Community
Organizing
What is community organizing?
Community organizing, one of the methods in community
development.
Community organizing is one of the strategies adopted in any
community development project that requires the full
participation of the community.
“Process by which a community identifies its needs or objectives,
order (or ranks) these needs or objectives, develops confidence and
will to work at these needs or objectives, finds the resources
(internal or external) to deal with these needs or objectives, takes
action in respect to them, and in so doing, extends and develops
cooperative and collaborative attitudes and practices in the
community”
Community Organizing
• Community organizing is the process of building power
through involving a constituency in identifying problems
they share and the solutions to those problems that they
desire; identifying the people and structures that can
make those solutions possible; enlisting those targets in
the effort through negotiation and using confrontation
and pressure when needed; and building an institution
that is democratically controlled by that constituency that
can develop the capacity to take on further problems and
that embodies the will and the power of that constituency.
THE FOUR STRATEGIES
• There are four fundamental strategies available to
neighbourhood groups to address community
problems:
• community organizing,
• advocacy,
• service delivery or development.
Community organizing
• Community organizing is characterized by the mobilizing of
volunteers. Staff roles are limited to helping volunteers become
effective, to guiding the learning of leaders through the process,
and to helping create the mechanism for the group to advocate on
their own behalf. Community organizing almost always includes
confrontation of some sort. The people who want something get
themselves together to ask for it, often the people who could give
them what they want get jumpy. Community organizing strategies
include meeting with corporate or government decision makers to
hold them accountable for their actions, designing programs for
others (not the group) to implement that meet the needs of the
community, and aggressive group action to block negative
developments or behaviours (highway construction that leads to
neighbourhood destruction, etc.).
Advocacy and Service
Delivery
• Advocacy and Service Delivery are both
characterized by doing FOR people. Often
professionals like lawyers or social workers will
attack a problem on behalf of those perceived as
unable to speak for themselves. Job referral
services, social work, training for job readiness,
homeownership counselling, business plan
preparation training - these are methods which fit
into the Advocacy or Service Delivery strategy.
Development
• 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 Principles of
Community
Organizing
FIRST, people are motivated
by their self interest.
• This is important to motivating involvement from
the community that's being organized. It's also key
to developing effective strategies to pressure the
opposition into giving up what the community
wants.
community organizing is a
dynamic process
• SECOND, community organizing is a dynamic
process, that requires constant attention and effort.
It is impossible to use community organizing to get
to a certain point and stop, or to build a community
organization up and then stop reaching out for new
folks and taking on new issues. The process of
development that we described above - broadening
peoples' view of their own self interest - is mirrored
in the political arena.
The formula for building a new organization is:
FWFWFLFH
This stands for Fight,
Win, Fight, Win, Fight,
Lose, Fight Harder.
learn to deal with conflict and
confrontation
• 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.
take into account the fundamental
definition of an issue
• FOURTH, in selecting an issue to work on, every
group has to take into account the fundamental
definition of an issue. A neighbourhood, 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.
THE TEN RULES
OF COMMUNITY
ORGANIZING
• 1. Nobody's going to come to the meeting unless they've got a
reason to come to the meeting.
• 2. Nobody's going to come to a meeting unless they know
about it.
• 3. If an organization doesn't grow, it will die.
• 4. Anyone can be a leader.
• 5. The most important victory is the group itself.
• 6. Sometimes winning is losing.
• 7. Sometimes winning is winning.
• 8. If you're not fighting for what you want, you don't want
enough.
• 9. Celebrate!
• 10. Have fun!
