One Day Teach For America Alumni Magazine

Profile

Power to the People

Industrial Areas Foundation organizer Mark Fraley (S. Louisiana ’92) is crossing boundaries and uniting communities in the fight for a better Wisconsin.

Power to the People

With a focus on concrete outcomes and inspiring leadership, community organizer Mark Fraley brings a steely edge to a grassroots world

By Sanford D. Horwitt
Photographs by Jean-Christian Bourcart

I think I was a strange kid,” Mark Fraley (S. Louisiana ’92) says, recalling that while his grade-school friends were reading about sports, he was reading biographies of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. “I read those books again and again. Who knows where all of that came from?”

Two other books would figure heavily in his career path. In 1988, as a freshman at Miami University of Ohio, Fraley bought a copy of Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the civil rights movement. Among the heroes profiled was Bob Moses, the legendary organizer of black voter registration campaigns in Mississippi’s most racist counties. “I was in awe,” Fraley says. “It was my introduction to organizing.”

Four years later, as a Teach For America corps member in Baton Rouge, La., Fraley read William Greider’s Who Will Tell the People? In a gloomy portrayal of the state of American democracy, Greider detailed the decline in voting and other forms of civic and political participation and a growing distrust of government as public policies increasingly favored big corporations and special interests. He noted one bright exception: the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by the late Saul Alinsky, and its growing network of large-scale, church-based community organizations.

Alinsky’s disciples were successfully organizing low- and moderate-income Americans from New York to Texas in the fight for affordable housing, better schools, and healthcare reform. IAF organizers, Greider wrote, were rekindling the American tradition of citizens working together for a common purpose.

“I read the chapter on the IAF,” Fraley says, “and I remember saying, ‘I’m going to work for them.’ ”

Fast-forward to 2006. Fraley has just accepted an offer to found a new IAF organization in Wisconsin. Before that, he served as lead organizer of Action In Montgomery, a large IAF affiliate in suburban Maryland—according to a Washington Post report, “perhaps the most powerful grassroots organization in the county.”

Fraley’s new organization, Common Ground, will span four counties in and around Milwaukee. His charge is to create from scratch a community organization comprising interfaith religious, civic, and other groups that will define a multi-issue agenda for public action in this racially, economically, and politically divided region.

A small group of Milwaukee-area interfaith clergy and lay leaders, led by businessman Bob Connolly, raised $750,000 to hire the IAF and Fraley in January, with the goal of launching an organization within three years. “I had talked to lots of local people who were angry about the problems around here—police abuse, murders, lack of jobs, expensive health care,” Connolly says. “The frustration was that no one had a plan for building something broad and diverse that was going to make some real change and have some real power.” That’s where Fraley comes in.

Fraley’s real introduction to the IAF came in 1995, after he and his wife, Leigh Anne Grady (L.A. ’92), moved to Wilmington, Del. Fraley had been working toward a master’s in public administration when he heard there was an IAF community organization in the city. (IAF has more than 60 community organizations around the country and some 150 organizers. Teach For America recently partnered with IAF to develop a summer fellowship program for corps members and alumni.)

Fraley and his wife joined a Wilmington church that was a member of the local IAF organization, and over the next two years, he threw himself into building relationships with people of different faiths and backgrounds and representing his church at meetings with public officials.

“I remember the first action that I was part of,” Fraley says. “We were supposed to meet with the governor’s chief of staff. We had 75 people in a church basement, but the chief of staff did not show up.”

The next day at lunchtime, Fraley and 70 other members of the community organization gathered at the governor’s office and asked to see the chief of staff. “Nobody was being disruptive, but we just continued to wait,” he recalls. “The governor’s press secretary came out and started yelling at us, ‘This is not how politics are done.’ And we said, ‘We don’t think it’s good politics when you schedule a meeting but don’t show up for it.’ We didn’t leave until we got our meeting.”

Fraley was also impressed by IAF organizers’ ability to persuade people to turn out for public meetings. “My pastor called me and said he had to get 20 people to go to a meeting with the police chief. It turned out to be a stormy night, and I figured nobody is going to show up. But by the time the meeting started, there were 500 people there. The place was packed.” That night, the organization’s leadership team successfully negotiated with the police chief for more night patrols.

Before long, Fraley became one of his church’s main representatives to the IAF’s community organization. As such, he was part of a group that was negotiating with the governor to shift tax revenues to youth programs. “There were 20 of us in the room,” Fraley says. “I’m 25 years old, the youngest person at the table.” At one point, the governor seemed to be evading an answer, and Fraley recalls blurting out, “Governor, the answer is either yes or no.” Usually polite and easygoing, Fraley had surprised himself. “I found an anger inside that I had never had before.”

Six months after his first action in Wilmington, Fraley was invited to the IAF’s 10-day national training in Chicago. (A decade earlier, a young Barack Obama attended a similar IAF training.) By 1996, he had earned a three-month organizing internship. When the IAF was suddenly in need of a full-time junior organizer in Montgomery County, Md., Fraley jumped at the chance. “They took a risk because I was green and new,” he says.

He served a seven-year apprenticeship, working closely with mentors and IAF senior organizers Jonathan Lang and Arnie Graf, who taught Fraley to think like an organizer. “You should always ask a couple of key questions,” he recalls them saying. “How many [citizen] leaders do you have [within the community]? What action are we in, and is that action helping to grow the organization?”

Under Fraley’s leadership, Action In Montgomery addressed a range of issues, from expanding the number of schools that offered all-day kindergarten to breaking the monopoly of a local taxicab company whose poor service triggered hundreds of complaints. AIM’s biggest accomplishment was winning passage of an affordable-housing proposal in the city council. The council had rejected the proposal by a vote of 8 to 1, but before the next election AIM’s volunteers gathered nearly 10,000 signatures on a petition and won a pledge of support from every candidate.

After the election, Fraley says, they worried that a particularly influential councilman might sabotage their efforts. “We had three of our strongest leaders sit down with him. They gave him three options: ‘You can support this bill, and we would like you to sponsor it. Option two is, if you choose not to, we’d like you to just quietly not support it. Option three is, you can not only oppose it but you can try to take away our support. If you try to do that, you will see a fight in this county like you have never seen before—and you will be the target of it.’ Three weeks later, he agreed to support the bill, and the council approved it by a vote of 6 to 3.”

Fraley’s current assignment, however, will be his biggest test. In January of 2006, Connolly gave him a list of 30 friends and associates with whom to start his outreach for Common Ground. That was it. From those 30 names he was expected to build a broad-based interfaith community organization across four racially and politically divided counties— home to 1.5 million people, or about 20 percent of Wisconsin’s total population.

“I was excited,” Fraley says about taking the job. “I wanted to move to the Midwest. And I wanted to move to a state that was politically relevant,” a reference to Wisconsin’s status as a presidential battleground state.

He’s ready for a big challenge. “I don’t know if we can do four counties, and I don’t know if we can do this religious, theological spread. I’m trusting in people’s hunger for being part of a diverse organization and their willingness to motivate each other.”

Most of the list of 30 were clergy and lay leaders. The IAF model relies heavily on engaging churches, synagogues, and other religious institutions, as well as some nonprofits, colleges, and occasionally small businesses and local labor unions. But within the organizational framework, nothing is more important for the organizer than finding and recruiting leaders from the various organizations and building strong working relationships among them.

“I met with as many of those 30 people who would talk to me,” Fraley says about his first winter months. The main goal was to get more potential contacts. By that summer, he and a few trained volunteers had conducted more than 700 individual meetings. By summer 2007, they had held more than 1,400. At the one-on-ones, Fraley is on the lookout for people who are passionate about an issue and have good communication skills. “If they can tell a story about what they’ve done, or if they’ve been in a political fight, that’s what I’m looking for,” he says.

Fraley starts by bringing people together in groups of 8 to 15. In these listening sessions, people share their stories and visions for how a community organization can make a difference in their region. “I’m always looking for talent in the room,” he says, meaning people who are ready to operate on a bigger stage and “who are excited about breaking down the barriers that separate people.”

The most promising leaders are invited to a nine-hour leadership institute conducted by Fraley. More than 200 emerging leaders have attended the sessions so far. These trained volunteers now run most of the listening sessions and head the eight research teams that are examining policy issues the organization might address.

Though the agenda is still being determined, Fraley says housing, crime, and health care will likely be top priorities. The goals for each issue must be “specific, immediate, and realizable,” Fraley says. For example, rather than merely calling for an increase in community policing, Common Ground would ask for a specific number of new patrols in a designated neighborhood or police district. Such concrete outcomes are critical for building the momentum and reputation of a new organization, he explains.

Milwaukee, with a population of just under 600,000, has been called one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Once a prosperous manufacturing center, it now has some of the nation’s highest rates of child poverty. About 38 percent of Milwaukee’s population is African American, but the counties on the west and north boundaries are almost all white and have little poverty, according to census data. These counties—Waukesha, Washington, and Ozaukee—unfailingly vote Republican on election day, whereas Milwaukee mostly backs Democrats.

Such deep divides are why citizenleaders and Fraley chose the name Common Ground. Much of his work has focused on finding open-minded, optimistic leaders who can reach across boundaries to see shared concerns, values, and goals.

So far, it looks promising. “I was surprised to find people in Ozaukee County with the same health-care problems,” says the Rev. Bobby Sinclair, pastor of Mt. Hermon Baptist Church in Milwaukee’s inner city. “And they have drug problems in these counties [too]. They know it but don’t like to admit it.”

In semirural Washington County, the Rev. Jeff Haines of St. Francis Cabrini Parish knows there is anxiety among his virtually all-white congregation about the economy. There have been plant closings nearby, he says, and many people are worried about their futures: “People struggle in the central city to find hope just like they do out here.” Haines and Sinclair had never crossed paths before Fraley introduced them, but now they’re talking about how they can work together on common interests.

Other leaders say they see Common Ground as an emerging nonpartisan voice that could break down barriers and end political gridlock. More than 2,000 delegates are expected to attend the organization’s public unveiling at a Milwaukee convention hall in April.

“Within two or three years,” Fraley says, “we want politicians of both political parties and opinion leaders in Wisconsin to view us as a force with whom to be reckoned.”

To learn more about our partnership with IAF, contact Mark Fraley at mark.fraley@commongroundwi.org.