Community Organizing: A Brief Introduction

Posted by on April 23, 2012

[posted from Comm-Org list]

From: Aaron Schutz <schutz@uwm.edu>

Announcing a new book:

Mike Miller, Community Organizing: A Brief Introduction (Euclid Avenue Press, 2012), 76pp.
Paperback: $6.50 (http://amzn.to/IzN2C7) ; Kindle, $2.99 (http://amzn.to/I3sf7g)

I believe this is the best short introduction to “faith-based” or “institution-based” community organizing currently available. It would be a great book to give to people who are completely new to organizing, or for courses that only have time for a single week or module on organizing.

In addition to the overview chapter on organizing, the book also includes brief chapters on “Teaching Politics as if It Matters,” and “Conflict Tactics.” Note that all royalties go directly to Miller.

Book Description:

Grounded in a composite case study of an actual organizing effort, the book shows how local communities can be organized for power. It illustrates key organizing concepts and strategies through stories of real encounters with leaders, communities, and powerful opposition figures.

Saul Alinsky developed the foundations of the tradition of organizing described here, an approach that remains dominant in the U.S. today. Alinsky rooted power deeply in the lives, relationships and institutions of marginalized and oppressed people. In his early efforts his organizations brought together a wide range of institutions: religious congregations and labor unions, as well as mutual aid, self-help, athletic, sororal and fraternal, neighborhood and other voluntary associations. By the late 1970s, as non-congregational neighborhood associations fell into decline, organizers in the Alinsky tradition started looking more carefully at how to sustain the vibrancy of the religious institutions that remained. Organizers sought to help congregation members become co-creators, rather than consumers, of the life of their churches, and worked to help members connect their faith more directly to action in the world. In this way, they helped make both faith and the action more meaningful.

This little book tells the story of one congregation that was a member of a “broadly-based community organization,” and how a community organizer assisted its development as a true community.