week 10

community organizing

and social change by randy stoecker

IAMA COMMUNITY ORGANIZERORGANIZER

Image courtesy AfroSpear

Obama’s community organizing experience, described in

his autobiographyDreams fromMyFather,became a lightning

rod at the 2008 Republican National Convention where for-

mer New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor

Sarah Palin mocked Obama and community organizing.

Community organizers responded—within days you could

buy a t-shirt saying “Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius

Pilate was a Governor.” (Pontius Pilate, of course, was the pub-

lic official said to have ordered the crucifixion of Jesus.)

Networks grew across the country as community organizers

and community organizing groups initiated a massive media

strategy and registered voters by the

hundreds of thousands. The Association

of Community Organizations for

Reform Now (ACORN) alone registered

more than 400,000 new voters and

nearly 1 million others who had fallen

off the rolls. Local community organiz-

ing groups in major cities each regis-

tered sometimes tens of thousands of

voters.

Then came the Republican attacks on ACORN, one of the

country’s largest community organizing networks. ACORN’s

success at voter registration drives in swing states brought out

the worst anti-democracy impulses from conservatives. In more

than a dozen states right-wing politicians accused ACORN of

voter registration fraud. Republican presidential candidate John

McCain, in an impossibly bizarre attempt at misdirection, even

charged ACORN with causing the global financial meltdown

(ACORN had, in fact, identified predatory lending as a problem

and began organizing against it more than a decade earlier).

ACORN fought back, and the GOP went down in defeat

in virtually every battle, with their attempts to thwart voter

registration turned back by courts, attorneys general and,

increasingly, popular opinion.

And now, we have a president who is a community organ-

izer. We could, perhaps, say “former” community organizer.

But once you learn the craft of community organizing, and

witness its ability to empower people, its spirit stays with you.

It certainly has for Obama. Community organizing’s democrat-

ic, and fundamentally sociological, impulses—understanding

how power works and using that understanding to build the

power of all the people—bring a sense of reward and satis-

faction unmatched by other forms of political practice.

There’s a great deal more to community organizing than

Barack Obama and ACORN, however. At its root, community

organizing isn’t about big organizations or charismatic lead-

ers, or even about specific political agendas or ideologies.

Rather, it’s about activating people at a local, neighborhood

21winter 2009 contexts Contexts,Vol.8,No.1,pp.20–25. ISSN1536-5042,electronic ISSN1537-6052.©2009AmericanSociologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2009.8.1.20.

Community organizing’s democratic, and funda- mentally sociological, impulses bring a sense of reward and satisfaction unmatched by other forms of political practice.

It was 2008, early in the presidential campaign season. Everyone

was talking about whether a woman or an African American would

be the Democratic party nominee for president. And then they

began talking about community organizing.

In the early days of the Democratic primary we learned that both

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had connections to it. Clinton

had written her undergraduate thesis on the famous community

organizer Saul Alinsky. Obama had actually done it in Chicago

through the Gamaliel Foundation, one of the national faith-based

community organizing networks.

level to claim power and make change

for themselves. It’s the process by

which grassroots organizations form

and grow, their members develop

leadership skills, and ordinary people

learn to change social policy.

The belief is that poor and work-

ing class people have been shut out

from access to political and econom-

ic power because they haven’t organ-

ized themselves in this way. Once

they’re organized, the theory goes,

they’ll have a voice in policy issues.

Without community organizing, there

are only fleeting demonstrations, iso-

lated spokespeople, and top-down

social policy.

the origins of organizing Community organizing has been

unique to the United States until

recently when U.S.-style global capitalism downsized and elim-

inated government services in nation after nation and forced

community-level responses. But in this country, Alexis de

Tocqueville documented our foreparents’ willingness to form

voluntary organizations two centuries ago.

The founding of this country in opposition to central gov-

ernment and collective tax redistribution, by a relatively small

group of people with exclusionary religious and cultural beliefs,

in a very big space, provided fertile ground for a form of polit-

ical action that focused on smaller community-based interest

groups. The idea of bringing together like-minded neighbors

to defend local space has remained ever since. And while the

participatory impulses of community organizing now push it

to be inclusive and democratic, its original populist underpin-

nings mean the craft is more anti-elitist than either conserva-

tive or progressive.

The power and presence of community organizing varies

over time, as urban historian Robert Fisher explored in his book

Let the People Decide. Working class people forced to stand in

bread lines during the Great Depression, African Americans

responding to the ravages of segregation while their white

neighbors enjoyed the expanding wealth of the late 1950s and

1960s, and urban neighborhood residents realizing that corpo-

rations and governments were disinvesting from their commu-

nities in the 1970s and 1980s were the source of the most

powerful community organizing periods in the past century.

But even during historical periods when not much appears to

be happening on the surface, community organizers were

working behind the scenes in rural and urban communities

across the nation.

The person most clearly associated with community organ-

izing is Saul Alinsky, who helped build powerful neighborhood

organizations, first in Chicago in 1939 and then across the

nation into the 1970s. His influence extends to many of the

community organizers working today, and he influenced the

development of many of the community organizing net-

works—national organizations that support the development

of thousands of neighborhood and community organizations

across the country.

Those networks include Alinsky’s own Industrial Areas

Foundation (IAF), the Gamaliel Foundation, the PICO National

Network, the Direct Action Research and Training Center

(DART), the Midwest Academy, National People’s Action (NPA),

ACORN, and others. The list is split about evenly between those

networks that are faith-based—relying on religious principles

for their motivation and congregations for their participants—

and secular networks such as ACORN, NPA, and the Midwest

Academy.

In ACORN we see the other foundation of community

organizing—the civil rights movement. While we best know

the civil rights movement because of its large national events

and its religious leaders, the movement was built by African

American community organizers such as Ella Baker in rural

communities and urban neighborhoods across the southern

United States. Myles Horton, the long-time leader and co-

founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, was per-

haps the crossing point between the Chicago influences that

guided Alinsky and the southern civil rights movement.

Until today, the most successful recent community organ-

izing period was in the 1970s when small neighborhood groups

across the country began realizing banks weren’t making loans

in their communities. As they studied and fought against this

22 contexts.org

A P Ph o to

Saul D. Alinsky speaks to crowd before meeting in a high school in 1967.

practice of “redlining” they built a national movement that

produced the federal Community Reinvestment Act. The result,

by some estimates, was as much as $1 trillion of investment

into poor and working class communities across the country.

Today, there are community organizing groups in every

state and every large city. Perhaps because of its local scale and

methodological process, most scholars never judged commu-

nity organizing interesting enough for serious study. So, no

one has counted all the groups, some of which come and go

with the ebb and flow of issues and funding.

We know even less about the numbers of lives touched by

those organizations. Many groups are part of one of the

national community organizing networks, others operate inde-

pendently. Many are informal groups composed of communi-

ty members who have maybe never heard the term commu-

nity organizing. We suspect the organizations number in the

thousands and have hundreds of thousands, possibly millions,

of members.

Despite these large numbers, community organizing did-

n’t get the attention it deserved until the practice elected a

community organizer as President of the United States. While

nearly everyone knows something about the civil rights move-

ment, and many have heard of Alinsky, few of us knew of any

of the major community organizing networks until ACORN

became so prominent this past election season.

Now we’re finally understanding how powerful commu-

nity organizing can be. Indeed, in many ways community

organizing is the foundation of social change.

how it works You may have encountered community organizers knock-

ing on your door. They aren’t the ones trying to convince you

to adopt their religion, or give money

and sign a petition, or vote for their

candidate. They’re the ones asking you

about the most important issues in the

community, and encouraging you to

come to a meeting to talk about those

issues. They want to know what you

think and what issues you’re willing to

work on. They will definitely twist your

arm—hard—to get you to contribute at least your time and

maybe your money, too. But their main focus will be in get-

ting you to work on issues you already care about. Of course,

if you want to discriminate against gays and lesbians, oppose

equal rights for all, or limit democracy to only the rich or edu-

cated, they won’t work with you. Their commitment, first and

foremost, is to the expansion of democracy, and that’s what

leads those on the extreme right to fear them so much.

Consequently, individual community organizers are more

likely to identify with the political left, because that’s where

they find the most sympathy for expanding democracy. But

they also find themselves organizing in white working class

communities, where injecting progressive ideology into the

process might get them booted from the neighborhood, and

where community members often support discrimination. One

of Alinsky’s greatest disappointments was the racism practiced

by his first, and most successful, community organizing effort

in Chicago’s Back of the Yards community. And community

organizers today, such as Rinku Sen in her book Stir it Up, are

asking whether some degree of ideology should help guide

organizing.

But because community organizing groups focus on issues

generated by their members from the ground-up, they typi-

cally don’t affiliate with political parties or strict ideological

platforms that impose issues on them from the top-down. Two

slogans of community organizing show just how embedded

the culture of populism is in the practice.

The first says “no permanent friends, no permanent ene-

mies.” In contrast to Giuliani’s bluster at the Republican

National Convention, in the documentary The Democratic

Promise we see him promoting the efforts of East Brooklyn

Congregations—a faith-based community organizing group—

after the same film showed the previous Democratic mayor,

Ed Koch, mocking them. The second slogan is “never do for

anyone what they can do for themselves,” which sounds as

much like “pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps” as any

conservative should want. The difference, of course, is that the

organizer is there to help people develop their own strategy

to demand and get boots.

In most cases, implementing these principles follows a

common path. The community organizer enters the neighbor-

hood and gets to know people. Some networks have a special

name for this process—the one-to-one. In a one-to-one, the

organizer talks with individuals in the community, learning how

they feel about it, what issues they’re passionate about, and

what skills and resources they could contribute to an organiz-

ing effort. Sometimes the organizer also visits existing civic

organizations and congregations.

At this point, they’re organizing what historian Mary Beth

Rogers described as coldanger in her book of the same name.

This is the process of taking unfocused frustration and chan-

neling it into social change strategy. Hot anger is the anger of

riots. Cold anger is rational anger, the anger of organizing.

Eventually, this process gives the organizer a sense of who

23winter 2009 contexts

You may have encountered community organizers knocking on your door. They’re the ones asking you about the most important issues in the community.

the community leaders are—not the official leaders, but the

actual leaders—and what the important issues are. Then they

start organizing meetings in people’s homes, church base-

ments, or other places people gather. It’s these places where

most of the work of community organizing is actually done.

Those meetings lead to the selection of issues for the

group to work on and the development of a strategy to work

on them. In some communities that may be about trying to

rid a park of gang violence, in others it may be about getting

rid of an unwanted developer. The organizer’s job is to help

the group pick an issue they actually have some hope of win-

ning, and then helping them develop a strategy for doing so.

The group then initiates a campaign strategy around that issue,

often involving some form of confrontation such as a large

public meeting with a targeted corporate or public official. The

group insists on a yes or no answer to very specific demands.

The goal is not just to win on the issue, but to build an

organization that can win on other issues as well and become

an institutionalized force in the political system. To this end,

some community organizing groups hold large annual cele-

brations where they promote their past victories and prioritize

their current issues.

organizing in action Community organizing is guided by the principle “the

people shall rule,” and its task is to help the people not only

gain power, but the skill to grow and use that power.

Community organizers, with some exceptions, don’t lead, they

propel. The organizer is, in the best case, the expert who knows

how to get people to a meeting, develop a strategy, and win

a policy battle. But it’s the people who come to that meeting

who are supposed to choose the issue, develop a position on

that issue, design a strategy, and lead the public effort.

An action training event led by Bertha Lewis, now

ACORN’s chief organizer, illustrates this process. Lewis and

other ACORN organizers were part of a three-year project to

build community organizing capacity in Toledo, Ohio, and they

held monthly trainings the first year.

The day before this particular training she met with the

leaders of two neighborhood organizations. Together they

decided to focus the training around how to do a public action,

and chose a local slumlord operating in both neighborhoods

as the target.

The morning of the training Lewis brought together the

neighborhood organizations’ two dozen members to talk

about the issue, come up with a position statement, and devel-

op an action strategy—picketing the slumlord’s suburban

home. Then, everyone made signs and Lewis trained neigh-

borhood people to lead all the important parts of the action.

Someone would speak to the media, someone would lead the

chants, someone would negotiate with the police if they came.

When the group left for the action, you could almost taste

the tension and worry—it was the first time most of them had

participated in a public action. Would they get arrested? Would

they be slandered in the news? But they started picketing,

negotiated the rules of peaceful protest with the police who

arrived on the scene, were interviewed by the TV news, and

they left with a new sense of power. It started out as just a

training, but it launched a multi-year

campaign that eventually helped shut

down the slumlord’s company.

In the early days of a community

organizing effort like this one, the res-

idents often don’t know enough to sus-

tain it without the organizer’s help, just

like they may not know enough to replace the shingles on their

roof or repair their pipes without an expert to help. The organ-

izer plays a much more prominent role in those early days. But

unlike the roofer or plumber who does the work for you, the

best organizers help you learn to do it yourself. In the best

community organizing, it’s the leaders—community residents—

who give the news interviews, do the public speaking, and yell

“charge!” in the campaign.

building on the foundation It’s possible community organizing’s new visibility will result

in new resources, energy, and initiatives. There are now efforts

through the National Organizers Alliance to channel former

24 contexts.org

A young Barack Obama while a student at Harvard Law School, where he studied after working in Chicago for three years as a community organizer.

A newly revitalized community organizing practice may help turn the tide of a decaying polity and a corrupt economy.

A P Ph o to /O b am a Pr es id en ti al C am p ai g n

campaign organizers into community organizing. A newly revi-

talized community organizing practice may help turn the tide

of a decaying polity and a corrupt economy, focusing especial-

ly on the poor and working class who lack access to the fun-

damentals of life itself—a living wage, an affordable mortgage,

and health care.

These possibilities come with risks. Politicians don’t nec-

essarily have ideals and goals compatible with community

organizing, and we don’t know whether the office of presi-

dent will influence Obama more than he can influence it.

Adding to this uncertainty, new initiatives have emerged

posing as community organizing under labels such as consen-

sus organizing, community building, or asset-based commu-

nity development. Promoted by academics, foundation offi-

cials, and government officials, these models replace an

understanding of oppressive social structures that divide the

haves and have nots with an assumption of common interests

between them that will allow for conflict-free social change.

Such an approach contains within it the threat of a renewed

backlash against community organizing.

For community organizing to continue making meaning-

ful contributions to broad-based empowerment and bottom-

up social change, education about the realities of oppression

and training in power-based community organizing strategies

will be crucial. Most community organizing networks have to

support their own organizer education programs, and in some

cases that can mean only 10 days of training and an appren-

ticeship.

Our universities and colleges—and sociology depart-

ments—haven’t been helpful in this regard. Community organ-

izing courses don’t exist on many college campuses, and the

number of degree programs that focus on community organ-

izing can be counted on two hands. This has long been the

case. In fact, three main historical heroes of community organ-

izing—Alinsky, Horton, and Jane Addams (who co-founded

with Ellen Gates Starr the famous settlement house Hull House

in Chicago)—studied with or were colleagues of the famous

University of Chicago sociologists of their time. But none of

them ever felt welcomed enough to make a career out of soci-

ology or academia.

Perhaps now is the time to finally make that right. In the

process, academics can begin to combine their efforts with

community organizers and their grassroots leaders, replacing

higher education’s charity-based approach to service learning

and civic engagement with a social justice approach that sup-

ports community organizing groups and helps secure the foun-

dation for social change.

recommended resources COMM-ORG. http://comm-org.wisc.edu. A website that assem- bles key works on community organizing from academics and practitioners, and offers a discussion list with more than 1,200 members.

Peter Dreier. “Shifting Gears: Transforming Obama’s Campaign into a Movement for Change,” TheHuffington Post, November 6, 2008. A sociological reflection on the role of community organizing in the Obama presidency by a prolific writer.

Robert Fisher. Let thePeopleDecide:NeighborhoodOrganizing in America,updated edition. (Twayne Publishers, 1997). A social his- tory of community organizing in the United States.

Robert Kleidman. “Community Organizing and Regionalism,” City andCommunity (2004) 3 (4): 403–421.An analysisof the challenges of moving community organizing beyond local issues.

Aldon Morris.TheOriginsof theCivil RightsMovement. (The Free Press, 1984). One of the few sociological studies of the civil rights movement from a community organizing point of view, focusing on the network of local organizations and strategies at the foun- dation of the movement.

Rinku Sen.Stir itUp. (Jossey-Bass, 2003). Explores how to integrate racial/ethnic identity and ideology into community organizing, and move from local to larger issues.

Randy Stoecker is in the rural sociology department at the University of

Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Research Methods For Community Change.

25winter 2009 contexts