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Contents
Introduction
Politics and Economics of The Social Service Industry
Factors Impacting Participatory Democracy
Conditions that Spark Community Organizing Movements
The Historical Context of Neighborhood Organizing Movements
New Organizing Approaches
Conclusion
References
About the Author
Introduction
There is no small coincidence that a group uniting for a common cause
achieved their dream of democracy in America and gained freedom and
independence from totalitarian rule by using community organizing tactics.
The American Revolution served as a template for community organizers like
Saul Alinsky to adapt strategies for their organizing initiatives. The irony is the
conditions that precipitated the creation of democracy are now the root causes
of community organizing efforts in America today as citizens’ struggle for
freedom and independence to restore social and economic justice, create
sustainable communities and live healthier and happier lives. Will history
repeat itself with another American Revolution?
At the same time ABCD was being unveiled in Chicago, I was a welfare
mother in Washington State who got fed up with the treatment and limited
resources of the social service system. As a way to create a support system in
my neighborhood and improve availability and accessibility of resources to
enable people to help themselves, I organized a group of neighbors into a
Family Support Network (FSN). The ideology of this loose knit group was that
people had the power to improve their quality of life when they functioned
within a system of support with people who shared common values. As the
size of the group grew, it increased individual and group capacity, as well as
the capacity of the whole community by being a valuable resource. I was
surprised when McKnight referenced the FSN for its capacity building
practices in the Guide to Capacity Building. (a.k.a. Blue Book) (McKnight and
Kretzman, 1996 p.23)
Another point Glazer makes that Roth (1998) references is “Entire industries
are devoted to helping people overcome something that shouldn’t exist in the
first place. It’s an enormous waste of knowledge and intelligence.”
Overwhelmed by these social services, citizens have lost their sense of social
responsibility to care about their neighbors in their neighborhoods and this has
led to the fragmentation of communities, the collapse of families, schools
failing, violence spreading, and medical systems spiraling out of control.
Instead of more or better services, McKnight (1995) contends the basis for
resolving social problems is contained within the community of the local
citizens. This principle is the core of Asset-Based Community Development
and demonstrated by practices of the Family Support Network.
Fewer citizens are engaging in participatory democracy activities because
they are too tired and too busy with their own lives to be aware of the political
economic conditions that are impacting their lives and communities. The irony
is the political economic conditions of our society is the reason why people are
simply too tired and too busy to get involved. (McKnight, 1995)
Alinsky organized people to take back their bargaining power to choose what
they wanted to improve in thier communities. This indicates that somewhere
along the line, the role of citizens in the democratic process was usurped
between the time of Tocqueville’s visit and the neighborhood organizing
movement that began in the late 1800’s.
Mike Thompson, a Harvard political science professor, feels the same way I
do. “The democratic system innovated by our founders no longer operates
effectively. The two party stronghold on our democracy – something not even
implied in the constitution – has dangerously weakened the separation of
powers. Almost all the people who now make up the legislative, executive, and
judicial branches of out government are either Democrats or Republicans. If
they are on the same side of an issue, such as access to the election process,
then the separation of powers has broken down and no longer serves the
public interest. And our elected leaders can’t effectively represent the people.”
When conducting research Thompson found, “a member of Congress in the
late seventeen hundreds represented ten thousand and fifteen people. Today
that same office ‘represents’ six hundred thousand people.” (Roth, 1995
p.139).
Nevertheless, specific conditions at the national and local levels determine the
approaches different groups use to restore social and economic justice.
Usually external pressure on traditional communities and a breakdown of the
routines of daily life trigger citizens to engage in activities to bring about
changes to better their lives. Disturbances in the larger political economy
create the momentum in which the powerless move the mass political
insurgency.
Midgley, (1986) a social work academician, points out central to the rationale
of community participation is “a reaction against the centralization,
bureaucratization, rigidity, and remoteness of the state. The ideology of
community participation is sustained by the belief that the power of the state
has extended too far, diminishing the freedom of ordinary people and their
rights to control their own affairs.”
The Historical Context of Neighborhood Organizing
Movements
Thomas Jefferson recommended that wards be established where groups of
citizens could gather and practice democracy in their communities. (Mattson,
1998 p. ). Neighborhood organizing efforts in the past mobilized citizens in
neighborhood around their individual needs.
Alinsky believed people organize solely for their own economic self-interests.
Similarly, neighborhood improvement associations are rooted in maintaining
property values, and liberal social reform of social services. Such material
incentives are important, but they are not the glue that keeps neighborhood
organizing efforts together. Victories are crucial; people seeing themselves
and their power differently in their activities. In order to sustain long-range
objectives, neighborhood organizing must be built around issues of personal
development and an ideology that articulates a sense of purpose extending
beyond individual advantage. It must be committed to developing knowledge,
dignity, and self-confidence of community residents. And these people must
see themselves as part of a larger cause. A focus on unity instructs that
oppressed people must build relationships with other oppressed people. In
doing so efforts affirm variety and diversity while working “to synthesize and
build unity that transcends diversity.” (Fisher, 1994 p. 228)
Conclusion
All three community organizing approaches, Alinsky, ABCD and FSN, provide
a framework to engage citizens in activities that empower people to help
themselves. Unlike Alinsky’s confrontational techniques to take power from
those in authority, ABCD and the FSN approaches view power as an
outgrowth of the organizing effort, rather than something they “need” or “lack.”
The dramatic changes in the political, economic, and institutional context over
the past two decades has impacted community organizing practices.
Communities are struggling for survival and stretching their assets to
unsustainable levels. According to Robinson (1995) there is an emergence of
aspirations towards a new social order in which community is based on “face-
to-face association in caring neighborhoods which retain individual liberty to
act, open access to knowledge, and global interconnections” (p. 22) that
sustain specialized small scale enterprise.
The organizing ideology for our times must combine new demands for
autonomy and identify with older ones for social justice, production for human
needs rather than profit, and a spirit of connectedness and solidarity rather
than competition.
The basis for such an ideology can be found in the themes of ABCD and FSN.
Feminist theory instructs the need to build relationships, make connections,
and accept responsibility – connecting the public and private, challenging
patriarchal and hierarchical forms of domination, and recognizing the
importance of solidarity across differences of class, ethnicity, race, religion,
and sexual orientation.
ABCD has created the gateway through which new initiatives are emerging.
The FSN is a mechanism that creates a new social order and orients people to
becoming an integral part of an informal system of care. Alinsky's approach
will be useful in leveraging systemic changes in service delivery approaches
and cooperation from formal institutions. These broad scale initiatives will
assuredly be met with resistance as consumption of social services declines.
Confusing as this may seem to those who feel entitled, institutions will slowly
give over the duties and communities will regain the right to take care of their
own. We must start now to train people on how to care for themselves and
one another. The Family Support Network is one of many new structures
being designed to make this America’s new reality and put democracy back
into the hands of the people. Jacob Needham (2002) points out in his book,
The American Soul, Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders, “The hope of
the democracy we know is that it allows – and, to a certain extent, calls us all
toward – the life of conscience, of respect for one’s neighbor, that is rooted in
the teachings of wisdom about the actual and potential selfhood of humanity
(p. 19).
At the core of all initiatives no matter how altruistic they seem, Saul Alinsky left
behind these words of wisdom, “The more power the neighborhood
organization secures, the better it serves the interest of its members. It is self-
interest rather than exalted ideals that motivate people to act." (Fisher, 1994 p.
54).
References
Amin, Samir. (1986), “The Social Movements in the Periphery,” Transforming
the Revolution.
Kretzman, J. & McKnight, J. (1993). Building communities from the inside out.
Chicago . IL: ACTA Publications.
Randy Stoecker
rstoecker@wisc.edu
March 2001
INTRODUCTION
Kia ora.
So what I'd like to offer today is what I think I know based on my experience
with social action groups in the United States, what I suspect based on my
more recent experience with Australia and Canada, and what I wonder based
on my very recent experience in Aotearoa/New Zealand. My focus, then is the
former British settler colonies--those colonies designed to populate far away
places with European settlers.1 In the context of these four nations--Australia,
Canada, Aotearoa/Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States--I want to
discuss two paths to community development.
And perhaps it is because of where I come from that I want to talk today about
two paths to community development. These two paths are much more
clearly separated in the United States than in the rest of the former British
empire, but as Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand have all gone
through their version of government self-destruction, the circumstances that
led to the separation in the United States are increasingly apparent for you
also. At the same time, the United States has always been different.
Consequently, parts of what I say may seem irrelevant, or disconnected form
your experience. Because I come from the place that is different, please
understand that I do not wish anything I say to be taken as truth. Only as
perspective.
What are these two paths? In the United States we call them community
development and community organizing. Community development, quite
differently from how most of you use the word, is defined as nonprofit
organizations called community development corporations -- CDCs -- doing
physical development of impoverished communities. CDCs are supposed to
be "community-based," having some connection with the residents who live
there. They are also expected to do "comprehensive development," creating
jobs, housing, safety and other changes (though most emphasize housing).
And they are supposed to accomplish all this within the existing political
economic system (Stoecker, 1997). This is the programs approach.
But in the 1980s, community development ascended onto the stage, with
growth mushrooming from the hundreds into the thousands. But then
increasingly vocal critics of the CDC model pointed out how CDCs often failed
at projects that left their host neighborhoods in as bad or worse shape than
when they started; folded under funding shortages that allow elites to both
prevent real redevelopment and blame CDCs for failure; or disrupted
neighborhood empowerment by purporting to speak on behalf of a community
who they barely know (and who barely knows them) (Stoecker, 1994; 1997).
These critics led a call to bring back community organizing.
Most importantly, the United States, in contrast to all the other British settler
colonies, was borne of war against the Empire. It was a country formed in
opposition to government, taxes and rules. And we have remained that way,
so much so that a terms has been coined for us, "normative anti-statism"
(Joppke, 1992). While the rest of the industralized world created national
health care, social housing, and a managed economy, we kept finding ways to
prevent government involvement in anything but prison-construction. With
such a weakened federal government, an anti-government culture, and so
many hungry, sick, and homeless people, we needed a different "solution,"
inadequate as it might be. And, in fact, we came up with two.
The second solution, which really came of age during the 1980s, supported
the "government-do-less" philosophy, though perhaps unwittingly. This was
the community development approach. Through finding their own financing
and their own contractors, poor communities were supposed to build their own
affordable housing, create their own jobs, and develop their own community
networks. It's important to understand, however, while this plays into the
hands of the right wing, it is not a right-wing approach. Indeed, even the
community organizing approach, while focusing on getting government to do
more, treats government as only ever a potential and temporary ally.
Now contrast this to the histories of the other former British settler colonies.
And this is not to deny the important differences between Australia,
Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Canada, but to show their similarities relative to
the United States. Still technically considered constitutional monarchies,
separation from the British empire is gradual and peaceful. And all have a
history, up until at least the mid-1980s, of strong government with heavy
involvement in providing social goods. Government housing, nationalized
utilities and transportation, national health care, were common to all. And in
contrast to the United States, which created a Bill of Rights in 1791 as one of
its first orders of business when it was founded, Canada only got their Charter
of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, Aotearoa/New Zealand just in 1990, and
Australia as far as I know is still waiting. It has taken 200 years or more for
your distrust of government to drop to original U.S. levels.
"Community development is
Concerned with change and growth within communities, with giving people more power
over the changes that are taking place around them, the policies which affect them and
the services they use. Our ultimate concern is to help increase the well being of
communities and takes place predominately within those communities that have been
most disadvantaged or discriminated against.
We choose to use community development methodologies as an approach to work with
communities because these increase opportunities for participation, enable the transfer of
skills between people, develop self reliance, build organisational capacity and networks
of community groups, ensures local ownership of projects and decisions, utilises local
resources to solve local problems and, in the end effectively increases the amount of
social capital available within a community.
The communities, and groups within communities, most in need of this capacity building
are those which suffer the most disadvantage and discrimination."
In fact, an important article by Canadian authors Boothroyd and Davis (1993) was one of
the earliest attempts to develop some distinctions in the field they referred to as CED--
community economic development. They were the first that I know of, outside of the
U.S. to make fine-grained distinctions between emphasizing the community,
emphasizing the economic, and emphasizing development. The fact that they had to
make the distinction shows how conflated the emphases were.
Now 20 years ago, the two paths I would have written about would be the
governmental versus nongovernmental path to community development. And,
by the way, just to be clear, I would not be arguing the U.S. model is better.
Indeed, in terms of your quality of life, the health of your cities, the provision of
public goods such as health care, your distaste for all weapons of mass
destruction, and a variety of other measures, you have been enviably
advanced compared to the United States. But it's not 20 years ago. It's 20
years later. The choices are no longer between governmental and non-
governmental community development. In each of our four nations we have
witnessed dramatic governmental downsizing and increasing disenchantment
with government. Indeed, Aotearoa/New Zealand provides the most dramatic
example of this trend when, in 1984, a Labour government began selling off
public industries, ending farm subsidies, and dramatically reducing its payroll,
It was a move equally revered and despised. The architect of the program,
Roger Douglas, has become the darling of the Alberta and Ontario
governments in Canada (Clancy, 1996), which has also gone through a
sudden and dramatic dismantling of government. In Australia the plan is
called economic rationalism (Whitwell, 1998), but it has the same basic
philosophy and consequences.
But where to start? Well, perhaps it is useful to explore, for a moment, the
distinction so prominent in the U.S. between community organizing and
community development--power and programs. Because to the extent that
you are faced with the situation of a government more distant from the people
(only 75% of the population voted in the last Aotearoa/New Zealand national
election--a historical low for Aotearoa/New Zealand but still remarkably high by
U.S. standards--and only 63% showed up at the last Canadian election.) and
larger corporations exerting more control over citizens' lives with fewer
mechanisms of accountability, building power may be as important as building
programs. So let's spend some more time with each of these models.
This CDC model is very popular with elites, especially government and
foundations. The U.S. federal government has set aside special funds for
CDCs in Empowerment Zones and other federal housing programs. The Ford
Foundation created a monster program to promote CDC-based
comprehensive community initiatives (Smock, 1997). Foundations, United
Ways, and other elite-connected organizations have been particularly
entranced with a version of this model called "asset-based community
development" promoted by Kretzmann and McKnight (1993), which they've
interpreted as a "pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" poverty reduction
strategy.
Steve Callahan et al. (1999) argue for combing what they call project-based
and power-based community development, something they call "rowing the
boat with two oars." For them, project-based community development is
focused on delivering services such as "transportation, childcare, social
services, housing, jobs, retail services, and micro financing to low-income
communities." The organization boards attempt to include local residents, and
the staff often have technical expertise in housing, real estate, and business
development. On the other hand, these organizations are constantly in danger
of becoming disconnected from local interests, and while they try to get
resident representation on their boards, they tend to not be very successful at
it. In addition, their small size and high skill requirements prevent many of
these organizations from producing to scale. They also tend to be politically
weak, as their "consensus" approach to change can maintain existing power
relationships, which can constrain possibilities for change over time."
Consequently, they are often forced to do projects on terms set by public and
corporate officials.
Conflict theory sees no natural tendency toward anything but conflict over
scarce resources. In this model society develops through struggle between
groups. To the extent that stability is achieved, it's not because society finds
equilibrium but because one group dominates the other groups. Conflict theory
sees society as divided, particularly between corporations and workers, men
and women, and whites and people of color. The instability inherent in such
divided societies prevents elites from achieving absolute domination and
provides opportunities for those on the bottom to create change through
organizing for collective action and conflict.
The CDC model, rooted in the functionalist ideas of common interest and
cooperation between rich and poor, can only work if functionalist theory is
correct. In other words, there can be no barriers to poor communities
rebuilding themselves. The problem is that, while individuals can lift
themselves up and attain greatness, not all poor people can lift themselves up
simultaneously because there are not enough better spaces available in
society--not enough good jobs, not enough good housing. This problem is
multiplied when the focus is trying to lift up poor communities, which can only
occur if the people in those communities are simultaneously lifted up. If there's
no space for all those individuals in the economy, there's no chance for that
community. The simultaneous improvement of poor people everywhere
requires a drastic redistribution of wealth, violating the fundamental
assumptions of functionalist theory, which argues that trying to create an
artificial equality would actually upset equilibrium.
The community organizing model and its conflict theory underpinnings also
has limits, however. When community organizations wrest concessions from
corporations or government they often discover that those wins are only as
good as the community's ability to implement them. When the Cedar-Riverside
neighborhood beat back a government-developer coalition out to displace the
neighborhood with massive high-rises, they were faced with the prospect of
their existing housing being condemned unless they found resources to fix it
up (Stoecker, 1994). When the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative won city
approval of their neighborhood redevelopment plan, they had to find funding
and eventually even do the development themselves (Medoff and Sklar,
1994). ACORN had to create a community development arm when it began
winning housing through squatting and other tactics (Russell, 2000; ACORN,
1997).
WHAT DO WE DO?
In deciding what to do, the question you might consider is whether your
historical combination of community organizing and development fits your
present circumstances. I wouldn't even pretend to propose an answer, but I
will offer some ways that you might ask the question.
Choosing
What are the indications that you should choose, or that you can choose? Since the
1960s, we have been learning about the role of militancy and confrontation cross
nationally. The basic finding is that the more access a challenging group has to
government, and the stronger the ability of government to implement rather than just pass
legislation, the less need for militant confrontation (Kitschelt, 1986; Kriesi, 1996;
Meyer,1993; Meyer and Staggenborg, 1996). It is no surprise, in Aotearoa/New Zealand,
that the most consistently confrontational action comes from Maori struggles for
autonomy and self-sufficiency. As Claudia Orange quotes Northern Maori Group Te
Kawarike leader Shane Jones as saying "the real issue is sovereignty over our resources."
Trying to remove historically oppressive and legislated supported conditions that are
institutionalized in land ownership and long-standing power differences will not, at least
initially, be achieved through cooperation. The progressive dismantling of Waitangi Day
through social action is dramatic testimony to the power of organized protest. Now, to
what extent does the potential of proportional representation afford greater access, and
thus require less militancy, than in the past? To what extent does the disruption of
traditional European Waitangi Day practices provide opportunities to create a new form
of multi-cultural national celebration, which some argue, I understand, the Treaty of
Waitangi was originally designed for?
So stopping bad things and gaining access to decision-making are two of the
most important reasons to choose community organizing over community
development.
Starting new things is one of the most important reasons to choose community
development. Challenging groups that have achieved access, may consider
whether the more cooperative community develompent model is appropriate.
Gaining official and substantial representation means, for better or worse,
becoming part of the system. In addition, winning on a policy challenge often
places a community organizing group in the difficult position of figuring out
how to implement that win. To an extent, this involves a group transitioning
from outsider to insider status. Implementing a win, or maintaining a victory,
requires building organizational stability and expertise over the long haul, and
cementing relationships with power holders.
Culture may also include community culture. How is conflict viewed within the
community? Can conflict be integrated without disrupting other cultural beliefs
or creating divisions within the community? Are there existing organizations or
leaders who would support or oppose conflict-based organizing?3
Now, it is often the case that choosing one or the other models is difficult,
impractical, or not strategic. when that is the case, it's imperative to consider
combining them.
Combining
The African American Civil Rights movement in the United States has seen many of its
victories whither away, such as affirmative action, voting rights protection, integration.
Neighborhood organizations have also experienced problems moving from a successful
community organizing phase to a community development phase. Because of the
incompatibilities of the theories on which they are based, many community organizing
groups make the transition to development gagging and retching. Some of them destroy
themselves in the process (Stoecker, 1995).
Of course, the fights between practitioners of the two models often prevent
collaboration, especially when each sees its position as "right" and the other
as "wrong" and Callahan et al's boat can sometimes get rowed in circles. And
as much as everyone in the United States says "it's not the '60s anymore", we
continue to act like it is. The conflict between the community organizing folks
and the community development folks is so much like the conflict between the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee which eventually led to the split between African-
American Civil Rights activists and Black Power activists. It is so much like the
split between the radical and mainstream branches of the women's
movement. It is so much like the split between the militant and mainstream
branches of the environmental movement. It is so much like the split between
the groups engaging in conflict against the power structure and those
cooperating with it on any contemporary issue today, whether it is AIDS,
poverty, education, or community empowerment.
Like for those other movements, if handled strategically this split has some
advantages. Those 1960s movement splits produced a tremendous body of
literature, some of which focused on social movement structure. These
analysts, when taking a big picture view of the action, found many movements
composed of groups confronting the target and groups attempting to work
cooperatively with it. The advantage of such a model, they discovered, is that
the conflict groups were needed to create access to power holders. Conflict
groups, if they are good, have the bargaining chip of being able to create
enough social instability to force the target to the table. But they have a
difficult time actually negotiating, because of their militancy. Moderate groups
are much more successful in negotiations, but achieve very little without the
threat of social disturbance from more militant groups (Gerlach and Hine,
1970).
This model of multiple, complementary organizations may work well in
situations where there are lots of resources and lots of potential members.
But in smaller communities, it is impractical. Even these communities,
however, can have some of the advantages of this model through using front
organizations. Perhaps the best example of this "front" organization structure
was in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis Minnesota in the
United States. This neighborhood, threatened with total destruction from a
developer-state coalition that wanted to replace their homes with high-rises,
waged a very sophisticated battle. They created a cafe they used as a
meeting place. They created a Project Area Committee that had official
government status. They created a tenants union as the developer had
bought up all their existing housing. They created an environmental defense
fund to raise money for legal battles. They created a community development
corporation to create alternative redevelopment plans. These organizations
were all active in the struggle at the same time, and they all took on a different
piece of the problem. They eventually drove the developer from their
neighborhood, took over all their housing, and turned the neighborhood
housing into community-owned cooperatives (Stoecker, 1994). But there were
not enough people to separately staff the organizations, so everybody got
involved in everything.
Innovating
Oddly enough, in this time when Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand seem to
have become more U.S. like, the innovations in the United States seem to look more like
you. There are an increasing number of attempts to create single programs that integrate
a mild non-conflict form of community organizing, bricks and mortar community
development, and individual treatment forms of social work. The four most popular
innovations are community building, consensus organizing, women-centered organizing,
and CDC-based organizing.
CDC-based organizing is the most intriguing of all. While the other models
have for the most part eliminated confrontational community organizing from
their practice, CDC-based organizing is trying to preserve it. Thus, they are
trying to bring a conflict-based model of organizing into a functional-based
model of development. It is very interesting. The largest and most well-known
effort to help CDCs do community organizing is the $1.5 million Ricanne
Hadrian Initiative for Community Organizing (RHICO), sponsored through the
Massachusetts Association of CDCs and the Neighborhood Development
Support Collaborative. The program supports and trains CDCs throughout
Massachusetts to do community organizing (Winkelman, 1998, 1998b). A
similar project to promote community organizing through CDCs was the
Toledo Community Organizing Training and Technical Assistance Program
sponsored through the Toledo Community Foundation. Over a two year
period, ACORN provided training and technical assistance to three CDCs,
though one dropped out due to a lack of fit. The Organized Neighbors Yielding
Excellence (ONYX) CDC adopted a combined organizing and development
group model, where leadership and authority over the organizing effort
remained vested in the CDC board of directors, though they gave tacit
approval to developing an informal community organizing leadership structure.
Conversely, the Lagrange Development Corporation established a relatively
autonomous community organizing group, adopting a written code of
principles to prevent the CDC from interfering in the organizing effort even
while it paid the organizer's salary. The Lagrange Village Council, the
relatively autonomous community organizing group, practices a more
traditional Alinsky-style community organizing model, using actions and
pressure tactics to close problem businesses in the community, improve trash
collection, and manage a long drawn-out campaign against a predatory
property speculator. ONYX has practiced a much more subdued approach
consistent with the community development model, and with fewer
subsequent victories.
What are the outcomes of this combined model? CDCs in the RHICO initiative
have seen are more community involvement in CDC decision-making, less
funder-driven project development, and more effective CDC advocacy efforts.
(Winkelman, 1998). This also appears to be the case with the Lagrange
Development Corporation and Lagrange Village Council in Toledo, which has
gotten a number of problem businesses to shape up or leave, can turn out
dozens of people for a demonstration, and has hundreds attend its annual
meetings. There are also important problems. The first problem is the potential
restriction on militancy. One of the RHICO CDCs lost government funding
when they moved to organizing. However, this CDC continued down the
organizing path, weathering the cut and actually freeing itself from restrictive
funding (Winkelman, 1998). Other groups are less able to make such bold
moves. In Toledo, ONYX's organizing effort has been hindered by the fear of
funding loss, as the organization has been threatened with government
funding reductions, and they eventually dropped their community organizing
effort.
CONCLUSION
If I have done my job I am leaving you with more questions than answers.
What I beseech of you inside and outside of government is to take on the task
that government used to be so good at--thinking ahead. One of the most
important infrastructures which has existed in the U.S for over half a century
is the popular education infrastructure, most embodied in the Highlander
Research and Education Center, which was so instrumental in the United
States union and Civil Rights movements. For consciously dealing with the
tensions and potentials of community organizing and community development
takes some reflection, planning, and infrastructure building. One of the most
encouraging signs in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand is the
new and growing popular education infrastructure than can further those
community-based planning, research, and education efforts. Here in
Aotearoa/New Zealand I have learned about the Kotare Trust in Auckland. In
Canada there is the Institutes in Management and Community Development.
In Australia there is the Centre for Popular Education at the University of
Technology in Sydney, among others. Those are a starting place for
beginning to sort out these questions further.
These are some beginning places to sort out these issues where people can
gather to study and reflect and begin to act on their own growing
understandings of the power and programs approaches. I look forward to
learning of your progress. Thank you.
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Online. December 14. http://http://www.atimes.com/oceania/AL14Ah01.html
Cahill, Damien. n.d. The Anti-WEF Protests and the Media. Znet InterActive.
http://zena.secureforum.com/interactive/content/display_item.cfm?itemID=97
Callahan, Steve, Neil Mayer, Kris Palmer, and Larry Ferlazzo. 1999. Rowing
the Boat With Two Oars. paper presented on COMM-ORG: The On-Line
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org.wisc.edu/papers.htm.
Dwyer, Cath. 2001. s11 Protestors Block Entry to WEF. Sydney Alternative
Media Centre, http://www.samcentre.org/display_stories/1-90000/2101-
2400/display_stories_2170.html
Eitzen, Stanley, and Maxine Baca Zinn. 2000. In Conflict and Order:
Understanding Society, 9e. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Finks, P. David. 1984. The radical vision of Saul Alinsky. New York: Paulist
Press.
Gerlach, Luther P., and Virginia H. Hine. 1970. People, Power, Change:
Movements of Social Transformation. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill.
Medoff, Peter, and Holly Sklar. 1994. Streets of hope : the fall and rise of an
urban neighborhood. Boston: South End Press.
Morris, Aldon. l984. The origins of the civil rights movement: Black
communities organizing for change. New York: Free Press.
New Party. 1997. Living Wage and Campaign Finance Reform Initiatives
http://www.newparty.org/reforms.html
Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward. 1979. Poor people's movements:
Why they succeed, how they fail. New York: Vintage.
Reitzes, Donald C. and Dietrich C. Reitzes. 1987. The Alinsky legacy: Alive
and kicking. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Rule, Andrew, Claire Miller, and Paul Robinson. 2000. Battle of Melbourne.
The Age. September 12. http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000912/A59747-
2000Sep11.html
Stasiulis, Davia, and Niaa Yuval Davis. 1995 Introduction, in Stasiulis and
Yuval-Davis (eds). Unsettling Settler Society. London: Sage.
NOTES
*This paper is part of a larger project studying the relationship between community organizing
and community development, supported by a grant from the University of Toledo Urban Affairs
Center. The author also gratefully acknowledges travel support from the Foy D. and Phyllis
Penn Kohler Fund and the governments of New Zealand, Western Australia, and Victoria
(Australia) during the course of this project. Many thanks to Tony Rea, Larry Stillman, Linda
Briskman, and Anna Vakil for information, wisdom, and insights during this project.
1
Settler colonies are established to replace the native population with the migrating
population. See Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, 1995; Osterhammel, 1997.
2
There is debate over the size and extent of Aotearoa/New Zealand's nonprofit sector, with
Leavitt (1997) arguing it is quite undeveloped especially in the area of housing, and Robinson
(1999) arguing it is quite extensive.
3
Attempts to address these questions in the U.S. are increasing organized around two
issues. First, it is important to assess what exists in the neighborhood already. If there is an
organizing group and a CDC, it is probably counterproductive for the CDC to also do
organizing. Instead, they should find ways to partner with the organizing group. If there is a
CDC but no organizing group in the neighborhood, it is important to assess the CDC's
readiness and capacity to do community organizing. How knowledgeable is the executive
director about organizing in general and different organizing models? Is there anyone else
highly skilled in organizing on staff? Is there an organizer in place and, if so, what do they
know about organizing in general and which organizing model do they prefer? Who is or
would be responsible for supervising the organizer? How are leaders (board members)
identified/recruited? Are leaders elected or appointed (elected is better for organizing)? What
do leaders know about organizing in general and different organizing models? How do
organization leaders and director respond to a series of organizing vs. development dilemmas
(such as doing an action against a bank that also gives loans to the CDC projects)? What
procedures are in place for replacing staff and leadership without losing internal organizing
culture? Does the CDC have a broad mission statement that could easily include community
organizing? In general, the more skill, knowledge, and support for community organizing, the
more successfully a CDC will be able to develop its organizing capacity. Second, it is
important to assess what exists beyond the neighborhood. If the neighborhood has neither a
CDC nor an organizing group, are there high-capacity CDCs or culti-local organizing networks
working in the area? If there are both, what are their histories of working cooperatively across
the organizing-development divide? If there is a neighborhood CDC, but it is not structured to
support organizing, what is its history of working cooperatively with other organizations? Also,
what is its level of power? Numerous neighborhoods have small CDCs which do little or
nothing, and would be better replaced with a combination of community organizing and high-
capacity community development.
Randy Stoecker
rstoecker@wisc.edu
February 2001
INTRODUCTION
This paper begins by defining and describing these two approaches. Next, it
explores the extent to which they are complementary or contradictory--apples
and oranges. Finally, it reviews ways of combining them, exploring their
chicken-egg relationships.
Critics of the CDC model, however, point out how CDCs often fail at projects
that left their host neighborhoods in as bad or worse shape than when they
started; fold under funding shortages that allow elites to both prevent real
redevelopment and blame CDCs for failure; or disrupt neighborhood
empowerment by purporting to speak on behalf of a community who they
barely know (and who barely knows them) (Stoecker, 1994; 1997). These
critics have led a call to bring back community organizing.
Can these two models--one that works within the system and the other that
tries to change it--be combined? Or are they the proverbial apples and
oranges? Steve Callahan et al. (1999) argue for combining project-based
community development--which delivers social, economic, and housing
services to poor communities--and power-based community development--
which employs polarizing and militant tactics to develop the power of low-
income people and hold officials accountable.
Conflict theory sees no natural tendency toward anything but conflict over
scarce resources. In this model society develops through struggle between
groups. To the extent that stability is achieved, it's not because society finds
equilibrium but because one group dominates the other groups. Conflict theory
sees society as divided, particularly between corporations and workers, men
and women, and whites and people of color. The instability inherent in such
divided societies prevents elites from achieving absolute domination and
provides opportunities for those on the bottom to create change through
organizing for collective action and conflict.
The CDC model, rooted in the functionalist tenets of common interest and
cooperation, can only work if functionalist theory is correct. In other words,
there can be no barriers to poor communities rebuilding themselves. The
problem is that, while individuals can lift themselves up and attain greatness,
not all poor people can lift themselves up simultaneously because there are
not enough better spaces available in society--not enough good jobs, not
enough good housing. This problem is multiplied when the focus is trying to lift
up poor communities, which can only occur if the people in those communities
are simultaneously lifted up. If there's no space for all those individuals in the
economy, there's no chance for that community. The simultaneous
improvement of poor people everywhere requires a drastic redistribution of
wealth, violating the fundamental tenets of functionalist theory, which argues
that trying to create an artificial equality would actually upset equilibrium.
The community organizing model is much better suited for attacking the
structural barriers that prevent poor communities from lifting themselves up. In
a capitalist society, equal competitors make deals because each either has
something to offer or something to take away. But when CDCs attempt to
make deals with these power holders, they have nothing with which to
bargain. They are in the powerless position of begging--for lower loan rates,
reduced construction costs, more open hiring practices, etc. CDCs have little
to offer as inducement for power-holders to say yes, and little to withhold if
they say no. The community organizing model, however, substitutes the lack
of money resources with people resources. The bargaining chip poor
communities have is their cooperation. If they can collectively withhold their
cooperation or, even more powerfully, can disrupt the activities of power
holders, they have something to bargain with (Piven and Cloward 1979).
The community organizing model and its conflict theory underpinnings also
has limits. When community organizations wrest concessions from
corporations or government they often discover that those wins are only as
good as the community's ability to implement them. When the Cedar-Riverside
neighborhood beat back a government-developer coalition out to displace the
neighborhood with massive high-rises, they were faced with the prospect of
their existing housing being condemned unless they found resources to fix it
up (Stoecker, 1994). When the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative won city
approval of their neighborhood redevelopment plan, they had to find funding
and eventually even do the development themselves (Medoff and Sklar,
1994). ACORN had to create a community development arm when it began
winning housing through squatting and other tactics (Russell, 2000; ACORN,
1997). Because of the incompatibilities of the theories on which they are
based, many community organizing groups make the transition to
development gagging and retching. Some of them destroy themselves in the
process (Stoecker, 1995).
1. Organizing in Development
Some CDCs are now able to break free of these limited community organizing
models through new funding sources. The largest and most well-known effort
to help CDCs do community organizing is the $1.5 million Ricanne Hadrian
Initiative for Community Organizing (RHICO), sponsored through the
Massachusetts Association of CDCs and the Neighborhood Development
Support Collaborative. The program supports and trains CDCs throughout
Massachusetts to do community organizing (Winkelman, 1998, 1998b).
What are the outcomes of this combined model? CDCs in the RHICO initiative
have seen are more community involvement in CDC decision-making, less
funder-driven project development, and more effective CDC advocacy efforts.
(Winkelman, 1998). This also appears to be the case with the Lagrange
Development Corporation and Lagrange Village Council in Toledo, which has
gotten a number of problem businesses to shape up or leave, can turn out
dozens of people for a demonstration, and has hundreds attend its annual
meetings.
There are also important problems. The first problem is the potential restriction
on militancy. One of the RHICO CDCs lost government funding when they
moved to organizing. However, this CDC continued down the organizing path,
weathering the cut and actually freeing itself from restrictive funding
(Winkelman, 1998). Other groups are less able to make such bold moves. In
Toledo, ONYX's organizing effort has been hindered by the fear of funding
loss, and the organization has been threatened with government funding
reductions.
A second related problem is the internal conflict that the combination can
produce. The East Toledo Community Organization (ETCO), an Alinsky style
community organization in Toledo, Ohio, turned to development to support its
staff during the 1980s when funding shifted from organizing to development.
ETCO began conducting home energy audits, providing advice on how to
reduce energy costs. They took on city contracts to board up vacant houses.
They got a grant to start a jobs bank. And the organization imploded as
infighting between organizing proponents and development proponents broke
into open warfare (Stoecker, 1995; 1995b). The Dudley Street Neighborhood
Initiative in Boston began by reclaiming a city park from drug dealers, closing
area garbage transfer sites, curbing illegal dumping. They also developed a
plan to build new housing in their community, fighting off a government
redevelopment plan that would have wiped them off the map. They won
government and foundation support for their plan, and found a developer who
would do the project. But they had problems finding a reliable development
partner and ended up doing the development themselves. The time
consuming technical and financially risky aspects of managing housing
construction badly distracted the organization. (Medoff and Sklar, 1994).
Perhaps the most famous case is the NorthWest Bronx Community and
Clergy Coalition. The NWBCCC, with a 25-year history, organizes with ten
neighborhoods and approximately twenty local religious communities in the
Northwest Bronx area of New York City and has spawned a number of CDCs.
Because NWBCCC is an affiliate of groups, different sub-coalitions can work
on issues they have in common. They consciously put organizing first,
understanding the technical constraints placed on development.
Consequently, they came up with the idea of "Neighborhood Improvement
Plans ... as opposed to fitting into existing programs, leaders were asked to
think about what they wanted to see in the area and then we would try to
figure out how to get there." (Buckley, n.d.). Two of the CDCs formed through
NWBCCC--Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation and Mount Hope Housing
Company--are highly capitalized, multi-local CDCs with hundreds of
employees and thousands of housing units. The NWBCCC's housing
committee, or neighborhood groups, determine projects and then negotiate
with one of the CDCs about how to implement it (Dailey, 2000).
REFERENCES
Bobo, K., Kendall, J. & Max, S. (l991). Organizing for social change: A manual
for activists in the l990s. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press.
Buckley, Jim. n.d. statement,
http://www.nwbccc.org/History/Stories/Buckley.html)
Callahan, Steve, Neil Mayer, Kris Palmer, and Larry Ferlazzo. 1999. Rowing
the Boat With Two Oars. paper presented on COMM-ORG: The On-Line
Conference on Community Organizing and Development. http://comm-
org.wisc.edu/papers.htm.
Eitzen, Stanley, and Maxine Baca Zinn. 2000. In Conflict and Order:
Understanding Society, 9e. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Finks, P. David. 1984. The radical vision of Saul Alinsky. New York: Paulist
Press.
Randy Stoecker
Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work
University of Toledo
Toledo, OH 43606
419-530-4975
rstoeck@pop3.utoledo.edu
Co-Authors
This paper is adapted from presentations at the annual meetings of the Midwest
Sociological Society, and the American Sociological Association, and COMM-ORG: The
On-Line Conference on Community Organizing and Development.
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
Despite a rich and proud heritage of female organizers and movement
leaders, the field of community organization, in both its teaching models
and its major exponents, has been a male-dominated preserve, where, even
though values are expressed in terms of participatory democracy, much of
the focus within the dominant practice methods has been nonsupportive or
antithetical to feminism. Strategies have largely been based on "macho-
power" models, manipulativeness, and zero- sum gamesmanship (Weil
l986, 192).
These communities do not just happen. They must be organized. Someone has to build
strong enough relationships between people so they can support each other through long
and sometimes dangerous social change struggles. Or, if the community already exists,
someone has to help transform it to support political action. Sometimes that requires
reorganizing the community (Alinsky, 1971) by identifying individuals who can move
the community to action.
The distinction is subtle but important. One of the most common definitions of social
movement, by Charles Tilly (1984) says that a social movement is a "sustained series of
actions between power holders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a
constituency lacking formal representation, in the course of which those persons make
publicly visible demands for changes in the distribution of exercise of power, and back
those with public demonstrations of support." A general definition of community
organizing, on the other hand, says that "community organizing is the process of building
power that includes people with a problem in defining their community, defining the
problems that they wish to address, the solutions they wish to pursue, and the methods
they will use to accomplish their solutions. The organization will identify the people and
structures that need to be part of these solutions, and, by persuasion or confrontation,
negotiate with them to accomplish the goals of the community. In the process,
organizations will build a democratically controlled community institution - the
organization - that can take on further problems and embody the will and power of that
community over time." (Beckwith, Stoecker, and McNeely, 1997) In general, Community
organizing is the work that occurs in local settings to empower individuals, build
relationships, and create action for social change (Bobo et al, 1991; Kahn, 1991,
Beckwith and Lopez, 1997).
Both of these definitions emphasize the action part of making change. Both talk about
moving people to put pressure on authorities to make that change. But in community
organizing the focus is on the community, while in social movements the focus is on the
movement. These are different levels of action. Community organization is the process
that builds a constituency that can go on to create a movement, and it occurs at a level
between the micro-mobilization of individuals (Snow et al, 1986) and the "political
process" of the broader social system (McAdam, 1982). It is the formation of local
movement centers like the Montgomery Improvement Association, which helped lead the
famed Montgomery Bus Boycott (Morris, 1984) and ultimately provided the impetus for
a national Civil Rights Movement.
The community is more than just the informal backstage relationships between
movement members (Buechler, 1990; 1993), or the foundation for social movement
action. The community relationships which sustain movement activists may, in fact,
include many people who are not involved in the movement at all (Stoecker, 1995). In
community organizing, the focus is on broadening the convergence between the social
movement and the community. This is also why community organizing occurs much
more as local phenomena--since it has historically focused on building a "localized social
movement" in places as small as a single neighborhood (Stoecker, 1993). Viewing social
movements as the outcome of community organizing processes can stand social
movement analysis on its head, showing how "leaders are often mobilized by the masses
they will eventually come to lead" (Robnett l996,1664).
Community organizing has scantly been studied by scholars until very recently (see
COMM-ORG, 1997) and even then not by social movement scholars. The Montgomery
Bus Boycott is the most cited example--and it has rarely, until quite recently, been
covered as community organizing (Payne,1989; Robnett 1996). Rather, social movement
concepts such as micromobilization and frame analysis have been used to dissect
community organizing, fragmenting it. The community organizing done by the famous
Saul Alinsky is barely mentioned in the social movements literature, and when it is, there
are only weak connections to broader social movement theories (Reitzes and Reitzes,
1987; 1987b). As a consequence, we know very little about whether the concepts and
theories developed to study large scale social movements apply to community organizing
or whether we need new concepts altogether (Stoecker, 1993).
Added to the neglect within the social movements literature of community organizing is
our lack of understanding of the role that gender structures and identities play in social
movements. Gender as a variable in social movements has only recently received much
attention (Bookman and Morgen l988; Barnett l993, 1995; Caldwell 1994; McAdam
1989; Stoecker, 1992; Robnett l996; Thompson l994; Tracy l994; Wekerle l996; West
and Blumberg l990). Yet, the organizational structure and practices of social movement
organizations and actors are not gender neutral. Due to the social consequences of sex-
category membership--the differential allocation of power and resources-- "doing gender
is unavoidable"(West and Zimmerman l987, 126). Gender, as a social product of
everyday actions and interactional work, is also produced and reproduced through social
movement activities. Within social movements, doing gender legitimates differences and
inequities in the sexual division of labor and creates and sustains the differential
evaluation of leadership and organizing activities. Gender also effects problem
identification and tactical choices (Brandwein l987, 122). The male-dominated world of
sports and the military provide images and metaphors for building teamwork, and for
igniting competition and antagonism against opponents "to win" a particular movement
campaign (Acker, l990). The rhythm and timing of social movement work often does not
take into account the rhythms of life of caring work outside of organizing meetings and
campaigns (Stoecker, 1992). Or when it does, the result is that women's movement
involvement is restricted. In the New York Tenants movement, women were restricted to
the most grass-roots organizing activities, while men did the negotiating (Lawson and
Barton, 1980). In the 1960s Freedom Summer campaign, organizers worried about the
consequences of white women recruits developing relationships with Black men in the
South (McAdam, 1986).
It is possible that community organizing is neglected for the same reason that women's
work in social movements has been neglected. Women's work and community organizing
are both, to an extent, invisible labor. What people see is the flashy demonstration, not
knowing the many hours of preparation building relationships and providing for
participants' basic needs that made the demonstration possible. Indeed, community
organizing is the part of social movements that occurs closest to the grassroots and is in
fact more often done by women (Robnett, 1996; Lawson and Barton, 1980). Even when
men, such as Saul Alinsky, do it, it receives short shrift. And social movement analysis,
with some exception (Taylor, 1989; Taylor and Rupp, 1993; Taylor and Whittier, 1992;
Robnett, 1996; Stoecker, 1992) has scarcely developed concepts which would even allow
us to see this grassroots labor, far less understand it.
What are some of the gender dimensions that would help us understand community
organizing and its relationship to movement building? Our analysis begins with the
historical division of American culture into public and private spheres that split the
"public work done mostly by men in the formal economy and government from the
"private" work done mostly by women in the community and home (Tilly and Scott,
1978). These spheres have always influenced each other (through routes such as the
economic impact of women's unpaid domestic labor or the impact of economic policy
changes on family quality of life), but have historically been organized around different
logics with different cultures and, we argue, have produced two distinct models of
community organizing. These two community organizing modeld--one developed by
Saul Alinsky and the other developed by a wide variety or women--in fact begin from
opposite ends of the public-private split. The Alinsky model begins with "community
organizing"--the public sphere battles between the haves and have-nots. The women-
centered model begins with "organizing community"--building relationships and
empowering individuals through those relationships.
The Alinsky model, which we name after its most famous practitioner, is based in a
conception of separate public and private spheres. Community organizing was not a job
for family types, a position he reinforced by his own marital conflicts, by his demands on
his trainees, and by his own poverty. In fact, if anything, the main role of the private
sphere was to support the organizer's public sphere work. In his Rules for Radicals,
Alinsky (1971) remarked:
His attitude toward which issues were important also illustrates his emphasis on the
public sphere. While problems began in the private sphere, it was important to move the
community to understand how those problems were connected to larger issues outside of
the community. Thus, problems could not be solved within the community but by the
community being represented better in the public sphere (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987,
pp.27-28). This is not to say that Alinsky avoided a focus on private sphere issues. His
first successful organizing attempt, in Back of the Yards, produced a well-baby clinic, a
credit union, and a hot lunch program (Finks, 1984, p. 21). But these programs were
accomplished through public sphere strategizing, not private relationships. In establishing
and maintaining the hot lunch program, Alinsky pushed the BYNC to understand its
relationship to the national hot lunch program and "In order to fight for their own Hot
Lunch project they would have to fight for every Hot Lunch project in every part of the
United States." (Alinsky, 1969, p. 168).
The women-centered model, though it has a long history, has only recently received
much attention as some feminist researchers and organizers began arguing for a theory of
organizing that is feminist or "women-centered" (Ackelsberg l988; Barnett l995; ECCO
1989; Gutierrez and Lewis 1992; Haywoode l991; Weil l986; West and Blumberg l990).
For the women-centered model, while organizing efforts are rooted in private sphere
issues or relationships, the organizing process problematizes the split between public and
private, since its "activities which do not fall smoothly into either category" (Tiano, l984,
p. 21). Women's emotional attachments to their families affect their everyday community
commitments and their priorities about what are appropriate targets for local social
change efforts (Colfer and Colfer, 1978; Genovese, 1980; Stoneall, 1981). But women-
centered organizing extends "the boundaries of the household to include the
neighborhood" and, as its efforts move ever further out, ultimately "dissolve[s] the
boundaries between public and private life, between household and civil society"
(Haywoode, l991, p. 175). Organizing to secure tenant rights, local daycares, and youth
programs "define a sphere which is public, yet closer to home" (Haywoode, l991, p. 175)
and demonstrates the importance of the interconnections between the spheres
(Ackelsberg, l988; Petchesky, l979). Women-centered organizing utilizes "feminist"
values, practices, and goals. Within this type of organizing there is an emphasis on
community building, collectivism, caring, mutual respect, and self-transformation
(Barnett l995). As we will discuss, women-centered organizing is defined as much by the
historical placement of women in the home and neighborhood as the Alinsky model is
defined by the historical placement of men in public governing and commerce.
In this paper, then, we address two neglected issues in one question: How do gender
structures and identities play out in community organizing? It would be nice if we could
just say that community organizing is the backstage women's work of movement
building. But the most famous of the community organizers, Saul Alinsky, was a man,
and one who was particularly fond of his masculine style of community organizing (see
below).
We first examine the historical roots and some basic traits of each tradition. Next, we
explore some key differences between the two approaches. We then discuss the
implications of each model and the potential for integrating them.
The very term "community organizing" is inextricably linked with the late Saul Alinsky,
whose community organizing career began in the late 1930s. As part of his field research
job as a graduate student in criminology at the University of Chicago he was to develop a
juvenile delinquency program in Chicago's "Back of the Yards," neighborhood
downwind of the Chicago Stockyards--a foul-smelling and crime-ridden slum of poor
Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks. When Alinsky arrived, the Congress of Industrial
Organizations was organizing the stockyard workers living there. Expanding the CIO
model beyond workplace issues, Alinsky organized the Back of the Yards Neighborhood
Council (BYNC) from local neighborhood groups, ethnic clubs, union locals, bowling
leagues, and an American Legion Post. The success of BYNC in getting expanded city
services and political power started Alinsky off on a long career of organizing poor urban
communities around the country (Finks 1984; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a).
Alinsky's targets shot at him, threw him in jail, and linked him to Communists, organized
crime, and other "undesirables." He saw how the "haves" blatantly took from the "have
nots" and unashamedly manipulated the consciousness of the "have a little, want mores."
Alinsky had little patience for the version of community organizing practiced by social
workers, saying "they organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize
to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats" (Alinsky
1971, 68).
Alinsky often argued that a career as a community organizer had to come before all else,
including family, and to enforce this he would keep his trainees up all hours of the night
at meetings and discussions (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987, p. 10). Though he did not
publicly discourage women from engaging in the work (Alinsky, 1971), he was skeptical
of women doing his kind of community organizing, fearing they were too delicate (Finks,
1984).1 Heather Booth, who went on to help found the Midwest Academy and Citizen
Action, quit the Community Action Program of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation
(IAF), believing that women received inadequate training from IAF and the IAF wasn't
sensitive to women's issues.
Alinsky's approach has influenced an entire generation of organizers who adapted his
principles, but retained a core of practices and assumptions we will explore later. The
practice of the Alinsky model has built powerful organizations and produced visible
victories across the country: Back of the Yards and TWO in Chicago, SECO in
Baltimore, FIGHT in Rochester, MACO in Detroit, ACORN in Little Rock, ETCO in
Toledo, and COPS in San Antonio, among others. These organizations have in some
cases saved entire communities from destruction and produced influential leaders who
have gone on to change the face of the public sphere.
Unlike the Alinsky model, the women-centered model of community organizing cannot
be attributed to a single person or movement. Indeed, a wide diversity of women have
mobilized around many different issues using many different methods. We are most
interested in those mobilizations which fit the community organizing definition of being
locale-based.
This model can be traced back to African-American women's efforts to sustain home and
community under slavery. Bell hooks (l990; also see Davis l981) notes the historic
importance for African-Americans of "homeplace" as a site to recognize and resist
domination. Hooks argues,
Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African-American women
involved in the Black Women's Clubs organized day-care centers, orphanages, and
nursing homes. Others, such as Ida B. Wells, organized campaigns around such issues as
lynching and rape (Duster 1970; Giddings l984; Gutierrez and Lewis l992).
Perhaps the most famous of these activities were the settlement houses, founded
primarily by college-educated white middle-class women who believed they should live
in the neighborhood wherethey worked (Bryan and Davis l990, 5). The most well-known
settlement house organizer was Jane Addams, who with Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull
House on Chicago's west side in 1889. Their goal was to improve the social networks,
social services, and community life in poverty-stricken immigrant slums. They succeeded
in developing parks, playgrounds, expanded community services, and neighborhood
plans. They were also involved in social reform movements promoting labor legislation
for women and children, care of delinquents, and women's suffrage. But community
organizers often saw them as engaging in charity work rather than adversarial social
action (Brandwein l981, l987; Finks 1984, 96-7), and clinical social workers saw them as
violating the detached casework method that emphasized individual treatment over social
reform and community development (Drew l983; Lee l937; Specht and Courtney l994).
The women-centered model also carries a history of success different from the Alinsky
model. The activism of women in the early settlement movement, the civil rights
movement, and the consciousness-raising groups of the radical branch of the 1970s
women's movement allowed women to challenge both private and public arrangements in
ways that would forever effect their relationships, housework, parenting practices, and
career paths. The consequent changes in women's health care and women's knowledge of
their own bodies, in cultural practices around dating and relationships, and the
relationship between work and family are still reverberating through society. That these
successes have not been better documented owes to the fact that struggles focused on the
private sphere have been neither defined nor valued as important. Today, women of
color, low-income, and working class women create and sustain numerous protest efforts
and organizations to alter living conditions or policies that threaten their families and
communities (Bookman and Morgen l988; Feldman and Stall, 1994; Garland l988; Gilkes
l988; Gutierrez and Lewis l992; Hamilton l991; Haywoode l991; Leavitt 1993; McCourt
l977; Rabrenovic l995). These include, but are not limited to tenant organizing (Lawson
and Barton l990), low income housing (Breitbart and Pader l995; Feldman and Stall,
1994), welfare rights (Naples l991), and environmental issues (Pardo l990).
The Alinsky model and the women-centered model begin from different starting points--
the rough and tumble world of aggressive public sphere confrontation; and the
cooperative nurturant world of private sphere personal and community development.
Consequently, they have very different views of what human nature is and its role in
human conflict.
Among all the tenets of the Alinsky model, the assumption of self-interest has the
strongest continuing influence (Beckwith n.d.) and is strongly influenced by the centrality
of the public shpere in the Alinsky model.. Modern society, from Alinsky's perspective, is
created out of compromise between self-interested individuals operating in the public
sphere. Thus, organizing people requires appealing to their self-interest. People become
involved because they think there is something in it for themselves (Alinsky 1969, 94-98;
1971, 53-9). Alinsky's emphasis on self-interest was connected to his wariness of
ideology. From his perspective, organizing people around abstract ideology leads to
boredom at best and ideological disputes at worst. Alinsky also feared ideology becoming
dogma and was adamant that building a pragmatic organization should come before
promoting any ideology. He did hope that, as the community became organized, the
process would bring out "innate altruism" and "affective commitment." But even that
level of commitment was based on building victories through conflict with targets
(Lancourt 1979, 51; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 56; 1987b). Alinsky relates the story of
one organizer's effort to start a "people's organization" and how he used self-interest to
achieve the desired result:
Unlike the Alinsky model, women-centered organizing involvement does not emanate
from self-interest but from an ethic of care maintained by relationships built on years of
local volunteer work in the expanded private sphere, particularly community associations
(Stall, 1991). Rather than a morality of individual rights, women learn a morality of
responsibility that is connected to relationships and is based on the "universality of the
need for compassion and care" (Gilligan l977: 509). Women-centered organizers grasp
the meaning of justice not as a compromise between self-interested individuals, but as a
practical reciprocity in the network of relationships that make up the community
(Ackelsberg l988; Haywoode 1991; Stall, 1991). Leavitt (l993) describes how concern
for their children's welfare led a group of African-American women in Los Angeles in
the late l980s to focus on rehabbing the existing tot lots in their public housing
development. In Nickerson Gardens, as in public housing across the country, women
make up the overwhelming majority of grassroots organizers. The campaign of this all-
women tot-lot committee ignited them to testify at housing authority hearings, conduct a
community survey, and eventually secure funds and participate in the design and the
construction of two play areas in their low-income community. They did not manipulate
self-interest but instead built a cooperative consensus.
Both models have seemingly inconsistent understandings of power and politics. These
inconsistencies are rooted partly in the ways each thinks about human nature, but are also
particularly affected by how they deal with the public-private split. The Alinsky model
sees power as zero-sum, but the polity as pluralist. The women-centered model sees
power as infinitely expanding, but the polity as structurally biased. Understanding both
the differences between the models, and their seeming inconsistencies, requires looking
at how each deals with the public-private split.
For the Alinsky model, power and politics both occur in the public sphere. When power
is zero-sum, the only way to get more is to take it from someone else. Alinsky was
adamant that real power could not be given, but only taken. He watched how obsessed
elites were with power, even taking it from each other when they could and thus making
the very structure of power zero-sum. Thus, the method for a poor community to gain
power was through public sphere action--by picking a single elite target, isolating it from
other elites, personalizing it, and polarizing it (Alinsky 1971).2 The 1960s Woodlawn
Organization (TWO) was one of Alinsky's most famous organizing projects in an African
American neighborhood on Chicago's south side. When TWO was shut out of urban
renewal planning for their neighborhood, they commissioned their own plan, and
threatened to occupy Lake Shore Drive during rush hour unless their plan held sway. Not
only did they get agreement on a number of their plan proposals, they also controlled a
new committee to approve all future plans for their neighborhood, shifting control of
urban planning from city hall to the neighborhood (Finks, l984, 153; Reitzes and Reitzes,
1987)).
I disagree with Tim, but he's a very empowering person. Tim is more
Alinsky. For me, the process, not the outcome, is the most important....
The empowerment of individuals is why I became involved.... I was a
single mother looking for income, and was hired as a block worker for the
dispute resolution board, and gained a real sense of empowerment.
Power, for this organizer, is gained not through winning a public sphere battle, but by
bringing residents together to resolve disputes and build relationships within their own
community.
When we shift the focus from more abstract notions of power to more concrete practices
of politics, both models are forced to work in the public sphere. But the public sphere-
private sphere split still influences how each relates to politics.
The Alinsky model sees itself as already in the public sphere, and as a consequence
already part of the political system. The problem was not gaining access--the rules of
politics already granted access. Rather, the problem was effectively organizing to make
the most of that access. Alinsky believed that poor people could form their own interest
group and access the polity just like any other interest group. They may have to make
more of a fuss to be recognized initially, but once recognized, their interests would be
represented just like anyone else's. Community organizing, for Alinsky, was bringing
people together to practice democracy. Consequently, Alinsky did not see a need for
dramatic structural adjustments. The system was, in fact, so good that it would protect
and support the have-nots in organizing against those elites who had been taking unfair
advantage (Alinsky l969; Lancourt l979, 31-35; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987, 17-18).
Alinsky organizations support government even while attacking office holders (Bailey
1972, 136). When the IAF-trained Ernesto Cortez returned to San Antonio to help found
Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in 1973, he began with the traditional
strategy of escalating from negotiations to protests to achieve better city services for
Latino communities. Soon after their initial successes, COPS turned to voter
mobilization, eventually resulting in a slim win to change San Antonio's council from at-
large to district representation. From there they were able to control half of the council's
seats, bringing over half of the city's federal Community Development Block Grant funds
to COPS projects from 1974-1981. Eventually COPS found that its political lobbying and
voter mobilization tactics outpaced the effectiveness of confrontation and protest (Reitzes
and Reitzes 1987a, 121-123). Heather Booth's Citizen Action project has taken this
pluralist organizing approach to its logical extreme, focusing her energies entirely on
voter mobilization in cities and states around the country (Reitzes and Reitzes l987a,
153).
The women-centered model, however, approaches politics from an experience and
consciousness of the exclusionary qualities of the public-private sphere split, which
becomes embedded in a matrix of domination along structural axes of gender, race, and
social class and hides the signficance of women's work in local settings. This matrix has
historically excluded women from public sphere politics, and restricted them through the
sexual division of labor to social reproduction activities centered in the home (Cockburn
l977; Kaplan l982, 545). Increasingly, women have politicized the private sphere as a
means to combat exclusion from the public agenda (Kaplan l982). Thus, women have
organized around issues that flow from their distinct histories, every day experiences, and
perspectives (Ackelsberg 1988; Bookman and Morgen l988; ECCO 1989; Haywoode
l991; Stall, 1991; West and Blumberg l990; Wilson l977). Women-centered organizing
"dissolve[s] the boundaries between public and private life, between household and civil
society" and extends "the boundaries of the household to include the neighborhood"
(Haywoode l991, 175). Organizing to secure local daycares, youth programs, tenant
rights and a clean environment "define a sphere which is public, yet closer to home"
(Haywoode l991, 175) and demonstrates the importance of the interconnections between
the spheres (Ackelsberg l988; Petchesky l979). Cynthia Hamilton (l99l), a community
organizer in South Central Los Angeles, described a primarily women-directed
organizing campaign to stop the solid waste incinerator planned for their community in
the late l980s. These low income women, primarily African-American, with no prior
political experience, were motivated by the health threat to their homes and children.
They built a loose, but effective organization, the Concerned Citizens of South Central
Los Angeles, and were gradually joined by white, middle-class, and professional women
from across the city. The activists began to recognize their shared gender oppression as
they confronted the sarcasm and contempt of male political officials and industry
representatives--who dismissed their human concerns as "irrational, uninformed, and
disruptive" (44)--and restrictions on their organizing created by their family's needs.
Eventually they forced incinerator industry representatives to compromise and helped
their families accept a new division of labor in the home to accommodate activists'
increased public political participation.3
Leadership Development
Leadership is another characteristic of these models that shows the influence of the
public-private split. The Alinsky model maintains and explicit between public sphere
leaders, called "organizers," and private sphere community leaders who occupy decision-
making positions in formal community organizations. For the women centered model,
leadership begins in the private sphere, but leadership becomes a form of boundary
spanning across public and private spheres.
For Alinsky, the organizer is a professional consultant from outside the community
whose job is to get people to adopt a delegitimizing frame (Ferree and Miller 1985;
Gamson et al. 1982;) that breaks the power structure's hold over them (Bailey 1972, 46-
7). Advocates of the Alinsky approach contend that organizing is a very complex task
requiring professional-level training and experience (Bailey 1972, 137; Reitzes and
Reitzes 1987a, 53). In many cases organizers must "disorganize" or reorganize the
community since so many communities are organized for apathy (Alinsky 1971, 116;
Bailey 1972, 50). The Alinsky model also maintains a strict role separation between
outside organizers and the indigenous leaders that organizers are responsible for locating
and supporting (Lancourt 1979; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987b). New leaders have to be
developed, often outside of the community's institutionally-appointed leadership
structure. The focus is not on those individuals, however, but on building a strong
organization and getting material concessions from elites. Organizers have influence, but
only through their relationships with indigenous leaders (Lancourt 1979). It may appear
curious that Alinsky did not emphasize building indigenous organizers, especially since
the lack of indigenous organizing expertise often led to organizational decline after the
pros left (Lancourt 1979).4 Tom Gaudette, an Alinsky-trained organizer who helped build
the Organization for a Better Austin (OBA) in Chicago, explicitly discouraged his
organizers from living in the neighborhood, arguing they had to be able to view the
community dispassionately in order to be effective at their job (Bailey 1972, 80). But
when viewed through the lens of the public-private split, it is clear that the organizers are
leaders who remain in the public sphere, always separate from the expanded private
sphere of community. Because the organizers remain in the public sphere, they become
the link that pulls private sphere leaders, and their communities, in to public action.
There is less separation between organizers and leaders in the women-centered model, as
women-centered organizers, rather than being outsiders, are more often rooted in local
networks. they are closely linked to those with whom they work and organize and act as
mentors or facilitators of the empowerment process.5 Private sphere issues seem
paramount with these organizers. They find they need to deal with women's sense of
powerlessness and low self-esteem (Miller l986)--before they can effectively involve
them in sustained organizing efforts. Mentoring others as they learn the organizing
process is premised on the belief that all have the capacity to be leaders /organizers.
Rather than focusing on or elevating individual leaders, women-centered organizers seek
to model and develop "group centered" leadership (Payne l989) that "embraces the
participation of many as opposed to creating competition over the elevation of only a
few" (ECCO l989, 16). Instead of moving people and directing events, this is a
conception of leadership as teaching (Payne l989).6 Analyses of women-centered
organizing and leadership development efforts also underline the importance of
"centerwomen," or "bridge leaders," who use existing local networks to develop social
groups and activities that create a sense of familial/community consciousness, connecting
people with similar concerns and heightening awareness of shared issues (Sacks l988b;
Robnett, 1996). These leaders can transform social networks into a political force, and
demonstrate how the particular skills that women learn in their families and communities
(e.g., interpersonal skills, planning and coordination, conflict mediation) can be translated
into effective public sphere leadership. Robnett (l996) provides evidence that, "The
activities of African-American women in the civil rights movement provided the bridges
necessary to cross boundaries between the personal lives of potential constituents and
adherents and the political life of civil rights movement organizations" (1664). Thus,
ironically, gender as a "construct of exclusion...helped to develop a strong grassroots tier
of leadership…women who served as "bridge leaders" who were central to the
"development of identity, collective consciousness, and solidarity within the civil rights
movement" (Robnett l996, 1667). Although bridge leaders were not exclusively women,
this "intermediate layer" of leadership was the only one available to women at that time
(Robnett l996). Mrs. Amey, now seventy years old, has been a key activist and a
centerperson in nearly all of the Wentworth Gardens organizing efforts discussed earlier
since the mid-l950s. A woman resident's description of Mrs. Hallie Amey provides some
insight into the importance of her leadership role:
She's [Mrs. Amey's] the type of person who can bring a lot of good ideas
to the community....And she's always there to help. And she's always here;
she's always doing things. And she's always pulling you, she's pushing
you, and she's calling you, "We've got to do this!" She makes sure you
don't forget what you have to do. Early in the morning she's on the phone,
"Mrs. Harris, what time you coming out?'' That was to say, "you gonna do
it without me having to ask, or you giving me an excuse (Stall, interview,
1991)?
Finally, these two models adopt organizing processes that reflect the influence of, and
their conceptualization of, the public-private split. The Alinsky model emphasizes farge
formal public organizations to manage large visible public events. The women-centered
model emphasizes the development of informal small groups that take on less visible
issues, in the private sphere, in less visible ways.
Within the Alinsky model the organizing process centers on identifying and confronting
public issues to be addressed in the public sphere. Door knocking is the initial strategy for
identifying issues. Those issues then become the means of recruitment to the organizing
effort. The organization bills itself as the best, if not only, means of resolving those
issues. The "mass meeting" is the means for framing issues and celebrating gains.
Important to the process of building up to the mass meeting are cumulative victories--
beginning with an easily winnable issue, and using the energy generated by that win to
build to bigger and bigger issues. The public activities of the mass march, the public
rally, the explicit confrontation, the celebrated win, are all part of building a strong
organization that can publicly represent the community's interests. The annual public
convention is the culmination of the Alinsky organizing process. The first annual
convention of the East Toledo Community Organization in 1979 was preceded by flyers
emphasizing the neglect of the east side of Toledo by city government, broken promises
from officials, the victories of initial organizing, and the unity developing in the
community. ETCO mailed packets across East Toledo that produced 500 registrants for
the meeting. At the meeting itself the 500-1000 people gathered passed 13 resolutions
covering dangerous rail crossings, park maintenance, utility complaints, service
shortages, truck traffic, and many other issues (Stoecker, 1995).
In the Alinsky model, the organizer isn't there just to win a few issues, but to build an
enduring organization that can continue to claim power and resources for the
community--to represent the community in a public sphere pluralist polity. The organizer
shouldn't start from scratch but from the community's pre-existing organizational base of
churches, service organizations, clubs, etc. In many cases, the community organizations
created also spawn community-based services such as credit unions, daycare, etc. This is
not a process to be taken lightly or with few resources. Alinsky often insisted that, before
he would work with a community, they had to raise $150,000 to cover three years of
expenses (Lancourt 1979). When Ed Chambers took over the Industrial Areas Foundation
from Alinsky, he required $160,000 just to cover startup costs for a serious organizing
project (Industrial Areas Foundation 1978). For Alinsky, the organization itself was part
of the tactical repertoire of community organizing. Dave Beckwith, an Alinsky-style
organizer with the Center for Community Change, also argues for the centrality of the
organization.
The presence, and partial restriction, of women in the private sphere leads the women-
centered organizing model to emphasize a very different organizing process formed
around creating an ideal private-sphere-like setting rather than a large public sphere
organization. The process begins by creating a safe and nurturing space where women
can identify and discuss issues effecting the private sphere (Gutierrez, l990). This model
uses the small group to establish trust, and build "informality, respect, [and] tolerance of
spontaneity" (Hamilton l991, 44). The civil rights organizer, Ella Baker, was dubious
about the long-term value of mass meetings, lobbying and demonstrations. Instead, she
advocated organizing people in small groups so that they could understand their potential
power and how best to use it, which had a powerful influence on the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (Britton l968; Payne l989).7 Small groups create an atmosphere
that affirms each participant's contribution, provides the time for individuals to share, and
makes it possible for participants to listen carefully to each other (Stall, 1993). Gutierrez
and Lewis (l992 126) affirm that, "The small group provides the ideal environment for
exploring the social and political aspects of `personal' problems and for developing
strategies for work toward social change". Moreover, smaller group settings create and
sustain the relationship building and sense of significance and solidarity so integral to
community.8 Women in Organizing (WIO), a 1990s urban-based project, organized
twelve low income, African-American teenage mothers to gain self-sufficiency and
political empowerment. One of the organizing staff described the effort of this "Young
Moms Program":
Our work is about connecting women with each other, about transforming
their experience in terms of working with mixed groups of people of
different races, about building the confidence of individual women and
building the strengths of groups....All of our work is really about
leadership development of women, of learning more of how consciousness
develops, of how we can collectively change the world.
While WIO did help these women to organize an advocacy meeting with public officials,
the meeting was preceded by nearly five months of training sessions that addressed less
traditional issues such as personal growth and advocacy in the family, as well as more
traditional organizing issues (Stall, 1993).
Because there is less focus on immediate public sphere action in the women-centered
model, a continuing organization is not as central in initial organizing. In place of the
focus on organization building are "modest struggles" ----"small, fragmented, and
sometimes contradictory efforts by people to change their lives" (Krauss l983, 54). These
short-lived collective actions (e.g., planting a community garden, opening a daycare,
organizing a public meeting) are often begun by loosely organized groups. The
organizing efforts of the African-American women in South Central Los Angeles,
described earlier, functioned for a year and a half without any formal leadership structure.
Their model depended on a rotating chair, stymying the media's hunger for a
"spokesperson" (Hamilton, l991, p. 44; see also Ferguson, l984). If empowerment is "a
process aimed at consolidating, maintaining, or changing the nature and distribution of
power in a particular cultural context" (Bookman and Morgen l988, 4), modest struggles
are a significant factor in this process. Engagement in modest resistance allows women to
immediately alter their community and gain a sense of control over their lives. Attention
to these struggles is necessary in order to understand the more elusive process of
resistance that takes place beneath the surface and outside of what have conventionally
been defined as community organizing, social protest, or social movements (Feldman and
Stall, 1994). Women can achieve significant change in their neighborhoods by building
on the domestic sphere and its organization, rather than separating it from their public
activities (Clark l994).. Research on New York City co-op apartment tenants in the
1980s, found that the tenant leaders were almost always women, the majority were
African-American and were long-time residents of their building and their community
(Leavitt and Saegert l990; Clark l994). These women organizers/leaders applied skills
they had learned and used to sustain their own families to the larger sphere of the
building. They often met around kitchen tables and they made building-wide decisions
with the same ethic of personal care that they applied to friends and family. Many of the
tenant meetings included food made by different women residents who equated sharing
their dish with the recognition of their role. The style and success of organizing was
rooted in aspects of the social life within buildings and on a gender-based response to
home and community. They discusses rent payment and eviction issues in terms of the
situations of each tenant involved, and searched for alternatives that supported residents'
overall lives as well as ensured that good decisions were made for the building as a whole
(Clark l994:943).
We see the differences in these two models as at least partly the result of the historical
split of family and community life into public and private spheres as U.S. industrial
capitalism destroyed Colonial-era community-based enterprise and forced men to work
outside of the home and away from the community (Tilly and Scott 1978). The
competitive, aggressive, distrustful, confrontational culture of the public sphere contrasts
starkly with the nurturant, connected, relationship-building and care-taking ideal of the
private sphere. Clearly the emphasis on conflict, opposition, separation, and winning in
the Alinsky model reflects public sphere culture. And just as clearly the emphasis on
nurturance, connectedness, and relationship-building in the women-centered model
reflects private sphere culture (Cott l977). The fact that for nearly four decades the
Alinsky model was the preserve of male organizers, and training in the Alinsky model
was controlled by men for even longer, while the women-centered model developed in
settings closer to the domestic sphere often among groups of women, reflects and has
influenced the development of these differences (Stall, 1991; ECCO 1989).
In the disinvestment and deindustrialization that has come with global capitalism, each
model is as weak by itself as a nuclear family with a full-time male breadwinner and a
full-time female homemaker. As corporations either disinvested wholesale from their
host communities or downsized their local workforce, they forced women into wage-
earning positions to make up for male wage losses, leading to pressures on men to take
on more private sphere tasks. In poor communities that disinvestment left devastation--
neighborhoods without businesses, services, or safety. Indeed, many urban
neighborhoods of the 1980s and 1990s were no longer communities at all, but only
collections of medium and high density housing with few sustainable social relationships.
In this kind of a setting, gender-segregated organizing models can work no better than
gender-segregated family members. Imagine trying to employ the Alinsky model
organizing young moms who are socially isolated and exhausted from the daily grind of
trying to make ends meet. The masculine confrontational style of the Alinsky model, that
must assume prior community bonds so it can move immediately into public sphere
action, may be disabling for certain grass-roots organizing efforts, "particularly in
domains where women are a necessary constituency" (Lawson and Barton l990, 49). The
de-emphasis on relationship building in the Alinsky model will mean that, where
neighborhoods are less and less communities, and the people in them are less and less
empowered, the community can engage the battle but not sustain it. Large organizations
may in fact inhibit empowerment because they are not "likely to offer the kind of
nurturing of individual growth that smaller ones can provide, and may be especially off-
putting to members of low-income communities, where the predominant style of relating
to individuals is still prebureaucratic" (Payne 1989, 894). Consequently, internal power
struggles will threaten many Alinsky-style organizations in these settings.
At the same time, the problems that poor communities face today cannot be solved at the
private sphere or local levels. The women-centered model, consequently, is also weak by
itself. First is the risk that postponing public sphere confrontation with a white patriarchal
capitalist elite will maintain the vulnerability of at-risk communities, because white
patriarchal capitalists don't play fair. While women-centered organizers are concentrating
on personal empowerment--a process which cannot be rushed--the bulldozers could be
coming. One criticism of consciousness-raising in the women's movement is that it
doesn't translate into action very effectively (Cassell l989, 55; Ferree and Hess 1985, 64-
67; Freeman, 1975). Indeed, those risks appeared very pronounced in the Young Moms
program described above. When the program was threatened with a staff lay-off,
organized resistance was difficult to mobilize. But they also appeared in the Wentworth
Gardens case where the maintaining a community-run on-site grocery store became
difficult as warehouses refused to deliver to what they saw as a `dangerous'
neighborhood. And they appeared in Cedar-Riverside as a community clinic saw its
funding cut and had to reduce services. Both communities had shifted away from
confrontational, Alinsky-style tactics to meet these issues and were consequently unable
to establish effective campaigns against these threats. The creation, nurturance, and
maintenance of community in the face of forces which threaten to destroy it--through
neglect, disinvestment, or disdain--is an act of resistance. It is a blow against the power
structure just to survive (Hill Collins l991; hooks l990). But the women-centered model
may not work when outside forces consciously attempt to destroy the community through
any means available. There is also a danger that this model may degenerate into a social
service program, reducing participants to clients. This tendency is what the settlement
house movement, and the subsequent "social work" version of community organizing,
has been criticized for.9
Today, global capitalism also creates a new set of challenges for community organizing
that requires drawing on both models. With footloose capital that can make broad-
reaching decisions, and can hop around at the slightest sign of resistance from a local
community, community organizing must build even stronger relationships and
interpersonal ties at the local level, and mobilize those communities for even more
forceful public sphere actions. You can't do an action at your local bank, because your
local bank is owned by a corporation hundreds of miles or more away. Organizing to
counteract and control global corporations requires at least national and probably
international coalitions. At the same time, you must organize locally or there will not be a
strong enough base on which to build anything larger. Building relationships that are
rooted in strong local bases, that can then be linked together, requires both models. Julian
Rappaport (1981) describes the "paradox of empowerment" as the need to organize
simultaneously at the personal and structural levels. True communities (with strong
networks, culture, mutual support systems, etc.) under siege from identifiable sources
need to engage in confrontational campaigns to defend themselves, and will probably
benefit most from emphasizing the Alinsky model. Communities that really are not
communities--that lack the networks, culture, support systems and other qualities--require
first the foundation that the women-centered model can provide to prevent self-
destructive oligarchies. But in both cases the other model cannot be neglected. The
tension created by the Alinsky model challenges the strongest community bonds and
requires compensating strategies of relationship building and personal empowerment.
And as much as a strong community provides the foundation for a strong defense, when a
threat presents itself, the community has to be able to respond effectively. This
integration of the two models also must be done very carefully. You can't just add
together an Alinsky organizing process with a women-centered leadership model, for
example. Rather, integration needs to occur across each principle so that the models are
combined. Ella Baker's comments that "real organizing" is working in small groups with
people so that they can discover their competencies, and then "parlaying those into larger
groups" (Britton l968, 67) is an example of bringing together the organizing process
components of the Alinsky and women-centered models.
Careful attention to history also shows there are times when one model will be more
viable than the other. Robert Fisher (1984) showed a see-sawing between more militant
and more community-building periods of community organizing which seem to
correspond to progressive and reactionary periods in history. The transformation of
Alinsky-style community organizing efforts in the Reagan 1980s into community
development efforts, and the "discovery" of women-centered organizing during that same
period, may also support the contention that the two types of organizing may be more
effective under different conditions. Reactionary periods such as the 1980s force social
movements into "abeyance" (Taylor 1989) where the maintenance of community bonds
and the provision of emotional support become paramount, since public sphere action
seems ineffectual. In these periods, the women-centered model sustains the possibility for
future public sphere action. Certainly, in the wake of the deindustrialization and
devastation of inner city communities there is a tremendous need to rebuild communities
of place. Mary Pardo (1990, 6) notes that "The issues traditionally addressed by women--
health, housing, sanitation, and the urban environment--have moved to center stage as
capitalist urbanization progresses." Community organizing today faces special
challenges, as the targets are no longer visible and local. As we move into the next
century, if women-centered organizing succeeds in rebuilding community bonds, aspects
of the Alinsky model may again become applicable. Some social workers are trying to
resurrect the profession’s community organizing roots (Specht and Courtney, 1994) and
are calling for a return to the empowerment model ala Piven and Cloward (1979). And
the realization that global economic processes continually threaten local communities
may provide for a new round of social movement activity.
NOTES
1
Alinsky, along with Fred Ross, were instrumental in organizing
"educationals" in California that used a popular education process to
support the organizing process. These educationals produced the first
woman organizer hired by Alinsky, and the first organizing effort
targeting women specifically (Finks, 1984:68-71).
2
This is not to say that Alinsky avoided a focus on private sphere
issues. His first successful organizing attempt, in Back of the Yards,
produced a well-baby clinic, a credit union, and a hot lunch program
(Finks 1984, 21). But these programs were accomplished through public
sphere strategizing, not private relationships. In establishing and
maintaining the hot lunch program, Alinsky pushed the organization to
understand its relationship to the national hot lunch program and "In
order to fight for their own Hot Lunch project they would have to fight
for every Hot Lunch project in every part of the United States"
(Alinsky 1969, 168).
3
In Bullard's (1993) study of nine cases of grassroots community groups
fighting proposed toxic industrial sites, incinerators, or hazardous
waste landfills, seven of these communities were organized by women.
These women improved "the environments of day to day life" by utilizing
family, ethnic, and community networks, creating a sense of community
commitment and connection (Wekerle l996, 141).
4
Sometimes, indigenous organizers did develop. Fred Ross's work in the
Southwest, for example, produced an indigenous organizer by the name of
Cesar Chavez (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a).
5
Fish (l986) distinguishes the Hull House mentoring model from the
traditional mentor model based on an unequal distribution of power
between an older gatekeeper or instructor and an apprentice. The mentor
model at Hull House, rather than a dyad, included a larger support
system characterized by a network of egalitarian relationships and
shared visibility that provided both public and private supports for
the women involved.
6
The Civil Rights leader, Ella Jo Baker, throughout her life modeled
group-centered leadership, stating that, "Strong people don't need
strong leaders," (Cantarow and O'Malley l980, 53). At one point Ms.
Baker shared, "I have always thought what is needed is the development
of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in
developing leadership among other people (Baker l973, 352).
7
A quote from Payne (l989, 892-893) about Ella Baker's views shows the
distinct position of the women-centered model on how the organizing is
done, versus the immediate, visible outcome.
How many people show up for a rally may matter less than
how much the people who organize the rally learn from doing
so. If the attempt to organize the rally taught them
anything about the mechanics of organizing, if the mere act
of trying caused them to grow in self-confidence, if the
organizers developed stronger bonds among themselves from
striving together, then the rally may have been a success
even if no one showed up for it. As she said, "You're
organizing people to be self-sufficient rather than to be
dependent upon the charismatic leader.
8
Tom Gaudette, in rebuilding the Alinsky-style Organization for a Better
Austin, started by creating small groups, but for the purpose of
targeting issues and building a larger organization (Bailey l972:66),
rather than to empower individuals as the women-centered model does.
9
To the extent that service provision can be organized through
indigenous leaders, or "centerwomen", and the goal of empowerment
sustained, this tendency can be countered. The Young Moms organizer
explains, "I think social service programs for the African American
community are really extended families that you are now getting paid to
be [part of]. So if you look at it like that, it's really not about the
numbers....It's about being there when the people need you." Gilkes
(l988) discusses how women social service workers who live and work in
Black communities are fashioning new organizational structures and
practices and transforming old ones--rebeling against the traditional
human service practices (e.g. impersonal, instrumental, bureaucratic)
and restructuring their organizational settings to make them "Black-
oriented" (56).
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e-mail: dbeckwith@needmorfund.org
Contents
The Four Strategies
Development is a strategy that gets the group directly into the business of
delivering a physical product. Generally, groups select a development strategy
because the normal course of events is not meeting the areas needs. The
profit motive either does not bring private developers into the area - they can't
make enough money - or it brings them in to do the wrong thing - they are
converting moderate cost rental units into yuppie condos. Development could
mean housing or commercial or even industrial development. Development
methods require, like the other two strategies, particular skills. Many groups
have struggled to achieve good results in housing development with staff
whose training, experience and interests are in community organizing, causing
pain and suffering for the group and the staff. This is unfair. If we understand
the distinction between the strategies, we can see the different resources
needed for the methods that fit within them.
Back to contents
Community organizing is not merely a process that is good for its own sake.
Unless the organization wins concrete, measurable benefits for those who
participate, it will not last long. The groups that content themselves with
holding endless meetings and plod along involving everyone in discussions
that never lead to action or to victory are doomed to shrink into nothing.
People want to see results. That's why they get involved. There is a theory
(isn't there always?) that says that folks join up if two things are true. First,
they must see a potential for either benefit or harm to themselves if the group
succeeds or fails. Second, they must see that their personal involvement has
an impact on the whole effort. This makes sense to me. Winning is critical, but
if the group's going to win whether I get involved or not - if my personal
involvement is not critical - then I can stay home and watch TV.
Back to contents
The Principles of Community Organizing
What are these simple principles? What is the essence of the science of
power, applied through the art of community organizing?
Think about the last time you were in a meeting, and the room was too hot or
too cold. You may have looked around for a door to open, a window to crack,
or even a thermostat. I'll bet, if you found none of these, you stopped being
bothered by the room, though. What if you were right next to the thermostat,
but it was locked? Wouldn't the heat bother you more, and if you knew where
the key was, or who could turn down the heat, wouldn't the temptation to DO
SOMETHING become almost irresistible? In the same way, our view of our
own self interest gets shrunk down to the arena in which we believe we can
have an impact. Community organizing seeks to teach people, through
experience, that they can be effective in a larger and larger sphere - their own
block, their own neighborhood, their city, their state, and so on. In the process,
we redefine our idea of self - who else is 'us' - and thus, of self interest.
We see this dynamic aspect in the initial stage of building a group. At first,
some people will want to take on big issues, and some will identify more
achievable goals. The organizer will push for a winnable project so that the
group can get stronger slowly. The formula for building a new organization is:
FWFWFLFH
This stands for Fight, Win, Fight, Win, Fight, Lose, Fight Harder. Any group
that can pick its issues - and this is sometimes impossible - needs to take this
process seriously.
THIRD, it's important that, at an early stage of the development of any group,
they learn to deal with conflict and confrontation. Some people see this as
manipulation, as tricking people. Obviously, some groups and some
organizers are guilty of this. In the final analysis, though, groups must learn
confrontation and negotiation because they'll eventually have to use both.
Many of the problems that confront low income and minority communities can
be solved by coordination and determination, simply by focusing people of
good will on a commonly understood problem. But most of the fundamental
problems are deeply rooted in greed and power, and there are those who
benefit from the status quo. Slum landlords might make as much or more
providing decent, safe housing, but not many will see it that way. If we are to
build organizations that can have any serious impact at all, they will eventually
have to come up against a situation where there will be winners and losers.
The potential losers are not likely to lay down and roll over because of the
righteousness of our cause. If the group has never stood strong before, if they
have never made a demand before, if they've never faced a target that really
had to be forced into complying, they're more likely to back down when the
going gets tough. If confrontation is not one of the tools in our toolbox, then
we're likely to ignore problems that require toughness to be addressed.
FOURTH, in selecting an issue to work on, every group has to take into
account the fundamental definition of an issue. A neighborhood, a minority
group, a group of workers or people who share any common complaint can be
a community that wants to get organized. Typically, there is a tangled web of
problems - complaints, irritations, bad situations, oppressions, difficulties,
injustices, crises, messes. An issue is a problem that the community can be
organized around. I learned a formula to describe this distinction from Stan
Holt, Director of People Acting through Community Effort, in Providence, RI in
1971, when he gave me and another raw recruit our 6 hours of basic training
before he sent us out door to door. He used the initials I S R on the
chalkboard in the dingy little office at Broad and Public (I thought it was a
pretty apt address for a community group - and I'm NOT making it up!).
Immediate, specific and realizable. (I never could spell that last one) An
organizer 'cuts' an issue - interprets or massages perceptions or manipulates
situations until they fit these criteria as closely as possible. The thought
process was to become automatic after a dozen years.
Immediate, he said, in terms of either the benefit folks would get from victory
or, preferably, the harm they would suffer from inaction. 'The bulldozers are
coming and you'll be out on the street tomorrow' is far better than 'would you
like to be part of a community planning process'.
Specific refers to both the problem and its solution. Vacant buildings are a
problem. That building that we want torn down by the end of the month is an
issue.
Realizable (it's easier to spell winnable, but it's not the way I learned, what
can I do?) is the toughest of all. It's easy to describe the extreme, the global
problem beyond the reach of a Block Club or a neighborhood organization.
That's not a good issue, especially not in the early stages. Most effective
community organizations can point to victories that any sane person would
say were far beyond their reach, though. Who would have thought that a
handful of neighborhood folks concerned about their children would get the
government to buy their homes and relocate their families, putting Love Canal
into the language as a symbol of environmental disaster in the process. Who
would have said that East Toledo could get agreement and construction on a
$10 million dollar road project that would open up employment possibilities for
their neighborhood, and only five years from concept to construction? It
remains true, though, that calculating the odds on winning is an important first
step.
Back to contents
8. If you're not fighting for what you want, you don't want enough.
9. Celebrate!
The first rule: Nobody's going to come to the meeting unless they've got
a reason to come to the meeting. Like many of my ten 'rules', this seems
self-evident. All of them, however, represent lessons that I have learned over
twenty years of making the same mistakes, taking the same basics for
granted, and paying the price over and over again, until the lesson is finally
learned. I have observed this rule being broken by groups all across the
country, groups with experience, groups with talented staff and leaders, who
know better, or should. Giving folks a REASON to attend means two things.
First, interpreting the issue as related to them. This means developing a 'line'
or a 'rap' that sells the issue simply and personally. Even if the issue has been
thought through, if the story can't be told simply and quickly in an exciting way,
the people are less likely to respond. The organizer has to be able to answer
the question 'what's in it for me?' We must GIVE people the reason - this
should have been thought through in the planning stage, but in the actual
implementation of a campaign, there must be considerable attention to how
it's going to be communicated. For example, if the issue is the need for better
equipment at the local park, there should be more than one approach, going
beyond the obvious. Kids who might use the park will be attracted because the
new equipment might be fun. How to sell the issue to their parents? What
about neighbors who don't have kids? People who live too far away to benefit
directly? A planning group usually grapples with this problem when they're
putting together the flyer and the phone call 'rap' sheet - or they should. In this
case, a phone rap might look like this:
Call Sheet - Parks Meeting - call in results to : Joe Schmoe, 123-4567 by Wednesday at 7
pm.
IF YES: We're having a meeting about the playground tomorrow night over at
the school at 7:30. Have your children ever been injured on the broken
equipment? (LISTEN) Have they ever been cut or hurt on the asphalt?
(LISTEN) Would you like to have a safe, well equipped facility to send them to?
Well, this is what we're working for. We have the head of Parks for the City
coming, and we want to show him just how many people want action. Will you
be able to come to the meeting?
IF NO: Have you ever been bothered by the kids hanging out on the corners or
playing on the street? (LISTEN) Does it bother you that the parks on the other
side of the river have brand new equipment, and kids here in MidRiver have to
play in the glass and asphalt, on broken swings? Did you know they just spent
$28,000 to put grass in the park on River Road, and it's been 14 years since
they spent a dime on our park? We're having a meeting about the playground
tomorrow night over at the school at 7:30. We have the head of Parks for the
City coming, and we want to show him just how many people want action. Will
you be able to come to the meeting?
1.
2.
3.
4.
These two 'raps' seek to interpret the problem in terms of the self interest of
the person you're talking to, and thus to get their interest aroused enough to
come out.
The second rule is: Nobody's going to come unless they know about it.
This is another painfully obvious point. Time after time, though, I have helped
groups analyze their shrinking participation, and found that they've ignored
this rule. They publicize meetings through the newsletter. The newsletter is
distributed door to door by block captains. Half the blocks have no captains.
On the other half, the newsletters were delivered for distribution on Tuesday
night after 7, and the meeting was held on Thursday. Even where the
conscientious block captains actually went to every house on the block and
dropped one off on Wednesday afternoon when they got home from work,
about a third of the folks didn't go to the front porch until the next morning,
another third read the story about crime on the front page, but missed the
meeting notice, and another third thought it MUST be next Thursday they're
talking about. Many groups rely on a regular meeting night and a telephone
tree to get people out. Others just invite the ones who came to this meeting to
come back to the next one.
In fact, there is an almost unbreakable ratio - for every one hundred folks who
get a timely, well crafted written notice and a follow-up personal contact by
phone or in person, ten will come out. Late notices or wordy, unclear ones cut
further into the final count. No personal contact cuts even further. Organizing
is hard work, and there are few shortcuts worth taking. A group that doesn't
plant seeds with effective outreach should not be surprised when the harvest
is sparse.
The third rule is: if an organization doesn't grow, it will die. A good
outreach effort will bring out new recruits. These folks must be put to work.
Somebody has to recognize their effort in coming out, and talk to them,
welcome them, give them a chance to get into things. Could they do calls for
the next meeting? Would they like to help with posters for the fundraiser?
What did they think of the meeting? Each issue should bring in new folks, and
there should always be a next issue on the horizon, to get out and touch the
community with, to find yet newer folks to get involved with. People naturally
fade in and out of involvement as their own life's rhythms dictate - people
move, kids take on baseball for the Spring, they get involved with Lamaze
classes, whatever. If there are not new people coming in, the shrinkage can
be fatal. New issues and continuous outreach are the only protection against
this natural process.
Rule four: anyone can be a leader. I have had the privilege of working with a
wide variety of very talented community leaders in twenty years of community
organizing. I can safely and in all humility admit that not one new leader was
'developed' because of my foresight and careful cultivation and training of a
new recruit who showed clear promise. Almost without exception, the best
leaders have been people who rose to the occasion of a crisis. The priest who
spoke at all our news conferences got sick at the last minute. Who can take
his place? Mrs. H., you're the only one at home, and the thing starts in five
minutes - let me pick you up and brief you in the car. What do you mean, Mr.
President, you're not going to run for reelection? This organization is big, it's
new, and nobody else is ready! Mr. T., you have to run, or else we'll have
those guys from UpThere in charge of the group, and we can't have that, can
we? The only wisdom or craft I can claim in any of these scenes is an ability to
convince people to step into a tough situation and give it a try, coupled with a
shameless willingness to praise and support a person after their first shaky
performance. They did the rest. Anybody can be a leader. A good community
organization provides a lot of people with a lot of opportunities to practice, to
try it out, to learn by doing. A broad team of folks who can lead is built by
constantly bringing new people into leadership roles and supporting them in
learning from this experience.
Rule five. The most important victory is the group itself. This starts a
series of rules about winning. Winning is what organizing is about. Winning
without building is a hollow process, though. We need to celebrate the simple
fact of survival, given the odds most groups face. The way to ensure that a
group is built out of activity on issues is to create a structure that governs the
group and bring people who work on issues into the governance of the group.
In a mature organization this happens through elections, and the elections
should at least bring new people in, even if they are not contests where folks
vie for the votes to outdo their 'opponents'. A growing organization should pay
close attention to this as well, through steering committees or leadership
meetings where folks who are mostly involved in issues get brought into the
deliberations on priorities, strategies, structure and the 'business' of the group.
Even if they choose to say no, the opportunity to join in setting the course of
the group makes it more their own. A group that is governed by one set of
folks and involves a whole different set as beneficiaries or volunteers is never
going to be a real people's organization. No empowerment ever comes from
well meaning outsiders helping the helpless.
Rule Eight - If you're not FIGHTING for what you want, you don't want
enough. We've talked before about the purpose of community organizing -
building power. It's a lot like lifting weights. If you stay with the little baby
weights, you'll never get the strength to do really heavy work. Community
organizers know that it's possible to keep busy doing stuff and still get
nowhere. It's possible to define your goals by what's achievable, and look like
you're succeeding. The tragedy is that a group that never defines a difficult
goal will never achieve a meaningful accomplishment. This extends, in the
arena of power, to conflict, which we've talked about before. For now,
remember the rule and check up on your group to make sure SOMEBODY
thinks you're too strong, too forceful, too demanding, too abrasive. That
probably means you're getting close to where the real power is.
Finally - rule number ten - have fun! I started organizing with an all business
attitude that looked at a meeting as being over when the gavel fell, and at the
hanging out and laughing and drinking coffee afterwards as a distraction and a
waste of time. I missed the community part of community organizing. These
people were building a community, and sharing their fears, their hopes and
their vision of the future over a beer at the club after the action was just as
important as the planning meeting. I learned that meals and birthdays and
Christmas parties and the summer picnic are organizing too. I learned that the
posters that got made in the office with pizza and pop by the gang of
volunteers we could scare up on a Friday night were far more important to the
organization than the same posters made separately in peoples' homes. I
learned that using humor to embarrass a public official brought a feeling of
power to our folks that straight, serious conversation about our rights and their
responsibilities could never come close to. I learned the power of FUN! and I
vowed to try to make organizing at least as much fun as TV.
Back to contents
First, the issue is defined, the goals for the campaign set, and the target
selected. All these three factors are interrelated. As we discussed in the
section on choosing and cutting an issue, there needs to be careful calculation
involved, but finally the group needs to settle on their best guess as to just
how broadly to define the issue, and on what to go for and who to go after.
Generally, the best plan has one target, a person who could take action to
deliver what the group wants. This person needs to be within reach - a Toledo
group shouldn't build its whole plan around getting somebody in New York to
make a decision, but rather should find a local target that they can put
pressure on in a variety of ways. The more you know about the target, the
more you can develop pressure tactics.
In developing a plan, look to cover the 'what ifs.' There are usually three
possible outcomes to any plan. If you've invited the mayor to your meeting,
either he'll come or he won't come or he'll send somebody else to represent
him (a variation on #2, but we'll call it a third alternative). The planning group
needs to talk about what the groups' response will be in all three eventualities.
If the mayor comes, how will he be welcomed, where will he sit, how many
minutes will he be given, will we let him talk first or only in response to our
questions, will he stay for the next part of the meeting or should we ask him to
leave - all these questions need to be dealt with. If he doesn't come, when will
we know, and is there anything we could/should do to get him to change his
mind, like maybe an action at city hall or at the golf course? If they send a
representative, who will it be, and do we accept him/her or not? In the same
way, there are three possible responses from the mayor to our demands - yes,
no or mushy/maybe. If he says yes, can we pin him down to a specific and
enforceable commitment, and if he says yes right away, is there any follow-up
that we should ask for while he's in an agreeable mood? If we get an outright
no, do we have any recourse, or a fallback position? Can we get the mayor to
recommend that somebody else do something instead? Can we lay out our
next step, that will try to change his mind? Who will be chairing the meeting at
that point, and can we get some mileage out of a no, with booing and hissing
and so on, rather than just roll over and play dead? Finally, if the mayor says
maybe/mushy, can the chair characterize this as a no, to push the mayor to a
clearer yes statement? Can we pin the mayor down on the next step, so we
know when the maybe/mushy might be converted to a yes or no? In fact, the
planning group needs to talk about the fact that most maybe/mushy answers
really mean NO, and they can be prepared to reject this kind of answer. A
planning group could review peoples' experience with meetings and
agreements and talk about just what constitutes a yes or a no. It's especially
important to be prepared with your next step, so that a no or a maybe/mushy
doesn't end the meeting, but rather you can announce that we'll all be down at
council on Tuesday to protest this lack of cooperation, or we'll be calling for a
new state law requiring the city to do this, starting on Monday with a press
conference, or whatever...
In developing the plan, never make empty threats. Threats are very
valuable, but if once you are unable to make good on them, your credibility will
be weakened for a long, long time. I worked with a neighborhood organization
in the Black community in Providence, Rhode Island in the early '70's. They
were concerned about the lack of good jobs for young people. A group of
leaders had identified the beer distributor that was located in the heart of the
area as a particularly bad actor, with lots of minority beer drinkers but no
minority drivers, warehouse personnel or sales staff. We held a long series of
revival style planning sessions, invited the company to a public meeting that
they ignored and declared a boycott on Narragansett beer, statewide. I was
excited - this was my first organizing job, and already we're taking on the big
guys, big time. Unfortunately, boycotting Narragansett beer in Rhode Island is
like trying to boycott air. It's a great target, but we didn't have the troops to
carry it off. The first night, 30 of the 100 folks who signed up at the meeting to
come and picket showed up. We downsized our plan - less pickets, less stores
- and went out anyway. The next night, only ten arrived. We did one store. The
third night, only the picket leader and me were there.
Plan to build on the reaction from the other side. One of our most
successful campaigns grew from an almost disastrous failure, through taking
advantage of the reaction. Parents at the Southside Elementary were
concerned about cars speeding by the playground. They were interested in a
little activism, but not much. They asked our help in developing a petition for
speed limit signs, and I met with a committee and urged them to make an
appointment to deliver the petitions to the traffic engineer as a group. They
agreed, made the appointment, and got the petitions signed. I arrived at the
school at 3 pm on the appointed day, to find not five parents but only one - a
short, meek, VERY pregnant mother who was also very reluctant to go alone
to a big city office and talk to the official city traffic guy. As I had her in the car
already, she found herself at the door of the city office before she could
convince me to take her home and just mail the petitions. "While we're here,
we might as well keep the appointment." The traffic engineer, a young, brash
Italian-American, proceeded to treat Mrs. M like dirt. He made us wait, he
dismissed her concerns as unimportant, he didn't offer her a chair, he said the
petitions probably wouldn't make a difference, he generally disregarded and
disrespected the whole situation. In the car, on the way home, I agitated Mrs.
M mercilessly. "Did you hear the way he talked to you? The nerve of this guy,
who pays his salary, anyway! I'll bet he wouldn't treat a white person that way!
And you six months pregnant! doesn't he have any manners?" I urged her to
call the four other ladies who couldn't make it, and tell them the story. I asked
her to call the neighborhood leadership and tell them the story as well, and
ask for a few minutes on the agenda of the next area public meeting. By the
time she'd told the story a half dozen times, and those folks had told it a few
more, it came back to me as a physical attack, with racist slurs! The issue took
off like a rocket - it led to a public meeting with 75 parents and over 100
children, and a hit on the installation dinner of the traffic engineer as the Grand
Master of the Masons' lodge...but that's another story.
3. Are our tasks (actions) working--are they helping the group gain support?
An evaluation of the strategy and its results may lead a group to conclude that
the reason why they have not met their goal is that the strategy was not fully
developed. For example, the "target" of the group's efforts may not have had
the power to make the change the group sought, or perhaps the timing of the
campaign was not right; or a group may conclude that the strategy and tactics
used were correct but not sufficient in number or frequency.
If your assessment indicates that your strategy is not working, you may need
to revise your approach. Re-evaluating and changing tactics is completely
acceptable. The bottom line for assessing success is: Did your efforts create
the change you wanted? You will want to know what might the group do
differently next time. Knowing what worked can help in planning your next
organizing campaign.
• The equitable redistribution of wealth and power to assure each person the
necessities of healthful physical survival and the maximal realization of human
potential, in viable communities, on a planet safeguarded from degradation.
• A multi-cultural, communal space where our various identities can shine and
interact in an environment of equally shared power and mutual respect.
These are the ideals that truly separate us from the Right.
And there is an additional leap that we, who identify ourselves as Left, need to
make. For too long, we have regarded organizing to build a broad class-based
movement for economic justice and identity organizing as competing, even
antithetical, goals; and at their respective worst, they have been. We believe
it+s time for these two streams to converge, and for a new synthesis to
emerge. The Right has already served warning that if we cannot fuse the two
pieces of our vision, they will forever play one off against the other -- and we
will achieve neither. That is our challenge, if we are to build the society to
which we aspire.
****
Miller and Gitlin are struggling to protect legacies of our progressive past --
including the classic American democratic vision and the early civil rights
movement. Both trace the deep fault lines in the movement today to an
obsession with the differences that set us apart from each other, rather than
the adoption of broadly acceptable goals of economic equity and political
democracy.
As Gitlin laments, "What has become of the ideal of the Left...that federates
people of different races, genders, sexualities, or for that matter, religions and
classes? Why has this ideal been neglected or abandoned by so many of the
poor and minorities who should share the Left's ideal of equity? Why are so
many people attached to their marginality and why is so much of their
intellectual labor spent developing theories to justify it? Why insist on
difference with such rigidity, rancor, and blindess, to the exclusion of the
possibility of common knowledge and common dreams?"
Mike Miller brings a similar plaint into his defense of the community organizing
discipline developed by Saul Alinsky, which he implies is the only legitimate
practice worthy of the name.
Miller, however, likes the place he's in, and doesn't want to move. He argues
that not only does Delgado malign Alinsky's legacy and misrepresent its
contemporary offshoots, but he also contends that current Alinsky-based, and
especially congregation-based organizing efforts, are changing sufficiently to
meet the needs of women and minorities, so as to make new forms
unnecessary.
Don't get us wrong. We are in debt to this legacy, which propelled many of us
to a justice vocation and drew us to practice community and/or union
organizing. From it, we learned to value the process whereby people come to
act collectively against injustice, through which the disenfranchised and
oppressed achieve voice and power. From among Alinsky's adherents, we
have frequently found our own mentors, and culled our own organizing
experiences.
However, the past 25 years have added new dimensions to our efforts -- and
refocused the lens through which we view the world. The labor movement, the
New Left and the organizing discipline that Saul Alinsky built, despite their
luster, also engendered many flaws of the larger society, notably the
dominance of white males in the power structures of their own organizations.
The dissonance between stated principle and practice stoked the demand by
activist women, people of color, and later gays and lesbians and the disabled,
that the movement itself live up to its rhetoric or, in some cases, rethink its
verities and structures.
Most of us have our own tales of conflict, chaos and ludicrous excess along
the mult-cult trail, but few of us who envision a successfully diverse society
would return to the old world order of progressive action -- the one that
preceded the emergence of identity-based power blocs demanding an
equitable share of leadership and resources. The reason is simple: We would
still be sidelined in the real decision-making structures of the organizations to
which we devote our energies, and our own experiences and priorities would
be relegated to a subsidiary position, if not entirely ignored.
This is not to say that traditional CO has not changed or absorbed some of the
lessons of identity struggles. Miller suggests that, "throughout its history,
broadly-based community organizing has dealt with inter-racial and ethnic
tension and conflict and has built multi-racial and ethnic organizations ....
Many of these organizations have people of color on their organizing staffs.
Many of them conduct bi- and tri-lingual meetings. A growing number of
people of color are now directors of organizing projects within networks.
Further, most of the white males in these organizations are seriously
addressing the gender and racial/ethnic imbalances in their respective
networks."
Nor is Miller the only one who advocates that diversity play second fiddle to
pragmatism. As we were writing this, we received a mailing from a fledgling
national formation, suggesting that their organizational culture, "...should not
get so bogged down with diversity issues that we lose the focus on economic
democracy....The fundamental issue is reconciling the tension between 'going
smarter' and 'going broader.'" A peculiar formulation at best.
But these cultural indicators do not merely deter the "square pegs" from
feeling welcome in the organization or impede the development of diverse
leadership. They also exact a price in building what one young organizer we
know calls an "holistically progressive" societal vision.
It is an inevitable consequence of funding only congregation-based
organizing, for example, that the issues of gay/lesbian rights and reproductive
choice will be swept off the organizing agenda.
Miller notes that the minister "seems to prefer that he be in relationship with a
broadly-based organization than with one that has a 'progressive' way of
understanding racism.... Should the test include gay marriages? Or pro-
abortion? Or: fill in the blank. While you're filling in the blank you better think
about all the Latino and Black Baptists, Pentecostals and Catholics who agree
with Catholic ethnics on some of these issues."
But this is exactly the reason that the emergence of identity has surfaced new
directions in the progressive organizing arena -- and these are exactly the
issues that the Right has raised with such gusto to woo our own constituents.
Miller warns that, "Those organizations that speak out on what they think is
right, without regard to effectiveness, may be prophetic voices, but if that is all
they do they are sure to remain far away from where decisions are being
made."
Yet, if there is not a second organizing path, with a different culture, that takes
these risks, how are we to address the attitudes that can turn the most
dedicated union member or community safety activist into a vote for the latest
immigrant-bashing or tax-slashing initiative?
It is part of our work to incorporate the new realities of our society, to take the
lessons of identity struggles and forge the next step. In doing so, we need to
build on the wisdom that we have gleaned from existing organizing disciplines
and experiences -- and take some leaps into the unknown.
In our experience, for example, communities are often too fractured to engage
in meaningful collective activity before building a culture that embraces its
diverse members. This disarray has been compounded by the Right's
ideological influence in framing critical issues in ways that divide, rather than
unify, communities.
When parents of color fight queer activists over school curricula, or when
neighbors are pitted against each other over the siting of polluting industries in
their community, then the emergence of a powerful movement is stunted. A
few months ago, Black ministers refused to attend an action that started out at
the headquarters of a gay/lesbian organization -- even though they supported
the action itself -- ironically, part of an affirmative action campaign.
These examples from our own organizing world graphically challenge the
traditional assumption that broad-based organizing efforts that tackle
immediate, winnable issues will inevitably lead to a more equitable and
tolerant society -- or that progressive views on economics or class will yield
progressive views on gender, race or sexual orientation (or vice versa for that
matter).
This approach asserts that the task of forging an equitable, respectful, multi-
cultural, shared, cohesive, progressive justice community out of many diverse
and competing identities is, in and of itself, an appropriate and necessary
organizing objective. As such, it demands the allocation of time, personnel and
financial resources; it cannot be relegated to the sidelines, as the casual by-
product of other, more tangible organizing goals. It also requires a different set
of techniques and sensibilities, including heightened emphasis on political
education that links economics with wedge issues, the celebration of diverse
identities and the forging of a new, shared culture that embraces the broadest
possible constituency for a progressive economic, social and environmental
agenda.
It will require experimentation, some of which will fail. But who is to say, in the
long run, that it will not contribute new strengths and dimensions to our
collective struggle for justice and equity?
Once upon a time, when we were young, almost all newspapers and major
printing jobs were typeset in hot metal by feisty, frequently radical craftsmen,
who were organized in the typographical unions and had won good pay for
their labor.
Then computers came into use -- "cold type" -- and younger workers with less
craft, frequently women, making low wages, were hired to sit at the terminals
and type in copy.
Because the wages and working conditions were low, the cold type workers
asked to join the typographers union. But the typographers refused to let them
in, because they were not viewed as craftspeople, only typists -- and lots of
them were women, to boot.
But cold type technology ruled. The machines and programs became more
sophisticated, and the computer typesetters became highly skilled in their own
right, perfecting their speed, adaptability and artistry. The hot metal shops
closed down; the men who had so carefully guarded their craft became as rare
as manatees.
And the world of computer typesetting, and the generation of women and men
who do that work, have remained largely unorganized.
Francis Calpotura is the Co-Director of the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO),
and Kim Fellner directs the National Organizers Alliance (NOA). You can write to us at:
CTWO, 1218 E. 21st Street, Oakland, CA 94606, or at NOA, 715 G Street, SE,
Washington, DC 20003.
Copyright (c) 1996 by Francis Calpotura and Kim Fellner, all rights reserved.
This work may be copied in whole or in part, with proper attribution, as long as
the copying is not-for-profit "fair use" for research, commentary, study, or
teaching. *No* part of the work may be used for profit without prior permission
of the authors. For other permissions, contact the authors.
This paper is presented as part of the Papers series for COMM-ORG: The On-line
Conference on Community Organizing and Development. Copyright is held by the author. To
cite, use: [author] [date] [title], paper presented on COMM-ORG: The On-Line Conference on
Community Organizing and Development. http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers.htm.
kharakim@jps.net
CONTENTS
Introduction
Theoretical Underpinnings
Notes
INTRODUCTION
It's a truism that we use negotiations to conclude conflicts in social life, albeit
unconditional surrender is the rare exception to the rule. Consider the gamut,
from marriages to wars.
Now imagine that the tenants' organization has an influx of new members and
several gifted leaders emerge, while simultaneously their housing conditions
worsen. Assume too that with new, improved leadership, the tenants'
organization becomes more disciplined. As the organization becomes more
powerful--its command of resources growing--there is a palpable tension
among the membership about the way tenants and their organization are
being treated by the housing authority.
A few members within the tenants' organization begin to agitate for radical
action. Conscious of their increased capacity, they press to have the
organization exercise its influence in ways that will materially improve their
housing. Countervailing this momentum is the inertia of most other tenants,
even members of the tenants' organization, based on their fear of
confrontation and retribution in the form of eviction by the housing authority.
The inertia is often rationalized, however, with popular ideas about why
grassroots community organizations engage, more or less, in cooperation and
conflict. It's commonly said that conflict is chosen by individual players as a
matter of personal style, psychological need, or political ideology--and
therefore should be avoided because it's not likely to serve the practical self-
interests of most people. Or, to the contrary, that the emergence of a particular
form of action is invariably the result of "bigger social forces"--and therefore
it's futile for common people to attempt to influence such matters.
While thoughtful arguments have been made for each of these ideas, macro
practitioners find it more useful to understand cooperation and conflict as the
outcomes of relationship dynamics occurring between organizations and
institutions in the organizational field of action. Thus they see the potential for
grassroots organizations to have significant influence through their campaigns
and actions.
On the one hand, if initially the differential in resources between the tenants
and the housing authority allows the tenants to demonstrate sufficient power
to give the housing authority a stake in negotiations, the competition may lead
directly to resolution of issues and some shift in realities. (We will return to the
idea of shifting realities momentarily.)
On the other hand, if the resource and power differential is substantial and
there is no hope of getting the housing authority into good-faith negotiations,
the tendency will be to move toward conflict. That is, it will be necessary for
the tenants to demonstrate their organizational power--their ability to impose
costs on the housing authority--as a precondition to achieving negotiations.
The conflict isn't for its own sake but to create incentives for the other side to
negotiate in good faith, to reach an agreement that resolves the issue.
THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS
The action field has two significant dimensions for which we need theoretical
explanations. These are: (1) relations of power--the building up and
expenditure of resources, with adjustments effected by cooperation,
competition, conflict, and negotiation; and (2) ideological realities--valued
expectations about social action, including shared understandings about
allied, neutral, and opposing players, their actions and the consequences that
flow from them.
It goes round and round: not only are both contingencies and ideologies
operating, they are inseparable in social life, and explanations of
organizational action are incomplete without reference to their dialectical
relationship.
Balance can usefully be said to exist only in the sense that each
organization's ideological definition of the other is an accurate reflection of
their resource and power disparity, and thus there is a tendency toward
stability in their relationship
Our example of grassroots conflict and cooperation shows that a gap grew up
between the housing authority's ideological definition of the tenants'
organization and the tenants' actual power.
To the extent that realities and resources (or power) between the parties were
no longer congruent, that is, that their socially constructed ideological
definitions of each other no longer fit their actual resource positions, an
imbalance or "tension" was created that tended toward competition. The
advent of this tension can be traced to resource shifts, planned or occurring
unexpectedly, such that relationships between the parties--the ways in which
they define each other--no longer correspond to actual resource and power
disparities.
Successful negotiations require a recognition that both parties must win, must
have some of their needs met, except in the case of "unconditional surrender,"
which is virtually unheard of in the world of community organization. But
successful negotiations also require a reduction of power disparity: it is the
building and demonstration of power that creates the essential incentive,
moving the parties toward negotiations.
When the conflict between the tenants and the housing authority has reached
a stage of resolution, the tenants' organization has certainly won concessions
on its issues, itself a shift in resources. But it has also achieved for itself and
its opponent a new ideological definition of itself as an organizational actor,
and it has established a new relationship based on that definition. No longer is
the tenant organization seen as powerless, even witless. Its leaders have
newly formed relationships of mutual respect with the leadership of the
housing authority. The housing authority's definition of them has changed, as
has their definition of themselves.
NOTES
1. Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science (Harper & Row, 1951).
3. Peter M. Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life (John Wiley & Sons, 1964).
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Anchor
4.
Books/Doubleday, 1967).
Three Alinskys?
by
Peter Szynka
peter.szynka@diakonie-oldenburger-land.de
Bremen / Germany
Contents
~ Introduction: Difficulties in Understanding Alinsky
~ A Bible Lesson with Saul Alinsky
~ Alinsky and Science
~ Alinsky and the American Way of Life
~ Conclusion
~ Notes
~ About the Author
One can say that Alinsky was rooted very strongly in the Chicago School of
Urban Sociology and that he learned a lot from his teachers. Furthermore, his
work was subject and is subject to the interpretations of his co-workers ,
colleagues, trainees and students, who brought in their own views and lost
others. This makes Alinsky part of a chain that we can define rather precisely.
The Alinsky tradition can in no way be understood without references to his
teachers and his trainees. Doing justice to the work of Saul D. Alinsky we
must regard his teachers and famous sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest
W. Burgess. Also John L. Lewis, the famous labor union leader, has to be
mentioned. We also have to name Edward T. Chambers, one of Alinsky’s
trainees and the present director of the Industrial Areas Foundation.
Occasionally one has to protect the teachers from their readers and trainees.
This is not only true concerning Alinsky's German readers, but also his
American trainees. Last but not least we have to protect Alinsky's teachers
from Alinsky himself.
Further difficulties appear because many of the core concepts used by Alinsky
have other, more complicated meanings in the German language. Many of
these concepts are needed as scientific concepts, to help to clarify social
facts. However, the same concepts are sometimes taken and turned into
political concepts by people who want to fight for social change. For example,
this is true for his concepts of "community", "organization", "power", "conflict",
"self-interest" and "compromise". It also applies to the term used in the titles
of his major works: "radical".
Another difficulty consists in the structure of the material left by Alinsky. There
are scientific articles from his early period and his major works "Reveille for
Radicals" and "Rules for Radicals". Sometimes they seem to be written down
in a hurry and contain a lot of cryptic parts. There are a lot of lectures,
fragments, interviews, press reports, films and all sorts of legends.
If one works precisely with the conceptual and structural difficulties and takes
note of the sources of Alinsky's ideas, one will come to fundamentally different
results than in older approaches to his work.
In the following section, I would like to present three pictures of Alinsky. These
pictures have two different functions. On the one hand they are analytic and
try to come closer to the truth of Alinsky’s person and work. However, the
presented pictures are also selected strategically. They are intended to irritate
and disturb the pictures people might have won during the reception of
Community Organizing in the 70s.
I will first introduce Alinsky to you as a student of the Talmud. This picture is
specially dedicated to German readers. In Germany it took a long time for
Community Workers to become independent from religious Community Work
during the 19th century. This led to the result that religious activities in the field
of Community Work are regarded with suspicion. On the other hand, in
Germany today, almost nothing is known about Judaism and its impact on
social work. Alinsky’s religious education prepared him very well as an
independent counselor of religious institutions.
You will then get to know Alinsky as scientist and science-critic. This section is
specially dedicated to readers who try to build community Organizing efforts
solely on the basis of religion or faith2. This is the case with some of his
successors in the USA3. Alinsky was heavily engaged in enlarging the
scientific base for his community organizing efforts. Sometimes it seems that
his approach should be a kind of socio-technique that would function under all
conditions. This surely did not come true. But it should be recognized that he
tried to enlarge, as we would say in Europe the knowledge-base of his
practice.
Finally I will show Alinsky advocating the American Way of Life. This is
especially dedicated to readers who tried to see Alinsky as some kind of
Marxist revolutionary leader. In contrast to this, he has to be seen as
somebody who finds orientation in the economic and moral writings of the 18th
century economist Adam Smith.
After one of theses fights, his mother took him to a rabbi. Saul defended his
behavior with a Bible quotation: "an Eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: this
is the way things go in America". The rabbi liked the vivacious boy and he
patiently explained to him what it means "zu sejn a mensh" (to be a man). He
introduced to him the maxim of the great Rabbi Hillel "Where there are no
men, be you a man!" This saying of Rabbi Hillel will more than 50 years later
stand over his second major work "Rules for Radicals".
Again and again Alinsky told the story of Moses and the "Exodus from Egypt".
In Alinsky’s eyes, it was an example of brilliant organizing. The core of that
story is the scene where Moses negotiated with God, who planned to destroy
his people because of their dance before the golden calf.
"Moses did not try to communicate with God in terms of mercy or justice, when
God was angry and wanted to destroy the Jews; he moved in on a top value
and outmaneuvered God. (...)
He knew that the most important center of his attack would have been what he
judged to be God´s prime value. As Moses read it, God wanted to be No. 1.
(…)
He began to negotiate, saying "Look God, you're God. You're holding all the
cards. Whatever you want to do, you can do and nobody can stop you. But
you (…) can't scratch the deal you've got with these people – (…) the
Covenant – (…).
But it isn't that easy. You are on the spot. The news of this deal has leaked out
all over the joint. The Egyptians, Philistines, Canaanites, everybody knows
about it.
But (…) you’re God. Go ahead and knock them off. What do you care if people
say, "There goes God. You can't believe anything he tells you. You can't make
a deal with him. His word isn't even worth the stone it's written on'. But after
all, you're God and I suppose you can handle it."4
“And the Lord was appeased from doing the evil which he had spoken against
his people.”
For our purpose it is only important that Alinsky neither invented this story nor
its interpretation. The story is told in the book of Exodus. Its interpretations are
more than 1800 years old and follow the ideas of the Chapter in the
Babylonian Talmud called Berachot 32. Moreover, this text occupies a central
position in Jewish thinking. Every Jewish child knows the story and its
problem. The manner in which Moses gets God off his oath of destruction is a
central part of the liturgy of the Reconciliation Day, the highest Jewish holiday.
In my opinion it is also a key to understand some of Alinsky's central concepts
of Community Organizing: conflict, negotiation, compromise and reconciliation.
However, it was his knowledge of the Bible, resulting from his Jewish
education, that gave him the ability to cooperate effectively with religious
organizations like the Christian Churches. From the beginning of his career to
the end of his life, he remained connected to the Roman Catholic Church and
particularly to the archdiocese of Chicago. He even participated in the
education of parish priests. For a time no parish priest was let into a
community of Chicago unless he had completed an elementary course in
Community Organizing with Saul D. Alinsky.
Alinsky as Scientist
Alinsky’s work becomes primarily understandable in the context of the
sociological discussions at the Chicago School of Sociology of his time.
Although Alinsky strongly criticized science, science business and the
practical relevance of sociological knowledge, he did research on his own and
made some remarkable contributions to the discussions of his time. His own
scientific work is recognizably stamped by the Chicago School of Sociology.
His later practice may also be seen as an application of central concepts from
the Chicago School.
His later publications are more popular-scientific and written for a broader
public.
Throughout his life Alinsky gave lectures at universities and other places of
adult-education. Now, what are the important concepts, Alinsky took from the
Chicago School?
Life-stories and the everyday experiences of the people stand also at the
beginning of Alinsky’s organizing efforts. Alinsky regarded communities as
primary groups. He related community organization/disorganization to
personal behavior. Furthermore, he discovered that the “Definitions-of-the-
Situation” upon which people act can be changed by communication and the
sharing of life-experience. This shared analysis of situations will be the basis
for his later power analysis.
This chapter was the model for Alinsky's evaluation of his own Back-of-the-
Yards Project. This Evaluation was published in the famous American Journal
of Sociology and tried to show that Community Organizing could be planned
and conducted on a scientific base5. He also distinguishes his Community
Organizing practice from the approach of the settlement houses, which
followed the model of Jane Addams’ Hull House. Further, he distinguished
between self-organized neighborhood institutions and outside-organized
services, which he accused of being some kind of welfare colonialism. From
Park and Burgess he took over the concept of social forces and the distinction
between scientific and “good-will” approaches. Participant observation, open
interview techniques, and "nosing around" remained essential in his approach.
I quote:
What is the social , i.e. what things must one do in the neighborhood in order
to escape being regarded with suspicion or looked upon as peculiar?
What does it regard as a matter of fact? What is news? What is the general
run of attention? What models does it imitate and are these within or without
the group?
What is there in clear consciousness, i.e. what are its avowed sentiments,
doctrines etc.?
I did not take these questions from Alinsky's chapter on “Native Leadership”
and “Community Traditions and Organizations” in his book "Reveille for
Radicals"6, as readers would probably expect. I took it from the original
source, the sociological classic of his teachers Park and Burgess called “The
City” 7.
Probably the best known contribution of the Chicago School to the world of
Sociology is Thomas’ theorem of the "Definition-of-the-Situation". In the
original version it is cited "If men define situations as real, they are real in their
consequences." It reflects the experience that people act upon their judgment
of the situation. They do this whether this definition is true or not.
"Power is not only what you have, but also what your opponent thinks you
have."8
Although Alinsky was very deeply rooted in the Chicago School of Sociology,
he strongly criticized sociology.
He used to say
In interviews Alinsky said that his work was not influenced by the Chicago
School of Sociology although this influence is conspicuous. He particularly
admired Robert E. Park. I think, therefore, that his polemics were not aimed at
the sociology of the Chicago School in general, but against special
developments and influences. His criticism can be understood as criticism of a
development which successively replaces qualitative social research by
quantitative, statistical research. The polemics aimed at a sort of sociology
that makes itself dependent on the market (as market research) and on the
state (as opinion research). His criticism aimed at a sociology that restricts the
empirical value of the single man or woman. He opposes a sociology that
cannot guarantee its relevance for an improved social and political practice, a
sociology that doesn't reflect the relevance of its results for social
development and social progress. His criticism coincides with that of Robert
Lynd9 or C. Wright Mills10 with whom he worked and corresponded about
these problems.
One can even say that Alinsky tried to counter the excesses of the student
movement in his second major work called "Rules for Radicals". In his later
years, he also seemed to switch over to the organization of the American
middle class and share-holders.13
Alinsky probably found his answer in the work of the economist Adam Smith,
which defined self-interest as a basis and prerequisite for all human behavior
and made this finding the basis of his economic theory. Alinsky quotes Smith’s
famous and well known sentences from the book “Wealth of Nations”:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we
expect our dinner, but from their regard of their own interest. We address
ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of
our own necessities but of their advantage.”15
Alinsky himself does not criticize the unjust distribution of property, but he
criticizes a moral deficit:
"We know that one of the greatest obstacles in the way of strengthening out
the affairs of mankind is the confusion and inner conflicts raging within men. It
is the vast discrepancy between our morals and our practices. It is the human
dilemma, which constantly draws a shadow of guilt over many of man's
noblest endeavors. It gnaws at our vitals and drives us to irrationality ".17
How does Alinsky intend to close this "vast discrepancy" between morals and
practice? We still have to learn a little more from Adam Smith at this point. We
find the key not in Smith's most famous book "The Wealth of Nations" but in
his “Theory of Moral Sentiments”.18
At this place it would fit that everyone ask him or herself in what manner he or
she expresses his or her feelings of "moral disapproval" in everyday-life.
According to Smith and Alinsky the adequate expression of “gratitude” and
“resentment” is of excellent value for the regulation of human matters.
"rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent
hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must
search out controversy and issues, rather than to avoid them. (…) An
Organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into
which people can angrily pour their frustrations. He must create a mechanism
that can drain them of the underlying guilt for having accepted the previous
situation for so a long time. Out of this mechanism, a new community
Organization arises".20
However, if Alinsky counts on Smith in this central question, then what kind of
a "radical" is he?
Here the nearest comparison can be made with Thomas Paine, of which the
following saying stands as a motto at the beginning of Alinsky's "Reveille for
Radicals":
"Let them call me a rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should
suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...".
"Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this,
for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian Church can live
up to Christianity."21
Conclusion
I again emphasize that these pictures remain parts of an incomplete mosaic. It
is not the purpose of my paper to deny the necessity of studying his writings. I
only try to replace some given pictures, drawn in the seventies, which I think
are too simple. Much more might be said about Alinsky: For instance “Alinsky
as Biographer of the Union leader John L. Lewis” or on “Alinsky and the
Socratic Dialog”. This was not the place to do that. I would like to advocate the
necessity of further research. Especially Alinsky’s roots in Chicagoan
Sociology throw new light on the history and development of social planning,
ecological thinking and systemic intervention. A just recognition of his
contribution to applied sociology and social policy is still inspiring for social
scientists, social workers and political engaged people who want to
understand and solve social problems.
Notes
1
An earlier version of this paper was part of apresentation in German language
at the conference of the German Society for Social Work in Frankfurt/Main,
2001-12-01 (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozialarbeit, Arbeitskreis „Soziale
Arbeit in und mit Gemeinwesen“). It was also part of a presentation in English
language at the conference of the Inter-University Consortium for International
Social Development (IUSCISD) in The Hague / Netherlands, 2002-09-27.
Because English is not my mother tongue, I have to thank Martin Asmuß,
Edewecht (Germany), Gisela Broers, Oldenburg (Germany) and Randy
Stoecker, Toledo (USA) for their help and remarks on the translation.
2
see "A saint man only gives birth to sacred cows ", Alinsky, Saul D., Reveille
for Radicals, 1946, p. XV
3
see for instance: Jacobsen, Dennis A., Doing Justice: Congregations and
Community Organizing, Minneapolis 2001
4
Alinsky, Saul D., Rules for Radicals, 1971, pp 89 ff
5
Alinsky, Saul D., (1941) Community Organization and Analysis. In: American
Journal of Sociology, May, 1941, pp. 797-808
6
Alinsky, Saul D., Reveille for Radicals, Chicago, 1946, pp. 87-111
7
Park, Robert E., Burgess, Ernest W., McKenzie, Roderick D., The City:
Suggestions for Investigations of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,
Chicago 1925, p. 11, (quoted in reversed order)
8
Alinsky formulated “13 Rules of Power-Tactics” which should be easily
remembered and foster group discussions: 1. Power is not only what you have
but what your enemy thinks you have, 2. Never go outside the experience of
your people, 3. Wherever possible, go outside the experience of your enemy,
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules, 5. Ridicule is the most
potent weapon, 6. A good tactic is what your people enjoy, 7. A tactic that
drags too long becomes a drag, 8. Keep the pressure on, 9. The threat is
usually more terrifying than the thing itself, 10 The major premise for tactics is
the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the
opposition, 11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break
through into its counterside, 12. The price of a successful attack is a
constructive alternative, 13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and
polarize it.
The Rule No. 4 will be discussed at the end of this paper. See: Alinsky, Saul
D.: Rules for Radicals, New York 1971, pp. 126 ff.
9
Lynd, Robert, Knowledge for What?, Princeton 1939
10
Mills, C. Wright, Sociological Imagination, New York 1959
11
Reitzes, Donald C. and Reitzes Dietrich C., The Alinsky Legacy: Alive and
Kicking, Greenwich 1987
12
Reckman, Piet, Soziale Aktion, Laetare, Freiburg, 1971 p. 11 and p 35ff.
13
Alinsky, Saul David, Rules for Radicals, 1971, p. 184: “Organization for
Action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America´s white middle
class.”
14
See: Federalist Papers, Article 10, (Madison)
15
Smith, Adam, An Inquiry to the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
1790, quoted in: Alinsky, Saul D., Rules for Radicals, New York 1971, p. 54
16
Recktenwald, Horst Claus, Freiheitliche Ordnung der Klassik, in: Smith,
Adam, Der Wohlstand der Nationen, Göttingen 1980, Appendix p. 820
17
Alinky, Saul D., Reveille for Radicals, 1946, pp. 39-40
18
Smith, Adam, The Theorie of Moral Sentiments, German Edition: Theorie
der ethischen Gefühle, Meiner, Hamburg 1994, pp. 60-69 , and pp 99-102
19
op.cit., p. 616
20
Alinsky, Saul D. , Rules for Radicals, 1971, p. 116 f.
21
Alinsky, Saul D. , Rules for Radicals, 1971, p. 128
Contents
Abstract
Community action: vital to sustainability
Empowered communities, powerful women
Government initiated community engagement
Conflict: a competing or complementary narrative?
Reconciling the two narratives
References
About the Author
Abstract
Community action shapes the urban landscape of Australian cities and towns.
Our urban future will be determined through vigilant and resourceful action by
residents’ groups and environmentalists.
Civic and conservation groups in these and other Australian cities and towns
participate actively in government-initiated community involvement activities,
but often find engagement and consultation processes have minimal impact
on planning decisions. As a result, residents with clear priorities for their urban
future rely on community action, organising and mobilisation to influence
decisions. Their experiences suggest local and state government authorities
are struggling with deliberative, inclusive and iterative decision-making
processes. Campaign anecdotes recounted here through an activist lens shed
light on decision-making processes for a sustainable urban future.
For a small village, Maleny on the Sunshine Coast has a remarkably strong
community sector. An online directory (Sunweb, 2005) lists almost seventy
diverse community-based organisations in the town, from the Recorder Group
to the Nursing Mothers, Film Society, Landcare group and Hospital Auxiliary.
Jordan and Haydon (2003) interviewed members of almost 150 groups in the
village. The City of Caloundra, of which Maleny is a satellite settlement, boasts
at least twenty-three voluntary community-based environmental organisations
(CC 2001b). A striking feature of community life in Maleny is the proliferation
of cooperative ventures. More than twenty cooperatives have been
established since the 1970s. Their objectives include the coordination,
provision and support of: housing; whole foods; social and cultural activities;
education and learning; artistic and publishing enterprises; conservation and
waste minimisation; credit; finance; and business incubation. Maleny’s
cooperative sector, for which it has received international attention, has
contributed to the town’s spirit of cooperation and enterprise (Schwarz and
Schwarz, 1997) in a time when Australian rural communities have been in
decline. Cooperatives have created at least 130 jobs directly (Jordan, 2000,
2003) and hundreds indirectly. Maleny’s Local Energy Transfer System
(LETS) facilitates the exchange of bunya, a non-cash currency named after
the edible nut prized by the region’s traditional owners, in return for required
skills and labour. The system was the first of its kind in Australia and is now
replicated in at least 240 other communities nationally, and is being
implemented internationally (Douthwaite 1998). In researching Maleny, it is
impossible to ignore the narrative of an empowered community seeking to
determine its own sustainable destiny. This shone through in radio interviews
(ABC, 2/6/03) in which Maleny locals spoke of their community having a high
level of social capital and cohesion. They compared Maleny to a ‘tribe’ and an
intentional community, and suggested these attributes provide a degree of
resilience in a time of rapid change. For this reason, the unsuccessful
community campaign examined here is of particular interest.
The Gold Coast City Council (GCCC) claims to take a consultative approach
to decisions about flood mitigation, catchment management, rates, beach and
harbour management, transport, tourism, crime and safety. The importance
attached to community involvement in decision-making is evident in the
Harbour Planning Study, one recent planning process, which GCCC refers to
as having reconciled “traditionally competing interests to construct a long-term
mechanism for area management” that integrates “broadly-based community,
environmental and business interests” (GCCC 2003). Conservationists were
active participants in this policy-setting exercise and the parallel Waterfuture
Strategy, which examined water quality and quantity options for the drought-
prone city. In developing the Waterfuture strategy, GCCC utilised a range of
community engagement strategies. Following initial research, Council
disseminated a discussion starter that outlined problems and possible
solutions and held community information sessions, workshops and focus
groups. A newsletter and survey were distributed throughout the city,
generating 9,000 responses. To develop a strategy that will “create a feeling of
joint ownership” (GCCC 2005a), Council has identified and addressed
questions of community trust and confidence in Council”, to ensure the
strategy does not “ignore community opinion” as it could be “difficult to gain
trust.” (GCCC 2005b). This council is far from unique in experiencing some
distrust and criticism concerning provision for community involvement in
governance. Woolcock, Renton and Cavaye (2003) note these concerns are
widespread and substantial. Council also remains open to community opinion
year-round through its online consultation panel which provides regular
opportunities for community members to contribute to decisions through
surveys and focus groups.
And these opportunities are valued by community groups. In fact, the pursuit
of their vision for a sustainable region and their members’ wide range of
interests motivates Gecko to participate in up to a dozen advisory and
consultative committees with state and local government authorities at any
one time. Lois Levy would like to see the group even more involved in policy
making.
The suggestion that a large supermarket may be built in Maleny has been
brewing for years. And the town’s history of cooperative enterprises, and
buying locally has consistently generated opposition to the notion. Community
members participating in the development of the town’s Local Area Plan (from
1999 to 2001) ensured the planning scheme explicitly ruled out this possibility.
Naturally, locals were up in arms when a supermarket development in the
heart of the village was subsequently proposed. In 2002, community
spokesperson Michael Berry urged Caloundra City Council to “exercise its
duty of care” by protecting “the retail and social heart of this town” (Range
News 13/12/02). Berry noted, as visitors to the village do almost immediately,
that Maple Street embodies the community’s spirit. Conducting interviews with
locals at sidewalk cafés on Maple Street, I was continually interrupted by the
greeting and connections typical of a close-knit town. This spirit was
spectacularly demonstrated when the village’s existing independent
supermarket celebrated its centenary and almost 2,000 people turned out.
As in Maleny, the dialogue between the community and its local government is
now in some ways irrelevant as the development decision is now to be made
by the Queensland State Government. The project has been declared a
significant project and is being championed by the Department of State
Development, which will act as both the proponent and assessor. The cruise
terminal will be exempt from the State Coastal Policy. Having decided the area
north of Sea World will be a port, the State Government is not obliged to
recognise the City Council’s planning guidelines. This top-down approach,
combined with secrecy surrounding a State Government study of liner
movements in the seaway, compounds Gecko’s lack of confidence in the
modes of consultation and engagement on offer. Lois, Sheila and other
community leaders declared the foreshadowed Environmental Impact
Statement a “rubber stamp for development” and called for more meaningful
dialogue. The conflict has been waged in the press with media releases
declaring, “The Premier and his Government have failed the accountability
and transparency test by refusing to provide the community with any
information” (Gecko, 4/7/05) and warning, “They're going to override our town
plan. If they do it once what's to stop them doing it again. It sets a precedent”
(Courier Mail 16/9/05).
A forgiving appraisal of these two scenarios might let government agencies off
the hook. After all, local government authorities cannot be held responsible for
the planning decisions and methods adopted by state agencies, and vice
versa. In some instances conservationists blame Queensland’s Integrated
Planning Act for State Government decisions which contradict prior community
consultation by local government. From a community perspective, however,
this justification is not convincing. Citizens who have actively contributed to
policy decisions at either level will naturally react with disappointment, if not
outrage, if jurisdiction is subsequently assumed by other agencies.
“Conflict can be magic,” Jill assured me, “but only when people are genuinely
willing to listen, and to change their position on the basis of what they’ve
heard.”
My sincere thanks to Jill Jordan, Lois Levy, Sheila Davis, Susie Duncan,
Katrina Shields, Jon Woodlands, Peter Oliver and Neil Lazarow for their
reflections and insights.
References
ABC Radio National (2/6/03) Life Matters, ‘Re-imagining Utopia 5: Alternative
Economics’, Downloaded 15/11/05 from
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/lm/stories/s853654.htm
ABC Radio National (12/7/05) PM, ‘Police move in on Maleny platypus
protest’. Downloaded 15/11/05 from
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/indexes/2005/pm_20050712.htm
Eisler, R. (1987) The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Harper
and Row, San Francisco.
GCCC (2003) Gold Coast Harbour Study Council Report No.22. Downloaded
15/11/05 from http://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/t_standard2.aspx?PID=3167
Milbrath, L.W. (1989) Envisioning a sustainable society : learning our way out,
State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.
COMM-ORG Papers
Volume 13, 2007
http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers.htm
Table of Contents
Abstract
Introduction
Community Engagement for Natural Resource Management
Grounds for Scepticism
1. Consensus and compromise
2. Conflict produces results
3. Community engagement: A wolf in sheep’s clothing
4. Some people are more equal than others
5. Community engagement takes energy
6. Community engagement rarely encompasses the full policy cycle
Conclusion
About the Author
References
Abstract
Introduction
The title of this paper echoes Hardin’s (1968) narrative that describes the
dilemma faced by herdsmen who graze their cattle on a shared public field.
Sustainable management of the available pasture relies upon restraint by
herdsmen not to stock too many cattle or exceed the field’s carrying capacity.
The tragedy in Hardin’s scenario is that human nature predicates that the
commons will not be equitably or sustainably shared, but contested, exploited
and depleted. This notion has more recently been interpreted in terms of
ecological footprint. Each member of the human population exerts a footprint
through consuming resources and generating waste. Citizens in the minority
world, including Australians, typically have ecological footprints that far exceed
the earth’s capacity and limit opportunities for citizens in the majority world to
meet their present and future needs.
The evolution of the Natural Heritage Trust, one of the nation’s most
significant exercises in community engagement and regionalisation, highlights
the potential for a mismatch between rhetoric, actions and consequences.
During the first five years of this environmental fund, recipients of government
support were selected by panels with strong community representation
(NNRMTF 1999, p. 30). The second phase of the scheme relies on regional
organisations to determine priority natural resource management
interventions. Although the scheme is consistently described by the state and
national funding agencies as ‘community-led’, the bilateral agreements
between these two levels of government make it clear that while significant
responsibility for NRM has been devolved to community-based organisations,
this is accompanied by only limited power. Under these arrangements,
government bodies retain the authority to endorse and fund regional plans.
Furthermore, the transition from the first phase of this scheme to the second
involved a lengthy hiatus during which community groups that had relied on
government funding languished. Many of these groups, including extensive
networks of ‘carers’ (landcare, bushcare and waterwatch groups), no longer
have the capacity to engage meaningfully in either decision making or on-
ground environmental projects. Government failure to genuinely share power
with regional NRM organisations, or to maintain funding for groups that
facilitate community engagement in environmental governance, suggests a
lack of “credible commitment” to sustainability that would entail a
“demonstrable agenda of appropriate and believable reforms within policy and
institutional systems” (Dovers 2003, p. 16).
The decision by Greenpeace in the oil shale campaign to invest in both insider
(deliberative) and outsider (community action) processes is not generally
available to environmental NGOs. If the Queensland conservationists working
to legislate land clearing had actively participated in the dozens of consultative
committees established to implement the vegetation management legislation
adopted in 2000, they would have had no time or energy to educate and
mobilise the community. Instead, they rejected these processes as ‘time-
wasting’ and successfully pushed for replacement legislation that would both
ensure a higher level of conservation and reinstate the responsibility of
Government agencies rather than rely on consensus politics in each region
(Whelan and Lyons 2004).
The sixth and final reason to question the adequacy of prevailing community
engagement exercises is that policy processes, in the environmental domain
at least, tend to more actively engage community groups and concerns at the
plan making stage, and relatively less frequently at the plan implementation
and plan evaluation stages of the policy cycle.
Conclusion
The environmental management stakes are high and extend to the ecosphere
upon which human society depends. It is generally agreed that centralised
forms of governance have failed to deliver outcomes that could be described
as sustainable and that communities expect to be meaningfully involved in
making decisions that affect them. Natural resource management and
community engagement researchers point to a range of additional benefits of
deliberative environmental governance.
References
Greenpeace 2004, Shale oil plant shut down after Greenpeace campaign,
viewed 28 March 2005,
http://www.greenpeace.org.au/features/features_details.html?
site_id=45&news_id=1522.
Hardin G 1968, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, vol. 162, pp. 1243-8.
Kingma O & Beynon N 2000, ‘It Can't Work Without People: Conceptual
frameworks for analysing effective relationships between players in natural
resource management’, Prepared by Capital Ag for Land and Water Australia.
Lee K 1993, The Compass and the Gyroscope: Integrating Science and
Politics for the Environment, Island Press, Washington DC.
NNRMTF 1999, Managing Natural Resources in Rural Australia for a
Sustainable Future prepared for the National Natural Resource Management
Task Force.
Poncelet E C 1998, ‘A kiss here and a kiss there: Conflict and Non-
confrontation in a Multi-stakeholder Environmental Partnership in Belgium’,
‘Crossing Boundaries’, The Seventh Annual Conference of the International
Association for the Study of Common Property, Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada, June 10-14.
Princen T 1994, Environmental NGOs in World Politics: Linking the Local and
the Global, Routledge, New York.