The media and the net has focused on Obama's background as a community organizer and his community organizer approach to campaigning.  His is supposed to be a "bottom up" instead of a "top down" approach.  One newspaper argued that "regardless of the outcome . . . the Obama campaign will leave behind a new generation of trained community activists." In fact Marshall Ganz, the designer of Obama's organizing approach states that "We're training a whole bunch of new leaders."

In this post, I argue that what Obama is doing has little to do with the core tradition of community organizing that I have been talking about in this series, and that he was trained in himself.  His approach is unlikely to "leave . . . a cadre of activists behind" that can generate power outside of the context of Obama's machine.

Traditional organizing seeks to create local groups whose direction is determined by local leaders.  Leaders elicit stories about the desires of many potential members, creating a broad network of relationships based in common goals.  Obama's approach is essentially the opposite.  Leaders go out in the community to tell people their stories in an effort to bring them over to Obama.  

Let me stress that my point, here, is not to critique the Obama campaign.  In fact, I'm generally an Obama supporter, although not a particularly strong one.  Efforts to mobilize voters are probably necessarily quite different from efforts to create strong local organizations.  But in part because few people in the media seem to really understand the distinction between these, many stories blur this distinction in problematic ways.  And the distinction is critical, because the campaign model, in its very structure, is directly opposed to the goals of community organizing in crucial ways.  (To some extent this post is related to Paul Rosenberg's earlier posts on Obama as a classic progressive.)

Those new to these posts may want to read Part I and Part II of "What is Organizing?".

More detail after the flip.
Crossposted from Open Left.

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It may surprise many readers that most of the largest progressive community organizing groups in America are coalitions of churches. 

In this post, I discuss why progressive community organizing in this country has ended up working so much through churches.  I also start to examine a few benefits and problems with this approach. In later posts will discuss other issues related to the continuing intersection between organizing and religion in America.

These seem like key issues to discuss at this anniversary of Reverend MLK's death and amidst all the reminiscence of the civil rights movement, which was so fundamentally based in churches.

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Every tradition of social action has its own ways of making sense of the world. Community organizing, for example, generally understands social action as an ongoing series of battles over power and resources and the less powerful as a repository of potential agency.  When social service agencies look out at the world, in contrast, they see suffering, a vast collection of people in need of help.  

In this post, I lay out some of the key concepts that "frame" the environment for community organizers, that help them make choices about strategy, recruitment, and action.  This is Part II of an introduction to the model of community organizing currently dominant in the United States.  See Part I: What is Community Organizing, What isn't Community Organizing.  I will come back to more "dilemmas" of organizing in later posts, but it seemed useful to create a shared context for this discussion in these more descriptive posts.  More on the flip.  See http://educationaction.org for more.

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(A somewhat updated version is available on OpenLeft: http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4710

Popular conceptions of civic action in America have become extremely impoverished. While struggle goes on in many arenas of our society, coherent traditions of community organizing in America have mostly faded to myth in the popular imagination.

Old black-and-white newsreels of marching students, brave sharecroppers, and police-wielded water cannons from the 1960s flicker through our minds.  But these images have lost most of their concrete meaning and contain few coherent lessons for social action.  

I've been writing about community organizing, but I haven't been clear about exactly what I mean by this.  There is no single effective model of "community organizing." Currently, however, the approach Saul Alinsky developed in the 1930s on the back streets of Chicago has become dominant in America--for good or ill.  I call the current version of this model "post-Alinsky" since it has been significantly developed and changed by people like Ed Chambers, Ernie Cortes, Heather Booth, and others who came after Alinsky.  More on the flip.  [See http://educationaction.org" for more. Crossposted from OpenLeft

If you are in the Midwest and interested in learning more about organizing, you might consider going to this weekend's Organizing Teach-In in Wisconsin that I helped organize http://www.mwsocialforum.org/teachin.  Space is limited, though.]

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Americans think of community participation almost entirely terms of social service to individuals.  This is a tragedy, and a key factor preventing strong progressive action for change. 

If you go to a volunteer center in an American city and ask how you can get involved in a social action project to fight collectively against police brutality, or for more school funding, you will likely be met with blank stares.  That's not "volunteering." Volunteers "help," they don't fight. 

If you go talk to a non-profit leader in America about community organizing, you will probably be treated like a nut.  "You mean, like Martin Luther King stuff?" 

More on the flip.  [Part of a continuing series.  See  http://www.educationaction.org/organizin g--education-series.html EducationAction for more.  Crossposted from OpenLeft]

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