A GREAT pillar in community organizing (CO) and the Church’s programs of social action, justice and peace has passed on.
Oscar Francisco, “Oca” to the countless many, passed away on Aug. 15 at the age of 64. He was many things to many people. He was an activist, organizer, builder, trainor, legislator, writer, dancer. He was also a great raconteur and romantic. He left behind his wife Edna (also a seasoned NGO worker), their three children and countless communities and groups that he had touched.
It was the heart attack, not the diabetes and failing kidneys, that claimed him.
Oca’s name is synonymous with CO. Despite his twice-weekly dialysis in the past two years, he remained active in the field of CO, having co-founded the Institute for Democratic Participation in Governance. Why, he even had a network he named with tongue in cheek, Dialogue (Dancing Instructors Action for Local Governance and Empowerment).
Oca recently served a year in Congress as representative of the Alliance for Rural Concerns. His ailment did not prevent him from shuttling between Manila and Leyte-Samar.
Last March he invited a bunch of us to Tacloban City and Balangiga, Eastern Samar, to show us people’s participation in local governance and community development. He invited fellow “alumni” from the National Union of Students of the Philippines, Student Catholic Action and the Church-based National Secretariat of Social Action (where Oca spent many years in justice, peace and development work and where I got to know him)—and brought us down to the grassroots to see for ourselves changes in people’s lives. I did write about that trip (“Balangiga in the cusp of development,” March 18, 2010).
Oca also wanted to stress to us the significance of getting back the bells of Balangiga that were carted away by US soldiers during the Philippine-American war. Oca wanted the bells returned to Balangiga by September (next month) and had again scheduled a trip for us there. He hoped newly elected President Aquino would strongly push for the return of the bells after 100 years. Two are in Wyoming, USA, and one is in South Korea.
One of the stuff Oca gave us to read was a serious discourse he had written, “Reflections on Community Organizing and Ballroom Dancing.” Oca presents CO as an act of creation and celebration and smashes the totalitarian view that there is only one correct reading of the world and history.
Oca’s colleagues are planning to put together many of his written works. Here are excerpts from Oca’s reflections on CO and ballroom dancing.
“Community organizing, like ballroom dancing, is a conscious and creative undertaking. Its main nemeses are irrelevance and atrophy. The organizer must be like the dance instructor who does not view dancing as routinary work but as an act of creation and celebration. Today’s organizers have been molded in a particular ideological crucible which demands one vision and line of action. The effects of this totalization (uhm, did he mean totalitarianization?) of perspectives are so well-entrenched that new ideas are immediately suspect.
“If organizers are committed to effect societal change, they need to develop a world view that does not pretend to exhaust description and analysis. The challenge of reeducating them involves not only introducing them to other theories or modes of social analysis and paradigms of development but also finding out how old concepts could now lead to new actions.
“Organizers have simply begun to rediscover voices of history drowned out by louder ones. These voices are reasserting themselves in the current discourse. The re-visitation of the humanities, especially the study of representations, could be an attempt to recapture such voices. After all, imagination allows us to see the moment and beyond.
“The shared tradition of CO work in the Philippines has spanned over 25 years. CO is a process of constant innovation and creation based on lessons from actual experience. Whatever the situation, the necessity of organizing people for power remains….
“Though the years, CO has had considerable achievements in empowering communities and has contributed to the cumulative development of people’s movements and coalitions that achieve both social and political power.
“More importantly, CO discovers and develops the power that lies in ordinary people, in ‘the poor and the powerless’ which, like oil or water, may be found deep inside the earth. This is combined with the fundamental faith of CO that ordinary people have the capacity to better their lives within existing structures and to participate in transforming these structures.
“Empowerment, like art, has many different expressions and methods because it is a process of releasing the potential and creativity of people. The people’s path to empowerment is a long and winding road. With the best of intentions and skills, we make mistakes and suffer defeats.
“CO is like ballroom dancing (or if you want to go local, baile sa baryo) is a conscious and creative undertaking. Thus the organizer must be like the dance instructor who does not look at dancing as a routinary work but as an act of creation and celebration. For those of us who struggle and hope for change, we should know when and how to celebrate.”
Oca then writes on about the need for organizers to re-imagine the world. He smashes the Marxist thinking that there is only one correct reading of the world and history. “To borrow Michael Foucault’s language,” Oca writes, “the only valid tribute to thought such as Marx’s is precisely to use it, deform it, to make it groan and protest.”
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