Community Organizing takes place in neighbourhoods, towns, communities or regions. Building relationships and a culture of self-determination and reaching decisions democratically helps citizens to act together and to contribute to solving problems in their surroundings.

“Organizing is actively excavating a person's history, jointly investigating the significance of that history and the opportunity to write a new conclusion for an individual and a shared history.” (McNeil 2007)

Community Organizing involves a good deal of such excavation: by talking to the people in a neighbourhood, a city ward or a region, salaried workers and volunteers find out what matters to them, what their most important concerns – sources of annoyance, wishes, interests – are and what they are willing to put actual effort into supporting. People discover that problems they previously saw as private have a public dimension, and discuss them together: how do the others see the problem, is there some measure of agreement, how can we act jointly to get closer to a solution?

Suitable

• for empowering and qualifying the members of an organization by means of hands-on action and challenges (empowerment und leadership development)
• for systematic, on-going work with active residents, topic-focussed study groups and steering/strategy groups
• The techniques (conversation as a gentle art) can in principle be utilized in any context, as universal human concerns are addressed: the wish for a good life for oneself and one's family, career perspectives, surroundings worth living in, etc. However, a certain minimum population density (to provide a pool of potential comrades-in-arms) seems to be necessary.

Sequence of events

Community Organizing, originally developed in the USA in the 1930s, is still in use today in several forms, and is constantly being developed further. It is not just a method, but also a philosophy to live by, with many different facets. While one cannot point to an ideal-typical sequence of events in the narrow sense, the following elements are characteristic:

• an internal or external impulse, to get dialogue going in a particular social field (residents, a church congregation, a foundation, etc.)
• any number of one-on-one talks between an organizer (often salaried) and active citizens and people who perhaps want to or could become active
• meetings to identify shared concerns and search for solutions
• working through the steps agreed on; the goals set should be as concrete as possible
• developing a unique structure and procedures for joint action.

In Community Organizing people with differing backgrounds and interests are deliberately approached, so as to obtain the greatest possible variety of points of view and construct the widest possible basis.

Participants

Interested citizens

Duration

Civic organizations are long-term in nature and therefore not issue-specific. The key element is an ongoing flow of new people, the continual search for comrades-in-arms and new forces – a never-ending task in civil society. The individual activities in this flow can range from ultra-short-term (e.g. public hearings lasting an hour, or press releases) to campaigns lasting several weeks or even months.

Points to note:

• Ideally setting up a civic organization should be tackled only if enough resources are on hand to ensure that long-term working is possible.
• It is desirable not to be dependent on public-sector money; this requires new experience and a new self-confidence as regards canvassing for other sources of funding.
• It is important to establish a level playing field as regards negotiating clout alongside existing policymaking structures (e.g. community politics and administration).
• Power is seen positively as a structuring force; in contrast to the power of money, the power that concerns us here grows from relationships and reciprocal trust.
• Building relationships takes time; a balance needs to be struck between a stable interpersonal basis and people's need for action and palpable successes.
• Decision-making structures within civic organizations should be transparent and enable all the members to participate.
• Structures that impair the quality of life can (within certain limits) be tackled, to some extent right in the social field in question. The causes of problems need to be identified and the right addressees for demands tracked down (also at regional/national/ international level). This may make it necessary to network with other groups and at other levels; the original praxis of organizing was and is primarily directed at the local level and what can be achieved there.

The author, Dr. Ulrike Schumacher, Dresden, is active in research and development projects concerned with civil society, participation and rural development.