What is Community Organizing?

img_community_organizingCommunity organizing empowers ordinary people to work together to make change. Organizing involves training local leaders, educating them about issues that affect their lives, and helping them understand the relevant power relationships. It means going door to door to share that information with one’s neighbors. It means bringing people together to demonstrate their power to government officials, corporations, and the media.

How Community Organizing Groups Work

Community organizing groups tend to be local and state-based, though some are national. They start with a handful of staff members, most of them community organizers themselves.

They are funded by member dues – which, because the members are not wealthy, are low – and by private foundations. They focus on leadership development and political education (understanding the political context of the issues they work on), expanding their base, and organizing members in campaigns. Their members testify in the state capitol, bring large groups to talk to legislators and corporate executives, organize community events, write letters to the editors of newspapers and are interviewed in the media. They vote, and get others to vote. Many of these groups also lobby their members of Congress.

A Few of Our Grantees

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC), founded by a handful of citizens in 1981 to force coal companies to pay property taxes on the land they owned in Kentucky, now has over 7,000 members from all over the state. Members representing different counties and regions make up the group’s steering committee and determine its policies and direction. In addition to its continuing fight for tax equity, KFTC’s current campaigns cover the spectrum, from ending mountaintop removal, an environmentally devastating method of coal mining, to bringing new sources of energy and jobs to Kentucky, to restoring the voting rights of former felons.

Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), a California-based environmental health and justice organization, which promotes clean air and water and advocates for toxic-free communities, became a FACT grantee in 2003. It deploys its legal, research and organizing forces to tackle such causes as stopping the expansion of the Chevron refinery in Richmond,California.

The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) creates advocacy coalitions of community, labor, faith, environmental and other groups. LAANE’s executive director, Madeline Janis, identifies six key elements that contribute to her organization’s ability to win its campaigns: legal skills, research, policy advocacy, communications, and coalition building as well as organizing. While it’s not necessary for every organization to have all these components, community organizing groups must be able to partner with others that have the necessary skills.

Large-scale efforts, like creating a green jobs policy in Los Angeles, stopping the expansion of a Chevron refinery in Richmond, or passing a local Family Medical Leave ordinance in Milwaukee, take staff, time, resources, and sophistication. For groups to expand from small local victories to efforts on a regional, state and national level, they must achieve organizational scale while still remaining rooted in the member-centered culture that gave birth to them.

KFTC: The transformative power of community organizing

CBE: Combatting Industrial Pollution

The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) creates advocacy coalitions of community, labor, faith, environmental and other groups. LAANE’s executive director, Madeline Janis, identifies six key elements that contribute to her organization’s ability to win its campaigns: legal skills, research, policy advocacy, communications, and coalition building as well as organizing. While it’s not necessary for every organization to have all these components, community organizing groups must be able to partner with others that have the necessary skills.

Large-scale efforts, like creating a green jobs policy in Los Angeles, stopping the expansion of a Chevron refinery in Richmond, or passing a local Family Medical Leave ordinance in Milwaukee, take staff, time, resources, and sophistication. For groups to expand from small local victories to efforts on a regional, state and national level, they must achieve organizational scale while still remaining rooted in the member-centered culture that gave birth to them.