Community organizing
Community organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to each other or share some common problem come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest. Unlike those who promote consensus-based community building, community organizers generally assume that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless. Community organizing has as a core goal the generation of durable power for an organization representing the community, allowing it to influence key decision-makers on a range of issues over time. In the ideal, for example, this can get community-organizing groups a place at the table before important decisions are made. Community organizers work with and develop new local leaders, facilitating coalitions and assisting in the development of campaigns. A central goal of organizing is the development of a robust, organized, local democracy bringing community members together across differences to fight together for the interests of the community.
Types of community organizing
Community organizers attempt to influence government, corporations, and institutions, increase direct representation within decision-making bodies, and foster general social reform more generally. Where negotiations fail, these organizations quickly seek to inform others outside of the organization of the issues being addressed and expose or pressure the decision-makers through a variety of means, including picketing, boycotting, sit-ins, petitioning, and electoral politics. Organizing groups often seek out issues they know will generate controversy and conflict. This allows them to draw in and educate participants, build commitment, and establish a reputation for advancing local justice.Community organizers generally seek to build groups that are democratic in governance, open and accessible to community members, and concerned with the general health of a specific interest group, rather than the community as a whole. In addition, community organizing seeks to broadly empower community members,through mobilizing efforts, with the end goal of "distributing" power and resources more equally between the community members and external political and social figures of power. When adapting the goal of community empowerment, organizers recognize the uneven distribution of material and social resources within society as the root cause of the community's issues. The process of creating empowerment starts with admitting that power gaps and resource inequalities exist in society and affects an individual's personal life. Though community organizers share the goal of community empowerment, community organizing itself is defined and understood in a variety ways. There are different approaches to community organizing. These include:
- Feminist organizing. However, feminist organizing can sometimes lean away from the conflictual vision of organizing to the point that it may not belong in the same category.
- Faith-based community organizing which brings together religious institutions. The Industrial Areas Foundation under Edward T. Chambers was the classic early example of this. The IAF as well as the Gamaliel Foundation, Faith in Action, and the Direct Action and Research Training Center are or were national or regional umbrella groups organized at one point around this approach.
- Broad-based organizing, which emerged from FBCO, reflecting the inclusion of a broader range of institutions and groups beyond religious ones. Parts of the IAF were early movers in this direction.
- A range of forms of neighborhood-based organizing that either organizes individuals or creates new "from scratch" kinds of organizations. This can include:
- * Doorknocking, where organizers go door to door and draw individuals into an organization. ACORN is a key example of an organization using this approach.
- * Block-club organizing, where blocks are organized into a club or sometimes tenants in a building are organized. Tom Gaudette and Shel Trapp were very involved in developing this approach. Generally the block-club model also includes higher level forms of organization because block clubs alone were felt not to form a strong foundation for organizing. Organization for a Better Austin and the Chatham-Avalon Park Community Council in Chicago and many of the organizations developed by Shel Trapp for National People's Action, including those in Cleveland, were good examples.
- * House meetings, where a series of house meetings are held in a community, leading to a community congress to form an organization. This approach was developed by Fred Ross. The Community Service Organization was a good example, and a similar approach was used by the Cesar Chavez in the United Farm Workers.
- * An "Organic" approach, where problems are located across a particular community and then people are organized around these problems locally, and then leaders are brought together in a larger organization. The Northwest Community Organization in Chicago, developed by Tom Gaudette and the early Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement were examples of this approach
- * Coalition building. National Peoples Action was a good example of this.
Grassroots action
organizing is distinctive for its bottom-up approach to organizing. Grassroots organizers are oftentimes members of the community, working to organize power collectively, rather than hierarchically. This type of organizing uses a process where people collectively act in the interest of their communities and the common good. According to scholar Brian D. Christens, grassroots organizing focuses on building and maintaining interpersonal relationships between their community members. Building social relationships allow community members to enhance both their collaborative and deliberative skills, to better handle conflict, and to strengthen civil engagement. Some networks of community organizations that employ this method and support local organizing groups include National People's Action and ACORN. Although efforts in grassroots organizing are significant in marginalized communities, it is specifically popular among marginalized communities of color."Door-knocking" grassroots organizations like ACORN organize poor and working-class members recruiting members one by one in the community. Because they go door-to-door, they are able to reach beyond established organizations and the "churched" to bring together a wide range of less privileged people. FBCOs have tended to organize more middle-class people, because their institutional membership is generally drawn from the mainline denominations. ACORN tends to stress the importance of constant action to maintain the commitment of a less rooted group of participants. ACORN and other neighborhood-based groups like the Organization for a Better Austin had a reputation of being more forceful than faith-based groups, in part because they needed to continually act to keep their non-institutionalized members engaged, and there are indications that their local groups were more staff directed than volunteer directed. However, the same can be said for many forms of organizing, including FBCOs. The "door-knocking" approach is more time-intensive than the "organization of organizations" approach of FBCOs and requires more organizers who, partly as a result, can be lower paid with more turnover. Unlike the existing FBCO national "umbrella" and other grassroots organizations, ACORN maintains a centralized national agenda and exerts some centralized control over local organizations. Because ACORN USA was a 5014 organization under the tax code, it was able to participate directly in election activities, but contributions to it were not tax-exempt.
Limitations to grassroots organizing
Grassroots organizing is vulnerable, being dependent on the support of more powerful people; its goals can be easily thwarted. Because grassroots organizing focuses on building relationships within the community, scholars note that grassroots community organizing can be passive and depoliticizing. This approach to building community empowerment does not aim for a specific political or social goal. In other words, building relationships do not always directly confront institutions, though it might challenge an individual's views through one-on-one conversations with other individuals in the community.Feminist community organizing
Feminist community organizing is a specific subset of social change work that centers around communal relationship building rather than just the acquisition of power. Gender structures are not neutral within social movements. Historically, men have been assigned to the higher, more visible aspects of movements, such as negotiating, due to the sexual division of labor carrying over into social movements. Because women have historically been behind the scenes during social movements, performing a kind of ‘invisible’ grassroots work, the importance of community organizing has only recently begun to be recognized.Feminist community organizing emphasizes an intersectional approach, aiming to empower the voices of those who have been historically marginalized, and recognizing that oppression often persists across multiple identities, creating intersecting forms of oppression. To take an intersectional approach, organizers pay special attention to the interactions of oppression among lines of gender, race, class, and other identities. This approach allows feminist community organizing to honor a much more diverse group of voices, oftentimes giving a spot to those who have been historically left out of these important conversations.
Feminist community organizing addresses a diverse set of issues, including but not limited to: sexual assault, reproductive justice, socioeconomic equality and welfare rights, and general structural and systemic inequalities. Organizers employ methods such as collective consciousness raising, which prioritizes raising consciousness for women to better understand how their personal struggles are interconnected with societal inequalities. While women have participated in grassroots organizing, the characteristics of feminism distinguish feminist organizing from other forms of grassroots organizing.