COMM-ORG Papers 2006 Community Organizing: Past, Present And Future Cheryl Honey

[email protected]

Contents

Introduction Politics and Economics of The Social Service Industry Factors Impacting Participatory Democracy Conditions that Spark Community Organizing Movements The Historical Context of Neighborhood Organizing Movements New Organizing Approaches Conclusion References About the Author

Introduction

There is no small coincidence that a group uniting for a common cause achieved their dream of democracy in America and gained freedom and independence from totalitarian rule by using community organizing tactics. The American Revolution served as a template for community organizers like Saul Alinsky to adapt strategies for their organizing initiatives. The irony is the conditions that precipitated the creation of democracy are now the root causes of community organizing efforts in America today as citizens’ struggle for freedom and independence to restore social and economic justice, create sustainable communities and live healthier and happier lives. Will history repeat itself with another American Revolution?

Citizen initiatives are a process of self-determination, in which ordinary people engage in activities to better their lives and their communities. (McKnight, 1995 p. 156). This paper explores the political and economic conditions that have spawned community organizing initiatives over the past century. Due to the vast number of organizing efforts that span this period of our history for good and just causes, the scope of this paper is narrowed down to three community organizing initiatives that represent the past, present and future: The Back of the Yards (Alinsky); Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD); and the Family Support Network (FSN). Each of these organizing efforts utilized different tactics and strategies to engage citizens to better their lives. To enrich understanding of the history of community organizing and future implications, this paper details the paradigm shifts and the ideological underpinnings of past, present and future community organizing initiatives.

The techniques used by the well-known community organizer, Saul Alinsky, forged a path for many organizers. John Mcknight, the co-founder of Asset- Based Community Development, is one of Alinsky’s successors and is forging a new path in the field of community organizing. As an activist and professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, McKnight studied Alinsky’s organizing practices and made a startling discovery. By shifting the focus from taking back power, which was at the crux of Alinsky’s tactics, to focusing on the strengths and assets that already exist, then people would realize their power within. Herein lies the impetus for people to exercise their power from within to create the changes they seek to better their lives and strengthen their community. This notion has led to shift in community organizing paradigms from taking back power, which indicates a lack of power that must be compensated for by taking from a source outside of the self; to realizing the existence of power within to affect change. McKnight and his colleague Jody Kretzman (1994) confirmed their notion in a quantititative study they did in the late 1980’s by collecting stories and publishing their findings in a guide for community organizing called, Building Communities from the Inside Out .

At the same time ABCD was being unveiled in Chicago, I was a welfare mother in Washington State who got fed up with the treatment and limited resources of the social service system. As a way to create a support system in my neighborhood and improve availability and accessibility of resources to enable people to help themselves, I organized a group of neighbors into a Family Support Network (FSN). The ideology of this loose knit group was that people had the power to improve their quality of life when they functioned within a system of support with people who shared common values. As the size of the group grew, it increased individual and group capacity, as well as the capacity of the whole community by being a valuable resource. I was surprised when McKnight referenced the FSN for its capacity building practices in the Guide to Capacity Building. (a.k.a. Blue Book) (McKnight and Kretzman, 1996 p.23) Politics and Economics of the Social Service Industry

In John McKnight’s (1995), book, The Careless Society: Community and it’s Counterfeits, he indicates capitalists in this country have fostered a reliance on professionals and institutions by creating the illusion of a system of “care” to meet the “needs” of citizens as consumers to grow a service economy in America. Mcknight believes communities have been invaded and colonized by professionalized services which have disempowered citizens and interfered with ways people can engage with one another. Because the gross national product is the sum of the goods and services produced each year, many policy experts have come to believe that our economy increasingly depends on the “services” that are produced by institutions and “consumed” by the people. (p. 162). He emphasizes this point by referencing “a 1984 study by the Community Services Society of New York who found that approximately $7,000 per capita of public and private money is specifically allocated to the low- income population of that city. Thus, a family of four would be eligible on a per capita basis for $28,000, which placed them in the moderate-income category. However, only 37 percent of this money actually reached low- income people in cash income. Nearly two-thirds is consumed by those who service the poor.” (p. 164).

Rashi Glazer, Ph.D., a UC Berkeley business professor, agrees with McKnight. Robert Roth (1998) recounts a conversation he had with Glazer in his book, The Natural Law Party: A reason to Vote. Glazer doesn’t put too much faith in the two party system because he claims the policies they promote don’t work.

“They’re kind of phony solutions. Most money is spent on bandaging up problems that already exist, rather than solving or preventing them. But worse than that, many positions are anti-ecological – they have toxic by-products – and I don’t mean just environmental, but also social, economic and political. They create another problem, which then demands another solution, which then creates another problem. So many products exist that are designed to clean up other problems created by someone else. Health care is an obvious example. So many health care products and services lead to other problems, which then create a demand for new products and services. It’s a vicious cycle that doesn’t end.”

Another point Glazer makes that Roth (1998) references is “Entire industries are devoted to helping people overcome something that shouldn’t exist in the first place. It’s an enormous waste of knowledge and intelligence.”

Overwhelmed by these social services, citizens have lost their sense of social responsibility to care about their neighbors in their neighborhoods and this has led to the fragmentation of communities, the collapse of families, schools failing, violence spreading, and medical systems spiraling out of control. Instead of more or better services, McKnight (1995) contends the basis for resolving social problems is contained within the community of the local citizens. This principle is the core of Asset-Based Community Development and demonstrated by practices of the Family Support Network. Fewer citizens are engaging in participatory democracy activities because they are too tired and too busy with their own lives to be aware of the political economic conditions that are impacting their lives and communities. The irony is the political economic conditions of our society is the reason why people are simply too tired and too busy to get involved. (McKnight, 1995) Factors Impacting Participatory Democracy

Local citizens engaging in the political and economic affairs of their communities was what intrigued Alexis de Tocqueville, the French Count, on his visit to the United States in 1831. He observed that groups of common citizens who formed associations to solve their own problems. What Tocqueville found so interesting was: 1) these groups had the power to decide what was a problem; 2) they had the power to decide how they wanted to solve the problem; and 3) they had the power to choose whether or not they participated in the solution. From Tocqueville’s perspective, these citizen associations were the foundation of American communities (McKnight, 1995 p. 117).

Alinsky organized people to take back their bargaining power to choose what they wanted to improve in thier communities. This indicates that somewhere along the line, the role of citizens in the democratic process was usurped between the time of Tocqueville’s visit and the neighborhood organizing movement that began in the late 1800’s.

An attitude about the citizen’s role in political democracy was prevailing among the capitalists and social elite between Tocqueville and ALinsky.. Mattsen (1998) references social theorist Joseph Schumpeter who wrote in his classic book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) that “politicians and administrators – not regular citizens - should be central actors in a political democracy.” Schumpeter believed the role of citizen was to choose from a marketplace of political candidates during occasional elections. Many citizens rebelled against these ideas and felt they were being coerced into accepting this new form democracy that restricted them to a two party choice. Fifty years later Peter Bachrach and Aryeh Botwinick (1992) remind us that, “Participation cannot be delegated and it cannot be institutionalized. It can only be personally undertaken – and enacted and reenacted.” It is disturbing to think that Schumpeter’s notion is being realized in this new millennium. What is even more disconcerting is after the 2000 election and the exclusion of third party participation in debates, I believe democracy is due for a major overhaul.

Mike Thompson, a Harvard political science professor, feels the same way I do. “The democratic system innovated by our founders no longer operates effectively. The two party stronghold on our democracy – something not even implied in the constitution – has dangerously weakened the separation of powers. Almost all the people who now make up the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of out government are either Democrats or Republicans. If they are on the same side of an issue, such as access to the election process, then the separation of powers has broken down and no longer serves the public interest. And our elected leaders can’t effectively represent the people.” When conducting research Thompson found, “a member of Congress in the late seventeen hundreds represented ten thousand and fifteen people. Today that same office ‘represents’ six hundred thousand people.” (Roth, 1995 p.139). Conditions that Spark Community Organizing Movements

Social and economic injustices that directly impact the lives of families and communities give rise to community organizing movements. The organizers, residents, local conditions, and many other factors at the grassroots level combine to forge diverse organizing experiences. But while neighborhood based projects do have a significant origin, nature, and existence of their own at the local level, they are also the products of national and even international political and economic developments. To no small degree, the larger political- economic context often determines the general tenor and success of local efforts.

The national political economy affects community organizing in surprising ways. Many incorrectly assume, for example, that radical organizing occurs and thrives only during periods of national economic depression, or that conservative neighborhood maintenance groups form and succeed only in periods of national affluence. While such a theory appears accurate for the 1930s, a similar movement developed in the 1960s and 1970s during a period of economic growth. The late 1970s and 1980s was a period of economic decline, on the other hand, and yielded a conservative response.

Nevertheless, specific conditions at the national and local levels determine the approaches different groups use to restore social and economic justice. Usually external pressure on traditional communities and a breakdown of the routines of daily life trigger citizens to engage in activities to bring about changes to better their lives. Disturbances in the larger political economy create the momentum in which the powerless move the mass political insurgency.

Midgley, (1986) a social work academician, points out central to the rationale of community participation is “a reaction against the centralization, bureaucratization, rigidity, and remoteness of the state. The ideology of community participation is sustained by the belief that the power of the state has extended too far, diminishing the freedom of ordinary people and their rights to control their own affairs.” The Historical Context of Neighborhood Organizing Movements

Thomas Jefferson recommended that wards be established where groups of citizens could gather and practice democracy in their communities. (Mattson, 1998 p. ). Neighborhood organizing efforts in the past mobilized citizens in neighborhood around their individual needs.

Robert Fisher (1994) describes the history of neighborhood organizing movements in his book, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America and describes how social developments are part of a total economic and political system – a political economy - in which all strands of life, from the national to the local level, intertwine. History is full of examples of how government and corporate interests conspire to stimulate economic growth or economic recovery through injustices that impact the every day lives of ordinary citizens. Social inequities make way for organizing efforts in the workplace and neighborhoods and lead to social uprisings to restore justice. Fisher (1994) quotes Dowd’s (1974) historical recount of neighborhood organizing.

“The first neighborhood organization movement must be seen as one trend in the national liberation reform movement called progressivism. Progressivism grew out of the industrial relations of the years 1870 to 1895, a period characterized by fierce and unbridled competition among, as well as, between capitalists, on the one hand, and workers and farmers, on the other, over who would control and benefit from industrialization. The decade from 1895 to 1905 was a watershed in the transition from the industrial capitalism of 1870- 95 to the finance capitalism and liberal reforms of the generation that followed. Around 1895 bankers like J. P. Morgan of Morgan Guaranty and Trust purchased controlling interest in corporations as diverse as the newly formed U.S. Steel and General Electric from industrial capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison. Control of key industries began to be consolidated among an elite group of financiers. The period 1895-1905, for example, saw the merger of some 300 separate firms each year into highly centralized and powerful industrial conglomerates. As economic power became more centralized, many corporate leaders concluded that the social order, too, should be stabilized by engineering democracy through private and public social engineering." (Dowd, 1974)

Neighborhood organizing, community organizing, community building and community development are all aspects of social movements. In the early twentieth century, social democratic movements that arose in the U.S. were in response to the excesses of industrial capitalism. Saul Alinsky paved the way in this era neighborhood organizing. The locus of organizing was the industrial factory. By organizing unions around class issues and provided the working- class a vision for the future. They targeted employers, the owners of production companies, and leveraged changes in public policies. Alinsky mobilized workers through his neighborhood organizing method of sending in an organizer (a.k.a. catalyst) who taught citizens the skills to initiate action on their own behalf, then left to organize in another neighborhood.

Alinsky believed people organize solely for their own economic self-interests. Similarly, neighborhood improvement associations are rooted in maintaining property values, and liberal social reform of social services. Such material incentives are important, but they are not the glue that keeps neighborhood organizing efforts together. Victories are crucial; people seeing themselves and their power differently in their activities. In order to sustain long-range objectives, neighborhood organizing must be built around issues of personal development and an ideology that articulates a sense of purpose extending beyond individual advantage. It must be committed to developing knowledge, dignity, and self-confidence of community residents. And these people must see themselves as part of a larger cause. A focus on unity instructs that oppressed people must build relationships with other oppressed people. In doing so efforts affirm variety and diversity while working “to synthesize and build unity that transcends diversity.” (Fisher, 1994 p. 228)

Alinsky’s style of organizing falls into the category of neighborhood organizing. Solidarity movements and factions in neighborhoods and in factories are organized around a cause and demands. This approach trains citizens as radical activists and organizers on how to leverage power for their self- interests. Alinsky organized the Back of the Yards project during the depression for worker’s rights and improvement of living conditions in “the Jungle” in Chicago. New Organizing Approaches

As issues arose over democratic participation, personal liberties, civil rights and quality of life, a new insurgence of grassroots associations and organizing approaches began in the 1950s. It wasn’t until the 1980s that community based efforts began addressing issues impacting whole communities, constituency or identity oriented groups, and focused on self-help strategies.

The social movements of the 1980’s have a vision of participatory democracy. They reject authoritarianism: in the government, leadership, party, organization and relationships (Amin, 1986). Class becomes part of - not the identify of the group (Brecher and Costello, 1990). The organizational form is smaller, looser and taps local knowledge and resources, to respond to problems rapidly and creatively, and to maintain the flexibility needed in changing circumstances (McKnight and Kretzman, 1984). Another aspect of the more recent social movements is their community building aspect. The term community building in this context refers to the creating and strengthening of social bonds among group members. Community building approaches are based in self-help and empowerment principles and the most effective efforts go beyond building community to targeting the public sector. Most community-based organizing seeks independence from the state rather than state power. They rely on a unitary conception of democracy within the community and de-emphasizes adversarial democracy, which challenges national, state and local politics and presupposes conflicting of interests. Community building is a natural focus of new social movement efforts, reflecting the anti-statist, decentralization trends of the postindustrial political economy.

Mary Weil, author of “Women, Community, and Organizing,” suggests consciousness raising and praxis give people the opportunity to “reflect on, re- experience, identify, and analyze the social stereotypes and environmental forces that have impeded their development” and help build both individual and collective strength. To make the personal political, which means being sensitive to the ways that “systemic factors result in problematic personal conditions” and recognizing that how people choose to live etheir daily lives is political as well. Community organizing emphasizes and works for structural change – to eliminate racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and other forms of oppression (Fisher, 1994). A vision of noncapitalist transformation has to be articulated in a broad ideology that addresses the causes of poverty and powerlessness, as well be attentive to such American ideals as equality, self- help, local self-reliance, participatory democracy, group solidarity, cultural pluralism, and grassroots insurgency (p. 229).

Asset-Based Community Development is a community development approach and is based on a paradigm of organizing different from Alinsky’s. ABCD is broad in scope, solution-based and community driven. The ideology behind ABCD is communities can drive their own development process themselves by identifying and mobilizing existing (but often unrecognized) assets, thereby responding to and creating local economic opportunity. Such unrealized resources include not only personal attributes and skills, but also the relationships among people that fuel local associations and informal networks. Mobilizing such social assets through training and asset mapping, activate more formal institutional resources such as government, formal community- based organizations, and private enterprise. In this way, the community development process is sustained and scaled up, while continuing to recognize local associations as the driving force – the vehicles through which all the community’s assets can be identified and then connected to one another in ways that multiply their power and effectiveness.

The principles of the Family Support Network are rooted in community building. and share the philosophy of ABCD in that individuals and their relationships are assets. The ideology behind the FSN is rooted in people helping people and empowerment where individuals take the initiative to help themselves and others to get their needs met and improve their quality of life. The methodology is based on social support, self-organizing and emergence theories. FSN provides people with a common purpose “To Save Our Children’s Future” and empowers individuals to create their own systems of support and grow social capital by providing easy access to resources, skill- building and recreational opportunities. The capacity of the group is expanded through association ties to other FSN groups that form in neighborhood, institution, business or broad-based community settings. Formal systems are an integral part of the FSN methodology. Conclusion

All three community organizing approaches, Alinsky, ABCD and FSN, provide a framework to engage citizens in activities that empower people to help themselves. Unlike Alinsky’s confrontational techniques to take power from those in authority, ABCD and the FSN approaches view power as an outgrowth of the organizing effort, rather than something they “need” or “lack.”

The dramatic changes in the political, economic, and institutional context over the past two decades has impacted community organizing practices. Communities are struggling for survival and stretching their assets to unsustainable levels. According to Robinson (1995) there is an emergence of aspirations towards a new social order in which community is based on “face- to-face association in caring neighborhoods which retain individual liberty to act, open access to knowledge, and global interconnections” (p. 22) that sustain specialized small scale enterprise.

The organizing ideology for our times must combine new demands for autonomy and identify with older ones for social justice, production for human needs rather than profit, and a spirit of connectedness and solidarity rather than competition.

The basis for such an ideology can be found in the themes of ABCD and FSN. Feminist theory instructs the need to build relationships, make connections, and accept responsibility – connecting the public and private, challenging patriarchal and hierarchical forms of domination, and recognizing the importance of solidarity across differences of class, ethnicity, race, religion, and sexual orientation.

Day to day organizing, if it is to move beyond the received wisdom of traditional values and cultures, must be informed by this sort of challenging politics and feel the tensions of the intellectual discourse of our era. Individual freedom cannot be achieved without sustaining and nurturing connections to the greater whole, be it humanity, nature or the planet. Robert Fisher (1994) believes local organizing efforts must include not only a critique of global corporate capitalism but a demand for a responsible public, from the grassroots to the state apparatus. (p. 232) The Family Support Network is an innovative social architecture that manifests a more responsible and responsive public that increases social capital by growing social networks and strengthening relationships that improve quality of life of community members. The FSN methodology instigates a paradigm shift in service delivery systems by creating a resource pool of trained volunteers who self-organize into an integrated system of support that formal agencies tap to increase their capacity to empower clients toward self-sufficiency. By engaging citizens in community service in this manner, formal service delivery is augmented with an informal system of care that is self-sustaining.

“Ironically, global capitalism destroys community at the same time it forces people back into it as their primary source of defense. Such structural contradictions mobilize opposition and lead, in the short run, to social disorder, spontaneous rebellion, and grassroots organizing around a wide array of issues and concerns. The task for community organizing is to tie people’s understanding of their grievances to an analysis that expands as well as addresses the problems affecting their lives and communities. The challenges that lie ahead are immense when taking the problems we face to the global scale. A consciously ideological, grassroots leadership committed to opposing the privatization of life and to building larger organizational forms is essential.” (Fisher, 1994 p. 232)

ABCD has created the gateway through which new initiatives are emerging. The FSN is a mechanism that creates a new social order and orients people to becoming an integral part of an informal system of care. Alinsky's approach will be useful in leveraging systemic changes in service delivery approaches and cooperation from formal institutions. These broad scale initiatives will assuredly be met with resistance as consumption of social services declines. Confusing as this may seem to those who feel entitled, institutions will slowly give over the duties and communities will regain the right to take care of their own. We must start now to train people on how to care for themselves and one another. The Family Support Network is one of many new structures being designed to make this America’s new reality and put democracy back into the hands of the people. Jacob Needham (2002) points out in his book, The American Soul, Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders, “The hope of the democracy we know is that it allows – and, to a certain extent, calls us all toward – the life of conscience, of respect for one’s neighbor, that is rooted in the teachings of wisdom about the actual and potential selfhood of humanity (p. 19).

At the core of all initiatives no matter how altruistic they seem, Saul Alinsky left behind these words of wisdom, “The more power the neighborhood organization secures, the better it serves the interest of its members. It is self- interest rather than exalted ideals that motivate people to act." (Fisher, 1994 p. 54). References

Amin, Samir. (1986), “The Social Movements in the Periphery,” Transforming the Revolution.

Brecher, J. and Costello, T. (1990). Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community. Monthly Review Press

Dowd, D. (1974). The Twisted Dream: Capitalist Development in the United States. Cambridge-Wintrop Publishers.

Fisher, Robert. (1994). Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, Updated ed. New York. McMillan Publishing

Foster, Megan. (2000), New & Evolving Ideas: Situating Asset-Based Community Development in the International Development Context, Coady International Institute, St. Francis Xavier University.

Kretzman, J. & McKnight, J. (1993). Building communities from the inside out. Chicago . IL: ACTA Publications.

Mattsen, K. (1998). Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

McKnight, J. and Kretzman, J. (1996), Guide to Capacity Building, Chicago. IL: ACTA Publications.

McKnight, J. (1995). The Careless Society: Community and it’s Counterfeits. NY. BasicBooks.

McKnight, J. and Kretzman, J. (1984) Community Organizing in the 80’s: Toward a Post-Alinsky Agenda, Social Policy, Winter, 14:17

Midgley, James. (1986). Community Participation, Social Development and the State. London , Methuen.

Needleman, J. (2002). The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders, New York : Tarcher/Putnam.

Robinson, M. (1995). “Towards a New Paradigm of Community Development.” Community Development Journal, 30:1, pp.21-30. Roth, Robert. (1998). The Natural Law Party: A Reason to Vote. New York, Martin Press.

Wallis, Allan, (1998). Social Capital and Community Building. (Building Healthier Communities: Ten Years of Learning) (part 2), National Civic Review, Winter, v87 i4 p317(2)

Weil, M. Women, Community and Organizing, excerpt from Fisher, R. (1994), Let the People Decide, Neighborhood Organizing in America.

About the Author

Cheryl Honey, ([email protected]) Certified Prevention Specialist and President, Excel Strategies, Inc. She founded the Family Support Network, International (FSNI), in 1993 and has been a volunteer with the organization since it's inception. Community Weaving practices emerged out of her grassroots experience growing the FSN across the country. She received recognition from the Asset-Based Community Development Institute and the Institute for Civil Society for her innovative approach to building individual and community capacity. Cheryl graduated from Antioch University- Seattle in Transformative Community Building and Human Services. She is a Daily Points of Light Honoree; the recipient of the Giraffe Award; and Ambassador for Peace and Excellence in Leadership Awards from the International and Interreligious Federation for World Peace. She trains Community Weavers around the world who grow Family Support Networks at all levels of community. Cheryl is a keynote speaker, lecturer and writer. She is currently working on her new book: Saving Our Children's Future.

[this is a draft, some of it may be wrong]

Power or Programs? Two Paths to Community Development(*)

Randy Stoecker

[email protected]

March 2001

Keynote Address Delivered to the International Association for Community Development Conference, Rotorua, New Zealand, 2001 ABSTRACT

There are two basic approaches to community development. The power approach emphasizes poor communities organizing themselves and using confrontational strategies to demand the removal of barriers and biases so they can receive the same opportunities as more affluent communities. The programs approach emphasizes poor communities cooperating with resource providers such as government or corporations to develop programs focused on helping individuals in poor communities. These two approaches are rooted in two different theories of society. The power approach sees society as divided between haves and have nots, requiring the have nots to organize their people power to counter the greater political economic power of the haves . The programs approach emphasizes the common interests of all people. Among the former British settler colonies--Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand--the United States stands out as having a much stronger history of power-based community development, called community organizing. In contrast, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Canada have historically had much stronger government and much more of a programs approach to community development. But the present and future holds questions. Are the two approaches both necessary for successful community development? Are they necessary in the same ways across nations? Have the Australian, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Canadian governments come to look more like the United States government-leaner and meaner? If so, does that mean people across those nations will need to shift to more of a power-based community development model?

INTRODUCTION

Kia ora.

I feel deeply humbled to be invited here to Aotearoa/New Zealand, and especially to this space, which I am still only beginning to understand the significance of. I have learned much during the last few days--just enough to realize how little I know.

So what I'd like to offer today is what I think I know based on my experience with social action groups in the United States, what I suspect based on my more recent experience with Australia and Canada, and what I wonder based on my very recent experience in Aotearoa/New Zealand. My focus, then is the former British settler colonies--those colonies designed to populate far away places with European settlers.1 In the context of these four nations--Australia, Canada, Aotearoa/Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States--I want to discuss two paths to community development. And perhaps it is because of where I come from that I want to talk today about two paths to community development. These two paths are much more clearly separated in the United States than in the rest of the former British empire, but as Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand have all gone through their version of government self-destruction, the circumstances that led to the separation in the United States are increasingly apparent for you also. At the same time, the United States has always been different. Consequently, parts of what I say may seem irrelevant, or disconnected form your experience. Because I come from the place that is different, please understand that I do not wish anything I say to be taken as truth. Only as perspective.

What are these two paths? In the United States we call them community development and community organizing. Community development, quite differently from how most of you use the word, is defined as nonprofit organizations called community development corporations -- CDCs -- doing physical development of impoverished communities. CDCs are supposed to be "community-based," having some connection with the residents who live there. They are also expected to do "comprehensive development," creating jobs, housing, safety and other changes (though most emphasize housing). And they are supposed to accomplish all this within the existing political economic system (Stoecker, 1997). This is the programs approach.

Community organizing, the second path, works in local settings to empower individuals, build relationships and organizations, and create action for social change. It is often confrontational, involving protest and even disruption (Beckwith & Lopez, 1997, Bobo, Kendall & Max, 1991, Kahn, 1991; Alinsky, 1969; 1971). Community organizers have historically focused on building localized social movements in places as small as a single neighborhood. Consequently, the bulk of community organizing occurs "backstage" (Goffman, 1959), building relationships and networks in the quasi-private setting of the neighborhood community (Stall and Stoecker, 1998) that can create a larger social movement. This is the power approach.

Community organizing has a much longer history than community development, dating from at least the early 20th century (Stall and Stoecker, 1998), and some might even say the revolutionary war. The most well-known influence was Saul Alinsky (1969; 1971) who, in the 1930s, created a community organizing model in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood that was rowdy, bawdy, and confrontational (Finks, 1984). The Civil Rights Movement is the other crucial source of community organizing, though its influence on community organizing practice has been as profound as Alinsky's but has been historically neglected. The accepted founding event of the movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was coordinated through local African American networks and organizations and created a model that would be used in locality-based actions throughout the south (Morris, 1984). Out of these efforts grew the Welfare Rights Movement (Piven and Cloward, 1979) and eventually the famous Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) (Delgado, 1986; Russell, 2000).

But in the 1980s, community development ascended onto the stage, with growth mushrooming from the hundreds into the thousands. But then increasingly vocal critics of the CDC model pointed out how CDCs often failed at projects that left their host neighborhoods in as bad or worse shape than when they started; folded under funding shortages that allow elites to both prevent real redevelopment and blame CDCs for failure; or disrupted neighborhood empowerment by purporting to speak on behalf of a community who they barely know (and who barely knows them) (Stoecker, 1994; 1997). These critics led a call to bring back community organizing.

Today, community organizing is experiencing a resurgence in the United States, with an explosion of small efforts and the growth of better-publicized efforts by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) (Tresser, 1999), by ACORN (1999) and the New Party (1997) in their Living Wage efforts, and by many other groups and networks (COMM-ORG, 2001) including the rapidly expanding National Organizers Alliance (2001) which is supporting and connecting independent and network organizers across North America.

Now, historically, there seems to be much less separation between community organizing and community development in Australia, Canada, and it appears Aotearoa/New Zealand (which I am only beginning to know). There also seems to be much less historical separation between government and the community sector than in the United States. Why?

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT ACROSS THE SETTLER COLONIES

In order to understand U.S. exceptionalism, we need to remember our different histories.

Most importantly, the United States, in contrast to all the other British settler colonies, was borne of war against the Empire. It was a country formed in opposition to government, taxes and rules. And we have remained that way, so much so that a terms has been coined for us, "normative anti-statism" (Joppke, 1992). While the rest of the industralized world created national health care, social housing, and a managed economy, we kept finding ways to prevent government involvement in anything but prison-construction. With such a weakened federal government, an anti-government culture, and so many hungry, sick, and homeless people, we needed a different "solution," inadequate as it might be. And, in fact, we came up with two.

The first solution supported the "government-do-more" philosophy to an extent. This was the community organizing approach. Through protest, confrontation, and other similar tactics people brought themselves together to demand that government enforce rights, redress wrongs, and provide for those who were historically left out. The two most famous periods of community organizing in U.S. history were during the 1930s--which produced the famous Saul Alinsky--and the 1960s--which saw the rise of the African American Civil Rights Movement.

The second solution, which really came of age during the 1980s, supported the "government-do-less" philosophy, though perhaps unwittingly. This was the community development approach. Through finding their own financing and their own contractors, poor communities were supposed to build their own affordable housing, create their own jobs, and develop their own community networks. It's important to understand, however, while this plays into the hands of the right wing, it is not a right-wing approach. Indeed, even the community organizing approach, while focusing on getting government to do more, treats government as only ever a potential and temporary ally.

Now contrast this to the histories of the other former British settler colonies. And this is not to deny the important differences between Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Canada, but to show their similarities relative to the United States. Still technically considered constitutional monarchies, separation from the British empire is gradual and peaceful. And all have a history, up until at least the mid-1980s, of strong government with heavy involvement in providing social goods. Government housing, nationalized utilities and transportation, national health care, were common to all. And in contrast to the United States, which created a Bill of Rights in 1791 as one of its first orders of business when it was founded, Canada only got their Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, Aotearoa/New Zealand just in 1990, and Australia as far as I know is still waiting. It has taken 200 years or more for your distrust of government to drop to original U.S. levels.

For Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, the historical strength of government and, relatively speaking, people's trust in government, is in stark contrast to the United States and has had important consequences for the practice of community development.

First, community development is as often practiced through government rather than against it. Indeed, in many cases the major agents in community development are on the government payroll (see Resource Renewal Institute, 2000). In the United States, the overwhelming degree of community development and community organizing occur through private non-profit non- governmental organizations.2 In addition, there is a highly developed infrastructure of philanthropic foundations that also provide much of the funding for these efforts. Second, there is much less separation between community organizing, community development, and social work in Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia compared to the United States. Though things are beginning to change, U.S. social work since WWII has devolved into an individual treatment model. But in the other three nations community development commonly refers to all three activities: individual, community, and physical development. Witness this statement from the Aotearoa/New Zealand Community Advisory Service of Internal Affairs (n.d.), still being used:

"Community development is Concerned with change and growth within communities, with giving people more power over the changes that are taking place around them, the policies which affect them and the services they use. Our ultimate concern is to help increase the well being of communities and takes place predominately within those communities that have been most disadvantaged or discriminated against. We choose to use community development methodologies as an approach to work with communities because these increase opportunities for participation, enable the transfer of skills between people, develop self reliance, build organisational capacity and networks of community groups, ensures local ownership of projects and decisions, utilises local resources to solve local problems and, in the end effectively increases the amount of social capital available within a community. The communities, and groups within communities, most in need of this capacity building are those which suffer the most disadvantage and discrimination." In fact, an important article by Canadian authors Boothroyd and Davis (1993) was one of the earliest attempts to develop some distinctions in the field they referred to as CED-- community economic development. They were the first that I know of, outside of the U.S. to make fine-grained distinctions between emphasizing the community, emphasizing the economic, and emphasizing development. The fact that they had to make the distinction shows how conflated the emphases were.

Now 20 years ago, the two paths I would have written about would be the governmental versus nongovernmental path to community development. And, by the way, just to be clear, I would not be arguing the U.S. model is better. Indeed, in terms of your quality of life, the health of your cities, the provision of public goods such as health care, your distaste for all weapons of mass destruction, and a variety of other measures, you have been enviably advanced compared to the United States. But it's not 20 years ago. It's 20 years later. The choices are no longer between governmental and non- governmental community development. In each of our four nations we have witnessed dramatic governmental downsizing and increasing disenchantment with government. Indeed, Aotearoa/New Zealand provides the most dramatic example of this trend when, in 1984, a Labour government began selling off public industries, ending farm subsidies, and dramatically reducing its payroll, It was a move equally revered and despised. The architect of the program, Roger Douglas, has become the darling of the Alberta and Ontario governments in Canada (Clancy, 1996), which has also gone through a sudden and dramatic dismantling of government. In Australia the plan is called economic rationalism (Whitwell, 1998), but it has the same basic philosophy and consequences.

We are witnessing what I regrettably call Americanization. You're becoming more like us and that's a scary thing. Now there are signs, particularly in Aotearoa/New Zealand with its switch to proportional representation and some welfare state restoration (Burton, 1999), of attempts to reverse Americanization. But as the global economy begins to lose some of its steam, the question is whether you can return to the days of the cradle to grave welfare state. But to the extent that you cannot, you will have to develop a nongovernmental sector for the funding and practice of community development. Indeed, that is already happening in all three nations as communities attempt to meet needs no longer served by government and attempt to protect themselves from vulnerabilities introduced by the dismantling of government. The question is whether these efforts are happening consciously or haphazardly, which means potentially a lot of wasted effort, a lot of duplication, and a lot of stumbling if the efforts are not conscious.

It doesn't have to be that way. Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are in the unique position of being able to learn from the mistakes and perhaps the occasional success of the U.S. in building a non-governmental community development infrastructure. And the models you come up with can inform practice in the U.S. which is too often encumbered by historical, or elite-driven models that may be doing more harm than good.

But where to start? Well, perhaps it is useful to explore, for a moment, the distinction so prominent in the U.S. between community organizing and community development--power and programs. Because to the extent that you are faced with the situation of a government more distant from the people (only 75% of the population voted in the last Aotearoa/New Zealand national election--a historical low for Aotearoa/New Zealand but still remarkably high by U.S. standards--and only 63% showed up at the last Canadian election.) and larger corporations exerting more control over citizens' lives with fewer mechanisms of accountability, building power may be as important as building programs. So let's spend some more time with each of these models.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

The power approach--community organizing is often confused with a generic social movement activism model, but it is importantly different. First, community organizers have historically focused on building a localized social movement in places as small as a single neighborhood. This is quite different from the social movement perspective adopted by many who see broad scale national-level or even global-level change as the starting point rather than the ending point. This is the confusion that is often evident when people discuss the Civil Rights Movement. That "movement" had only one national action--the March on Washington. Much more important to the outcomes of the movement were the locally-organized events--Selma, Montgomery, and others--that took on national significance. Many of these momentous events only became national in impact because of the reaction of the local power structure. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, began with relatively minor demands made upon the bus company for more dignified treatment of Black bus riders. It was only when the authorities' only response was to attempt to destroy the organizing that the case ended up with the Supreme Court outlawing segregation on intra-state buses (*).

Community organizing is the "backstage" (Goffman, 1959) work needed to build a public social movement, in contrast to social movements, which focus on public large-scale action. It is the process of building a constituency that can create a larger social movement, and generally has as its first goal building an enduring community organization. Community Organizing is interesting to note in this regard that most community organizers carefully distinguish themselves from "activists." Organizers, in contrast to activists, most often see themselves not as leaders but as helping to build indigenous community leadership. Organizers also develop issues based on what community members see as important, rather than picking an issue themselves and then trying to recruit people to join based on that issue.

In many other respects, however, community organizing uses social movement forms of action. Demonstrations, protests, street theatre, and even disruptions are popular tactics. Many community organizing groups practice strict independence from both government and political parties, as they never know when they may have to target them for some policy change.

The programs approach--community development is in stark contrast to community organizing. Community development corporations, or CDCs, while not for profit, must operate in cooperation with for profit actors--banks, real estate, insurance, contractors. And in contrast to building a community-based organization, community development is about building expert-based organizations that can manage the highly technical aspects of housing construction and management, and job and business development.

This CDC model is very popular with elites, especially government and foundations. The U.S. federal government has set aside special funds for CDCs in Empowerment Zones and other federal housing programs. The Ford Foundation created a monster program to promote CDC-based comprehensive community initiatives (Smock, 1997). Foundations, United Ways, and other elite-connected organizations have been particularly entranced with a version of this model called "asset-based community development" promoted by Kretzmann and McKnight (1993), which they've interpreted as a "pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" poverty reduction strategy.

Steve Callahan et al. (1999) argue for combing what they call project-based and power-based community development, something they call "rowing the boat with two oars." For them, project-based community development is focused on delivering services such as "transportation, childcare, social services, housing, jobs, retail services, and micro financing to low-income communities." The organization boards attempt to include local residents, and the staff often have technical expertise in housing, real estate, and business development. On the other hand, these organizations are constantly in danger of becoming disconnected from local interests, and while they try to get resident representation on their boards, they tend to not be very successful at it. In addition, their small size and high skill requirements prevent many of these organizations from producing to scale. They also tend to be politically weak, as their "consensus" approach to change can maintain existing power relationships, which can constrain possibilities for change over time." Consequently, they are often forced to do projects on terms set by public and corporate officials.

Power-based community development, on the other hand, is an important complement. Its strengths almost exactly fit the weaknesses of project-based community development. It emphasizes developing the power of low-income people, and holding officials accountable. It's insistence of the necessity and ability of a group to engage in polarizing and militant tactics is what provides some of this power. The weaknesses of the power-based community development model also almost exactly fit the strengths of the project-based model. For one, the methods of this approach can sometimes "obscure progress toward concrete goals." And when these organizations do not use confrontation strategically they can lose some of their influence. In addition, the emphasis on building an inclusive and democratic organization and lack of strong technical expertise can sometimes limit the impact of an organizing victory.

The challenge is that these models are rooted in fundamentally different theories of how society works, which sociologists refer to as functionalist and conflict models. The functionalist model argues that society tends toward natural equilibrium and its division of labor develops through an almost natural matching of individual talents and societal needs. For functionalists, healthy societies maintain some basic degree of equilibrium and place all of their members into the roles for which they are fit. The implication (though few today admit it) is that the poor and the oppressed are supposed to be poor and oppressed. Of course, those who don't belong there (i.e., those who are willing to work hard) are provided new roles. This theory also assumes that people have common interests even when they have different positions in society. Healthy, persistent societies are in a constant state of gradual equilibrium-seeking improvement. Thus, a group organizing to force change is actually unhealthy, as it can throw off equilibrium, and cooperation to produce gradual change is a better alternative (Eitzen and Baca Zinn, 2000). In this model, poor people only need opportunity, not power, and cooperation between the haves and the have-nots is the best means to provide opportunity. But because the model does not recognize structural barriers to equality, it can only provide opportunities determined by existing power holders.

Conflict theory sees no natural tendency toward anything but conflict over scarce resources. In this model society develops through struggle between groups. To the extent that stability is achieved, it's not because society finds equilibrium but because one group dominates the other groups. Conflict theory sees society as divided, particularly between corporations and workers, men and women, and whites and people of color. The instability inherent in such divided societies prevents elites from achieving absolute domination and provides opportunities for those on the bottom to create change through organizing for collective action and conflict.

The CDC model, rooted in the functionalist ideas of common interest and cooperation between rich and poor, can only work if functionalist theory is correct. In other words, there can be no barriers to poor communities rebuilding themselves. The problem is that, while individuals can lift themselves up and attain greatness, not all poor people can lift themselves up simultaneously because there are not enough better spaces available in society--not enough good jobs, not enough good housing. This problem is multiplied when the focus is trying to lift up poor communities, which can only occur if the people in those communities are simultaneously lifted up. If there's no space for all those individuals in the economy, there's no chance for that community. The simultaneous improvement of poor people everywhere requires a drastic redistribution of wealth, violating the fundamental assumptions of functionalist theory, which argues that trying to create an artificial equality would actually upset equilibrium.

So what happens in the United States community development model is that people's need for a transformed economy providing a wealth of good jobs becomes replaced with training programs for people to compete for an extremely limited good job pool. People's need for affordable housing that is controlled by its occupants becomes replaced by a tradeoff between expensive home ownership and affordable rental housing. People's need for high quality health, daycare, and other services becomes translated into sporadic, overcrowded, and inefficient low quality stop-gap programs. Not only can a model emphasizing cooperation and denying class conflict not work to end poverty and oppression, it's not even supposed to work. The community organizing model is much better suited for attacking the structural barriers that prevent poor communities from lifting themselves up. In a capitalist society, equal competitors make deals because each either has something to offer or something to take away. But when CDCs attempt to make deals with these power holders, they have nothing with which to bargain. They are in the powerless position of begging--for lower loan rates, reduced construction costs, more open hiring practices, etc. CDCs have little to offer as inducement for power-holders to say yes, and little to withhold if they say no. The community organizing model, however, substitutes the lack of money resources with people resources. The bargaining chip poor communities have is their cooperation. If they can collectively withhold their cooperation or, even more powerfully, can disrupt the activities of power holders, they have something to bargain with (Piven and Cloward 1979).

The community organizing model and its conflict theory underpinnings also has limits, however. When community organizations wrest concessions from corporations or government they often discover that those wins are only as good as the community's ability to implement them. When the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood beat back a government-developer coalition out to displace the neighborhood with massive high-rises, they were faced with the prospect of their existing housing being condemned unless they found resources to fix it up (Stoecker, 1994). When the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative won city approval of their neighborhood redevelopment plan, they had to find funding and eventually even do the development themselves (Medoff and Sklar, 1994). ACORN had to create a community development arm when it began winning housing through squatting and other tactics (Russell, 2000; ACORN, 1997).

Community organizing is necessary to get the power. Community development is necessary to keep it. So what do we do?

WHAT DO WE DO?

In deciding what to do, the question you might consider is whether your historical combination of community organizing and development fits your present circumstances. I wouldn't even pretend to propose an answer, but I will offer some ways that you might ask the question.

Choosing What are the indications that you should choose, or that you can choose? Since the 1960s, we have been learning about the role of militancy and confrontation cross nationally. The basic finding is that the more access a challenging group has to government, and the stronger the ability of government to implement rather than just pass legislation, the less need for militant confrontation (Kitschelt, 1986; Kriesi, 1996; Meyer,1993; Meyer and Staggenborg, 1996). It is no surprise, in Aotearoa/New Zealand, that the most consistently confrontational action comes from Maori struggles for autonomy and self-sufficiency. As Claudia Orange quotes Northern Maori Group Te Kawarike leader Shane Jones as saying "the real issue is sovereignty over our resources." Trying to remove historically oppressive and legislated supported conditions that are institutionalized in land ownership and long-standing power differences will not, at least initially, be achieved through cooperation. The progressive dismantling of Waitangi Day through social action is dramatic testimony to the power of organized protest. Now, to what extent does the potential of proportional representation afford greater access, and thus require less militancy, than in the past? To what extent does the disruption of traditional European Waitangi Day practices provide opportunities to create a new form of multi-cultural national celebration, which some argue, I understand, the Treaty of Waitangi was originally designed for?

So stopping bad things and gaining access to decision-making are two of the most important reasons to choose community organizing over community development.

Starting new things is one of the most important reasons to choose community development. Challenging groups that have achieved access, may consider whether the more cooperative community develompent model is appropriate. Gaining official and substantial representation means, for better or worse, becoming part of the system. In addition, winning on a policy challenge often places a community organizing group in the difficult position of figuring out how to implement that win. To an extent, this involves a group transitioning from outsider to insider status. Implementing a win, or maintaining a victory, requires building organizational stability and expertise over the long haul, and cementing relationships with power holders.

Another thing to consider in choosing is the cultural context. There is some antipathy outside of the U.S. to conflict-based organizing. Some Canadians are opposed to the model both on the grounds that it seems to be conflict for conflict's sake, and that it is in fact a conservative approach to just getting a piece of the pie rather than changing how the pie is made (Roussopoulos, 1982; Muller, 1990). And when Melbourne erupted in protest last September during the World Economic Forum meetings, the West Australian Premier Richard Court, Victorian Premier Steve Bracks, and Australian Prime Minister John Howard all called the protests "un-Australian" (Cahill, n.d.; Dwyer, 2001; Rule et al., 2000). The previous year, when similar protests erupted in Seattle, no one called the protests un-American (though Seattle elites did complain they were un-Seattle). Additionally, with governments that are more open to dialogue from the beginning--which the stronger welfare states of Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand seem to be--protest and confrontation is less needed to gain access.

Culture may also include community culture. How is conflict viewed within the community? Can conflict be integrated without disrupting other cultural beliefs or creating divisions within the community? Are there existing organizations or leaders who would support or oppose conflict-based organizing?3

Now, it is often the case that choosing one or the other models is difficult, impractical, or not strategic. when that is the case, it's imperative to consider combining them.

Combining The African American Civil Rights movement in the United States has seen many of its victories whither away, such as affirmative action, voting rights protection, integration. Neighborhood organizations have also experienced problems moving from a successful community organizing phase to a community development phase. Because of the incompatibilities of the theories on which they are based, many community organizing groups make the transition to development gagging and retching. Some of them destroy themselves in the process (Stoecker, 1995).

Of course, the fights between practitioners of the two models often prevent collaboration, especially when each sees its position as "right" and the other as "wrong" and Callahan et al's boat can sometimes get rowed in circles. And as much as everyone in the United States says "it's not the '60s anymore", we continue to act like it is. The conflict between the community organizing folks and the community development folks is so much like the conflict between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which eventually led to the split between African- American Civil Rights activists and Black Power activists. It is so much like the split between the radical and mainstream branches of the women's movement. It is so much like the split between the militant and mainstream branches of the environmental movement. It is so much like the split between the groups engaging in conflict against the power structure and those cooperating with it on any contemporary issue today, whether it is AIDS, poverty, education, or community empowerment.

Like for those other movements, if handled strategically this split has some advantages. Those 1960s movement splits produced a tremendous body of literature, some of which focused on social movement structure. These analysts, when taking a big picture view of the action, found many movements composed of groups confronting the target and groups attempting to work cooperatively with it. The advantage of such a model, they discovered, is that the conflict groups were needed to create access to power holders. Conflict groups, if they are good, have the bargaining chip of being able to create enough social instability to force the target to the table. But they have a difficult time actually negotiating, because of their militancy. Moderate groups are much more successful in negotiations, but achieve very little without the threat of social disturbance from more militant groups (Gerlach and Hine, 1970). This model of multiple, complementary organizations may work well in situations where there are lots of resources and lots of potential members. But in smaller communities, it is impractical. Even these communities, however, can have some of the advantages of this model through using front organizations. Perhaps the best example of this "front" organization structure was in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis Minnesota in the United States. This neighborhood, threatened with total destruction from a developer-state coalition that wanted to replace their homes with high-rises, waged a very sophisticated battle. They created a cafe they used as a meeting place. They created a Project Area Committee that had official government status. They created a tenants union as the developer had bought up all their existing housing. They created an environmental defense fund to raise money for legal battles. They created a community development corporation to create alternative redevelopment plans. These organizations were all active in the struggle at the same time, and they all took on a different piece of the problem. They eventually drove the developer from their neighborhood, took over all their housing, and turned the neighborhood housing into community-owned cooperatives (Stoecker, 1994). But there were not enough people to separately staff the organizations, so everybody got involved in everything.

There are other possible multiple organization combinations. One is to have a multi-local community organizing group that can partner with local community development organizations, which seems to be increasingly common in the United States. The Sacramento Valley Organizing Community (SVOC), an organization of nearly 30 predominantly Latino Catholic and African-American Protestant churches across a three-county area in Northern California, is part of the Industrial Areas Foundation community organizing network founded by Saul Alinsky. In one instance SVOC brought 1,800 members to a meeting with area health system officials, successfully demanding 200 jobs. To implement the win, SVOC partnered with the Private Industry Council (PIC), the county welfare department, and a community college to do job training and preparation (Callahan et al., 1999). The famous Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio practiced a similar model, and ended up directing a large proportion of San Antonio's CDBG budget over a number of year to COPS-defined project. But COPS refused to do any of the development themselves to preserve their organizing focus (Cortes, 1995; Warren, 1995). Perhaps the most famous case is the NorthWest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. The NWBCCC, with a 25-year history, organizes with ten neighborhoods and approximately twenty local religious communities in the Northwest Bronx area of New York City and has spawned a number of CDCs. Because NWBCCC is an affiliate of groups, different sub- coalitions can work on issues they have in common. They consciously put organizing first, understanding the technical constraints placed on development. Consequently, they came up with the idea of "Neighborhood Improvement Plans ... as opposed to fitting into existing programs, leaders were asked to think about what they wanted to see in the area and then we would try to figure out how to get there." (Buckley, n.d.). Two of the CDCs formed through NWBCCC--Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation and Mount Hope Housing Company--are highly capitalized, multi-local CDCs with hundreds of employees and thousands of housing units. The NWBCCC's housing committee, or neighborhood groups, determine projects and then negotiate with one of the CDCs about how to implement it (Dailey, 2000).

Another is to have a multi-local community development corporation that can partner with local community organizing groups, which I argued (1997) was preferable since CDCs, to be successful, needed technically-skilled (and thus expensive) staff and enough capitalization to do development in higher risk situations. Larger CDCs would be more likely to have those qualities. But because those characteristics would also increase the separation of the CDC from the community, small neighborhood-based community organizing groups were necessary to maintain community control of development. I have had great difficulty finding examples of this model. This "Stoecker model" has yet to make me famous, however. :-)

Innovating Oddly enough, in this time when Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand seem to have become more U.S. like, the innovations in the United States seem to look more like you. There are an increasing number of attempts to create single programs that integrate a mild non-conflict form of community organizing, bricks and mortar community development, and individual treatment forms of social work. The four most popular innovations are community building, consensus organizing, women-centered organizing, and CDC-based organizing.

Community building is defined as "projects which seek to build new relationships among members in a community and develop change out of the connections these relationships provide for solving member-defined problems." (Hess 1999). Linked to Kretzmann and McKnight's (1993) asset- based community development model, and to communitarianism, the emphasis in community building is creating and restoring relationships between community residents. The focus is internal, finding and building the community's own "assets" or "social capital" rather than confronting or negotiating with external power and resource holders (Smock, 1997).

Consensus organizing includes relationship-building but also focuses on moving people from welfare to work, improving school achievement, promoting inner-city reinvestment, and developing housing and businesses, among other things. This model specifically opposes the "us vs. them" model of community organizing (Eichler 1998). The purpose of consensus organizing, consistent with functionalist theory, is to build cooperative relationships between community leaders and business and government to improve poor communities (Consensus Organizing Institute, 2000). The women-centered organizing model emphasizes relationship building that is not rooted in self-interest but in an understanding of mutual responsibility. And while it does see a structural division in society that holds women back, it also emphasizes that power is infinitely expandable rather than zero-sum, thus reducing the need for conflict. Like the community building model, women- centered organizing emphasizes small group development and has more of an internal problem-solving focus. The goal is as much the development of individuals as it is the development of communities (Stoecker, and Stall, 1998).

CDC-based organizing is the most intriguing of all. While the other models have for the most part eliminated confrontational community organizing from their practice, CDC-based organizing is trying to preserve it. Thus, they are trying to bring a conflict-based model of organizing into a functional-based model of development. It is very interesting. The largest and most well-known effort to help CDCs do community organizing is the $1.5 million Ricanne Hadrian Initiative for Community Organizing (RHICO), sponsored through the Massachusetts Association of CDCs and the Neighborhood Development Support Collaborative. The program supports and trains CDCs throughout Massachusetts to do community organizing (Winkelman, 1998, 1998b). A similar project to promote community organizing through CDCs was the Toledo Community Organizing Training and Technical Assistance Program sponsored through the Toledo Community Foundation. Over a two year period, ACORN provided training and technical assistance to three CDCs, though one dropped out due to a lack of fit. The Organized Neighbors Yielding Excellence (ONYX) CDC adopted a combined organizing and development group model, where leadership and authority over the organizing effort remained vested in the CDC board of directors, though they gave tacit approval to developing an informal community organizing leadership structure. Conversely, the Lagrange Development Corporation established a relatively autonomous community organizing group, adopting a written code of principles to prevent the CDC from interfering in the organizing effort even while it paid the organizer's salary. The Lagrange Village Council, the relatively autonomous community organizing group, practices a more traditional Alinsky-style community organizing model, using actions and pressure tactics to close problem businesses in the community, improve trash collection, and manage a long drawn-out campaign against a predatory property speculator. ONYX has practiced a much more subdued approach consistent with the community development model, and with fewer subsequent victories.

What are the outcomes of this combined model? CDCs in the RHICO initiative have seen are more community involvement in CDC decision-making, less funder-driven project development, and more effective CDC advocacy efforts. (Winkelman, 1998). This also appears to be the case with the Lagrange Development Corporation and Lagrange Village Council in Toledo, which has gotten a number of problem businesses to shape up or leave, can turn out dozens of people for a demonstration, and has hundreds attend its annual meetings. There are also important problems. The first problem is the potential restriction on militancy. One of the RHICO CDCs lost government funding when they moved to organizing. However, this CDC continued down the organizing path, weathering the cut and actually freeing itself from restrictive funding (Winkelman, 1998). Other groups are less able to make such bold moves. In Toledo, ONYX's organizing effort has been hindered by the fear of funding loss, as the organization has been threatened with government funding reductions, and they eventually dropped their community organizing effort.

CONCLUSION

If I have done my job I am leaving you with more questions than answers. What I beseech of you inside and outside of government is to take on the task that government used to be so good at--thinking ahead. One of the most important infrastructures which has existed in the U.S for over half a century is the popular education infrastructure, most embodied in the Highlander Research and Education Center, which was so instrumental in the United States union and Civil Rights movements. For consciously dealing with the tensions and potentials of community organizing and community development takes some reflection, planning, and infrastructure building. One of the most encouraging signs in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand is the new and growing popular education infrastructure than can further those community-based planning, research, and education efforts. Here in Aotearoa/New Zealand I have learned about the Kotare Trust in Auckland. In Canada there is the Institutes in Management and Community Development. In Australia there is the Centre for Popular Education at the University of Technology in Sydney, among others. Those are a starting place for beginning to sort out these questions further.

These are some beginning places to sort out these issues where people can gather to study and reflect and begin to act on their own growing understandings of the power and programs approaches. I look forward to learning of your progress. Thank you.

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NOTES

*This paper is part of a larger project studying the relationship between community organizing and community development, supported by a grant from the University of Toledo Urban Affairs Center. The author also gratefully acknowledges travel support from the Foy D. and Phyllis Penn Kohler Fund and the governments of New Zealand, Western Australia, and Victoria (Australia) during the course of this project. Many thanks to Tony Rea, Larry Stillman, Linda Briskman, and Anna Vakil for information, wisdom, and insights during this project.

1Settler colonies are established to replace the native population with the migrating population. See Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, 1995; Osterhammel, 1997.

2There is debate over the size and extent of Aotearoa/New Zealand's nonprofit sector, with Leavitt (1997) arguing it is quite undeveloped especially in the area of housing, and Robinson (1999) arguing it is quite extensive.

3 Attempts to address these questions in the U.S. are increasing organized around two issues. First, it is important to assess what exists in the neighborhood already. If there is an organizing group and a CDC, it is probably counterproductive for the CDC to also do organizing. Instead, they should find ways to partner with the organizing group. If there is a CDC but no organizing group in the neighborhood, it is important to assess the CDC's readiness and capacity to do community organizing. How knowledgeable is the executive director about organizing in general and different organizing models? Is there anyone else highly skilled in organizing on staff? Is there an organizer in place and, if so, what do they know about organizing in general and which organizing model do they prefer? Who is or would be responsible for supervising the organizer? How are leaders (board members) identified/recruited? Are leaders elected or appointed (elected is better for organizing)? What do leaders know about organizing in general and different organizing models? How do organization leaders and director respond to a series of organizing vs. development dilemmas (such as doing an action against a bank that also gives loans to the CDC projects)? What procedures are in place for replacing staff and leadership without losing internal organizing culture? Does the CDC have a broad mission statement that could easily include community organizing? In general, the more skill, knowledge, and support for community organizing, the more successfully a CDC will be able to develop its organizing capacity. Second, it is important to assess what exists beyond the neighborhood. If the neighborhood has neither a CDC nor an organizing group, are there high-capacity CDCs or culti-local organizing networks working in the area? If there are both, what are their histories of working cooperatively across the organizing-development divide? If there is a neighborhood CDC, but it is not structured to support organizing, what is its history of working cooperatively with other organizations? Also, what is its level of power? Numerous neighborhoods have small CDCs which do little or nothing, and would be better replaced with a combination of community organizing and high- capacity community development.

Community Development and Community Organizing:

Apples and Oranges? Chicken and Egg?(1)

Randy Stoecker

[email protected]

February 2001

INTRODUCTION

Since the 1960s, as the presence and activity of community development corporations, or CDCs, in poor neighborhoods has grown, so has the debate surrounding them. Recently, community development analysts and practitioners have been trying to combine community development with the more politicized community organizing model.

This paper begins by defining and describing these two approaches. Next, it explores the extent to which they are complementary or contradictory--apples and oranges. Finally, it reviews ways of combining them, exploring their chicken-egg relationships.

Community development, in this paper, is defined as nonprofit organizations-- CDCs--doing physical development of impoverished communities. CDCs are supposed to be "community-based," having some connection with the residents who live there. They are also expected to do "comprehensive development," creating jobs, housing, safety and other changes (though most emphasize housing). Finally, they are supposed to accomplish all this within the existing political economic system (Stoecker, 1997).

Critics of the CDC model, however, point out how CDCs often fail at projects that left their host neighborhoods in as bad or worse shape than when they started; fold under funding shortages that allow elites to both prevent real redevelopment and blame CDCs for failure; or disrupt neighborhood empowerment by purporting to speak on behalf of a community who they barely know (and who barely knows them) (Stoecker, 1994; 1997). These critics have led a call to bring back community organizing.

Community organizing works in local settings to empower individuals, build relationships and organizations, and create action for social change (Beckwith & Lopez, 1997, Bobo, Kendall & Max, 1991, Kahn, 1991; Alinsky, 1969; 1971). Community organizers have historically focused on building localized social movements in places as small as a single neighborhood. Consequently, the bulk of community organizing occurs "backstage" (Goffman, 1959), building relationships and networks in the quasi-private setting of the neighborhood community (Stall and Stoecker, 1998) that can create a larger social movement.

Community organizing has a much longer history than community development, including the early 20th century settlement house movement and other women-centered efforts (Stall and Stoecker, 1998), the Civil Rights Movement (Morris, 1984), and others. The most well-known influence was Saul Alinsky (1969; 1971) who, in the 1930s, created a community organizing model in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood that was rowdy, bawdy, and confrontational (Finks, 1984). The Civil Rights Movement is the other crucial source of community organizing, though its influence on community organizing practice has been as profound as Alinsky's but has been historically neglected. The accepted founding event of the movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was coordinated through local African American networks and organizations and created a model that would be used in locality-based actions throughout the south (Morris, 1984). Out of these efforts grew the Welfare Rights Movement (Piven and Cloward, 1979) and eventually the famous Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) (Delgado, 1986; Russell, 2000).

Today, community organizing is experiencing a resurgence, with an explosion of small efforts and the growth of better-publicized efforts by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) (Tresser, 1999), by ACORN (1999) and the New Party (1997) in their Living Wage efforts, and by many other groups and networks (COMM-ORG, 2001) including the rapidly expanding National Organizers Alliance (2001) which is supporting and connecting independent and network organizers across North America.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT--COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: APPLES AND ORANGES?

Can these two models--one that works within the system and the other that tries to change it--be combined? Or are they the proverbial apples and oranges? Steve Callahan et al. (1999) argue for combining project-based community development--which delivers social, economic, and housing services to poor communities--and power-based community development-- which employs polarizing and militant tactics to develop the power of low- income people and hold officials accountable.

The challenge is that these models are rooted in fundamentally different theories of how society works, which sociologists refer to as functionalist and conflict models. The functionalist model argues that society tends toward natural equilibrium and its division of labor develops through an almost natural matching of individual talents and societal needs. For functionalists, healthy societies maintain some basic degree of equilibrium and place all of their members into the roles for which they are fit. The implication (though few today admit it) is that the poor and the oppressed are supposed to be poor and oppressed. Of course, those who don't belong there (i.e., those who are willing to work hard) are provided new roles. This theory also assumes that people have common interests even when they have different positions in society. Healthy, persistent societies are in a constant state of gradual equilibrium-seeking improvement. Thus, a group organizing to force change is actually unhealthy, as it can throw off equilibrium, and cooperation to produce gradual change is a better alternative (Eitzen and Baca Zinn, 2000). In this model, poor people only need opportunity, not power, and cooperation between the haves and the have-nots is the best means to provide opportunity. But because the model does not recognize structural barriers to equality, it can only provide opportunities determined by existing power holders.

Conflict theory sees no natural tendency toward anything but conflict over scarce resources. In this model society develops through struggle between groups. To the extent that stability is achieved, it's not because society finds equilibrium but because one group dominates the other groups. Conflict theory sees society as divided, particularly between corporations and workers, men and women, and whites and people of color. The instability inherent in such divided societies prevents elites from achieving absolute domination and provides opportunities for those on the bottom to create change through organizing for collective action and conflict. The CDC model, rooted in the functionalist tenets of common interest and cooperation, can only work if functionalist theory is correct. In other words, there can be no barriers to poor communities rebuilding themselves. The problem is that, while individuals can lift themselves up and attain greatness, not all poor people can lift themselves up simultaneously because there are not enough better spaces available in society--not enough good jobs, not enough good housing. This problem is multiplied when the focus is trying to lift up poor communities, which can only occur if the people in those communities are simultaneously lifted up. If there's no space for all those individuals in the economy, there's no chance for that community. The simultaneous improvement of poor people everywhere requires a drastic redistribution of wealth, violating the fundamental tenets of functionalist theory, which argues that trying to create an artificial equality would actually upset equilibrium.

So what happens in the community development model is that people's need for a transformed economy providing a wealth of good jobs becomes replaced with training programs for people to compete for an extremely limited good job pool. People's need for affordable housing that is controlled by its occupants becomes replaced by a tradeoff between expensive home ownership and affordable rental housing. People's need for high quality health, daycare, and other services becomes translated into sporadic, overcrowded, and inefficient low quality stop-gap programs. Not only can a model emphasizing cooperation and denying class conflict not work to end poverty and oppression, it's not even supposed to work.

The community organizing model is much better suited for attacking the structural barriers that prevent poor communities from lifting themselves up. In a capitalist society, equal competitors make deals because each either has something to offer or something to take away. But when CDCs attempt to make deals with these power holders, they have nothing with which to bargain. They are in the powerless position of begging--for lower loan rates, reduced construction costs, more open hiring practices, etc. CDCs have little to offer as inducement for power-holders to say yes, and little to withhold if they say no. The community organizing model, however, substitutes the lack of money resources with people resources. The bargaining chip poor communities have is their cooperation. If they can collectively withhold their cooperation or, even more powerfully, can disrupt the activities of power holders, they have something to bargain with (Piven and Cloward 1979).

The community organizing model and its conflict theory underpinnings also has limits. When community organizations wrest concessions from corporations or government they often discover that those wins are only as good as the community's ability to implement them. When the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood beat back a government-developer coalition out to displace the neighborhood with massive high-rises, they were faced with the prospect of their existing housing being condemned unless they found resources to fix it up (Stoecker, 1994). When the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative won city approval of their neighborhood redevelopment plan, they had to find funding and eventually even do the development themselves (Medoff and Sklar, 1994). ACORN had to create a community development arm when it began winning housing through squatting and other tactics (Russell, 2000; ACORN, 1997). Because of the incompatibilities of the theories on which they are based, many community organizing groups make the transition to development gagging and retching. Some of them destroy themselves in the process (Stoecker, 1995).

Community organizing is necessary to get the power. Community development is necessary to keep it. So what do we do?

COMBINING ORGANIZING AND DEVELOPMENT: CHICKEN AND EGG?

Regardless of how hard it is to combine community organizing and community development, we must figure out how. This is the chicken and egg problem. Which is more important? Which is more powerful? Which comes first? Can you move from development to organizing and actually build power? Can you move from organizing to development without disrupting organizing?

There are two basic strategies. One is to combine organizing and development in a single organization. The other is to separate them into allied organizations.

1. Organizing in Development

The initial efforts to combine organizing and development came as effective organizing groups were forced into doing their own development. Because of the shift in funding during the 1980s from development to organizing, staff and directors of organizing groups found themselves forced into becoming developers. But many really wanted to be organizers and kept looking for ways to bring organizing back (Rubin, 2000).

Given the funding constraints, however, traditional organizing that threatened funders' power was not to be and it is no mistake that community building, consensus organizing, and women-centered organizing are in the spotlight today. The avoidance of confrontation, the lack of focus on structural change, and the absence of conflict in these models makes them well-suited to CDCs.

Community building is defined as "projects which seek to build new relationships among members in a community and develop change out of the connections these relationships provide for solving member-defined problems." (Hess 1999). Linked to Kretzmann and McKnight's (1993) asset- based community development model, and to communitarianism, the emphasis in community building is creating and restoring relationships between community residents. The focus is internal, finding and building the community's own "assets" or "social capital" rather than confronting or negotiating with external power and resource holders (Smock, 1997).

Consensus organizing includes relationship-building but also focuses on moving people from welfare to work, improving school achievement, promoting inner-city reinvestment, and developing housing and businesses, among other things. This model specifically opposes the "us vs. them" model of community organizing (Eichler 1998). The purpose of consensus organizing, consistent with functionalist theory, is to build cooperative relationships between community leaders and business and government to improve poor communities (Consensus Organizing Institute, 2000).

The women-centered organizing model emphasizes relationship building that is not rooted in self-interest but in an understanding of mutual responsibility. And while it does see a structural division in society that holds women back, it also emphasizes that power is infinitely expandable rather than zero-sum, thus reducing the need for conflict. Like the community building model, women- centered organizing emphasizes small group development and has more of an internal problem-solving focus. The goal is as much the development of individuals as it is the development of communities (Stoecker, and Stall, 1998).

Some CDCs are now able to break free of these limited community organizing models through new funding sources. The largest and most well-known effort to help CDCs do community organizing is the $1.5 million Ricanne Hadrian Initiative for Community Organizing (RHICO), sponsored through the Massachusetts Association of CDCs and the Neighborhood Development Support Collaborative. The program supports and trains CDCs throughout Massachusetts to do community organizing (Winkelman, 1998, 1998b).

A similar project to promote community organizing through CDCs was the Toledo Community Organizing Training and Technical Assistance Program sponsored through the Toledo Community Foundation. Over a two year period, ACORN provided training and technical assistance to three CDCs, though one dropped out due to a lack of fit. The Organized Neighbors Yielding Excellence (ONYX) CDC adopted a combined organizing and development group model, where leadership and authority over the organizing effort remained vested in the CDC board of directors, though they gave tacit approval to developing an informal community organizing leadership structure. Conversely, the Lagrange Development Corporation established a relatively autonomous community organizing group, adopting a written code of principles to prevent the CDC from interfering in the organizing effort even while it paid the organizer's salary. The Lagrange Village Council, the relatively autonomous community organizing group, practices a more traditional Alinsky-style community organizing model, using actions and pressure tactics to close problem businesses in the community, improve trash collection, and manage a long drawn-out campaign against a predatory property speculator. ONYX has practiced a much more subdued approach consistent with the community development model, and with fewer subsequent victories.

What are the outcomes of this combined model? CDCs in the RHICO initiative have seen are more community involvement in CDC decision-making, less funder-driven project development, and more effective CDC advocacy efforts. (Winkelman, 1998). This also appears to be the case with the Lagrange Development Corporation and Lagrange Village Council in Toledo, which has gotten a number of problem businesses to shape up or leave, can turn out dozens of people for a demonstration, and has hundreds attend its annual meetings.

There are also important problems. The first problem is the potential restriction on militancy. One of the RHICO CDCs lost government funding when they moved to organizing. However, this CDC continued down the organizing path, weathering the cut and actually freeing itself from restrictive funding (Winkelman, 1998). Other groups are less able to make such bold moves. In Toledo, ONYX's organizing effort has been hindered by the fear of funding loss, and the organization has been threatened with government funding reductions.

A second related problem is the internal conflict that the combination can produce. The East Toledo Community Organization (ETCO), an Alinsky style community organization in Toledo, Ohio, turned to development to support its staff during the 1980s when funding shifted from organizing to development. ETCO began conducting home energy audits, providing advice on how to reduce energy costs. They took on city contracts to board up vacant houses. They got a grant to start a jobs bank. And the organization imploded as infighting between organizing proponents and development proponents broke into open warfare (Stoecker, 1995; 1995b). The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston began by reclaiming a city park from drug dealers, closing area garbage transfer sites, curbing illegal dumping. They also developed a plan to build new housing in their community, fighting off a government redevelopment plan that would have wiped them off the map. They won government and foundation support for their plan, and found a developer who would do the project. But they had problems finding a reliable development partner and ended up doing the development themselves. The time consuming technical and financially risky aspects of managing housing construction badly distracted the organization. (Medoff and Sklar, 1994).

2. Organizing and Development In this model, organizing and development are separated into different organizations. In a 1997 article I argued that the ideal type model was a small locality-based community organizing group partnering with a high-capacity multi-local CDC. The reason was that CDCs, to be successful, needed technically-skilled (and thus expensive) staff and enough capitalization to do development in higher risk situations. Larger CDCs would be more likely to have those qualities. But because those characteristics would also increase the separation of the CDC from the community, small neighborhood-based community organizing groups were necessary to maintain community control of development. I have had great difficulty finding examples of this model.

The Cedar-Riverside neighborhood redevelopment movement is the source of my model, as they consciously kept their organizing and development activities separate, gaining a combination of political power and redevelopment resources that I have not seen matched since. There were very concerned (and it was from them that my own thinking developed) about the compromised politics of CDCs that might prevent them from truly following the neighborhood's direction and abiding by their demands. At one point the neighborhood's community organizing group brought in a private developer to build housing when its own CDC was behaving too insensitively (Stoecker, 1994).

In contrast to my model of a highly-capitalized CDC partnering with local community organizing groups, more common are cases of large community organizing networks partnering with small development and service organizations. The Toledo Community Organizing Training and Technical Assistance Program discussed above has expanded to a partnership between the two local participating CDCs and an independent ACORN organizing effort now in the city. The Sacramento Valley Organizing Community (SVOC), an organization of nearly 30 predominantly Latino Catholic and African-American Protestant churches across a three-county area in Northern California, is part of the Industrial Areas Foundation community organizing network founded by Saul Alinsky. In one instance SVOC brought 1,800 members to a meeting with area health system officials, successfully demanding 200 jobs. To implement the win, SVOC partnered with the Private Industry Council (PIC), the county welfare department, and a community college to do job training and preparation (Callahan et al., 1999). The famous Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio practiced a similar model, and ended up directing a large proportion of San Antonio's CDBG budget over a number of year to COPS-defined project. But COPS refused to do any of the development themselves to preserve their organizing focus (Cortes, 1995; Warren, 1995).

Perhaps the most famous case is the NorthWest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. The NWBCCC, with a 25-year history, organizes with ten neighborhoods and approximately twenty local religious communities in the Northwest Bronx area of New York City and has spawned a number of CDCs. Because NWBCCC is an affiliate of groups, different sub-coalitions can work on issues they have in common. They consciously put organizing first, understanding the technical constraints placed on development. Consequently, they came up with the idea of "Neighborhood Improvement Plans ... as opposed to fitting into existing programs, leaders were asked to think about what they wanted to see in the area and then we would try to figure out how to get there." (Buckley, n.d.). Two of the CDCs formed through NWBCCC--Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation and Mount Hope Housing Company--are highly capitalized, multi-local CDCs with hundreds of employees and thousands of housing units. The NWBCCC's housing committee, or neighborhood groups, determine projects and then negotiate with one of the CDCs about how to implement it (Dailey, 2000).

The problem with this multi-organizational model is not its theoretical desirability but its practicality. In many poor communities, even with the resurgence of community organizing, we are more likely to find a neighborhood CDC than an organizing group. Corvallis Neighborhood Housing Services, in Corvallis Oregon, is looking for community organizing groups to partner with so they can "direct development to organized neighborhoods instead of building a project and then organizing around it." But the neighborhoods in Corvallis, with rare exception, are not organized (Smith, 2000). It makes no sense to tell CDC staff with a knowledgeable commitment to community organizing that they shouldn't do it just because they don't fit the ideal model.

There are also risks in separating organizing and development into independent organizations. When separate organizations forget their complementarity, they can compete rather than cooperate. In a single neighborhood, the infighting that can occur within a CDC trying to do both organizing and development can also occur between a neighborhood-based CDC and a neighborhood-based organizing group.

So how do we decide whether to implement the organizing in development or the organizing and development model? Based on lessons from RHICO (Winkleman, 2001) and the Toledo Community Organizing Training and Technical Assistance Program, here are some guidelines.

First, it is important to assess what exists in the neighborhood already. If there is an organizing group and a CDC, it is probably counterproductive for the CDC to also do organizing. Instead, they should find ways to partner with the organizing group. If there is a CDC but no organizing group in the neighborhood, it is important to assess the CDC's readiness and capacity to do community organizing. How knowledgeable is the executive director about organizing in general and different organizing models? Is there anyone else highly skilled in organizing on staff? Is there an organizer in place and, if so, what do they know about organizing in general and which organizing model do they prefer? Who is or would be responsible for supervising the organizer? How are leaders (board members) identified/recruited? Are leaders elected or appointed (elected is better for organizing)? What do leaders know about organizing in general and different organizing models? How do organization leaders and director respond to a series of organizing vs. development dilemmas (such as doing an action against a bank that also gives loans to the CDC projects)? What procedures are in place for replacing staff and leadership without losing internal organizing culture? Does the CDC have a broad mission statement that could easily include community organizing? In general, the more skill, knowledge, and support for community organizing, the more successfully a CDC will be able to develop its organizing capacity.

Second, it is important to assess what exists beyond the neighborhood. If the neighborhood has neither a CDC nor an organizing group, are there high- capacity CDCs or culti-local organizing networks working in the area? If there are both, what are their histories of working cooperatively across the organizing-development divide? If there is a neighborhood CDC, but it is not structured to support organizing, what is its history of working cooperatively with other organizations? Also, what is its level of power? Numerous neighborhoods have small CDCs which do little or nothing, and would be better replaced with a combination of community organizing and high-capacity community development.

It is clear there is no single correct way to combine organizing and development. It is also clear that the two models, contradictory as they are, are inseparable. So we must continue the search for ways of combining them where organizing will not be compromised and development will not be limited.

REFERENCES

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Eichler, Michael. 1998. Organizing's Past, Present, and Future. Shelterforce Online. http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/101/eichler.html

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Goffman, E.(1959).The presentation of self in everyday life. GardenCity, NY: Anchor.

Hess, Doug. 1999. Community Organizing, Building and Developing: Their Relationship to Comprehensive Community Initiatives. Paper presented on COMM-ORG: The On-Line Conference on Community Organizing and Development. http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers.htm.

Kahn, S. (1991). Organizing: a guide for grassroots leaders. Silver Springs: MD. NASW Press. COMMUNITY ORGANIZING OR ORGANIZING COMMUNITY? GENDER AND THE CRAFTS OF EMPOWERMENT

Susan Stall Department of Sociology Northeastern Illinois University 5500 N. St. Louis Ave. Chicago, IL 60625 773-794-2997 [email protected]

Randy Stoecker Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work University of Toledo Toledo, OH 43606 419-530-4975 [email protected]

Co-Authors

This paper is adapted from presentations at the annual meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society, and the American Sociological Association, and COMM-ORG: The On-Line Conference on Community Organizing and Development.

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at two strains of urban community organizing, distinguished by philosophy and often by gender, and influenced by the historical division of American society into public and private spheres. We compare the well-known Alinsky model, which focuses on communities organizing for power, and what we call the women- centered model, which focuses on organizing relationships to build community. These models are rooted in somewhat distinct traditions and vary along several dimensions, including conceptions of human nature and conflict, power and politics, leadership, and the organizing process. We conclude by examining the implications of each model in the current socioeconomic context and the potential for their integration.

INTRODUCTION Despite a rich and proud heritage of female organizers and movement leaders, the field of community organization, in both its teaching models and its major exponents, has been a male-dominated preserve, where, even though values are expressed in terms of participatory democracy, much of the focus within the dominant practice methods has been nonsupportive or antithetical to feminism. Strategies have largely been based on "macho- power" models, manipulativeness, and zero- sum gamesmanship (Weil l986, 192).

The WOMAN in woman organizer is important....It stands for a growing awareness of different tactics and techniques, and maybe even a growing awareness of unique goals (Education Center for Community Organizing [ECCO] 1989, 15).

Behind every successful social movement is a community, or a network of communities. The community behind the movement provides many things. It sustains the movement during the hard times, when the movement itself is in abeyance (Taylor, 1989). It provides for the social reproduction needs of movement participants, providing things as basic as childcare so parents can participate in movement events (Stoecker, 1992). It provides a free space (Evans and Boyte, 1986) where members can practice "prefigurative politics" (Breines, 1989), attempting to create on a small scale the type of world they are struggling for.

These communities do not just happen. They must be organized. Someone has to build strong enough relationships between people so they can support each other through long and sometimes dangerous social change struggles. Or, if the community already exists, someone has to help transform it to support political action. Sometimes that requires reorganizing the community (Alinsky, 1971) by identifying individuals who can move the community to action.

This process of building a mobilizable community is called "community organizing." It involves "the craft" of building an enduring network of people, who identify with common ideals, and who can engage in social action on the basis of those ideals. In practice, it is much more than micromobilization or framing strategy (Snow et al., 1986.). Community organizing can in fact refer to the entire process of organizing relationships, identifying issues, mobilizing around those issues, and maintaining an enduring organization. The distinction between community organizing and social movement is that community organizing is localized, often "pre-political" action, while social movements are multi-local. Consider, for a moment that we speak of the Civil Rights "Movement," or even the "sit-in movement," but not the "Montgomery Bus Boycott movement" (whose community was organized long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat).

The distinction is subtle but important. One of the most common definitions of social movement, by Charles Tilly (1984) says that a social movement is a "sustained series of actions between power holders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking formal representation, in the course of which those persons make publicly visible demands for changes in the distribution of exercise of power, and back those with public demonstrations of support." A general definition of community organizing, on the other hand, says that "community organizing is the process of building power that includes people with a problem in defining their community, defining the problems that they wish to address, the solutions they wish to pursue, and the methods they will use to accomplish their solutions. The organization will identify the people and structures that need to be part of these solutions, and, by persuasion or confrontation, negotiate with them to accomplish the goals of the community. In the process, organizations will build a democratically controlled community institution - the organization - that can take on further problems and embody the will and power of that community over time." (Beckwith, Stoecker, and McNeely, 1997) In general, Community organizing is the work that occurs in local settings to empower individuals, build relationships, and create action for social change (Bobo et al, 1991; Kahn, 1991, Beckwith and Lopez, 1997).

Both of these definitions emphasize the action part of making change. Both talk about moving people to put pressure on authorities to make that change. But in community organizing the focus is on the community, while in social movements the focus is on the movement. These are different levels of action. Community organization is the process that builds a constituency that can go on to create a movement, and it occurs at a level between the micro-mobilization of individuals (Snow et al, 1986) and the "political process" of the broader social system (McAdam, 1982). It is the formation of local movement centers like the Montgomery Improvement Association, which helped lead the famed Montgomery Bus Boycott (Morris, 1984) and ultimately provided the impetus for a national Civil Rights Movement.

The community is more than just the informal backstage relationships between movement members (Buechler, 1990; 1993), or the foundation for social movement action. The community relationships which sustain movement activists may, in fact, include many people who are not involved in the movement at all (Stoecker, 1995). In community organizing, the focus is on broadening the convergence between the social movement and the community. This is also why community organizing occurs much more as local phenomena--since it has historically focused on building a "localized social movement" in places as small as a single neighborhood (Stoecker, 1993). Viewing social movements as the outcome of community organizing processes can stand social movement analysis on its head, showing how "leaders are often mobilized by the masses they will eventually come to lead" (Robnett l996,1664).

Community organizing has scantly been studied by scholars until very recently (see COMM-ORG, 1997) and even then not by social movement scholars. The Montgomery Bus Boycott is the most cited example--and it has rarely, until quite recently, been covered as community organizing (Payne,1989; Robnett 1996). Rather, social movement concepts such as micromobilization and frame analysis have been used to dissect community organizing, fragmenting it. The community organizing done by the famous Saul Alinsky is barely mentioned in the social movements literature, and when it is, there are only weak connections to broader social movement theories (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987; 1987b). As a consequence, we know very little about whether the concepts and theories developed to study large scale social movements apply to community organizing or whether we need new concepts altogether (Stoecker, 1993).

Added to the neglect within the social movements literature of community organizing is our lack of understanding of the role that gender structures and identities play in social movements. Gender as a variable in social movements has only recently received much attention (Bookman and Morgen l988; Barnett l993, 1995; Caldwell 1994; McAdam 1989; Stoecker, 1992; Robnett l996; Thompson l994; Tracy l994; Wekerle l996; West and Blumberg l990). Yet, the organizational structure and practices of social movement organizations and actors are not gender neutral. Due to the social consequences of sex- category membership--the differential allocation of power and resources-- "doing gender is unavoidable"(West and Zimmerman l987, 126). Gender, as a social product of everyday actions and interactional work, is also produced and reproduced through social movement activities. Within social movements, doing gender legitimates differences and inequities in the sexual division of labor and creates and sustains the differential evaluation of leadership and organizing activities. Gender also effects problem identification and tactical choices (Brandwein l987, 122). The male-dominated world of sports and the military provide images and metaphors for building teamwork, and for igniting competition and antagonism against opponents "to win" a particular movement campaign (Acker, l990). The rhythm and timing of social movement work often does not take into account the rhythms of life of caring work outside of organizing meetings and campaigns (Stoecker, 1992). Or when it does, the result is that women's movement involvement is restricted. In the New York Tenants movement, women were restricted to the most grass-roots organizing activities, while men did the negotiating (Lawson and Barton, 1980). In the 1960s Freedom Summer campaign, organizers worried about the consequences of white women recruits developing relationships with Black men in the South (McAdam, 1986).

As a consequence, the community organizing work that women do in social movements is also neglected. Payne (1989), Barnett (1993, 1995) and Robnett (l996) have challenged accounts of the civil rights movement that neglect the central contributions of women activists. Barnett (l993, 165) challenges research on modern social movement leadership that presents "the erroneous image that `all of the women are white, all of the Blacks are men'" She argues against the narrow definition of social movement leadership that elevates the movement spokesperson, while neglecting the "leaders", often women, who serve as grassroots organizers. Robnett (l996) analyzes how the "gendered organization" of the civil rights movement defined the social location of African-American women in the movement, creating a particular substructure of leadership.

It is possible that community organizing is neglected for the same reason that women's work in social movements has been neglected. Women's work and community organizing are both, to an extent, invisible labor. What people see is the flashy demonstration, not knowing the many hours of preparation building relationships and providing for participants' basic needs that made the demonstration possible. Indeed, community organizing is the part of social movements that occurs closest to the grassroots and is in fact more often done by women (Robnett, 1996; Lawson and Barton, 1980). Even when men, such as Saul Alinsky, do it, it receives short shrift. And social movement analysis, with some exception (Taylor, 1989; Taylor and Rupp, 1993; Taylor and Whittier, 1992; Robnett, 1996; Stoecker, 1992) has scarcely developed concepts which would even allow us to see this grassroots labor, far less understand it.

What are some of the gender dimensions that would help us understand community organizing and its relationship to movement building? Our analysis begins with the historical division of American culture into public and private spheres that split the "public work done mostly by men in the formal economy and government from the "private" work done mostly by women in the community and home (Tilly and Scott, 1978). These spheres have always influenced each other (through routes such as the economic impact of women's unpaid domestic labor or the impact of economic policy changes on family quality of life), but have historically been organized around different logics with different cultures and, we argue, have produced two distinct models of community organizing. These two community organizing modeld--one developed by Saul Alinsky and the other developed by a wide variety or women--in fact begin from opposite ends of the public-private split. The Alinsky model begins with "community organizing"--the public sphere battles between the haves and have-nots. The women- centered model begins with "organizing community"--building relationships and empowering individuals through those relationships.

The Alinsky model, which we name after its most famous practitioner, is based in a conception of separate public and private spheres. Community organizing was not a job for family types, a position he reinforced by his own marital conflicts, by his demands on his trainees, and by his own poverty. In fact, if anything, the main role of the private sphere was to support the organizer's public sphere work. In his Rules for Radicals, Alinsky (1971) remarked:

The marriage record of organizers is with rare exception disastrous. Further, the tension, the hours, the home situation, and the opportunities, do not argue for fidelity. Also, with rare exception, I have not known really competent organizers who were concerned about celibacy. Here and there are wives and husbands or those in love relationships who understand and are committed to the work, and are real sources of strength to the organizer (p. 65).

His attitude toward which issues were important also illustrates his emphasis on the public sphere. While problems began in the private sphere, it was important to move the community to understand how those problems were connected to larger issues outside of the community. Thus, problems could not be solved within the community but by the community being represented better in the public sphere (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987, pp.27-28). This is not to say that Alinsky avoided a focus on private sphere issues. His first successful organizing attempt, in Back of the Yards, produced a well-baby clinic, a credit union, and a hot lunch program (Finks, 1984, p. 21). But these programs were accomplished through public sphere strategizing, not private relationships. In establishing and maintaining the hot lunch program, Alinsky pushed the BYNC to understand its relationship to the national hot lunch program and "In order to fight for their own Hot Lunch project they would have to fight for every Hot Lunch project in every part of the United States." (Alinsky, 1969, p. 168).

The women-centered model, though it has a long history, has only recently received much attention as some feminist researchers and organizers began arguing for a theory of organizing that is feminist or "women-centered" (Ackelsberg l988; Barnett l995; ECCO 1989; Gutierrez and Lewis 1992; Haywoode l991; Weil l986; West and Blumberg l990). For the women-centered model, while organizing efforts are rooted in private sphere issues or relationships, the organizing process problematizes the split between public and private, since its "activities which do not fall smoothly into either category" (Tiano, l984, p. 21). Women's emotional attachments to their families affect their everyday community commitments and their priorities about what are appropriate targets for local social change efforts (Colfer and Colfer, 1978; Genovese, 1980; Stoneall, 1981). But women- centered organizing extends "the boundaries of the household to include the neighborhood" and, as its efforts move ever further out, ultimately "dissolve[s] the boundaries between public and private life, between household and civil society" (Haywoode, l991, p. 175). Organizing to secure tenant rights, local daycares, and youth programs "define a sphere which is public, yet closer to home" (Haywoode, l991, p. 175) and demonstrates the importance of the interconnections between the spheres (Ackelsberg, l988; Petchesky, l979). Women-centered organizing utilizes "feminist" values, practices, and goals. Within this type of organizing there is an emphasis on community building, collectivism, caring, mutual respect, and self-transformation (Barnett l995). As we will discuss, women-centered organizing is defined as much by the historical placement of women in the home and neighborhood as the Alinsky model is defined by the historical placement of men in public governing and commerce.

In this paper, then, we address two neglected issues in one question: How do gender structures and identities play out in community organizing? It would be nice if we could just say that community organizing is the backstage women's work of movement building. But the most famous of the community organizers, Saul Alinsky, was a man, and one who was particularly fond of his masculine style of community organizing (see below).

This paper attempts to understand the not-quite-social-movement world of community organizing. We draw on U.S. examples across five decades utilizing secondary sources and our own community-based research to compare the Alinsky model and the women- centered model--which we see as two of the most important strands of community organizing in the United States. Our purpose is not to systematically test theories or evaluate the models. Rather, using a heuristic approach, we want to begin exploring the possible dimensions across which these two organizing models can be compared. Some authors have examined and critiqued the Alinsky style of organizing (Lancourt 1979; Sherrard and Murray 1965; Stein 1986), and a few authors have argued that there is a distinct way of women's organizing (ECCO l989; Haywoode l991; Oppenheim l991; Weil l986), but no one has compared these two approaches. These "models" are ideal type constructs and, we suspect, do not occur as mutually exclusive in the real world. Indeed, many Alinsky organizations have been reluctant to engage in public conflict (Lancourt l979; Bailey 1972), and Alinsky followers such as Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez, and Ed Chambers increasingly emphasized private sphere issues and family and community relationship building (Reitzes and Reitzes l987a; Industrial Areas Foundation l978). We also focus on the more traditional Alinsky-style organizing rather than recent adaptations by groups like the IAF. Likewise, the women- centered model has to-date not been portrayed as a model and thus its practitioners, many of whom are trained in Alinsky-style organizing, are very diverse. Instead, our purpose is to show two strains of influence on community organizing.

We first examine the historical roots and some basic traits of each tradition. Next, we explore some key differences between the two approaches. We then discuss the implications of each model and the potential for integrating them.

BACKGROUND OF THE ORGANIZING MODELS

The Alinsky Model

The very term "community organizing" is inextricably linked with the late Saul Alinsky, whose community organizing career began in the late 1930s. As part of his field research job as a graduate student in criminology at the University of Chicago he was to develop a juvenile delinquency program in Chicago's "Back of the Yards," neighborhood downwind of the Chicago Stockyards--a foul-smelling and crime-ridden slum of poor Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks. When Alinsky arrived, the Congress of Industrial Organizations was organizing the stockyard workers living there. Expanding the CIO model beyond workplace issues, Alinsky organized the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) from local neighborhood groups, ethnic clubs, union locals, bowling leagues, and an American Legion Post. The success of BYNC in getting expanded city services and political power started Alinsky off on a long career of organizing poor urban communities around the country (Finks 1984; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a).

Alinsky's targets shot at him, threw him in jail, and linked him to Communists, organized crime, and other "undesirables." He saw how the "haves" blatantly took from the "have nots" and unashamedly manipulated the consciousness of the "have a little, want mores." Alinsky had little patience for the version of community organizing practiced by social workers, saying "they organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats" (Alinsky 1971, 68).

Alinsky often argued that a career as a community organizer had to come before all else, including family, and to enforce this he would keep his trainees up all hours of the night at meetings and discussions (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987, p. 10). Though he did not publicly discourage women from engaging in the work (Alinsky, 1971), he was skeptical of women doing his kind of community organizing, fearing they were too delicate (Finks, 1984).1 Heather Booth, who went on to help found the Midwest Academy and Citizen Action, quit the Community Action Program of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), believing that women received inadequate training from IAF and the IAF wasn't sensitive to women's issues.

Alinsky's approach has influenced an entire generation of organizers who adapted his principles, but retained a core of practices and assumptions we will explore later. The practice of the Alinsky model has built powerful organizations and produced visible victories across the country: Back of the Yards and TWO in Chicago, SECO in Baltimore, FIGHT in Rochester, MACO in Detroit, ACORN in Little Rock, ETCO in Toledo, and COPS in San Antonio, among others. These organizations have in some cases saved entire communities from destruction and produced influential leaders who have gone on to change the face of the public sphere.

The Women-Centered Model

Unlike the Alinsky model, the women-centered model of community organizing cannot be attributed to a single person or movement. Indeed, a wide diversity of women have mobilized around many different issues using many different methods. We are most interested in those mobilizations which fit the community organizing definition of being locale-based.

This model can be traced back to African-American women's efforts to sustain home and community under slavery. Bell hooks (l990; also see Davis l981) notes the historic importance for African-Americans of "homeplace" as a site to recognize and resist domination. Hooks argues,

Historically, African-American people believed that the construction of a homeplace, however fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical political dimension...it was about the construction of a safe place where black people could affrim one another and by so doing heal many of the wouunds inflicted by racist domination" (l990 42).

Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African-American women involved in the Black Women's Clubs organized day-care centers, orphanages, and nursing homes. Others, such as Ida B. Wells, organized campaigns around such issues as lynching and rape (Duster 1970; Giddings l984; Gutierrez and Lewis l992).

Also important in understanding the historical roots of current women-centered organizing efforts are Anglo women's "municipal housekeeping" activities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Then public spirited women, in attempting to overcome disapproval of their public role...explain[ed] that they were only protecting their homes and families by extending their activities from the home into the public arena. Women claimed the right to be guardians of the neighborhood, just as they were acknowledged to be guardians of the family"(Haywoode l991, l80). Since then, women have created numerous voluntary and benevolent associations to campaign for concrete reforms in local neighborhoods and broader reforms in municipal services, education, labor, housing, health care, and childrens' rights (Berg 1978; Haywoode l991; Tax 1980).

Perhaps the most famous of these activities were the settlement houses, founded primarily by college-educated white middle-class women who believed they should live in the neighborhood wherethey worked (Bryan and Davis l990, 5). The most well-known settlement house organizer was Jane Addams, who with Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House on Chicago's west side in 1889. Their goal was to improve the social networks, social services, and community life in poverty-stricken immigrant slums. They succeeded in developing parks, playgrounds, expanded community services, and neighborhood plans. They were also involved in social reform movements promoting labor legislation for women and children, care of delinquents, and women's suffrage. But community organizers often saw them as engaging in charity work rather than adversarial social action (Brandwein l981, l987; Finks 1984, 96-7), and clinical social workers saw them as violating the detached casework method that emphasized individual treatment over social reform and community development (Drew l983; Lee l937; Specht and Courtney l994).

The women-centered model also carries a history of success different from the Alinsky model. The activism of women in the early settlement movement, the civil rights movement, and the consciousness-raising groups of the radical branch of the 1970s women's movement allowed women to challenge both private and public arrangements in ways that would forever effect their relationships, housework, parenting practices, and career paths. The consequent changes in women's health care and women's knowledge of their own bodies, in cultural practices around dating and relationships, and the relationship between work and family are still reverberating through society. That these successes have not been better documented owes to the fact that struggles focused on the private sphere have been neither defined nor valued as important. Today, women of color, low-income, and working class women create and sustain numerous protest efforts and organizations to alter living conditions or policies that threaten their families and communities (Bookman and Morgen l988; Feldman and Stall, 1994; Garland l988; Gilkes l988; Gutierrez and Lewis l992; Hamilton l991; Haywoode l991; Leavitt 1993; McCourt l977; Rabrenovic l995). These include, but are not limited to tenant organizing (Lawson and Barton l990), low income housing (Breitbart and Pader l995; Feldman and Stall, 1994), welfare rights (Naples l991), and environmental issues (Pardo l990).

COMPARING THE MODELS

Human Nature and Conflict

The Alinsky model and the women-centered model begin from different starting points-- the rough and tumble world of aggressive public sphere confrontation; and the cooperative nurturant world of private sphere personal and community development. Consequently, they have very different views of what human nature is and its role in human conflict. Among all the tenets of the Alinsky model, the assumption of self-interest has the strongest continuing influence (Beckwith n.d.) and is strongly influenced by the centrality of the public shpere in the Alinsky model.. Modern society, from Alinsky's perspective, is created out of compromise between self-interested individuals operating in the public sphere. Thus, organizing people requires appealing to their self-interest. People become involved because they think there is something in it for themselves (Alinsky 1969, 94-98; 1971, 53-9). Alinsky's emphasis on self-interest was connected to his wariness of ideology. From his perspective, organizing people around abstract ideology leads to boredom at best and ideological disputes at worst. Alinsky also feared ideology becoming dogma and was adamant that building a pragmatic organization should come before promoting any ideology. He did hope that, as the community became organized, the process would bring out "innate altruism" and "affective commitment." But even that level of commitment was based on building victories through conflict with targets (Lancourt 1979, 51; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 56; 1987b). Alinsky relates the story of one organizer's effort to start a "people's organization" and how he used self-interest to achieve the desired result:

Mr. David was a businessman who...had avoided participation in any kind of social-betterment program or community group....His whole manner let me know that in his opinion I was just another `do-gooder' and as soon as I finished my song and dance he would give me a dollar or two and wish me well. I suddenly shifted from my talk on the children and began to point out indirectly the implications of his joining our organization....I could almost hear Mr. David thinking..."And where could I get better business relations than at this meeting." Then David turned to me and said "I'll be at that meeting tonight." Immediately after I left David I went across the street to Roger, who is in the same business, and I talked to him the same way. Roger had a doubled-barreled incentive for coming. First there was David's purpose and secondly Roger wanted to make sure that David would not take away any part of his business (Alinsky 1969, 95-97).

Since Alinsky saw society as a compromise between competing self-interested individuals, conflict was inevitable, and a pluralist polity was the means by which compromise was reached. Since poor people are at an initial disadvantage in that polity, the organizer's job is to prepare citizens to engage in the level of public conflict necessary for them to be included in the compromise process (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a). Alinsky contended that the only way to overcome the inertia that exists in most communities (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 70) was to "rub raw the resentments of the people in the community" (Alinsky 1971, 116). In order to engage in the level of battle necessary to win, "the rank and file and the smaller leaders of the organizations must be whipped up to a fighting pitch" (Alinsky 1969, 151). Alinsky would engage small-scale conflicts within communities against unscrupulous merchants, realtors, and even entrenched community organizations, to build victories and a sense of power (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 54, 65), treating even the relatively private sphere of the neighborhood as a public sphere arena. Alinsky's involvement in 1960s Rochester with FIGHT, pressing for Kodak to support an affirmative hiring and jobs program, is illustrative. FIGHT began with a drawn-out negotiation process, and then Alinsky escalated to confrontational rhetoric and pickets. When Kodak reneged on a signed agreement, Alinsky and FIGHT organized a proxy campaign for Kodak's annual meeting. Forty members of FIGHT and Friends of FIGHT attended the meeting, demanded that Kodak reinstate its original agreement by 2 pm, and then walked out to 800 supporters in the street. They came back at 2 pm and were told Kodak would not reverse its position. The FIGHT leadership came out and told the crowd: "Racial War has been declared on black communities by Kodak. If it's war they want, war they'll get." Threats of a major demonstration in July and further escalation of the conflict produced a behind the scenes agreement at the eleventh hour (Finks 1984, 213-221).

Unlike the Alinsky model, women-centered organizing involvement does not emanate from self-interest but from an ethic of care maintained by relationships built on years of local volunteer work in the expanded private sphere, particularly community associations (Stall, 1991). Rather than a morality of individual rights, women learn a morality of responsibility that is connected to relationships and is based on the "universality of the need for compassion and care" (Gilligan l977: 509). Women-centered organizers grasp the meaning of justice not as a compromise between self-interested individuals, but as a practical reciprocity in the network of relationships that make up the community (Ackelsberg l988; Haywoode 1991; Stall, 1991). Leavitt (l993) describes how concern for their children's welfare led a group of African-American women in Los Angeles in the late l980s to focus on rehabbing the existing tot lots in their public housing development. In Nickerson Gardens, as in public housing across the country, women make up the overwhelming majority of grassroots organizers. The campaign of this all- women tot-lot committee ignited them to testify at housing authority hearings, conduct a community survey, and eventually secure funds and participate in the design and the construction of two play areas in their low-income community. They did not manipulate self-interest but instead built a cooperative consensus.

Within the women-centered model, the maintenance and development of social cohesion--personal connections with others that provide a safe environment for people to develop, change and grow--is more immediately important than conflict to gain institutional power (Kaplan l982). For women, community relationships include the social fabric created through routine activities related to the private sphere, such as childcare, housekeeping, and shopping (DeVault l991), as well as through social arrangements they make to protect, enhance, and preserve the cultural experience of community members (Bernard l981, Stoneall l983). Historically, women have relied on community networks to feed, clothe, and shelter their families (Sacks 1988a, 21; also see Hill Collins l990). Particularly for women, communal structures can serve as "free spaces" offering arenas outside of the family where women can develop a "growing sense that they [have] the right to work -- first in behalf of others, then in behalf of themselves" (Evans and Boyte l981, 61; l986).

Women residents of the Wentworth Gardens Chicago public housing development in Chicago, in 1968, created and now continue to manage their own laundromat which provides both on-site laundry facilities and a community space that serves as a primary recruitment ground for community activists. The ongoing volunteer work of women residents over four decades has assured the laundromat's continued success, and has helped numerous women develop skills and self-confidence to further develop the community through the opening of an on-site grocery store and obtaining other improvements to their housing. A Resident Service Committee, made up of laundromat volunteers, meets monthly to resolve problems and allocate laundromat profits to annual community festivals, scholarship funds, and other activities.

Power and Politics

Both models have seemingly inconsistent understandings of power and politics. These inconsistencies are rooted partly in the ways each thinks about human nature, but are also particularly affected by how they deal with the public-private split. The Alinsky model sees power as zero-sum, but the polity as pluralist. The women-centered model sees power as infinitely expanding, but the polity as structurally biased. Understanding both the differences between the models, and their seeming inconsistencies, requires looking at how each deals with the public-private split.

For the Alinsky model, power and politics both occur in the public sphere. When power is zero-sum, the only way to get more is to take it from someone else. Alinsky was adamant that real power could not be given, but only taken. He watched how obsessed elites were with power, even taking it from each other when they could and thus making the very structure of power zero-sum. Thus, the method for a poor community to gain power was through public sphere action--by picking a single elite target, isolating it from other elites, personalizing it, and polarizing it (Alinsky 1971).2 The 1960s Woodlawn Organization (TWO) was one of Alinsky's most famous organizing projects in an African American neighborhood on Chicago's south side. When TWO was shut out of urban renewal planning for their neighborhood, they commissioned their own plan, and threatened to occupy Lake Shore Drive during rush hour unless their plan held sway. Not only did they get agreement on a number of their plan proposals, they also controlled a new committee to approve all future plans for their neighborhood, shifting control of urban planning from city hall to the neighborhood (Finks, l984, 153; Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987)).

In women-centered organizing, power begins in the private sphere of relationships, and thus is not conceptualized as zero-sum, but as limitless and collective. "Co-active power" is based on human interdependence and the development of all within the group or the community through collaboration (Follet l940; see also Hartsock l974). "[I]t belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together" (Arendt l969, 44). The goal of a women-centered organizing process is empowerment (ECCO l989). Empowerment is a developmental process that includes building skills through repetitive cycles of action and reflection which evoke new skills and understandings, which in turn provoke new and more effective actions (Keiffer l984). Empowerment includes the development of a more positive self-concept and self-confidence; a more critical world view; and the cultivation of individual and collective skills and resources for social and political action (Rappaport l986; Van Den Bergh and Cooper l986; Weil l986). In the case of the Cedar Riverside Project Area Committee, an organization dedicated to planning resident-controlled redevelopment of a counter-culture Minneapolis neighborhood, tensions developed in the 1980s between those who emphasized building power as an outcome and empowering residents as a process. One woman organizer compares her approach to that of the lead organizer:

I disagree with Tim, but he's a very empowering person. Tim is more Alinsky. For me, the process, not the outcome, is the most important.... The empowerment of individuals is why I became involved.... I was a single mother looking for income, and was hired as a block worker for the dispute resolution board, and gained a real sense of empowerment.

Power, for this organizer, is gained not through winning a public sphere battle, but by bringing residents together to resolve disputes and build relationships within their own community.

When we shift the focus from more abstract notions of power to more concrete practices of politics, both models are forced to work in the public sphere. But the public sphere- private sphere split still influences how each relates to politics.

The Alinsky model sees itself as already in the public sphere, and as a consequence already part of the political system. The problem was not gaining access--the rules of politics already granted access. Rather, the problem was effectively organizing to make the most of that access. Alinsky believed that poor people could form their own interest group and access the polity just like any other interest group. They may have to make more of a fuss to be recognized initially, but once recognized, their interests would be represented just like anyone else's. Community organizing, for Alinsky, was bringing people together to practice democracy. Consequently, Alinsky did not see a need for dramatic structural adjustments. The system was, in fact, so good that it would protect and support the have-nots in organizing against those elites who had been taking unfair advantage (Alinsky l969; Lancourt l979, 31-35; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987, 17-18). Alinsky organizations support government even while attacking office holders (Bailey 1972, 136). When the IAF-trained Ernesto Cortez returned to San Antonio to help found Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in 1973, he began with the traditional strategy of escalating from negotiations to protests to achieve better city services for Latino communities. Soon after their initial successes, COPS turned to voter mobilization, eventually resulting in a slim win to change San Antonio's council from at- large to district representation. From there they were able to control half of the council's seats, bringing over half of the city's federal Community Development Block Grant funds to COPS projects from 1974-1981. Eventually COPS found that its political lobbying and voter mobilization tactics outpaced the effectiveness of confrontation and protest (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 121-123). Heather Booth's Citizen Action project has taken this pluralist organizing approach to its logical extreme, focusing her energies entirely on voter mobilization in cities and states around the country (Reitzes and Reitzes l987a, 153). The women-centered model, however, approaches politics from an experience and consciousness of the exclusionary qualities of the public-private sphere split, which becomes embedded in a matrix of domination along structural axes of gender, race, and social class and hides the signficance of women's work in local settings. This matrix has historically excluded women from public sphere politics, and restricted them through the sexual division of labor to social reproduction activities centered in the home (Cockburn l977; Kaplan l982, 545). Increasingly, women have politicized the private sphere as a means to combat exclusion from the public agenda (Kaplan l982). Thus, women have organized around issues that flow from their distinct histories, every day experiences, and perspectives (Ackelsberg 1988; Bookman and Morgen l988; ECCO 1989; Haywoode l991; Stall, 1991; West and Blumberg l990; Wilson l977). Women-centered organizing "dissolve[s] the boundaries between public and private life, between household and civil society" and extends "the boundaries of the household to include the neighborhood" (Haywoode l991, 175). Organizing to secure local daycares, youth programs, tenant rights and a clean environment "define a sphere which is public, yet closer to home" (Haywoode l991, 175) and demonstrates the importance of the interconnections between the spheres (Ackelsberg l988; Petchesky l979). Cynthia Hamilton (l99l), a community organizer in South Central Los Angeles, described a primarily women-directed organizing campaign to stop the solid waste incinerator planned for their community in the late l980s. These low income women, primarily African-American, with no prior political experience, were motivated by the health threat to their homes and children. They built a loose, but effective organization, the Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, and were gradually joined by white, middle-class, and professional women from across the city. The activists began to recognize their shared gender oppression as they confronted the sarcasm and contempt of male political officials and industry representatives--who dismissed their human concerns as "irrational, uninformed, and disruptive" (44)--and restrictions on their organizing created by their family's needs. Eventually they forced incinerator industry representatives to compromise and helped their families accept a new division of labor in the home to accommodate activists' increased public political participation.3

Leadership Development

Leadership is another characteristic of these models that shows the influence of the public-private split. The Alinsky model maintains and explicit between public sphere leaders, called "organizers," and private sphere community leaders who occupy decision- making positions in formal community organizations. For the women centered model, leadership begins in the private sphere, but leadership becomes a form of boundary spanning across public and private spheres.

For Alinsky, the organizer is a professional consultant from outside the community whose job is to get people to adopt a delegitimizing frame (Ferree and Miller 1985; Gamson et al. 1982;) that breaks the power structure's hold over them (Bailey 1972, 46- 7). Advocates of the Alinsky approach contend that organizing is a very complex task requiring professional-level training and experience (Bailey 1972, 137; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 53). In many cases organizers must "disorganize" or reorganize the community since so many communities are organized for apathy (Alinsky 1971, 116; Bailey 1972, 50). The Alinsky model also maintains a strict role separation between outside organizers and the indigenous leaders that organizers are responsible for locating and supporting (Lancourt 1979; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987b). New leaders have to be developed, often outside of the community's institutionally-appointed leadership structure. The focus is not on those individuals, however, but on building a strong organization and getting material concessions from elites. Organizers have influence, but only through their relationships with indigenous leaders (Lancourt 1979). It may appear curious that Alinsky did not emphasize building indigenous organizers, especially since the lack of indigenous organizing expertise often led to organizational decline after the pros left (Lancourt 1979).4 Tom Gaudette, an Alinsky-trained organizer who helped build the Organization for a Better Austin (OBA) in Chicago, explicitly discouraged his organizers from living in the neighborhood, arguing they had to be able to view the community dispassionately in order to be effective at their job (Bailey 1972, 80). But when viewed through the lens of the public-private split, it is clear that the organizers are leaders who remain in the public sphere, always separate from the expanded private sphere of community. Because the organizers remain in the public sphere, they become the link that pulls private sphere leaders, and their communities, in to public action.

There is less separation between organizers and leaders in the women-centered model, as women-centered organizers, rather than being outsiders, are more often rooted in local networks. they are closely linked to those with whom they work and organize and act as mentors or facilitators of the empowerment process.5 Private sphere issues seem paramount with these organizers. They find they need to deal with women's sense of powerlessness and low self-esteem (Miller l986)--before they can effectively involve them in sustained organizing efforts. Mentoring others as they learn the organizing process is premised on the belief that all have the capacity to be leaders /organizers. Rather than focusing on or elevating individual leaders, women-centered organizers seek to model and develop "group centered" leadership (Payne l989) that "embraces the participation of many as opposed to creating competition over the elevation of only a few" (ECCO l989, 16). Instead of moving people and directing events, this is a conception of leadership as teaching (Payne l989).6 Analyses of women-centered organizing and leadership development efforts also underline the importance of "centerwomen," or "bridge leaders," who use existing local networks to develop social groups and activities that create a sense of familial/community consciousness, connecting people with similar concerns and heightening awareness of shared issues (Sacks l988b; Robnett, 1996). These leaders can transform social networks into a political force, and demonstrate how the particular skills that women learn in their families and communities (e.g., interpersonal skills, planning and coordination, conflict mediation) can be translated into effective public sphere leadership. Robnett (l996) provides evidence that, "The activities of African-American women in the civil rights movement provided the bridges necessary to cross boundaries between the personal lives of potential constituents and adherents and the political life of civil rights movement organizations" (1664). Thus, ironically, gender as a "construct of exclusion...helped to develop a strong grassroots tier of leadership…women who served as "bridge leaders" who were central to the "development of identity, collective consciousness, and solidarity within the civil rights movement" (Robnett l996, 1667). Although bridge leaders were not exclusively women, this "intermediate layer" of leadership was the only one available to women at that time (Robnett l996). Mrs. Amey, now seventy years old, has been a key activist and a centerperson in nearly all of the Wentworth Gardens organizing efforts discussed earlier since the mid-l950s. A woman resident's description of Mrs. Hallie Amey provides some insight into the importance of her leadership role:

She's [Mrs. Amey's] the type of person who can bring a lot of good ideas to the community....And she's always there to help. And she's always here; she's always doing things. And she's always pulling you, she's pushing you, and she's calling you, "We've got to do this!" She makes sure you don't forget what you have to do. Early in the morning she's on the phone, "Mrs. Harris, what time you coming out?'' That was to say, "you gonna do it without me having to ask, or you giving me an excuse (Stall, interview, 1991)?

The Organizing Process

Finally, these two models adopt organizing processes that reflect the influence of, and their conceptualization of, the public-private split. The Alinsky model emphasizes farge formal public organizations to manage large visible public events. The women-centered model emphasizes the development of informal small groups that take on less visible issues, in the private sphere, in less visible ways.

Within the Alinsky model the organizing process centers on identifying and confronting public issues to be addressed in the public sphere. Door knocking is the initial strategy for identifying issues. Those issues then become the means of recruitment to the organizing effort. The organization bills itself as the best, if not only, means of resolving those issues. The "mass meeting" is the means for framing issues and celebrating gains. Important to the process of building up to the mass meeting are cumulative victories-- beginning with an easily winnable issue, and using the energy generated by that win to build to bigger and bigger issues. The public activities of the mass march, the public rally, the explicit confrontation, the celebrated win, are all part of building a strong organization that can publicly represent the community's interests. The annual public convention is the culmination of the Alinsky organizing process. The first annual convention of the East Toledo Community Organization in 1979 was preceded by flyers emphasizing the neglect of the east side of Toledo by city government, broken promises from officials, the victories of initial organizing, and the unity developing in the community. ETCO mailed packets across East Toledo that produced 500 registrants for the meeting. At the meeting itself the 500-1000 people gathered passed 13 resolutions covering dangerous rail crossings, park maintenance, utility complaints, service shortages, truck traffic, and many other issues (Stoecker, 1995).

In the Alinsky model, the organizer isn't there just to win a few issues, but to build an enduring organization that can continue to claim power and resources for the community--to represent the community in a public sphere pluralist polity. The organizer shouldn't start from scratch but from the community's pre-existing organizational base of churches, service organizations, clubs, etc. In many cases, the community organizations created also spawn community-based services such as credit unions, daycare, etc. This is not a process to be taken lightly or with few resources. Alinsky often insisted that, before he would work with a community, they had to raise $150,000 to cover three years of expenses (Lancourt 1979). When Ed Chambers took over the Industrial Areas Foundation from Alinsky, he required $160,000 just to cover startup costs for a serious organizing project (Industrial Areas Foundation 1978). For Alinsky, the organization itself was part of the tactical repertoire of community organizing. Dave Beckwith, an Alinsky-style organizer with the Center for Community Change, also argues for the centrality of the organization.

If an organization doesn't grow, it will die...People naturally fade in and out of involvement as their own life's rhythms dictate--people move, kids take on baseball for the spring, they get involved with Lamaze classes, whatever. If there are not new people coming in, the shrinkage can be fatal. New issues and continuous outreach are the only protection against this natural process. (Beckwith n.d., 13)

The presence, and partial restriction, of women in the private sphere leads the women- centered organizing model to emphasize a very different organizing process formed around creating an ideal private-sphere-like setting rather than a large public sphere organization. The process begins by creating a safe and nurturing space where women can identify and discuss issues effecting the private sphere (Gutierrez, l990). This model uses the small group to establish trust, and build "informality, respect, [and] tolerance of spontaneity" (Hamilton l991, 44). The civil rights organizer, Ella Baker, was dubious about the long-term value of mass meetings, lobbying and demonstrations. Instead, she advocated organizing people in small groups so that they could understand their potential power and how best to use it, which had a powerful influence on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Britton l968; Payne l989).7 Small groups create an atmosphere that affirms each participant's contribution, provides the time for individuals to share, and makes it possible for participants to listen carefully to each other (Stall, 1993). Gutierrez and Lewis (l992 126) affirm that, "The small group provides the ideal environment for exploring the social and political aspects of `personal' problems and for developing strategies for work toward social change". Moreover, smaller group settings create and sustain the relationship building and sense of significance and solidarity so integral to community.8 Women in Organizing (WIO), a 1990s urban-based project, organized twelve low income, African-American teenage mothers to gain self-sufficiency and political empowerment. One of the organizing staff described the effort of this "Young Moms Program":

Our work is about connecting women with each other, about transforming their experience in terms of working with mixed groups of people of different races, about building the confidence of individual women and building the strengths of groups....All of our work is really about leadership development of women, of learning more of how consciousness develops, of how we can collectively change the world.

While WIO did help these women to organize an advocacy meeting with public officials, the meeting was preceded by nearly five months of training sessions that addressed less traditional issues such as personal growth and advocacy in the family, as well as more traditional organizing issues (Stall, 1993).

Because there is less focus on immediate public sphere action in the women-centered model, a continuing organization is not as central in initial organizing. In place of the focus on organization building are "modest struggles" ----"small, fragmented, and sometimes contradictory efforts by people to change their lives" (Krauss l983, 54). These short-lived collective actions (e.g., planting a community garden, opening a daycare, organizing a public meeting) are often begun by loosely organized groups. The organizing efforts of the African-American women in South Central Los Angeles, described earlier, functioned for a year and a half without any formal leadership structure. Their model depended on a rotating chair, stymying the media's hunger for a "spokesperson" (Hamilton, l991, p. 44; see also Ferguson, l984). If empowerment is "a process aimed at consolidating, maintaining, or changing the nature and distribution of power in a particular cultural context" (Bookman and Morgen l988, 4), modest struggles are a significant factor in this process. Engagement in modest resistance allows women to immediately alter their community and gain a sense of control over their lives. Attention to these struggles is necessary in order to understand the more elusive process of resistance that takes place beneath the surface and outside of what have conventionally been defined as community organizing, social protest, or social movements (Feldman and Stall, 1994). Women can achieve significant change in their neighborhoods by building on the domestic sphere and its organization, rather than separating it from their public activities (Clark l994).. Research on New York City co-op apartment tenants in the 1980s, found that the tenant leaders were almost always women, the majority were African-American and were long-time residents of their building and their community (Leavitt and Saegert l990; Clark l994). These women organizers/leaders applied skills they had learned and used to sustain their own families to the larger sphere of the building. They often met around kitchen tables and they made building-wide decisions with the same ethic of personal care that they applied to friends and family. Many of the tenant meetings included food made by different women residents who equated sharing their dish with the recognition of their role. The style and success of organizing was rooted in aspects of the social life within buildings and on a gender-based response to home and community. They discusses rent payment and eviction issues in terms of the situations of each tenant involved, and searched for alternatives that supported residents' overall lives as well as ensured that good decisions were made for the building as a whole (Clark l994:943).

CONCLUSION: SEPARATE MODELS, LINKED ISSUES

We see the differences in these two models as at least partly the result of the historical split of family and community life into public and private spheres as U.S. industrial capitalism destroyed Colonial-era community-based enterprise and forced men to work outside of the home and away from the community (Tilly and Scott 1978). The competitive, aggressive, distrustful, confrontational culture of the public sphere contrasts starkly with the nurturant, connected, relationship-building and care-taking ideal of the private sphere. Clearly the emphasis on conflict, opposition, separation, and winning in the Alinsky model reflects public sphere culture. And just as clearly the emphasis on nurturance, connectedness, and relationship-building in the women-centered model reflects private sphere culture (Cott l977). The fact that for nearly four decades the Alinsky model was the preserve of male organizers, and training in the Alinsky model was controlled by men for even longer, while the women-centered model developed in settings closer to the domestic sphere often among groups of women, reflects and has influenced the development of these differences (Stall, 1991; ECCO 1989).

In the disinvestment and deindustrialization that has come with global capitalism, each model is as weak by itself as a nuclear family with a full-time male breadwinner and a full-time female homemaker. As corporations either disinvested wholesale from their host communities or downsized their local workforce, they forced women into wage- earning positions to make up for male wage losses, leading to pressures on men to take on more private sphere tasks. In poor communities that disinvestment left devastation-- neighborhoods without businesses, services, or safety. Indeed, many urban neighborhoods of the 1980s and 1990s were no longer communities at all, but only collections of medium and high density housing with few sustainable social relationships. In this kind of a setting, gender-segregated organizing models can work no better than gender-segregated family members. Imagine trying to employ the Alinsky model organizing young moms who are socially isolated and exhausted from the daily grind of trying to make ends meet. The masculine confrontational style of the Alinsky model, that must assume prior community bonds so it can move immediately into public sphere action, may be disabling for certain grass-roots organizing efforts, "particularly in domains where women are a necessary constituency" (Lawson and Barton l990, 49). The de-emphasis on relationship building in the Alinsky model will mean that, where neighborhoods are less and less communities, and the people in them are less and less empowered, the community can engage the battle but not sustain it. Large organizations may in fact inhibit empowerment because they are not "likely to offer the kind of nurturing of individual growth that smaller ones can provide, and may be especially off- putting to members of low-income communities, where the predominant style of relating to individuals is still prebureaucratic" (Payne 1989, 894). Consequently, internal power struggles will threaten many Alinsky-style organizations in these settings.

At the same time, the problems that poor communities face today cannot be solved at the private sphere or local levels. The women-centered model, consequently, is also weak by itself. First is the risk that postponing public sphere confrontation with a white patriarchal capitalist elite will maintain the vulnerability of at-risk communities, because white patriarchal capitalists don't play fair. While women-centered organizers are concentrating on personal empowerment--a process which cannot be rushed--the bulldozers could be coming. One criticism of consciousness-raising in the women's movement is that it doesn't translate into action very effectively (Cassell l989, 55; Ferree and Hess 1985, 64- 67; Freeman, 1975). Indeed, those risks appeared very pronounced in the Young Moms program described above. When the program was threatened with a staff lay-off, organized resistance was difficult to mobilize. But they also appeared in the Wentworth Gardens case where the maintaining a community-run on-site grocery store became difficult as warehouses refused to deliver to what they saw as a `dangerous' neighborhood. And they appeared in Cedar-Riverside as a community clinic saw its funding cut and had to reduce services. Both communities had shifted away from confrontational, Alinsky-style tactics to meet these issues and were consequently unable to establish effective campaigns against these threats. The creation, nurturance, and maintenance of community in the face of forces which threaten to destroy it--through neglect, disinvestment, or disdain--is an act of resistance. It is a blow against the power structure just to survive (Hill Collins l991; hooks l990). But the women-centered model may not work when outside forces consciously attempt to destroy the community through any means available. There is also a danger that this model may degenerate into a social service program, reducing participants to clients. This tendency is what the settlement house movement, and the subsequent "social work" version of community organizing, has been criticized for.9

Today, global capitalism also creates a new set of challenges for community organizing that requires drawing on both models. With footloose capital that can make broad- reaching decisions, and can hop around at the slightest sign of resistance from a local community, community organizing must build even stronger relationships and interpersonal ties at the local level, and mobilize those communities for even more forceful public sphere actions. You can't do an action at your local bank, because your local bank is owned by a corporation hundreds of miles or more away. Organizing to counteract and control global corporations requires at least national and probably international coalitions. At the same time, you must organize locally or there will not be a strong enough base on which to build anything larger. Building relationships that are rooted in strong local bases, that can then be linked together, requires both models. Julian Rappaport (1981) describes the "paradox of empowerment" as the need to organize simultaneously at the personal and structural levels. True communities (with strong networks, culture, mutual support systems, etc.) under siege from identifiable sources need to engage in confrontational campaigns to defend themselves, and will probably benefit most from emphasizing the Alinsky model. Communities that really are not communities--that lack the networks, culture, support systems and other qualities--require first the foundation that the women-centered model can provide to prevent self- destructive oligarchies. But in both cases the other model cannot be neglected. The tension created by the Alinsky model challenges the strongest community bonds and requires compensating strategies of relationship building and personal empowerment. And as much as a strong community provides the foundation for a strong defense, when a threat presents itself, the community has to be able to respond effectively. This integration of the two models also must be done very carefully. You can't just add together an Alinsky organizing process with a women-centered leadership model, for example. Rather, integration needs to occur across each principle so that the models are combined. Ella Baker's comments that "real organizing" is working in small groups with people so that they can discover their competencies, and then "parlaying those into larger groups" (Britton l968, 67) is an example of bringing together the organizing process components of the Alinsky and women-centered models.

Careful attention to history also shows there are times when one model will be more viable than the other. Robert Fisher (1984) showed a see-sawing between more militant and more community-building periods of community organizing which seem to correspond to progressive and reactionary periods in history. The transformation of Alinsky-style community organizing efforts in the Reagan 1980s into community development efforts, and the "discovery" of women-centered organizing during that same period, may also support the contention that the two types of organizing may be more effective under different conditions. Reactionary periods such as the 1980s force social movements into "abeyance" (Taylor 1989) where the maintenance of community bonds and the provision of emotional support become paramount, since public sphere action seems ineffectual. In these periods, the women-centered model sustains the possibility for future public sphere action. Certainly, in the wake of the deindustrialization and devastation of inner city communities there is a tremendous need to rebuild communities of place. Mary Pardo (1990, 6) notes that "The issues traditionally addressed by women-- health, housing, sanitation, and the urban environment--have moved to center stage as capitalist urbanization progresses." Community organizing today faces special challenges, as the targets are no longer visible and local. As we move into the next century, if women-centered organizing succeeds in rebuilding community bonds, aspects of the Alinsky model may again become applicable. Some social workers are trying to resurrect the profession’s community organizing roots (Specht and Courtney, 1994) and are calling for a return to the empowerment model ala Piven and Cloward (1979). And the realization that global economic processes continually threaten local communities may provide for a new round of social movement activity.

NOTES

1Alinsky, along with Fred Ross, were instrumental in organizing "educationals" in California that used a popular education process to support the organizing process. These educationals produced the first woman organizer hired by Alinsky, and the first organizing effort targeting women specifically (Finks, 1984:68-71).

2This is not to say that Alinsky avoided a focus on private sphere issues. His first successful organizing attempt, in Back of the Yards, produced a well-baby clinic, a credit union, and a hot lunch program (Finks 1984, 21). But these programs were accomplished through public sphere strategizing, not private relationships. In establishing and maintaining the hot lunch program, Alinsky pushed the organization to understand its relationship to the national hot lunch program and "In order to fight for their own Hot Lunch project they would have to fight for every Hot Lunch project in every part of the United States" (Alinsky 1969, 168).

3In Bullard's (1993) study of nine cases of grassroots community groups fighting proposed toxic industrial sites, incinerators, or hazardous waste landfills, seven of these communities were organized by women. These women improved "the environments of day to day life" by utilizing family, ethnic, and community networks, creating a sense of community commitment and connection (Wekerle l996, 141).

4Sometimes, indigenous organizers did develop. Fred Ross's work in the Southwest, for example, produced an indigenous organizer by the name of Cesar Chavez (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a).

5Fish (l986) distinguishes the Hull House mentoring model from the traditional mentor model based on an unequal distribution of power between an older gatekeeper or instructor and an apprentice. The mentor model at Hull House, rather than a dyad, included a larger support system characterized by a network of egalitarian relationships and shared visibility that provided both public and private supports for the women involved.

6The Civil Rights leader, Ella Jo Baker, throughout her life modeled group-centered leadership, stating that, "Strong people don't need strong leaders," (Cantarow and O'Malley l980, 53). At one point Ms. Baker shared, "I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people (Baker l973, 352).

7A quote from Payne (l989, 892-893) about Ella Baker's views shows the distinct position of the women-centered model on how the organizing is done, versus the immediate, visible outcome.

How many people show up for a rally may matter less than how much the people who organize the rally learn from doing so. If the attempt to organize the rally taught them anything about the mechanics of organizing, if the mere act of trying caused them to grow in self-confidence, if the organizers developed stronger bonds among themselves from striving together, then the rally may have been a success even if no one showed up for it. As she said, "You're organizing people to be self-sufficient rather than to be dependent upon the charismatic leader.

8Tom Gaudette, in rebuilding the Alinsky-style Organization for a Better Austin, started by creating small groups, but for the purpose of targeting issues and building a larger organization (Bailey l972:66), rather than to empower individuals as the women-centered model does.

9To the extent that service provision can be organized through indigenous leaders, or "centerwomen", and the goal of empowerment sustained, this tendency can be countered. The Young Moms organizer explains, "I think social service programs for the African American community are really extended families that you are now getting paid to be [part of]. So if you look at it like that, it's really not about the numbers....It's about being there when the people need you." Gilkes (l988) discusses how women social service workers who live and work in Black communities are fashioning new organizational structures and practices and transforming old ones--rebeling against the traditional human service practices (e.g. impersonal, instrumental, bureaucratic) and restructuring their organizational settings to make them "Black- oriented" (56).

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e-mail: [email protected]

Contents

The Four Strategies

What is Community Organizing?

The Principles of Community Organizing

The Ten Rules of Community Organizing

Defining an Action Strategy

THE FOUR STRATEGIES

There are four fundamental strategies available to neighborhood groups to address community problems: community organizing, advocacy, service delivery or development. There is no right or wrong strategy - each organization has to choose among them constantly. Each group should specialize - the skills needed to do a good job in one are seldom those needed for another. Sometimes, groups use a combination of strategies. What is important here is that you know what you're doing - that the method matches the strategy you've chosen and they both match the mission the group has adopted. This article will focus on defining and developing the ideas behind community organizing.

Community organizing is characterized by the mobilizing of volunteers. Staff roles are limited to helping volunteers become effective, to guiding the learning of leaders through the process, and to helping create the mechanism for the group to advocate on their own behalf. Community organizing almost always includes confrontation of some sort. The people who want something get themselves together to ask for it, often the people who could give them what they want get jumpy. Community organizing strategies include meeting with corporate or government decision makers to hold them accountable for their actions, designing programs for others (not the group) to implement that meet the needs of the community, and aggressive group action to block negative developments or behaviors (highway construction that leads to neighborhood destruction, etc.).

Advocacy and Service Delivery are both characterized by doing FOR people. Often professionals like lawyers or social workers will attack a problem on behalf of those perceived as unable to speak for themselves. Job referral services, social work, training for job readiness, homeownership counseling, business plan preparation training - these are methods which fit into the Advocacy or Service Delivery strategy.

Development is a strategy that gets the group directly into the business of delivering a physical product. Generally, groups select a development strategy because the normal course of events is not meeting the areas needs. The profit motive either does not bring private developers into the area - they can't make enough money - or it brings them in to do the wrong thing - they are converting moderate cost rental units into yuppie condos. Development could mean housing or commercial or even industrial development. Development methods require, like the other two strategies, particular skills. Many groups have struggled to achieve good results in housing development with staff whose training, experience and interests are in community organizing, causing pain and suffering for the group and the staff. This is unfair. If we understand the distinction between the strategies, we can see the different resources needed for the methods that fit within them.

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WHAT IS COMMUNITY ORGANIZING? Community organizing is the process of building power through involving a constituency in identifying problems they share and the solutions to those problems that they desire; identifying the people and structures that can make those solutions possible; enlisting those targets in the effort through negotiation and using confrontation and pressure when needed; and building an institution that is democratically controlled by that constituency that can develop the capacity to take on further problems and that embodies the will and the power of that constituency.

Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy and legendary community organizer, expressed the fundamentals in this formula:

OOO = Organizers Organize Organizations.

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?) that says that folks join up if two things are true. 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.

Back to contents The Principles of Community Organizing

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? Wouldn't the heat bother you more, and if you knew where the key was, or who could turn down the heat, wouldn't the temptation to DO SOMETHING become almost irresistible? 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.

SECOND, community organizing is a dynamic process, that requires constant attention and effort. 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:

FWFWFLFH

This stands for Fight, Win, Fight, Win, Fight, Lose, Fight Harder. 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. A musical mom I know tells her children that 'practice makes PERMANENT, GOOD practice makes perfect!' If people in the early stages of a group learn that all it takes is a phone call to get things done, they'll look to the same strategy next time. 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 1971, when he gave me and another raw recruit our 6 hours of basic training before he sent us out door to door. He used the initials I S R on the chalkboard in the dingy little office at Broad and Public (I thought it was a pretty apt address for a community group - and I'm NOT making it up!). 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. 'The bulldozers are coming and you'll be out on the street tomorrow' is far better than 'would you like to be part of a community planning process'.

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?) is the toughest of all. 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. Who would have said that East Toledo could get agreement and construction on a $10 million dollar road project that would open up employment possibilities for their neighborhood, and only five years from concept to construction? 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. Some factors to consider include: who is effected by the problem, and can I get to them? How much does the problem hurt them, and how hard are they likely to fight? Are they able to escape easily, or is standing and fighting their only option? What resources are we likely to need and can we get them? On the other side, who benefited from the problem the way things are, and how much? Could they easily give us what we want, or would it cost them, and how much? Who else is peripherally hurt - or helped - by the way things are? How would the solution we seek change this equation? Could we go after something that would help us just as much, but get us more friends? In the end, all we can do is step out. The more we've tried to peer ahead, the less likely we are to stumble.

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THE TEN RULES OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

1. Nobody's going to come to the meeting unless they've got a reason to come to the meeting.

2. Nobody's going to come to a meeting unless they know about it.

3. If an organization doesn't grow, it will die.

4. Anyone can be a leader.

5. The most important victory is the group itself.

6. Sometimes winning is losing.

7. Sometimes winning is winning.

8. If you're not fighting for what you want, you don't want enough.

9. Celebrate!

10. Have fun!

The first rule: Nobody's going to come to the meeting unless they've got a reason to come to the meeting. Like many of my ten 'rules', this seems self-evident. All of them, however, represent lessons that I have learned over twenty years of making the same mistakes, taking the same basics for granted, and paying the price over and over again, until the lesson is finally learned. I have observed this rule being broken by groups all across the country, groups with experience, groups with talented staff and leaders, who know better, or should. Giving folks a REASON to attend means two things. First, interpreting the issue as related to them. This means developing a 'line' or a 'rap' that sells the issue simply and personally. Even if the issue has been thought through, if the story can't be told simply and quickly in an exciting way, the people are less likely to respond. The organizer has to be able to answer the question 'what's in it for me?' We must GIVE people the reason - this should have been thought through in the planning stage, but in the actual implementation of a campaign, there must be considerable attention to how it's going to be communicated. For example, if the issue is the need for better equipment at the local park, there should be more than one approach, going beyond the obvious. Kids who might use the park will be attracted because the new equipment might be fun. How to sell the issue to their parents? What about neighbors who don't have kids? People who live too far away to benefit directly? A planning group usually grapples with this problem when they're putting together the flyer and the phone call 'rap' sheet - or they should. In this case, a phone rap might look like this:

Call Sheet - Parks Meeting - call in results to : Joe Schmoe, 123-4567 by Wednesday at 7 pm.

"Hi, my name is ______, and I'm calling for the MidRiver Neighborhood Organization. Do you have children in school?"

IF YES: We're having a meeting about the playground tomorrow night over at the school at 7:30. Have your children ever been injured on the broken equipment? (LISTEN) Have they ever been cut or hurt on the asphalt? (LISTEN) Would you like to have a safe, well equipped facility to send them to? Well, this is what we're working for. We have the head of Parks for the City coming, and we want to show him just how many people want action. Will you be able to come to the meeting?

IF NO: Have you ever been bothered by the kids hanging out on the corners or playing on the street? (LISTEN) Does it bother you that the parks on the other side of the river have brand new equipment, and kids here in MidRiver have to play in the glass and asphalt, on broken swings? Did you know they just spent $28,000 to put grass in the park on River Road, and it's been 14 years since they spent a dime on our park? We're having a meeting about the playground tomorrow night over at the school at 7:30. We have the head of Parks for the City coming, and we want to show him just how many people want action. Will you be able to come to the meeting?

Names & Numbers------Yes ------No ------Ride

1. 2. 3. 4. These two 'raps' seek to interpret the problem in terms of the self interest of the person you're talking to, and thus to get their interest aroused enough to come out.

The second aspect of a REASON to come to the meeting is what happens at the meeting. If the people in the audience are there just to cover a chair, and they are not asked to participate, or there's no chance to ask questions or tell their story, they will find it easier and easier to drop out. The agenda for the meeting should always include a time for individual stories to be told, to put a human face on the problem. Mrs. Schultz should be lined up in advance to come to the mike and tell about poor little Otto who went to the hospital for stitches after he fell off the broken swing. The chair should ask if anybody else has had kids hurt, and ask them to stand, or raise their hand, or even come to the mike. The agenda should include parts for lots of people - not just one chair who speaks and leads and asks the questions of the city folks or the other targets, but plenty of folks trooping up to do their pre-assigned parts -- the more folks who have a part, the more are likely to come out. Even spectators can get the feeling that, next time, they could have an important part in the group, if there are obviously lots of parts being given out. A one- person show, however, tends to stay that way.

The second rule is: Nobody's going to come unless they know about it. This is another painfully obvious point. Time after time, though, I have helped groups analyze their shrinking participation, and found that they've ignored this rule. They publicize meetings through the newsletter. The newsletter is distributed door to door by block captains. Half the blocks have no captains. On the other half, the newsletters were delivered for distribution on Tuesday night after 7, and the meeting was held on Thursday. Even where the conscientious block captains actually went to every house on the block and dropped one off on Wednesday afternoon when they got home from work, about a third of the folks didn't go to the front porch until the next morning, another third read the story about crime on the front page, but missed the meeting notice, and another third thought it MUST be next Thursday they're talking about. Many groups rely on a regular meeting night and a telephone tree to get people out. Others just invite the ones who came to this meeting to come back to the next one.

In fact, there is an almost unbreakable ratio - for every one hundred folks who get a timely, well crafted written notice and a follow-up personal contact by phone or in person, ten will come out. Late notices or wordy, unclear ones cut further into the final count. No personal contact cuts even further. Organizing is hard work, and there are few shortcuts worth taking. A group that doesn't plant seeds with effective outreach should not be surprised when the harvest is sparse. The third rule is: if an organization doesn't grow, it will die. A good outreach effort will bring out new recruits. These folks must be put to work. Somebody has to recognize their effort in coming out, and talk to them, welcome them, give them a chance to get into things. Could they do calls for the next meeting? Would they like to help with posters for the fundraiser? What did they think of the meeting? Each issue should bring in new folks, and there should always be a next issue on the horizon, to get out and touch the community with, to find yet newer folks to get involved with. People naturally fade in and out of involvement as their own life's rhythms dictate - people move, kids take on baseball for the Spring, they get involved with Lamaze classes, whatever. If there are not new people coming in, the shrinkage can be fatal. New issues and continuous outreach are the only protection against this natural process.

Rule four: anyone can be a leader. I have had the privilege of working with a wide variety of very talented community leaders in twenty years of community organizing. I can safely and in all humility admit that not one new leader was 'developed' because of my foresight and careful cultivation and training of a new recruit who showed clear promise. Almost without exception, the best leaders have been people who rose to the occasion of a crisis. The priest who spoke at all our news conferences got sick at the last minute. Who can take his place? Mrs. H., you're the only one at home, and the thing starts in five minutes - let me pick you up and brief you in the car. What do you mean, Mr. President, you're not going to run for reelection? This organization is big, it's new, and nobody else is ready! Mr. T., you have to run, or else we'll have those guys from UpThere in charge of the group, and we can't have that, can we? The only wisdom or craft I can claim in any of these scenes is an ability to convince people to step into a tough situation and give it a try, coupled with a shameless willingness to praise and support a person after their first shaky performance. They did the rest. Anybody can be a leader. A good community organization provides a lot of people with a lot of opportunities to practice, to try it out, to learn by doing. A broad team of folks who can lead is built by constantly bringing new people into leadership roles and supporting them in learning from this experience.

Rule five. The most important victory is the group itself. This starts a series of rules about winning. Winning is what organizing is about. Winning without building is a hollow process, though. We need to celebrate the simple fact of survival, given the odds most groups face. The way to ensure that a group is built out of activity on issues is to create a structure that governs the group and bring people who work on issues into the governance of the group. In a mature organization this happens through elections, and the elections should at least bring new people in, even if they are not contests where folks vie for the votes to outdo their 'opponents'. A growing organization should pay close attention to this as well, through steering committees or leadership meetings where folks who are mostly involved in issues get brought into the deliberations on priorities, strategies, structure and the 'business' of the group. Even if they choose to say no, the opportunity to join in setting the course of the group makes it more their own. A group that is governed by one set of folks and involves a whole different set as beneficiaries or volunteers is never going to be a real people's organization. No empowerment ever comes from well meaning outsiders helping the helpless.

Rule six: Sometimes winning is losing. Remember in our initial discussion of the process of organizing we talked about the FWFWFLFH method. A group that never loses is probably just too naive or nearsighted to understand what's happening. Part of the political literacy that community organizing ought to impart is the ability to stare the facts in the face and understand that the politician who just talked for twenty minutes didn't really mean that he supports us - he really said he wasn't going to do what we want. Beyond this, we need to be careful that we ask for something we really want. A community organization that I worked with in Providence once undertook a two year campaign to open up membership in the United Way to more minority and non-traditional agencies. One result was that the group itself became a member agency! We thought this was the ultimate victory! No more spaghetti suppers, no more grant writing, no more scratching around for free paper for the mimeo - easy street. When a big Federal grant came down for anti-crime organizing, all other fundraising ground to a halt, everybody got a raise, the group bought a van and moved into a nice office. The dark side soon surfaced, though. The highly motivated but formerly low paid staff started to get resistance from leadership when it came time to challenge the real power brokers downtown - these folks are big in the United Way! We're going to be cutting our own throats! Leaders started to bid for the job openings, which now were much more lucrative - and those who didn't get hired felt that they had been put down unfairly, and stopped volunteering - if their fellow leader was now going to get to take home all that money, well he could make the phone calls! The final straw was the fight over the van. Who gets to drive it home at night -the new director of the anticrime project or the president - the fight was vicious and bitter, and the staff that thought they'd signed on for a crusade left in disgust, and the organization took a two year nosedive, leading to de- funding by the United way and death. This group thought they wanted respectability and acceptance, and were willing to pay any price to get them. In the end, they lost their power and they lost their integrity, and finally they lost their very existence.

Rule Seven - sometimes winning is winning. Most community organizations take on little slices of the problems that confront their community. The achievements seem insignificant, and the progress seems so slow! A good organizer knows how to build a sense of power and accomplishment, while not ignoring the problems that still remain to be solved. Every group has a cynic, who says 'okay, we got a million for our loan program. There's still vacant buildings out there we won't be able to fix!' This can lead to discouragement. Nobody can fight day after day without some hope, and acknowledging the victories along the way builds that hope. The East Toledo Community Organization fought for three years to get a new road built to open up the industrial potential of the area. There were plenty of reasons to complain about what we didn't get - no job guarantees from new industry, no required hiring of neighborhood folks on the road construction. The victory was that we got a ten million dollar road built, though, and we worked very hard to let the whole community - inside East Toledo and outside - know that that's what we wanted, and that's what we got. This rule - know when to stop and claim the win - leads very directly to the ninth, but that's not coming until after the next one.

Rule Eight - If you're not FIGHTING for what you want, you don't want enough. We've talked before about the purpose of community organizing - building power. It's a lot like lifting weights. If you stay with the little baby weights, you'll never get the strength to do really heavy work. Community organizers know that it's possible to keep busy doing stuff and still get nowhere. It's possible to define your goals by what's achievable, and look like you're succeeding. The tragedy is that a group that never defines a difficult goal will never achieve a meaningful accomplishment. This extends, in the arena of power, to conflict, which we've talked about before. For now, remember the rule and check up on your group to make sure SOMEBODY thinks you're too strong, too forceful, too demanding, too abrasive. That probably means you're getting close to where the real power is.

Rule Nine - celebrate! I once ordered a young organizer in a new group to find some excuse and hold a victory party within a week or face firing! This young woman could only see the tough part - the half empty glass. She was starting to infect the neighborhood leadership with this negativity, and the group was sinking fast. Much to her surprise and delight (it saved her job), when she started talking to leaders, they came up with lots of reasons to celebrate! They wrote a VICTORY flyer, organized a block party with a cookout and games and awards, and turned the whole spirit of the group around - now they were winners! Everybody wants to be with a winner!

Finally - rule number ten - have fun! I started organizing with an all business attitude that looked at a meeting as being over when the gavel fell, and at the hanging out and laughing and drinking coffee afterwards as a distraction and a waste of time. I missed the community part of community organizing. These people were building a community, and sharing their fears, their hopes and their vision of the future over a beer at the club after the action was just as important as the planning meeting. I learned that meals and birthdays and Christmas parties and the summer picnic are organizing too. I learned that the posters that got made in the office with pizza and pop by the gang of volunteers we could scare up on a Friday night were far more important to the organization than the same posters made separately in peoples' homes. I learned that using humor to embarrass a public official brought a feeling of power to our folks that straight, serious conversation about our rights and their responsibilities could never come close to. I learned the power of FUN! and I vowed to try to make organizing at least as much fun as TV.

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DEFINING AN ACTION STRATEGY

Every group should plan. This is not to say that things don't change, and often in ways that have not been anticipated. Real community organizing, though, is an educational process of action and reflection that puts people into the power game as players. Planning should be a participatory process, then. A leadership group, with staff participation if there is an organizer on board, should plan out the strategy and steps on an issue.

First, the issue is defined, the goals for the campaign set, and the target selected. All these three factors are interrelated. As we discussed in the section on choosing and cutting an issue, there needs to be careful calculation involved, but finally the group needs to settle on their best guess as to just how broadly to define the issue, and on what to go for and who to go after.

Generally, the best plan has one target, a person who could take action to deliver what the group wants. This person needs to be within reach - a Toledo group shouldn't build its whole plan around getting somebody in New York to make a decision, but rather should find a local target that they can put pressure on in a variety of ways. The more you know about the target, the more you can develop pressure tactics.

In developing a plan, look to cover the 'what ifs.' There are usually three possible outcomes to any plan. If you've invited the mayor to your meeting, either he'll come or he won't come or he'll send somebody else to represent him (a variation on #2, but we'll call it a third alternative). The planning group needs to talk about what the groups' response will be in all three eventualities. If the mayor comes, how will he be welcomed, where will he sit, how many minutes will he be given, will we let him talk first or only in response to our questions, will he stay for the next part of the meeting or should we ask him to leave - all these questions need to be dealt with. If he doesn't come, when will we know, and is there anything we could/should do to get him to change his mind, like maybe an action at city hall or at the golf course? If they send a representative, who will it be, and do we accept him/her or not? In the same way, there are three possible responses from the mayor to our demands - yes, no or mushy/maybe. If he says yes, can we pin him down to a specific and enforceable commitment, and if he says yes right away, is there any follow-up that we should ask for while he's in an agreeable mood? If we get an outright no, do we have any recourse, or a fallback position? Can we get the mayor to recommend that somebody else do something instead? Can we lay out our next step, that will try to change his mind? Who will be chairing the meeting at that point, and can we get some mileage out of a no, with booing and hissing and so on, rather than just roll over and play dead? Finally, if the mayor says maybe/mushy, can the chair characterize this as a no, to push the mayor to a clearer yes statement? Can we pin the mayor down on the next step, so we know when the maybe/mushy might be converted to a yes or no? In fact, the planning group needs to talk about the fact that most maybe/mushy answers really mean NO, and they can be prepared to reject this kind of answer. A planning group could review peoples' experience with meetings and agreements and talk about just what constitutes a yes or a no. It's especially important to be prepared with your next step, so that a no or a maybe/mushy doesn't end the meeting, but rather you can announce that we'll all be down at council on Tuesday to protest this lack of cooperation, or we'll be calling for a new state law requiring the city to do this, starting on Monday with a press conference, or whatever...

In developing the plan, never make empty threats. Threats are very valuable, but if once you are unable to make good on them, your credibility will be weakened for a long, long time. I worked with a neighborhood organization in the Black community in Providence, Rhode Island in the early '70's. They were concerned about the lack of good jobs for young people. A group of leaders had identified the beer distributor that was located in the heart of the area as a particularly bad actor, with lots of minority beer drinkers but no minority drivers, warehouse personnel or sales staff. We held a long series of revival style planning sessions, invited the company to a public meeting that they ignored and declared a boycott on Narragansett beer, statewide. I was excited - this was my first organizing job, and already we're taking on the big guys, big time. Unfortunately, boycotting Narragansett beer in Rhode Island is like trying to boycott air. It's a great target, but we didn't have the troops to carry it off. The first night, 30 of the 100 folks who signed up at the meeting to come and picket showed up. We downsized our plan - less pickets, less stores - and went out anyway. The next night, only ten arrived. We did one store. The third night, only the picket leader and me were there.

We were demoralized. I went to my Director, a legendary organizer, trained in Chicago. What's wrong with these people, why don't they want to fight? He pointed out, in language clear and straightforward (that better be the last time, or you're out) that I was looking in the wrong place for blame. As the organizer, it was MY job to design a campaign that could work, so if it wasn't working I should try to figure out why, and fix the plan, not blame the people...He led me through an analysis that identified the weak points of the plan. First, the group was made up largely of people who cared in general terms about getting more and better jobs for minority neighborhood residents, but very few actual job seekers, so the self interest was weak, and the commitment level low. Second, the tactic of a boycott is a long term, people- intense one, requiring a vast network of willing workers, and likely to succeed when there are lots of alternate products that folks could use. Narragansett was the cheapest brand, the locally produced brands, and held intense brand loyalty - tough to take on. In the end, we developed a quick and dirty approach to saving the campaign - and the reputation of the group. We did a week of outreach with a flyer that said, "Need a job? Come to the Meeting!" We took actual applications from people, explaining that we would turn them all over to the company at a certain time and in a group. We sent a letter demanding that the company meet us, in the street in front of their place, at noon on Friday. We called al the original leaders, and all the job applicants, and got a hundred folks there. The leaders presented a package of applications and a list of demands: accept these applications and pledge to give everybody an equal chance at all your job openings and we'll call off the boycott. Refuse at your peril! Needless to say, the media loved it, the company bought it and the organization declared a victory and got the heck out of the issue. A number of folks actually got jobs, too, and my career was preserved, with a difficult lesson learned.

Plan to build on the reaction from the other side. One of our most successful campaigns grew from an almost disastrous failure, through taking advantage of the reaction. Parents at the Southside Elementary were concerned about cars speeding by the playground. They were interested in a little activism, but not much. They asked our help in developing a petition for speed limit signs, and I met with a committee and urged them to make an appointment to deliver the petitions to the traffic engineer as a group. They agreed, made the appointment, and got the petitions signed. I arrived at the school at 3 pm on the appointed day, to find not five parents but only one - a short, meek, VERY pregnant mother who was also very reluctant to go alone to a big city office and talk to the official city traffic guy. As I had her in the car already, she found herself at the door of the city office before she could convince me to take her home and just mail the petitions. "While we're here, we might as well keep the appointment." The traffic engineer, a young, brash Italian-American, proceeded to treat Mrs. M like dirt. He made us wait, he dismissed her concerns as unimportant, he didn't offer her a chair, he said the petitions probably wouldn't make a difference, he generally disregarded and disrespected the whole situation. In the car, on the way home, I agitated Mrs. M mercilessly. "Did you hear the way he talked to you? The nerve of this guy, who pays his salary, anyway! I'll bet he wouldn't treat a white person that way! And you six months pregnant! doesn't he have any manners?" I urged her to call the four other ladies who couldn't make it, and tell them the story. I asked her to call the neighborhood leadership and tell them the story as well, and ask for a few minutes on the agenda of the next area public meeting. By the time she'd told the story a half dozen times, and those folks had told it a few more, it came back to me as a physical attack, with racist slurs! The issue took off like a rocket - it led to a public meeting with 75 parents and over 100 children, and a hit on the installation dinner of the traffic engineer as the Grand Master of the Masons' lodge...but that's another story.

Finally, when a meeting is designed to get an agreement from a person, the meeting should be structured to tie that agreement down, tight. Two tried and true techniques for this are the written agreement and the report card. Often, an official or a target can be asked to sign a written agreement that embodies the demands. If they do, you know that their answer is really yes. If they don't sign, they will usually get much more specific about what they DO mean, and sometimes will sign a revised version so you know what they ARE agreeing to. The other approach is to post a list of demands, with a check-off spot marked YES and another for NO. This gives the chair a technique for concentrating the target on a specific answer that goes beyond "I'll do my best". The meeting can be focused around the list of demands very simply with either of these methods.

Evaluating the success of your effort is a critical part of any organizing campaign. Don't wait until the end to find out if you were effective. As you carry out your strategy and tactics, assess and evaluate your efforts. One approach is to have the group members answer the following three questions:

1. Is our strategy achieving the desired results--are we closer to the goal?

2. What's working, what isn't?

3. Are our tasks (actions) working--are they helping the group gain support?

An evaluation of the strategy and its results may lead a group to conclude that the reason why they have not met their goal is that the strategy was not fully developed. For example, the "target" of the group's efforts may not have had the power to make the change the group sought, or perhaps the timing of the campaign was not right; or a group may conclude that the strategy and tactics used were correct but not sufficient in number or frequency.

If your assessment indicates that your strategy is not working, you may need to revise your approach. Re-evaluating and changing tactics is completely acceptable. The bottom line for assessing success is: Did your efforts create the change you wanted? You will want to know what might the group do differently next time. Knowing what worked can help in planning your next organizing campaign.

This paper is presented as part of the H-Urban Seminar on the History of Community Organizing and Community-Based Development. It is part of an ongoing debate about Alinsky-style organizing, of which most of the papers and discussion are available at http://h-net.msu.edu/~urban/comm-org/alinsky. For additional information on the Seminar, visit the WWW Home Page at http://h-net2.msu.edu/~urban/comm-org or write to [email protected].

The Square Pegs Find Their Groove: Reshaping the Organizing Circle by Francis Calpotura and Kim Fellner

Sure, we progressive organizers are a skeptical bunch, the better to laugh in the face of near-impossible odds. But dig to the core, and most of us still cradle two intertwined dreams:

• The equitable redistribution of wealth and power to assure each person the necessities of healthful physical survival and the maximal realization of human potential, in viable communities, on a planet safeguarded from degradation. • A multi-cultural, communal space where our various identities can shine and interact in an environment of equally shared power and mutual respect.

These are the ideals that truly separate us from the Right.

However, a debate is percolating in the progressive organizing community about how these two ideals are realized through our organizing practice -- and to what extent these goals are made explicit in our work.

This controversy is being mirrored in the funding community. Increasingly, the already limited number of organizing funders are choosing to support mostly congregation or faith-based organizing and the established organizing networks which emerged from the community organizing practice pioneered by Saul Alinsky. The language that tends to accompany these initiatives is that of participatory democracy and community economic development. Lost in the mix are the newer, more experimental organizing efforts, many of them based in communities of color, the gay/lesbian and immigrant communities, where issues of identity, diversity and the challenge of prevailing capitalist practice are among the explicit primary goals.

It is, in part, a re-hash of an old polemic -- do fights for incremental changes necessarily contain, or even lead to, a critique of prevailing social and economic structures, or do they only re-divide the same pie in other ways? Increasingly since the 1960s, we are also asking: Do organizations that engage in these fights -- purportedly to alter relations of power between the powerful and the dispossessed -- build more just and equitable internal structures or do they merely replicate the patterns and culture of the larger society? An assumption of Alinsky-based organizing practice has been that if you build powerful neighborhood organizations that wield that bigger slice of influence or money in the offices of government or capital, then a fairer and more ecumenical community will result.

Based on our understandings and experiences, we believe that, while this approach can change the location of a highway or give parents a greater voice on their local school board, it alone is insufficient to build a truly equitable, multi-cultural larger society -- or even a progressive movement. It is like the San Francisco neighborhood organization strong enough to win speed bumps on the local thoroughfare, but unwilling to decisively oppose, much less work for, the defeat of an anti-immigrant ballot initiative. Yet racism is surely as crucial to the ultimate health of an urban community as traffic.

We would suggest that multi-cultural organizing -- embracing work that is specifically anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, or has as its primary goal the development of equitable, multi-cultural communities -- is a critical organizing arena, requiring a more varied palette of approaches, practices and techniques than have been customary in traditional community organizing. We suspect that, while we constantly discuss these wedge issues as crucial to address if we are to move beyond our current disarray as a movement and a society, far more organizers and resources are deployed to fight city hall than to fight racism.

Likewise, we believe that greater inclusion in the existing economic and political structures of this country, while empowering, is inadequate to bring about a democratic redistribution of resources. Democratic participation in the service of capitalism is not enough to change prevailing economic priorities. If we only buy into the existing economic system, without questioning its underlying assumptions, we will be unable to move from the over-riding criterion of financial gain and the survival of the fiscally fittest to a working concept of the common good.

Our goal is to reshape the organizing circle. We see ourselves as part of a community where traditional organizing to build powerful neighborhood organizations on immediate, winnable issues, union and class-based economic organizing, and the newer forms of organizing that explicitly address identity conflicts, promote multi-culturalism and challenge existing cultural frameworks, will all thrive.

And there is an additional leap that we, who identify ourselves as Left, need to make. For too long, we have regarded organizing to build a broad class-based movement for economic justice and identity organizing as competing, even antithetical, goals; and at their respective worst, they have been. We believe it+s time for these two streams to converge, and for a new synthesis to emerge. The Right has already served warning that if we cannot fuse the two pieces of our vision, they will forever play one off against the other -- and we will achieve neither. That is our challenge, if we are to build the society to which we aspire.

And therein lies this tale.

****

It seems to be fashionable these days, in certain liberal intellectual circles, to view identity politics -- political action dictated by oppressions based on immutable personal identities of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc. -- as the murderers of a powerful progressive movement. This position is exemplified by Todd Gitlin's book, The Twilight of Common Dreams. In the progressive organizing community, it is represented by Mike Miller's critique of Beyond the Politics of Place , Gary Delgado's 1994 work on new directions in community organizing.

Miller and Gitlin are struggling to protect legacies of our progressive past -- including the classic American democratic vision and the early civil rights movement. Both trace the deep fault lines in the movement today to an obsession with the differences that set us apart from each other, rather than the adoption of broadly acceptable goals of economic equity and political democracy.

As Gitlin laments, "What has become of the ideal of the Left...that federates people of different races, genders, sexualities, or for that matter, religions and classes? Why has this ideal been neglected or abandoned by so many of the poor and minorities who should share the Left's ideal of equity? Why are so many people attached to their marginality and why is so much of their intellectual labor spent developing theories to justify it? Why insist on difference with such rigidity, rancor, and blindess, to the exclusion of the possibility of common knowledge and common dreams?"

Mike Miller brings a similar plaint into his defense of the community organizing discipline developed by Saul Alinsky, which he implies is the only legitimate practice worthy of the name.

The definition of Alinsky-based organizing championed by Miller includes: "building units of permanent power, rooted in local communities, led by and accountable to local people." Its goals tend to involve redistributing power away from unaccountable institutions and towards the organization; with a professional organizer who brings the organization into being, and nurtures indigenous leadership from the organization's membership base. Characteristics of this organizing practice have included a pragmatic focus on issues that are "immediate, specific and winnable," and the dominance of white male organizers, albeit ones of tremendous intellect and energy. Delgado proposes that "the ground-breaking work, the innovation, the experimentation, and the motivating livid anger that comes from the truly oppressed is at the heart of the work in immigrants' rights organizations, gay and lesbian organizations, disabled people's organizations and organizations of people of color. It is these formations, compelled always to struggle with the politics of difference, that will force the practitioners of traditional CO to move 'beyond the politics of place' to address the cultural dimensions of power in their own organizations, as well as in society at large."

Miller, however, likes the place he's in, and doesn't want to move. He argues that not only does Delgado malign Alinsky's legacy and misrepresent its contemporary offshoots, but he also contends that current Alinsky-based, and especially congregation-based organizing efforts, are changing sufficiently to meet the needs of women and minorities, so as to make new forms unnecessary.

Don't get us wrong. We are in debt to this legacy, which propelled many of us to a justice vocation and drew us to practice community and/or union organizing. From it, we learned to value the process whereby people come to act collectively against injustice, through which the disenfranchised and oppressed achieve voice and power. From among Alinsky's adherents, we have frequently found our own mentors, and culled our own organizing experiences.

Furthermore, we value the results these organizations have yielded and admire (even lust after) the longevity and savvy at marshaling resources that the organizing networks have achieved. In addition, many of us first try to fit our feet to the Alinsky footprint and adopt many of the assumptions and techniques that he, and his descendents, developed. We too want to nurture organizations that can win voice and power for our communities.

However, the past 25 years have added new dimensions to our efforts -- and refocused the lens through which we view the world. The labor movement, the New Left and the organizing discipline that Saul Alinsky built, despite their luster, also engendered many flaws of the larger society, notably the dominance of white males in the power structures of their own organizations. The dissonance between stated principle and practice stoked the demand by activist women, people of color, and later gays and lesbians and the disabled, that the movement itself live up to its rhetoric or, in some cases, rethink its verities and structures.

Most of us have our own tales of conflict, chaos and ludicrous excess along the mult-cult trail, but few of us who envision a successfully diverse society would return to the old world order of progressive action -- the one that preceded the emergence of identity-based power blocs demanding an equitable share of leadership and resources. The reason is simple: We would still be sidelined in the real decision-making structures of the organizations to which we devote our energies, and our own experiences and priorities would be relegated to a subsidiary position, if not entirely ignored.

This is not to say that traditional CO has not changed or absorbed some of the lessons of identity struggles. Miller suggests that, "throughout its history, broadly-based community organizing has dealt with inter-racial and ethnic tension and conflict and has built multi-racial and ethnic organizations .... Many of these organizations have people of color on their organizing staffs. Many of them conduct bi- and tri-lingual meetings. A growing number of people of color are now directors of organizing projects within networks. Further, most of the white males in these organizations are seriously addressing the gender and racial/ethnic imbalances in their respective networks."

However, this is not really adequate for developing a multi-cultural community. The critical difference is between the concept of inclusion and that of self- determination. Some traditional community organizing has moved, in more and less effective ways, to be inclusionary, bringing women and people of color into their existing organizational structure and culture. But the women and people of color who rise in the ranks of traditional community organizing endeavors are those who buy into the traditional culture -- a policy and practice of affirmative action, at best. That is far different from having the room to redefine or transform organizational life.

Nor is Miller the only one who advocates that diversity play second fiddle to pragmatism. As we were writing this, we received a mailing from a fledgling national formation, suggesting that their organizational culture, "...should not get so bogged down with diversity issues that we lose the focus on economic democracy....The fundamental issue is reconciling the tension between 'going smarter' and 'going broader.'" A peculiar formulation at best.

This question of reframing organizing culture is hard to capture. Traditional Alinsky-based organizing practice does indeed have its own culture, which is largely hierarchical, defined by a specific methodology, focused on issues that can be won sooner rather than later and uncontroversial enough to be broadly subscribed to within the target geographic area -- i.e. not so contentious that it alienates key members or funders.

But these cultural indicators do not merely deter the "square pegs" from feeling welcome in the organization or impede the development of diverse leadership. They also exact a price in building what one young organizer we know calls an "holistically progressive" societal vision. It is an inevitable consequence of funding only congregation-based organizing, for example, that the issues of gay/lesbian rights and reproductive choice will be swept off the organizing agenda.

This is made explicit by Miller's discussion on ideology and the choice of issues. He asks whether we would dismiss the approach of an IAF project minister who "also thinks there is more power in being part of an inter-racial alliance that includes organizations that are based in white ethnic communities elsewhere in New York and which aren't 'progressive' in the sense that they have (quoting Delgado) 'a perspective that views racism as a primary mode of oppression in US society.' Anyone who tried to organize white ethnics in Queens on that basis wouldn't get very far.

Miller notes that the minister "seems to prefer that he be in relationship with a broadly-based organization than with one that has a 'progressive' way of understanding racism.... Should the test include gay marriages? Or pro- abortion? Or: fill in the blank. While you're filling in the blank you better think about all the Latino and Black Baptists, Pentecostals and Catholics who agree with Catholic ethnics on some of these issues."

But this is exactly the reason that the emergence of identity has surfaced new directions in the progressive organizing arena -- and these are exactly the issues that the Right has raised with such gusto to woo our own constituents.

There is no demand that organizers in a white ethnic neighborhood in Queens lead with anti-racism or pro-abortion issues. Rather, there is an imperative that other organizing occurs that does address these critical issues head on -- even if they do not lend themselves neatly to the traditional admonition that the issues we select should be "immediate, specific and winnable," or mimic the structures and techniques that have worked in different circumstances, or even turn out large numbers of people on command.

Miller warns that, "Those organizations that speak out on what they think is right, without regard to effectiveness, may be prophetic voices, but if that is all they do they are sure to remain far away from where decisions are being made."

Yet, if there is not a second organizing path, with a different culture, that takes these risks, how are we to address the attitudes that can turn the most dedicated union member or community safety activist into a vote for the latest immigrant-bashing or tax-slashing initiative?

If we do not explore organizing that raises a direct challenge to unfettered capitalism, how will we begin the task of refocusing our society on the importance of collective good over private gain? And how are we going to make the leaps that forge a proactive class-based solidarity that transcends barriers of conflicting identities?

It is part of our work to incorporate the new realities of our society, to take the lessons of identity struggles and forge the next step. In doing so, we need to build on the wisdom that we have gleaned from existing organizing disciplines and experiences -- and take some leaps into the unknown.

In our experience, for example, communities are often too fractured to engage in meaningful collective activity before building a culture that embraces its diverse members. This disarray has been compounded by the Right's ideological influence in framing critical issues in ways that divide, rather than unify, communities.

When parents of color fight queer activists over school curricula, or when neighbors are pitted against each other over the siting of polluting industries in their community, then the emergence of a powerful movement is stunted. A few months ago, Black ministers refused to attend an action that started out at the headquarters of a gay/lesbian organization -- even though they supported the action itself -- ironically, part of an affirmative action campaign.

Recently, Labor Party Advocates, an effort to develop a progressive, labor- based third party, struck reproductive choice off their platform so as not to alienate some of their Latino supporters. This capitulation epitomizes the "class struggle uber alles" approach to organizing, that discounts the fundamental rights of part of the collective as a strategic expedient -- and in the process disregards all the lessons we should have learned in the last 30 years. Even the Republican Party seems to have second thoughts about antagonizing the majority of women voters. Yet the LPA leadership will undoubtedly express dismay if we fail to embrace their efforts -- and blame those bad identity politics for blinding us to our own class self-interest.

These examples from our own organizing world graphically challenge the traditional assumption that broad-based organizing efforts that tackle immediate, winnable issues will inevitably lead to a more equitable and tolerant society -- or that progressive views on economics or class will yield progressive views on gender, race or sexual orientation (or vice versa for that matter).

Therefore, some of us are exploring an inverse proposition to prevailing practice: Perhaps, if you forge a diverse and respectful community culture, then creative and cohesive work to build organizations to redistribute power will follow.

This approach asserts that the task of forging an equitable, respectful, multi- cultural, shared, cohesive, progressive justice community out of many diverse and competing identities is, in and of itself, an appropriate and necessary organizing objective. As such, it demands the allocation of time, personnel and financial resources; it cannot be relegated to the sidelines, as the casual by- product of other, more tangible organizing goals. It also requires a different set of techniques and sensibilities, including heightened emphasis on political education that links economics with wedge issues, the celebration of diverse identities and the forging of a new, shared culture that embraces the broadest possible constituency for a progressive economic, social and environmental agenda.

It will require experimentation, some of which will fail. But who is to say, in the long run, that it will not contribute new strengths and dimensions to our collective struggle for justice and equity?

Once upon a time, when we were young, almost all newspapers and major printing jobs were typeset in hot metal by feisty, frequently radical craftsmen, who were organized in the typographical unions and had won good pay for their labor.

Then computers came into use -- "cold type" -- and younger workers with less craft, frequently women, making low wages, were hired to sit at the terminals and type in copy.

Because the wages and working conditions were low, the cold type workers asked to join the typographers union. But the typographers refused to let them in, because they were not viewed as craftspeople, only typists -- and lots of them were women, to boot.

But cold type technology ruled. The machines and programs became more sophisticated, and the computer typesetters became highly skilled in their own right, perfecting their speed, adaptability and artistry. The hot metal shops closed down; the men who had so carefully guarded their craft became as rare as manatees.

And the world of computer typesetting, and the generation of women and men who do that work, have remained largely unorganized.

There is nothing to be gained by defining a dynamic, dedicated, diverse and innovative new wave of organizers as pretenders, except a shrinking corps of purists. We want to honor our mentors and learn the craft as they have practiced it. And we also want, and need, to make some new additions based on our own life experiences, the conditions we encounter in our communities and the changing times. Together, we can build a stronger progressive movement that contends for power while reconstructing communal space. A movement where square pegs can find their groove. The time has come for us to reshape our progressive organizing circle. In the struggle for justice, there is work enough for all.

Francis Calpotura is the Co-Director of the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), and Kim Fellner directs the National Organizers Alliance (NOA). You can write to us at: CTWO, 1218 E. 21st Street, Oakland, CA 94606, or at NOA, 715 G Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003.

Copyright (c) 1996 by Francis Calpotura and Kim Fellner, all rights reserved. This work may be copied in whole or in part, with proper attribution, as long as the copying is not-for-profit "fair use" for research, commentary, study, or teaching. *No* part of the work may be used for profit without prior permission of the authors. For other permissions, contact the authors.

This paper is presented as part of the Papers series for COMM-ORG: The On-line Conference on Community Organizing and Development. Copyright is held by the author. To cite, use: [author] [date] [title], paper presented on COMM-ORG: The On-Line Conference on Community Organizing and Development. http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers.htm. CONFLICT & COOPERATION IN MACRO THEORY & PRACTICE

By Moshe ben Asher, Ph.D.

[email protected]

CONTENTS

Introduction

Cycle of Cooperation, Competition, Conflict, and Negotiation

Theoretical Underpinnings

Field of Social Action Dialectic of Social Action

Ideology & Power in Organizational Life Ideological Realities & Power Disparities Essentials of Conflict Resolution

Notes

INTRODUCTION

It's a truism that we use negotiations to conclude conflicts in social life, albeit unconditional surrender is the rare exception to the rule. Consider the gamut, from marriages to wars.

The potential for successful negotiations to end conflicts is often thought, in turn, to hinge entirely on bargaining over resources. Wars are seen to conclude with the redrawing of national boundaries, marriages end with property settlements.

But suggested here by example and theoretical explanation is the possibility that conflict resolution between organizations may depend at least as much on whether each organization's ideological reality of the other(s) in the conflict is an accurate reflection of their resource disparity.

CYCLE OF COOPERATION, COMPETITION, CONFLICT, AND NEGOTIATION

Imagine a relationship between a small, loose-knit organization of tenants and a public housing authority, a relationship in which there is cooperation but not equality. That is to say, the tenants understand their relative powerlessness and rarely if ever approach the housing officials with requests for more than what can be had for the asking. The relationship between tenant leaders and housing authority officials is "friendly and cooperative," although with an undercurrent of resentment on the tenants' side and arrogance on the housing authority side.

Now imagine that the tenants' organization has an influx of new members and several gifted leaders emerge, while simultaneously their housing conditions worsen. Assume too that with new, improved leadership, the tenants' organization becomes more disciplined. As the organization becomes more powerful--its command of resources growing--there is a palpable tension among the membership about the way tenants and their organization are being treated by the housing authority.

A few members within the tenants' organization begin to agitate for radical action. Conscious of their increased capacity, they press to have the organization exercise its influence in ways that will materially improve their housing. Countervailing this momentum is the inertia of most other tenants, even members of the tenants' organization, based on their fear of confrontation and retribution in the form of eviction by the housing authority.

The inertia is often rationalized, however, with popular ideas about why grassroots community organizations engage, more or less, in cooperation and conflict. It's commonly said that conflict is chosen by individual players as a matter of personal style, psychological need, or political ideology--and therefore should be avoided because it's not likely to serve the practical self- interests of most people. Or, to the contrary, that the emergence of a particular form of action is invariably the result of "bigger social forces"--and therefore it's futile for common people to attempt to influence such matters.

While thoughtful arguments have been made for each of these ideas, macro practitioners find it more useful to understand cooperation and conflict as the outcomes of relationship dynamics occurring between organizations and institutions in the organizational field of action. Thus they see the potential for grassroots organizations to have significant influence through their campaigns and actions.

Community organizers typically employ several methodologies to help members of grassroots organizations overcome their resistance to confrontation and conflict, simultaneously reducing the potential for destructive outcomes. Not demonizing officials who may become organizational opponents, but acknowledging that they represent adverse institutional interests and that they are "human beings who deserve to be treated with civility and respect," frequently has the effect of displacing inhibitions about confrontation and conflict. Organizing "research actions," which afford the opportunity to meet with decision-makers and "take their measure" before confronting them with specific demands, reinforces the value of self-discipline when engaged in conflict. And leadership training that focuses on overall campaign development, including negotiations, helps to create a more grounded perspective.

In the best of circumstances, the momentum based on confidence that confrontation and conflict can be constructive offsets the inertia based on fear that they will be destructive. The tension, then, that begins with the tenants' increased capacity, leads to an active "competition." The tenants' organization begins to marshal its resources--both material resources and the resources that enable it to influence wider ideological realities (e.g., with other non- member tenants, the media, and local politicians)--in order to influence institutional decision-making. The goal ultimately is to win campaigns on issues that will both relieve pressures and realize hopes, and that will build the capacity of tenants' organization itself.

On the one hand, if initially the differential in resources between the tenants and the housing authority allows the tenants to demonstrate sufficient power to give the housing authority a stake in negotiations, the competition may lead directly to resolution of issues and some shift in realities. (We will return to the idea of shifting realities momentarily.)

On the other hand, if the resource and power differential is substantial and there is no hope of getting the housing authority into good-faith negotiations, the tendency will be to move toward conflict. That is, it will be necessary for the tenants to demonstrate their organizational power--their ability to impose costs on the housing authority--as a precondition to achieving negotiations. The conflict isn't for its own sake but to create incentives for the other side to negotiate in good faith, to reach an agreement that resolves the issue.

Cycle of Cooperation, Competition,

Conflict, and Negotiation

There is, then, a discernable cycle of cooperation, competition, conflict, and negotiation in which these two organizations are engaged. These cyclical stages, along with the shifts in realities that link them, are illustrated in the diagram above. In the first instance of cooperation, we note that the shift in the tenants' resources leads to competition when the "perceptual reality of [the] more powerful [housing authority is] not congruent with [the] new resources of the less powerful [tenants' organization]." The transition from competition to conflict reflects a similar failure to appreciate new realities. And, lastly, the transition from conflict to negotiation typically reflects a demonstration of power that compels the acceptance of new realities.

THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS

Why do macro practitioners need theoretical understanding of this cycle of conflict and cooperation? Theoretical understanding is useful for many reasons. Foremost among them is that we advance our knowledge and skill as organizers through praxis, by the interplay of practice and reflection--a continuous give and take between what we do and our systematic thinking about what we do. Theory for macro practice isn't for its own sake but to guide action, especially in new and unexpected situations, when we have no prior experience, preparation, or knowledge. Theory also enables us to better analyze past and current events, and to make predictions about the future. Theory allows us to derive practice roles, hypotheses (testable propositions), and methodologies for achieving specific organizing objectives.

Field of Social Action

Every theory needs a central concept that encompasses the "universe" to be explained, connecting all of its components. Because the idea of a field of social action(1) reflects the main facets of organizing life, it's the centerpiece of this theory. The theoretical definition of the action field includes individuals and collectivities (groups, organizations, and institutions), their social processes, structures, and objectives. The theory accounts for the dynamics of power and ideology in the political economy, and, in doing so, its action-field definition distills from psychology, sociology, and political-economics, the analytical and methodological tools for macro practice.

The pivotal purpose of every organization in the action field of political economy is survival. Organizations must gather resources over and above their costs, to ensure continued life and growth. They seek resources to secure their domain and to achieve autonomy and movement toward their goals. And their field of action is animated by the cycle of cooperation, competition, conflict, and negotiation over scarce resources.

The action field has two significant dimensions for which we need theoretical explanations. These are: (1) relations of power--the building up and expenditure of resources, with adjustments effected by cooperation, competition, conflict, and negotiation; and (2) ideological realities--valued expectations about social action, including shared understandings about allied, neutral, and opposing players, their actions and the consequences that flow from them.

Three paradigmatic social science theories are drawn together here to describe the action field. The foundation is social learning theory,(2) because all human activity is an extension of individual behavior. Learning theory covers the main psychological factors that account for individual behavior: environmental cues that are prior to action, cognition (thinking and knowing), and rewarding and punishing consequences that follow action. To avoid explaining sociological processes with psychological theory, and building directly on the behavioral principles of social learning, we employ social exchange theory.(3)

Exchange theory elaborates the sociology of collective action, especially the acquisition of resources and power, and injustices in their distribution. While both learning and exchange theories admit the importance of shared, valued ideas that are linked to centers of power--usually called ideologies--they often leave this realm unexplored, taking its effects as given but beyond their purview. Theory for social construction of reality(4) makes it possible to connect ideology with learning and exchange--and thus to propose a dialectic of social action. (In the language of community organizing, rough approximations of these theoretical categories are values, which are equivalent to ideological realities, and self-interests, which are equivalent to learning and exchange contingencies.)

The action-field strands of power and ideology are interwoven in a seamless web. That is, our resources--mainly people and money--are valued not only for their direct effects, but also for broader influence, both within our own organizations and beyond. We use them to create shared ideologies (i.e., phenomenological realities) that define our allies and opponents, good and evil, winning and losing.

As already noted, relationships between organizations and institutions in the action field may be cooperative, competitive, conflicting, or in negotiation, and they are invariably in transition from one stage to another. Contrary to the popular view of the urban political economy as unorganized and chaotic, through this theoretical lens the action field appears comparatively stable and patterned. Much of the "coordination" is not by way of formal institutional arrangements but through realignments that result from competition and conflict. This activity appears as coordination only when we have an overview of the entire field of action. Because the coordination occurs largely in competition and conflict, it appears that most of the permanent cooperative arrangements are symbolic, reflecting long-term resource and power disparities.

Dialectic of Social Action To understand social action, it's helpful to see that we commonly experience events as good or bad because of ideologies that define their meanings. We create the ideologies, in our shared history and language experience. Yet the everyday behavior required to construct ideologies doesn't happen without sufficiently attractive incentives, a variety of circumstances on which our learning and exchange are contingent, and which in turn are themselves invested with value by ideologies.

It goes round and round: not only are both contingencies and ideologies operating, they are inseparable in social life, and explanations of organizational action are incomplete without reference to their dialectical relationship.

This explanation of social action, based on empirically grounded behavioral and phenomenological theories, provides a foundation for explaining the cycle of cooperation, competition, conflict, and negotiation. The cycle may be understood theoretically, for purposes of macro practice, as a response to the dialectical relationship between (1) behavioral contingencies of learning and exchange, and (2) socially constructed ideological realities. IDEOLOGY & POWER IN ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE

It is important when beginning to examine the cycle of cooperation, competition, conflict, and negotiation not to confuse stability in the field of organizational action with some notion of "balance." There may be some form of "cooperation" between master and slave, between powerful institution and weak grassroots organization, but such relationships do not reflect equality of resources and power.

Ideological Realities & Power Disparities

Balance can usefully be said to exist only in the sense that each organization's ideological definition of the other is an accurate reflection of their resource and power disparity, and thus there is a tendency toward stability in their relationship

Our example of grassroots conflict and cooperation shows that a gap grew up between the housing authority's ideological definition of the tenants' organization and the tenants' actual power.

To the extent that realities and resources (or power) between the parties were no longer congruent, that is, that their socially constructed ideological definitions of each other no longer fit their actual resource positions, an imbalance or "tension" was created that tended toward competition. The advent of this tension can be traced to resource shifts, planned or occurring unexpectedly, such that relationships between the parties--the ways in which they define each other--no longer correspond to actual resource and power disparities.

Essentials of Conflict Resolution

Successful negotiations require a recognition that both parties must win, must have some of their needs met, except in the case of "unconditional surrender," which is virtually unheard of in the world of community organization. But successful negotiations also require a reduction of power disparity: it is the building and demonstration of power that creates the essential incentive, moving the parties toward negotiations.

This is true because the essence of negotiation is bargaining of resources based on each side's perception of the other's resource leverage and ability to control wider realities. Thus a major stumbling block to resolution of issues in negotiation, particularly in instances of a first negotiation between the parties, is the unwillingness or incapacity of the previously dominant party to experience a shift in attitude about the previously subordinate party's capacity to exercise power and impose costs. The key to conflict resolution--recognizing that all such resolution is temporary--in many instances is a shift in realities. In effect, each side's ideological definition of the other must be realigned to more accurately reflect their actual resource and power positions.

When the conflict between the tenants and the housing authority has reached a stage of resolution, the tenants' organization has certainly won concessions on its issues, itself a shift in resources. But it has also achieved for itself and its opponent a new ideological definition of itself as an organizational actor, and it has established a new relationship based on that definition. No longer is the tenant organization seen as powerless, even witless. Its leaders have newly formed relationships of mutual respect with the leadership of the housing authority. The housing authority's definition of them has changed, as has their definition of themselves.

NOTES

1. Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science (Harper & Row, 1951).

2. Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory (Prentice Hall, 1976).

3. Peter M. Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life (John Wiley & Sons, 1964).

4. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1967). Three Alinskys?

by

Peter Szynka

[email protected]

Bremen / Germany

Contents

~ Introduction: Difficulties in Understanding Alinsky ~ A Bible Lesson with Saul Alinsky ~ Alinsky and Science ~ Alinsky and the American Way of Life ~ Conclusion ~ Notes ~ About the Author

Introduction: Difficulties in Understanding Alinsky1

At first, I would like to share some thoughts concerning the word tradition, before I go on to present my findings on Alinsky. Tradition could be defined as the passing on of knowledge and experience to others. Although Alinsky has written and reported basic findings on Community Organizing, I would not like to see him as a starting point of whatever tradition. This would deeply miss his intentions. Much of what Alinsky has said or written on Community Organizing was not new at his time. I do not want to say that Alinsky brought nothing new, however. But I would like to claim that Alinsky can only be understood adequately when one sees him as part of a chain within which something like tradition was passed on.

One can say that Alinsky was rooted very strongly in the Chicago School of Urban Sociology and that he learned a lot from his teachers. Furthermore, his work was subject and is subject to the interpretations of his co-workers , colleagues, trainees and students, who brought in their own views and lost others. This makes Alinsky part of a chain that we can define rather precisely. The Alinsky tradition can in no way be understood without references to his teachers and his trainees. Doing justice to the work of Saul D. Alinsky we must regard his teachers and famous sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess. Also John L. Lewis, the famous labor union leader, has to be mentioned. We also have to name Edward T. Chambers, one of Alinsky’s trainees and the present director of the Industrial Areas Foundation.

Occasionally one has to protect the teachers from their readers and trainees. This is not only true concerning Alinsky's German readers, but also his American trainees. Last but not least we have to protect Alinsky's teachers from Alinsky himself.

Further difficulties appear because many of the core concepts used by Alinsky have other, more complicated meanings in the German language. Many of these concepts are needed as scientific concepts, to help to clarify social facts. However, the same concepts are sometimes taken and turned into political concepts by people who want to fight for social change. For example, this is true for his concepts of "community", "organization", "power", "conflict", "self-interest" and "compromise". It also applies to the term used in the titles of his major works: "radical".

Another difficulty consists in the structure of the material left by Alinsky. There are scientific articles from his early period and his major works "Reveille for Radicals" and "Rules for Radicals". Sometimes they seem to be written down in a hurry and contain a lot of cryptic parts. There are a lot of lectures, fragments, interviews, press reports, films and all sorts of legends. If one works precisely with the conceptual and structural difficulties and takes note of the sources of Alinsky's ideas, one will come to fundamentally different results than in older approaches to his work.

In the following section, I would like to present three pictures of Alinsky. These pictures have two different functions. On the one hand they are analytic and try to come closer to the truth of Alinsky’s person and work. However, the presented pictures are also selected strategically. They are intended to irritate and disturb the pictures people might have won during the reception of Community Organizing in the 70s.

I will first introduce Alinsky to you as a student of the Talmud. This picture is specially dedicated to German readers. In Germany it took a long time for Community Workers to become independent from religious Community Work during the 19th century. This led to the result that religious activities in the field of Community Work are regarded with suspicion. On the other hand, in Germany today, almost nothing is known about Judaism and its impact on social work. Alinsky’s religious education prepared him very well as an independent counselor of religious institutions.

You will then get to know Alinsky as scientist and science-critic. This section is specially dedicated to readers who try to build community Organizing efforts solely on the basis of religion or faith2. This is the case with some of his successors in the USA3. Alinsky was heavily engaged in enlarging the scientific base for his community organizing efforts. Sometimes it seems that his approach should be a kind of socio-technique that would function under all conditions. This surely did not come true. But it should be recognized that he tried to enlarge, as we would say in Europe the knowledge-base of his practice.

Finally I will show Alinsky advocating the American Way of Life. This is especially dedicated to readers who tried to see Alinsky as some kind of Marxist revolutionary leader. In contrast to this, he has to be seen as somebody who finds orientation in the economic and moral writings of the 18th century economist Adam Smith. A Bible Lesson with Saul Alinsky

Saul David Alinsky grew up in a Jewish home. His parents were orthodox Jews and belonged to those approximately 50.000 Russian Immigrants who came to the US after the pogroms of 1881. At first they came to New York, and then went to Chicago to escape the overcrowded immigrant neighborhoods of New York. About his new home in Chicago, Alinsky later said, that it was "a slum in a slum". His orthodox parents sent Saul David to the Cheder, the Jewish elementary school. His progress in reading Hebrew texts was rewarded and he was expected to finish the Yeshiva, the Jewish Talmudic school. Due to his stubbornness and independence of mind, his parents called him a "goyischen kop", which means a "non Jewish mind". His father always feared that mobs from the Polish neighborhood could penetrate into the Jewish neighborhood and instigate a pogrom in the style of the old world he knew. The young Saul David participated in Jewish gangs which engaged in many fights with Polish and other gangs.

After one of theses fights, his mother took him to a rabbi. Saul defended his behavior with a Bible quotation: "an Eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: this is the way things go in America". The rabbi liked the vivacious boy and he patiently explained to him what it means "zu sejn a mensh" (to be a man). He introduced to him the maxim of the great Rabbi Hillel "Where there are no men, be you a man!" This saying of Rabbi Hillel will more than 50 years later stand over his second major work "Rules for Radicals".

Again and again Alinsky told the story of Moses and the "Exodus from Egypt". In Alinsky’s eyes, it was an example of brilliant organizing. The core of that story is the scene where Moses negotiated with God, who planned to destroy his people because of their dance before the golden calf.

"Moses did not try to communicate with God in terms of mercy or justice, when God was angry and wanted to destroy the Jews; he moved in on a top value and outmaneuvered God. (...)

A great Organizer, like Moses, never looses his cool (…)

He knew that the most important center of his attack would have been what he judged to be God´s prime value. As Moses read it, God wanted to be No. 1. (…)

Knowing this, Moses took off on his attack. (…)

He began to negotiate, saying "Look God, you're God. You're holding all the cards. Whatever you want to do, you can do and nobody can stop you. But you (…) can't scratch the deal you've got with these people – (…) the Covenant – (…).

You're going to tell me that they broke their end of it (…).

But it isn't that easy. You are on the spot. The news of this deal has leaked out all over the joint. The Egyptians, Philistines, Canaanites, everybody knows about it.

But (…) you’re God. Go ahead and knock them off. What do you care if people say, "There goes God. You can't believe anything he tells you. You can't make a deal with him. His word isn't even worth the stone it's written on'. But after all, you're God and I suppose you can handle it."4

And he finished with the quotation from Exodus, 32: 7-14

“And the Lord was appeased from doing the evil which he had spoken against his people.”

For our purpose it is only important that Alinsky neither invented this story nor its interpretation. The story is told in the book of Exodus. Its interpretations are more than 1800 years old and follow the ideas of the Chapter in the Babylonian Talmud called Berachot 32. Moreover, this text occupies a central position in Jewish thinking. Every Jewish child knows the story and its problem. The manner in which Moses gets God off his oath of destruction is a central part of the liturgy of the Reconciliation Day, the highest Jewish holiday. In my opinion it is also a key to understand some of Alinsky's central concepts of Community Organizing: conflict, negotiation, compromise and reconciliation.

Therefore, was Alinsky a religious man? His employee and successor Ed Chambers claims that Alinsky was an atheist. I think he was an assimilated, enlightened, modern Jew.

However, it was his knowledge of the Bible, resulting from his Jewish education, that gave him the ability to cooperate effectively with religious organizations like the Christian Churches. From the beginning of his career to the end of his life, he remained connected to the Roman Catholic Church and particularly to the archdiocese of Chicago. He even participated in the education of parish priests. For a time no parish priest was let into a community of Chicago unless he had completed an elementary course in Community Organizing with Saul D. Alinsky. Alinsky as Scientist

Alinsky’s work becomes primarily understandable in the context of the sociological discussions at the Chicago School of Sociology of his time. Although Alinsky strongly criticized science, science business and the practical relevance of sociological knowledge, he did research on his own and made some remarkable contributions to the discussions of his time. His own scientific work is recognizably stamped by the Chicago School of Sociology. His later practice may also be seen as an application of central concepts from the Chicago School.

Alinsky studied criminology and sociology. He took part in projects of Ernest W. Burgess and worked for Clifford R. Shaw, where he began to fight against youth crime. He had practical experience as a participant observer and interviewer in the mobster-groups around Al Capone. He also took part in research of Ernest W. Burgess about the impact of dancing-halls on the moral development of young people.

The Chicago-Area-Project, guided by Clifford R. Shaw, was a model and a starting point for his own Back-Of-the-Yards Project. His early scientific work deals with interview techniques and the evaluation of his Back-of-The-Yards Project.

His later publications are more popular-scientific and written for a broader public.

Throughout his life Alinsky gave lectures at universities and other places of adult-education. Now, what are the important concepts, Alinsky took from the Chicago School?

The Chicago School of Sociology is inseparably linked to William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. Their major sociological work is entitled: "The Polish peasant in Europe and America". In this sparkling work the authors follow the question of how immigrants manage their everyday-lives in the US. This topic directly touches the history of Saul Alinsky’s family, immigrating from the east European, Jewish “shtetl” into the modern American, industrial “city”. The authors evaluated an enormous quantity of life-stories from Polish immigrants in this work.

The work of Thomas and Znaniecki is a milestone in the development of the sociology from a theoretical science towards an empirical science. At the core of this development stands the systematic evaluations of life-histories.

They also developed a theory of primary groups, a theory of the "Definition-of- the-Situation", and a dialectic-process of “Organization/Disorganization/Reorganization” which remained basic for their students.

Life-stories and the everyday experiences of the people stand also at the beginning of Alinsky’s organizing efforts. Alinsky regarded communities as primary groups. He related community organization/disorganization to personal behavior. Furthermore, he discovered that the “Definitions-of-the- Situation” upon which people act can be changed by communication and the sharing of life-experience. This shared analysis of situations will be the basis for his later power analysis.

Thomas’ and Znaniecki’s successors at the Chicago School were Ernest W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park. One of their trainees was Saul D. Alinsky. The major work of Park and Burgess was called "The City" and is regarded as a manifesto of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology. "The City" contains nine chapters and an annotated bibliography of the urban community.

Three chapters deal directly with questions of Community Organizing. One deals with the interesting question of whether neighborhood work can have a scientific base.

This chapter was the model for Alinsky's evaluation of his own Back-of-the- Yards Project. This Evaluation was published in the famous American Journal of Sociology and tried to show that Community Organizing could be planned and conducted on a scientific base5. He also distinguishes his Community Organizing practice from the approach of the settlement houses, which followed the model of Jane Addams’ Hull House. Further, he distinguished between self-organized neighborhood institutions and outside-organized services, which he accused of being some kind of welfare colonialism. From Park and Burgess he took over the concept of social forces and the distinction between scientific and “good-will” approaches. Participant observation, open interview techniques, and "nosing around" remained essential in his approach. I quote:

“Who are the leaders?

Which interests of the neighborhood do they incorporate in themselves and what is the technique by which they exercise control?

What is the social , i.e. what things must one do in the neighborhood in order to escape being regarded with suspicion or looked upon as peculiar?

What does it regard as a matter of fact? What is news? What is the general run of attention? What models does it imitate and are these within or without the group?

What is there in clear consciousness, i.e. what are its avowed sentiments, doctrines etc.?

What is the history of the neighborhood? What is there in sub consciousness -- in forgotten or dimly remembered experiences- of this neighborhood which determines its sentiments and attitudes?”

I did not take these questions from Alinsky's chapter on “Native Leadership” and “Community Traditions and Organizations” in his book "Reveille for Radicals"6, as readers would probably expect. I took it from the original source, the sociological classic of his teachers Park and Burgess called “The City” 7. Probably the best known contribution of the Chicago School to the world of Sociology is Thomas’ theorem of the "Definition-of-the-Situation". In the original version it is cited "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." It reflects the experience that people act upon their judgment of the situation. They do this whether this definition is true or not.

With this background, Alinsky’s famous Rule No. 1 on power-tactics becomes easily understandable. He says:

"Power is not only what you have, but also what your opponent thinks you have."8

Although Alinsky was very deeply rooted in the Chicago School of Sociology, he strongly criticized sociology.

He used to say

“The words academic and irrelevant are synonymous”.

In interviews Alinsky said that his work was not influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology although this influence is conspicuous. He particularly admired Robert E. Park. I think, therefore, that his polemics were not aimed at the sociology of the Chicago School in general, but against special developments and influences. His criticism can be understood as criticism of a development which successively replaces qualitative social research by quantitative, statistical research. The polemics aimed at a sort of sociology that makes itself dependent on the market (as market research) and on the state (as opinion research). His criticism aimed at a sociology that restricts the empirical value of the single man or woman. He opposes a sociology that cannot guarantee its relevance for an improved social and political practice, a sociology that doesn't reflect the relevance of its results for social development and social progress. His criticism coincides with that of Robert Lynd9 or C. Wright Mills10 with whom he worked and corresponded about these problems. Alinsky and the American Way of Life

Reitzes and Reitzes11 wrote that only a brief examination of Alinsky’s work shows that the American Founding Fathers were more important to him than Karl Marx. This also applies to Thomas Paine, to Alexis de Tocqueville and furthermore to the economist Adam Smith.

He permanently denied being a Marxist and there is no reason to quote Alinsky together with Frantz Fanon or Brazilian guerilla leader Carlos Marighela, as for instance the Dutch author Piet Reckman did 1971 in his book about Social Action12. It was never Alinsky’s intention "to crush the welfare islands of the world". He did not agree with groups - also existing at that time in the USA - who hoped, that an "armed People's Army" would come to "free the American people".

One can even say that Alinsky tried to counter the excesses of the student movement in his second major work called "Rules for Radicals". In his later years, he also seemed to switch over to the organization of the American middle class and share-holders.13

On the question of property, Alinsky was on the side of the Founding Fathers.14 But how then, can the community be protected against the bad consequences of unjust distribution of property in society?

Alinsky probably found his answer in the work of the economist Adam Smith, which defined self-interest as a basis and prerequisite for all human behavior and made this finding the basis of his economic theory. Alinsky quotes Smith’s famous and well known sentences from the book “Wealth of Nations”:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard of their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantage.”15

According to Smith, the excesses of unbridled self-interest (egoism and lack of interest) can only be controlled by moral rules, compassion, positive law and competition.16

Alinsky himself does not criticize the unjust distribution of property, but he criticizes a moral deficit:

"We know that one of the greatest obstacles in the way of strengthening out the affairs of mankind is the confusion and inner conflicts raging within men. It is the vast discrepancy between our morals and our practices. It is the human dilemma, which constantly draws a shadow of guilt over many of man's noblest endeavors. It gnaws at our vitals and drives us to irrationality ".17

How does Alinsky intend to close this "vast discrepancy" between morals and practice? We still have to learn a little more from Adam Smith at this point. We find the key not in Smith's most famous book "The Wealth of Nations" but in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments”.18

As already said, according to Alinsky and Smith, in a world of people who follow their self-interest and pursue their happiness, people’s morals become very important. According to Smith and Alinsky, there are primarily two moral feelings which fulfill this educational and stabilizing function. In Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments” these feelings always appear together as counterparts. On the one hand, there is the positive feeling of “gratitude” we feel towards others, who behave according to the necessities of the common welfare. On the other hand we feel and express a negative feeling of “moral disapproval” towards others who are going to damage the common welfare by their behavior.

This feeling of "moral disapproval" appears in the original text of Smith as "resentment". In the German translation it appears as "retribution feeling"19, which in German language also contains an aggressive connotation. Therefore I prefer to say "moral disapproval".

At this place it would fit that everyone ask him or herself in what manner he or she expresses his or her feelings of "moral disapproval" in everyday-life. According to Smith and Alinsky the adequate expression of “gratitude” and “resentment” is of excellent value for the regulation of human matters.

Therefore, Alinsky says, that the first task of an Organizer is to

"rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than to avoid them. (…) An Organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into which people can angrily pour their frustrations. He must create a mechanism that can drain them of the underlying guilt for having accepted the previous situation for so a long time. Out of this mechanism, a new community Organization arises".20

This essential finding of Alinsky can not be adequately understood without Smith's “Theory of Moral Sentiments.”

However, if Alinsky counts on Smith in this central question, then what kind of a "radical" is he?

Here the nearest comparison can be made with Thomas Paine, of which the following saying stands as a motto at the beginning of Alinsky's "Reveille for Radicals":

"Let them call me a rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...".

Alinsky radicalism is like that of Thomas Paine. It is a civil radicalism. Paine aimed against the American dependence from England and against aristocracy and totalitarianism. Alinsky aimed his radicalism against injustice, a lack of democracy and against welfare colonialism. Alinsky was not a "radical" according to the extremist-resolutions in Germany. He was not "radical" in the sense of Marxists, who aimed at changing the system.

His "Back-of -the-Yards Project" stepped forward from good-will and compassion to the articulation of citizen-rights. This step was also a step from the general call for the gratitude of the people to everybody’s right to indignation.

In this sense Saul D. Alinsky was a radical moralist. He formulated a criticism of the (moral) conditions (of the system) and not a criticism of the system itself. He didn't create any alternative systems but he analyzed Adam Smith, the mentor of a free economy, so precisely that he got his ally. According to the famous Alinsky Power Rule No. 4, he “hit the system with his own book of rules” or, as he used to say,

"Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity."21 Conclusion

I again emphasize that these pictures remain parts of an incomplete mosaic. It is not the purpose of my paper to deny the necessity of studying his writings. I only try to replace some given pictures, drawn in the seventies, which I think are too simple. Much more might be said about Alinsky: For instance “Alinsky as Biographer of the Union leader John L. Lewis” or on “Alinsky and the Socratic Dialog”. This was not the place to do that. I would like to advocate the necessity of further research. Especially Alinsky’s roots in Chicagoan Sociology throw new light on the history and development of social planning, ecological thinking and systemic intervention. A just recognition of his contribution to applied sociology and social policy is still inspiring for social scientists, social workers and political engaged people who want to understand and solve social problems.

Notes

1An earlier version of this paper was part of apresentation in German language at the conference of the German Society for Social Work in Frankfurt/Main, 2001-12-01 (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozialarbeit, Arbeitskreis „Soziale Arbeit in und mit Gemeinwesen“). It was also part of a presentation in English language at the conference of the Inter-University Consortium for International Social Development (IUSCISD) in The Hague / Netherlands, 2002-09-27. Because English is not my mother tongue, I have to thank Martin Asmuß, Edewecht (Germany), Gisela Broers, Oldenburg (Germany) and Randy Stoecker, Toledo (USA) for their help and remarks on the translation.

2 see "A saint man only gives birth to sacred cows ", Alinsky, Saul D., Reveille for Radicals, 1946, p. XV

3 see for instance: Jacobsen, Dennis A., Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing, Minneapolis 2001

4 Alinsky, Saul D., Rules for Radicals, 1971, pp 89 ff

5Alinsky, Saul D., (1941) Community Organization and Analysis. In: American Journal of Sociology, May, 1941, pp. 797-808

6 Alinsky, Saul D., Reveille for Radicals, Chicago, 1946, pp. 87-111

7 Park, Robert E., Burgess, Ernest W., McKenzie, Roderick D., The City: Suggestions for Investigations of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment, Chicago 1925, p. 11, (quoted in reversed order)

8 Alinsky formulated “13 Rules of Power-Tactics” which should be easily remembered and foster group discussions: 1. Power is not only what you have but what your enemy thinks you have, 2. Never go outside the experience of your people, 3. Wherever possible, go outside the experience of your enemy, 4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules, 5. Ridicule is the most potent weapon, 6. A good tactic is what your people enjoy, 7. A tactic that drags too long becomes a drag, 8. Keep the pressure on, 9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself, 10 The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition, 11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside, 12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative, 13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. The Rule No. 4 will be discussed at the end of this paper. See: Alinsky, Saul D.: Rules for Radicals, New York 1971, pp. 126 ff.

9 Lynd, Robert, Knowledge for What?, Princeton 1939

10 Mills, C. Wright, Sociological Imagination, New York 1959

11Reitzes, Donald C. and Reitzes Dietrich C., The Alinsky Legacy: Alive and Kicking, Greenwich 1987

12 Reckman, Piet, Soziale Aktion, Laetare, Freiburg, 1971 p. 11 and p 35ff. 13 Alinsky, Saul David, Rules for Radicals, 1971, p. 184: “Organization for Action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America´s white middle class.”

14 See: Federalist Papers, Article 10, (Madison)

15 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry to the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1790, quoted in: Alinsky, Saul D., Rules for Radicals, New York 1971, p. 54

16 Recktenwald, Horst Claus, Freiheitliche Ordnung der Klassik, in: Smith, Adam, Der Wohlstand der Nationen, Göttingen 1980, Appendix p. 820

17 Alinky, Saul D., Reveille for Radicals, 1946, pp. 39-40

18 Smith, Adam, The Theorie of Moral Sentiments, German Edition: Theorie der ethischen Gefühle, Meiner, Hamburg 1994, pp. 60-69 , and pp 99-102

19 op.cit., p. 616

20 Alinsky, Saul D. , Rules for Radicals, 1971, p. 116 f.

21 Alinsky, Saul D. , Rules for Radicals, 1971, p. 128

About the Author

Peter Szynka was a Social Scientist and Social Worker, Community Organizer in Duisburg-Bruckhausen during the 70's. At present he is a regional advisor, responsible for the organizational development of services for homeless people run by the Service Agency of the Protestant Church (DIAKONIE) in North-West Germany. He was trained in Community Organizing by Ed Shurna of Chicago, Don Elmer of San Francisco, and the IAF of Chicago. He is currently chair of FOCO (Forum Community Organizing) in Germany.

© 2001 Moshe ben Asher Community Engagement: Practical Strategies for Empowerment or a Wishful Narrative? James Whelan [email protected]

Contents

Abstract Community action: vital to sustainability Empowered communities, powerful women Government initiated community engagement Conflict: a competing or complementary narrative? Reconciling the two narratives References About the Author

Abstract

Community action shapes the urban landscape of Australian cities and towns. Our urban future will be determined through vigilant and resourceful action by residents’ groups and environmentalists.

Vigorous community action is clearly an important element of planning processes in Queensland’s South East region. This rapidly growing coastal area and its hinterland struggle to reconcile population growth with the maintenance and restoration of a mega-diverse natural environment. Community groups in the region have responded to this challenge with creative and tenacious strategies to conserve and restore habitat, minimise waste and consumption, educate, entertain and protest. On the Gold Coast, and in the rural village of Maleny on the Sunshine Coast, community action has generated involvement, awareness and sustainable enterprises, and averted some of the more destructive development tendencies and proposals.

Civic and conservation groups in these and other Australian cities and towns participate actively in government-initiated community involvement activities, but often find engagement and consultation processes have minimal impact on planning decisions. As a result, residents with clear priorities for their urban future rely on community action, organising and mobilisation to influence decisions. Their experiences suggest local and state government authorities are struggling with deliberative, inclusive and iterative decision-making processes. Campaign anecdotes recounted here through an activist lens shed light on decision-making processes for a sustainable urban future. Community action: vital to sustainability Community action is vital to sustainability. Without the active involvement of community members in shaping towns and cities, development is unlikely to follow a sustainable pattern. This conclusion has been consistently drawn in sustainability blueprints since (at least) the 1989 World Commission on Environment and Development’s Brundtland Report ‘Our Common Future’. International and domestic sustainability plans including Agenda 21, the consensus action plan that emerged from the 1992 World Earth Summit, reinforce this conviction. Broad public participation in decision-making and genuine partnership between community, government and industry are prerequisites for the achievement of ecologically sustainable development (ESD). The practical benefits of community involvement have become a mantra at all levels of Australian government. Through active self- determination, citizens mobilise resources including funds and volunteerism that may not have been available otherwise, generate and share knowledge, contribute to better decisions, create community, and generate solutions in tune with community needs (Wates, 2000, pp.4-5). Public participation also has the potential to accomplish a more equitable distribution of environmental risk or even a decrease in risk for all (Schlosberg, 2002, p.13).

The ‘sustainable community’ narrative comprises a set of assumptions or beliefs: (1) decisions are ideally made through equitable, deliberative and inclusive processes that allow community members a range of options for involvement; (2) these processes encourage and support social learning, negotiation, and community building (a positive feedback loop); and (3) the resulting decisions are ones that everyone can live with, and that steer the community toward sustainability. A fourth thread is that subscription to the narrative is universal and in the public interest. This narrative motivates elected representatives and planners to actively involve stakeholders in decision-making, and encourages community members to participate in civic life.

Contemporary social life in Australia cities demonstrates both the potential benefits of this narrative, and the consequences of over-writing the storyline of environmental democracy with that of top-down, decide-announce-defend governance arrangements.

Two Australian communities - a booming coastal city and a small rural community - provide the backdrop for this discussion. Few Australian cities illustrate the dilemmas of sustainable urban development better than the Gold Coast. The sixth largest city in Australia is expecting to grow by one-third, to 700,000, in the next fifteen years. Having started its life as a holiday resort village, the Gold Coast now extends along almost seventy kilometres of coastline and is rapidly extending its tentacles into the coastal hinterland, one of Australia’s fifteen biodiversity ‘hotspots’ (DEH 2005). The Gold Coast City Council (GCCC) considers the city the most biodiverse in Australia. The protection of the flora and fauna in the region clearly warrants urgent government and community action, as do the institutions that support community involvement in the burgeoning city. This is equally true of the rural village of Maleny on the Sunshine Coast hinterland. The village of roughly 1,700 is located on the Maleny Plateau, which has a dispersed population of around 4,500. Maleny, other hinterland towns and villages, and the coastal cities of the Sunshine Coast, are also experiencing rapid population growth and consequent pressures on both the biophysical and social environments. Empowered communities, powerful women

The good news is that community action is alive and kicking. The Gold Coast City Council’s on-line community directory lists more than 2,000 non-profit community groups, including fifteen environment groups. The diversity, resourcefulness and tenacity of community action is revealed by looking closely at one of these groups, the Gold Coast and Hinterland Environment Council (Gecko). Six local environment groups founded the umbrella organisation in 1989.

Gecko House, on the banks of Currumbin Creek, is a hive of voluntary activity. As well as advocacy and community building work, Gecko has created three non-profit businesses. Gecko Regen coordinates tree planting and revegetation projects, including the rehabilitation of landfill sites. The business employs thirty people to manage its nursery, field projects and training. Gecko Recycle is modelled on the successful Reverse Garbage enterprises in Brisbane and Sydney, and redirects resources from the waste stream. The third enterprise, Gecko Ed, helps schools and other educational institutions engage qualified environmental educators. Volunteers also provide a free information service and website. Gecko is perhaps best known for community events including the annual World Environment Day ‘Do’ and Clean Up Australia Day on the Gold Coast. Both events provide opportunities for thousands to participate in environmental learning and action and have been recognised through awards and sponsorship. Gecko creates further community involvement opportunities with regular information nights, conferences, seminars, its monthly meeting of member groups, Walk With Wildlife guided bushwalks and artGecko participatory cultural events.

For a small village, Maleny on the Sunshine Coast has a remarkably strong community sector. An online directory (Sunweb, 2005) lists almost seventy diverse community-based organisations in the town, from the Recorder Group to the Nursing Mothers, Film Society, Landcare group and Hospital Auxiliary. Jordan and Haydon (2003) interviewed members of almost 150 groups in the village. The City of Caloundra, of which Maleny is a satellite settlement, boasts at least twenty-three voluntary community-based environmental organisations (CC 2001b). A striking feature of community life in Maleny is the proliferation of cooperative ventures. More than twenty cooperatives have been established since the 1970s. Their objectives include the coordination, provision and support of: housing; whole foods; social and cultural activities; education and learning; artistic and publishing enterprises; conservation and waste minimisation; credit; finance; and business incubation. Maleny’s cooperative sector, for which it has received international attention, has contributed to the town’s spirit of cooperation and enterprise (Schwarz and Schwarz, 1997) in a time when Australian rural communities have been in decline. Cooperatives have created at least 130 jobs directly (Jordan, 2000, 2003) and hundreds indirectly. Maleny’s Local Energy Transfer System (LETS) facilitates the exchange of bunya, a non-cash currency named after the edible nut prized by the region’s traditional owners, in return for required skills and labour. The system was the first of its kind in Australia and is now replicated in at least 240 other communities nationally, and is being implemented internationally (Douthwaite 1998). In researching Maleny, it is impossible to ignore the narrative of an empowered community seeking to determine its own sustainable destiny. This shone through in radio interviews (ABC, 2/6/03) in which Maleny locals spoke of their community having a high level of social capital and cohesion. They compared Maleny to a ‘tribe’ and an intentional community, and suggested these attributes provide a degree of resilience in a time of rapid change. For this reason, the unsuccessful community campaign examined here is of particular interest.

Another feature of community action in Maleny, Gold Coast and other Australian cities is the pivotal role played by women. Lois Levy and Sheila Davis have been the public faces of GECKO for fifteen years. Lois’ profile on Gecko’s website communicates her belief that “an educated community plays a vital role in protecting and caring for nature”. As well as being a full-time TAFE instructor and social worker, she received an Order of Australia medal in 2001 for services for the environment. Sheila is widely recognised as a tenacious battler and community builder. She juggles being Gecko’s Campaign Coordinator with raising two children, as well as writing and volunteering for several other community groups. Jill Jordan is arguably Maleny’s best-known community activist. During the last thirty years, Jill helped found and steer cooperatives in Maleny and around Australia. She served as a Councillor for the rural Division of Caloundra City encompassing Maleny in the early nineties. Jill, Sheila, Lois and the many, many women involved in the community action described here are part of a bigger picture. Women often drive grassroots campaigns both in Australia and internationally. This is clear from Kathleen McPhillips’ edited collection (2002) of activists’ accounts of community toxics campaigns in Australia, Lois Gibbs’ leadership against toxic waste dumping in Love Canal, USA, and the leadership of women in the demand for justice in Bhopal, India, where Union Carbide released poisonous chemicals in 1984 and opposition to nuclear power stations in Europe (Shiva and Miles 1993, p.14).

Eisler (1987, p.189) attributes women’s dynamic contribution to community life to socialisation processes that encourage men to “pursue their own ends, even at the expense of others” whereas women are socialised to “see themselves primarily as responsible for the welfare of others, even at the expense of their own well-being.” Milbrath (1989: p.54) concludes that, “women have a much better chance of saving the world than men.” Gender forms an additional element to the narrative: women occupy positions of leadership in healthy communities on the path toward sustainability. Government initiated community engagement

Local Government, as the form of government closest to the community, has a better opportunity than state and national governments to engage, involve and mobilise communities around sustainability objectives. This opportunity is affirmed in Local Agenda 21, the international campaign endorsed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 which, “promotes a participatory, long-term, strategic planning process that helps municipalities identify local sustainability priorities and implement long-term action plans.” In the ten years after Rio, 6,400 local government authorities in 113 countries implemented LA21 initiatives including the establishment of stakeholder groups to develop and implement local sustainability plans (ICLEI, 2005). LA21 is embraced by the Local Government Association of Australia, and by both the Gold Coast and Caloundra City Councils.

This commitment to active community participation and to the sustainable communities narrative permeates government discourse. Caloundra City Council’s Corporate Plan (CC 2001a, p.6) set the 2006 objective to “be a City and a community which has created its own destiny and which continues to refine and redefine its future on a regular basis.” Elected representatives also express this vision in both cities’ corporate and strategic plans and State of the Environment reports. Caloundra’s Mayor, Don Aldous, has argued that to meet the challenges of governing this rapidly growing and changing city, “Council cannot do these things in isolation” and “needs the enthusiasm and participation of its community” (Local Government Focus, 2004).

The Gold Coast City Council (GCCC) claims to take a consultative approach to decisions about flood mitigation, catchment management, rates, beach and harbour management, transport, tourism, crime and safety. The importance attached to community involvement in decision-making is evident in the Harbour Planning Study, one recent planning process, which GCCC refers to as having reconciled “traditionally competing interests to construct a long-term mechanism for area management” that integrates “broadly-based community, environmental and business interests” (GCCC 2003). Conservationists were active participants in this policy-setting exercise and the parallel Waterfuture Strategy, which examined water quality and quantity options for the drought- prone city. In developing the Waterfuture strategy, GCCC utilised a range of community engagement strategies. Following initial research, Council disseminated a discussion starter that outlined problems and possible solutions and held community information sessions, workshops and focus groups. A newsletter and survey were distributed throughout the city, generating 9,000 responses. To develop a strategy that will “create a feeling of joint ownership” (GCCC 2005a), Council has identified and addressed questions of community trust and confidence in Council”, to ensure the strategy does not “ignore community opinion” as it could be “difficult to gain trust.” (GCCC 2005b). This council is far from unique in experiencing some distrust and criticism concerning provision for community involvement in governance. Woolcock, Renton and Cavaye (2003) note these concerns are widespread and substantial. Council also remains open to community opinion year-round through its online consultation panel which provides regular opportunities for community members to contribute to decisions through surveys and focus groups.

And these opportunities are valued by community groups. In fact, the pursuit of their vision for a sustainable region and their members’ wide range of interests motivates Gecko to participate in up to a dozen advisory and consultative committees with state and local government authorities at any one time. Lois Levy would like to see the group even more involved in policy making. Conflict: a competing or complementary narrative?

Despite these strong expressions of support for community involvement to steer sustainability, both Maleny and the Gold Coast have generated headlines nationally and internationally in recent times for sustained conflict over development decisions. The high level of engagement suggested in local government plans and strategies cited above, and described by community activists interviewed for this chapter, has been a backdrop to urban planning decisions characterised by rancorous conflict, litigation and allegations of secrecy and corruption. In Maleny, this conflict has been triggered by the construction of a supermarket beside picturesque Obi Obi Creek, which crosses the village’s main street. On the Gold Coast, a controversy is raging around a proposal to develop a terminal for cruise ships on The Spit, a strip of dunes that separate the city’s harbour (the Broadwater) from the ocean. Both developments are contrary to Local Area Plans that were developed through extensive community consultation. These disputes communicate a contrasting narrative that includes the following threads: (1) community action is an essential safeguard against solely economic interests that are, by nature, unsustainable; (2) government-initiated community engagement practices have strictly limited capacity to counteract these economic interests, especially when local government is overtly influenced by the development industry or over-ridden by the Queensland Government; and (3) community action that builds power to confront government and industry is an essential part of the mix.

The suggestion that a large supermarket may be built in Maleny has been brewing for years. And the town’s history of cooperative enterprises, and buying locally has consistently generated opposition to the notion. Community members participating in the development of the town’s Local Area Plan (from 1999 to 2001) ensured the planning scheme explicitly ruled out this possibility. Naturally, locals were up in arms when a supermarket development in the heart of the village was subsequently proposed. In 2002, community spokesperson Michael Berry urged Caloundra City Council to “exercise its duty of care” by protecting “the retail and social heart of this town” (Range News 13/12/02). Berry noted, as visitors to the village do almost immediately, that Maple Street embodies the community’s spirit. Conducting interviews with locals at sidewalk cafés on Maple Street, I was continually interrupted by the greeting and connections typical of a close-knit town. This spirit was spectacularly demonstrated when the village’s existing independent supermarket celebrated its centenary and almost 2,000 people turned out.

Even before Woolworths secured its site, community organising began in earnest. People were galvanised by concerns about traffic generated by the proposed supermarket’s 180 parking spaces, stormwater and trade waste management, anticipated impacts on the town’s economy and character, the loss of open space and impacts on a recognised platypus habitat. Maleny is one of very few towns where these shy monotremes can be regularly observed in the heart of the urban area. Another significant point of community opposition to the proposal was the decision-making process. Community members felt left out, and expressed their outrage through a long series of community meetings, rallies and publications. As the development approval processes gained momentum, so too did the community campaign. Council’s failure to embed the wishes of the community into its 2004 Strategic Plan (the local town planning scheme) resulted in the supermarket decision being taken out of the community’s hands and becoming the responsibility of the State Government. A petition asking for this decision to remain Council’s responsibility was signed by 2,000 Maleny residents but failed to sway State Government. The situation prompted Michael Berry to note, “We are locked out of the process and Council has no duty to take heed of resident objections. In other words, a developer living in Melbourne can decide to fundamentally change the character of the Maleny township without ever having been here and without the township having any say in that change” (Range News 13/12/02). In the ensuing conflict, Councillors, town planners and community leaders pointed the finger at each other while Woolworths moved closer to realising their intention. One Councillor suggested that community representatives in the local area planning group were responsible for failing to include the provisions of the plan in Council’s planning scheme. Jill Jordan is quick to point out, however, that the voluntary committee members “gave up their nights and Sundays for three years to do a great job on developing a Plan that the community wanted and had “signed off” on, and they shouldn’t be castigated for not doing what the Council Planning Department, whose planners are being paid $80,000 per annum, should have done!”

Community action throughout 2004 and 2005 culminated in a series of well- attended rallies and protest actions. There were also regular community- initiated negotiations involving Woolworths, the construction company and Council. In April 2004 the Deen Brothers, who came to fame for their part in the midnight demolition of several heritage buildings in Brisbane, were hired to clear forty large trees on the site. Heavy machinery rolled into town during the night. The community’s condemnation was palpable with at least 200 people attempting to stop work despite having no prior warning of this destructive activity. With the support of local Aboriginal groups, approximately seventy protestors occupied the site (Courier Mail 06/05/05) chanting, “We won't shop there” and, “We shall overcome”. Around twenty of the protesters erected tents and marked out the platypus burrows they believed would be destroyed. Maleny local Daniel Jones climbed one of the remaining bunya pines, where he stayed for 100 days. His supporters in the community (including local businesses) provided warm meals and solidarity throughout the winter months, further demonstrating the depth of community support for the protest. In May 2004, Woolworths developer Cornerstone Properties offered to sell the site to Council and the community for $1.89 million, considerably more than the $600,000 paid nine months previously. A community petition with 5,300 signatures (more than the town’s entire population) contributed to an effort by Council to acquire the land as a community asset. Despite extraordinary fundraising efforts by the community and a part-commitment by Council, the asking price was not achieved. This whole scenario was played out again in July 2005 when an eleventh hour deal was brokered with the new Woolworths developer, Uniton Pty Ltd. to purchase the site for $2million.By mortgaging their homes and pledging donations, the small community raised $2 million within 48 hours. The cheque which was presented was spurned by the developer on the grounds that Woolworths would not agree to the deal. The opportunity for a win-win conclusion to the conflict was lost, and construction commenced. Even so, community opposition to the supermarket continues to be expressed creatively and vociferously. In July 2005, Maleny residents laid head to toe in a nearby park to spell out anti-Woolworths slogans. And in August, Daniel Jones again entered the construction site. On this occasion, he locked himself to heavy machinery dressed in a platypus suit.

It is difficult to imagine a Woolworths supermarket succeeding in Maleny. Throughout the village, placards, stickers, t-shirts and banners that read “Don’t shop there”, “Support small business”, “Spare Maleny from bad planning” and “Keep Maleny’s character” urge shoppers to boycott the supermarket. On-line activists around the country are being urged to register their opinions on the www.WeWontShopThere.com website. The gate of the construction site has been decorated with ribbons as a reminder of local opposition. And locals speak with conviction about ensuring the business fails. Jill Jordan swears the community will, “frustrate them at their own game” and, “teach them about economics”. “At the beginning,” Jill says, “it was really just the radicals. As the campaign’s gone on, it’s just grown and grown. As Woolworths have shown themselves to be the bullies they are, it’s drawn more and more the conservative community who are now contributing to the strategic options of how we can make this thing fail.” Around the country, people sympathetic to the community’s battle are abandoning shopping trolleys filled with non- perishable items in Woolworths supermarkets as a statement of solidarity.

On the Gold Coast, a similar battle is raging. Community groups including GECKO contributed to the Gold Coast Harbour Study which identified the Spit, a peninsula of sand dunes and open space immediately to the north of the city centre, as an important asset to be retained and enhanced. The Study resolved, in particular, that there would be no further private or commercial development on the Spit (GCCC 2003). Lois describes the consultative processes that led to this policy as “exhausting”. GECKO submitted written responses to Council’s monthly drafts and proposals, and eventually “carried the vote”. Despite the policy, a terminal for large cruise ships and associated on-land development is now on the drawing board. Community groups have identified a range of concerns about this proposal including: loss of open space, amenity and recreational access on land and water; pollution; economic impacts; waste management; and impacts on marine habitat and biodiversity.

As in Maleny, the dialogue between the community and its local government is now in some ways irrelevant as the development decision is now to be made by the Queensland State Government. The project has been declared a significant project and is being championed by the Department of State Development, which will act as both the proponent and assessor. The cruise terminal will be exempt from the State Coastal Policy. Having decided the area north of Sea World will be a port, the State Government is not obliged to recognise the City Council’s planning guidelines. This top-down approach, combined with secrecy surrounding a State Government study of liner movements in the seaway, compounds Gecko’s lack of confidence in the modes of consultation and engagement on offer. Lois, Sheila and other community leaders declared the foreshadowed Environmental Impact Statement a “rubber stamp for development” and called for more meaningful dialogue. The conflict has been waged in the press with media releases declaring, “The Premier and his Government have failed the accountability and transparency test by refusing to provide the community with any information” (Gecko, 4/7/05) and warning, “They're going to override our town plan. If they do it once what's to stop them doing it again. It sets a precedent” (Courier Mail 16/9/05). A forgiving appraisal of these two scenarios might let government agencies off the hook. After all, local government authorities cannot be held responsible for the planning decisions and methods adopted by state agencies, and vice versa. In some instances conservationists blame Queensland’s Integrated Planning Act for State Government decisions which contradict prior community consultation by local government. From a community perspective, however, this justification is not convincing. Citizens who have actively contributed to policy decisions at either level will naturally react with disappointment, if not outrage, if jurisdiction is subsequently assumed by other agencies.

Having exhausted the usefulness of community delegations and submissions, Gecko and their allies soon turned to alliance building and mobilisation. The Save Our Spit (SOS) Alliance was formed to pursue the shared concerns of more than twenty groups including conservationists, residents and ratepayers, surfers, divers, recreational fishers and local businesses. In April and July 2005, the alliance held rallies in the Doug Jennings Park on the Spit, drawing more than 2,000. During the rallies, picnics and public information nights, the alliance collected 6,500 signatures on a petition which was carried on a surfboard by a group of local surfers into a meeting of State Government parliamentarians and ministers in July 2005.

These struggles have seriously tested the ‘sustainable community’ narrative. Community members participating in consultative policy-setting exercises in Maleny and the Gold Coast speak of being out-numbered by pro-development interests, having their input ignored, receiving little or no support for their participation while generous allowances are available to others, and of ‘burning out’ their voluntary delegates. Having been a councillor previously, Jill Jordan observes, “local government is basically a numbers game. If you have 6-5 you’re home. If it’s 5-5 you have to woo the chairperson and you’re home and hosed. And if you are down and you don’t manage that wooing, you’re buggered.” She considers council’s community engagement activities are “rigged” and that outcomes that might impede development are ignored. Despite maintaining positive relationships with council planning officers and working solidly to facilitate collaboration, Lois Levy says “the lines are drawn” between Gecko and the Gold Coast City Council and that relations with the development industry are worse. During the last five years Gecko has noted with concern the termination of the environmental advisory committee and the current Mayor’s “lack of interest in community engagement”. Their experience is at odds with the State of the Environment Report (GCCC, 2001b, p.2), where the Mayor acknowledges “the achievements of the many individuals and community groups who have generously committed their own time to sustain the environment which benefits all of us.” Community groups in both cities consider secrecy is a regular feature of decision-making.

It is tempting to suggest a discontented minority fuels these disputes, and to suggest that more effective or creative engagement processes can overcome the conflict by creating a deliberative space for all views to be heard and integrated. But these explanations just don’t work. The observations and interviews that inform this chapter suggest that in these and other communities planning decisions are infrequently made through satisfactory community engagement and consensus-based decision-making. The failure to adhere to basic standards of transparency and inclusiveness is acute. During the conflicts described here, a probity audit was conducted to investigate Caloundra City Council’s decisions as developer and assessment authority for a golf course and residential development in Maleny. Simultaneously, the Gold Coast City Council was embroiled in a Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) inquiry concerning allegations of misconduct and election bribery in the 2004 Council elections, when a secret developer-backed election campaign fund was established to support a majority of ‘like-minded’ (pro-development) councillors. The Inquiry will also pursue allegations that a subdivision of one of the region’s last cane farms “ignored Council officers’ advice and state government planning regulations” (The Australian 3/10/05). The Inquiry will also pursue allegations of misconduct and election bribery in the 2004 Council elections. Lois Levy is certain that, “It won’t matter what happens now with the CMC. That Council is dead and buried. Nobody will ever believe them again.”

In terms of democratic legitimacy, voluntary community-based groups enjoy broad and resilient foundations. Citizens trust and rely on community sector groups more than government or industry, especially with respect to environmental information (NSW EPA, 1994, 2004). Citizens are also highly responsive to the rallying calls of conservation groups. Gecko’s rallies to conserve the Spit attract growing numbers, and their membership is strong. The Maleny protests were well attended and, when it looked like the supermarket site could be bought from the developer, $2 million was raised within forty-eight hours. Reconciling the two narratives

It’s easy to draw the conclusion, from the experiences of community activists in Maleny and the Gold Coast, that polite discussions about the future of Australian cities and towns are unlikely to steer anybody toward sustainability. Even though government, community and industry almost universally embrace dialogue and deliberation and attempt creative mechanisms for this dialogue, there are compelling reasons for conservationists to rely on mobilisation and grassroots politics rather than community engagement. And their conservation victories achieved outside the deliberative space are impressive. In the recent past, community groups on the Gold Coast prevented construction of a cableway through the Springbrook World Heritage Area and cabins in an adjacent conservation area, attempted to prevent further development on the city’s major flood-prone area, the Gurungumbah Floodplain, and successfully opposed creation of the Eastern Tollway through koala habitat. At the same time, they have seen prevailing decision-making approaches result in the incremental erosion of parkland and remnant vegetation: what Lois calls the ‘nibble syndrome’ and the wholesale destruction of areas of remnant vegetation for housing development. Community action of an oppositional nature prevented a cement batching plant being established in Maleny. It seems unlikely that the spirit reflected in these campaigns will be diluted or defused. Even as bulldozers cleared the Woolworths site, one Maleny local predicted the campaign loss “will actually strengthen the idea of Maleny as being an independent community which stands up for its rights and what it believes in” (ABC, 12/7/05).

But there are long-term consequences of failing to provide satisfactory mechanisms for deliberative planning, of forcing conservationists and other community groups to choose between dialogic processes and oppositional community action that may outstrip these short-term gains. Lester Milbrath (1989) is in good company when he suggests the ‘dominator society’ is incapable of sustainability and that social learning through approaches involving partnership and collaboration is urgently required. Community activists in Maleny and the Gold Coast know this. Despite years of “hard slog” on committees where they are “hopelessly out-numbered by rednecks with no idea about environmental planning”, Lois, Sheila and Gecko remain committed to dialogue. Jill Jordan is similarly committed to fixing engagement practices, rather than rejecting them. Drawing on her experience in cooperatives, Jill advocates a local government system that would facilitate learning by electing only half the Councillors at each election. (A similar practice to this currently operates in New South Wales Councils.) This would reduce the disruption to corporate memory and relationships. She and others in Maleny also imagine Maleny being governed by a Hinterland Council more attuned to local needs. Uninterrupted community-government-industry dialogue that is well facilitated, maintains equitable representation and fairly supports participants is part of the answer.

“Conflict can be magic,” Jill assured me, “but only when people are genuinely willing to listen, and to change their position on the basis of what they’ve heard.”

My sincere thanks to Jill Jordan, Lois Levy, Sheila Davis, Susie Duncan, Katrina Shields, Jon Woodlands, Peter Oliver and Neil Lazarow for their reflections and insights. References

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Dr James Whelan is Citizen Science Theme Leader with the Coastal CRC and convenes the Environmental Advocacy course at Griffith University’s Faculty of Environmental Science. He is Co-director of thechangeagency.org. Thanks to Nelson, A. (ed) Steering Sustainability, Australian Housing and Urban Research Centre. Publication expected 2006, for allowing COMM-ORG to post this paper.

COMM-ORG Papers Volume 13, 2007

http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers.htm

Six Reasons Not to Engage: Compromise, Confrontation and the Commons James Whelan Co-Director The Change Agency Email: [email protected]

Table of Contents

Abstract Introduction Community Engagement for Natural Resource Management Grounds for Scepticism 1. Consensus and compromise 2. Conflict produces results 3. Community engagement: A wolf in sheep’s clothing 4. Some people are more equal than others 5. Community engagement takes energy 6. Community engagement rarely encompasses the full policy cycle Conclusion About the Author References

Abstract

Environmental advocates have experienced a frustrating honeymoon with deliberative governance during the past two decades. Across Australia, environmentalists are turning from collaborative governance in favour of community action and mobilisation. This strategic reorientation is evident in national and international efforts to halt dangerous climate change, the successful community-led campaign to control land clearing in Queensland and in grassroots campaigns to halt the release of genetically engineered food crops. It is also reflected in the obstacles to effective community engagement in regional natural resource management planning exercises currently occurring around Australia.

Introduction

Environmental policy processes are increasingly framed around claims of environmental democracy. Plans, strategies and decisions are considered legitimate and their prospects of successful implementation purportedly enhanced by community engagement--the involvement of community members in policy setting. This involvement takes the form of consultative committees, public hearings, submissions and other community engagement mechanisms. Recent research suggests that conservation groups appear to consider community engagement an inadequate basis for conserving the commons, and use strategies other than community engagement (in the forms most commonly practised) because of six problems with community engagement: (1) lack of true consensus and reciprocal compromise in multi- stakeholder decision-making; (2) inability to recognise and deal with conflict; (3) capture of the community engagement discourse by power elites in government and industry; (4) some stakeholders being treated as more equal than others; (5) inequity and inequality of access to community engagement and decision-making processes; and (6) failure by government agencies to involve stakeholders in all phases of an adaptive management cycle. These explanations for non-engagement highlight opportunities for government, industry and community to enhance collaborative environmental strategies.

Community Engagement for Natural Resource Management

The title of this paper echoes Hardin’s (1968) narrative that describes the dilemma faced by herdsmen who graze their cattle on a shared public field. Sustainable management of the available pasture relies upon restraint by herdsmen not to stock too many cattle or exceed the field’s carrying capacity. The tragedy in Hardin’s scenario is that human nature predicates that the commons will not be equitably or sustainably shared, but contested, exploited and depleted. This notion has more recently been interpreted in terms of ecological footprint. Each member of the human population exerts a footprint through consuming resources and generating waste. Citizens in the minority world, including Australians, typically have ecological footprints that far exceed the earth’s capacity and limit opportunities for citizens in the majority world to meet their present and future needs.

Community engagement is commonly offered as one solution to this dilemma. To gauge the ascendance of community engagement ideals in environmental management practice and research, try a Google search for the words partnership, collaboration and environment. Your search will yield more than 1.5 million results. Through community engagement and deliberative governance, citizens can theoretically enhance their prospects of determining how best to sustainably manage the commons. At a global level, this conviction is evident in the pronouncements that emerged from the United Nations Conferences on Sustainability and Development (or Earth Summits) convened in 1992 and 2002. In closing the second Summit in Johannesburg, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (Annan 2004) summarised delegates’ confidence that sustainability would be advanced through partnerships that involved voluntary multi-stakeholder initiatives. The UN has subsequently built a database that describes more than 300 such initiatives (Earth Summit 2002). The Earth Summits have also promoted community engagement through Agenda 21 and Local Agenda 21--which outline strategies for maximising community involvement in sustainability initiatives--and National Councils for Sustainable Development--which explicitly engage non-government entities in policy development (Dovers 2003, p. 8). These institutional arrangements provide for broad community involvement in decisions and actions that affect them. Confidence in community engagement as a panacea for just, democratic and sustainable governance is underscored by the adoption of community engagement policies and strategies by state government agencies during the past decade (e.g. Queensland Government 2003, Carson and Gelber 2001, Western Australian Government 2003) and by the many conferences on the subject, including International Association for Public Participation annual gatherings, ‘Beyond Declarations: Working Partnerships for Sustainability’ 2005 National Conference and this joint UN–Queensland Government conference.

Community engagement is a standard feature of Australian policies and institutional arrangements for environmental governance and natural resource management. The Australian Government is relying on community engagement as an integral element of the National Action Plan for Water Quality and Salinity (or NAP) and the Natural Heritage Trust (NHT). These two national schemes are described as the “biggest action programs directed to environmental, social and economic sustainability in Australia's history” and are “based on partnerships between levels of community and Government, working together” (Australian Government 2004). Together, the NAP and NHT will provide in excess of $4 billion for sustainable land and water management during this decade, channelling these funds through regional, multi- stakeholder, ‘community-led’ organisations. This preferred funding model is informed by more than twenty years’ experience in collaborative natural resource management (Head 2004), including inter-sectoral forums, taskforces, committees and the Decade of Landcare (the 1990s) when environmental funding was directed through multi-stakeholder and community- based organisations.

Research in this field tends to reify the merits of community engagement. Environmental governance through decentralised, inclusive and dialogic entities (rather than government agencies alone) is typically considered dynamic, responsive to community needs and values, proactive and trust- building (Henton et al. 2000; Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000). Moreover, this approach is considered cost-effective (Head 2004), a sound basis for identifying and resolving conflicts (Bellamy and MacDonald 2004), and an effective response to historical failures in natural resource management such as the Murray Darling Basin tragedy (Aslin and Brown 2002).

Grounds for Scepticism

To question the intrinsic and operational merits of community engagement in this context is a heresy. My background in the community sector as an environmental advocate and my more recent research experience examining environmental governance arrangements that aim to realise the claimed benefits of community engagement encourage me to question these assumptions. There is ample evidence that some stakeholders consider current community engagement practices adequate to conserve the commons. There is also evidence that community-based organisations are pursuing conservation objectives through mechanisms other than community engagement, with positive biophysical (if not social) outcomes. Recent and ongoing Australian case studies (Whelan 2002; Whelan and Oliver 2003, 2004a, 2004b; Whelan and Lyons 2004) suggest six reasons why environmental advocates may choose to eschew community engagement in favour of more effective conservation strategies.

1. Consensus and compromise

The herdsmen’s goal of maximising personal gain, like democracy, entails reciprocal compromise. Intergenerational equity or the ability for future generations to meet their needs is dependent upon intra-generational equity. As soon as one of us grazes more than our fair share of cattle or overstocks the commons, both forms of equity are out of reach.

Forms of deliberative governance such as multi-party committees, advisory groups and the regional natural resource management entities established under NAP/NHT arrangements provide part of the answer to this tension. They create a structured environment within which divergent and, perhaps, competing interests can be expressed and mediated: a space for negotiation and deliberation. While these terms tend to be used interchangeably, Baccaro (2002, p. 5) highlights the significant difference between negotiation--which inevitably entails trade-offs such as partial environmental degradation--and deliberation, which he defines as:

“exchanging reasons on the desirability or undesirability of various possible collective choices. These reasons are backed by appeals to principles and/or generalizable interests…The proposal that withstands criticism and wins the contest of ideas becomes the collective choice of the group as a whole.”

This approach to environmental decision-making is extremely rare in practice. It is much more readily observed that particular interest groups dominate committees through numbers, political influence and tactical sophistication. Decisions are more likely to be made through majority voting than consensus, and chairs are rarely truly independent or especially skilled. Stakeholders are not necessarily motivated by principles of guardianship and the promotion of sustainability as suggested by Kingma and Beynon’s (2000) prescription for ‘effective’ natural resource management. On the contrary, the strong representation of industry organisations on the boards of regional NRM organisations suggests these groups’ decisions will also be influenced by short-term economic imperatives. Finally, even when community engagement actually ensures representation by a wide range of interests, there is an observed tendency for multi-stakeholder groups to avoid conflict. Poncelet (1998, p. 6) notes that facilitators may attempt to reconcile disparate views by seeking common ground, steering away from practices and discourses that depart from the goal of ‘dialogue’, constraining or evading debate and avoiding disharmony. He considers dominant partnership models to be distinctly non-adversarial and beyond dichotomies such as ‘good guys’ versus ‘bad guys’ and ‘winners’ versus ‘losers’. Yet the range of environmental values and interests drawn together through community engagement clearly encompass diametrically opposing positions.

These patterns in group behaviour mitigate against environmental management decisions that provide the highest level of conservation. Majority decisions and consensus through exhaustion or brinkmanship result in decisions that may offer some level of environmental protection but fall well short of the precautionary principle, which is both widely held and enshrined in environmental legislation and policy. In every instance of compromise, the biosphere upon which life depends loses out. The trade-off is an indirect ‘loss’ for human stakeholders, but has immediate impacts on the natural systems they are managing. Relationships, trust, norms and other indicators of social capital may be enhanced, but this is no surrogate or substitute for biophysical sustainability.

2. Conflict produces results

A second rational reason for environmental advocates to look beyond community engagement in the quest for sustainability is provided by evidence that confrontational strategies have protected the environment.

Despite Princen’s (1994, p. ix) assertion that the action of non-government organisations (NGOs) has been “absolutely essential to most international environmental action”, there is considerably less attention paid by sustainability researchers to the actions of environmental NGOs than those of industry and government stakeholders. Australian civil society includes a vibrant environment movement and a growing number of advocacy organisations which seek to “influence the social and political decisions of an institutional elite” and promote outcomes which “benefit a broader range of society than just (their) own members” (Powell 1987 p. 297). In their history of the Australian environment movement, Hutton and Connors (1998) depict an evolving and divergent array of advocacy groups that have pursued conservation objectives through research, community education, lobbying, networking, electoral politics and direct action. An important trend they observe is environmentalists’ reliance on advisory committees, boards, submissions, “polite deputations”, well-researched lobbying and letter-writing to achieve their goals. The “closure or inadequacy of these traditional institutional processes” since the 1980s has radicalised conservationists and convinced many to relocate their debates with government from private meetings and parliamentary hearings to the “public space of civil society” (Hutton and Connors 1998, p. 90). This strategic (re)orientation in the environment movement is also shaped by attitudes toward social institutions and environmental values. The discourse of environmental modernisation which “views existing political, economic and social institutions as the most appropriate structures for addressing issues of environmental protection” (Hajer 1995, p. 25) is clearly reflected in contemporary NGO tactics. These beliefs, combined with dependence on government grants, convince environmentalists to participate actively in government-initiated deliberative governance processes. The peak environmental NGOs in each Australian state (the conservation councils) each employ several staff members who do little else than comment on draft policies, participate in committee meetings and prepare submissions. By contrast, the ‘survival’ discourse described briefly by Hutton and Connors is reflected in the direct action tactics of groups including Greenpeace, and the ‘Wilderness, No Compromise’ slogan of the Wilderness Society.

Three case studies, necessarily summarised here, illustrate the capacity of community mobilisation to create “constructive confrontation with government authorities” (Kingma and Beynon 2000, p. 66) which stands in sharp contrast to community engagement. The first case study is the campaign by the Queensland Conservation Council, the Wilderness Society, the Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Australian Conservation Foundation to secure the conservation of native vegetation on leasehold and freehold land in Queensland. These organisations successfully pushed the Queensland Government to adopt vegetation management legislation, effectively conserving as much as twenty million hectares of remnant vegetation. Interviews with activists central to this campaign (Whelan and Lyons 2004) revealed their decision to reject deliberative governance mechanisms in favour of community mobilisation. Until 2000, conservationists actively participated in government committees, commissioned research, developed policy positions and lobbied government-initiated committees for their adoption. Between 2000 and the campaign’s denouement in 2004, these environmental advocacy groups redirected their energy to raising awareness in targeted constituencies and mobilising concern through tactical electoral politics. This decision was based on consensus in the sector that community engagement exercises were, in one activist’s words, “time consuming, and in the service of legislation that’s flawed, and cannot possibly deliver on your objectives…so why would you put your effort into it?” (Whelan and Lyons 2004, p. 7).

A second case study that illustrates the potency of community action is Greenpeace’s 1998 to 2004 campaign against the Stuart oil shale project in Central Queensland. Southern Pacific Petroleum’s plans to extract oil from shale (rock) drew criticism from a range of community and environment groups. The proposed industrial process involved an open cut mine to extract rock, which would then be crushed and heated to 500°C to extract oil. Opponents of the project were concerned the project would involve mining activity in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, discharge contaminated water, increase Australia’s greenhouse emissions by up to 200 per cent (Greenpeace 2004) and lead to ocean warming and coral bleaching. Emissions from the plant were blamed for illness in the local community. The Queensland and Australian governments unambiguously supported the project. Government intervention to help facilitate the plant included excise relief and research and development grants, as well as funds to offset the $11 million cost of a new wharf in Gladstone harbour (Wilson 2005). A Freedom of Information search by Greenpeace revealed that the Commonwealth Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources had offered an additional subsidy of $36 million in 2002 if the project owner Southern Pacific Petroleum took legal action against Greenpeace.

Despite this explicit government support for the project, community engagement activities were initiated. And despite having cause to doubt the sincerity of the government agencies that initiated these activities and their autonomy to heed community concerns, civil society groups including Greenpeace participated. Over 20,000 people wrote to the Queensland Government opposing the development of shale oil. Twenty-seven environment, tourism and fishing groups made a joint submission expressing opposition to the project (Greenpeace, 2004). One hundred local residents initiated legal action against the energy companies involved, seeking $12 million compensation for health impacts and diminished property values. Greenpeace initiated or supported many of these actions, as well as making presentations to senate inquiries and lodging a formal complaint to the Australian Stock Exchange.

Activists did not, however, trust that the mechanisms of community engagement or consultation would provide adequate opportunities for influence. Throughout the six-year campaign, Greenpeace organised regular direct action encounters with the oil shale plant operators and investors, including blockading shipments of shale oil to refineries.

US investors withdrew funding in 2003 and Greenpeace no longer considered the project viable (and wound down their campaign) by late 2004. The case study highlights the difficult strategic decisions faced by environmental advocates, and especially the importance of balancing the competing demands of community engagement and community mobilisation. The campaign included tactics associated with both approaches. Its ultimate success is difficult to attribute to just one or the other.

The third community campaign that suggests community sector rejection of community engagement as an adequate basis for environmental governance is the international campaign against genetically engineered (GE) food and crops. Current institutional arrangements to regulate the release of GE crops in Australia provide several opportunities for community engagement. The Office of the Gene Technology Regulator regularly invites submissions on planned GE crop trials. The Food Standards Authority of Australia and New Zealand actively seeks public comment on its decisions to approve the use of GE ingredients in manufactured foods. The ministers of agriculture in most Australian states convene advisory committees with community representation to consider issues relating to GE crops and state and national wheat boards include community (grower) representation. Finally, media outlets such as the Sydney Morning Herald conduct community surveys through their websites to assess and report on community attitudes toward genetically engineered food and crops.

GE activists actively participate in these formal community engagement opportunities and proactively initiate additional spaces for dialogue including public seminars and parliamentary briefings. Recent interviews with GE activists and campaign analysis suggest that few, if any, campaign victories can be attributed causally to these activities. GE activists have turned to an array of community action tactics that fall well outside the widely accepted definition of community engagement. During 2004, anti-GE groups organised regular mobilisation events including street theatre, hanging banners in prominent locations and local supermarket demonstrations. One such action, held at a supermarket in downtown Melbourne, involved over 70 non-aligned activists who surveyed and persuaded shoppers, placed stickers on products containing GE ingredients, pranced in chicken suits and created congestion at checkouts by asking for an assurance that products were not contaminated with GE ingredients. On other occasions, GE activists staged direct action encounters at the corporate headquarters and feed mills of Australia’s leading poultry companies to encourage the company to import non-GE soy meal for chicken feed. National media interest was generated when Greenpeace’s GE activists aboard the Rainbow Warrior blockaded Port Kembla harbour to block the passage of the Rhein, a ship carrying 100,000 tonnes of genetically engineered soy. In the same week, activists wrote “Stop GE imports” in ten metre letters on the Rhein while it was docked in Brisbane and delivered supplies of organic (non-GE) soy to a feed mill operated by Inghams, Australia’s largest poultry company.

These activities, combined with overwhelming community opposition to unlabelled GE food products, led Inghams and three other Australian poultry companies to reject GE soy in early 2005. This decision represents the achievement of an important GE campaign objective. Community, environmental and public health organisations involved in the GE campaign should interpret this breakthrough as evidence that community action is an important priority to complement their participation in government-initiated community engagement.

3. Community engagement: A wolf in sheep’s clothing A third explanation for community sector reservation about community engagement is that this discourse has been applied to decision-making processes that fall well short of the democratic ideals appropriately associated with community engagement. At times, expressions such as community engagement, consultation, partnership and collaboration are used to describe top-down, decide-announce-defend approaches to environmental management. Community engagement activities are frequently conducted after political support for specific outcomes has already been announced. The expression ‘partnership’ is applied to governance arrangements that clearly maintain or entrench power differentials between government agencies and non government organisations.

The evolution of the Natural Heritage Trust, one of the nation’s most significant exercises in community engagement and regionalisation, highlights the potential for a mismatch between rhetoric, actions and consequences. During the first five years of this environmental fund, recipients of government support were selected by panels with strong community representation (NNRMTF 1999, p. 30). The second phase of the scheme relies on regional organisations to determine priority natural resource management interventions. Although the scheme is consistently described by the state and national funding agencies as ‘community-led’, the bilateral agreements between these two levels of government make it clear that while significant responsibility for NRM has been devolved to community-based organisations, this is accompanied by only limited power. Under these arrangements, government bodies retain the authority to endorse and fund regional plans.

Furthermore, the transition from the first phase of this scheme to the second involved a lengthy hiatus during which community groups that had relied on government funding languished. Many of these groups, including extensive networks of ‘carers’ (landcare, bushcare and waterwatch groups), no longer have the capacity to engage meaningfully in either decision making or on- ground environmental projects. Government failure to genuinely share power with regional NRM organisations, or to maintain funding for groups that facilitate community engagement in environmental governance, suggests a lack of “credible commitment” to sustainability that would entail a “demonstrable agenda of appropriate and believable reforms within policy and institutional systems” (Dovers 2003, p. 16).

The credibility of community engagement rhetoric is further undermined by the observation that in some developing countries decentralised governance has, in some instances, “entrenched the dominance of local elites, deepened authoritarianism in governance, and even increased intolerance toward minorities” (Lane et al. 2004).

4. Some people are more equal than others In theory, professionally conducted community engagement activities provide all stakeholders with adequate opportunities to present their preferences and aspirations and for these to be carefully noted in decision making. An advisory group, for instance, established to provide representative input on matters that trigger community concern, should satisfy all parties’ desires to be heard. In practice, this is rarely the case and additional or alternative opportunities for influence are available to the more powerful stakeholders and those able to mobilise capital, political influence or community action (Ewing 2003).

The opportunism and determination of interest groups was illustrated in the shale oil and GE case studies discussed previously. It is also illustrated in the decision-making processes that culminated in significant decisions about transport planning in South East Queensland. In the mid 1990s, the Queensland Government’s Integrated Regional Transport Plan for the region was developed. The community engagement activities culminating in this plan were touted as both extensive and effective. Every household in the region received information about the draft plan, and community forums to solicit community input were well attended. The plan committed the Queensland Government to establish a ministerial advisory committee with representatives for each of several ‘communities of interest’ identified through stakeholder workshops. However, shortly after the committee’s inauguration, the trucking industry, automobile insurance association and other powerful stakeholders stopped attending meetings and exerted their policy influence through less public channels. The consensus support for light rail and integrated transport planning established by the remaining parties carried little influence with the minister. Some of the most important transport decisions, such as the Queensland Government’s considerable fuel subsidies and the construction of freeways were not brought to the Committee for deliberation, let alone open to public comment.

These and similar experiences of community engagement activities contribute to community sector disillusionment and ‘consultation fatigue’. Some NGOs have adopted policies to determine the conditions under which they will participate in consultation or engagement activities. The Brisbane-based Rivermouth Action Group (RAG 2005), for instance, insists on input to the terms of reference for consultation, adequate time to consider relevant information, access to independent legislative advice, sitting fees and inclusion of a ‘do nothing’ option in all development considerations.

5. Community engagement takes energy

Active participation in community engagement activities requires time, stamina and considerable personal and economic resources. Government agencies and industry groups possess and commit these resources. Their representatives on advisory committees and boards are typically well-paid professionals whose expenses are reimbursed. Community and conservation delegates, on the other hand, are generally volunteers and often meet their own costs to participate — transport, meals, photocopying and costs incurred in communicating with their constituents. Community engagement can be seen as a process of attrition whereby those left standing exercise greatest influence. These stakeholders will rarely represent conservation. The process logically favours economic and resource-exploitative interests.

The decision by Greenpeace in the oil shale campaign to invest in both insider (deliberative) and outsider (community action) processes is not generally available to environmental NGOs. If the Queensland conservationists working to legislate land clearing had actively participated in the dozens of consultative committees established to implement the vegetation management legislation adopted in 2000, they would have had no time or energy to educate and mobilise the community. Instead, they rejected these processes as ‘time- wasting’ and successfully pushed for replacement legislation that would both ensure a higher level of conservation and reinstate the responsibility of Government agencies rather than rely on consensus politics in each region (Whelan and Lyons 2004).

6. Community engagement rarely encompasses the full policy cycle

The sixth and final reason to question the adequacy of prevailing community engagement exercises is that policy processes, in the environmental domain at least, tend to more actively engage community groups and concerns at the plan making stage, and relatively less frequently at the plan implementation and plan evaluation stages of the policy cycle.

Increasingly, many environmental management agencies have embraced the principles and practices of adaptive management. Lee (1993, p. 9) differentiates between adaptive management and traditional government- controlled environmental management approaches by acknowledging that uncertainty is inevitable and that:

“Adaptive management takes that uncertainty seriously, treating human interventions in natural systems as experimental process. Its practitioners take special care with information. First, they are explicit about what they expect, so that they can design methods and apparatus to make measurements. Second, they collect and analyze information so that expectations can be compared with actuality. Finally, they transform comparison into learning — they correct errors, improve their imperfect understanding, and change action and plans. Linking science and human purpose, adaptive management serves as a compass for us to use in searching for a sustainable future.”

The anticipated benefits of adaptive management include institutional and social learning (Henton et al. 2001, p. 9) and the potential for community members to reconsider both policy problems or goals and their social construction (Dovers 2003, p. 12). Studies of institutional arrangements for environmental governance, including a “three-decade review of policy and institutional development for Australian resource and environment management, undertaken by a large, multidisciplinary team” (Dovers and Wild River 2003) highlight the importance of organisational persistence and longevity in maximising these forms of learning. The researchers concluded that persistence allows “sufficient time for policy and institutional ‘experiments’ to be run and lessons accrued”. Similar conclusions are drawn by Wondolleck and Yaffee (2001) in their studies of enduring collaborative environmental organisations and Lane et al. (2004) who note that the broad array of social and ecological issues, and the time lag between implementation and measurable change, means we cannot be certain of outcomes: ‘the jury is still out’.

Social learning and other benefits of adaptive management rely on community engagement throughout the entire policy cycle: plan making, implementation and evaluation. This is infrequently the case.

Conclusion

The environmental management stakes are high and extend to the ecosphere upon which human society depends. It is generally agreed that centralised forms of governance have failed to deliver outcomes that could be described as sustainable and that communities expect to be meaningfully involved in making decisions that affect them. Natural resource management and community engagement researchers point to a range of additional benefits of deliberative environmental governance.

The obstacles to whole-hearted community sector participation in government initiated community engagement activities identified here should not be interpreted as either comprehensive or insurmountable. Community engagement should not be dismissed simply because it has not been done well. Left unchecked, these explanations for non-engagement can maintain and even compound contemporary institutions’ inability to conserve the commons. Stakeholders may refrain from entering into or continuing debates and withhold their views and opinions (Poncelet 1998, p. 6) that could offer the hope of sustainable futures. By pursuing alternative strategies to communicate their environmental priorities and preferences, non-engaged stakeholders may undermine the social and institutional learning crucial to long-term sustainability.

About the Author

James Whelan is co-director of The Change Agency ( http://www.thechangeagency.org ). His PhD developed strategies for activist education and training, which have been applied by hundreds of social and environmental justice groups in the Australia-Pacific region. James has two decades activist experience with groups including the Queensland Conservation Council, the Wilderness Society, Amnesty International and Greenpeace, campaigning on air pollution and sustainable transport, toxic pollution, tropical rainforest conservation, human and civil rights, genetic engineering and wilderness conservation, and six years as a social movement researcher and lecturer with Griffith University. He has published widely in both academic and community sector literature.

This paper is presented with permission of the International Conference on Engaging Communities.

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