People finding their voice, becoming empowered, and working for change defines MIWON, which stands for Multi-ethnic Immigrant Worker Organizing Network.
Five organizations compose MIWON: the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, the Korean Immigrant Workers' Advocates, the Pilipino Workers Center, the Garment Worker Center and Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California/Institute of Popular Education of Southern California. MIWON focuses on leadership development and civic participation of immigrant workers from Chinese, Korean, and Latino communities. Its members work to bring about the necessary changes in the political and legal landscape to improve their lives and restore their dignity.
People finding their voice, becoming empowered, and working for change also defines the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), founded in 1969 as the U.S. Catholic Bishops' domestic anti-poverty and social justice program.
CCHD's mission is to address the root causes of poverty in America through promotion and support of community-controlled, self-help organizations and through transformative education. It is about empowerment of the poor through participation and about education for justice, leading toward solidarity between poor and non-poor as impelled by the church's biblical tradition, modern Catholic social teaching, and the pervasive presence of poverty in the United States.
As a recipient of CCHD funding, MIWON truly embodies the mission of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development in its empowerment of low-income individuals. It effectively accomplishes this through leadership development and more specifically, through its School of Education, Empowerment and Determination (SEED) for Advanced Leadership Training.
---Through education MIWON invests in developing leaders from the base.
---Through empowerment they build confidence, trust and skills.
---Through determination, they link organizers across campaigns and ethnic boundaries for greater solidarity and greater success.
Through the SEED program, leaders already identified by the five organizations of MIWON come together once a month for 13 months to develop their leadership capabilities. Last weekend, their training session exposed them to the Theater of the Oppressed, which incorporates the model of popular education. This model provides a space for people to tell their stories and to see that the difficulties they face as immigrants and low-wage workers are not an isolated phenomenon but a systemic reality.
The Theater of the Oppressed, established in the early 1970s by Brazilian director and political activist Augusto Boal, is a form of popular theater, of, by and for people engaged in the struggle for liberation. It is a participatory theater that fosters democratic and cooperative forms of interaction among participants.
During the Nov. 5 site tour by CCHD officials, Brent Blair, a senior lecturer at the USC School of Theater (and founding director of the Center for Theater of the Oppressed in Los Angeles), led the leaders in skits that acted out the realities they face daily, from asking for back wages from their employer to improved living conditions from slum landlords. Theater is emphasized not as a spectacle but rather as a language designed to: 1) analyze and discuss problems of oppression and power; and 2) explore group solutions to these problems.
MIWON is the leading worker organizing network in the country. The commitment of the workers is exemplified by people like Grandma Kim, a woman in her 80s who organizes people as she rides the bus and in the 10,000 immigrant families and activists who make their presence known at MIWON's annual May 1 Action for Immigrant Rights.
Their work strives to uphold and promote the concept that all immigrant community members, regardless of immigration status, must have full recognition as human beings, that their civil and human rights be protected and respected, and that they are empowered to stand up for and benefit from social, economic and political justice. |