Article review: Community organizing and Development文献:社区组织和发展
组织集体授权会激进分子和劳动组织桩血汗工厂;祖母、母亲和女儿在华盛顿3月来保卫堕胎权利;邻居一起工作来保护他们的家园和健康的威胁的有毒废料。以社区为基础的开发机构的合作伙伴随着城市大厅建设经济适用房;社区成员的竞赛行业工作也从他们的城里,去除,邻居们支持社区健康诊所。通过集体行动,人们叫的注意社会、政治和经济的不公正,然后一起工作战斗这些问题。社区组织是要创造一种民主仪器会带来持续的社会变革。社区组织减少了拥挤的学校、提供获得医疗保健,增加了经济适用房之间的紧张关系,族群与文化团体。基层的努力已经取得的合法权益少数民族,工人,女权主义者,同性恋者。组织帮助人们学习技术技能,提高个人能力和实现赋权,使政府和企业公民责任。社区组织还包括使得人们团结起来对抗共享问题。当人们加强社区发展发生的债券在他们的社区,建立社会网络,并由自己团体提供一个长期的解决问题的能力。社会运动是创造的,人们和机构禁止在一起战斗不公。
Organizing for Collective Empowerment
Community activists join with labor organizes to picket sweatshops;
grandmothers, mothers and daughters march on Washington to defend abortion
rights; neighbors work together to protect their homes and health from the
menace of toxic waste. Community based development organizations partner
with city hall to build affordable housing; community members contest
industries that remove jobs from their cities; neighbors support a
community health clinic. Through collective actions people call attention
to social, political and economic injustice and then work together to
combat these problems. Community organizing is about creating a democratic
instrument to bring about sustained social change. Community organizations
have reduced overcrowding in schools, provided access to health care,
increased affordable housing and eased tensions between ethnic and
cultural groups. Grassroots efforts have secured legal rights for
minorities, workers, feminists, and gays. Organizing helps people learn
technical skills, increases personal competence and achieves the
empowerment to make government and businesses accountable to citizens.
Community organizing involves bringing people together to combat shared
problems. Community development occurs when people strengthen the bonds
within their neighborhoods, build social networks, and form their own
organizations to provide a long-term capacity for problem solving. Social
movement is created when people and organizations ban together to combat
injustice.
People, problems and feelings of powerlessness
People fight back to eliminate a variety of socially caused problems.
Urban redevelopment programs destroy needed housing. Housing
discrimination concentrates the poor, minorities, and new immigrant groups
in high-crime neighborhoods served by inadequate school systems. These
neighborhoods contain health hazards, from lead based paint to toxic fumes
from incinerators. Health-care costs keep going up, while more than 40
million individuals many of them children have no health insurance. The
combined burdens of child rearing and earning a living are falling
increasingly on women, but in manufacturing industries is decreasing as
international conglomerates move jobs abroad. In general the rich get
richer the poor fall further behind.
Why People Feel Helpless
Even when people experience problems, they often do not think to fight
back. To complain to corporations seems futile. Government appears as a
collection of bumbling, indifferent bureaucrats who are allied with
business interests that are causing some of the problems. Furthermore,
many of the problems people routinely encounter are complex; people have
no idea how to solve them. Fear of retaliation is another reason why many
people do not raise their voices. Retaliation may include arrests of those
provoked in violence, disseminating false rumors to ruin the person's
reputation, or actual physical harm
People in positions of wealth or political power shape the ideas through
which the rest of us interpret the world. In doing so, they exercise a
subtle dominance over the society. Antonio Gramsci calls this ability of
those in power to frame how others think about key issues, an intellectual
hegemony. Even when people earnestly want to fight against the conditions
under which they live, they don't know how. Poor people have little way of
discovering how to set up community-based development organizations to
rebuild their own neighborhoods. People have little experience with
organizing a rally or demonstration, or persuading others to join in the
battle, or pressuring politicians. Further reasons why people feel
helpless is that they are financially or socially dependent on precisely
those that are causing them harm. Citizens understand that their families
are being poisoned by dirty air, undrinkable water but are unwilling to
antagonize the companies that provide their jobs. Finally, people feel
vulnerable when they think they are alone in facing a problem.
Organizing is About Obtaining Collective Power for Ordinary People
Through organizing and fighting back people reduce the sense of
powerlessness. As people join together, they learn from one another that
the causes of problems are social or economic, not personal, and that
problems are shared. Collective people forge a shared sense of legitimacy
and purpose that challenges the myth that decision makers are right
because they are in formal positions of power. People build organizations
that can gather and focus information, pressure government agencies,
conduct successful protests, or create new forms of ownerships. Initial
successes give ordinary people more confidence that they can solve future
problems and by joining together in an organization, individuals reduce
the risk of retaliation. Organizing empowers both individuals and the
communities to which they belong.
Power is achieved by expanding Democracy
Bringing about social change is a vital purpose of organizing, but social
change must be accomplished in democratic ways. Democracy involves the
informed participation of a large number of people in decisions that
affect them. It requires that governmental bodies be accessible to all,
and that policy issues be clearly stated and widely disseminated.
Democracy allows for conflict as different interests are fought out
through a fair and transparent decision-making process. Community
organizing is about creating democratic involvement. Social change
organizations must be run democratically, through there are a variety of
ways of doing so. At the very least decisions are made through votes which
all can participate. Democracy is fragile. What destroys it most easily is
lack of use. If people feel alienated an powerless and thereby do not use
the democratic rights they have democracy dies.
When Organizing and Development efforts succeed
Recognition of a shared and urgent problem is the starting point, but to
achieve a shared vision of what society can and should be requires
building lasting democratically guided organizations. Visions for change
can emerge as people work together and reflect on what they need to
accomplish to solve problems they face. Such visions may stem from an
underlying ideology, a lasting set of beliefs about what society should be
like. The means of achieving social change must be consistent with its
goals. There cannot be racism or sexism in the process of organizing, if
people hope to achieve a more just society. The goals of organizing may
differ from person to person and from time to time. For us, the vision
includes more fairly distributing wealth and power, encouraging those from
different ethnic and cultural groups to work together, and eliminating the
structural obstacles to a more just society, such as poverty and
discrimination. Successful organizing implies a continuing capacity to
address new problems as they emerge, as people develop confidence and
skills and feel empowered to fight back.
People are Empowered
Organizing is about empowering people. Through involvement with community
organizations, people develop confidence that they can succeed. People are
empowered when they pull down the barriers of discrimination and get jobs
based on their skills and experience, not their gender or ethnic
backgrounds.
Communities are Strengthened
Communities can be seen as physical places people who live near one
another; or in terms of a shared social status being a woman or a native
American; or of people who confront a common problem the parents of a
disabled child. Successful organizing builds on communities already in
place and helps to create new bonds among those who share difficulties. As
people identify as members of a community, they learn that the problems
they face and the solutions required are collective ones. As a sense of
community is built and organizational successes become visible, power
increases.
Problems are Solved
Working together in community and social change organizations people have
solved a wide variety of problems. Neighborhood organizations have
alleviated overcrowding in schools, forced drug peddlers to flee, have
pushed for flood control measures to keep basements dry etc.. Victories
multiply as one success enables others to occur.
Social Change is Accomplished through a Variety of Democratic Organizations
Each woman who refuses to be treated in a demeaning way, each citizen who
calls to complain about developers tearing down trees, and each young man
who, during the Vietnam war era, burned his draft card, made a protest,
joined a movement, contributed to social change. People rarely
spontaneously rise up in protest; however when people protest one by one
they often lack the power to bring about needed change. Instead people
come together in community and social change organizations that gain power
by aggregating individual concerns and build the capacity to work toward
needed solutions.
Social change and community organizations can be classified according to
their primary missions, to improve social equity, increase social justice,
provide a good or service, enhance community identity, or strengthen
community defense. In practice most durable organizations combine several
of these missions
Organization Functions Blur and Evolve
In practice, the missions of the separate types of community and social
change groups blur. An organization that defends a geographic community
from outside economic forces may also provide a sense of pride and
identity to those who live nearby. Many organizations that initially came
into being to increase pride in a shared heritage end up demanding social
services or economic improvement for their members.
Contrasting Models of Organizing and Development
Models or organizing describe broader strategies for accomplishing a
vision, the appropriate steps for getting there, and how to evaluate
whether the means of getting there ae consistent with the desired ends.
Some models grow out of specific ideologies of change, but most emerge in
response to concrete situations. Organizers approach people to help them
solve the immediate problems they face, not to carry out some abstract
ideology. Unemployed community members aren't thinking abstractly about
the world economy when their jobs disappear; they are worried about how
they will pay their bills and whether they will eber be employed again.
People organize to combat a specific problem. Organizers see much of their
work in immediate and practical terms, not as a means to carry out some
distant ideology. What motivates them is a sense of injustice that
inflames them. Organizers respond to firsthand experiences and then share
practical knowledge with one another. Over time however, accumulated
experiences can lead different groups to believe in distinct tactics. An
organization might successfully pressure city officials to increase
services to the neighborhood by massing people in the mayor's office. They
may have failed in the past by simply requesting that the city provide a
service. But a few blocks away, another community organization itself
provides the service the city failed to provide. Eventually such
differences are almost codified in contrasting models of what organizing
and development ought to be about. These emerging models develop
passionate supporters and equally passionate detractors among
practitioners and the academics who study organizing. The models provide
answers to different sets of questions. The first is how ideological
should the community organizing effort be? The second is how important is
it to solve problems in a particular way? If the problems are severe
enough, is it ok to solve them even if the process isn't democratic or
empowering? The third set of issues deals with how members should be
recruited and what their roles should be after they are brought on board.
Can Social Change Be brought about Nonideologically?
Any community organization that plans to be around for more than one
campaign needs to address a very practical problem, how to decide what to
work on first and what to work on next. One approach is to not answer the
questions abstractly but instead to determine to work on whatever seems
urgent to members at the time. Some activists fear that such an
opportunistic approach won't add up to substantial gains and argue that it
would be better if the efforts were sequenced in some way and progressed
toward some goal.
At the other extreme, some community activists are ideological and want to
move toward a society with less private ownership and far more collective
responsibility for social welfare. Still others argue that organizing is
not about fighting over the distribution of wealth but is more about
rebuilding community and restoring collective responsibility. Such
value-based organizing is largely influenced by progressive, socially
responsible churches. Economic issues are ignored, but economic
improvement and equity are seen as a consequence of the restoration of
core, values, not as independent issues.
In part, the battle between pragmatically guided and ideologically guided
models reflects deeper concerns about how fundamental the changes are that
should be sought. Should social change and community organizations be
primarily reformist or should they be more revolutionary?
Another ideological concern involves the decision on how confrontational a
social change organization should be. Should such organizations directly
assault the system through demonstration, protests, or perhaps more
radical tactics? Or should they negotiate with those in power, build
consensus, and bring about changes step by step?
Many community organizers view the tradeoff between direct action and
negotiation as a pragmatic, tactical decision: is the immediate problem
better resolved through a directs confrontation or will consensus be
better? Others see confrontation and negotiation as linked in stages: You
try to negotiate, and that failing, escalate step by step until a direct
confrontation is at hand, or confront first, having weakened the enemy and
shown your own strength, then come to the bargaining table.
The choice between direct actions and consensus building however can have
broader implications. Groups that routinely undertake direct actions do so
becaue they believe the establishment is simply wrong; they feel that
involvement in rallies, sit-ins, and other forms of protest, gives
participants a sense that they can make the establishment quake. Direct
actions are not simply about winning an issue, they can make people feel
empowered. In contrast, proponents of consensus building models argue that
organizing succeeds when people learn to work together and that consensus
means that community has been built.
Many of these strategic differences are subsumed as part of the
differences between two contrasting thrusts to organizing. The first
reflects a social mobilization tradition, the second a social production
tradition.
In social mobilization, direct action tradition, the core strategic goal
is to get people to act together, to gain power through the numbers
involved on the assumption that such pressures will make those in power
comply with the demands these people make. In this tradition the emphasis
is on the mobilizing effort-contacting people and encouraging them to
become socially and politically active.
In the social production tradition the strategic goal is to get services,
material goods or ownership of property for people in need. In this
tradition the core emphasis is on achieving the outcome-helping those in
need with personal problems they face, providing jobs, better apartments
or ownership of homes.
Choosing between Means and Ends
Even when there is agreement on what the overall goals of organizing are,
there may be disagreement on how to get there and balance between means
and ends. The balance between means and ends affects how organizers
interpret the role of the community organization. Is the organization a
tool to bring about change or is it an end to be achieved? There is no
clear-cut answers here. Without a formal organization sustained action is
impossible, the organization builds solidarity and community capacity that
enable people to accomplish their shared goals. Bringing solidarity
between members is another concern of means and ends.
Our approach to organizing and Development
The role of the organizer is to help create a sense that change is
possible and show the way. The organizer's job is not an easy one.
Building progressive community and social change organizations requires
dedication and energy, as well as knowledge and experience. Further,
organizing work is often done in the face of larger economic and political
forces that can sometimes overwhelm even the best community organizations.
Regardless of skill levels, not every effort will succeed, but greater
skills and knowledge such as the presented in this article improve the
chances of success. Our approach to organizing involves combining insights
from a variety of models. Rather than promoting one approach. We argue
that social mobilization and social production approaches are
complementary and compatible.
We use numerous ex. Of social problems but recognize that the issues about
which people get most upset change over time, as some problems are solved
and others become more salient. The feminization of poverty continues
while inequality in the distribution of wealth and opportunity gets worse.
The problems and programs designed to deal with them continue t change.
Community organizers need to know the details of these programs, the
problems they cause and the opportunities they present and where to look
for updated info.
Successful organizers believe that community and social change groups can
create a more equal, democratic and empowered society with a stronger
sense of being part of a shared community. To achieve this vision
organizers need to reflect on what has worked and what has not worked. AS
they reflect, organizers will develop their own theories of what task must
be undertaken and carried out.
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Article review: Community organizing and Development
Organizing for Collective Empowerment
Community activists join with labor organizes to picket sweatshops; grandmothers, mothers and daughters march on Washington to defend abortion rights; neighbors work together to protect their homes and health from the menace of toxic waste. Community based development organizations partner with city hall to build affordable housing; community members contest industries that remove jobs from their cities; neighbors support a community health clinic. Through collective actions people call attention to social, political and economic injustice and then work together to combat these problems. Community organizing is about creating a democratic instrument to bring about sustained social change. Community organizations have reduced overcrowding in schools, provided access to health care, increased affordable housing and eased tensions between ethnic and cultural groups. Grassroots efforts have secured legal rights for minorities, workers, feminists, and gays. Organizing helps people learn technical skills, increases personal competence and achieves the empowerment to make government and businesses accountable to citizens. Community organizing involves bringing people together to combat shared problems. Community development occurs when people strengthen the bonds within their neighborhoods, build social networks, and form their own organizations to provide a long-term capacity for problem solving. Social movement is created when people and organizations ban together to combat injustice.
People, problems and feelings of powerlessness
People fight back to eliminate a variety of socially caused problems. Urban redevelopment programs destroy needed housing. Housing discrimination concentrates the poor, minorities, and new immigrant groups in high-crime neighborhoods served by inadequate school systems. These neighborhoods contain health hazards, from lead based paint to toxic fumes from incinerators. Health-care costs keep going up, while more than 40 million individuals many of them children have no health insurance. The combined burdens of child rearing and earning a living are falling increasingly on women, but in manufacturing industries is decreasing as international conglomerates move jobs abroad. In general the rich get richer the poor fall further behind.
Why People Feel Helpless
Even when people experience problems, they often do not think to fight back. To complain to corporations seems futile. Government appears as a collection of bumbling, indifferent bureaucrats who are allied with business interests that are causing some of the problems