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Community organizing

Community organizing is a strategy for mobilizing residents or groups sharing common interests to identify grievances, build collective capacity, and exert pressure on institutions to achieve specific demands or policy changes.^[1]^[2] Emerging from late-nineteenth-century labor protests and early-twentieth-century settlement houses, it was formalized in the United States by Saul Alinsky through the Industrial Areas Foundation, which trained organizers to prioritize power acquisition over consensus-building.^[3]^[4] Alinsky's approach, detailed in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, advocates tactics like freezing targets for attack, personalizing conflicts, and polarizing issues to amplify perceived leverage, enabling "have-nots" to negotiate from strength against entrenched interests.^[5]^[6] These methods have powered campaigns in labor rights, civil rights, and urban renewal, yielding tangible wins such as improved wages, desegregation efforts, and local resource allocations, though empirical studies indicate outcomes often hinge on short-term mobilization rather than enduring structural shifts.^[7]^[8] While proponents credit it with enhancing civic efficacy and social capital, critics contend that its reliance on manufactured conflict and external nonprofit funding fosters dependency, division, and alignment with progressive priorities, potentially undermining broader cooperation or self-reliance in communities.^[9]^[10] Such evaluations are complicated by source biases, as much supportive research originates from aligned academic and advocacy institutions, with less emphasis on failed efforts or unintended escalations of antagonism.^[7]

Definition and Core Principles

Definition of Community Organizing

Community organizing is a structured process through which residents of a locality or members sharing common interests or grievances form organizations to identify collective problems, build relational networks, and pursue sustained action to alter power dynamics or institutional behaviors.^[11]^[12] This approach emphasizes empowering participants to develop indigenous leadership and leverage numbers for leverage against decision-makers, rather than relying on external advocacy or charity.^[2]^[13] Unlike ad hoc protests or service delivery, community organizing prioritizes long-term capacity-building, including one-on-one relational recruitment, issue prioritization via democratic means, and tactical escalation to hold targets accountable, often through public confrontation rooted in conflict as a catalyst for negotiation.^[14] This method views power as relational and zero-sum, requiring organizers to analyze antagonists' self-interests to apply pressure effectively.^[15] The modern framework traces to Saul Alinsky's work in the 1930s and 1940s, where he established the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940 to institutionalize training for "people's organizations" among working-class and immigrant communities in Chicago, aiming to counterbalance entrenched elites through mass mobilization.^[4] Alinsky's approach, detailed in his 1946 book Reveille for Radicals, framed organizing as a pragmatic, non-ideological pursuit of "middle-class" aspirations for the marginalized via ethical realism over moral absolutism. Empirical applications, such as early Back-of-the-Yards campaigns, demonstrated tangible wins like improved sanitation and union protections, validating the model's focus on winnable, concrete demands to sustain momentum.^[4]

Foundational Principles and First-Principles Rationale

Community organizing derives its foundational principles from the empirical observation that isolated individuals lack the leverage to influence entrenched power structures, necessitating structured collective action to resolve coordination failures inherent in group endeavors. At its core, the approach recognizes the free-rider problem, wherein rational actors withhold contributions to shared efforts due to the certainty of benefiting regardless of participation, as formalized by Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action (1965).^[16] Organizing mitigates this by establishing selective incentives—such as social recognition, reputational gains, or material benefits—and hierarchical leadership to enforce accountability, transforming latent discontent into sustained pressure on decision-makers. This principle holds across contexts, as unorganized groups dissipate energy in fragmented protests, while formalized entities sustain campaigns through delegated roles and mutual monitoring. Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1971) distills these into pragmatic tactics, asserting that effective organization begins with concrete, winnable issues tied to participants' self-interests rather than ideological abstractions, as "people don't do things for other people, they do things for themselves." Central rules include building power from preexisting local institutions (e.g., churches, unions) to aggregate numbers rapidly, personalizing conflicts to expose antagonists' vulnerabilities, and maintaining flexibility in means to achieve ends, since "the morality of means depends on whether you win." Alinsky's model, tested in 1930s Chicago back-of-the-yards organizing, prioritizes relational one-on-one meetings to forge trust and identify indigenous leaders, ensuring the structure outlives the initial organizer.^[4] From first principles, these elements align with causal realities of human association: self-interest drives initial engagement, as actors weigh personal costs against amplified outcomes; repeated interactions build reciprocity and norms that reduce defection; and adversarial framing heightens salience, converting apathy into cohesion by clarifying stakes. Without such mechanisms, grievances remain inert, as diffuse interests fail to cohere against concentrated opponents; with them, arithmetic scaling—wherein n individuals yield disproportionate influence through unified disruption—alters opponents' calculations, compelling concessions. Empirical validations appear in labor contexts, where union density correlates with wage gains (e.g., U.S. manufacturing sectors post-1935 Wagner Act), underscoring that organization causally precedes leverage rather than emerging spontaneously.^[16]

Methods and Tactics

Core Organizing Strategies

Core organizing strategies in community organizing emphasize building relational networks, developing leadership, and deploying targeted actions to aggregate individual interests into collective power capable of influencing institutions. Relational organizing forms the foundation, involving systematic one-on-one meetings to cultivate trust, identify shared values, and recruit participants by understanding personal motivations rather than relying on mass appeals. This approach, central to models like the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), prioritizes mutual commitments over transactional exchanges, enabling organizers to transform loose affiliations into disciplined teams.^[17]^[18] Leadership recruitment and development follows, where organizers identify potential leaders through these relationships and train them in skills such as public narrative, team structuring, and strategic planning. Effective leaders are those who can mobilize others by framing issues as winnable campaigns with clear timelines, such as halting a specific development project via petitions within months, rather than vague advocacy. This process draws from empirical observations that sustained organizing requires distributed leadership to avoid dependency on single figures, as seen in IAF affiliates where annual budgets support paid organizers to scale local efforts.^[19]^[20] Power analysis and action tactics complete the cycle, involving mapping stakeholders' interests and resources to select leverage points, then applying pressure through direct confrontations like accountability sessions or disruptions. Saul Alinsky's tactics, outlined in Rules for Radicals (1971), stress perceiving and projecting power effectively—such as exaggerating strength to intimidate opponents or personalizing conflicts to isolate targets—while keeping actions within participants' experience to maintain momentum. These methods, including ridicule and relentless pressure via varied tactics, aim to force concessions by disrupting status quo incentives, though they risk backlash if alternatives are not proposed. Implementation often mobilizes diverse power sources, from political advocacy to economic boycotts, with success hinging on reframing problems as achievable goals and celebrating incremental wins to sustain engagement.^[6]^[21]

Power Dynamics and Leadership Development

Power dynamics in community organizing center on the strategic assessment and leveraging of influence structures to enable marginalized groups to challenge established authorities. Organizers conduct power analyses to map decision-makers, including elected officials, business leaders, and institutional actors, categorizing them by their interests, networks, and potential as allies or opponents.^[22] This process, involving steps such as defining community boundaries, researching backgrounds via public records and local consultations, and evaluating organizational strengths and weaknesses, aims to identify leverage points for shifting power balances.^[22] Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940, framed power as derived from organized collective action, asserting that "change comes from power, and power comes from organization."^[22]^[23] Alinsky's conflict-oriented model posits that self-interest motivates participation, with organizers fostering confrontation—through tactics like direct actions and negotiations—to extract concessions from power holders and redistribute resources.^[23] This approach views power not merely as coercive force but as relational capacity built through numbers, disruption, and perceived threats, where the organized community's strength lies in amplifying resentments against elites.^[23] Empirical frameworks emerging from grassroots campaigns reinforce this by linking power building to base-building processes, such as relational networks that sustain long-term influence, though outcomes depend on contextual factors like institutional resistance.^[24] Leadership development constitutes a core mechanism for internalizing these dynamics, emphasizing the cultivation of local, "indigenous" leaders over dependence on professional organizers to ensure organizational sustainability.^[23] Alinsky's methodology prioritizes resident-led people's organizations, training individuals through iterative experiences in power exercises, such as holding public officials accountable via researched demands and public confrontations.^[23]^[4] In practice, this involves one-on-one relational meetings to build trust and identify potential leaders, followed by structured training in tactics like agitation and evaluation of actions' impacts.^[17] Affiliates of the Industrial Areas Foundation, continuing Alinsky's legacy, employ multi-tiered leadership programs—from introductory sessions on self-interest and power mapping to advanced training in alliance-building and policy negotiation—reportedly enabling participants to secure concessions like workforce development initiatives in high-demand sectors.^[25] These efforts aim to transform passive residents into active agents capable of sustaining power, with studies indicating that such development correlates with niche innovations in grassroots settings, though measurable long-term retention of leaders remains challenged by resource constraints and external pressures.^[26] Overall, effective leadership emerges from repeated exposure to real stakes, where leaders learn to navigate dynamics by testing organizational capacity against tangible targets.^[4]

Fundraising and Resource Mobilization

Community organizing relies on fundraising and resource mobilization to sustain operations, hire professional organizers, and execute campaigns, with strategies emphasizing member investment to foster accountability and reduce external dependencies. Core methods include collecting membership dues, which typically range from $10 to $50 annually per household, to demonstrate grassroots commitment and generate steady revenue independent of elite funders.^[27] ^[28] These dues, often structured as sliding-scale fees based on ability to pay, accounted for a significant portion of budgets in early models like Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), where they reinforced organizational self-reliance.^[29] Additional tactics encompass grassroots appeals such as door-to-door canvassing, house parties, and special events like dinners or rallies, which not only raise funds but also build relational networks and leadership skills among participants.^[27] Individual donations, including small recurring gifts, form the bulk of non-grant revenue, mirroring broader U.S. charitable patterns where individuals contribute 74.5% of total giving.^[27] Earned income from services, such as leadership training or consulting, provides further diversification; for instance, IAF affiliates generated over $1.3 million from program services in recent years.^[30] Grants from foundations constitute a major source, comprising about 62.8% of funding for many groups in surveys from the early 2000s, though Alinsky-era principles cautioned against over-reliance to preserve autonomy and avoid mission drift toward funder priorities.^[27] ^[29] Government grants, at around 5.2%, are minimized in traditional models due to risks of bureaucratic constraints and political influence, as evidenced by Alinsky's outright rejection of public funds for core organizing work.^[27] ^[29] Networks like the IAF and Gamaliel Foundation have sustained operations through federated dues-sharing and targeted foundation support, such as Ford Foundation grants for capacity-building, while prioritizing local revenue to mitigate dependency.^[31] ^[27] Challenges persist, including stagnant budgets—averaging $207,686 in 2002 surveys compared to slight increases prior—and cultural aversion to fundraising among volunteer leaders, who view it as diverting from action-oriented work.^[27] Diversification efforts, such as funder collaboratives and staff training in donor cultivation, aim to counter these, but heavy grant dependence can align groups with foundation agendas, often skewed toward progressive causes, potentially undermining broad-based appeal.^[27] Empirical data indicate that dues-heavy models enhance member ownership and resilience, as higher volunteer investment correlates with sustained engagement over grant-driven volatility.^[28]

Variations and Types

Grassroots and Broad-Based Models

Grassroots organizing refers to decentralized, bottom-up efforts where ordinary citizens, often without formal institutional backing, mobilize around local issues to influence policy or social conditions through direct participation and collective action.^[32] This model prioritizes volunteer leadership and spontaneous or community-driven initiatives, such as door-to-door canvassing, petitions, and protests, to build momentum from the ground level rather than relying on elite or centralized direction.^[33] Empirical studies of grassroots efforts highlight their role in amplifying marginalized voices, as seen in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956, where local African American residents, organized through churches and civic groups, sustained a 381-day action that led to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling desegregating public buses on December 20, 1956.^[32] In contrast, broad-based organizing employs a structured approach to forge alliances among diverse institutions—such as congregations, labor unions, and civic associations—to cultivate relational power and achieve long-term influence.^[34] Pioneered by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), founded in 1940, this model sequences activities starting with one-on-one relational meetings to identify shared interests, followed by research, public assemblies for accountability actions, and evaluation to refine strategies.^[17] Unlike grassroots models, which may center on immediate issue mobilization and risk fragmentation, broad-based efforts emphasize "power before program," delaying specific campaigns until institutional networks are solidified, enabling sustained leverage against entrenched interests.^[34] For instance, IAF affiliates in Texas secured over $300 million in infrastructure investments by 2000 through negotiated wins with public officials, demonstrating the model's capacity for measurable policy gains via institutional aggregation.^[17] Key distinctions lie in scalability and durability: grassroots organizing excels in rapid, high-energy responses to acute crises, fostering broad participation but often facing challenges in maintaining cohesion without dedicated infrastructure, as evidenced by the short-lived Occupy Wall Street encampments in 2011, which mobilized thousands yet yielded limited enduring policy shifts.^[35] Broad-based models, by contrast, invest in leadership training and cross-sector ties to mitigate burnout and ideological silos, though they require more time—typically 1–2 years per cycle—and can dilute focus on singular causes.^[34] Both approaches share causal mechanisms of amplifying citizen agency against power imbalances, but broad-based variants correlate with higher retention of leaders, per IAF's internal evaluations, due to their emphasis on reciprocal relationships over transactional activism.^[17] While direct comparative empirical data remains sparse, case analyses suggest grassroots suits volatile environments like environmental protests—such as the 2013 Balcombe fracking resistance in the UK, which delayed drilling permits through local blockades—whereas broad-based thrives in policy arenas demanding sustained negotiation.^[35]

Faith-Based Community Organizing

Faith-based community organizing (FBCO) integrates religious congregations and institutions into community mobilization efforts, leveraging shared moral frameworks derived from faith traditions to address local issues such as economic justice, education, and public safety. Unlike secular models, FBCO emphasizes the role of houses of worship as stable, pre-existing networks that foster relational ties and ethical motivation among participants, often drawing on scriptural imperatives for social action to sustain long-term engagement. This approach prioritizes broad-based alliances across denominations, including Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and increasingly interfaith groups, to build collective power rather than relying solely on charismatic leadership or issue-specific advocacy.^[36]^[37] Emerging in the mid-20th century as an adaptation of Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) model, FBCO shifted under leaders like Ed Chambers to center faith communities after recognizing their organizational durability and volunteer base, with the first formal networks forming in the 1970s in urban areas like Chicago and San Antonio. By the 1980s and 1990s, specialized training institutes proliferated, training over 20,000 clergy and lay leaders annually by the early 2000s through structured curricula focused on power analysis and democratic participation. Key organizations include the IAF, which operates in over 60 U.S. affiliates; Gamaliel Foundation, emphasizing racial equity and worker rights; PICO (rebranded Faith in Action in 2017), with a focus on national policy campaigns; and Direct Action Research Training (DART), active in the Southeast. These entities, often funded by foundation grants and member dues from congregations (typically $20–$50 per member annually), have engaged approximately 4,000 congregations nationwide, representing millions of adherents.^[36]^[38] Core tactics in FBCO involve relational organizing through one-on-one meetings to identify self-interests, followed by "accountability sessions" where leaders publicly confront officials on commitments, such as securing living wages or school funding, often framed in moral terms like stewardship or neighborly justice. Leadership development targets laypeople over clergy to avoid institutional silos, with training in agitation techniques—deliberately creating tension to reveal power imbalances—and research-driven campaigns that map institutional allies and adversaries. This method contrasts with protest-centric activism by prioritizing negotiated wins, such as the IAF's role in electing over 100 pro-organizing officials in Texas by 2000, and has expanded internationally to Europe and Latin America, adapting to local faith contexts like evangelical churches in Brazil. Empirical analyses indicate higher civic participation rates among FBCO affiliates, with participants 15–20% more likely to vote and engage in volunteering compared to non-affiliated peers, attributed to the causal leverage of religious social capital for sustained action.^[39]^[11]^[36] Assessments of effectiveness reveal mixed outcomes: while FBCO has secured tangible policy changes, including $15 billion in community investments via campaigns like those against predatory lending in the 2000s, rigorous causal studies are sparse, with much evidence anecdotal or from organization-sponsored evaluations prone to selection bias. Reviews of nearly 800 studies on faith-based initiatives find them competitive with secular nonprofits in service delivery, often excelling in volunteer mobilization due to intrinsic motivations, but lacking randomized controls to isolate impacts from confounding factors like congregational demographics.^[40]^[41] Critics argue FBCO risks conflating spiritual authority with political advocacy, potentially enabling proselytizing under the guise of organizing or advancing partisan agendas—predominantly progressive ones like immigration reform—that may alienate conservative faith voices and overlook market-based solutions. Funding dependencies on left-leaning foundations can introduce ideological tilts, as seen in Gamaliel's ties to Obama-era networks, raising questions about neutrality despite claims of nonpartisanship. Additionally, separation-of-church-and-state concerns have historically limited federal partnerships, with religious groups facing eligibility hurdles for overtly faith-infused programs until policy shifts in the early 2000s. Despite these, FBCO's emphasis on moral realism and institutional accountability provides a counter to atomized individualism, fostering causal pathways for community empowerment through enduring relational bonds.^[42]^[43]^[36]

Identity and Ideological Variants

Community organizing exhibits ideological variants that reflect broader political philosophies, with progressive applications emphasizing confrontation against entrenched power structures to achieve redistributive ends, while conservative variants focus on preserving local autonomy and countering perceived overreach by elites or institutions. Progressive models, such as the social action approach, utilize direct action and agitation to mobilize disadvantaged groups, as demonstrated by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), founded in 1970 to advocate for low-income communities through tactics like housing campaigns and voter registration drives.^[23] Transformative variants within this spectrum seek radical societal restructuring, often employing symbolic protests to challenge norms, though empirical outcomes vary due to reliance on sustained mobilization rather than institutional leverage.^[23] Conservative ideological variants adapt power-mapping and pressure tactics—originally outlined by Saul Alinsky in his 1971 work Rules for Radicals—to defend fiscal restraint and cultural traditions, eschewing the left's frequent focus on grievance-based narratives. The Tea Party movement, which began with protests on April 15, 2009, against the federal stimulus package, exemplifies this by organizing decentralized local groups to influence elections and policy, contributing to Republican gains in the 2010 midterm elections where the party secured 63 House seats.^[44]^[45] Contemporary examples include targeted corporate accountability efforts, such as the 2022 Florida legislative action revoking Disney's self-governing district status after the company's public opposition to a law restricting classroom discussions of sexual orientation in early grades, a move that leveraged grassroots pressure on economic incentives.^[46] These variants prioritize instrumental alliances over ideological purity, often succeeding through reputational and financial leverage rather than mass disruption.^[46] Identity variants of community organizing prioritize mobilization around ascribed group characteristics—such as race, ethnicity, or gender—over cross-cutting economic class interests, potentially fostering targeted advocacy but risking fragmentation of broader coalitions. For instance, civil rights organizations like the NAACP, established in 1909, have historically organized African American communities around anti-discrimination efforts, achieving milestones like the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision through legal and protest strategies. In contrast, class-based models, rooted in labor traditions, emphasize shared material conditions, as seen in tenant unions that negotiate collective bargaining irrespective of demographic traits.^[9] Scholarly critiques contend that identity-centric approaches, while effective for symbolic wins like increased representation, often underperform in material gains compared to class-oriented efforts, as they incentivize intra-group competition rather than unified power-building against capital; for example, post-1960s shifts toward identity politics correlated with declining union density from 20.1% in 1983 to 10.1% in 2022.^[47] This distinction underscores causal tensions: identity organizing amplifies voice for specific minorities but may dilute leverage where numerical majorities could otherwise prevail through economic solidarity.

Effectiveness and Empirical Outcomes

Documented Successes and Case Studies

The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, established in 1939 by Saul Alinsky in Chicago's meatpacking district, mobilized diverse ethnic groups, unions, and Catholic parishes to address deteriorating living conditions amid economic hardship.^[48] Within its first year, the council pressured local banks to issue 560 home-improvement loans and upgrades, fostering neighborhood stabilization.^[48] It also secured school lunch programs and enhanced cooperation among sixteen Roman Catholic parishes, labor organizations, and veterans' groups, demonstrating how relational organizing could yield concrete infrastructure and social service gains without ideological rigidity.^[49]^[50] The Montgomery Bus Boycott of December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, exemplified community organizing's capacity for sustained mass mobilization against segregation.^[51] Led by the Montgomery Improvement Association under Martin Luther King Jr., it coordinated carpools for over 40,000 African American participants, inflicting financial losses on the bus system estimated at $3,000 per day.^[51] The effort culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court's November 13, 1956, affirmation of the federal district court's ruling in Browder v. Gayle, mandating bus desegregation effective December 21, 1956.^[51] This outcome stemmed from pre-existing networks like the Women's Political Council and NAACP chapter, which rapidly assembled logistics and leadership, proving nonviolent economic pressure's efficacy in altering legal norms.^[51]^[52] Industrial Areas Foundation affiliates have documented housing and wage policy victories through broad-based alliances. The Nehemiah Plan, initiated in the early 1980s by the East Brooklyn Congregations, constructed over 2,600 single-family homes by 1990, accounting for 38% of East New York's net housing stock increase and 77% of single-family home gains during that period.^[53] Overall, Nehemiah initiatives enabled more than 6,500 first-time low-income homeowners across New York and Baltimore, leveraging public subsidies and church-led recruitment to revive abandoned urban areas.^[54] Separately, organizing campaigns secured living wage ordinances in over 125 U.S. cities and counties by the early 2010s, starting with Baltimore's 1994 measure requiring contractors to pay $6.10 per hour plus benefits, expanding coverage to municipal employees and subcontractors.^[55] These wins, often via coalitions of faith, labor, and community groups, raised wages for thousands in public service roles, though empirical analyses vary on net employment effects.^[55]^[56]

Failures, Limitations, and Measurement Challenges

Community organizing efforts have encountered notable failures, such as the collapse of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in 2010 following scandals including a $1 million embezzlement by its founder's brother in 2008, which was concealed for years, and subsequent voter registration irregularities involving up to 400,000 questionable forms across multiple states.^[57] Undercover videos released in 2009 depicted ACORN staff advising on illegal activities, prompting Congress to defund the group and leading to its bankruptcy amid governance lapses from rapid expansion without adequate oversight.^[58] ^[59] Limitations often stem from Saul Alinsky-inspired tactics emphasizing confrontational power-building, which prioritize short-term wins like policy concessions over sustainable structural reforms or internal democratic processes, resulting in organizer-led initiatives that marginalize participant agency and foster dependency.^[60] Empirical critiques highlight how such models fail to address entrenched economic inequalities, as pluralist assumptions overlook class dynamics and lead to co-optation by elites rather than transformative change.^[61] Rapid organizational growth, as in ACORN's case, exacerbates internal contradictions, including inadequate leadership training and resource mismanagement, yielding high failure rates without scalable models.^[62] Evaluating effectiveness poses significant measurement challenges, primarily due to the intangible nature of "power" outcomes, which demand longitudinal tracking over years while short-term metrics like event attendance or policy victories overlook leadership development or causal attribution.^[63] ^[64] Rigorous assessments suffer from selection bias, absence of randomized controls, and confounding variables like external economic shifts, rendering many studies anecdotal rather than causal, with the field criticized as more "art than science" lacking standardized empirical benchmarks.^[62] ^[65] Funding cycles misalign with slow-building impacts, often incentivizing superficial indicators over verifiable long-term shifts in community capacity.^[65]

Causal Analysis of Outcomes

Causal inference in community organizing outcomes is complicated by selection bias, where motivated communities self-select into organizing efforts, confounding attribution to the intervention itself; long temporal lags between actions and measurable effects; and the difficulty of isolating organizing from broader socioeconomic trends.^[66] Rigorous designs like randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are infrequent due to ethical constraints on withholding organizing from control groups and logistical barriers in community-level randomization.^[67] Most evidence relies on quasi-experimental methods, instrumental variables, or longitudinal surveys, which provide suggestive but not definitive causality.^[68] One RCT examined neighborhood-based organizing in Seattle from 1994 to 1997, randomizing four intervention neighborhoods to receive paid organizers forming action boards against youth drug use, violence, and risky sexual behavior, compared to six controls. No overall effects emerged on community mobilization or targeted behaviors, with similar increases in mobilization across groups and only localized gains in the most active intervention site.^[67] Limitations included potential underpowering from individual-level surveys and insufficient intervention intensity, highlighting how weak implementation can mask true causal potential or reveal inefficacy.^[67] Quasi-experimental analyses offer some positive causal signals. A fixed-effects instrumental variable study across 264 U.S. cities (1990–2013) found that local nonprofits, including those engaged in community organizing for crime prevention and neighborhood development, causally reduced violent crime: each additional 10 nonprofits per 100,000 residents lowered murder rates by 9% and violent crime by 6% in year-to-year estimates, with larger long-term effects.^[68] This operates through enhanced collective efficacy and social cohesion, mechanisms central to organizing models, though the analysis encompasses broader nonprofits rather than pure organizing entities.^[68] In public health, partnerships with organizing groups show capacity-building effects like policy advocacy successes and social capital gains, but causal evidence remains limited, with only a few quantitative studies demonstrating significant increases in social capital and none establishing robust links to health metrics like disease reduction.^[69] Congregation-based organizing, such as Industrial Areas Foundation affiliates, correlates with congregational development and civic bridging, yet lacks large-scale causal evaluations isolating outcomes from selection or religious participation effects.^[70] Overall, while organizing can amplify relational power leading to targeted wins (e.g., local ordinances), empirical causal chains often weaken against confounders, underscoring the need for stronger designs to distinguish genuine impacts from placebo or contextual drivers.^[71]

Historical Development

Pre-20th Century Origins

Early instances of collective community action trace back to ancient Rome, where plebeians organized secessions to protest patrician dominance and demand legal protections. In 494 BCE, plebeians withdrew en masse from the city to the Sacred Mount, halting Roman military and economic functions until patricians conceded the creation of tribunes to represent plebeian interests.^[72] Similar secessions occurred in 449 BCE and later, compelling reforms like the Twelve Tables laws that codified rights against debt bondage and arbitrary authority.^[73] These actions demonstrated causal mechanisms of organized withdrawal as leverage, enabling lower classes to extract institutional concessions from elites without violence. In medieval Europe, craft and merchant guilds emerged as structured associations advancing members' economic and social interests through mutual aid and collective bargaining. Formed from the 11th century onward, guilds regulated apprenticeships, set quality standards, and negotiated with feudal lords for market access and protection from competition.^[74] They provided insurance against illness, death, or unemployment, fostering solidarity among artisans in urban centers like those in England and Italy.^[75] This organization countered fragmented individual bargaining power, enabling guilds to influence local governance and prices via monopolistic controls, though often at the expense of non-members. By the 18th and 19th centuries, labor organizing and mutual aid societies formalized community responses to industrialization's disruptions. The first recorded U.S. labor strike occurred in 1768 among New York journeymen tailors protesting wage cuts, followed by the 1786 Philadelphia printers' strike for a six-day workweek.^[76] Mutual aid groups, such as fraternal societies, proliferated in the early 1800s, offering reciprocal support like sickness benefits and burial funds to workers lacking state welfare.^[77] The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, united diverse workers across crafts to advocate for eight-hour days and currency reform, peaking at 700,000 members by 1886 before internal divisions and employer opposition curtailed growth.^[78] These efforts laid groundwork for broader power-building by aggregating individual grievances into coordinated demands, though success depended on avoiding elite co-optation.

Saul Alinsky and Mid-Century Institutionalization

Saul Alinsky, a Chicago-born criminologist and activist, began developing systematic community organizing techniques in the late 1930s amid the economic hardships of the Great Depression. Drawing from labor union models and observations of industrial neighborhoods, he targeted the "Back of the Yards" area adjacent to Chicago's Union Stock Yards, a predominantly immigrant, working-class district plagued by poverty and poor sanitation. In 1939, Alinsky co-founded the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) with local priest Joseph Meegan, uniting packinghouse workers, clergy, and residents under the motto "the people will work out their own destiny."^[48]^[79] The BYNC achieved tangible gains, such as improved housing and union recognition, by leveraging collective action against meatpacking industry interests, demonstrating Alinsky's emphasis on building power through broad coalitions rather than ideological purity.^[80] To replicate and scale this approach, Alinsky established the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940, backed by philanthropists including Marshall Field III and Catholic Bishop Bernard Sheil.^[81]^[82] The IAF served as a training institute for professional organizers, focusing on recruiting indigenous leaders from churches, unions, and ethnic groups to form "people's organizations" that confronted local power structures through tactics like public confrontations and negotiated compromises.^[17] Unlike earlier spontaneous protests, the IAF institutionalized organizing by standardizing methods: identifying community self-interests, fostering accountability among leaders, and prioritizing relational networks over charismatic individualism. By the 1940s, IAF affiliates expanded to Rochester, New York, where Alinsky orchestrated a 1940s campaign against corporate discrimination, securing jobs and recreation facilities for Black residents via alliances with white ethnics and clergy.^[80] Alinsky codified his philosophy in Reveille for Radicals, published in 1946 by the University of Chicago Press, which argued that the "have-nots" must organize ruthlessly for power, rejecting middle-class reformism in favor of mass-based action rooted in pragmatic self-interest.^[83] The book critiqued apathetic institutions and advocated "ends justify the means" realism, influencing mid-century shifts toward professionalized networks. During the 1950s and 1960s, the IAF's model proliferated, training over 200 organizers by 1960 and inspiring faith-based iterations that integrated religious congregations, thereby embedding community organizing within established civic structures.^[82] This institutionalization marked a transition from episodic activism to enduring organizations with paid staff and strategic curricula, enabling sustained campaigns against urban decay and inequality, though critics noted its occasional reliance on polarizing tactics that strained interracial coalitions.^[17]

Post-1960s Expansion and Civil Rights Influence

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s exemplified community organizing through grassroots tactics such as sit-ins, boycotts, and voter registration drives, which mobilized thousands to challenge segregation. The 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, coordinated by students, led to desegregation in 26 Southern cities by 1961.^[84] Similarly, the 1964 Freedom Summer project involved over 1,000 volunteers registering approximately 17,000 Black voters in Mississippi despite widespread violence, demonstrating the power of sustained local organizing to build political capacity.^[84] Organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) emphasized developing indigenous leadership and community control, influencing subsequent models by prioritizing long-term empowerment over top-down directives.^[85] Following the legislative victories of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), community organizing expanded via federal initiatives like the Community Action Program (CAP), established under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 as part of the War on Poverty. CAP mandated "maximum feasible participation" of the poor in antipoverty efforts, creating over 1,000 Community Action Agencies (CAAs) by the late 1960s to coordinate local organizing, services, and advocacy.^[29] This institutionalized approach correlated with a decline in the U.S. poverty rate from 19% in 1964 to 11.1% by 1973, though causal attribution remains debated due to concurrent economic growth.^[86] SNCC's focus on bottom-up mobilization informed CAP's emphasis on resident involvement, bridging movement activism with government-funded structures.^[87] In the 1970s, organizing proliferated beyond civil rights into welfare rights, housing, and labor issues, with groups like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke in Arkansas, exemplifying this growth. ACORN expanded to over 100,000 members across 75 cities by the 1980s, employing confrontational tactics to secure policy wins such as improved tenant protections and community reinvestment from banks. These efforts drew on civil rights strategies of mass action and coalition-building, adapting them to urban poverty amid deindustrialization, while resistance to urban renewal projects in the late 1960s and 1970s further spurred localized organizing against displacement.^[88] By the 1980s, the model had influenced broad-based networks, marking a shift toward multi-issue alliances that sustained expansion despite funding cuts to federal programs.^[89]

International Histories and Adaptations

The Alinsky-style model of community organizing, disseminated primarily through the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) established in 1940, began expanding internationally in the 1980s on an ad hoc basis to countries including Canada, South Africa, Mexico, the Philippines, and Guatemala, where adaptations faced challenges from limited democratic freedoms and institutional constraints.^[90] By the 1990s, more structured growth occurred in Western Europe, with the IAF promoting affiliates in the United Kingdom and Germany, emphasizing broad-based alliances of faith, labor, and civic institutions to build relational power among diverse populations.^[91] ^[92] In the United Kingdom, Citizens UK formed in the 1990s starting in East London, adapting Alinsky's tactics of one-on-one relational meetings and accountable action assemblies to address issues like living wages and refugee rights, drawing on local churches and community groups while navigating a welfare state context that differed from U.S. neighborhood-centric models.^[90] Germany's efforts, initiated in the late 1990s through organizations like the Community Organizing Institute in Berlin and Hamburg, incorporated similar IAF training in leadership development but adjusted for stronger labor unions and secular skepticism toward faith-based mobilization, focusing on urban integration challenges for immigrants.^[90] The European Community Organizing Network (ECON), founded in January 2008 in the Czech Republic, extended these practices across over a dozen countries through trainings, site visits, and organizer exchanges with U.S. groups, promoting alignment on power-building without direct IAF governance.^[93] Australia saw formal introduction in 2007, culminating in the Sydney Alliance's launch in 2011, which scaled Alinsky principles to city-wide scope by recruiting diverse institutional members and establishing district networks, raising approximately US$1 million for sustainability by 2008 and targeting policy wins on education and transport.^[90] In regions like Latin America and Asia, direct Alinsky adaptations remained limited, with IAF efforts in Mexico and Guatemala encountering political repression, leading to hybrid forms blending local indigenous organizing traditions rather than pure replication.^[90] South Africa's civic associations, influenced indirectly through anti-apartheid networks, incorporated relational tactics post-1994 but prioritized reconciliation over confrontational power exercises characteristic of the original model.^[90] These international variants generally retained core elements like iron rule discipline and public accountability but modified scale, funding, and ideological framing to fit varying cultural and institutional landscapes, with success hinging on local organizer training and institutional buy-in.^[94]

Contemporary Developments

Digital Integration and Post-2020 Adaptations

Digital integration in community organizing emerged prominently in the early 2000s with tools like email lists and petitions, exemplified by MoveOn.org's 1998 founding, which mobilized over 8 million supporters by 2020 through online campaigns targeting policy issues. Social media platforms further amplified grassroots efforts, enabling rapid information dissemination and event coordination; a 2011 survey of U.S. local governments found 43% adopted social media for citizen engagement, rising to over 70% by 2019, though adoption in nonprofit organizing lagged due to resource constraints.^[95] These tools facilitated relational organizing online, where activists used Facebook groups and Twitter for recruitment, as seen in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, which coordinated via digital networks to sustain decentralized protests across 951 cities globally.^[96] Empirical studies indicate social media boosts initial awareness and mobilization—e.g., a 2020 analysis showed platforms like Twitter increased protest turnout by 10-20% in urban campaigns—but often fail to foster deep interpersonal ties essential for long-term organizing, with retention rates dropping below 30% without follow-up offline interactions.^[96] The COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 onward accelerated adaptations, compelling organizers to shift from door-knocking and assemblies to virtual formats amid lockdowns that restricted in-person activities in over 90% of U.S. jurisdictions by mid-2020.^[97] Community-based organizations reported using Zoom for virtual town halls, reaching 2-5 times more participants than pre-pandemic in-person events, and apps like Mobilize for digital RSVPs, which tracked over 1 million volunteer commitments in 2020-2021 social justice drives.^[98]^[99] A 2022 Colorado Trust study of 20 grassroots groups documented integration of communication apps (e.g., Signal, Slack) with social media, yielding 40% higher engagement in remote canvassing, though effectiveness varied by demographics, with rural and low-income communities facing barriers from limited broadband access affecting 21 million Americans.^[100] Post-restrictions, hybrid models persisted, blending digital tools for scalability—such as e-petitioning on Change.org, which garnered 500 million actions since 2020—with in-person verification to mitigate misinformation risks, as evidenced by a 2023 review finding digital campaigns 15-25% more cost-effective for voter turnout but prone to echo chambers reducing cross-ideological dialogue.^[101]^[96] Challenges in these adaptations include the digital divide exacerbating inequalities, with a 2021 Pew survey showing 29% of U.S. adults lacking home broadband, disproportionately impacting minority and elderly groups central to organizing bases, thus limiting tool efficacy without supplemental analog outreach. Empirical evaluations, such as a 2023 study of U.S. institution-based networks, reveal that while digital pivots sustained operations during 2020-2022 peaks (e.g., maintaining 80% of pre-pandemic activity levels via participatory apps), they yielded shallower relational depth, with participant trust scores 20% lower in fully virtual cohorts compared to hybrid ones.^[102]^[103] By 2025, tools like AI-assisted mapping for targeted outreach have emerged, but their causal impact on outcomes remains understudied, with advocacy sources overstating benefits amid institutional biases favoring tech optimism over rigorous controls for selection effects in engagement metrics.^[104] Community organizing played a pivotal role in the Tea Party movement, which mobilized conservative activists against perceived government overreach following the 2008 financial crisis. Local groups coordinated tax day protests across over 750 U.S. cities in April 2009, emphasizing grassroots tactics such as town halls and volunteer-driven events to influence Republican primaries and policy debates on fiscal conservatism.^[105] Organizers adapted strategies from progressive playbooks, including sustained local activism between national rallies, to build enduring networks despite lacking centralized leadership.^[106] ^[107] Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tea Party-affiliated organizations like the Convention of States and FreedomWorks facilitated anti-lockdown demonstrations in 2020, drawing on established volunteer bases to challenge public health restrictions through petitions and public gatherings.^[108] On the progressive side, Occupy Wall Street exemplified community organizing's emphasis on horizontal structures and direct action, beginning with encampments in New York City's Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, to protest economic inequality and corporate influence. Participants employed consensus-based decision-making and skill-sharing assemblies, fostering a model of participatory democracy that influenced subsequent activist training and spread to over 900 cities worldwide within weeks.^[109] ^[110] The Black Lives Matter network, formalized after the 2013 Trayvon Martin acquittal, relied on frontline community chapters to coordinate protests following events like the 2014 Ferguson unrest and 2020 George Floyd killing, advancing demands for policy reforms such as community control of policing through decentralized hubs and partnerships with over 50 civil rights groups.^[111] ^[112] In environmental activism, Extinction Rebellion (XR), launched in the UK in 2018, utilized community organizing for nonviolent civil disobedience, establishing local affinity groups to execute coordinated disruptions like road blockades and glue-ins targeting fossil fuel infrastructure, which escalated to the Impossible Rebellion protests in London during August 2021.^[113] ^[114] These efforts, rooted in training for mass arrests and regenerative culture, aimed to pressure governments on climate targets, though they faced criticism for alienating public support due to disruptive tactics.^[115] Across these movements, community organizing facilitated rapid mobilization but often struggled with sustaining momentum without formal hierarchies, highlighting its dual capacity for amplifying dissent and exposing internal fractures.^[116]

Criticisms and Controversies

Ideological and Ethical Critiques

Critics of community organizing, especially Saul Alinsky's framework, argue that its ideological core prioritizes raw power dynamics over substantive ethical or philosophical commitments, treating politics as a zero-sum contest devoid of universal principles. Alinsky explicitly rejected ideological rigidity, advocating "political relativity" and a "free and open mind" to pursue winnable issues, which detractors claim dilutes radical potential and confines action to superficial reforms rather than systemic overhaul.^[117] This approach, while pragmatic, has been faulted for masking underlying collectivist or socialist aims—such as wealth redistribution through adversarial "confrontations with power"—under a neutral facade of local empowerment, effectively advancing incremental state expansion without transparent debate.^[118]^[119] From a conservative perspective, this power-centric ideology undermines individual agency and market-based solutions, fostering grievance-based coalitions that exacerbate class and racial divisions rather than building genuine communal bonds or self-reliance.^[120] Ethically, Alinsky's tactics—such as "picking the target, freezing it, personalizing it, and polarizing it"—invite charges of moral flexibility, where organizers withhold information or employ deception to manipulate outcomes, justifying such means by the purported nobility of ends.^[117]^[10] This relativism, critics maintain, erodes civil discourse and truth-seeking, as seen in the model's tolerance of alliances with institutionally conservative groups despite clashing values like misogyny or homophobia, provided they yield tactical gains.^[10] Even left-leaning observers decry the professionalized structure, where paid organizers dominate over grassroots participants, stifling democratic agency and long-term mobilization in favor of controlled, issue-specific campaigns.^[117] Such methods, while effective for short-term leverage, risk perpetuating dependency on external agitation rather than empowering communities through internal capacity-building or principled negotiation.^[121]

Political Weaponization and Bias

Community organizing techniques, as outlined in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1971), emphasize confrontational tactics designed to seize political power from established institutions on behalf of disadvantaged groups, inherently favoring radical restructuring over incremental reform.^[5] Alinsky's rules, such as using ridicule as a "potent weapon" to infuriate opponents and "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it," enable organizers to weaponize community grievances for ideological ends, often embedding a bias towards anti-establishment, left-leaning agendas that prioritize class and power conflicts.^[122]^[6] This framework, while effective for mobilization, has drawn criticism for promoting division and manipulation rather than genuine consensus-building, with Alinsky himself dedicating the book to Lucifer as the "first radical" who rebelled against divine order.^[5] In practice, organizations like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) exemplified this weaponization during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, submitting thousands of falsified voter registration forms across states, including over 1,700 suspicious submissions in Indianapolis and similar issues in Nevada and Missouri.^[123] ACORN self-reported many irregularities but faced federal investigations revealing systemic failures, leading to 15 indictments of employees for forgery and 11 convictions, though the group maintained these were isolated acts by low-paid workers incentivized by quotas.^[124]^[125] Congressional Republicans accused ACORN of partisan fraud to boost Democratic voter rolls, resulting in a 2009 vote to defund the organization by over $4 million in federal grants, highlighting how organizing drives can serve electoral power grabs under the guise of civic engagement.^[126] Barack Obama's background as a Chicago community organizer directly influenced his 2008 campaign, which scaled Alinsky-inspired tactics to enlist 2.2 million volunteers through relational organizing and community empowerment models, fundamentally altering Democratic field operations to prioritize grassroots networks for partisan mobilization.^[127]^[128] This approach, blending activism with electoral strategy, blurred distinctions between nonpartisan community work and political campaigning, enabling rapid volunteer scaling but raising concerns over ideological indoctrination and one-sided power consolidation favoring progressive policies.^[129] Ideological bias permeates community organizing through disproportionate philanthropic and governmental funding directed toward groups advancing social justice and equity agendas, often aligned with left-wing priorities, while conservative or market-oriented initiatives receive scant support.^[130] Foundations like the Ford Foundation have historically channeled billions into such entities, reinforcing a ecosystem where organizing rarely challenges progressive orthodoxies, as evidenced by the scarcity of right-leaning counterparts and institutional preferences in academia and media that portray left-aligned efforts favorably.^[131] This skew is compounded by systemic left-leaning biases in source institutions, where mainstream outlets minimized ACORN's 2008 irregularities as non-fraudulent despite convictions, while amplifying similar issues in conservative contexts.^[125]^[126]

Alternatives to Community Organizing

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) represents a key alternative to traditional community organizing by emphasizing the mobilization of inherent community strengths rather than deficit identification or power confrontations with external authorities. Originating from the work of John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight at Northwestern University's Asset-Based Community Development Institute in the early 1990s, ABCD maps and leverages individual talents, local associations, institutions, and physical resources to foster self-sustaining initiatives.^[132]^[133] Unlike organizing models that prioritize building "people power" through agitation and alliances for policy wins, ABCD views communities as asset-rich, arguing that external aid often undermines local agency by reinforcing needs-based narratives.^[134] Empirical applications of ABCD, documented in over 20 years of U.S. and international cases, demonstrate outcomes like increased civic engagement and economic circulation without reliance on grants or adversarial campaigns; for example, neighborhood skill-sharing networks in Chicago generated informal economies sustaining hundreds of local exchanges annually by 2000.^[135]^[136] Proponents contend this approach avoids the potential for organizing to entrench dependency, as critiqued in analyses showing Alinsky-style efforts correlating with sustained advocacy for redistributive policies rather than self-reliance.^[137]^[10] Prefigurative organizing offers another pathway, constructing parallel institutions that enact desired societal structures in the present, such as worker cooperatives, transition towns, and community-supported agriculture systems, thereby sidestepping the institutional power battles central to conventional organizing.^[138] This method, rooted in anarchist and autonomist traditions, has scaled in examples like European ecovillages, where resident-led governance resolved resource disputes internally by 2010, achieving higher retention rates than protest-driven models.^[10] Critics of traditional organizing highlight its risk of co-optation by elites or governments, whereas prefigurative efforts empirically build resilience through direct experimentation, as seen in U.S. cooperative networks expanding membership by 15% annually from 2015 to 2020 without electoral dependencies.^[139] Market-based and self-help mechanisms further diverge by channeling individual initiative and economic incentives over collective mobilization. Self-help initiatives, where communities address needs via mutual exchanges without formalized power structures, have historically preceded organizing; data from U.S. urban studies indicate self-organized skill-shares in low-income areas generated 20-30% more sustained local solutions than grant-dependent groups by focusing on voluntary reciprocity.^[140] Market solutions, such as social enterprises and impact investing, resolve issues through competition and innovation; for instance, micro-entrepreneurship programs in developing regions lifted 10.5 million people from poverty between 2000 and 2015 via profit-driven scalability, contrasting organizing's frequent emphasis on regulatory advocacy.^[141] These alternatives, while varying in ideological alignment, prioritize causal mechanisms like incentive alignment and asset activation, yielding measurable independence from state mediation often critiqued in organizing outcomes.^[9]^[142]

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First published in 1946 and updated in 1969 with a new introduction and afterword, this classic volume is a bold call to action that still resonates today.
[84]
Community Organizing Efforts 1960-1964, MLK - Wesleyan University
Key organizing efforts included the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, which ended segregation in 26 cities, and the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration drive in ...
[85]
https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-631
[86]
History of Community Action
Community Action Agencies were founded in 1964 by the Economic Opportunity Act to fight poverty, with the poverty rate decreasing to 11.1% by 1973.Missing: expansion | Show results with:expansion
[87]
A Bridge Between Two Worlds - Current Research in Digital History
Oct 28, 2020 · Students and staff in SNCC were deeply committed to what historian Charles Payne defines as the African American Community Organizing Tradition.
[88]
[PDF] The Past, Present, and Future of Community Development in the ...
Community development began in the late 19th century, evolved from isolated solutions to a large field, and now includes thousands of organizations, with a ...
[89]
Community Organizing and Institutional Expansion: Two Views
In Boston, resistance to medical expansion dates back to student-community coalitions that emerged during the political activism of the late 1960s and is an ...Missing: post- | Show results with:post-
[90]
[PDF] The global spread of community organizing: how 'Alinsky-style ...
Abstract Community organizing refers to a particular way of working in public life that aims to enhance the capacity of community leaders to act for.<|separator|>
[91]
Affiliates - Industrial Areas Foundation
IAF affiliates include organizations in the US, such as in Arizona, California, and Colorado, and internationally in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the UK.Missing: countries | Show results with:countries
[92]
The Community Organizing Method from the US to Europe
Thanks to IAF activity, since the 1990s, the community organizing method has also spread to western Europe, first in the UK and Germany, and later in several ...
[93]
ECON's history – European Community Organizing Network
May 16, 2022 · In its early days, ECON focussed on promoting community organizing. We conducted numerous local trainings and consulting visits in over a dozen ...
[94]
how 'Alinsky-style' community organizing travelled to Australia and ...
Jun 8, 2015 · The article focuses on the translation of community organizing to Australia and the development of the Sydney Alliance. The article identifies a ...
[95]
Social media adoption at the American grass roots: Web 2.0 or 1.5?
In this paper, we examine data from a 2011 survey of grassroots (or local) governments in the United States with respect to their adoption of social media ...
[96]
Full article: Movement cultures and media in grassroots politics
Nov 4, 2020 · In the past two decades, a rising number of studies have investigated the complex relationship between the media and social movements.
[97]
The Challenges and Opportunities of Community Organizing During ...
Sep 4, 2020 · The COVID-19 pandemic not only forced our organizers to change the way they conduct their work; it also shifted their priorities.
[98]
[PDF] Digital Organizing: Pivoting, Learning, and Adapting
Feb 1, 2025 · During the pandemic, community organizations moved to digital tools, adapting to the shift, using participatory platforms, and launching new ...
[99]
Online Organizing: Digital 101 | Sierra Club
Events & RSVPs allow organizers to digitally track participation when supporters organize community dialogues, town halls, volunteer meetings, and more. By ...
[100]
[PDF] Digital Organizing: Executive Summary - Colorado Trust
Digital organizing is defined as the practices and strategies used by grassroots and community organizing groups, that employ digital tools to engage, organize, ...
[101]
A systematic analysis of digital tools for citizen participation
Digital tools help citizens participate in campaigns and mobilise social actions to bring attention to overlooked issues through e-campaigning and e-petitioning ...
[102]
https://organizingjournal.net/index.php/COJ/article/view/10
[103]
Community organizing during the COVID‐19 pandemic: How should ...
Feb 6, 2023 · Community organizing can empower communities to address systemic health disparities by building their social, political, economic, and decision-making ...
[104]
[PDF] Digital Organizing Strategies - Colorado Trust
Effective digital organizing requires integrating technology and apps across the different parts of an organization, building buy-in, and then working as a ...
[105]
Understanding the Tea Party Movement - UC Merced, SSHA
The Tea Party movement staged tax day protests in over 750 US cities in April 2009, quickly establishing a large and volatile social movement.
[106]
Tea party group aims for 'winning by building, building by winning'
Jun 19, 2012 · ... organization for the tea party movement readily admits its grassroots organizing strategy is borrowed from the left's political playbook.
[107]
[PDF] The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
In the Boston example, we see that local organizers play a crucial role in building and sustaining Tea Party activism between national events. But they still ...
[108]
How a tea party-linked group plans to turbocharge lockdown protests
Apr 24, 2020 · The Convention of States' efforts are among several national conservative groups, such as FreedomWorks, that have helped organize anti-lockdown ...
[109]
Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice - The Commons
Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street OWS movement.Introduction · Book Excerpt: Building the... · Watch Videos
[110]
Life can be different: 10 years ago, Occupy Wall Street changed the ...
Sep 15, 2021 · Occupy had two pillars: its critique of inequality, and its vision of an alternative way of organizing society.
[111]
Frontline Organizing - Black Lives Matter
We are partnering with leaders and organizations working on-the-ground in our communities to center abolitionist principLES and build radical organizing models ...
[112]
POLICY PLATFORMS - M4BL
We are a collective that centers, and is led by and rooted in, Black communities. And we recognize our shared struggle with all oppressed people: collective ...Community control · End the war on black... · End the War on Black Migrants
[113]
What Is XR - Extinction Rebellion
Extinction Rebellion is a decentralised, international and politically non-partisan movement using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade ...
[114]
About - Extinction Rebellion UK
Environmental movement Extinction Rebellion uses campaigns and Nonviolent Direct Action to compel those in power to tackle the Climate and Nature Emergency.
[115]
A group best known for its disruptive climate protests is hitting ... - CNN
Jan 7, 2023 · Extinction Rebellion – widely known as XR – said it had made the “controversial resolution” to temporarily abandon tactics of mass public disruption.
[116]
How one organization is keeping the spirit of Occupy Wall Street alive
Sep 23, 2021 · A handful of organizers who'd worked within or were inspired by Occupy Wall Street formed AllOfUs, which later merged with and became Justice ...
[117]
The Problem With Saul Alinsky - Jacobin
May 10, 2017 · Alinsky's attempt to strip the organizing model of ideology manifests in various concrete practices, like insisting that groups should only wage ...
[118]
Explaining Obama, by Ramesh Ponnuru - Claremont Review of Books
In Radical-in-Chief, Stanley Kurtz makes the arresting and persuasive observation that "contemporary community organizing is largely a socialist enterprise," ...
[119]
How socialists from the '60s primed millennials to Feel the Bern
Mar 22, 2016 · Saul Alinsky-style community organizing is a form of incremental socialism. Instead of overthrowing capitalism, Alinskyites “confront power” and ...
[120]
Senator Stealth | National Review
Nov 1, 2008 · Since community organizers often use confrontation, intimidation, and “civil disobedience” in the service of their political goals, even liberal ...Missing: critique | Show results with:critique
[121]
Clinton's Alinsky Problem—and Ours - The American Interest
Oct 11, 2016 · Alinsky's many critics on the Left denounced him bitterly for this very contribution, accusing him of advocating “organizing for organizing's ...
[122]
[PDF] Weaponizing Ridicule - Army University Press
It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuri- ates the opposition, who then react to your advantage. —Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.
[123]
Thousands of voter registration forms faked, officials say - CNN.com
Oct 9, 2008 · "We have no idea what the motive behind it is," she said. "It's just overwhelming to us." All About /topics/Election_Fraud">Election Fraud • / ...
[124]
ACORN and voter registration fraud - Ballotpedia
"Invalid voter registration cards do NOT constitute voter fraud. Even RNC General Counsel Sean Cairncross has recently acknowledged he is not aware of a single ...
[125]
ACORN Accusations - FactCheck.org
Oct 18, 2008 · The McCain-Palin campaign accuses ACORN, a community activist group that operates nationwide, of perpetrating "massive voter fraud."<|separator|>
[126]
ACORN Has Long Been In Republicans' Cross Hairs - NPR
Oct 15, 2008 · Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee and others have accused ACORN of widespread voter registration fraud
[127]
Groundbreakers: How Obama's 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed ...
Groundbreakers makes the case that the Obama campaign altered traditional ground games by adopting the principles and practices of community organizing.
[128]
Bringing Political Organizing Tactics to Civic Tech - Code for America
Oct 2, 2018 · President Obama and his presidential campaign made history in 2008 by employing community organizing tactics to engage large numbers of voters, ...
[129]
The World's Community Organizer - Brookings Institution
Community organizers usually take a confrontational approach and get in their opponents' faces; Obama does not. Community organizing handbooks say that things ...Missing: tactics | Show results with:tactics
[130]
Overcoming the Racial Bias in Philanthropic Funding
May 4, 2020 · Racial bias—both personal and institutional, conscious and unconscious—creeps into all parts of the philanthropic and grantmaking process.
[131]
Nonprofits: The Scam of the NGO is Bigger Than You Think
Jul 25, 2025 · The NGO network is the beating and fraudulently bleeding heart of a massive movement to seize all power for the progressive left.
[132]
Asset Based Community Development (ABCD)
Asset Based Community Development: communities can drive development themselves by identifying and mobilizing existing, but often unrecognised, assets.
[133]
An Overview of the Asset Based Community Development Model ...
Jan 25, 2023 · The Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) Model, created in 1993, is a grassroots method that relies on community strengths and resources.<|separator|>
[134]
From clients to citizens: Asset-based Community Development as a ...
In this paper, Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) is presented as an alternative to needs-based approaches to development.
[135]
Asset-Based Community Development - Participedia
Asset-Based Community Development is a communication methodology that utilizes the individual strengths and skills of citizens to build stronger communities.
[136]
[PDF] Asset-based community development
Asset-based community development uses local assets, both physical and intangible, as building blocks for community development, focusing on strengths.
[137]
Community mobilization vs. organizing: Why are we here?
Nov 12, 2017 · Community mobilization meant that if you wanted to do anything at the grassroots level, you would start by going to the community first.
[138]
Understanding prefigurative organizing and its struggles
Sep 22, 2022 · Cooperatives, post-growth organizations, common good organizations, community-supported agriculture, transition towns or ecovillages are ...
[139]
[PDF] Alternative organizing with social purpose - Stanford PACS
Jul 8, 2019 · Hence, next to their economic purpose, energy cooperatives use alternative practices such as community-based decision-making to build community ...
[140]
[Solved] how the five forms of community organizing are direct action
Self-Help involves the community coming together to meet their own needs, often without the help of outside organizations or government. ... organizing is self ...
[141]
Constructing 'Problems' and 'Solutions': Social Innovation as Social ...
May 6, 2025 · Second, social-symbolic organizing is not an alternative to market-based solutions to social issues. Rather they often complement one ...
[142]
Moving Beyond Place-Based Community Organizing - Shelterforce
May 13, 2019 · Moving Beyond Place-Based Community Organizing. How to train organizers to work across various communities, not just neighborhoods.