Feb. 27, 2011 10:05 p.m. |(0) Comments
Ana Garcia-Ashley calls herself an "action junkie."
She's so hyper, she says, that until she recently quit drinking coffee, she used it to slow her down, not wake her up. She says she has enough energy for two or three people.
Those are excellent qualifications for her new job - one that requires the Franklin resident to travel 300 days a year, giving training sessions and staying in close touch with a network of 62 church-based community organizations in 19 states.
In January, Garcia-Ashley was promoted to executive director of the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation. She's only the second person to hold that job in the 25-year history of the organization that once served as a training ground for a young Chicago community organizer named Barack Obama.
The job has put her organization on the radar screen of conservative critics of Obama, one of whom recently referred to Gamaliel as a "radical left-wing" foundation that "uses the tactics espoused by community organizing guru Saul Alinsky to incite church members to agitate for socialism."
She calls the socialism claim "very misguided, defamatory and untrue."
"We talk about social justice, not socialism," she says.
As for herself, she says she's not even a liberal. "I'm too Catholic to be liberal," she says.
In the face of such criticism, she's tasked with carrying out the new strategic plan for the group - getting networks going in all 19 states where the foundation operates. There's one already in operation, called WISDOM, in Wisconsin - that she helped create.
Garcia-Ashley has come a long way from her days in the 1990s as an organizer for the Milwaukee Inner-city Congregations Allied for Hope and other faith-based social-justice organizations in the state.
She's much farther from Yasica, the tiny village in the mountains of the Dominican Republic where she was born, and where her grandmother had the only key to the church.
But that doesn't seem to faze her.
"I have a divine purpose to have enough power to live out my values with other people," she said in a recent interview at home in the Franklin subdivision where she lives. "Wisconsin and the entire Midwest is an incredible place to be a person of faith and to organize."
In the hour-and-a-half interview on Feb. 18, Garcia-Ashley was friendly and frank, and you could hear a hint of the Bronx, where she spent much of her childhood and teen years, in her voice.
You could also tell that she would rather have been in Madison, with union demonstrators protesting Gov. Scott Walker's budget-repair bill, than sitting in her kitchen at home.
Grandmother's influence
She attributed much of her activism today to her grandmother Isabel Castaños, a devout Catholic.
Visiting priests would say Mass in the church, but Castaños would feed them breakfast first and go over their sermons, Garcia-Ashley said.
Castaños taught her granddaughter to say the rosary, she said, but also "that it was the job of women to transform the world."
Garcia-Ashley's family immigrated to New York City when she was 7, settling in the violent, drug-infested South Bronx. She was bused to Christopher Columbus High School, where she first became an activist.
"I was totally politically against Columbus," because of his cruelty to the natives of her island, she said.
A bright student, she became president of the Columbus High chapter of Aspira - an organization that encourages Hispanic students to go to college.
"In protest, I graduated in three years," she says.
She went to New Mexico Highlands University and then graduated from the University of Colorado, where she studied psychology and Latin American literature.
After graduating in 1980, she organized a neighborhood group in the southwest side of Denver and ended up as an organizer for the regionwide Metro Organizations for People, paid by the Diocese of Denver.
It was there that Cheryl Spivey-Perry, the first paid organizer of Milwaukee's 3-year old MICAH organization, met Garcia-Ashley at a retreat in 1991 and was impressed.
"I thought she had the same work ethic that I did in this kind of work," Spivey-Perry said. "You have to have a lot of energy and determination, and be committed to justice."
Spivey-Perry had come up as a Gamaliel Foundation protégé at the same time as Obama. In fact, she remembers the future president speaking on church-based organizing to a MICAH audience at the old St. Philip Neri Catholic Church on the northwest side in 1988.
When Spivey-Perry left Milwaukee for Washington in 1992, Garcia-Ashley was chosen to replace her.
She arrived in Milwaukee with her husband and two daughters. She was with MICAH until 1996 and then organized a similar church-based social justice organization in Racine, before launching the statewide WISDOM organization.
In the mid to late 1990s, she joined the Gamaliel staff as a regional director. Over the years she served as director of an immigration reform campaign (a conservative blogger points out that she called the Patriot Act an "attack on immigrants") and since 2009 has been associate director, groomed to take over for founder Greg Galluzzo.
Gamaliel is one of four national organizing networks, including the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation founded by Alinsky. It's funded by foundations, contributions and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
Another such organizing network, ACORN, declared bankruptcy after accusations of voter fraud and heavy criticism from conservatives.
That makes it a difficult environment to operate in.
"I feel like we're the next on their list," Garcia-Ashley said.
Gamaliel is the biblical figure known for defending early Christians from persecution by Pharisees and for mentoring St. Paul (whom Alinsky is said to have called the first great congregation-based organizer).
Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest who founded Gamaliel with his wife, Mary Gonzalez, in 1986, and served as community organizing mentor to Obama in the 1980s, says he's staying on the staff, partly as a mentor to Garcia-Ashley.
As for her, he said, "Ana is a natural organizer."
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Franklin resident amped up to head Gamaliel Foundation - JSOnline
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