Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of how Saul Alinsky’s practices of building democratic power have shaped modern day community organizing. It explains why the Alinsky tradition is useful to the study of community organizations through a description of his enduring core principles of collective power, “native” leadership, and confrontational politics. The chapter makes the case for the continued relevance of Alinsky’s main tenets as well as the need to critique and adapt those methods to new contexts in the 21st century. While it focuses primarily on Alinsky-style organizations, this chapter takes into account a larger ecosystem of organizations and the varying schools of thought that influence the practice of community organizing. It also offers a critique of where Alinsky’s approach falls short in confronting racial and gender barriers to engagement in building power for social change. In addition to exploring the development of Alinsky’s organization, the Industrial Areas Foundation, the chapter features themes of organizational structure and process as they relate to Alinsky’s core principles that are reflected in similar types of organizations. The chapter brings together the theoretical underpinnings of Alinsky’s approach with the practical implications for how community organizing has progressed. It describes where community organizing today diverges from traditional Alinsky-style organizing, especially in trends towards the professionalization of practice, new organizing practices, and the nationalization of grassroots organizing through intermediaries.
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Notes
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There have certainly been exceptions to this often times toxic dynamic, but the overriding sense in the field is that these groups do not get along.
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The “house meeting” is an organizing strategy attributed to Fred Ross and the farmworker movement. Though not directly from Alinsky, this strategy is an essential element among some community organizing groups to recruit and identify local leaders and determine shared community concerns.
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Also see Heather Booth: Changing the World (2017) A film by Lilly Rivlin; http://www.midwestacademy.com/about/mission-history/.
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Swarts also takes up a useful discussion of the dynamics and differences in movement organizations and Alinsky-style organizations. For example, pp. 179–180.
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Schutz and Miller (2015) offer a more expansive set of principles, each of which are important dimensions of community organizing. For this discussion, I emphasize three of the principles as fundamental pillars from which other principles follow.
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Gecan (2002) explores the notion that organizing is not only about political change but also cultural change in three public realms: market culture, bureaucratic culture, and relational culture (151–166).
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People’s Action and People’s Action Institute were founded in 2016 as a merger of National People’s Action, Alliance for a Just Society, and US Action and their 501(c)4 sister organizations.
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Just as the organizational structure of community organizations have shifted over time, so too has the structure of funding and fundraising. Alinsky-style organizations typically have been supported through dues-paying memberships with limited funding support from outside sources such as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (a primary funder of community organizing for decades) or private foundations. Today, more and more organizations rely on grants to support their work. As a result, many organizations fall victim to the instability inherent in an inconsistent and unpredictable funding environment.
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Post, M.A. (2018). Alinsky Style Organizing. In: Cnaan, R., Milofsky, C. (eds) Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations in the 21st Century . Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77416-9_18
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