Book Proposal
Collective Action for Social Change: An Introduction to Community Organizing
Aaron Schutz and Marie Sandy
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201
(414) 303-1395
schutz@uwm.edu
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Book Proposal
Collective Action for Social Change: An Introduction to Community Organizing
Aaron Schutz and Marie Sandy
I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have
actual responsibilities.
--Sarah Palin, Republican National Convention, 2008
A People’s Organization lives in a world of hard reality. It lives in the midst of smashing
forces, dashing struggles, sweeping cross-currents, ripping passions, conflict, confusion,
seeming chaos, the hot and the cold, the squalor and the drama, which people prosaically
refer to as life and students describe as “society.”
--Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, 1946
A “Teachable Moment” in America
The 2008 presidential campaign brought “community organizing” into the public
dialogue and saw the first former community organizer, Barack Obama, elected as president.
This has piqued a broad interest in this model of collective action. In fact, a recent New York
Times article (April, 2009) reported that applications for organizing jobs and attendance in
courses on organizing have substantially increased. Very few people, however, really
understand what “community organizing” means. This is the perfect time for publishing a clear
and readable introduction to community organizing.
The book proposed, here, is designed to be used as a textbook in college courses on
community organizing and to provide an accessible introduction to a wider audience. The book
draws from both authors’ extensive experience participating in community organizing efforts and
teaching courses on community organizing to novices.
Beyond the “Bag of Tricks” Approach to Educating About Organizing
A few other introductions to community organizing exist (listed in “market” section,
below). These are mainly “how to” manuals that cover a wide range of different aspects of
organizing practice like working with the media and running a public meeting. In our experience
these existing books cover too much ground for novices. They give a sense of the “bag of tricks”
that organizers use, but without enough information or experience to actually use these. As a
result, we have found that this all-encompassing approach generally fails to initiate readers into
the rich but often counter-intuitive worldview of organizers.
Our approach, developed through more than a decade teaching of introductory courses on
organizing, is largely unique in that it is aimed at complete novices. It is narrowly designed to
teach people how to think like an organizer instead of trying to teach them to be an organizer—
which we doubt a text or a single course can do. Because the community organizing perspective
on power and inequality is quite alien to the way most people understand civic action, learning to
think like an organizer turns out to be quite a task by itself.
In our experience, people in our society are programmed to equate social action with
social service. It is quite challenging to get them to think about social change in a new way. The
ways organizers think about “power” and “self interest” and “relationships” are quite alien.
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Unless a text takes the time to make sure readers understand this, they often go away without
really grasping what is most important and powerful about the organizing perspective.
Overview and Aims of the Book
Part I will combine original chapters with a few key articles and chapters by other
scholars and organizers. Part II will contain entirely new material, representing expanded
versions of the written lectures from our online community organizing course. In these chapters
we will use many stories and anecdotes from our and others’ experience to illustrate different
methods and concepts. An appendix will give more specific instructions and suggestions for
instructors. We will also point readers to a website including some online video presentations of
key concepts and skills.
The material covered by the book’s chapters include:
1. A succinct history of the emergence of community organizing in America.
2. A discussion of differences between organizing and other approaches to community
improvement like “community development.”
3. A chapter on the difference between political campaigning and organizing, and an
analysis of Obama campaign’s approach to the 2008 campaign, showing why it was not
really “community organizing.”
4. Writings from key community organizers that give a sense of their (often idiosyncratic)
personalities and visions. The most important “character” will be Saul Alinsky who
formulated today’s most influential model of organizing in the 1930s and 40s.
5. Key critiques of organizing in the Alinsky tradition.
6. Information about how organizing has changed since Alinsky’s day.
7. Introductions to key concepts of organizing, including how to choose a “target,” how to
“cut an issue,” etc.
8. Exercises and discussion questions for each chapter that provide opportunities for
practice and critical reflection.
9. A list of suggested supplementary books and videos.
10. A sample course schedule, syllabus, and recommended exercises for instructors.
Manuscript Status
The readings for Part I of the book have largely been chosen and draft introductions for
many have been written. We are waiting for a contract before pursuing permissions for
publication. We have ideas for alternatives, and will write these chapters ourselves if necessary.
The chapters for Part II are currently in the form of online lectures from our community
organizing course that will need to be expanded and rewritten. We believe that we could have a
completed MS by the end of September, 2009.
Market
Audience
The audience for this book will be instructors of courses on community organizing in
colleges and universities in sociology and social work departments, among others. A recent NY
Times article and recent posts on a community organizing listserv indicate that interest in
organizing and enrollment in courses on organizing are increasing. In their current form, the
lectures from our online course are publicly available and some of these have already been used
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in courses across the nation. For example, a social work college in India informed Schutz that
they use this material as their core curriculum. These early versions will remain online, drawing
a wider audience to the more complete material available in the book.
The book will also appeal to those interested in organizing more generally. In fact, one
author, Schutz, publishes an ongoing front-page series, “Core Dilemmas of Community
Organizing,” on the popular progressive blog Open Left (openleft.com) with 80,000 unique
visitors a month. He could market this book to the Open Left audience in his posts.
Competition
A small number of contemporary introductions to the practice of community organizing
are currently available, including:
Kimberly Bobo, et. al., Organizing for Social Change, 3rd Ed. (Santa Ana, CA: Seven
Locks Press, 2001).
Michael Jacoby Brown, Building Powerful Community Organizations (Arlington, MA:
Long Haul Press, 2007).
Michael Gecan, Going Public: An Organizer's Guide to Citizen Action (NY: Anchor
Press, 2004).
Joan Minieri, Tools for Radical Democracy: How to Organize for Power in Your
Community (NY: Jossey Bass, 2007)
Rinku Sen, Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy (NY: Jossey
Bass, 2003)
Lee Staples, Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing, 2nd Ed. (NY: Praeger,
2004)`
Most of these reflect the “bag of tricks” approach discussed earlier. In our experience,
having tried out a number of these texts (including Bobo, et. al., Brown, Sen, and Staples) in our
courses, none provide a sufficiently engaging or comprehensive introduction to the worldview of
community organizing. This has led to our own extensive online lectures. Staples’s Roots to
Power is probably the closest to our approach, but is does not have the kind of rich detail we
include, and our students found it fairly dry and unengaging.
Another set of existing books consists of academic case studies of organizing groups or
sociological overviews of organizing. They show what organizers do but are rarely written by
people with deep experience in organizing themselves and focus on the internal dynamics of
these groups. These books could be good supplementary texts for ours in an organizing course.
In fact, we plan to use edited chapters from both Swarts and Warren in Part I of our book.
Recent examples include:
Dennis Shirley, Community Organizing for Urban School Reform (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1997).
Heidi Swarts, Organizing Urban America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008)
Mark Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American
Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
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Finally, Loretta Pyles’s recent Progressive Community Organizing (NY: Routledge,
2009), is essentially a standard sociology text, analyzing organizing from an academic
perspective but not trying to initiate students into the worldview of organizers.
Our book will be unique in that it is neither a “how to” manual nor an academic
sociological analysis of community organizing. Instead, it seeks to impart a gut-level sense of
how community organizers make sense of the world. Further, it will include key texts in the
voices of actual organizers and key scholars. Our students frequently come back to us and tell us
how they found themselves using this way of thinking to react to challenges in their own lives.
Authors
Aaron Schutz has worked with local community organizing groups in Milwaukee for the
past decade. He has helped plan campaigns and actions, collaborated on efforts to “cut” issues,
and given testimony to different elected groups. He was primarily responsible for four million
dollars given last year by the State of Wisconsin to Milwaukee Public Schools to hire school
nurses in all schools without one. He recently founded the Milwaukee Community Organizing
Coalition, one of few efforts in the nation to bring the community organizing groups in a city
together to work on shared projects. He has taught the course “Introduction to Community
Organizing” for eight years. And he is increasingly well-known nationally under the handle
“educationaction” for his ongoing series “Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing” on Open
Left (see www.educationaction.org/core-dilemmas-of-organizing.html).
Marie Sandy was deputy director of Wider Opportunities for Women in Washington, DC,
where, among other efforts, she worked with organizing groups around the nation in fights over
welfare reform. She also created and facilitated a local community organizing group in a lowincome neighborhood in Ontario, California, bringing together a range of organizations and
individuals from all walks of life, from stable workers to administrators to homeless people, on
projects seeking changes in health care, food provision, and more. She has taught the
“Introduction to Community Organizing” course for two years.
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Chapter Overview
Collective Action for Social Change: An Introduction to Community Organizing
The book will be split into two major sections, with an introduction and a concluding
appendix aimed at college instructors.
Introduction
As in all of the chapters written by the authors, the introduction will provide a series of
rich narratives about organizing meant to give readers a “feel” for what we are trying to teach.
The introduction will begin with a discussion of the different kinds of civic engagement that are
not organizing. We have found that it is easier to help people understand what organizing is by
describing what it is not. By activating people’s existing schemas for more familiar forms of
engagement, like short term “mobilizing” efforts, “service” projects, and collaborative
“community development” projects, among others, we define the boundaries of what organizing
is. Much of the introduction is drawn from a brief workshop developed by Schutz to introduce
organizing to large groups..
By telling stories about organizing, we will seek to bring students vicariously into
different educational contexts. The following is an example:
A few years ago, a conservative talk show host on a radio station referred to
Latinos in our community as a bunch of “wetbacks” from across the border. Some
outraged community groups responded by protesting in front of the station.
During this time, a community organizer came to talk to one of our classes. He
belittled the protestors for their failure to think strategically.
“What does the radio station really care about?” he asked the class.
After some silence and different answers, like “audience numbers” and
“reputation,” someone said “Money!”
“All of the issues you mentioned are important,” he said, “but I tend to think the
core issue is usually money. In any case, an organizer always thinks about the range of
things that motivate his opposition.” Then he asked, “Given what you think about their
core motivation, how many of you think they will care that much if some people walk
around with signs in front of their building?”
Students thought about it for a while, and then agreed that it probably wouldn’t
make that much difference to the station. “Everyone already knows they are
conservative,” one student pointed out. Another added that it might actually increase
their audience.
“Okay,” the organizer said. “So let’s think about this differently. Do you know
who the biggest advertiser on that radio station is?” No one knew. “Well, see, you
would need to do some research instead of just wandering around in front of the building
yelling. I happen to know that it’s Durable Motors.” Many students nodded. They’d
heard commercials from about this dealership.
“Okay, then. Well, let’s think about the station’s motivation instead of just
running off to hold another protest. Now that you have this information, what kind of
action would you suggest?”
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One student came up with the idea of having groups of people go to the dealership
every day to test-drive cars without buying them, tying up the dealership’s staff, until the
dealership agreed to pull their ads.
“Now you’re thinking like an organizer,” our visitor said.
Part I: History and Theory
Part I brings texts by other scholars together with original chapters written by Schutz and
Sandy. It will introduce readers to the history of organizing, key theoretical considerations, and
texts actually written (or spoken) by key characters in organizing. Texts written by us are
marked as “original.”
Chapter 1: The History of Community Organizing in America (Original)
We begin with labor organizing as the key precursor to community organizing in
America. No existing text exists that we are satisfied with.
In the decades at the end of the 19th Century, labor and community organizing were not
really distinct approaches. Local residents and employees often fought together in early
struggles. Early in the 20th Century for a range of reasons, however, these approaches began to
diverge. The settlement house movement of the turn of the century emerged, representing an
important early effort to intervene in impoverished urban communities. But it differed
significantly from the union model of collective struggle in its focus on collaboration instead of
conflict. The tradition of service-based “social work” grew in part from the settlement house
model, focusing on helping people instead of teaching them how to fight oppression. In the
1930s, Saul Alinsky developed the most influential model of community organizing when he
created the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council an impoverished area of Chicago. He
worked in coalition with labor leader John L. Lewis and his Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) as they sought to unionize the local slaughterhouses. We discuss how Alinsky responded
to the different historical challenges of his time. Then we examine how and why his lieutenants
and other organizers advanced organizing in the years after his death in 1972. We use the Civil
Rights Movement in the South and Students for a Democratic Society in the North from the
1950s through the 1970s as contrasting examples of the different visions of community
engagement that still tend to dominate in America today. We discuss how the deterioration of
truly grassroots community groups in urban America has led to a focus on churches as some of
the last remaining durable community institutions, especially in impoverished areas.
Chapter 2: Saul Alinsky’s Model of Organizing (Original)
In this chapter we will give an overview of Alinsky’s biography and lay out the key
concepts and ideas that structured his model of organizing. We will provide excerpts from his
writings to give a good sense of his often profane and combative personality. We focus in on
areas where people often misinterpret Alinsky’s vision. For example, Alinsky has often been
described as focused simply on using selfish impulses to bring people together to fight “the
man.” This is unfair to the rich complexity of his vision of power and resistance, and disregards
his years of graduate education at the University of Chicago under the most important urban
sociologists of his time. We lay out the key concepts that informed his perspective on social
action and collective power.
Chapter 3: Saul Alinsky Speaks (Alinsky)
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We plan to reprint sections of a Playboy interview with Alinsky that gives a good
example of the way Alinsky thought and spoke as well as an overview of his biography in his
own words. If this interview or another equivalent is not available or cost-effective, we can
expand the citations in Chapter 2, and this would suffice as an introduction to Alinsky. The
interview has been reprinted on the Internet at http://www.progress.org/, but there are no
assurances it will stay up, and it is very long and somewhat challenging to read in its current
form. We would edit the interview, and it would be more accessible in a book.
The following is a sample of the interview and of the way Alinsky thought and spoke:
PLAYBOY: Why did you pick the Back of the Yards district as your first target?
ALINSKY: . . . For one thing, it was the area behind the Chicago Stockyards that Upton
Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle at the turn of the century, and nothing at all had been
done to improve conditions since then. It was the nadir of all slums in America. People
were crushed and demoralized, either jobless or getting starvation wages, diseased, living
in filthy, rotting unheated shanties, with barely enough food and clothing to keep alive.
And it was a cesspool of hate; the Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Negroes, Mexicans and
Lithuanians all hated each other and all of them hated the Irish, who returned the
sentiment in spades.
. . . . I knew that once [people] were provided with a real, positive program to change
their miserable conditions, they wouldn't need scapegoats anymore. Probably my prime
consideration in moving into Back of the Yards, though, was because if it could be done
there, it could be done anywhere. People would say to me, "Saul, you're crazy; try any
place but Back of the Yards. It's impossible, you'll never get anywhere." You've got to
remember that, to most people in those days, the concept that the poor have the
intelligence and ingenuity to solve their own problems was heresy; even many radicals
who paid it lip service in principle were elitist in practice. So the more I was told it was
impossible the more determined I was to push ahead.
Chapter 3: Community Organizing or Organizing Community (Stall and Stoecker)
This well-known article critiques Alinsky’s model from a “feminist” perspective,
describing what the authors argue represents an alternative model of collective action. We have
seen this article reprinted elsewhere. This article does a nice job of laying out key differences in
each model’s vision of power, leadership, action, and other concepts in a clear and
conversational style. Stall and Stoecker argue that the women’s model of organizing is less
hierarchical and more focused on generating collective power from group collaboration instead
of wresting power from others. This article provides a broad range of potential topics for group
discussion, including questions about how much the two models can be integrated together.
In our introduction to this chapter we prepare readers for our later chapter about
definitions of “public” and “private” relationships, noting that these key organizing concepts
draw from the ideas presented in this chapter. We also point to key areas of the article that, in
our experience, have led to student misunderstandings. For example, we emphasize that while
Stall and Stoecker draw their model from women’s experience, they are not arguing that only
women use this model. And we ask readers to judge whether the authors have been fair to
Alinsky, pointing out areas where we think it is not.
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Chapter 4: Ella Baker and a Non-Alinsky Model of Organizing (Barbara Ransby)
This chapter will consist of excerpts from a biography of Ella Baker. Baker helped found
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the South during the 1960s, and her
vision provides a good example of someone representing the “women’s” model of organizing
discussed in Chapter 3. We will keep the selections brief enough to be read together with that
chapter for a single class period. The sophistication of her vision complicates the clear
conceptual differences that Stall and Stoecker lay out, helping students get beyond simple
binaries in their understanding.
If necessary we could go with Chapter 3 alone with an expanded introduction.
Chapter 5: A Theology of Organizing (Mark Warren)
This chapter will reprint an edited version of a chapter from Mark Warren’s book, Dry
Bones Rattling to introduce “faith-based community organizing.” Again, we have seen this
reprinted elsewhere. It often surprises students when they find out that the dominant form of
progressive community organizing in America involves churches. Drawing from his case study
of groups in Texas, Warren provides the best available explanation of how the faith based
approach emerged as an adaptation of Alinsky’s approach, and of how the faith-based model
works, at least in the ideal. This chapter provides an opportunity to discuss issues involved in
organizing religious organizations for collective action and in encouraging religious leaders to
think differently about what the relationship between faith and action. This chapter also shows
how ideas drawn from what Stall and Stoecker call the “women’s” model of organizing have
increasingly been integrated into contemporary approaches to organizing, partly responsible for
increased participation and leadership of women.
Chapter 6: ACORN and “Door Knocking” Groups (Heidi Swarts)
Heidi Swarts conducted extensive case studies of ACORN, the most prominent example
of the second major contemporary approach to organizing: what we call “door knocking” groups
that go door to door to organize individuals one by one. We plan to use an edited version of a
chapter from her book, but there are other options.
In our introduction, we will relate this chapter to Warren’s discussion of faith-based
groups, discussing how faith-based “organizations of organizations” differ from “organizations
of individuals.” For example, “door knocking” approach is much more time-intensive than the
faith-based model. At the same time, the “door knocking” approach tends to reach low-income
and poor groups that faith-based groups often fail to include. Organizers from “door knocking”
groups approach organizing quite differently from those working in faith-based groups. For
example, ACORN groups are usually more militant than faith based groups. And they must
constantly engage in “actions” to keep participants involved and committed, while faith based
groups can take a more leisurely approach to campaigns because their membership, based in
congregations, is more stable.
Chapter 8: The Difference Between Campaign and Community Organizing: Obama’s 2008
Presidential Campaign (Original)
This chapter expands two of Schutz’s blog posts on Open Left (one of which was
reprinted at Black Agenda Report) where he explains the differences between Obama’s approach
to campaigning and more standard models of community organizing. Instead of meeting with
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people and asking about their concerns, Obama’s volunteers were taught to use an “evangelical”
approach to voter mobilization. Volunteers were taught to develop brief, standardized scripts
describing why they had “converted” to Obama. They then told these stories to other voters on
phone calls, in house meetings, and elsewhere in an effort to activate the excitement of others.
Marshall Ganz, a former lieutenant of Cesar Chavez’s in California and now a Harvard lecturer,
developed this approach for Obama out of his organizing experience. This chapter gives us an
opportunity to introduce this “storytelling” strategy of organizing and to discuss how it would be
used differently in an organizing campaign. This chapter also lays out the differences between
short term efforts to mobilize huge numbers of voters and longer term efforts by community
organizers to activate smaller numbers of leaders committed for the long haul.
Part II: Learning to Think Like an Organizer
Part II expands lectures from our online community organizing course. Because we have
tested these lectures out, we have a sense of how students make sense of them and the kinds of
challenges they encounter in making sense of the concepts we present.
Chapter 9: Overview
Chapter 9 revisits some of the key points from the Introduction. In our experience, some
level of repetition is useful in helping students internalize key ideas about organizing. We will
use different anecdotes and take less space to lay out some of the most important points to ensure
that readers remain engaged.
Chapter 10: Public vs. Private Relationships
One of the key distinctions organizers use to make sense of the world and to keep
powerful people from manipulating them is between “private” and “public” relationships. We
start this chapter by reminding readers of the “women’s” or what we call the “private” model of
organizing discussed in earlier chapters. In “private” relationships like ones in families, people
generally experience safety and intimacy. “Public” relationships, in contrast, lack this kind of
safety. In “private” relationships one can expect to be loved regardless of what one does or
becomes. In “public” relations, however, organizers argue that people should be held
accountable for one’s actions, and that people should seek not love but respect.
This public/private distinction provides participants in organizing groups with a powerful
tool to distinguish what kind of relationship one is in and what kind of interactions are legitimate
in each. We will tell stories taken from writings about organizing as well as our and others’
experience to help illuminate this dichotomy, and will also include examples that complicate it,
helping readers understand that simple concepts like this never fully describe the complexities of
real situations.
We will describe how powerful people often try to make leaders in organizing groups
think that they are in a “private” relationship with them to divert or blunt actions against them.
For example, when an organizing group was pursuing a campaign to get banks to change their
lending practices, a bank president often started his discussions with the group’s organizer with
questions about his children and personal life. This was part of the president’s effort to create
the illusion of a “private” relationship with the organizer. In another story, an elected official
talked about what a nice, churchgoing person he was in an effort to stop an organizing group
from holding him accountable for his actions. The public/private distinction also helps
organizing groups make ethical decisions about what is and is not fair game for public action.
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Chapter 11: One-on-One Interviews
The one-on-one interview is the one practical skill we try to teach in this book. The oneon-one is the key tool used in organizing groups to create strong relationships between
participants and keep leaders in touch with the beliefs and hopes of less involved participants. In
one-on-one interviews, a leader or organizer in an organizing group meets with a prospective
participant for a 30-45 minute discussion focused on this person’s history, beliefs, and desires.
Organizing groups use one-on-one interviews to achieve a discrete set of goals: to create a
relationship, to discover someone’s “self-interest” or “passion,” and to see whether there is a
place this person can be plugged in to the organization’s ongoing efforts.
While this interaction is relatively brief, when students actually do one-on-one interviews
with each other they almost invariably find that they do develop surprisingly real relationships.
In one of Aaron’s recent classes, for example, the room was always almost completely silent
when he came in to teach for the first half of the semester. It was the quietest class he ever
taught. In the days after the students completed two rounds of brief (10-15 minute) one-on-ones,
the class became a chatterbox. Organizers of faith-based groups often point out to members that
they don’t really know much of anything about people they have been sitting next to in the pews
for years. They encourage churches to use one-on-ones internally to strengthen their community.
A motto of organizing is that “nobody comes to a meeting because they see a flyer. People come
to a meeting when someone they know invites them.” Completing lots of one-on-ones give
leaders the power to invite lots of people, and knowledge about what is likely to really engage
each person—it gives leaders a group of potential “followers” that they can draw upon for future
participation.
One-on-ones keep leaders in contact with the interests and beliefs of less involved or
potential members. This knowledge helps leaders “cut” issues that are likely to reflect the real
passions of members, and helps them avoid issues that won’t.
Chapter 12: Values
The first organization Saul Alinsky created was the Back of the Yards Neighborhood
Council. Early in his organizing career, especially, Alinsky did not worry much about “values.”
He focused on what needed to be changed, and not on the danger that some efforts might make
things better for some by making life more difficult for others.
In part because of this lack of focus on values, years later the Back of the Yards
organization started organizing to keep African Americans out of their neighborhood. Alinsky
actually threatened to try to overthrow his own creation when he found out about this.
This chapter explores how organizers and organizing groups think about values, and the
tensions that can arise within them. Given the realities of the world “the way it is,” as Alinsky
often said, it is often the case that groups cannot really fulfill all of their core values at the same
time. For example, “democracy” and broad participation is a critical value for community
organizing groups. Yet these groups often operate in a fairly hierarchical way, seeking
democratic input only at crucial points. In part this is because fostering democratic participation
and dialogue can take a lot of time and effort. If you try to make everything democratic, you will
likely end up actually doing very little. As usual we discuss concrete examples of the kind of
tensions organizers face when they seek to live by a broad set of values.
Chapter 12: Locating a Target
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This chapter introduces the first few of a set of concepts organizers use to plan actions
and campaigns. We explain what “counts” as a “target” in community organizing and why it is
so important to choose a clear target. We discuss the ethics of choosing targets in organizing,
noting that the key issue is not who caused a problem, but who we can get to solve it. And we
include a number of examples from our experience and from courses where we discussed
effective and ineffective targets.
Chapter 13: Cutting an Issue
This chapter is in many ways central to Part II. One of the most important and
challenging tasks of any community organizing groups is to “cut” a good issue. We start by
examining the difference between a “problem” and an “issue.”
A problem (or “concern”) is some large and amorphous challenge for which there are no
clear solutions. World hunger is a “problem.” Police Harassment is a “problem.” Bad Schools
are “problems.” A problem is something that makes you want to go home and pull the covers
over your head. They are depressing with no real sense of how you might do something about
them.
A good “issue” from a community organizing standpoint has a number of criteria. It
must be clear and simple so that people can easily understand it (even if the underlying change is
actually quite complex). It must be winnable by your organization with the power it currently
has. It must be deeply felt (a significant number of people have to care enough about it to want
to do something about it). It must build the organization and provide opportunities to enhance
the capacities of participants. The organization must have a clear solution in mind to fight for.
And there are others.
As with “values,” the criteria for cutting an issue are often contradictory. For example it
is often difficult to find something that is deeply felt and winnable.
One of the key concepts that students often struggle with is the core goal of fighting for a
particular issue. We have been programmed to think that the aim of any particular effort is to
win. But it is not that simple in community organizing. Of course you do want to win, but the
core aim of organizing is to build long term, durable power. You want issues that will help you
build that power. It is that power—or the belief by other powerful people that you have such
power—that will allow you to win bigger issues in the future and may prevent the powerful from
doing things you don’t like because they are worried you may respond. Power can get you to the
table with decision-makers and increase the chance that they may actually listen to you. Good
issues change the balance of power and increase the capacity of your organization. If you win an
issue without actually “organizing,” without actually demonstrating power, you haven’t actually
fulfilled the requirements of a good issue.
For this reason, organizing groups generally choose issues that will be challenging to win
on. A group may sometimes want to pursue an issue that doesn’t really require intensive
organizing, but this won’t do much to help the organization long-term. In fact, pursuing too
many “non-organizing” efforts, too many easy wins, may actually reduce your power in the longterm. It may end up mis-educating participants about what organizing is, and bleeding resources
off from efforts that would.
Chapter 14: Research and Power Analysis
Okay, so you have a clear target, and you have an at least acceptable issue to work on.
What now? Well, we’ve actually skipped a step. Because you can’t get a good issue unless you
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do research. You need to become an expert not only on your issue, but also on the target you are
focusing on. Because a good “issue” includes a solution, you need to understand the different
ways people have tried to solve the problem you are interested in. You also need to know the
history of different efforts to address the issue. For example, when Aaron worked on the
challenge of dental access for poor children in Wisconsin, he needed to know that there was a
bias in the state against mobile dental treatment vans. They weren’t a good place to start for a
solution. Once you focus on a particular aspect of a problem—like dental services for kids—it
can take a lot of work to gather enough information even to figure out if you can cut a good
issue. You need to read reports and studies and talk to a lot of people. This is different from
standard “academic” research, however. And we talk about how we have transformed
information into forms usable by organizing groups.
Part of your research will involve a power analysis. There are many different ways to
conceptualize this, but for simplicity’s sake, in this book, we will define power analysis as an
examination of the motivations, constraints, and connections of your target. If you are going to
get a target to make the change you want, you need to have a good idea of the kinds of things
that are likely to influence it. You need to know who the target is most likely to listen to, and
why. You need to understand the target’s history of decisions in the past. In this sense, a power
analysis is an exploration of the levers you have to get a target to “move” and of the ties that will
likely prevent such movement.
Chapter 15: Tactics or “Doing Actions”
So you have gone to your target and asked “pretty please” for them to do what you want.
And they’ve said no—or have given one of the range of responses that powerful people use to
get petitioners to go away: “we’ll think about it,” or “let’s put a group together to study that,” or
“we’d love to but we can’t afford it,” and the like. At this point you need to come up with a
tactic, what organizers call “an action” to increase the pressure on this person to come around to
your side.
The core aim of an action is not simply to put pressure on a target (although, of course,
that is necessarily part of the goal). Instead, as with issues, the best actions build your
organization. Again, this is difficult for students to internalize, because they will almost
invariably begin by trying to find some easy tactic that will “win” the day. But if an organizing
group wins without increasing its power and capacity, it won’t increase its ability to win on even
larger issues in the future.
For example, a good action will involve a lot of people, and will include opportunities for
participants to learn not only about the issue but also about how to engage with a target. This is
true even if you could achieve the same goal with an action that only involved a couple of
people. In fact, early on this is the kind of action students often come up with. An example of
the problem with this approach came in the experience of a parent organizing group in
California. This group managed to get the state involved in local district challenges when a
single leader wrote a letter to the state commissioner accusing the district of failing to follow
state laws. This approach did work, but it also represented a lost opportunity to engage and
educate members of the parent group. One could have imagined, for example, an entire bus of
parents going to the state capitol to deliver this letter (or a collection of letters) to the
commissioner, perhaps as part of a meeting where the parents could present testimony.
Activities like these might have been unnecessary from the point of view of “winning,” but could
have been enormously productive from an organizing point of view.
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As in earlier chapters, we will provide a series of stories, including a more elaborated
version of the parent organizing example, as well as exercises, to help readers get beyond their
initial instinct to “win” through the easiest avenue possible.
Chapter 16: Planning a Campaign
This chapter will pull the concepts above together into a coherent structure for planning a
campaign. There are a range of ways to conceptualize a “campaign.” We start with a basic
exercise that asks students to come up with an initial tactic and imagine possible responses a
target could make. Then we ask them to imagine different tactics to respond to these possible
responses. We give a number of examples of what this might look like, and stories about what
has actually happened in different campaigns. In other words, we encourage them to speculate
about what is likely to happen and actually plan for different contingencies (emphasizing that it
is never possible to predict the future).
At the same time, in this chapter, we discuss a range of other tasks that need to be
completed in order to prepare for and conduct an organizing campaign, including pulling
together a time-line, negotiating with allies, etc.
This is as far as our text goes. At this point, students that actually want to be organizers
would need to get involved in an actual organizing group. It is at this point that the “bag of
tricks” approach may become relevant. But we believe students will learn these other skills best
in the context of actual action, not in a classroom. They need their own real experience to make
useful sense of these skills. This class provides a foundation for action, and is no substitute for
it.
Chapter 17: Conclusion: Critical Issues in Organizing
We conclude with a discussion of some of the key challenges facing organizing today.
These prefigure the discussions in Schutz’s next book, which will be drawn from his blog series:
Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing. We note some of the ways that this model seems to
have failed. We explore, for example, the racial and class challenges that have hobbled many
organizing groups that have tried to create diverse constituencies. We discuss some of the
reasons why organizing in America has been less successful than one might expect given the
hopeful tone of earlier chapters. If organizing in its current form is so effective, we note, then
why has hardly anyone heard about it? Why hasn’t it gained more power? Why is organizing
almost invisible in many locations in the United States?
We mean this book to provide a base for readers to move on to improve organizing, not
as a canonical text laying out the “truths” of collective action in the modern world. This last
chapter seeks to leave readers with this more critical perspective. Overall, however, the core
goal of this introductory text is to initiate students into the standard organizing vision of the
world.
Appendix: Ideas for Instructors
The appendix will include a recommended syllabus for the course, recommended videos
and other supplementary materials for each chapter. We will discuss aspects of the text that, in
our experience, students often have difficulty understanding or become confused about. We will
also include exercises that have proved effective in getting key concepts across to students.