What do community organisers do

In order to work towards this objective, community organizers must be trained to really listen to people when they articulate their concerns and voice their fears. Organizers are focused on building social organizations, expanding their membership base, raising questions or alternatives, developing sound organizing strategies, recruiting leadership, assisting with fundraising, running member meetings, and facilitating training sessions.

Since community organizers often spend their days engaging with marginalized populations, they also frequently strive to uncover resources that were previously unavailable to bear on community issues. Although formal training is typically not required to be a community organizer, the role comes with plenty of hard work that is best suitable for individuals with a strong background in social justice, social work, sociology, and other social services. In order to get the lay of the land before embarking on a career in community organizing, it is often recommended that people volunteer with social organizations.

Volunteering will provide the practical learning that is needed to navigate policies for social change as well as connect with others. They do this by knocking on doors and by going to local places where people hang out. They explore what local people care about — their loves, their concerns, visions and dreams for their community — and collate this information to share with the community at a future date. Community Organisers build capacity, trust, relationships and networks within a neighbourhood.

In doing so, they begin to identify local leaders and volunteers — people willing to get together to do something to help tackle local issues. Some of these will go on to become part of the local Community Organiser team as volunteers in the community.

Community Organisers challenge and support people to convert their ideas into action. Community Organisers are not there to do the job for people, but to support them to get their views and opinions heard. Community organizing is NOT 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. There is a theory isn't there always? 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. This makes sense to me. Winning is critical, but if the group's going to win whether I get involved or not - if my personal involvement is not critical - then I can stay home and watch TV. 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 US 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. We can too. What are these simple principles? What is the essence of the science of power, applied through the art of community organizing?

FIRST , people are motivated by their self interest. This is important to motivating involvement from the community that's being organized.

It's also key to developing effective strategies to pressure the opposition into giving up what the community wants.

Many people are uncomfortable with self interest. They'd rather focus on values, on selfless giving, or on mutual aid as the highest virtue. All these may be true, and we might hope that human beings could somehow be changed into angels. Human nature fails the angel test every time, though.

Effective community organizing can develop a broader sense of self interest - this is where hope comes in to the picture. How can we broaden the sense of self interest? Through a process of building up the horizons of the people we are organizing.

It seems to me that people are taught everyday in countless little ways that the system is not going to change, no matter what they do. We learn to stand in line and fold our hands on our desks in school. We see politicians betray promises daily, with very little regard for the faith that voters place in them before the election. We see the rich get richer, the powerful escape the consequences of wrongdoing. In all these ways, we learn that nothing we do will change the way things are.

Out of simple self preservation, we begin to lower our horizons, to shrink into a world we define by our ability to have an impact. Think about the last time you were in a meeting, and the room was too hot or too cold. You may have looked around for a door to open, a window to crack, or even a thermostat.

I'll bet, if you found none of these, you stopped being bothered by the room, though. What if you were right next to the thermostat, but it was locked? In the same way, our view of our own self interest gets shrunk down to the arena in which we believe we can have an impact. Community organizing seeks to teach people, through experience, that they can be effective in a larger and larger sphere - their own block, their own neighborhood, their city, their state, and so on.

In the process, we redefine our idea of self - who else is 'us' - and thus, of self interest. It is impossible to use community organizing to get to a certain point and stop, or to build a community organization up and then stop reaching out for new folks and taking on new issues. The process of development that we described above - broadening peoples' view of their own self interest - is mirrored in the political arena.

We see this dynamic aspect in the initial stage of building a group. At first, some people will want to take on big issues, and some will identify more achievable goals. The organizer will push for a winnable project so that the group can get stronger slowly. The formula for building a new organization is:.

Any group that can pick its issues - and this is sometimes impossible - needs to take this process seriously. What's necessary in these early stages to grow a strong group? Although simpler, lower risk issues could be addressed quickly and behind the scenes, it is especially important that they be handled the same way the big ones would. For example, even if you know that the city will put up a stop sign upon request, you should still hold a press conference on the street corner and a march to city hall to demand it, then negotiate with the traffic engineer over which tree it will be posted on.

Community organizing is a process of teaching people to work together, and how to be effective. THIRD , it's important that, at an early stage of the development of any group, they learn to deal with conflict and confrontation. Some people see this as manipulation, as tricking people. Obviously, some groups and some organizers are guilty of this. In the final analysis, though, groups must learn confrontation and negotiation because they'll eventually have to use both.

Many of the problems that confront low income and minority communities can be solved by coordination and determination, simply by focusing people of good will on a commonly understood problem. But most of the fundamental problems are deeply rooted in greed and power, and there are those who benefit from the status quo. Slum landlords might make as much or more providing decent, safe housing, but not many will see it that way.

If we are to build organizations that can have any serious impact at all, they will eventually have to come up against a situation where there will be winners and losers. The potential losers are not likely to lay down and roll over because of the righteousness of our cause. If the group has never stood strong before, if they have never made a demand before, if they've never faced a target that really had to be forced into complying, they're more likely to back down when the going gets tough.

If confrontation is not one of the tools in our toolbox, then we're likely to ignore problems that require toughness to be addressed. FOURTH , in selecting an issue to work on, every group has to take into account the fundamental definition of an issue. A neighborhood, a minority group, a group of workers or people who share any common complaint can be a community that wants to get organized. Typically, there is a tangled web of problems - complaints, irritations, bad situations, oppressions, difficulties, injustices, crises, messes.

An issue is a problem that the community can be organized around. I learned a formula to describe this distinction from Stan Holt, Director of People Acting through Community Effort, in Providence, RI in , when he gave me and another raw recruit our 6 hours of basic training before he sent us out door to door.

Immediate, specific and realizable. I never could spell that last one An organizer 'cuts' an issue - interprets or massages perceptions or manipulates situations until they fit these criteria as closely as possible. The thought process was to become automatic after a dozen years. Immediate , he said, in terms of either the benefit folks would get from victory or, preferably, the harm they would suffer from inaction.

Specific refers to both the problem and its solution. Vacant buildings are a problem. That building that we want torn down by the end of the month is an issue. Realizable it's easier to spell winnable, but it's not the way I learned, what can I do? It's easy to describe the extreme, the global problem beyond the reach of a Block Club or a neighborhood organization.

That's not a good issue, especially not in the early stages. Most effective community organizations can point to victories that any sane person would say were far beyond their reach, though. Who would have thought that a handful of neighborhood folks concerned about their children would get the government to buy their homes and relocate their families, putting Love Canal into the language as a symbol of environmental disaster in the process.

It remains true, though, that calculating the odds on winning is an important first step. The key to this aspect of 'cutting an issue' is calculation. The organizer - volunteer or staff - has to look with a cold, hard balancing of accounts at all the factors on our side and their side of the issue, and determine whether it's worth starting out on. This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse and use the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. It also provides expert input and guidance through guest lectures and webinars as well as informal networking opportunities and wider issue based discussion groups.

When communities work together, the possibilities for positive change are endless.