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| Organizing |
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Blame the
System
Community Organizing assumes the possibility of
agency on the part of most people including the most oppressed people.
People need not remain victims; they can be actors in the process of
creating their own futures. This encompasses individual self-help (the
emphasis of conservatives), mutual aid or community development
(conservative unless it involves changing systems), and collective action
to change institutions (the emphasis of liberals, progressives, and
radicals). …
How change comes about begins with
core values – like freedom, community, equality, justice, security,
democratic participation. These are standards against which any
ideological conclusion or policy formulation needs to be measured: does it
bring us closer to or take us farther away from those core values? The
next question is about how to build the people power that will bring us
closer to realizing those values. What alliances, in what form of
organization, with what relationship to a broad constituency of people are
required to hold those in power accountable? Further, what will it take to
transform dominant relations of power in which a relatively small group of
people holding great wealth or key political positions defines the
parameters of how the people live – what kinds of jobs they have, at
what pay; what kind of housing they live in, at what cost; what kind of
health care they receive, paid by whom; what kind of education their
children experience, serving whom; what kind of environment we live in, at
what price to whom? …
Within
the context of organizing, ideas most be assessed with two measures –
first, their merit, and second, their capacity to unite the broad and
diverse base that is required to build effective constituencies for
change. For the most part, intellectuals focus on the former to the
exclusion of the latter.” ( 185, 187-8)
At
the Table
System
Meetings
Frederick
Douglass
A
COMMUNITY ORGANIZER'S TALE by Mike Miller, Berkeley:Heyday Books, 2009.
CSCO believes this is the best book on organizing. Miller has been with
CSCO for many years.
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CSCO, P.O. Box 60123, Dayton, OH 45406; email: