May 21, 2004

"Eddie Bautista, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest"

Welcome to this online interview with Eddie Bautista is Director of Community Planning for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI). Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on Friday, May 21. Bautista will share nationally applicable lessons from his efforts to help low-income New York communities block city plans to unfairly burden their neighborhoods with waste-transfer stations and other waste management facilities. read background

Leadership for a Changing World
Welcome to Leadership Talks with Eddie Bautista, Director of Community Planning for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and a 2003 Leadership for a Changing World awardee.

Eddie, can you tell us how you got involved in social justice work?

Eddie Bautista
My social justice commitment stems from my first, life-altering exposure to environmental racism. I grew up in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the quintessential waterfront community controlled by the longshoreman's union and the mob (it was the setting for “On the Waterfront”). Red Hook is one of Brooklyn’s oldest neighborhoods and once a vibrant home for 25,000 residents, including one of NYC’s first Puerto Rican communities. The loss of the shipping industry forty years ago triggered a long period of decline.

In 1977 (the same year of the NYC blackout, Son of Sam murders and emergence of hip-hop), City officials “temporarily” halted a sewer reconstruction project behind my home. As a result, the community was exposed to an open sewer for over a year. Several buildings collapsed, killing four residents and most of our neighborhood's spirit. I was thirteen years old. My neighbors began to organize to save the community from wholesale displacement, and despite my youth, I attended meetings and carried petitions. What began as a grassroots campaign ended when local political hacks seized control. Fearing further building collapses, the City condemned dozens of buildings. Low-income Puerto Rican families were displaced, including my own; the replacement housing, unaffordable for displaced residents. Entire families never recovered from this trauma and a community was destroyed. Shortly after this trauma, I learned about the civil rights movement, the Puerto Rican experience, and specific injustices visited on my family. I was hooked for life.

Los Angeles
What is it about poorer communities that makes them so succeptible to environmental victimization? Do the public and private parties responsible see them as unempowered, or is it something else?

Eddie Bautista
Poor communities are clearly perceived by public and private parties as unempowered. Poor communities, if you look at the evolution of ghettos and the way jobs are located, clearly poorer residents seek jobs that match their skills and try to live near their workplace, so poor communities historically have developed around semi-skilled work opportunities. It’s those kind of industries that have been the least capable of meeting minimal environmental standards. That’s something else. Clearly there’s a perception of lack of power and there’s also a marked response in terms of zoning and residential patterns that reflect a confluence of factors that kind of lead to not just issues of environmental racism, but economic injustice.

Brooklyn, New York
It often becomes sexy to only focus attention on one neighborhood in NYC. What can be done to insure that the movement internally benefits from an equitable distribution of resources? If it were not for you and NYLPI, Southwest Brooklyn would have very limited resources to fight environmental racism.

Eddie Bautista
NYLPI prioritizes its organizing and legal support for communities that are underserved. So our job is to make ourselves obsolete over time as communities develop resources to be able to defend and promote their interests. So institutionally while our priorities are to seek out and work with communities that request our assistance, that lack resources, there’s a concomitant responsibility within the movement and among the technical assistance community in NY to ensure they’re likewise thinking about the communities that are under-resourced. So there’s responsibility both on the part of communities who tend to attract a lot of resources to share those resources and information with communities that may not be as positioned strategically to attract those resources as well as a responsibility on the part of the providers. The reality is that foundations chase movement and so your providers then chase foundations. So to the degree that it’s a vicious circle it’s unfortunate, but the reality is that there are more communities in need in NYC than are receiving the resources and it’s a fact that NYLPI’s painfully aware of and address n our priorities.

Cleveland, OH
What are you doing to link your work in New York to national environmental movements?

Eddie Bautista
Our priority in networking is less with the national environmental movements than it is with the environmental justice networks. To that end we have relationships with folks in the Southwest Environmental Justice Network and the Southern Organizing Committee, and we’re constantly trying to identify opportunities for collaboration and we keep in touch, I think that’s one of the benefits of the information age. For example, NYC produces over 40,000 tons of waste per day and over 12 million tons per year. And although we’re on the verge of radically revising our solid waste system to maximize environmental justice for NYC communities, the tragic reality is that all this garbage is ending up in landfills in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and states farther south. We’re painfully aware of that and have begun identifying strategies to, over time, reduce and minimize the impacts on landfill communities. And some of our strategies are going to require closer networking as well as strategic targeting of campaigns at multinational corporations.

Alexandria, VA
You seem to have worked in coalitions for many of your campaigns. Any general lessons about coalition work you can share from your experience?

Eddie Bautista
The key to coalition-building is identifying a mutuality of interests and values, while encouraging diversity among stakeholders. NYLPI works with different stakeholders to facilitate democratic and transparent processes and structures that allow everyone to have a voice, as well as a sense of ownership over the alliance and campaign. In building grassroots coalitions, our goal is to help local communities overcome parochial agendas, while developing cross-neighborhood solutions to vexing infrastructure problems such as the sitings. To that end, facilitation and listening skills are critical to identify areas of conflict, propose solutions, elicit participation and create healthy group dynamics.

The development of clear structures and platforms or “principles of unity” allow for different stakeholders to develop trust in activists from other communities not to “sell them out.” While there are always tensions, coalitions with clear platforms and structures can encourage communities to turn to, rather than on, each other. Ultimately, a central goal of effective coalitions should be the creation of community organizing cultures of respect, solidarity and accountability, which urge everyone to look beyond their immediate self-interest to bigger, more sustainable issues.

Albuquerque
Your work seems to rely heavily on mobilizing the community. How do you effectively gain citizens' interest, then their trust, and eventually their enduring involvement?

Eddie Bautista
Generally NYLPI is invited in by stakeholders in a community, so there’s usually some level of interest. Our job is to work with the people that invite us in to identify additional stakeholders in the community and strategies for stoking their interest. Once those stakeholders and strategies for outreach and education have been identified, the next step is to identify mechanisms to build trust and strategies. The most effective way to build trust is developing conscious coalition-building model structures and decision-making processes that are clear, transparent, and democratic. Those, in developing clear processes as well as platforms or principles of unity that are both ways of holding all of us accountable as well as clearly stating what our purpose is, is the most effective way of building trust. Enduring involvement rises out of both of these clear processes, platforms, and campaigns with measurable outcomes that reflect both short-term and long-term goals. Otherwise if a campaign of structure, a coalition, is open-ended without any clear goals, enduring involvement can become alienating and ineffective.

Milwaukee
Once you've revitalized a community, how do you make it sustainable? As Red Hook and other neighborhoods are revived, how can you keep them moving on their own?

Eddie Bautista
Community life, particularly in NYC, is one of rapid change. The way to sustain community involvement is to understand change while planning for and including long-time residents and cultures from a community. So there are three essential ways that I’ve seen sustainable involvement evolve over time. One way is the creation and nurturing of institutions and/or relationships. The second is to be clear about the different stakeholders and the diversity of stakeholders in a given community and work towards having the institutions and the relationships I just mentioned accessible to the diversity of stakeholders. And I think probably the best recipe for sustainable community involvement is some ongoing commitment by the relevant institutions, relationships, and stakeholders to proactive planning and visioning, to constantly ask and check in with each other what are our priorities for living together in the future, that forces the stakeholders and institutions to discuss priorities. But that’s really a reflection of people’s fundamental values, which, to me, is a core dynamic in sustainable community life, understanding and adjusting for different value systems, but constantly trying to recognize common community values.

Huntsville, AL
Can you explain the community lawyering model?

Eddie Bautista
The philosophy behind NYLPI’s “Community lawyering” model is that lawyers don't empower communities - communities empower themselves. We believe that every community has power, whether latent or overt – a community’s quest for empowerment is a quest on how to “mine” and apply that power.

NYLPI’s “community lawyering” approach has the dual effect of respecting community leadership in local campaigns, while placing legal and organizing tools at their disposal. Our community organizers and attorneys work directly with neighborhood residents, community-based organizations and other stakeholders to bridge boundaries among communities, building successful campaigns and fostering leadership. We work with communities to identify and define their problem (i.e. – the root causes and possible solutions), as well as its scope. Through this analysis, potential allies usually emerge, and NYLPI helps impacted communities develop alliances with other impacted communities. Our goal in community campaigns is to provide effective structure and discipline to maximize our community partners' potential to influence local decision-making.

NYLPI’s staff attorneys take the lead from the community groups in its representation, strategizing, and advocating. The community’s ability to successfully advocate on their own behalf in their own voices is of paramont concern.

Jackson, Miss.
You seem to have founded several organizations (OWN, CURE) in addition to running NYLPI. What is the benefit of having multiple organizations, and how do they work together without becoming redundant?

Eddie Bautista
First I have to clarify a couple of points. While I appreciate the promotion, my executive director may be puzzled at discovering that I’m actually running NYLPI. My role at NYLPI is, in addition to my direct community organizing campaign work, is to mentor our other community organizers on their campaigns as well as working with our organizers, advocates, and lawyers on their lobbying and communication strategies.

Secondly, I co-founded OWN and CURE along with dozens of other community-based organizations and allies, such as the New York Environmental Justice Alliance. But the most important distinction regarding OWN and CURE are that they are not organizations so much as social justice movements that are campaign- and issue-directed and focused. So therefore, as opposed to multiple organizations they are actually multiple movements who work together when there are tactical benefits of doing so, particularly because many of the same communities are impacted by power plant sitings as well as transfer station sitings.

Ann Arbor, MI
What role do you think lawyers can have in community building that can't be filled by other types of community leaders? Why "New York Lawyers in the Public Interest" instead of "New York Teachers" or just "New Yorkers"?

Eddie Bautista
Because New York teachers weren’t hiring at the time. Seriously, I agree with the underlying premise of the question that there are numerous other professions and perspectives that can and should be brought to bear on community empowerment campaigns. Lawyers’ particular expertise obviously rests on their ability to interpret and translate legal systems, documents, laws, regulations, statutes, et cetera, that guide development in communities. However, the law is just another arrow in the quiver of weapons communities utilize in their quest for self-empowerment. We have, over the years, depended on the kindness of planners, doctors, engineers, laborers, factory workers, and, of course, even teachers. A community’s a sum of all its parts and all are required to move together.

South south bronx, the boogie down
Thanks for your good efforts.
A common experience I have found, is when vigorous grass roots efforts on the local level are synergized with a larger, city-wide elevel approach. When community based efforts are folded under a larger umbrella, there is often an abdication of energy and focus, in favor of listening to the "professional" perspective of lawyers and "experts" that are the paid staff of larger groups. This transformation often deflates the vereve and excitment and creativity of the local activists and direct action is discouraged in favor of over reliance on lawsuits, press conferences and such. How do you approach this dynamic? What process to you embrace to provide assistance and help to local initiatives while fostering autonomy and diverse tactics to achieve socail justice?

Eddie Bautista
The tensions and dangers identified in this question are real and must be guarded against. NYLPI’s community lawyer model is an attempt to adjust and avoid the pitfalls you’ve identified. The need for accountable processes and platforms is one essential way of ensuring accountability and autonomy. However, this is a two-way street. Occasionally community groups hide behind the mask of autonomy to avoid issues of accountability to a movement, its platform, and responsibility to other allies and stakeholders. Tactics such as direct action have a place and a legitimacy that can’t be undervalued. However, as with any other tactic or strategy, direct action needs to be part of an overall campaign and not just an independent expression of disgust at the system. That may feel good, but can be ultimately ineffective.

Providence, RI
Has it been tough integrating lawyers into organizing campaigns? What have the biggest challenges been?

Eddie Bautista
Lawyers are not trained to be team players in social justice or community campaign settings. Having never attended law school, I can only speculate that the law school experience can sometimes develop behavior and skills that undermine team-building and trust. Whether its the emphasis on individual competition, the drive to be the “expert,” the tunnel-vision created by excessive attention to detail, the “knight on a white horse” syndrome, the elite professional status conferred – still, despite lawyer jokes – all these factors can create barriers to communication and collaboration, even for progressive, humble attorneys. By the way, all of the above, with the exception of the elite status, can be equally true of organizers and other professionals working for social justice – it’s just that the lawyer jokes are funnier.

Having said that, I’ve had the privilege of working with many progressive lawyers who “get it” – otherwise, I wouldn’t have lasted at NYLPI for 15 years. Lawyers committed to social justice, who are self-aware and open to the power of organizing and collective action, who understand the limits – and occasional disempowerment – of litigation, can flourish in community campaigns, and be invaluable to a community’s quest for self-empowerment, whose legacies often outlive more traditional forms of legal advocacy.

The analogy I use for lawyers, organizers and community leaders alike when asked about the role of lawyers in the “community lawyering” model is to describe a driver’s relationship to their mechanic. When you have engine trouble, you take your car to the mechanic – but ultimately, you’re in the driver’s seat and responsible for your direction and destination. Not the most environmentally correct analogy, but…

Bronx
No question. Just wanted to say congratulations and to let you know how pleased I am that your excellent work has been recognized.

Your Friend, Harry DeRienzo

Eddie Bautista
Harry! When I started in New York Lawyers in January 1990, I was hired to implement our environmental justice project’s predecessor project, the Charter Rights Project. New York City had just amended its charter and radically revised our land use and budget decision-making processes. I knew squat about the charter. I asked around and discovered there were at least three or four key people to talk to specifically about the impacts of the charter’s land use revisions for low-income communities of color. Harry was the second name on that list and I’ll be forever grateful for his strategic insights and his pioneering role as one of the founders of the community development corporation movement. Let’s have a drink sometime, Harry.

Richmond, VA
You clearly have deeply planted roots in your community. Has your insider status helped you in your work? If so, how?

Eddie Bautista
I would hope so. I love the audience for the LCW chats. Only such an audience member would ascribe my community roots as insider status. That’s great.

Seriously, my sense is that having been born and raised in Red Hook and as a man of color, people understand a certain perspective that I bring to the work that apparently is valued, which I deeply appreciate and respect. The trick is not to allow my roots to confuse me into thinking that I’m a stakeholder of equal stature as the impacted community leaders I work with. It’s a difficult balance bringing my experience and insights to bear while resisting the inclination at times of imposing my personal or political viewpoint. Time will tell how successful I will have been in balancing that tension, but I thank you for your question.

Washington, DC
It sounds like you got involved at a young age. Do you still see young people getting involved in campaigns? Do you have any strategies for getting youth involved in your work?

Eddie Bautista
Young people are involved more than ever at a rate I haven’t seen since the Young Lords/Black Panther days. That is enormously satisfying and hopeful to me. And I marvel at the work of organizations such as UPROSE and The Point and Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice and their ability to engage young people and follow their leadership on issues that are, by turn, as abstract and life-threatening as environmental justice. My hat’s off to activists who work with youth. I don’t know where you all get the energy, but God bless you for it, and I defer to those activists in terms of strategies. And I would urge anyone interested to contact those organizations to learn from them.

Phoenix, AZ
How do you feel about being called a leader? Do you see yourself as one? Or do you think of what you do as something else? Some people resist that label.

Eddie Bautista
I have deep ambivalence about my identification as a “leader.” By virtue of who and what I am, where I’ve come from, what I’ve survived, what I’ve done and continue to do daily, I reluctantly have to accept that I’m a leader after a fashion. Leadership comes in many forms and can be exercised in a variety of ways. To the degree that I help create space and systems for leaders to come together and synergistically wield their power, it’s a form of leadership that embraces collectivity and the notion that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that kind of turns me on. The key to leadership in all its varieties is allowing for space for other leaders to emerge, develop, and exercise leadership while understanding in some ways that true leadership implies not really followers, but allies working together for a common goal and cause.

Leadership for a Changing World
Last question for today:

Eddie, how do you sustain yourself and maintain your energy to continue the work?

Eddie Bautista
A sense of humor and perspective goes a long way. I need both to get through the day, not to mention a campaign. Learn from the defeats, and celebrate the victories – but don’t get too caught up in either. Hope for the best, plan for the worst – and accept the fact that all the planning and hoping in the world will not trump fate, God, destiny, the Creator, whatever you believe. Honor hard work and never take your community for granted. Balance your romanticism and cynicism. Don’t take yourself, or your opponents, too seriously. Try not to forget that humanity and justice is supposed to guide your work, and try to control and focus the rage that drove you to this path in the first place. Understand that work, life, family, community, etc., is a life-long process – try to enjoy and grow from the journey.

People that know me and read this may fall out of their chairs laughing, but in my more reflective moments, these are the thoughts and emotions that sustain me.

Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you again for joining us for today's Leadership Talks with Eddie Bautista. For more information about Eddie:

Eddie Bautista
Director of Community Planning
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest
151 West 30th St
11th Floor
New York, NY 10001-4007
Phone: 212-244-4664, x229
Fax: 212-244-4570
Email: ebautista@nylpi.org
Web: www.nylpi.org

Please join us again for next month's Leadership Talks.

Eddie Bautista

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