they were in school, and so they are determined to get their education back." -GIHAN PERERA
The Miami Workers Center (MWC) is a strategy and organizing center for low-income and low-wage workers that has been developing a broad-based social justice movement in the South Florida region for nearly five years.The organization uses a unique blend of popular and political education methodologies as a part of its leadership development efforts.These initiatives are central to the Miami Workers Center's organizing strategy, which emphasizes developing grassroots leadership from within the communities.As the Executive Director of the organization, Gihan Perera, notes, "Leadership development is not part of our organizing model, it is our organizing model."
The Miami Workers Center has developed two initiatives geared toward building grassroots leadership from among those who face a variety of socioeconomic insecurities: the Circles of Consciousness and the Rotating Organizing Corps Internships (ROC-IT) programs.The Circle of Consciousness is a weekly political education program during which participants explore historical and contemporary issues that relate to the daily realities of their communities. A particular emphasis of this program is making analytical links between global processes and their local impacts so that members can identify their struggles as related to the struggles of communities in other parts of the world. The ROC-IT program is an intensive effort to build the organizing skills of emerging grassroots leaders through hands-on training as well as mentoring. Max Rameau, former leadership development coordinator at the Miami Workers Center, noted that during this three-month training process, members gain a variety of skills that they employ in real-time, including the valuable lessons that can be drawn from "making their own mistakes" and thus developing "self-ownership" over these tools and resources and how they are employed in organizing work.
The centrality of grassroots leadership development has resulted in breakthroughs on the issues important to Miami Workers Center's organizing. In November 2003, as the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) took place in Miami, Florida, the Miami Workers Center-in cooperation with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Power U: Center for Social Change-developed a unique grassroots, people of color led coalition to raise awareness about the potential impacts and implications of the FTAA for poor communities in the region.This coalition, known as Root Cause, effectively demonstrated the potential and need for those communities most adversely impacted by global processes to assume leadership roles in addressing these impacts.
Today, the Miami Workers Center continues to deepen its understanding of the role that popular education can play in its work. In Summer 2004, Gihan Perera took a trip to Brazil to meet with Brazilian social movements including the powerful Landless Workers Movement (MST) and MOVA, the literacy movement of Porto Alegre, to learn about their long histories of Freirian popular education. As Tony Romano, Organizing Director, notes, witnessing the success of these organizations is proof that popular education methodology could be more than an organizing technique, it has the potential to be the fabric that runs through everything the Center does.