Companion Lectures
For
Progressive Community Organizing in a Globalizing World
By
Loretta Pyles
Copyright © 2014, Loretta Pyles. From Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World, 2nd Edition, by Loretta
Pyles. New York: Routledge.
Chapter 5
critical organizing
frameworks
• Jack Rothman articulated three modes of intervention
that are widespread in community settings:
• Locality development
• Social planning/policy
• Social action
• Mondros and Wilson also identified three models of
social action organizations
• Grassroots
• Lobbying
• Mobilizing
Copyright © 2014, Loretta Pyles. From Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World, 2nd Edition, by Loretta
Pyles. New York: Routledge.
Chapter 5
critical organizing
frameworks
• Transformative organizing approaches are meansoriented, revolutionary and ideological; examples
include third wave feminist approaches, popular
education models, and Zapatista and other indigenous
movements
• Utilitarian organizing is ends-oriented, reformist and
populist; examples include first wave feminist
organizing, Alinsky style organizing, and other forms
of neighborhood organizing
Copyright © 2014, Loretta Pyles. From Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World, 2nd Edition, by Loretta
Pyles. New York: Routledge.
Chapter 5
critical organizing
frameworks
In choosing an approach consider whether the approach will:
• Facilitate sustained engagement over time?
• Engender empowerment among constituents?
• Result in real improvement in people’s lives?
• Foster changes to oppressive cultural and institutional
practices?
• Would be useful in cross-cultural and transnational settings?
• Would be personally gratifying in which to operate?
Copyright © 2014, Loretta Pyles. From Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World, 2nd Edition, by Loretta
Pyles. New York: Routledge.
Chapter 5
Alinsky and the utilitarian
approach
• Saul Alinsky, is considered by some to be the father of
community organizing; he innovated by bringing
together unions, church leadership and local citizens
• To achieve change, he believed it was necessary for
oppressed groups to pressure those with power by
creating demands or engaging in other confrontational
tactics
• Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)
engaged in boycotts of stores, strikes against meat
packers, rent strikes against slumlords, picketing of
business, and sit-downs at city hall
Copyright © 2014, Loretta Pyles. From Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World, 2nd Edition, by Loretta
Pyles. New York: Routledge.
Chapter 5
the highlander center and the
transformative approach
• Myles Horton was an organizer interested in adult
popular education and founded the Highlander Folk
School in Tennessee in the 1930s, training union and
civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Horton advocated that education be grounded in the
learner’s experiences and included the use of questions
to stimulate self-examination as well as an examination
of social systems
• Today, the Highlander Center has a multi-issue agenda
including labor, immigration, LGBTQ, and global
justice
Copyright © 2014, Loretta Pyles. From Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World, 2nd Edition, by Loretta
Pyles. New York: Routledge.
Chapter 5
Freire and the transformative
approach
• Paulo Freire was an educator who organized illiterate
peasants in rural Brazil; he was critical of banking
education which assumes that knowledge is a
commodity that teachers deposit with students
• Problematizing education is a critical dialogical reflection
on knowledge that is usually taken for granted. To
problematize something goes beyond mere critique and
involves the use of critical questioning by a teacher
• Four qualities of critical consciousness are: (a) power
awareness, (b) critical literacy, (c) desocialization, and
(d) self-organization/self-education.
Copyright © 2014, Loretta Pyles. From Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World, 2nd Edition, by Loretta
Pyles. New York: Routledge.
Chapter 5
feminist organizing and
the transformative approach
• Through consciousness-raising feminists came to affirm the
axiom that “the personal is political”
• Feminists pioneered non-hierarchical organizations that
utilize consensus decision-making
• Feminist organizing tends to have the following dimensions:
•
•
•
•
Concern with power, oppression, and pathways to liberation
Non-hierarchical and/or consensus-oriented decision making
Valuing of group process
Coalition building and concern beyond single-issue organizing
Copyright © 2014, Loretta Pyles. From Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World, 2nd Edition, by Loretta
Pyles. New York: Routledge.
Chapter 5
reconciliation and justicemaking
• Truth-telling – sharing the experience
• Acknowledging the violation
• Compassion – to suffer with
• Protecting the vulnerable from further harm
• Accountability for the abuser
• Restitution to the survivor
• Vindication for the survivor
Copyright © 2014, Loretta Pyles. From Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World, 2nd Edition, by Loretta
Pyles. New York: Routledge.