Jason Negron-Gonzales, interviewed here, is POWER’s leadership development and education director, and coordinates the popular education activities. He offers valuable insight into their organizational model and commitment to bringing up leaders from within the membership base. Jason also discusses POWER’s reaction to post-9/11 issues and their decision to focus in on the connections between global forces and local struggles.

By way of introduction, can you talk about what you see as the role of popular education in POWER’s work?

We came to it by having exposure to different groups that were trying to employ it in the movement. It has a particular currency right now, and people are very excited about it. What people actually mean by it, and how they practice it, though, varies a lot. For us, it’s non-banking education, where you’re trying to draw on people’s experiences as a primary basis for drawing out political consciousness. It’s a critical consciousness not just in relation to understanding stuff, but a consciousness in engaging folks to create change. What we’ve seen with it is that, number one, it’s important just to create a space for people to have that dialogue and reflect on their own experiences in a structured way. Then, second, there’s this important question of how we do it in a way that’s connected to people’s ability to take action.

Within our organization we try to put a real priority on leadership development work, in part because we’re trying to create an organization that’s led by the workers in the organization where people can come into have a maximum level of participation in the organization and develop their own leadership as a person. I mean in our group but also to participate more broadly in the movement, in the movement to end poverty and oppression. We set up the structure of the organization so that members are not only able to develop their capacity as leaders, but also have the opportunity to take over more work. We use popular education and political education through something called POWER University, which we do through different curriculums that we run with folks to do leadership development work and take people from being a member to a leader, trying to give people more of a context around what’s going on that impacts our work. We also have a weekly forum called Fantastic Friday, which lets us deal with other political issues, or just practical issues that are coming up in the group. So, we might talk about the elections, we might talk about Iraq or Palestine, or we might talk about how we do better follow-up calls after the meeting.