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Community Organizing
Community Organizing is about building power among a broad membership base -- either individual or institutional -- of low and very-low income people. The members provide the leadership, direction and “troops” for the organization's activities. The group's work is centered around issues chosen by the members themselves and focuses largely on subjects which affect a broad swath of very low to moderate income people. http://www.communitychange.org/CO.htm
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.
Community organizing is NOT just a technique for problem
solving. Those who would use simple confrontation or mass meetings to meet their
own selfish need for power, and skip the step of democratic involvement and
control in the selecting of issues, the crafting of demands or the negotiating
of the victory are called demagogues. Their organizations are a hollow sham,
without the empowering aspect that humanizes and ennobles the effort.
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.
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.
Community organizing is not just a neighborhood thing, not
just a minority thing, not just a 60's thing. Many - especially those
uncomfortable with a particular community organizing effort because it's
confronting them at the time - seek to 'label' organizing as somehow out of date
or out of place. The fact is that the method, the strategy, the science of
community organizing has been applied all over the world in situations as
disparate as Solidarity in Poland, Welfare Rights in the U.S. and 'communidades
del base' in Brazil. The simple principles of community organizing are being
applied right now in the barrios of San Antonio and in the ghettoes of
Baltimore. They are winning victories and building power. You can too.
http://www.communitychange.org/CO.htm
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