The Practice of Community Organizing

The Practice of Community Organizing

Community organizing is about people coming together to fight shared problems. Organizing efforts vary from a single concerned parent going door to door to unite neighbors to fight for a needed stop sign to massive social movements. People organize to protect civil liberties, combat ethnic prejudices, battle homophobia, or preserve freedom of speech. Sometimes organizing efforts start with a limited geographic focus and gradually expand to include the broader societal conditions that created the initial problems. Other times, organizing unites people who share problems, regardless of where they live, as when people with disabilities from across the country join together to fight for equal access and fair treatment. Organizing is also motivated by economic concerns, as when workers fight a plant closing or broad coalitions of activists join together to fight for a living wage.

Organizers follow numerous models in bringing people together. Marie Weil and Dorothy Gamble (1995) listed eight approaches ranging from confrontational social movements to accommodative social planning. The approach chosen depends on its social acceptability and its match to the problem at hand (Weil, 1996). Jacqueline Mondros and Scott Wilson (1994) portrayed organizing as the work done to build social action groups that create power for ordinary people, while Mark Hanna and Buddy Robinson (1994) emphasized that organizing also involves transforming individual and collective values to build support for social justice and social equity. For us, organizing is the process of helping people [Page 190]understand the shared problems they face while encouraging them to join together to fight back. Organizing builds on the social linkages and networks that bring people together to create firm bonds for collective action. It creates a durable capacity to bring about change. The process of building that capacity is called development.

Development is the ongoing creation of personal and collective resources that enable people to fight back and take charge. Development includes building organizations that have the knowledge to help those in need, creating the bonds of trust among people that constitute community, sharing technical skills, and gaining ownership of material wealth in ways that improve the lives of those in need.

Development is about empowerment. Empowerment occurs when groups of people with a shared mission act collectively to control decisions, projects, programs, and politics that affect them as a community (Rubin & Rubin, 2001, p. 6).

The choice of strategies and tactics depends on the climate of the times. In a conservative era, organizers might emphasize small-scale lobbying, while during more progressive times, they might encourage people to engage in dramatic confrontations that challenge the status quo and threaten the powerful. Today, some activists rely on confrontations to exert pressure for racial, gender, or economic justice, while others work to establish community-controlled organizations that provide social services, housing, and economic development (Fisher, 1994, 1996; Rubin, 2000).

People are mobilized—that is, come together for action—in a number of ways, through door-knocking campaigns; by building coalitions among existing religious, social, and work groups; or through electronic contacts through the Internet. Some organizations emerge in neighborhoods after angry community members persuade their neighbors to join together to combat an immediate problem such as polluted water supplies or drug dealers. Other community organizations get under way because of the work done by professional organizers from such national networks as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), National Peoples' Action, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the Pacific Institute for Community Organizing (PICO), Direct Action Research and Training Center, or the Gamaliel Foundation. Individuals who share a belief about a specific issue may join social movement organizations that focus on poverty, racism, gender equality, sexual orientation, pollution, ethnic heritage, or a variety of other shared concerns (Freeman & Johnson, 1999; Tarrow, 1994).

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