On the eve of a new budget - What we're learning from this crisis

On the eve of Mayor Nutter's budget speech, Kristin Campbell, an organizer with the Coalition to Save the Libraries, has a piece in Organizing Upgrade that reminds us what the city has learned from last year’s successful fight to keep the Nutter administration from closing 11 libraries. 

Tomorrow morning Mayor Nutter will outline his budget plans for the next fiscal year. And while we don’t yet know the details of what he’ll propose, we do know that he remembers what happened the last time he tried to shut down our services. The Inquirer is reporting that Nutter says he won’t slash libraries, rec. centers or public safety, saying “we are at a stage where preserving core services is critical”.

As we wait to hear how our city government will respond to another year of crisis, it’s worth looking back to what our neighbors learned through the process of organizing to protect Philadelphia’s public libraries, and it's worth remembering that this is the kind of work that makes our communities better for all of us:

CSL developed a collective analysis that saw libraries as much more than mere buildings with books, but rather, as powerful organizing bases across the city. As Sherrie Cohen put it: “Libraries are one of the few government sponsored institutions left in our communities. They are a beacon of light in our communities, a sanctuary, a community center, a hub of information and resources.”

Closing the 11 libraries would be an attack on poor and working people throughout our City, because as Carolyn Morgan, Coalition leader and Southwest Philly resident put it unequivocally, “Taking away these materials would be a form of murder because the mind is not being fed. Just as the physical body needs to be fed in order to be healthy, the mind needs to be fed in order to grow in wisdom and knowledge.”

While the Mayor was proposing stark neoliberal solutions—including a proposal to sell the eleven library buildings and turn them into privately managed “knowledge centers”—we were demanding that public services be considered common, neighborhood-owned institutions. A common refrain of the CSL has been, “You can’t close these libraries because they are not yours to take!” Looking for more action oriented strategies to involve people outraged by the Mayors proposal, the CSL began to create a community budgeting process for Philadelphia by establishing a ‘People’s Court’—a series of actions outside of City Hall coinciding with the opening day of legal hearings, which stated that it was ‘illegal’ to close down the 11 libraries.

Kristin also points out that this fight has forged new alliances across communities that were previously isolated from one another, building a sense of power and hope.

Building a strong cross-neighborhood alliance to fight the library cuts became central to CSL’s strategy and was successful for a few reasons. Connecting structurally segregated neighborhoods in Philadelphia meant that we were inevitably building a multi-racial, cross-class, intergenerational organization, which we learned holds tremendous power and potential. Gregory Benjamin, Coalition leader and Southwest Philly block captain remarked, “The citywide coalition was dynamite. It gave us an opportunity to connect with other people, communities and  ethnic groups that really had the same concerns that we had.”

By bringing different people from different neighborhoods together the Coalition built a very real feeling of collective power. Sheila Washington recalls: “I was invited to a Coalition meeting and it was wonderful because I was so stressed out. They were removing books and packing up our library. They were moving the after-school program. And I thought, oh my God, what is this neighborhood going to do?” Organizing to defend the libraries helped us cope with the incredibly difficult economic times, together. The budget cuts were coming down in multiple neighborhoods across the city, mostly low-income neighborhoods, and by building alliances among people who were experiencing the affects of these budget cuts our organization replaced feelings of isolation and shock with feelings of strength and a belief that together we could win.

You can read the whole piece here.

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