Community Organizing

David S. Walls

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745688169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This incisive book provides a critical history and analysis of community organizing, the tradition of bringing groups together to build power and forge grassroots leadership for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice. Begun by Saul Alinsky in the 1930s, there are today nearly 200 institution-based groups active in 40 U.S. states, and the movement is spreading internationally. David Walls charts how community organizing has transcended the neighborhood to seek power and influence at the metropolitan, state, and national levels, together with such allies as unions and human rights advocates. Some organizing networks have embraced these goals while others have been more cautious, and the growing profile of community organizing has even charged political debate. Importantly, Walls engages social movements literature to bring insights to our understanding of community organizing networks, their methods, allies and opponents, and to show how community organizing offers concepts and tools that are indispensable to a democratic strategy of social change. Community Organizing will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of sociology, social movements and social work. It will also inform organizers and grassroots leaders, as well as the elected officials and others who contend with them.

1
Introduction: Making Change

Is the world to be changed? How? By whom?

The skeptical “first god” in
The Good Person of Szechwan
by Bertolt Brecht

Can the world be changed? Bertolt Brecht’s challenging question continues to provoke. Community organizers answer with a resounding “Yes!” But exactly how? And who would be the active agents of change?

This book argues that the tradition of community organizing launched by Saul Alinsky, as modified and developed, offers concepts and tools that are indispensable to a democratic strategy of social change that promotes grassroots leadership and power for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice. Some critics have claimed the scale of community organizing is too small for the task of making transformative change in a large and complex society. But it’s no longer just about stop signs, block clubs, and neighborhood associations. Consistent with Alinsky’s original vision, the scope of community organizing has expanded to include cities, metropolitan areas, states, and even national government policy. Alinsky’s approach to organizing, like the man himself, was a product of his time and place, and needed to be modified to thrive in changing circumstances. We will look at the development of this organizing tradition through a framework of social movement analysis, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and examine proposals to modify and develop community organizing to meet its promise of deepening democracy in our challenging times of expanding inequality.

This introductory chapter will define community organizing and social movements, glance at recent controversies about community organizing in national political races, present a typology that distinguishes community organizing from many other examples of social movements, and examine how community organizing figured in twentieth-century social reform. Chapter 2 explores the social, political, and intellectual forces that influenced Alinsky from the 1930s to the 1960s. Following Alinsky’s death in 1972, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) under Ed Chambers began to systematize the training and practice of community organizing. The approach developed by Chambers and Ernesto Cortes, Jr. in the 1970s – a very different time from Alinsky’s – focused on developing an organization whose members are primarily religious congregations – often termed congregation-based community organizations (CBCOs). Today this approach is itself 40 years old and in need of updating. We will examine the innovations Chambers, Cortes, and others introduced to the IAF, and begin to assess whether they still match the circumstances of our time.

The IAF training programs, launched by Alinsky but developed and standardized by Chambers, have created an organizing culture that brings staff organizers and community leaders together in long-range commitments to one another and to the community organizing process. Chapter 3 outlines the essential features of the Alinsky tradition’s distinctive organizing worldview, which has had much to do with the success of CBCOs.

Chapter 4 surveys the “tools of the trade” of community organizing, many of which have been borrowed to one degree or another by movement organizations not necessarily sharing the worldview or organizational culture of the networks in the Alinsky tradition.

A venerable tool of community organizations in the Alinsky tradition is the public meeting, or accountability session, often an organization’s annual highlight gathering. Rather than simply analyze the elements of these pieces of public theater, Chapter 4 features a case study of the first public meeting, in October 2011, of the North Bay Organizing Project in California. The study tries to communicate a sense of the excitement that can occur at such events when there are genuine victories won that deserve celebration.

Chapter 5 explores the development of some distinctive contributions made by other new networks of community organizations. Of particular interest are the national networks – PICO, Gamaliel, National People’s Action, and ACORN – as they began to influence policy at the national level. Virginia Hine’s SPIN model of network analysis, which we will examine in that chapter, explains the ability of the network form to protect organizations from internal scandal and external attack.

The community organizing approach has been modified to apply to political campaigns, online activism, and mainstream social movement groups. Most notable is the work of Marshall Ganz, who worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) for many years, served as a political consultant for Democrats from Nancy Pelosi to Barack Obama, and now teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Chapter 6 looks at the applications of his approach. Chapter 7 examines other alternatives to the Alinsky tradition, including the popular education work of the Highlander Center, and the efforts to reduce hierarchy in organizational structure that fit under the title of horizontalism – ranging from the participatory democracy of the 1960s New Left, radical feminist groups, anti-nuclear and anti-globalization movements, and the recent Occupy movement. Finally, Chapter 8 considers various critiques of the community organizing tradition, and proposals to increase its power to win structural reforms and transformational change on a national level, particularly in alliance with labor and other social movements.

Barack Obama: The First Organizer President

Barack Obama’s successful 2008 Presidential campaign drew attention to community organizing by highlighting his work as an organizer in Chicago from 1985 to 1988, between completing his undergraduate studies at Columbia University and his decision to attend Harvard Law School. Obama had worked in far-south Chicago with the Developing Communities Project associated with the Gamaliel Foundation, a network of community organizing projects in the Alinsky tradition (Obama 1995: 133–86). He was mentored by Jerry Kellman and Mike Kruglik of the Gamaliel staff.

Conservative critics were vocal. In her Vice-Presidential candidate acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican convention, Alaska governor Sarah Palin commented sarcastically, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities” (Katz 2008–9). Campaigning in the 2012 Republican primary, former Congressman and House majority leader Newt Gingrich asserted, “The centerpiece of this campaign is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.”

Hard-right author David Horowitz used the writings of Alinsky to attack Obama in his polemical pamphlet Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model (Horowitz 2009), then promoted tactics similar to those he ascribed to Alinsky in another pamphlet, The Art of Political War for Tea Parties (Horowitz 2010). Some conservatives seemed obsessed with finding deeper connections between Alinsky and President Obama, despite the fact that Alinsky died in 1972 when Obama was 10 years old, and – no surprise – they never met.

The irony in this story is that Obama had come to doubt the efficacy of the Alinsky community organizing approach to make the changes in society that he had hoped to foster. In his 1988 article in Illinois Issues, “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” reprinted in After Alinsky (Obama 1990), Obama noted the contending alternative strategies of political empowerment, economic development, and grassroots organizing. He cited the economic self-help approach of Northwestern University professor John McKnight (see Chapter 7) as one promising supplement to community organizing. Although Obama remained upbeat in this article, it is clear he was becoming disillusioned with what he could accomplish working as a community organizer. In a round-table discussion in September 1989 on “Organizing in the 1990s,” among the authors of the articles collected in After Alinsky, Obama draws a sharper critique of the Alinsky tradition. First, organizing needs to place more emphasis on its long-term vision, based on its values, and less emphasis on people’s short-term self-interest. Second, Alinsky’s criticism of charismatic leaders and social movements, taken up especially by the IAF under Chambers, has been carried too far. And finally, avoidance of direct political involvement is a mistake; in the end politics is essential to obtaining the power to make social changes that can impact low-income communities across the country (Knoepfle 1990: 132–4). As we know, after completing law school Obama entered elective politics, running campaigns that built on his skills as a charismatic speaker and that had some of the feel of a social movement. John Judis may have exaggerated when he argued that Obama’s choice of a political career was more a “wholesale rejection” than an embrace of community organizing in the Alinsky tradition (Judis 2008: 19), but it is clear Obama personally had decided to approach making change from a different direction. The use of some organizing techniques in the Presidential campaign does not make it an example of good community organizing practice (Stout 2010: 260–77).

Community Organizing

By and large, community organizers welcomed the attention the Obama campaign brought to their profession, absurd and distorted as the references often were (Dreier and Moberg 2008–9). More young people were attracted to careers as organizers (Rimer 2009), and more communities were moved to develop broad-based community organizations. Whether these trends continue or not, community organizing has a higher public profile than it did before Obama’s Presidency.

There has been a substantial expansion of institution-based community organizations (IBCOs) over the last 20 years, especially in the last decade, mostly taking place under the radar of the mass media. As of 2011, a comprehensive study of the field by Interfaith Funders identified 189 active IBCOs operating in 40 states. The 178 IBCOs that responded to the survey had some 4,100 member institutions, primarily religious congregations, which represent some 5 million people (Wood et al. 2013: ii–iv). That’s an increase from approximately 133 groups in 1999 and more than double the number of some 90 groups in 1994. Congregation-based community organizing has become a significant expression of religious traditions of working for social justice (Slessarev-Jamir 2011: 67–96). But this success contains a puzzle. Community organizing is, at best, known locally; the major national networks have little national visibility. Political scientist Peter Dreier has caught this paradox in noting that “the whole of the community organizing movement is smaller than the sum of its parts” (Dreier 2007: 221). Why this may be so, and how organizers and leaders can realize the full potential of this movement, we will address over the course of this book.

What exactly is community organizing? Let’s begin with a broad definition from Doran Schrantz, executive director of ISAIAH, an organization of over 100 congregations in the St. Paul–Minneapolis area: “Organizing is a set of strategic disciplines and practices to build the capacity of people to participate in and shape democratic life” (Schrantz 2013). I would add a somewhat more detailed definition:

Community organizing is a process that seeks to build powerful, purposeful, coordinated, and disciplined activity by groups of people who support and challenge each other to affirm, defend and advance their values and self-interests. (Adapted from Mike Miller 1987)

This definition serves to emphasize that participants are serious a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1 Introduction: Making Change
• 2 Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation
• 3 An Organizing Worldview
• 4 Tools of the Trade
• 5 New Networks Innovate
• 6 Organizing and Electoral Politics
• 7 Alternative Approaches
• 8 What’s Next?
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement