The Assembly: A Tool for Transforming Communities
by Donald L. Anderson
Sixteenth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture
October 1996, Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Edited by Hildegarde Hannum
©Copyright 1999 by the E. F. Schumacher Society and Donald
L. Anderson
May be purchased in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher
Society, 140 Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230, (413)
528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html
The concept I am about to describe—the concept of
the Assembly, which is a means of encouraging the low-income
people of entire counties and cities to deal with their
own individual and community problems—is one I proposed
in 1956. After searching for financial aid for ten years
I received my initial funding from another dreamer, then
gradually from churches and major foundations.
In 1966 I became General Counsel of the U. S. House of
Representatives Anti-Poverty Subcommittee, which had
created the anti-poverty legislation. Prior to its
passage the subcommittee’s staff had extensive conversations
with the staff of Sargent Shriver (then the prospective
head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was to
administer the legislation). Good programs such as Headstart
and the Job Corps resulted from that legislation; however,
I was dissatisfied with the community action concept that
was in the Act.
My main objection was its emphasis on creating programs
prior to organizing the impoverished community. This is
the approach of most anti-poverty initiatives, and it results
in programs that are designed and controlled by persons
outside the community. Under the community action programs,
only a fraction of the community was organized, perhaps
less than a fifth or even a tenth. That meant the programs
put forward were in response to the needs of only a small
part of the community. I believed that an entire
impoverished community could be efficiently organized, and
the poor themselves could then express their priorities,
but my point of view did not get into the legislation or
its implementation
Destiny dictated that I was not to be on the subcommittee
staff for long. The powerful chairman of the House Committee
on Education and Labor, Adam Clayton Powell, who had created
the subcommittee, was ejected from the House, and as a consequence
I was given twenty-four hours to clear my desk. I
worked for another House committee for a few months after
that, but then I was finally able to find funding for my
idea, and in 1968 I went into the field to implement it.
The idea of the Assembly is very logical, perhaps
too logical to be immediately comprehended. I sometimes
have difficulty communicating it completely. For instance,
about six months ago I met with the vice-president of
a major foundation to which I had submitted a grant proposal.
We talked for three hours, at the end of which time she
asked me, “And by the way, what is an Assembly?”
I’ll try to explain the concept to you comprehensively
and clearly. The purpose of the Assembly is to strengthen
neighborhood institutions and leadership at the grassroots
level. One of the great problems facing us in the United
States today is that communities do not exist. People are
not connected with one another. Not only are social services
making little or no impact, but there also has been a notable
decline in the efficacy of institutions such as public schools.
Remedies do not appear to be readily available.
To arrive at a solution, one must begin with an understanding
of the cause of the problem. What, for instance, is responsible
for the decline in quality public education?
An article written by William Raspberry that appeared in
The Washington Post on May 24 of this year addresses
this question. He discusses a booklet written by David Mathews,
the former president of the University of Alabama and President
Ford’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare,
who states that the problem with the schools in a city like
the District of Columbia has to do with “the disengagement
between the schools and their public.”
Raspberry comments: “The public he is talking about
is more than a collection of people such as you might find
in a shopping mall, more than members of the same audience,
more even than people who live near one another. He has
in mind people who have a particular sort of relationship:
who are committed to common purposes, who know they need
one another even when they might not particularly like one
another.”
He continues, “These relationships lead to a distinctive
kind of action, to cooperative civic action that is complementary
and mutually reinforcing.” And, Raspberry says, Mathews
is right—“right as well when he says that ‘fundamental
change [in public education] has to start with the public
and within the community. . . . It is unlikely that schools
will change unless communities change, unless citizens increase
their capacity to band together and act together.’”
The article ends by asking: “But is that an important
insight, or merely the interposition of another, equally
vexing question: How do you change—or build—community?
Maybe the thoughtful David Mathews will tell us in another
book.”
To answer Mathews’s question, the National Association
of the Southern Poor (NASP), which I founded in 1968, introduced
the idea of the Assembly.
What is an Assembly? It is a structure that brings the
people of an entire community into a systematic relationship
with one another for the purpose of solving individual and
community problems. It is the organization of a community
in such a manner that if a great many people wanted to do
a particular thing, they could do it. It is a means—through
its formal structure and logical, systematic organization—of
connecting masses of people; a means, through such systematic
organization, of establishing a channel of communication
between the Assembly’s elected leadership and every
last man and woman in the community; a means by which large
numbers of people may engage in a common effort.
The Assembly follows certain rules of logic: in order
for masses of people to enter into collective decision-making
they must be organized prior to any decisions having been
made. This means that for an anti-poverty effort to succeed,
structure must be established prior to the creation of any
program; otherwise it is likely that programs will be designed
and controlled by persons outside the community.
Under an Assembly organization, each county or city is
organized like a country, but instead of unwieldy Congressional
districts there are districts of fifty people—or in
cities, fifty households. These districts of manageable
size are called Conferences.
The representational dimension of the Assembly enables
it to function community-wide. Each Conference elects one
Representative to the Assembly. Thus, if there are five
thousand adults (in cities, five thousand households) in
a given community, there will be one hundred Representatives
for one hundred groups of fifty people (in cities, fifty
households). If there are ten thousand adults (or households),
there will be two hundred Representatives, and so forth.
Committees are organized into Conferences
of 50 people each. Each Conference elects one representative
who stays in touch with the Conference through seven committee
members—each of whom stays in contact with six other
members.
Representatives meet at a community-wide
Assembly to discuss problems.
Community members can fill out a problem
sheet to address individual concerns. The sheet is then
passed on to the representative.
If the representative cannot resolve
the problem, they are passed on to the executive council,
which is made up of a dozen chairmen assigned to areas like
employment, social services, housing, etc.
We go into a community, and we divide it into Conferences.
Each Conference meets on a regular basis, and each sends
a Representative to a central decision-making body called
the Assembly. The Conference provides a setting in which
citizens can bring their problems (ranging from disparities
in government services, the need for job training, and school
problems confronted by their children) to the group for
discussion and creative problem-solving. And it works! What
we’ve done is transform entire communities. You’ll
see a little of that now in a brief film we produced in
1989. Afterwards I’ll bring the statistics up to date.
[Excerpts from the film “The Assembly:
An Organization That Works”]
Commentator: The federal government
has been fighting poverty with bureaucratic programs. After
a multi-billion dollar effort, millions of Americans still
live at a level of poverty commonly associated with Third-World
countries. One of the worst areas is the region known as
the Black Belt. Stretching across the nine southern states
from Virginia to Louisiana, the Black Belt includes 259
rural and urban counties with large black populations. Small
farmers are disappearing and industry is bypassing the area
for foreign sites. As a result, 44 percent of the South’s
black population remains desperately poor, still suffering
the legacy of slavery.
Conventional anti-poverty efforts have failed for two reasons.
First, these programs have not created the structures for
the poor to help themselves. Second, they are designed and
controlled by people outside of the affected communities.
The critical question is how to engage entire communities
in the fight against poverty. And this is possible only
if the people who live in the communities build their own
structure and leadership for providing assistance.
Based on this idea, the National Association for the Southern
Poor has created the Assembly. Working at the county level,
the concept of the Assembly is based on an idea of Thomas
Jefferson’s:
Among other improvements, I hope [the Virginia Legislature]
will adopt the subdivision of our counties into wards. Each
ward would thus become a small republic within itself and
every man in the state would thus become an acting member
of the common government, transacting in person a great
portion of his rights and duties, subordinate indeed, but
important, and entirely within his competence. The wit of
man cannot devise a more solid base for a free, durable,
and well administered republic.
Cliff Somerville, NASP Field Director:
What we found is that the Assembly helped develop and bring
out new leadership by giving a voice to people who normally
don’t get up in front of groups or normally don’t
get involved in, say, the local government. Through the
Assembly they are able to come to meetings and participate.
And not only participate in the Assembly; then they start
to participate in other community organization meetings.
And later on it carries them to local government.
Lloyd Hamlin, Principal, Surry County High School:
I remember the black leaders in the county talking
about the Assembly and attending Assembly meetings. And
I think the basic thing they got from the meetings, as I
remember my mama and other people going, was a sense of
focus, a setting of priorities and goals.
Gammiell Poindexter, Commonwealth Attorney, Surry
County, Virginia: The Assemblies built up
a network of local manpower, local interest in county government.
It was an organization that existed throughout the county
it served. And with that network you got people registered
to vote. Those voters then made a difference in local elections.
Commentator: The idea of the Assembly
is simple. Similar to Jefferson’s wards, each county
or city is organized like a country. But instead of being
divided into Congressional districts it’s divided into
districts of fifty people. These districts are called Conferences
[see diagram]. This arrangement is to assure an easy channel
of communication without placing too much of a burden on
one person. No one need be in touch with more than seven
others. Every Representative is in contact with his or her
seven committeemen, and each committeeman is in contact
with the six other members.
Representative in Assembly meeting: Our
concerns at the moment are for the handicapped, the elderly,
and people of very low income. Now, I went to the Housing
Assistance Office to get an assessment of the program and
to see if it was able to take care of the needs of the county.
The information I got from Mrs. Wade was that it’s
not even able to take care of a third of the requests coming
in.
Commentator: The Assembly is designed
to be a body that can solve problems directly and develop
programs that address the needs of the poor. It can do this
because, first, it offers a structure of organization .
Second, it provides a problem-solving mechanism for individual
problems. And third, the Assembly gets directly involved
in developing programs that meet the needs of the people.
Let’s look at each.
First, the basic structure permits the communication of
problems by individuals who may not know where to go for
help. Thus, a channel of communication is established which
permits the leadership, who cannot be in touch with masses
of people directly, to reach them through their Representatives.
T. C. Lane, Treasurer, Surry County, Virginia:
That was the main problem we had: we couldn’t
get our news out. But after the Assembly came, we were able,
through the community leaders, to reach all the people on
every road.
Sadie L. Bland: Anything that’s
going on in the county that they have discussed in their
Conference meetings, they bring back to us in our church
services or our Sunday schools or any other organizations
in the county, and then we discuss them.
Commentator: Second, the Assembly’s
problem-solving mechanism begins with the use of a “Problem
Sheet.” A person having a problem fills out the sheet
and lists the needs.
Representative in Assembly meeting: The
Problem Sheet is the only sure way we have of getting to
you. The Assembly tries to reach everybody it can. I don’t
think there is anybody who ever filled out a Problem Sheet
and sent it to this Assembly without the problem being solved.
L. Essex Moseley, President, Assembly of Charlotte
County, Virginia: We react to the Problem
Sheet. Now, we have had child abuse cases occurring in our
school system. There was one in particular where a principal
slapped a Special Ed child. We felt that was pretty bad.
So the mother filled out a Problem Sheet and we took on
the case. We went as far as we could to the point where
the Superintendent came and apologized to us for what happened
in his system.
Commentator: The third part of the Assembly
is the development of programs fitted to the needs of the
people. These are decided upon by the Assemblies themselves.
These programs may be for repairing roads or setting up
a better education system.
Representative in Assembly meeting: At
this time there is no housing for the handicapped in the
county. There is very little for senior citizens. And the
cost is so high for the housing that is available that they
can’t afford to live there.
Commentator: After Assembly meeting,
the Representatives report back to their Conferences. Through
the Assembly a community is created where none previously
existed, and collective decision-making can take place.
Thirty-three counties [the figure has since risen to forty-one]
and two cities in Virginia and North Carolina have organized
Assemblies. These are at various levels of maturity and
strength. Surry County, Virginia, is the home of one of
the oldest Assemblies. Twenty years ago Surry was like many
other Black Belt counties: segregated, no jobs for blacks,
and no hope.
Lloyd Hamlin, Principal, Surry County High School:
Most of the blacks were farmers. Some were fortunate
enough to own land and farm for themselves. Many, though,
were tenant farmers for either other blacks or for white
farmers. And if you were a tenant for a white farmer, he
attempted to control the extent to which you were educated,
because it meant that he would always have a labor supply.
Commentator: Through the work of
the Assembly, Surry County of today is a model county with
opportunity for all its citizens. The Assembly’s black
leadership sits on every governing board, working side by
side with whites for programs that benefit all the citizens.
Gerald Poindexter, Surry County Attorney:
The Assembly knew where to go to get help. Knowing
where to go may sound very basic; why don’t these people
know where to go? But it wasn’t basic fifteen or sixteen
years ago.
Walter Hardy, Chairman, Surry County Board of Supervisors:
The Assembly has given us a feeling that we can
actually solve our own problems. It gives us a feeling of
independence.
Commentator: The Assembly in Surry
recognized that the future of the children depended upon
the quality of their education. Following desegregation,
all but six white children fled to private schools. The
public school buildings were allowed to deteriorate. For
years the Assembly labored to improve the schools.
Dr. C. P. Penn, Superintendent, Surry County Schools:
It’s helped me because the members of the
Assembly have elected a board of supervisors that is sensitive
to the needs of the students.
Commentator: The result of this
hard work is the construction of a new $4.6 million high
school and a $3 million elementary school. The superintendent
and the principal are black. And the students have a brighter
future.
Dr. C. P. Penn, Superintendent, Surry County Schools:
The level of education today in comparison to the
situation when the Assembly was first organized here is
vastly improved. The students on the elementary level tested
from the seventeenth to the twenty-seventh percentile on
the SRA test. On the high school level they tested from
the tenth to the seventeenth percentile, which was one of
the lowest scores in the state of Virginia. Today our students
test on the elementary level from the forty-fifth to the
seventy-fifth percentile and on the secondary level from
the thirty-eighth to somewhere near the fiftieth percentile.
So we have come a long way. We were sending approximately
25 percent of our students to some form of higher education
in 1977; today we are sending between 60 and 75 percent.
Commentator: In Surry, poverty is
becoming a relic of the Old South. There is so little crime
that the jail has been closed. And an aggressive health-care
program is working to bring good health care to all county
residents. While the statistics of Surry’s transformation
are impressive, the best indicator of change is the new
spirit of the communities’ young people.
In other southern counties, citizens are also hard at work
using the Assembly’s structure to tackle their problems.
L. Essex Moseley, President, Assembly of Charlotte
County, Virginia: We selected the senior
citizens as a priority when we started out because we didn’t
have anything going for them here in Charlotte County. And
being newly retired, I was, you might say, a senior citizen
myself. One of the first things we worked on was to bring
a nutrition program to the elderly. We also bought a forty-passenger
bus and equipped it with camper toilets so that they could
ride around over the countryside, and we took them to such
places as the Coliseum in Richmond, the Ice Capades, Old
Williambsburg—most anywhere they’d like to go.
It was something they needed because a lot of them were
what you might call housebound; they had no way of going
anywhere.
Isaac Long, President, Assembly of Caswell County,
North Carolina: Well, here in Caswell County
we do have a housing problem. We have a lot of people who
are living in houses with no toilet facilities, not even
indoor running water. In the school system we have a problem
about hiring for racial balance and things of that nature.
And I feel the Assembly can really help us get that solved.
Thomas A. Chilton, Sr., President, Assembly of
Appomattox County, Virginia: We set up a
county-wide voter registration drive. And we conducted that
for two years until we got every eligible person in the
county registered, or almost everybody. That was terrific.
I’ve never seen volunteers work so dedicated at a job.
Among other things, we’re going to build a community
center. It will be a place primarily for recreation, for
training, for teaching. It will house a lot of the social
services. We’ll have workshops, primarily for the elderly
and the youth. We raised the money by having raffles, picnics,
singings, and by individual contributions.
Commentator: The Black Belt is still
an area of desperate poverty, an area many of the residents
have left in search of greater opportunity in the North.
But many remain trapped. All of these Black Belt counties
are potential locations for the Assembly structure. Mr.
C. C. Pedaway explains what can happen when people understand
the power of the Assembly: “It works. Then they have
faith in themselves. Then they will tell their friends,
it caught afire; it caught afire and went across our county.”
Henry Elly, President, Assembly of Parson County,
North Carolina: My advice to the people of
the county would be to come together and get involved in
an Assembly. That will give them an opportunity to have
input and an opportunity to know where to go to get answers
to some of their questions. For years and years they have
not known where to go; they have gone to individual people.
For example, here in Roxboro, so many of them come to me
with Social Security questions and questions about sidewalks
and water and things like that. They don’t have the
expertise themselves, and they don’t know who to go
to, so they go to an individual. My experience is that individuals
cannot, by themselves, solve their problems. They have to
be solved through a strong organization, where you know
that you have someone supporting you and you’re asking
the question in the right way and you’re going to the
proper source to get the answers.
Commentator: More important than
the programs and the statistics are the individual lives
that have been changed. Debbie Hardy’s dreams had been
crushed . She told the Surry Assembly she could not qualify
for college admission because her school did not have a
math teacher. With the help of the Central Office of the
Assemblies, Debbie was the first black to enter Chatham
Hall, a prestigious Virginia prep school. Now she has completed
her medical residency in obstetrics and gynecology.
Michael Forest was working in the tobacco fields when he
won the Assembly music competition. The prize for that victory
was a scholarship to the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music.
He made his debut at the Kennedy Center in 1986 and placed
second in the Metropolitan Opera’s Mid-Atlantic Competition.
His career has blossomed, and his performances have received
rave reviews in Europe. [Since 1989 he has been performing
on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.]
Through scholarship programs, the Assemblies have sent
many other students to prep schools and colleges. The Assembly
is a proven idea that works. It is an idea that offers real
hope for ending the vicious cycle of poverty that has strangled
countless aspirations. Through the Assembly, communities
have become unified to focus on goals that can make a real
difference. And the result is a more equitable sharing of
power, enabling the poor to take the last steps away from
slavery.
[end of film]
There are a lot of people who want urgently and earnestly
to deal with the problem of poverty in this country, and
they believe that to do so they must first come up with
a program. That is the conventional way of doing things.
But sometimes progress comes about when an unconventional
course is taken instead. Take the example of Mr. Singer,
who wanted to invent a sewing machine. He had the conventional
idea, handed down over many centuries, of a needle with
the point on one end and the hole on the other, and he worked
on his invention for many years without success. Then—and
this is a true story—he had a dream that he was captured
by cannibals, who were going to kill him. As he looked up
at their spears, he saw a hole right next to the point.
He woke up the next morning and invented the sewing machine,
so important to the Industrial Revolution in this country.
Like Mr. Singer, we have addressed a problem the opposite
way from the conventional approach.
Surry County, Virginia, was the first place I went with
my idea in 1968 after leaving Congress. Surry
County was a mess. It was wracked by racial disharmony.
There were no medical facilities, no recreational facilities.
The schools had been integrated, and all but six white students
had left the school system. Most employment was on the farms
or on the janitorial level.
When I presented my idea, people asked me why I didn’t
address the problem in a straightforward manner. Why did
I have to talk about such a complicated structure, which
most people in Surry County wouldn’t even understand?
I told them that, in general, people get what they want
if they organize first, like the labor unions when they
are well organized, and then ask what needs to be
done.
Things got so bad, people finally said, “All right,
let’s give this thing a try.” Today, of course,
the community has been completely transformed, and Surry
has our model Assembly. Per capita income rose—and
these are the poor people who made it happen—from $2,200
to $19,000, which is above the national average. They raised
millions for recreational facilities and medical facilities.
Since 1985 they’ve led all school districts in Virginia
in the percentage going on to college. It was 65 percent
then; it’s 95 percent today, with the dropout rate
at 1.7 percent There has been so little crime—six robberies
in twelve years, two drug arrests in fourteen years—that
they closed the jail. What these people have done is create
a “dream society.” Surry County is a microcosm
of what the rest of the country could be. If you want inspiration,
just go to Surry County and see for yourself.
The first question you might ask is, How do you get the
poorest and most unsophisticated people in the United States
to create and engage in such an intricate organization?
And they are engaged. If you go to an area where
there is an Assembly, you will see a large turnout of people.
(Assembly meetings are better attended, I might say, than
prayer meetings, which of course are a very important feature
of the black culture.) Poor people in forty-one counties
and two cities have brought into their communities millions
of dollars in resources to change their lives.
The Assembly technique does not begin with program but
with structure. The structure encourages self-help initiatives,
which in turn create programs that are fitted to the community’s
needs and deal with common problems. Such an approach assures
that the initiatives undertaken by the leadership of the
poor reflect the judgment of the entire low-income community
and are concurred in by a majority. It provides a method
by which the poor may judge the policies of their leaders
and give assent to those policies.
The arrangement known as the Assembly is not intended as
a temporary expedient but as a permanent institution. It
is not organized around issues but according to an abstract
structure. Nor is it organized around any fixed objectives
but adheres to a rigid pattern meant to deal with whatever
problems emerge. As a result, the community’s capacity
for dealing with problems and needs increases over time.
Assemblies are non-political, although they can have political
consequences. Virginia provides an example of this. It was
the existence of the Assembly that brought Charles Robb
into office, first as Lieutenant Governor and then as Governor.
The black vote was essential to those races, as it was to
the election of the first black governor in the United States,
Doug Wilder. When I was talking with him about six months
ago, I said, “You know, it was the votes of blacks
and women that decided the contest between Robb and Oliver
North.” And Wilder said, “It was the black vote.
Robb got only 37 percent of the white vote.”
Before we established Assemblies, people just weren’t
voting They were discouraged. One of their leaders said,
“You know, we lost the election of one of our people
by just thirty-six votes. I sat down and cried.” But
when the people finally said, “Let’s give it a
try,” they gained a majority in the county government
within five months. The same thing happened throughout the
Assembly areas; blacks were elected to county governments
and city governments for the first time since Reconstruction.
I took people from the Ford Foundation to Surry County
for a site visit about three years ago. A little old woman
standing at the first site we visited saw me, came up to
me, and asked, “Aren’t you Donald Anderson?”
I said I was. She said, “Let me tell you, I never dreamed
there could be such change during my lifetime as that which
has occurred here.”
The problem of poverty is one of the most critical issues
for the richest country the world has ever known. It hangs
over America like a heavy burden. Yet there are solutions,
and I believe the concept of the Assembly is one of them.
