Community organizing’s bold attempt to address some of the biggest challenges of the last several generations (poverty, equality, ect.) has forged a significant impact on the course of history. This top ten list takes a look at some of the men and women who successfully dedicated their life’s work to a higher cause.
First some rules.
1) This countdown will only be limited to community organizing in America. So, people such as Ghandi and Mother Teresa will be left off.
2) To make my list the organizer had to have made a positive impact on humanity (sorry, Klu Klux Klan).
3) He/She must have made a unique contribution to the field that revolutionized community organizing methodology or solved an outstanding problem for his/her generation
4) Finally, he/she must have dedicated a significant portion of his/her professional career to the field of community organizing
Ok, now that we have our ground rules let’s jump into the much anticipated list starting at number ten.
10.
Wade Rathke
Association of Community Organizations for ReformNow (ACORN)
Rathke founded ACORN in Arkansas in the early 1970s to unite poor and working class families around a common public agenda. ACORN is currently the largest organization of poor and working class people in the United States with a dues paying membership of 175,000 families and 82 offices throughout the US. ACORN has expanded globally with operations in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Dominican Republic, and Peru. Rathke is also a union organizer as he founded SEIU Local 100 labor union, which organizes public sector workers including school employees, Head Start, and health care workers. Rathke is successful at merging the labor union, community organizing, and traditional political aspects of public life to leverage power for lower income people.
9.Dolores Huerta (1930-present)
National Farm Workers Association
Co-founder of the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. She was pivotal to the civil rights movement and labor movement as she helped to score victories for voter’s right to vote in Spanish, and the right of individuals to take the driver’s license examination in their native language. She also complemented her organizing efforts by lobbying politicians for unemployment benefits and disability insurance in California. In 1966, Dolores negotiated the first UFW contract with the Schenley Wine Company. This was the first time in the history of the United States that a negotiating committee comprised of farm workers negotiated a collective bargaining agreement with an agricultural corporation. Huerta has received many honors including the Outstanding Labor Leader Award from the California Senate, induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty Award from the ACLU, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation Outstanding American Award, the Ellis Island Medal of Freedom Award, the Consumers’ Union Trumpeter’s Award, and she was one of three Ms. Magazine’s, "Women of the Year", and the Ladies Home Journal’s, "100 Most Important Women of the 2oth Century".
8.
Ed Chambers (1927-present)
Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)
An Alinsky and Day disciple, “Big Ed” is credited with two major contributions to the field of organizing: 1) He successfully took over as the head of the Industrial Areas Foundation after Alinsky’s death and built it into a powerhouse (it has over 57 affiliates in the US, Germany, Canada, and England) in which several other organizing networks now mimic. 2) He is credited with revolutionizing organizing strategy when dealing with “Big Business”. In 1968, he successfully organized a power group in Rochester, New York, to hold Eastman-Kodak accountable for its hiring practices (at the time, they hired a disproportionate amount of whites compared to blacks). The strategy he used, the “stock proxy” campaign, was the first time that a community group won an issue against a multinational corporation by encouraging key investors to divest stock. This gave birth to a new strand of community organizing known today as “shareholder activism”.
7.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKiLCDaCAOU
Dorothy Day (1897-1980)
Catholic Workers Movement
Day’s efforts showed the power of religious organizing in America. She founded the Catholic worker’s movement in 1933 amid the great depression. Originally a journalist, she first started the Catholic Worker newspaper, and this led to her organizing a “house of hospitality” campaign in the slums of New York City. This movement soon spread to other cities in the
United States, and to
Canada and the
United Kingdom; more than 30 independent but affiliated CW communities had been founded by
1941. Today, over 100 communities exist in Australia, the UK, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
6.
Cesar Chavez (1927-1993)
National Farm Workers Association
Another Alinsky disciple, Chavez went on to score major gains for both the labor and Mexican-American civil rights movements. He co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (presently the United Farm Workers) with Dolores Huerta. The organization achieved several major policy victories including ending the Bracero Program in 1964 (this helped to restrict immigration and increase farm workers’ wages) and helped to get the 1986 federal immigration act passed. Chavez helped to spark the Mexican-American movement, which was responsible for creating Chicano study programs in universities and raising the overall awareness of Mexican-American struggles. He is honored in several places and his birthday is a holiday in four states.
5.
Edith Terry Bremer (1885-1964)
Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA)
Bremer took the community center movement of the early 1900s to the next level when she became the first to exclusively dedicate her work to organizing immigrants. The nearly sixty international institutes in America during the early twentieth century wanted to support immigrant services and programs. The Young Women’s Christian Association hired Edith Terry Bremer in 1909 to lead this effort and, inspired by her leadership, by the mid 1920s they achieved many of their initial social goals, gave up considerable control of local agencies to the immigrant communities, and even pioneered the concept of cultural pluralism. She helped international institutes to better organize immigrant communities so that they could more effectively organize for themselves. These institutes were largely funded by their own members and the YWCA. International institutes had organizations in urban centers such as Boston, Providence, Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and San Antonio.
4.
Jane Addams (1860-1935)
Hull House
Addams became the mother who birthed community organizing in America in the 1880s when she founded the settlement house movement. Settlement houses were an early attempt to address the fundamental social and economic disparities created by the industrial revolution. The Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in America, served upwards of two thousand people in Chicago and had a night school for adults,
kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an
art gallery, a
coffeehouse, a
gymnasium, a girls club, a swimming pool, a
book bindery, a
music school, a drama group, a library, and labor-related divisions. She is probably most remembered today for her adult night school, a forerunner of the
continuing education classes offered by many
community colleges today. She also worked with
George H. Mead on social reform issues including promoting
women's rights, ending child-labor, and helped to mediate during the
1910 Garment Workers' Strike. She was the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her contributions.
3.
Barack Obama (1961-present)
44th President of the United States of America
Community organizing methods helped to fuel Obama's remarkable rise to the top. He effectively brought community organizing into both campaighning and governance. His masterful use of combining old school organizing strategy with the latest technological tools will be a model used by politicians for decades to come. Moreover, unlike previous campaighns, he uses the millions of people who organized to help govern the country. Obama's contribution to community organizing is simply bringing community organizing tools to national politics and governance.
2.
Dr. Martin Luther King (1929-1968)
Southern Christian LeadershipCommittee (SCLC)
Although King’s methods weren’t original (he borrowed heavily from Mohandas Gandhi and Saul Alinsky), he was as good as it gets when it came to planning and executing organizing strategy to exploit an enemy’s weakness for the maximum gain. King’s most famous example of this was the infamous confrontation with then police chief Eugene “Bull” Conner in Birmingham, Alabama, when Connor decided to unleash droves of dogs on peaceful protestors. This spectacle shocked America when it was broadcasted on national television, which led to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and forever crystallized Connor as a symbol of racial bigotry. In addition to his brilliant tactical mind, King’s single most significant contribution to the field was capturing the elusive goal of civil rights in America. This led to several major policy changes such as voter’s rights, affirmative action, and title IX. King’s accomplishments cemented his place amongst the greatest Americans of all time.
1.
Saul David Alinsky (1909-1972)
Industrial Areas Foundation
A Chicago native, Saul David Alinsky is affectionately known as the father of modern community organizing. He was a brash and gruff organizer who revolutionized the field (Alinsky once declared that the “war on poverty” was “a prize piece of political pornography” because it was a “huge political pork barrel, and a feeding trough for the welfare industry”). He was the first to bring institutionalized structure to organizing with his development of “people’s organizations”. This new method involved “broad-based organizing” which transformed churches, block clubs, labor unions, ect. into a formidable power broker in the community. He founded the first modern community organizing network in the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940, which is still running strong today. However, his biggest achievement was to turn a field full of rag-tag do-gooders and reformers into a collection of professionals with only one ideology: to systematically change the power dynamics in any given community. He was also a noted scholar who contributed to intellectualizing community organizing within academic circles. This was crucial since at the time community organizing was seen as a subset of social work instead of independent of it. His books, Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals, are considered must reads for anyone looking to get involved
in the field of community organizing.
So we decided to pursue a low key grassroots strategy that entails getting petitions out to churches, calling county supervisors, and meeting with supervisors one on one. Waukesha County is pretty cool to the idea of "in your face" activism so we are adjusting our strategy and tactics to fit within this framework. I drove around Waukesha County today dropping off petitions and found that mostly Catholic churches and some food pantries were receptive while most politely denied to pass the petition. The greatest challenges we will face will be finding a suitable funding source for the housing trust to provide monies for affordable housing (the good people of Waukesha do not enjoy tax increases) and convincing elected officials that affordable housing is a problem.
