(Blogging isn't organizing, either. But the two can intersect, and/or interact. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Popular conceptions of civic action in America have become extremely impoverished. While struggle goes on in many arenas of our society, coherent traditions of community organizing in America have mostly faded to myth in the popular imagination.
Old black-and-white newsreels of marching students, brave sharecroppers, and police-wielded water cannons from the 1960s flicker through our minds. But these images have lost most of their concrete meaning and contain few coherent lessons for social action.
I've been writing about community organizing, but I haven't been clear about exactly what I mean by this. There is no single effective model of "community organizing." Currently, however, the approach Saul Alinsky developed in the 1930s on the back streets of Chicago has become dominant in America-for good or ill. I call the current version of this model "post-Alinsky" since it has been significantly developed and changed by people like Ed Chambers, Ernie Cortes, Heather Booth, and others who came after Alinsky.
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