1.3: Why Learn Community Organizing?

Note

Andrew Mott is the founder of Community Learning Partnership, a network of community organizer training programs that are based in community colleges. Mott explains why community organizing is important and why it is important for people to get the kinds of training you will get in this class. 

University Education for Community Change: A Vital Strategy for Progress on Poverty, Race, and Community-Building

Poverty, race, and strengthening the social fabric by strengthening community institutions – there is broad agreement that these are central issues for the United States. Poverty is growing as increasing numbers of people are being left behind by our economy, our educational institutions, and our traditional system for providing social mobility. Race relations are becoming more complex as our nation becomes far more multicultural and issues of racial justice and racial tensions simmer. Our social fabric and democratic institutions are under strain, as concern grows about the extent to which our community institutions have the strength, openness and leadership to bring and hold people together, creating the webs of close ties, common values, helping relationships and democratic traditions which are so important to successful communities.

There is also broad agreement that community organizations of various types must be central to any strategy for addressing the interlocked issues of poverty, race, and social fabric. In this era of government retrenchment it is clear that the public sector will not take the lead in addressing these issues. Nor are large nonprofit institutions well-suited for this task, as they typically work area-wide and must balance many interests and activities rather than focus on particular communities. And the traditional civic concerns and leadership of local business are being weakened as mergers and globalization reduce the number of hometown corporations and local corporate leaders.

There is no choice: Leadership on poverty and race therefore must come from the community itself. Well-led, truly community-based organizations can become uniquely knowledgeable about the community’s needs, skilled at involving large numbers of volunteers to work on priority issues, and effective in ensuring that new resources, partnerships, policies and programs are developed to strengthen the community. They also can become vital bridges for linking people together across racial and economic lines to address issues of race and poverty.

Strong, well-led community organizations are therefore essential to the success of other partners in the process of community change. Without effective systems for involving community residents, efforts to reform public education, increase public safety, or transform the lives and attitudes of community residents will fail. So will initiatives which are designed to improve housing and sustain it over the long-run, or to prepare hard-to-employ people for lives of work and a chance to move up. All these reforms require changes in people’s attitudes and the development of systems which are sensitive to a community’s unique opportunities, are “owned” by those they are serving, and enlist strong neighborhood backing.

There is growing recognition of these lessons in major public and private institutions. Many police departments, public health and mental health professionals, experts in youth and family development, workforce development specialists, and foundations creating “comprehensive community initiatives,” for example, have concluded that they must work through community-based organizations if they are to achieve their goals.

As agreement has grown on the central importance of grassroots groups, there has been very substantial investment in those organizations. Foundations, churches, corporations, government agencies, and others have invested billions of dollars in community organizing, community development and community-building. Low-income people, especially people of color, have invested huge amounts of volunteer time in building organizations through which they work to change their communities and public policies for the better.

The need for grassroots organizations and well-trained people to lead them is certain to increase. As new immigrant groups settle into the United States and as the working poor, people of color, young people and the elderly grow in relation to the rest of the population, they will need to band together on the particular issues they face. They will need formal and informal groups through which they can join with their peers, represent their interests, meet their immediate needs, and increasingly serve as partial substitutes for the government agencies which are shrinking as the social safety net weakens. People will therefore be strongly motivated to create a new generation of self-help and mutual help organizations, drawing on the unique American traditions of self-reliance, the building of strong voluntary associations, and vital support for those associations by private philanthropy.

Reliance on grassroots groups will grow as tax cuts, military expenditures, the shaky economy, and conservative social and fiscal policies further reduce support for social programs. Poverty will increase dramatically: government cutbacks are reducing services and income transfer programs, and low-income people of all races are facing growing barriers to advancement because, while the need for a well-educated workforce is growing, they typically face poor schools, the digital divide, and increasingly unaffordable higher education. The gap between rich and poor will widen rapidly unless the political and fiscal situations change dramatically. Because poor people cannot count on the public or private sector or large nonprofits to take the lead in changing this situation, there will be a growing need for strong nonprofits which represent and serve poor and working people.

There is by now a rich body of experience with different strategies for strengthening low-income communities. These include community organizing, community development, and approaches to reforming the public and private sector policies which have such an impact on neighborhoods and on each person’s chance to get ahead. There is much to learn, and it is essential that people who lead these vital efforts have opportunities to learn from the experience of their predecessors and peers. Informed with this knowledge, they will have a far greater chance of succeeding in bringing about significant social and community change.

The Crisis in Leadership

Despite the growing consensus on the critical importance of grassroots organizations, and despite this major investment and growth, the field of community change faces a mounting crisis of leadership. There is a severe shortage of people who are fully prepared for key positions in the field – whether leading grassroots groups or providing vital support to them from other sectors. The infrastructure for learning is still pitifully weak, with people expected to learn on the job, through trial and error, with little access to the lessons others have learned in tackling similar challenges. Nonprofits typically are so overstretched that few can either hire people as apprentices to their top leaders or invest significantly in other forms of training and mentoring.

To build a strong community-based sector which fully responds to these needs, far greater priority must be given to developing a pipeline which can generate the skilled leadership community groups will need. It will be particularly important that growing numbers of young people from immigrant populations and other families of color be prepared for challenging jobs in community-based nonprofits, as their backgrounds give them unique advantages for understanding and leading their communities. Their backgrounds also increase the likelihood they will make long-term rather than fleeting commitments to the neighborhoods and people who most need their help.

Community change is, in short, a tough and demanding job requiring a broad background, analytic and strategic skills, and practical experience in understanding and motivating people and moving them into action on strategies which will lead to growing success. It is a tremendously challenging – and exciting – responsibility, at least as complex as any other profession. Like other professions, it requires extensive preparation, well beyond what people can learn on a job without a serious educational component, mentoring and guidance.

This challenge is greatly heightened by the major leadership transition now underway. Many grassroots groups and support organizations are now going through a wrenching generational change. Organizers and leaders who emerged from the activism of the 1960s – a unique period in American history when the civil rights, Chicano, antipoverty, and women’s movements stimulated a surge of community organizing, alternative social service and community development efforts – are now retiring or otherwise stepping out of management roles, leaving leadership positions vacant.

In many ways this transition is healthy, bringing new energies and ideas to the work. But the trend also has great dangers. The older generation is often passing the torch to people who are 25 or 30 years younger because there is a “missing generation” of people who would now be 40-55. When that generation was young, few entry-level jobs were available as grassroots groups were reducing their budgets in the face of a poor economy, backlash against the activism of the 1960s, and reduced philanthropic giving and government support. Furthermore, those who found jobs with community groups often found their path to advancement blocked as founders stayed on and budgets remained static. Many therefore moved to jobs with greater upward mobility – politics and government, other nonprofits with higher salaries and benefits, foundations, and corporations and banks concerned about their affirmative action and community reinvestment obligations. This brain drain has left many groups with such a large generational gap that they now have no choice but to shift to much younger leadership as their founders move on.

Second, as the variety of approaches to community change has multiplied, most people have been forced to specialize in just one somewhat narrow aspect of the work. They have specialized in housing development, or anticrime efforts, or health care, or tenant organizing, with relatively few people having an opportunity to broaden their knowledge and analytic skills beyond what they learn in carrying out their particular duties.

This is unfortunate as it is increasingly clear that the highly complex work of community change requires a mix of approaches – community organizing, community development, coalition-building and policy advocacy among others. It is also apparent that communities require multi-issue, increasingly comprehensive strategies rather than concentrating on a single issue. 

You cannot, for example, solve the housing problem without addressing issues of jobs and income, schools, public services, safety, and public and private investment in the neighborhood as a whole. Furthermore, those issues require working at the citywide, metropolitan and statewide levels as well as locally, a challenge which requires strong political skills and alliances.

Third, the shortage is especially great among people of color whose leadership is essential because communities of color are disproportionately poor, neglected and cut off from opportunities. Educational gaps, stubborn patterns of white dominance in key institutions, and the appeal of jobs offering greater security and upward mobility continue to limit the number of people of color in grassroots leadership positions.

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Reading Response Questions:

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. What is a grassroots group?
2. Why does Mott think grassroots groups are important?
3. What are the skills needed to be a grassroots organizer?
4. Why does Mott think we need to get more people of color to be community change leaders?
5. What did you find interesting in this reading?

Attributions

University Education for Community Change: A Vital Strategy for Progress on Poverty, Race and Community-Building ” by Andrew Mott, licensed under [License Type] has been reproduced with permission from the author.