Social change needs engaged communities, not heroes | Gerardo Calderón | TEDxLehighU

Thank you very much for this opportunity. To the organizers, I just want to begin my talk with a little story. When first I came to the States, I was at a barbecue here on campus that was like two and a half years ago, and one of my American friends approached me and asked me, 'Which kind of superheroes do you guys have in El Salvador?' I was like, 'We don't really have superheroes down there.' Then I started digging a little bit more into that answer, and I realized that in my country, since the very beginning in the family and in schools, we are taught that if we want to see change, if we want to foster change, we have to get together with other people, build relationships, and act as a family, act as a community. That's why we don't really feel the need of superheroes.

Having said this, my talk is about social change, community, and superheroes. When I was crafting this talk, I started doing a little brainstorming of the ideas that came to my mind when I heard 'social change.' The first thing that came to my mind were names of people that have done great contributions to societies around the world, like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, or Cesar Chavez. The problem with these iconic figures in history is that they are portrayed as icons, almost as godliness, and we kind of relate them to superheroes. So we can see that superheroes are not only in comics; superheroes are also in the way we learn history, and that's very dangerous because we don't really feel connected to these big social leaders, and we feel that we don't have their power to foster change in our society. For example, I'm not feeling really capable right now of gathering 250,000 people and bringing them to Washington in order to foster some landmark act. I don't feel like I have Martin Luther King's power. I feel disconnected. But it's because I have learned that Martin Luther King was a very special person, like a hero, and I feel like I'm more normal. However, I rather conceive these social heroes as community organizers, and I'd rather dig a little bit more into history. I realized by myself that these people were not alone; they really built power among the community. They were not doing these things by themselves. They reached out to churches, they reached out to other communities, and that's why they were capable of fostering these big landmark transformations in their own societies.

There is a huge difference among heroes, superheroes, and community power. As you may recall, superheroes usually act alone. They climb buildings, they can fly, they don't need anyone. While community empowerment is all about reaching out to people, making connections, doing relationships. Also, superheroes are most of the time hidden. They have a hidden identity, they use masks, they don't want to be noticed. While community organizers, they need to become public. They need to showcase their plans, whatever they are capable to do so, they need to be there in the public sphere. Additionally, superheroes build dependence. Citizens are dependent on superheroes. What will Metropolis do without Superman? Nothing. They are fully dependent on Superman. But community organizers, they try to build power in the community. They try to empower regular people, and they help them realize that they are capable of fostering change if they act together as a community. Finally, the most important difference is that superheroes do not transform society; they only fight evil on the surface level. That's why we have so many movies of Batman: Batman 1, 2, 3. I think next year is going to be Batman 15, because evils keep coming and coming and coming. Batman hasn't been able to really transform society in such a way that wouldn't allow more evil people to come to the city.

Having said this, I need to clarify the concept of social change. For me, social change is intrinsically related to social justice, and social justice is the way how society delivers wealth, opportunity, and power among society members. So any sort of social change has to do with transforming the society into a more equal and fair environment. I want to put an example on this. For example, food stamps are very good, but they are not really fostering social change because food stamps are not really transforming the economic structure that is excluding people from the capability of going to the supermarket and buying the food by themselves or growing their own food. Food stamps are just on a surface level; they are not changing that economic system that excludes people. I'm not saying that food stamps are bad, but they are not social change. It can be a public welfare program, or could be charity or goodwill, but they are not social change. Social change has to do with social justice.

I want to give you three concrete takeaways beyond this theoretical concept of social change. These three takeaways I didn't read them in a book, I didn't learn them watching movies, but I experienced them by myself in social movements. The first one is this picture: a gigantic human chain of a thousand people covering almost a mile, and what they are doing is bringing together two monuments, one monument representing justice and the other one representing dignity. This took place in El Salvador, a country where the poverty rate is over 35%. When I was back there, I was working for a nonprofit and we decided to take a step further. We decided to affect the decision-making structure that was excluding people to poverty. So we invited the communities that we were working with all around the country. There were around 25 communities, and we asked them to come to the capital and to voice their needs. This means that although the general topic was 'There is no dignity without justice,' communities were allowed to claim and advocate for their own issues. For example, some communities were advocating for land rights, clean water rights, or violence or lack of safety in their communities. The takeaway of this successful public demonstration in this social movement is that communities and the participants really owned the activity. So ownership will be a very key element in social movement.

The next picture is back in El Salvador. That's my town, I was born there. El Salvador is also very well known because of its high crime rates. Nobody there goes out at night by themselves. And some other friends and I decided to challenge that perception, and we decided to go out for a run at night. It was a short run, like four miles. When we went back like an hour later, we felt something good. We felt like we had fun, but besides that, we felt excitement because we were challenging a very well-known and spread perception, the perception of unsafety. Because it was good and we enjoyed it, we decided to replicate the same run the next week, but with more friends. We decided to invite more friends. So the next week we were not just four, we were 13, and the next week we were around 35, and so on and so on. After two months, we were 200 people, 200 citizens running every single week at night in El Salvador, one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Now I came to the States and some of their friends took over the leadership of the initiative, and three years later they are not 200, they are 500 runners, and they do not only run once per week, they do it twice per week. So we really transformed the city by just doing some sport at night. Now the city is not alone at night; you have hundreds of people there and they are taking care of each other. You have thousands of eyes there that are witness of anything that may happen. It's a safer city now. The takeaway of this experience is I didn't show you how the movement looks like now. Yeah, that's like around 500 people right there. The takeaway of this movement is you have to do something cool, something that people really like, but at the same time something challenging. We were challenging the perception that nobody goes out at night in El Salvador, and for young people that's very attractive.

The last experience I want to talk about is Campaign for Change. That's my job. I'm the full-time organizer for this grassroots initiative in the next city to Bethlehem, which is Allentown. As you may know, the American public education system doesn't work in the same way for all, especially doesn't work well for African-Americans and Latinos. In Allentown there is a huge concentration of Latinos and African-Americans. So we decided to do an assessment of the school board and try to make them realize that they are accountable to the people who pay taxes and who voted them into power. So we used a very well-known tool that teachers use to grade students: the report card. Everybody who goes through the American public education system receives periodically report cards to inform their parents how their children are doing in schools. So we asked the community to design a report card for the school board. The community designed this huge report card in English and Spanish, and we failed them in some categories, and we publicly delivered this report card to the administration building. It was great. We had a lot of media coverage. We had The Morning Call, Channel 69, The Express Times covering that activity. It was a great and easy approach of how to empower the community, how to make them realize that they have the power to hold these public officials more accountable using the same tools that they are already used to. The takeaway of this experience is: use the tools that are already available in your own community. In this case, the tool was a report card. Everybody knew what the report card was for at that time.

I need to put these three takeaways in a broader perspective right now. In the world we are still facing hunger, we are still facing war, we are still facing crime. However, we have the technology, knowledge, and resources to solve it, but nobody is doing anything meaningful regarding solving these issues. That's because frontline communities and people who are really experiencing these issues in the world don't have the political power to use the resources and technology to solve those issues. But now I'm giving you these three specific takeaways, these three specific steps for you to use them and start your own social movement. My last message to you will be: you are not superheroes. You are real. You are real people capable of transforming your own society. Thank you.