20 Overview of Community Organizing

Community organizing has been a necessary strategy for change due to the historical and contemporary systemic oppression driven by colonization. This practice and mindset of conquering has exploited people, damaged their health, destroyed livelihoods, reduced safety, and decreased well-being for the benefit of others – almost always a financial benefit. The people impacted have quite naturally organized themselves against this to resist the oppression and exploitation. The exploiters intentionally removed access to tools that inherently included political, social, and economic power (voting, lawmaking, buying, educating, etc.) and intentionally made change-making within traditional systems difficult. Eliminating access to these still remains an early target for marginalization.

Therefore, community organizing usually works outside of the traditional systems and relies on more informal (yet powerful) networks of people.

Saul Alinsky, who began his organizing in Chicago, is typically credited with introducing the term “community organizing” in Rules for Radicals, published in 1971, which was written to help younger radicals develop rational tactics to guide their social change efforts^[1].

There are so many historical and contemporary examples of groups engaging in community organizing, including:

• Farm labor
• Tenant unions
• Civil rights
• Treaty rights
• Water rights
• Disability rights
• Anti-war resistance

Community organizing is an exciting and dynamic part of community change work and could easily take a full semester or multiple resources to effectively teach about the various tactics used by effective organizers. However, there are some very fundamental approaches used by community organizers which will be described here in detail:

• Issue identification and issue framing
• Mapping and analyzing power
• Mobilizing stakeholders and advancing support

Often community organizing is done exclusively by volunteers, but some are professional community organizers. These may be social workers, criminal justice advocates, public health workers, etc. Their role is typically to facilitate the community organizing steps and keep the momentum, but they are not intended to be the token leader or only spokesperson for any community organizing work. That type of elevating role would defeat the essential nature of community organizing to be done BY and FOR the community.

A community organizer is also a hired position, one of the most famous organizers being former United States President Barack Obama. According to Jacoby Brown, a community organizer “Builds community with a purpose. An organizer provides a means (an ongoing group) by which people solve their own problems”. ^[2]

I do encourage you to supplement with these additional resources as you consider using community organizing or learning more about the work:

• Communitychange.org
• Native Organizers Alliance
• Re: Power
• Organizing for Power
• The Commons: Social Change Library