community organizing and social change Author(s): randy stoecker Source: Contexts, Vol. 8, No. 1, who fights our wars (WINTER 2009), pp. 20-25 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the American Sociological Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41959977 Accessed: 01-04-2019 07:00 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Sage Publications, Inc., American Sociological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contexts This content downloaded from 103.25.55.93 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 07:00:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms community organizing and social change by randy stoecker This content downloaded from 103.25.55.93 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 07:00:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms It was 2008, early in the presidential campaign season. Everyone was talking about whether a woman or an African American. would be the Democratic party nominee for president. And then they began talking about community organizing. In the early days of the Democratic primary we learned that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had connections to it. Clinton had written her undergraduate thesis on the famous community organizer Saul Alinsky. Obama had actually done it in Chicago through the Gamaliel Foundation, one of the national faith-based community organizing networks. Obama's community organizing experience, described in his autobiography Dreams from My Father, became a lightning (ACORN had, in fact, identified predatory lending as a problem and began organizing against it more than a decade earlier). rod at the 2008 Republican National Convention where for- ACORN fought back, and the GOP went down in defeat mer New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor in virtually every battle, with their attempts to thwart voter Sarah Palin mocked Obama and community organizing. Community organizers responded- within days you could buy a t-shirt saying "Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a Governor." (Pontius Pilate, of course, was the pub- registration turned back by courts, attorneys general and, increasingly, popular opinion. And now, we have a president who is a community organ- izer. We could, perhaps, say "former" community organizer. lic official said to have ordered the crucifixion of Jesus.) But once you learn the craft of community organizing, and Networks grew across the country as community organizers witness its ability to empower people, its spirit stays with you. and community organizing groups initiated a massive media It certainly has for Obama. Community organizing's democrat- strategy and registered voters by the hundreds of thousands. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) alone registered more than 400,000 new voters and nearly 1 million others who had fallen off the rolls. Local community organiz- ing groups in major cities each regis- Community organizing's democratic, and fundamentally sociological, impulses bring a sense of reward and satisfaction unmatched by other forms of political practice. tered sometimes tens of thousands of voters. ic, and fundamentally sociological, impulses - understanding Then came the Republican attacks on ACORN, one of the how power works and using that understanding to build the country's largest community organizing networks. ACORN'spower of all the people - bring a sense of reward and satissuccess at voter registration drives in swing states brought outfaction unmatched by other forms of political practice. the worst anti-democracy impulses from conservatives. In more There's a great deal more to community organizing than than a dozen states right-wing politicians accused ACORN ofBarack Obama and ACORN, hpwever. At its root, community voter registration fraud. Republican presidential candidate John organizing isn't about big organizations or charismatic lead- McCain, in an impossibly bizarre attempt at misdirection, eveners, or even about specific political agendas or ideologies. charged ACORN with causing the global financial meltdown Rather, it's about activating people at a local, neighborhood Contexts, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 20-25. ISSN 1 536-5042, electronic ISSN 1 537-6052. © 2009 American Sociological Association. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 1 0. 1 525/ctx.2009.8. 1 .20. This content downloaded from 103.25.55.93 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 07:00:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms winter 2009 contexts 21 level to claim power and make change for themselves. It's the process by which grassroots organizations form and grow, their members develop leadership skills, and ordinary people learn to change social policy. The belief is that poor and work- ing class people have been shut out from access to political and economic power because they haven't organ- ized themselves in this way. Once they're organized, the theory goes, they'll have a voice in policy issues. Without community organizing, there are only fleeting demonstrations, iso- lated spokespeople, and top-down o social policy. o .e Q_ Q. < the origins of organizingSaul D. Alinsky speaks to crowd before meeting in a high school in 1967. Community organizing has been unique to the United States until is Saul Alinsky, who helped build powerful neighborhood recently when U.S. -style global capitalism downsized izing and elim- organizations, first in Chicago in 1939 and then across the inated government services in nation after nation and forced nation into community-level responses. But in this country, Alexis de the 1970s. His influence extends to many of the Tocqueville documented our foreparents' willingness community to form organizers working today, and he influenced the voluntary organizations two centuries ago. development of many of the community organizing net- works - national organizations that support the development The founding of this country in opposition to central gov- of thousands of neighborhood and community organizations ernment and collective tax redistribution, by a relatively small across the country. group of people with exclusionary religious and cultural beliefs, in a very big space, provided fertile ground for a form of Those polit-networks include Alinsky's own Industrial Areas ical action that focused on smaller community-basedFoundation interest (IAF), the Gamaliel Foundation, the PICO National Network, the Direct Action Research and Training Center groups. The idea of bringing together like-minded neighbors the Midwest Academy, National People's Action (NPA), to defend local space has remained ever since. And (DART), while the ACORN, participatory impulses of community organizing now push and it others. The list is split about evenly between those networks that are faith-based - relying on religious principles to be inclusive and democratic, its original populist underpintheir motivation and congregations for their participants nings mean the craft is more anti-elitist than either for conserva- and secular networks such as ACORN, NPA, and the Midwest tive or progressive. Academy. The power and presence of community organizing varies In ACORN we see the other foundation of community overtime, as urban historian Robert Fisher explored in his book Let the People Decide. Working class people forced toorganizing stand in - the civil rights movement. While we best know the civil rights movement because of its large national events bread lines during the Great Depression, African Americans and white its religious leaders, the movement was built by African responding to the ravages of segregation while their neighbors enjoyed the expanding wealth of the late 1American 950s andcommunity organizers such as Ella Baker in rural communities and urban neighborhoods across the southern 1960s, and urban neighborhood residents realizing that corpoStates. Myles Horton, the long-time leader and corations and governments were disinvesting from their United communities in the 1970s and 1980s were the source of the most founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, was per- haps the crossing point between the Chicago influences that powerful community organizing periods in the past century. guided Alinsky and the southern civil rights movement. But even during historical periods when not much appears to be happening on the surface, community organizers were Until today, the most successful recent community organ- izing period was in the 1970s when small neighborhood groups working behind the scenes in rural and urban communities across the nation. across the country began realizing banks weren't making loans The person most clearly associated with community organ- in their communities. As they studied and fought against this 22 contexts.org This content downloaded from 103.25.55.93 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 07:00:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms practice of "redlining" they built a national movement that they also find themselves organizing in white working class produced the federal Community Reinvestment Act. The result, communities, where injecting progressive ideology into the by some estimates, was as much as $1 trillion of investment process might get them booted from the neighborhood, and into poor and working class communities across the country. where community members often support discrimination. One Today, there are community organizing groups in every of Alinsky's greatest disappointments was the racism practiced state and every large city. Perhaps because of its local scale and by his first, and most successful, community organizing effort methodological process, most scholars never judged commu- in Chicago's Back of the Yards community. And community nity organizing interesting enough for serious study. So, no organizers today, such as Rinku Sen in her book Stir it Up, are one has counted all the groups, some of which come and go asking whether some degree of ideology should help guide with the ebb and flow of issues and funding. organizing. But because community organizing groups focus on issues We know even less about the numbers of lives touched by those organizations. Many groups are part of one of the generated by their members from the ground-up, they typi- national community organizing networks, others operate inde- cally don't affiliate with political parties or strict ideological pendently. Many are informal groups composed of communi- platforms that impose issues on them from the top-down. Two ty members who have maybe never heard the term commu- slogans of community organizing show just how embedded nity organizing. We suspect the organizations number in the the culture of populism is in the practice. The first says "no permanent friends, no permanent ene- thousands and have hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, mies." In contrast to Giuliani's bluster at the Republican of members. Despite these large numbers, community organizing did- n't get the attention it deserved until the practice elected a National Convention, in the documentary The Democratic Promise we see him promoting the efforts of East Brooklyn community organizer as President of the United States. While Congregations - a faith-based community organizing group - nearly everyone knows something about the civil rights move- after the same film showed the previous Democratic mayor, ment, and many have heard of Alinsky, few of us knew of any Ed Koch, mocking them. The second slogan is "never do for of the major community organizing networks until ACORN anyone what they can do for themselves," which sounds as became so prominent this past election season. Now we're finally understanding how powerful commu- much like "pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps" as any conservative should want. The difference, of course, is that the nity organizing can be. Indeed, in many ways community organizer is there to help people develop their own strategy organizing is the foundation of social change. to demand and get boots. how it works common path. The community organizer enters the neighbor- In most cases, implementing these principles follows a You may have encountered community organizers knock-hood and gets to know people. Some networks have a special name for this process - the one-to-one. In a one-to-one, the ing on your door. They aren't the ones trying to convince you to adopt their religion, or give money and sign a petition, or vote for their candidate. They're the ones asking you You may have encountered community organizers about the most important issues in the community, and encouraging you to knocking on your door. They're the ones asking you about the most important issues in the come to a meeting to talk about those issues. They want to know what you community. think and what issues you're willing to work on. They will definitely twist your arm - hard - to get you to contribute at least your time andorganizer talks with individuals in the community, learning how they feel about it, what issues they're passionate about, and maybe your money, too. But their main focus will be in getwhat skills and resources they could contribute to an organizting you to work on issues you already care about. Of course, ing effort. Sometimes the organizer also visits existing civic if you want to discriminate against gays and lesbians, oppose organizations and congregations. equal rights for all, or limit democracy to only the rich or educated, they won't work with you. Their commitment, first and At this point, they're organizing what historian Mary Beth Rogers described as cold anger in her book of the same name. foremost, is to the expansion of democracy, and that's what leads those on the extreme right to fear them so much. This is the process of taking unfocused frustration and chan- neling it into social change strategy. Hot anger is the anger of Consequently, individual community organizers are more riots. Cold anger is rational anger, the anger of organizing. likely to identify with the political left, because that's where they find the most sympathy for expanding democracy. But Eventually, this process gives the organizer a sense of who winter 2009 contexts 23 This content downloaded from 103.25.55.93 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 07:00:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the community leaders are - not the official leaders, but the actual leaders - and what the important issues are. Then they start organizing meetings in people's homes, church basements, or other places people gather. It's these places where most of the work of community organizing is actually done. Those meetings lead to the selection of issues for the group to work on and the development of a strategy to work c on them. In some communities that may be about trying to <TJ Q_ rid a park of gang violence, in others it may be about getting E u rid of an unwanted developer. The organizer's job is to help Ü2 the group pick an issue they actually have some hope of win- ;g c ai a) ning, and then helping them develop a strategy for doing so. Q. ro E The group then initiates a campaign strategy around that issue, ai xi I often involving some form of confrontation such as a large o -d Q. public meeting with a targeted corporate or public official. The Q_ < group insists on a yes or no answer to very specific demands. A young Barack Obama while a student at Harvard Law School, where The goal is not just to win on the issue, but to build an he studied after working in Chicago for three yearsbecome as a community organizer. organization that can win on other issues as well and an institutionalized force in the political system. To this end, about the celeissue, come up with a position statement, and develsome community organizing groups hold large annual an action strategy - picketing the slumlord's suburban brations where they promote their past victories andopprioritize their current issues. home. Then, everyone made signs and Lewis trained neigh- organizing in action Someone would speak to the media, someone WQuld lead the borhood people to lead all the important parts of the action. chants, "the someone would negotiate with the police if they came. Community organizing is guided by the principle When the group left for the action, you could almost taste people shall rule," and its task is to help the people not only the tension and worry - it was the first time most of them had gain power, but the skill to grow and use that power. participated in a public action. Would they get arrested? Would Community organizers, with some exceptions, don't lead, they slandered in the news? But they started picketing, propel. The organizer is, in the best case, the expert they who be knows negotiated the rules of peaceful protest with the police who how to get people to a meeting, develop a strategy, and win arrived on the scene, were interviewed by the TV news, and a policy battle. But it's the people who come to that meeting they left with who are supposed to choose the issue, develop a position ona new sense of power. It started out as just a training, but it launched a multi-year A newly revitalized community organizing practice may help turn the tide of a decaying polity and a campaign that eventually helped shut down the slumlord's company. In the early days of a community organizing effort like this one, the res- corrupt economy. idents often don't know enough to sustain it without the organizer's help, just like they may not know enough to replace the shingles on their that issue, design a strategy, and lead the public effort. roof or repair An action training event led by Bertha Lewis, nowtheir pipes without an expert to help. The organplays a and much more prominent role in those early days. But ACORN's chief organizer, illustrates this process.izer Lewis the roofer other ACORN organizers were part of a three-yearunlike project to or plumber who does the work for you, the bestand organizers build community organizing capacity in Toledo, Ohio, they help you learn to do it yourself. In the best held monthly trainings the first year. community organizing, it's the leaders- community residents- who give the news interviews, do the public speaking, and yell The day before this particular training she met with the "charge!" in the campaign. leaders of two neighborhood organizations. Together they decided to focus the training around how to do a public action, building on the and chose a local slumlord operating in both neighborhoods foundation It's possible community organizing's new visibility will result as the target. The morning of the training Lewis brought together the neighborhood organizations' two dozen members to talk in new resources, energy, and initiatives. There are now efforts through the National Organizers Alliance to channel former 24 contexts.org This content downloaded from 103.25.55.93 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 07:00:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms campaign organizers into community organizing. A newly revi- recommended resources talized community organizing practice may help turn the tide COMM-ORG. http://comm-org.wisc.edu. A website that assembles key works on community organizing from academics and practitioners, and offers a discussion list with mòre than 1,200 of a decaying polity and a corrupt economy, focusing especial- ly on the poor and working class who lack access to the fundamentals of life itself - a living wage, an affordable mortgage, and health care. These possibilities come with risks. Politicians don't nec- essarily have ideals and goals compatible with community organizing, and we don't know whether the office of president will influence Obama more than he can influence it. members. Peter Dreier. "Shifting Gears: Transforming Obama's Campaign into a Movement for Change," The Huffington Post, November 6, 2008. A sociological reflection on the role of community organizing in the Obama presidency by a prolific writer. Robert Fisher. Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, updated edition. (Twayne Publishers, 1997). A social history of community organizing in the United States. Adding to this uncertainty, new initiatives have emerged Robert Kleidman. "Community Organizing and Regionalism," City posing as community organizing under labels such as consen- and Community (2004) 3 (4): 403-42 1 . An analysis of the challenges sus organizing, community building, or asset-based commu- of moving community organizing beyond local issues. nity development. Promoted by academics, foundation offi- Aldon Morris. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (The Free cials, and government officials, these models replace an understanding of oppressive social structures that divide the Press, 1 984). One of the few sociological studies of the civil rights movement from a community organizing point of view, focusing on the network of local organizations and strategies at the foun- haves and have nots with an assumption of common interests dation of the movement. between them that will allow for conflict-free social change. Such an approach contains within it the threat of a renewed backlash against community organizing. Rinku Sen. Stir it Up. (Jossey-Bass, 2003). Explores how to integrate racial/ethnic identity and ideology into community organizing, and move from local to larger issues. For community organizing to continue making meaning- Randy Stoecker is in the rural sociology department at the University of ful contributions to broad-based empowerment and bottom- Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Research Methods For Community Change. up social change, education about the realities of oppression and training in power-based community organizing strategies will be crucial. Most community organizing networks have to support their own organizer education programs, and in some cases that can mean only 10 days of training and an apprenticeship. Our universities and colleges - and sociology departments - haven't been helpful in this regard. Community organ- izing courses don't exist on many college campuses, and the number of degree programs that focus on community organ- izing can be counted on two hands. This has long been the case. In fact, three main historical heroes of community organ- izing - Alinsky, Horton, and Jane Addams (who co-founded with Ellen Gates Starr the famous settlement house Hull House in Chicago) - studied with or were colleagues of the famous University of Chicago sociologists of their time. But none of them ever felt welcomed enough to make a career out of soci- ology or academia. Perhaps now is the time to finally make that right. In the process, academics can begin to combine their efforts with community organizers and their grassroots leaders, replacing higher education's charity-based approach to service learning and civic engagement with a social justice approach that supports community organizing groups and helps secure the foun- dation for social change. winter 2009 contexts 25 This content downloaded from 103.25.55.93 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 07:00:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
