Community Organizing

Perhaps the best way to seek the good of other people is by helping them to do things for themselves. Instead of providing a service, we can help them learn to serve themselves. Instead of advocating for them, we can help them speak for themselves. Instead of pursuing policies for them, we can help them pursue policies for themselves.

This is the essence of Community Organizing: helping a group of people to take united action for their own good. It’s about empowering people to empower themselves.

The biggest obstacle to community organizing is “learned helplessness” - the people’s sense that they have no influence over what happens to them. This comes from years of having to bear the consequences of the elite’s decisions, being subdued when they speak out, being outmaneuvered legally and politically, losing to the more powerful.

To fight against learned helplessness, Community Organizing builds leadership within the community, pursues a long-term strategy, and challenges systems of power. These are done through deliberate relationship-buidling among those who are affected, sustained effort, and collective action.

Two persons have had so much influence on Community Organizing: Saul Alinsky and Paulo Freire. Alinsky emphasizes finding a conflict that affects people so strongly it overcomes their own apathy. He encourages confrontation between the community and a target person of authority - as a way of giving people a taste of their communal ability to demand changes. Alinsky wrote “Rules for Radicals” to describe his thinking and methods.

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator who believed that dialogue between the people and authorities is important. He encouraged both reflection and action - without action, reflection is just talk, and without reflection, action can be misdirected or meaningless. For Freire, the objective is the humanization of both the oppressed and the oppressors by challenging and transforming dehumanizing systems of injustice. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is Freire’s book, still read, referenced, and acted on by educators and Community Organizers today.

The starting point for any Community Organizer (CO) is building relationships in the community. He pursues this by holding “one-on-one”s - conversations. These talks may seem casual, but the CO always has an objective for each conversation. He might want to know more about the community member, see how this person can contribute to the group’s effort, or gauge his level of interest or commitment, etc.

One-on-ones have to be respectful, done on an equal footing, in a safe space (no judgments), and for the Christian CO, must be done in the spirit of seeking the good of the other person.

Who would you like to have a one-on-one with?