During the past 15 years InterValley Project organizing has been built on these realities. Campaigns such as these have often also produced working relationships that have grown richer over the years, and excellent labor leadership in the highest ranks of our leadership teams. But as with any relationship between congregations and other organizations organized primarily to defend and advance specific rights and interests tenant, immigrant, small business groups we have found that unless we focus on building deeper relationships among religious, community and labor leaders, they are more likely to become temporary organizational relationships which end when the issue campaign is over. All organizations are organized around values and self-interests which grow out of those values. Religious organizations are clear about their explicit values and tend to have implicit self-interests.
Labor organizations are clear about their explicit self-interests and tend to have implicit values.
The values of both tend to overlap justice, the dignity and worth of the individual, and the welfare of families as do their self-interests, and sometimes key moments in their histories or at least the life stories of their families, especially in the communities in which we organize. The meeting ground for drawing these values, self-interests and stories into a working mix is to take the time to build relationships between leaders of both types of organizations, making explicit the elements which are simply implicit, as well as, most importantly, mutual apprehensions about working with the other. When we do this we build organizations whose vision and power, grows enormously. Bringing community organizing back to its ties with labor provides us with a way to organize to promote the well-being of families in their economic as well as in their political arenas. It is critical to the growth of our power, our vision and our contribution to the struggle for justice.