The Emerging Structure

There has been some confusion about the various organizations and how we all tie into them so I wanted to take a minute to share my understanding of how things are developing. This is not an official explanation but what I believe to be the case based on the bits and pieces I’ve learned.

USA Service is the launching point for Obama's new national service initiative.  Our national service efforts started through the Presidential Inauguration Committee (PIC) and its website but they are ephemeral entities -- they will cease to exist once the inauguration is complete. So, USA Service was created to realize the vision of a new national service effort.

The community service events that we created on the PIC website have been moved to the USA Service website. Going forward, I envision USA Service as the national umbrella under which we will be developing and promoting many of our community service projects. If we are tied into USA Service, we will be notified when new efforts are initiated and we can provide input into what our community needs are.

I see Community Organize is the custodial organization for the Obama grassroots organization in California and through which our local teams are linked to each other as well as our state and national leadership. It may be that Community Organize will become a model for the rest of the nation, an adjunct entity, or it could get folded into a new national site. It’s too early to tell but the important thing is it is serving the purpose of keeping our network of community organizers connected to one another in California.

As I’m sure you know by now, US election law does not allow the new administration to use the campaign database. So, we need to build a new national database of community organizers and volunteers. It is my understanding that the USA Service site feeds into a VAN (Voter Activation Network) database to which I have been given access to help organize and recruit volunteers for our service projects MLK weekend and beyond.  Please encourage everyone you know to go to http://USAService.org and signup so we get they can become part of this next phase in the movement.

Please remember that we are very much in a time of transition and it will take weeks, if not months, to reconstitute this organization completely.  

I’ll leave you with an analogy I heard this morning regarding the political process which I will reapply to our efforts. Right now our efforts are less like performing a precisely-composed symphony and more like improvising a piece of modern Jazz built upon a general theme.

If we are patient and continue to do our individual parts while everyone else does theirs, it will come together.

Yes we can!