| Organizers across the country reacted angrily when Sarah Palin attacked organizing in her Republican convention speech. Some tried to use her attack as a "teachable moment," as an opportunity to remind the public about the importance of organizing.
A key limitation of this effort to respond to Palin was that almost no one really has any good sense of what "organizing" is outside of the organizing community. (For evidence, see this quote from the 2008 "Civic Health Index" survey (via Peter Levine).)
Almost every semester for more than 5 years, I have taught a required introductory course about organizing for our Community Education major. Our program is almost unique in the nation, designed to prepare students for a range of different community service, non-school education, government and other related positions. Our students are extremely diverse, frequently older, and many live in central city areas in Milwaukee.
Almost none of them know anything at all about organizing. Many are deeply involved in different social service efforts in the community. Some of them even have the title of "organizer" in local community based organizations. But these jobs invariably have nothing to do with organizing people to collectively contest inequality and oppression. Some are familiar with local "activist" groups (e.g. Peace Action) that have little or no coherent approach to the generation of power.
Milwaukee actually has a long history of social action, as well as a long-standing congregational organizing group that has engaged in a range of effective campaigns in the past. But while these students have vague understandings that there were social action efforts in the past, they have no sense of the practical approaches that make these efforts effective. They have little or no idea that there is a tradition and a set of practices for creating collective power.
Organizing Campaigns Don't Effectively Educate About Organizing
One of the core ideas of organizing is that participants learn about how collective action works by actually engaging in it.
This makes a lot of sense for those who are active leaders in organizing efforts. Leaders sit at the table during strategy sessions and hear advice from trained organizers. When they participate in an "action," it is likely that they understand the structure that lies beneath the action, the reasons for this structure, and how this connects to a range of other related efforts that may not be overtly visible.
However, even for these most involved members, organizing groups do not depend simply upon participation for their education. All of the major community organizing groups spend a significant amount of their resources on intensive trainings-usually a week or more in length-that are attended by nearly all key leaders. These groups understand, then, the importance of providing their members with explicit introduction to the key concepts and language that inform organizing efforts. (At some point I may talk about some of the plusses and minuses of the training I attended.)
Brief Participation in Organizing or Hearing About Organizing Won't Teach You Much About What Organizing Is
If even the most involved leaders are unlikely to learn enough about organizing to participate effectively without intensive training, it is even more unlikely that more peripherally involved people will pick up much understanding.
"Actions" for example (rallies, press conferences, pickets, and the like) are designed to put pressure on a "target." While they are also important opportunities for educating members, this has to be a secondary goal. In fact, education as a goal is actually in tension with the overall material aims of a campaign. You don't, for example, want to expose your overall strategy to the opposition, even if that would help your members learn about the process.
The limitation of organizing activity as an educational tool is magnified for non-participants. The media is often not very sympathetic to organizing efforts ("rabble rousers") and often either refuses to cover organizing events, or blunts groups' messages in reports. Furthermore, even sympathetic reporters, like everyone else, are unlikely to have any real understanding of how organizing works. Thus, their summaries of these efforts rarely capture the important components of what is going on.
Organizing Concepts are At Odds With Most People's Understandings of Community "Service"
As I have noted in earlier posts , Americans have essentially been programmed to think of "service" when they think about community engagement. Almost every community support event or campaign we hear about seeks to "help" different service agencies-food pantries, AIDS research groups, homeless shelters, etc., etc.
What this means is that we have no available frameworks or "schemas" for making coherent sense of collective action efforts. As Walter Lippmann argued almost a century ago, and as George Lakoff has partly reiterated, recently, we make sense of the data that comes to us by fitting it into the patterns we already expect. Thus, information about community organizing often gets translated into our dominant "service" model. Or it gets filed away in the same place as our fuzzy narratives about the civil rights movement along with vague images of marching people and MLK.
In other words, the very data that some organizers hope would educate people about organizing is neither complete enough nor structured enough to help people generate new conceptual structures that would reflect the underlying processes involved in organizing for social change. And the little information about organizing that is available is swamped out by the vast range of images, text, and talk about community engagement as "service."
Disseminating Core Concepts
What all this means is that if we want people to understand what organizing is, we need to provide them with a conceptual structure to make sense of the little information they do receive. And given extremely limited resources, we need to learn how we can initiate people into this framework in the most efficient manner. The most effective approaches are likely to involve active participation, but will nonetheless need to involve more formal and planned education.
A couple of approaches are available.
A movie that laid out these key concepts in an engaging way might be effective. This would need to go beyond available documentaries that tell stories about organizing, but don't make the underlying concepts explicit enough. (Salt of the Earth is a good example, but is old and doesn't quite do what I'm thinking of. See actual movie here.)
A slick video game with entertaining game-play might really make a difference. A video game would almost certainly be the best way to reach young people. There actually is an interactive video game to teach people about aspects of organizing. But it is too clunky to really attract people who don't already know they want to learn about organizing. ( Recent evidence indicates that interaction with other players online, planning collaborative efforts, is a core attraction for many players. But this interaction is not currently designed to teach key organizing concepts. You can't just go storm the local county office armed with broadswords and fireballs.)
It would be great if some foundation or rich progressive could fund a start-up or existing game company to create such a game. But you wouldn't want to do it in the usual non-profit way. To be effective, the game would need to be something people would be willing to actually pay $$ for. You would want the developers to have a deep financial incentive, to the extent that they would actually lose money if it failed. The clunkyness of the one existing "game" I know of is almost certainly partly a result of the fact that it was developed as a training tool and not as a fun and engaging experience. Sim City can do it. Roller Coaster Tycoon can do it. Why can't we do the same thing with organizing. Anyone?
A Brief Introductory Workshop
I have no real background in videogames and movies, but I have put some effort into developing a brief introductory workshop about organizing. The two introductory pieces about organizing in this series are drawn from that workshop, and you can download an early version of it here.
The aim in the workshop is to activate people's existing schemas for "service" and "activism" and "mobilizing," explaining why each of these are NOT "organizing." Then I give what seemed like the minimum number of concepts that would allow people to construct a new "schema" for organizing. By starting with what organizing ISN'T, I'm trying to carve out space for them to develop an understanding of what organizing IS. Interestingly, when I asked members of the Comm-Org Listserv how they would approach a workshop like this, many came up with the same basic approach. (See my summary of what people said here .)
Why Bother?
There is no way to teach people about the full richness of organizing in such a workshop. Further, most people, even those deeply involved in community issues, are not in any position to fundamentally change what they do and start organizing. In fact, as I've noted, organizing was eliminated from service-based CBOs because it threatened the survival of agencies that didn't do this. So why bother?
First, because there are existing community organizing groups that people could join if they were interested. Thus, this could be a recruiting tool.
Second, it is hard for organizing groups to work with local agencies on any level when they have no idea what organizing is in the first place.
Third, I believe that if a large enough group of people had a sense of what organizing entailed, organizing might slowly become more accepted as an effective community change tool.
Fourth, even in CBOs focused on service, opportunities may emerge for engaging in organizing, especially youth. But this can't happen if people don't know anything about organizing.
Overall, I have the hope that if we ran 5,000 people in this city through an engaging workshop about organizing, introducing them an their friends and co-workers to the key concepts and language, it might slowly produce a shift in culture about how "we" think about approaching social problems. Certainly this is unlikely to happen when people don't even know they don't know what organizing is.
In the end, I believe that we need to think seriously about approaching educating the public about organizing as a crucial task separate from actual organizing efforts. As long as knowledge about organizing remains a possession of very few, it is difficult to see how organizing could spread more widely.
APPENDIX: The Public Doesn't Know What Community Organizing Is: From 2008 "Civic Health Index Survey" (PDF) ( Return to Text above.)
In the quote below, that only 5% of respondents related "community organizing" to political activity of any kind (which is probably the best answer, even though electoral politics and organizing are not the same thing). 6% cited a specific organization, most of which seem to have been service groups or not really organizing in any comprehensive way, although at least a few mentioned "labor unions," which is close enough.
"Community organizing"
The most common category of responses, at 31%, involved helping others locally. These responses suggested that the respondents basically identified community organizing with volunteering or charity, although sometimes there was an emphasis on the process of being organized (e.g., "group of people getting together for one cause"). Older respondents were less likely to mention helping behaviors. Twenty-one percent said they did not know what this phrase meant. Ten percent gave a vague positive response ("good," "important") and five percent offered a vague negative answer ("opinionated," "pushy," or "waste of time"). Almost 6% mentioned a particular community organization such as the YMCA, labor unions, or a neighborhood watch. A total of about 5% either cited political activity or the government in some way. Only seven individuals mentioned Barack Obama, who has talked extensively about his community organizing experience.
In other words, almost NO ONE conceptualized "community organizing" as a coherent effort to generate long-term collective power for social change and resistance against oppression. This survey clearly supports my contention that we have been programmed to think of "service" when we think of community engagement.
The percent mentioning Obama is probably less informative given the focus on "organizing" in the media after the survey was given.
Future Posts
Stuff I'm planning about discussing in the future:
The Return on Organizing
Studies have shown that investment in organizing can generate enormous returns.
Pro-Democracy in Organizing
I've written some critiques about too much focus on "democratic dialogue" in organizing, which has made some people grumpy. I want to take the other side, and discuss how it can be critically important.
Social Class and Returning to the "Ghetto"
I want to discuss Mary Patillo's findings in Black on the Block about what happens when middle-class African Americans move into the "ghetto" in an effort to reclaim it.
Some addition of information made since post was promoted |
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