Every tradition of social action has its own ways of making sense of the world. Community organizing, for example, generally understands social action as an ongoing series of battles over power and resources and the less powerful as a repository of potential agency. When social service agencies look out at the world, in contrast, they see suffering, a vast collection of people in need of help.
In this post, I lay out some of the key concepts that "frame" the environment for community organizers, that help them make choices about strategy, recruitment, and action. This is Part II of an introduction to the model of community organizing currently dominant in the United States. See Part I: What is Community Organizing, What isn’t Community Organizing. I will come back to more "dilemmas" of organizing in later posts, but it seemed useful to create a shared context for this discussion in these more descriptive posts. More on the flip. See http://educationaction.org for more.
The world is too complex ever to be fully captured by any single set of conceptual tools. The process of "making sense" of our surroundings invariably involves simplification. As a result, any theory always simplifies and obscures some aspects of our environment. It is always dangerous, therefore, to place too much faith in one approach to social action. I worry, for example, that some community organizing groups are so enamored of the "community organizing" model can blind themselves to possibilities not visible within its relatively narrow field of vision. I’d like people to keep this in mind as they read the description, below.
In a previous post I laid out the basic model of community organizing, distinguishing it from other approaches to social engagement. Again, what I am talking about, here, is the tradition of community organizing first formulated (but not invented) by Saul Alinsky in Chicago during the 1930s. Below, I discuss some key conceptual tools that organizers use to structure their action and make decisions about strategy.
Problems
A problem is a broad, vague challenge in the world. World hunger is a "problem." Bad schools, collectively, are a "problem." Understood in this way, problems are so enormous, ill-defined, and overwhelming that just thinking about them can be disempowering. The tendency for progressives to stay focused on "problems" is one factor limiting actual efforts to participate in social action. Instead of activating people, thinking about problems can make people want to go home, close the curtains, and have a beer or take a nap.
Issues
In community organizing, issues are "cut" out of problems. An authentic issue includes a very specific solution, so that organizing groups know exactly what they are fighting for and what would "count" as winning. For example, an issue cut out of the problem of "world hunger" might be getting county government to fund a local food bank. An issue cut out of "bad schools" might be having the state pay to lower class sizes in grades 1-3 to a maximum of 16 students.
Good issues:
Can be felt in the "gut"
Note the difference between "we want more money for schools" and "40 kids in a classroom is unjust. We need smaller class sizes." The first may be what you actually need, but it is only indirectly related to the actual problem in people’s minds. Furthermore, it may actually activate problematic ways of thinking about poor people "’Those people’ don’t spend their money right already, why should we give them more?" Or my favorite: "You can’t solve the problem just by throwing money at it." On the other hand, envisioning 40 kids in a classroom can have a visceral impact on those who hear it. You can even imagine actions that would make this problem even more concrete for people—having 40 kids sit together in a fairly small space, for example, during testimony to the state senate.
Are measureable
Because the goal of community organizing is to develop long-term power for an organization, and because someone who gives you something today can take it away tomorrow, it is important to be able to measure your success over time. Did you get the money for the food bank or not? Did the class sizes go down? If they didn’t, it may be time for more action to hold whoever is responsible accountable for making sure they keep their promises. This issue of measurability is one reason why improving teaching in schools has only become an aim of community organizing groups fairly recently. It remains very difficult to measure exactly what counts as better education.
Are simple
Even if your goal is complex, you need to find a way to make it simple enough for the person on the street to easily understand. This also helps you make it a more "gut" issue. For example, when the group I work with fought for a complicated school improvement program called SAGE, we focused on how it would reduce class sizes, even though that was only part of the program. The right wing often uses this strategy of simplification to mislead people. The "Patriot Act," for example, or the "Death Tax." This is a problematic strategy from a progressive point of view, obviously. So you want to simplify without distorting. And you want to expend effort to educate people about the underlying details of your effort through actions and other avenues. Your leaders, especially need to understand your issue in detail if they are going to be defending it to supporters and against the opposition.
Appeal to a large number of supporters
Because you want to build power, you want to pick issues that bring a large constituency with them. Sometimes you may want to fight over an issue that doesn’t engage that many people, but even if you win you won’t have strengthened your organization as much as a more broad-based issue would have. This is a difficult criteria for some people to keep in mind, since we tend to focus so much on winning and much less on how a particular "win" will help our organization. Remember, the goal is POWER and not to achieve any individual goal. You want to USE campaigns over issues to build the power of your organization. It is this power that will allow you to win on bigger issues in the future, and that will lead the opposition to take your more seriously.
Won’t split your coalition
Different coalitions have different issues they can and can’t work on. I work with a congregational organizing group. Even though this group is quite progressive, we can’t work on the abortion issue—it would split our coalition. The point is not that abortion isn’t important. But this particular coalition is not the one to work on it.
Other criteria
Other criteria for good issues are more obvious. A good issue will make a real improvement in people’s lives, will address core causes of social inequality, and are the kinds of things that your constituency cares about deeply as opposed to more shallow agreement that success would be a good thing. Key is the question of "winability." Given the resources you have in people, money, etc., what are realistic goals that will stretch your organization—help it grow and build more power—but are not so ambitious that you will end up failing and actually reduce your power.
Community organizers have been critiqued for focusing so much on individual issues and not on a broader vision of a better world. However, many of those who critique this model end up, in my experience, focusing on specific issues anyway. It’s hard to see what else one could do. Further, the truth is that a broader vision should always be integrated within these battles over specific issues. You want, in the ideal, to be fighting for the power to fundamentally change the way your society works. However, the community organizing vision is basically a reformist one. The aim is not radical revolution, but instead more incremental shifts in the conditions that oppress people.
Target
The target is the person or institution that can make the change you want. You need to know who or what the target is, because it is only by understanding the goals, motivations and interests of your target that you will be able to focus your efforts and actions. You don’t want to just "act." You want to do things that are designed to make a specific target react and eventually give in to your demands. It is this kind of strategic thinking that seems often missing from many "protest" groups.
Secondary Target
A secondary target is the person or institution that can influence the target. It’s important to know who can really make the change you want, but sometimes the person or institution you can influence isn’t the actual target but some other powerful entity.
For example, in Wisconsin they passed a law changing who gets money first after a firm goes bankrupt. As I understand it, workers used to be the ones who got paid first, but now it is the banks. The "target" who can change this law is the legislature (and then the governor). But legislators didn’t just wake up one day and decide to take money from workers. It was the banking lobby that influenced their actions. And it is likely that the banking lobby, as a secondary target (probably one specific bank at the beginning) would be the place to put pressure.
Constituency
A constituency is the group of people you are trying to organize for action. They generally include those most affected by the issue you have cut, and you cut the issue in order to capture a significant constituency. Because we are so trapped within the "service" mentality, when I ask people in my class to identify a target, they often identify their constituency as the target. "I want to target young people and educate them not to take drugs." Within this tradition, this approach looks a lot like "blaming the victim." Instead you want to organize youth to fight for the resources or social changes that would reduce the chances that they will take drugs, and to help them get clean if they do. Don’t try to make "bad" kids "good," get the kids together and help them develop power to resist the forces that oppress them.
One-On-Ones
To make sure that community organizing groups pick issues that their constituents actually care about, leaders and organizers are supposed to do many one-on-one interviews with their members. These interviews help leaders and organizers stay in contact with the interests and concerns of their members, and give them the information they need to craft issues that address these. In a sense, the one-on-one interview process acts as a more sophisticated form of "voting." (Organizing groups often "vote" on what issue they will pursue, but these votes are usually pretty pro-forma). One-on-one interviews also help build power by creating webs of relationships between leaders and members that allow leaders to draw people into action and participation. It gives leaders a tool for identifying the "passions" that would drive people to actually engage in one issue or another.
The organizing model assumes that these personal connections are what most fundamentally hold groups together. And you need these to be developed one-on-one. You can’t generate these kind of personal relationships in a larger house meeting, for example. Michael Jacoby Brown reports that he has
posed this question—What led you to join a group?— to hundreds of people, individuals from many classes, races, and backgrounds. Ninety percent say they joined a group because a person asked them. A few join groups after reading a flyer or newspaper ad. Very few, but often highly motivated, people go looking for groups to join. Most people join because someone thev know asks them. Face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball. This is an important finding. If you want people to join your group, you have to ask them, in person. This is what works. Person-to-person. One-on-one. (Building Powerful Community Organizations, pp. 137-38)
This interview process may seem a little manipulative. However, in the ideal the goal is to identify people’s passions and then to give them an opportunity to make these private interests public. Because organizing groups are seeking mass action, they generally don’t have the time to be manipulative, or even to twist people’s arms except around big actions where they need big numbers. They don’t have time to try to convince people who probably wouldn’t be reliable, anyway. The goal here is not to brainwash people to agree, but to educate people about issues while identifying those who may be willing to support a particular campaign.
To a large extent, this is a tool for building community in a society where the old ethnic and religious communities have lost some of their cohesiveness. Angela Davis argues, for example, that:
it is extremely important not to assume that there are "communities of color" out there fully formed, conscious of themselves, just waiting for vanguard organizers to mobilize them into action. . . . [W]e have to think about organizing as producing the communities, as generating community, as building communities of struggle. (cited in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, p. 161)
It’s not about YOU
Organizers, and to a lesser extent leaders are not supposed to be trying to push their own particular agenda in an organizing groups. The question is not what YOU want to do, specifically, but instead what seems like a compelling issue for your membership (or potential membership). My favorite story that drives this home was told to me by a local organizer who once wanted to organize a housing complex in Milwaukee. The complex had a range of difficult problems, including drug dealers, plumbing and heat issues, and on and on. However, when she went around and talked to residents, what she found was that those issues weren’t the ones that were most compelling to them. What was? Cable television. They wanted to have cable access in their apartments. So that’s what this organizer brought them together around. She used this issue to teach them basic skills in organizing (even though it probably didn’t require much of this process to actually win). And then, once they won, as the celebrated, she said, "well what other problems do you want to solve?"
There is always an ethical challenge here. What if the members of an organization want to pursue an issue that you think is unethical? You can always try to educate them. But ultimately, you may have to decide whether you can stay with the organization or not. This question of ethics and values is one that Alinsky did not often have a good handle on, and the earliest group he founded actually ended up, decades later, organizing to keep black people out of their neighborhood. More contemporary organizations are often careful to develop statements about their values to guide their actions.
Summary
Community organizers support local leaders in the development of powerful long-term organizations. Because these organizations "live" and maintain themselves only through constant action that keeps members engaged, leaders and organizers. Organizers and leaders use the on-on-one interview process to keep their finger on the pulse of their members, informing their efforts to craft issues. The overall aim is always to build the POWER of an organization, to give it influence in a range of areas.
Caveats: About Myself
I am not an organizer, though I have worked for about a decade as a leader in a local organizing group, and more recently with other groups in town. I have also taught about organizing on the university level for about the same time. My perspective is colored by the fact that I am a white middle-class scholar, and I try to remain conscious of this when possible. I am not someone you would come to for advice about how to actually organize—I can’t tell you how to deal with the media, or what the best "action" would be in any particular case—but I think I have a reasonably coherent understanding of the broader issues and tensions that organizers grapple with. I don’t have any deep commitment to any specific model or approach, so I may actually be better positioned than some who are more enmeshed in the work of social action to be critical, but readers will have to decide for themselves. Posts in this series are really meant as think pieces, not authoritative statements. I am very much a learner in this area, myself. I look forward to more critical dialogue.