Citizenship in a democracy is about more than marking an occasional ‘X.' A vibrant democracy requires the active participation of citizens of all backgrounds and economic circumstances. This includes participation in meetings. The rewards of selflessly devoting your time and energy to your community are to see the results of your efforts improve the lives of your fellow citizens.
So goes the theory. The reality is that community organizations often exist more as a lucrative position or as a political power base for someone than to meet any social need. There may be a board of directors, but directors who take seriously their mandate to learn something about the organization and to participate in setting its policies often get a rough ride. They can be subjected to verbal abuse and slander, and attempts to intimidate and isolate them.
Until volunteer board members of limited means are better protected by legislation this is reality for anyone trying to represent, and assert the rights of, one's fellow marginalized citizens. That said, getting thrown in jail for five weeks solely through the allegations of someone who wanted me silenced during the city budget process is way too much.
This is what Bob Besanson, the Federation of Metro Tenant's Association's little Frankenstein, did to me. I understand that the clique which controls FMTA had a hard time deposing him as board chairman and getting him to resign from FMTA. He was becoming a liability. But no one had ever heard of Besanson before they parachuted him into the chairmanship.
I have been elected or acclaimed to the board of FMTA four years running. They tolerated for three years my nagging about financial accounting and improved delivery of the services we were receiving public money in order to deliver. Then they found new allies at city council and decided that they could safely get rid of me.
Constant verbal abuse did not make me go away. I was reelected by the general membership meeting of FMTA on the promise to keep pushing to improve service delivery and accountability. This despite the FMTA ruling clique's usual attempt to stack the annual meeting by informing only selected people of the time and date.
For them, this was the last straw. At the new board's first meeting they tried to remove me from the board by a majority vote. In fact, they have to call a special membership meeting to do this. They used as justification an incident in which I had shouted back at some little twit who was enraged that I had been elected and she hadn't.
I refused to accept this. I came to the next board meeting and they called the police, who ejected me. I laid a complaint and got two opinions from two different police complaints officers. One said the beat cops had acted wrongly in removing me. The other said I shouldn't go back there, but made no threat of action against me.
The FMTA clique began keeping the date of the board meetings secret from me. I went to the FMTA office occasionally to see what was going on. Soon there was no point going to board meetings anymore because those directors who hadn't gone along with Besanson had been driven away by relentless verbal abuse. Then with no warning the two cops, who threw me out of the board meeting, arrested me at my home. They implied that they were good friends of Bob and were annoyed at me for laying a complaint against them.
The bail conditions forbid me to be at city hall whenever FMTA is ‘conducting business' there. Had I been able to speak to the community services committee when funding for FMTA was being considered, instead of in jail, it might not have passed.
Fortunately, city council has set conditions on FMTA that require it to show by September that it can adequately deliver services. Their abusive ways are making them more enemies all the time. FMTA has no reason to exist. Other groups could deliver the same services much better, but were intimidated from bidding for them.
FMTA needs to attract some intelligent people who also happen to be low income tenants, if it is to have credibility. Why would such people want to try, after what happened to me? Why would we want to be on any community board? Perhaps this, rather than ‘apathy,' is why so few low income people get involved in the community. How much democracy is in this?
The more that evidence accumulates of the FMTA ruling clique's vicious nature, the sooner they will be out of operation.
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