EducationAction
Online "Introduction to Community Organizing" Course
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Overview
This course was created for a lower-division, Introduction to Community Organizing Course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The course is NOT intended to teach students how to be a community organizer. They don't learn how to work with the media, or run a house meeting, nor other practical skills like that. Instead the course is designed to help students learn how to THINK like an organizer. To some extent, the course content reflects my own limitations. I have worked extensively with community organizing groups but have not actually been an organizer. For this online version I have cut some of the content specific to UWM, like the number of points for each exercise.
For most students, this is the first time they have ever heard about "organizing." The course is required for all students in our Community Education BS program, so most aren't taking it because they have necessarily chosen to focus on social action. It may be helpful to know that our students are extremely diverse, in terms of race, age, etc. Most of the students in our Department are interested in community change more generally, and many currently work in community-based organizations.
The first half of the course focuses on the history of organizing. We start by discussing a documentary of the school walkout by Chicano students in Los Angeles during the 1970s. This video provides a common "experience" of organizing for all of us to refer back to, and also gives the students a chance to develop their own list of "lessons" about effective social action.
We go on to read chapters from Saul Alinsky's Reveille for Radicals and watch a video on Alinsky. Then we read a critique of Alinsky's model from a feminist perspective. Finally, we read a chapter from Mark Warren's Dry Bones Rattling, which provides a case study of how congregational community organizing groups tend to operate today, noting how Alinksy's model has evolved.
The second half of the course focuses on a small number of key organizing concepts. In my experience, less is more in an introductory organizing course. Even students with extensive experience working in community groups find it challenging to think like an organizer. It is very difficult for them to shake the "social service" and "community development" perspectives on community change that predominate today. They tend, for example, to focus on changing community culture rather than on addressing larger structural challenges. If they choose to develop a campaign around neighborhood beautification in the inner city, for example, even at the end of the course it is not unusual for them to recommend a neighborhood clean up, "targeting" neighborhood members instead of addressing the forces that lead poor communities to look different than rich ones.
In Part II, then, we discuss how to locate a "target," how to "cut an issue," how to develop "tactics," and a very basic approach to "strategy." In the past I used Si Kahn's Organizing, to cover this material, but it's expensive and was too vague in many areas. I used Kim Bobo, et. al.'s Organizing for Social Change this time, which is the text used for the week-long Midwest Academy organizing workshop, but I have been disappointed with its lack of detail in key areas as I've read it more carefully this semester. The lectures in Part II are so detailed because of the limits of these texts. Next time I teach this course I may use Lee Staples's Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing, which I only recently discovered and which seems more compatible with my own approach. We had none of the speakers I usually invite to limit the challenges. Activities are added in for each semester depending on what is going on in Milwaukee.
This was my first time teaching an online course, so the lectures are more like first draft efforts than final documents. The lectures have the kind of minor editing issues and occasional repetitions that come with early drafts that are still in process.
Please post comments on your impressions or experiences here.
NOTE: I WILL CONTINUE TO WORK ON THESE LECTURES, AND WILL CHANGE THE "DRAFT" DATE AS I GO.
All links below are to Microsoft Word documents.
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Part I: Community Organizing in the United States (11/29/07 DRAFT)
To download a single file with all of these lectures, go here.
[IF MSWORD FILES AREN'T AVAILABLE A GOOGLE DOCS DRAFT IS HERE.]
With the exception of the Course Overview, these lectures are largely introductions to readings. Part II, below, will be of more interest to those looking for an overview of the conceptual framework of organizing. The conceptual parts of the Overview are repeated in Part II.]
Course Overview and Introduction (DRAFT 11/29/07)
"Taking Back the Schools" in Los Angeles
Encountering Alinsky I
Encountering Alinsky II
[In the course, Public vs. Private, placed below, comes here]
[Course needs a history overview, here, maybe from Fisher or Halpern]
Gender and Organizing
Organizing After Alinsky
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Part II: Key Concepts in Community Organizing (11/29/07 DRAFT)
To download a single file with all of these lectures, go here.
[IF MSWORD FILES AREN'T AVAILABLE, A GOOGLEDOCS DRAFT IS HERE]
The Parable of the River [Excerpted from Overview, above] (DRAFT 11/29/07)
Public vs. Private
Conducting One-on-One Interviews
(Good video example of a one-on-one from Marshall Gantz's Obama organizing training. Original
page with flash video here--the video is #7.)
Locating a Target
Cutting an Issue
Tactics
Strategy
Final Exam
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
In other words, to paraphrase the Dalai Lama: 'What you like, take with you. What you do not, throw away!'
All I ask is that if you use this material, you leave suggestions or critiques to help improve it. I am especially interested in any student responses. You can leave comments here.