* Network of grassroots organizations working to bring about social change
* Models its tactics after those of the radical Sixties activist Saul Alinsky
The Gamaliel Foundation (GF) was established in 1968 to support the Contract Buyers League, an African-American organization that advocated on behalf of black Chicago homeowners who had been discriminated against by lending institutions. GF derived its name from a Pharisee who, according to the New Testament, chastised the Jewish Sanhedrin (rabbinical court) for seeking to execute Jesus’s apostles.
When former Jesuit priest Gregory Galluzzo became the foundation’s executive director in 1986, Gamaliel was restructured as a community-organizing leadership institute that focused on training activists “to build and maintain powerful organizations in low-income communities.” GF has since grown into a network of faith-based community-organizing affiliates with branches in 18 U.S. states, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.[1]
Like the Gamaliel Foundation itself, GF’s affiliates carefully select non-threatening names that form biblical acronyms. Michigan, for instance, has the Interfaith Strategy for Advocacy & Action in the Community (ISAAC); a Wisconsin affiliate is called Joining Our Neighbors, Advancing Hope (JONAH); and a New York affiliate is named Niagara Organizing Alliance for Hope (NOAH).
In the mid-1980s, Galluzzo served as a mentor for a young Barack Obama during the latter’s organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, where Obama first worked as an organizer, was (and still is) part of the Gamaliel network. By early 1988, Obama had become a consultant for, and a trainer of, GF community organizers; he would maintain his ties to Gamaliel throughout his years in the U.S. Senate. As Galluzzo said shortly after Obama was elected President in 2008: “Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training [and attending] our public meetings.”
In 2001, Dennis Jacobsen, director of Gamaliel’s National Clergy Caucus, published Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing, a handbook/ideological guide for GF’s religious organizers. Depicting the U.S. as a “sick society” in need of radical transformation, this text derides America’s free-market system for allegedly harming the poor. The author affirms that GF’s goal is to foment public anger and “shake the foundations of this society.” Though he never mentions socialism explicitly, Jacobsen praises the communal property arrangements of the early Christians and the “radical sharing” practiced by various African groups. A self-described “radical Christian,” Jacobsen acknowledges that he has “deep prejudices … against wealthy people.” He contends that Christians who view America as a just society are plagued by “false consciousness” — a Marxist construct.
Gamaliel today offers more than 100 training events per year, teaching “techniques and methodologies that have worked in rural, urban, suburban, white, Black, Hispanic and working-class communities.” The foundation’s seven-day residential training events use the “Socratic” method to promote an “agitational” approach to community organizing, modeled on the tactics of the late Saul Alinsky. GF has also developed training programs geared specifically toward clergy and women.
According to Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts, who has studied GF extensively, Gamaliel’s organizers engage freely in ideological talk when speaking privately among themselves, but they carefully avoid such talk during their trainings so as not to alienate working-class people. In those settings, the organizers present their ideas as pragmatic, “commonsense solutions” for “working families.”
GF and its affiliates focus their training and activist efforts on the following major issues[2]:
GF’s modus operandi is to bring local, inner-city churches into its fold, and then to pressure political and corporate leaders to support Gamaliel’s goals vis à vis the foregoing issues.
Former GF community organizer Rey Lopez-Calderon reports that Gamaliel’s “culture” is exceedingly “strange and warped.” “[Gregory] Galluzzo,” says Calderon, “told me that he wanted organizers to be tough bastards who could build power like the Conquistadors.” Calderon further reveals that Galluzzo, in seminars, would teach trainees to be “ruthless” in actualizing the premise that “the ends justify the means.”
GF receives much of its funding from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. Yet according to the Roman Catholic Faithful website, the foundation’s “goals and philosophies are at fundamental odds with Church teaching.” In March 2010, David Ricken — the Roman Catholic bishop of Green Bay, Wisconsin — said that certain “principles of the Gamaliel Foundation are inconsistent with the tenets of our Catholic Social Teaching.” Vicar general and chancellor Father John Doerfler of Northeast Wisconsin specified one particularly problematic GF doctrine: “The end,” he said, “does not justify the means.”
GF has also received much financial support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Arca Foundation, the Bauman Family Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Glaser Progress Foundation, George Soros‘s Open Society Institute, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Wieboldt Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Woods Fund of Chicago.[3]
In January 2011, veteran community organizer Ana Garcia-Ashley became GF’s new executive director, replacing Gregory Galluzzo, who had held the position for 24 years.
For additional information on the Gamaliel Foundation, click here.
NOTES:
[1] This was as of February 2011.
[2] These were GF’s programs as of February 2011.
[3] Sources: The Foundation Center; the Capital Research Center; Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief (2010)