Tom Gaudette
| Tom Gaudette | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Thomas Aquinas Gaudette March 8, 1923 Medford, Massachusetts |
| Died | September 23, 1998 (age 75) Chicago, Illinois |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Boston College |
| Occupation | Community Organizer |
| Known for | Founder of the: Mid-America Institute for Community Development |
| Home town | Boston, Massachusetts |
| Spouse(s) | Kathryn Gaudette |
| Children | 7 children |
Thomas A. "Tom" Gaudette (1923–1998) was a community organizer who worked in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago. Originally a businessman, Gaudette became interested in neighborhood organizing through his Catholic Church activism. Gaudette helped form a neighborhood group, along the lines of those organized by Saul Alinsky, on the far West Side of Chicago called Organization for a Better Austin. OBA was concerned with poor schools and neighborhood decline.
He also founded the Mid-America Institute for Community Organizations, and trained notable organizers like Shel Trapp and Gale Cincotta.
Thomas A. Gaudette was born in 1923, in Medford, Massachusetts. His parents were Roman Catholic and his father a member of a railroad union, two critical influences on Tom Gaudette's later development as a community organizer. Gaudette served with distinction in the United States Army Air Corps in World War II, surviving the famous raid on Ploesti, Romania, and by war's end earning the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and a Presidential Unit Citation. After the war, he graduated in 1949 from Boston College.
By the 1950s Tom Gaudette and his wife Kay had settled in Chicago, where he worked as a vice-president for the Admiral Corporation. Here, he was introduced to community organizing, for his new home had become a center of community organizing because of the work of Saul Alinsky and the Roman Catholic Church.
Experienced in labor organizing and trained in sociology, Saul Alinsky (1909–1972) inspired the community organizing movement in the United States. Alinsky-style community organizing is dedicated to creating grass-roots organizations led by local people with the end of combating government bureaucracies or businesses or other powers unresponsive to local concerns. The organizer, in the classic Alinsky sense, does not assume leadership of community organizations. Instead, he or she may inspire local communities to action, but the organizer's real job is to identify leaders who can direct the community organizations, so that communities themselves can truly determine their own direction. The Alinsky maxim "Never do for the people what they can do for themselves" aptly expresses this approach to community organizing. Identified with neither socialist thought nor the New Left of the 1960s, community organizing is thus a populist movement possessed of a profound faith in the democratic abilities of local communities to control their destiny. A major correlative belief is that, when local communities themselves address their problems, social justice and true democracy are realized.
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