Mike Schramm

On a cold December day, a group of young adults stood at Rockefeller Chapel in Hyde Park in front of their communities, politicians and reporters, and made their demands.

Two young women, Michelle DeTolla and Alissa Melczer, stood up and asked for health care for those aged 18-29. "More than half of the young adults in Illinois are without health care," said Melczer. A young man with a yarmulke named Matt Weinstein stood up and said he, like many young adults, was "sick and tired of living in a world where extremists are the ones who shout the loudest." South Sider Justin Starnes said, to the cheers of his family and friends in attendance, that he just wanted to go to college. Aaron Bowen, a young gay man who became homeless when he came out of the closet, demanded something be done about the 12,000 homeless youths in Chicago, who have 119 beds to share among them. Brandon Johnson of Humboldt Park stood up and told Arne Duncan, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools that, like his mother told him after he had cleaned his room unsatisfactorily as a kid, what Duncan had done so far to provide funding for education had only been "a good start."

The public officials in the pews of the chapel nodded and clapped at the right times, and stood when asked. Governor Blagojevich came early for an opening statement, and thanked the young people just for showing up. "I want to commend all of you for your willingness to get out there and get into the fray," he told them, just before he rushed off the stage, presumably for another engagement. State Treasurer and gubernatorial candidate Judy Topinka made remarks also. "Your agenda is my agenda," she promised. "This agenda is not new. To put young people behind it and to actively promote it, that is new."

And so, after the remarks had been made, that's exactly what they did. Co-chairs Mike Blake and Amy Totsch led the voting, and the young people in attendance voted to ratify the constitution, the name and the platform of a new organization. It was the founding convention of Public Action for Change Today, and, to the cheers of about 800 people in Rockefeller Chapel, PACT was founded.

"PACT is born!" Blake shouted, to great applause. "We are no longer just the future, we are now the present. We are PACT!"

After the applause, the public officials went home. The community members who'd showed up to support their young adults thanked them, and then filed out. The reporters left and filed stories about a clash of candidates, barely mentioning the reason they'd been there. But the young adults all stayed in Rockefeller Chapel. They made their way down to the basement, where another young man was waiting for them. When they had all settled in, he told them how they did. They'd done well with their speeches, he said. They'd confronted their public officials with a strong youth presence, and even though they hadn't filled the chapel like they'd planned to, they'd kicked PACT off with a strong statement, which was exactly what they'd wanted to do. And he told them to go home and celebrate, and then be ready for January.

Because in January, he said, the real work would begin.

Though PACT may have been "born" at the Founding Convention in December, its story is already four years old. In October 2001, Chicago advocacy group United Power for Action and Justice held a rally at Navy Pier called "Chicagoans and Islam," in which they brought together 2,000 Muslims and Non-Muslims. They gathered "to sit down and break down some of the racial barriers that occurred after 9/11," says Amy Totsch, who attended the rally.

"There was a huge number of young people that were there for that event," she says. "And so that was kind of where the idea was decided on that said that this is something we should address. There really seems to be a youth voice that needs to be organized in Chicago. That's when they decided to hire a professional organizer."

The organizer they hired was Stephen Smith. He's the man in the basement of Rockefeller Chapel, and while he swears, rightfully so, that PACT is driven by Chicago's young adults, he's the one teaching them how to do what they're doing. He's always been an organizer, starting student volunteer groups in high school in Plano, Texas, and "mentor and internship programs" during his stay as a sociology major at Harvard University. "This is what I wanted to do," he says about organizing people, specifically young people. "I think some people know what they want to do and it's business, so they're always doing the business internship and they're meeting folks. Some people know what they want to do and it's art, so they're creating stuff, writing, doing that. This is what I wanted to do."

After he graduated in 2002, Smith applied for and won a yearlong fellowship to work as a public servant in both the US and Botswana. "I wish to spend the year after I graduate and the rest of my life researching and implementing a model for transforming the hobby of direct service for millions of students nationwide into a passion for democracy and equality expressed through community organizing," he told a Harvard newsletter, a full two years before he ever showed up in Chicago, commissioned by United Action, and its parent organization, the Industrial Areas Foundation, to organize the "youth voice." "I was really lucky that came around," he says about the fellowship.

In Botswana, Smith spent four months working with the social issue of AIDS, and he got a firsthand look at how local social programs help--or hurt. "Ultimately the experience was a very conflicted one," he says. Once there, he found that while the programs being used in Botswana had been very successful in Uganda, they didn't work as well when transplanted to a different locale. "I think up until that point, I had been taught, and more or less believed, that if you had a good idea, that's what mattered," he says. "Go and implement your good idea. That the world wants problems to be solved. If you've got enough smart people, and enough money, you could probably solve this problem." But in Botswana, he says, pulling in programs from places they didn't originate just wasn't working. "You couldn't look away," Smith recalls. "30 percent of adult females in Botswana had the virus, but it just wasn't going down." What did he learn from the experience? "It's not what you do that matters," he says about the lesson he brought with him when he came to Chicago. "It's who's doing it."

It's a lesson that he found meshed well with what IAF was trying to plan after that rally at Navy Pier. The rally "was the first time that they'd intentionally brought young people to the table as well," he says, "and people were very moved by the presence of young people and by their leadership. And that's what got a small group of folks talking--young people, lay leaders, church leaders, the national director of the IAF. What would it look like to build power with young people?"

After a few meetings to test the waters, United Power (as part of IAF) decided to form a sponsoring committee. They raised more than $100,000 from area churches and organizations. And when Smith arrived, he and the group started looking for the young people who would help lead Chicago. "I was working with them to figure out how can we identify other people who want to join as sponsors, because if we're going to do this thing, we need to pull them up."

Through a series of "relational meetings," one-on-one introductions between people of different backgrounds, they laid out a foundation and found young people that wanted to organize. One of them was Amy Totsch. "I met with Steven," she says about her beginnings with the group that would become PACT. "And we sat down and had one of those one-on-one meetings," says Totsch, "and that was all it took for me to get involved."

"During that time, we were called the Young Adults Organizing Drive," says Smith, "because that's who we were. We were trying to organize young adults." He laughs. "We made a lot of mistakes--our main goal was to make mistakes." One, early on, was to focus too young--PACT has since decided to focus on young adults, from 18 up to 25, or even higher. Another mistake was to simply build groups, instead of putting those groups into action. "We did a series of twenty-five trainings around the city on a sort of introduction to organizing--how do you build power among people from different backgrounds," Smith remembers. "And those were good. We used them as a way to bring together district groups and stuff like that, but the mistake was that they were too far removed from real action." And so then, he says, "we focused on action."

As the Young Adults Organizing Drive, they worked on the DREAM act, allowing young immigrants to attend college in the United States. They registered voters, and fought for youth jobs in the city, did all the youth actions they could think of. And then, in August of 2004, the Young Adults Organizing Drive helped their parent group, United Action, meet again on Navy Pier, this time to hold Senator Barack Obama, who attended the meeting, accountable on issues United Power was interested in.

"Afterwards," says Smith, "we were in the evaluation, and people were feeling frustrated. So someone asked, `Why are we getting frustrated? We just did this thing, we started this action!' and a young woman named Deonna Adams was like, `I want to be able to do that, to put this on ourselves.' And it set off this conversation about what it would take." They decided that, to do the same kind of things United Power did on a young-adult level, they needed more people. A lot more. And they decided that instead of simply running random actions, they would need to know what young people wanted. "And so that's how this house-meeting campaign came up," says Smith. "It was like, let's commit to go out and do these things, and do this human research. Find leaders, go into all these different neighborhoods. See what works, see what people are talking about."

Through 127 different house meetings, they found that the young people of Chicago were interested in three things: "Health care, financial aid, police reform," recounts Smith. "And," over the next year after that, "we won some small victories. We also did some work on military recruitment in high schools. We sent an interfaith group down to Springfield to lobby on the payday loan reform act." But, "it was still the Young Adults Organizing Drive. Because we were still experimenting. We had these issues; we were trying to see if we could make some change on them. And then we got to a point over the summer where folks were like, this is working, we need to make this real." In August of 2005, four years after the original 9/11 rally, and two years after Stephen Smith came to Chicago by way of Harvard and Botswana, the Drive held a rally and announced that they would be back at Rockefeller Chapel in four months with almost a thousand people, and a group called PACT (chicagopact.org).

In those four months, they eventually decided to put seven issues in their platform: Health Care, Financial Aid, Police Reform, Jobs, Homelessness, Civic Power, School Funding and Criminal Justice. The group is made up of ten caucuses (so far--they invite communities to form their own) from all over the city--there's a Catholic Caucus, a Jewish Caucus, an LGBT and an I-55 Caucus. And each issue has its own leadership team, researching and organizing the issue they're assigned to.

Even with a plan, Smith says, it's not going to be easy. Young people aren't just fighting for their issues, they're fighting for respect, too. They're facing public stereotypes of indifference and apathy, and stereotypes that politicians bring into meetings with them. But, he says, "the same things that are our weakness as young people are the things that are also our strength. When public officials or business leaders see us, they see that we're serious, they see that we've been trained and we know what we're doing--that's actually an extra punch. We then separate ourselves, even from other advocacy groups who've been around longer because it's something new. That's the biggest thing we have on our side."

Today, the real work has begun. In another church on the campus of DePaul University, a month and a half after the founding convention, the Homelessness leadership team is meeting to sit down and create not just "political action for the sake of action," says Tim King, one of the Homelessness co-chairs, but "real strategy and real goals." They come up with three goals today: Awareness, Diversity and Relationships, and Smith writes them on the whiteboard. King and his co-chair Aaron Bowen (who both demanded action on homelessness at the founding convention) go over what's been written, and then ask those in attendance, youths from different caucuses around the city, to ratify the committee's goals. They ask for the yeas, and get a fairly humdrum round of approval.

That's not good enough for Smith. Even though it's a Saturday morning, and the hard work has just begun, he reminds the members not to "say yes unless you're committed personally to this." It rings of the founding convention, when those who would become PACT committed to meet each alderman in the city by March. They promised to work with politicians to meet the demands that they'd made. And they made commitments to have plans, by them and for them, on health care, financial aid, and school-funding reform by the middle of July.

"We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of commitments we wanted from our public figures. But the more important commitment we made was to ourselves," Smith had said back in January in the basement of the chapel. "Those public officials we aren't going to see everyday, work with them. But we are going to see each other."

Smith's reminder works. Everyone in the room stands and shouts a yea with every ounce of vitality they can muster. There are no "nays," and the goals of the Homelessness committee are ratified. By the end of the meeting, each of them has personally committed to head back into their separate communities and find allies in their homes, their churches and their schools that can help them do what they want to do. They've made plans to work towards their first big action, a rally at City Hall on March 31st. And, as they pack up and adjourn, they're clearly excited about what they're doing.

The hard work is here, and, as young people of Chicago, they're ready for it.

(2006-02-14)

Also by Mike Schramm

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