AUSTIN, Texas–Ernesto Cortÿs, Jr., Southwest regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, will speak at The University of Texas at Austin campus on Tuesday (Nov. 3) on the topic, “Community Organizing in the 21st Century.”
The 7:30 p.m. program in Bass Lecture Hall is free and open to the public. The event is sponsored by the UT Austin School of Social Work.
Cortÿs is the fall, 1998, Robert Lee Sutherland Visiting Scholar at the UT Austin School of Social Work. A graduate of Texas A&M with post-graduate studies in economics at UT Austin, Cortÿs participated in the leadership training program at the Industrial Areas Foundation headquarters in Chicago in 1972. In 1974, Cortÿs went to San Antonio, where he organized Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), a community-based movement for social justice.
In the years since then, Cortÿs has been involved in the mobilization of local communities. He has received appointments as a MacArthur Fellow, as visiting professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard University and as a Martin Luther King, Jr. visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Today, there are 23 community-based organizations in the Southwest Region of Industrial Areas Foundation, stretching from New Orleans to Los Angeles. There are 12 organizations in Texas.
For additional information, contact Prof. David M. Austin, (512) 471-0517 or (512)471-1937, or via email at daustin@mail.utexas.edu.
