How is Community Organizing Different Than Traditional Advocacy
Community organizing is different from traditional advocacy which usually involves well-trained experts speaking on behalf of people in need. Traditional advocacy and service delivery are both characterized by doing things FOR people. Professionals like lawyers, social or healthcare workers will address a problem on behalf of those perceived as unable to speak for themselves.
Although traditional advocacy has its role and importance, it doesn’t focus on building leadership, power, and capacity among people, so they can address them. Community organizing, on the other hand, focuses on developing and building cooperative power of the community itself to both address the challenges and build power and accountability.
Our approach to community organizing focuses less on designing the perfect policy solution or technical capacity and more on mobilizing the resources of a community to act together. As this constituency develops relationships around a set of shared values for change, they make commitments to transform their collective resources into the power to make the change.
The framework of community organizing consists of three practices: (1) identifying, recruiting, and developing leaders; (2) building community around those leaders; and (3) building power from that community. Organizing enables a community to be transformed into a constituency that is mobilized towards a common goal, in this case, climate justice & health*. It is a form of leadership that enables the constituency to use its resources to make change based upon the mastery of six key skills:
Creating a shared story;
Building relationships grounded in mutual and long term commitment;
Structuring diverse, bounded and stable teams with clear roles, norms and a shared purpose;
Developing a strategy that is derived from the resources that already exist within the community;
Engaging in collective action that is based on specific, measurable goals, and
Coaching to sustain momentum.
A core part of our approach is developing leaders who have the capacity to bring people together to achieve common purpose. Note that in organizing the term “leader” does not necessarily refer to an individual in a position of hierarchical authority in an institutional context, but rather an individual who is willing to take responsibility to help create the conditions within which others will work to accomplish their collective purposes. Community organizing has potential to be an effective approach to change in complex situations in part because it creates agency within and among healthcare professionals and their community.
Because organizing equips people with the skills they need to enact change, organizing is also a form of leadership development. In this context, leadership is defined as “taking responsibility to enable others to achieve common purpose in times of uncertainty.*” This definition of leadership is not about one individual doing extraordinary things or leading from the top-down. Rather, in the healthcare setting, it is about creating the conditions that make it possible for others to become agents of change and work towards a common goal at every level.
In all, organizing is necessarily community-focused because it is based on recruiting, embedding, and training leaders designed to be change agents in their local communities. In combining with one another, people discover shared values they may not have recognized when acting alone; and they work together based on shared interests toward an outcome that is best realized through the commitment of their collective resources.
*adapted from the work of prof. Marshall Ganz