User:Ngdana/Community organizing

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Types of Community Organizing
Community organizers attempt to influence government, corporations, and institutions, increase direct representation within decision-making bodies, and foster general social reform. Where negotiations fail, these organizations quickly seek to inform others outside of the organization of the issues being addressed and expose or pressure the decision-makers through a variety of means, including picketing, boycotting, sit-ins, petitioning, and electoral politics. Organizing groups often seek out issues they know will generate controversy and conflict'''. T'''his allows them to draw in and educate participants, build commitment, and establish a reputation for advancing local justice.

Community organizers generally seek to build groups that are democratic in governance, open and accessible to community members and concerned with the general health of a specific interest group, rather than the community as a whole. In addition, community organizing seeks to broadly empower community members through mobilizing efforts, with the end goal of "distributing" power and resources more equally between the community members and external political and social figures of power. When adapting the goal of community empowerment, organizers recognize the uneven distribution of material and social resources within society as the root cause of the community's issues. The process of creating empowerment starts with admitting that power gaps and resource inequalities exist in society and affects an individual's personal life. Though community organizers share the goal of community empowerment, community organizing itself is defined and understood in a variety ways.

Scholars have identified five different types of community organizing: grassroots organizing, feminist organizing, faith-based community organizing (FBCO), broad-based, and coalition building. While some of these types focus on challenging systemic oppression at national and global scales, others prioritize community interests by focusing on local issues.

There has been an attempt to build a general community organizing practice model that ties the different types of community organizing together despite their differences. '''Scholars Shane R. Brady and Mary Katherine O’Connor construct a starting point for a general practice model, a model that defines community organizing as its own field of practice. However, this model depends on existing practice models adapted by the different types of community organizing. For example, FBCOs and many grassroots organizing models use the “social action approach”''' built on the work of Saul Alinsky from the 1930s into the 1970s. By contrast, feminist organizing follows a “community-building approach,” which emphasizes raising consciousness to support the community’s empowerment.

Grassroots Organizing
Grassroots organizing is distinctive for its bottom-up approach to organizing. Grassroots organizers build community groups from scratch, developing new leadership where none existed and organizing the unorganized. This type of organizing uses a process where people collectively act in the interest of their communities and the common good. According to scholar Brian D. Christens, grassroots organizing focuses on building and maintaining interpersonal relationships between their community members. Building social relationships allow community members to build collaborative skills, deliberative skills to handle conflict, and strengthen civil engagement. Some networks of community organizations that employ this method and support local organizing groups include National People's Action and ACORN. Although efforts in grassroots organizing are significant in marginalized communities, it is specifically popular among marginalized communities of color.

"Door knocking" grassroots organizations like ACORN organize poor and working-class members recruiting members one by one in the community. Because they go door-to-door, they are able to reach beyond established organizations and the "churched" to bring together a wide range of less privileged people. ACORN tends to stress the importance of constant action in order to maintain the commitment of a less rooted group of participants.

ACORN has a reputation of being more forceful than faith-based (FBCO) groups, and there are indications that their local groups were more staff (organizer) directed than leader (local volunteer) directed. (However, the same can be said for many forms of organizing, including FBCOs.) The "door-knocking" approach is more time-intensive than the "organization of organizations" approach of FBCOs and requires more organizers who, partly as a result, can be lower paid with more turnover.

Unlike existing FBCO national "umbrella" and other grassroots organizations, ACORN maintains a centralized national agenda, and exerts some centralized control over local organizations. Because ACORN USA was a 501(c)4 organization under the tax code, it was able to participate directly in election activities, but contributions to it were not tax exempt.

Limitations to Grassroots Organizing
Grassroots organizing is vulnerable, being dependent on the support of more powerful people; its goals can be easily thwarted. Because grassroots organizing focuses on building relationships within the community, scholars note that grassroots community organizing can be passive and depoliticizing. This approach to building community empowerment does not aim for a specific political or social goal. In other words, building relationships do not always directly confront institutions, though it might challenge an individual's views through one-on-one conversations with other individuals in the community.

Feminist Community Organizing
Feminist organizing, also known as women’s community organizing, is community organizing with a feminist motivation. The goals of feminist organizing include: increasing women's employment opportunities; improving women's physical and mental well-being; and, raising consciousness. Organizers prioritize raising consciousness for women to understand how their personal struggles are interconnected with societal inequalities. While women have participated in grassroots organizing,  the characteristics of feminism distinguish feminist organizing from other forms of grassroots organizing.

Community-Building in Feminist Organizing
'''Feminists want to break down racial and gendered boundaries and promote unity among women. Feminist organizing focuses on building relationships within the community, seeing such relationships as a prerequisite for raising consciousness. This type of organizing is called the community-building approach, which is the opposite of the social action (Alinsky) approach (where the focus is on challenging social and political inequalities that impact the community). The community-building approach depends on the participation and collaboration of both community organizers and community members. This eliminates the power difference between an organizer and participants. Therefore, the community-building approach supports the belief that power rests in the community and community empowerment is the process of building that power. Scholars Catherine P. Bradshaw et al. states that feminist organizers believe power is not quantifiable, and that power is created, rather than distributed. The hierarchical relationship between organizer and participant is broken down also by facilitating decision-making among community members rather than just by community leaders. '''

'''To build relationships among community members, feminist organizers encourage sharing personal experiences.  Feminist organizers believe that this forms a sense of interconnectedness and trust among community members which is important in the community organizing process. '''

'''The shift to community building was also caused by external forces, rather than just feminist organizer’s motivations. During 1980s, the rising neoliberal agenda caused many community organizers to shift to the community-building approach. '''

Limitations to Feminist Organizing
'''Some feminists argue that feminist community organizing can disregard the racial and capability diversity among women. In the process of pushing for unity among women, feminist organizers are inclined to disregard the benefits of diversity. Economist Marilyn Power uses the term “homogenous category” to highlight the problem of masking racial diversity, while professor and sociologist Akwugo Emejulu uses the concept of essentialism (reducing women to their gender stereotypes) to highlight the capabilities limitation.  Though feminist organizers' intentions are to recognize women's diversity through unity, some are concerned that the vision of unity eclipses a diverse reality.'''

'''There are studies that speculate that these limitations are caused by feminism’s emergence from a Eurocentric perspective. Historically, European American feminists delegitimize the racial difference of women.  In addition, European American feminists delegitimize women who do not follow the traditional gender norms influenced by white domestic middle class womanhood.  Currently, feminist organizing focuses on addressing gender inequalities, which means only the problems of women who follow and are impacted by gender norms will be addressed. Feminist organizing becomes counterproductive for those who do follow gender norms. Psychologist Lorraine Gutierrez claims that feminist organizing disregards problems that are larger than the scope of gender norms. This negatively impacts women empowerment because it is the diversity that motivates women to mobilize. '''