The energy, activity and emotion brought about through collective problem solving, and the changes this activity made in the interviewees' lives gives us a small glimpse into the potential of learning at the edge of social movements. The EZ was a mechanism to mobilize the community to learn for self-reliance. Bottom up leadership is possible when the conditions are right. The Chicago base community had been developing through social movements over the last three decades. These data support Haymes' view that poor people can reinvent cities by building solidarity among cultural groups and by reappropriating their place in the city.
Poor people construct their learning by taking advantage of their own cultural tools.
Sophisticated organic intellectuals committed to their class produced and disseminated their own knowledge gained from a critical examination of their experience. In this Chicago experience, the hundreds of pages of strategic plan developed by over a thousand poor residents suffered a major set back by the limited vision of a handful of their own Black alderpersons. The lesson here is that reinventing government takes place both on the ground by mobilizing ordinary people as well as the demanding of accountability of elected officials in the political arena. There are several implications for adult educators. We would be more successful if we would either go out into the community, or bring the community into our classrooms.