Mark Schultz - Staff Writer
Wed, Dec. 31, 2008

News and Observer

Ivan Parra is in a good place to judge the Durham and Orange county political climates.

N&O article includes photo .

Parra, the former longtime director of El Centro Hispano in Durham, is now the main staff person for the community organizing group Triangle Congregations, Associations and Neighborhoods.

In Durham, the group has successfully worked to bring specialty health care to the poor and to get Duke food vendors to guarantee their workers the same living wage (about $11/hr.) and health benefits Duke pays its own employees.

Now the group's Orange County Organizing Committee is working to get local governments to protect affordable housing and pass a "housing wage," a higher $15/hr. standard tied to local housing costs.

Triangle CAN uses the organizing model of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the Saul Alinsky-founded group that builds coalitions between community groups and elected officials to leverage power. President-elect Barack Obama was influenced by Alinsky's ideas when he worked as an organizer in Chicago's South Side black community.

"The culture of the towns is different," Parra agrees when I ask him about Durham and the Chapel Hill/Orange County areas.

"The people in Durham act more out of impulse. The heart is at the center of everything they do," he says. "In Orange County there's so much education. People act out of intellect."

That's not to say one is right and the other wrong, only that you have to take that into account, Parra says. The communities also have more obvious differences. The Durham membership is racially and ethnically diverse and low to moderate income. The Orange County membership is mostly white and has more money.

Parra knows the newer Orange effort is barely on the map.

"I don't think if you asked the chancellor what's the Orange County Organizing Committee [that] he would know," Parra says. "A lot of the work here is about being recognized first."

Triangle CAN is trying to grow 100 community leaders each in Durham and Orange counties. It has about 70 in Durham and between 40 and 50 in Orange.

The idea is that these leaders will then organize their own constituencies to build a bigger power base.

I got to know Parra when I covered the Latino community for The Herald-Sun. A few years ago he and I were part of a group that traveled to Guanajuato with UNC's Center for International Understanding to learn how immigration by Mexican men was affecting the women, children and communities left behind.

Parra says he's enjoying taking on a broader range of issues.

"Before I was the Latino guy," he says. "I was boxing myself."

But it's the victories, first at El Centro and more recently with Durham CAN, that keep him in the game.

"I have seen that we can win," he says. "That becomes ... I don't want to say addictive. But it's that. That possibility of winning, of being relevant, becomes very rewarding."

Mark Schultz is the editor of The Chapel Hill News. D.G. Martin's column, which normally runs here, will return next week.