Lessons from community organizing
29/Jan/2007 21:38
We’ve come
full circle. The organizing skills and principles of
community activists, learned from unions decades ago
and adapted as their own, are now being passed back.
Community organizing is about building power through
grassroots mobilization. And so integrating
principles of community organizing into the
day-to-day work of unions is really nothing more than
going back to basics—back to our roots.
Michael Jacoby
Brown, who just
published Building Powerful Community
Organizations (A Personal Guide to Creating Groups
that Can Solve Problems and Change the
World), spoke to our class
about the theory of community organizing:
1. The people closest to the problem are the experts,
2. People close to the problem have to be part of figuring out the solution if the solution is going to be implemented,
3. To make change you need to build and exercise power.
The point of community organizations (including unions) is to give people a vehicle to harness and exercise their power. But organizations don’t get created (or keep going) by themselves. A principal of community organizing is that organizations need organizers. Organizers have two jobs: (a) develop leaders (b) build organizations.
Easy to say but complicated to do.
One of Brown’s main messages is that “community organizing, building the power of a group to change the world, is both an art and a science. It requires understanding your self-interest in the deepest sense, building relationships with others, and a desire to change the world.”
Personal relationships, says Brown, are fundamental to building a powerful organization. If members of a group are connected to one another in a personal way, they are more likely to be able to overcome differences that inevitably arise. Brown believes that group members connect on a personal level through the sharing of their stories and organizations have to give room for that to happen. To illustrate the point, Brown asked us to team up with someone in the class to talk about who has most influenced us in our lives. In just a few minutes of conversation, connections were made that hadn’t been made in our first three weeks together.
Brown’s book is a good guide to building powerful organizations through effective organizing. By using his own personal stories and case studies, he goes through the steps of building an organization to last . The book includes a chapter on developing leaders; a chapter on meetings, a chapter on recruitment; a chapter on taking action and getting results. The book also includes a series of exercises to help the reader put theory into practice, as well as a listing of the quick tips that can be found throughout the book (eg. on physical layout of furniture at meetings, a checklist for evaluating an action, etc.).
The book is a good and easy read and a helpful guide for anyone wanting to build powerful unions. Highly recommended. Click here for information on how to get a copy.
1. The people closest to the problem are the experts,
2. People close to the problem have to be part of figuring out the solution if the solution is going to be implemented,
3. To make change you need to build and exercise power.
The point of community organizations (including unions) is to give people a vehicle to harness and exercise their power. But organizations don’t get created (or keep going) by themselves. A principal of community organizing is that organizations need organizers. Organizers have two jobs: (a) develop leaders (b) build organizations.
Easy to say but complicated to do.
One of Brown’s main messages is that “community organizing, building the power of a group to change the world, is both an art and a science. It requires understanding your self-interest in the deepest sense, building relationships with others, and a desire to change the world.”
Personal relationships, says Brown, are fundamental to building a powerful organization. If members of a group are connected to one another in a personal way, they are more likely to be able to overcome differences that inevitably arise. Brown believes that group members connect on a personal level through the sharing of their stories and organizations have to give room for that to happen. To illustrate the point, Brown asked us to team up with someone in the class to talk about who has most influenced us in our lives. In just a few minutes of conversation, connections were made that hadn’t been made in our first three weeks together.
Brown’s book is a good guide to building powerful organizations through effective organizing. By using his own personal stories and case studies, he goes through the steps of building an organization to last . The book includes a chapter on developing leaders; a chapter on meetings, a chapter on recruitment; a chapter on taking action and getting results. The book also includes a series of exercises to help the reader put theory into practice, as well as a listing of the quick tips that can be found throughout the book (eg. on physical layout of furniture at meetings, a checklist for evaluating an action, etc.).
The book is a good and easy read and a helpful guide for anyone wanting to build powerful unions. Highly recommended. Click here for information on how to get a copy.
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