Community Organizing
Citizens Working Together to Transform Their Communties
Community organizing is a process that empowers people to recognize and honor their individual and collective voices by working together to transform their communities.
These days, there are myriad problems that affect, and sometimes paralyze us. We often feel powerless to change a system that seems too vast to navigate and too bureaucratic to care. We don’t think that we have the power to make a difference.
Many have found hope in a process called "community organizing", which helps people transform that feeling of powerlessness into action.
Community organizing teaches those who want to make a change, but who don't have experience in the public sphere, how to take back their communities by holding public officials accountable for the decisions they make regarding their private lives. By learning how to engage in the political process, leaders are emerging across the country as they come to understand their own power and gifts, transform their neighborhoods, and impact city, state and even national policy.
There are many different shades of community organizing (i.e. grassroots organizing, values-based organizing, issue organizing, and neighborhood based organizing) but two principles that are common to most community organizing practice:
Power is in the relationship
This concept may seem counterintuitive in a society that promotes individualism and isolationism and in an economy that has forced most of us to work longer hours. Community organizing attempts to reweave the social fabric and rebuild trust within our neighborhoods by bringing people into relationship so that they may better understand their collective concerns and then learn how to act together to transform their communities. Community organizing finds its power in numbers.
Self interest moves people
We are most motivated to act when what we value most is threatened. Often when people hear the term “self-interest”, they associate it with selfishness. In community organizing, self-interest is considered the midway point between selfishness and selflessness. It is the fuel for creating effective community organizing campaigns. Community organizers work with community members to help them understand their individual and collective self interest. The community’s collective self-interest is what provides the base for action.
Often we find ourselves in situations where people are speaking for us, not with us. In community organizing, residents are considered the masters of their experience. Typically, community members partner with a paid community organizer from a local nonprofit organization to learn the community organizing process. Community organizers who do their jobs well are seen and not heard. Their purpose is to facilitate a process of change that (on a basic level) involves:
1. Understanding the collective self interest of a community.
2. Prioritizing an issue to focus on.
3. Meeting with public officials and experts to better understand the issue.
4. Conducting further research.
5. Holding public officials accountable by proposing change and negotiating a reasonable solution.
6. Follow up and evaluation.
Want to get involved or learn more? There are currently five major community organizing national networks in the US. Check to see if there is an affiliate organization where you live:
- Industrial Areas Foundation
- PICO National Network
- Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
- Gamaliel Foundation
- Direct Action & Research Training
