Barack the community organizer returns with a pledge of support
President Obama announced a community solutions agenda yesterday, naming Melody Barnes to be his new director of the Domestic Policy Council. Her mission is to travel around the country to discover great non-profit initiatives that are helping to strengthen communities.
Obama also proposed to Congress a $50 million innovation fund included in the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act — an initiative designed to assist community initiatives. The investment fund will help good ideas scale up to help more people, but will require that government funds be matched by private funds.
The former community organizer-become-president gave credit to grass-root innovators:
Ultimately, the best solutions don’t come from the top-down, not from Washington; they come from the bottom-up in each and everyone one of our communities.
As some of you know, I first saw this years ago when I worked as a community organizer in Chicago — neighborhoods devastated by steel plant closings. And I spent hours going door to door, meeting with anyone who would talk to me, asking people about their struggles and what an organization could do to help.
And it was slow, laborious going. We had plenty of setbacks and failed more often than we succeeded. But we listened to the people in the community and we learned from them and got them engaged and got them involved. And slowly, block by block, we began to turn those neighborhoods around, fighting for job training and better housing and more opportunity for young people.
The lesson I learned then still holds true today: that folks who are struggling don’t simply need more government bureaucracy; that top-down, one-size-fits-all program usually doesn’t end up fitting anybody. People don’t need somebody out in Washington to tell them how to solve their problems, especially when the best solutions are often right there in their own neighborhoods, just waiting to be discovered. …
The bottom line is clear: Solutions to America’s challenges are being developed every day at the grass roots — and government shouldn’t be supplanting those efforts, it should be supporting those efforts. Instead of wasting taxpayer money on programs that are obsolete or ineffective, government should be seeking out creative, results-oriented programs like the ones here today and helping them replicate their efforts across America.
