By ANN RICHARDS
In late 2008, representatives from the European Community Organizing Network (ECON) – a network of people and organizations from 13 countries – began working with a longtime Mott Foundation grantee, the Center for Community Change (CCC), to organize training conferences. To date, they have provided technical assistance and training in community organizing to more than 225 people in six countries. Earlier this year, Mott Program Officer Cris Doby traveled to London to conduct a workshop at the invitation of a group of funders in the United Kingdom. She also had the opportunity to attend the founding convention for North London Citizens, a community-organizing group affiliated with another longtime Mott grantee, the Industrial Areas Foundation. Following that, Doby visited several of the community organizers and organizing groups that had received training from CCC. In the following Q&A, she offers her reflections about the similarities and differences of organizing in different cultures and how the groups she visited are using the techniques of community organizing to help build stronger civic participation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mott: Tell us a little more about your visit to London and how community organizing has taken root there. Doby: I’m sure there’s lots of community organizing in the U.K., especially neighborhood-based organizations that are made up of individuals. But I only had a chance to visit one organization, an affiliate of Citizens UK which is itself an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a Mott grantee.
Cris Doby sits with community organizers working in the Zapad neighborhood in Zvolen, Slovakia. The organizers successfully campaigned to get a new sidewalk installed between some housing projects and the local school. The neighborhood organization received training through a Mott grant to the Center for Community Change. |
Citizens UK has more than 160 member institutions. That is, individuals don’t join Citizens UK, only institutions do. These are mostly faith congregations but also schools, community groups, service agencies and union locals. The organization began in 1989 after its lead organizer, Neal Jameson, spent time the U.S. learning the arts of organizing from the Industrial Areas Foundation.
A challenge in the U.K. is that the current government is using the term “Big Society” as a way of referring to its approach to governing. Within that, the government holds up the role of community organizer as a critical player at the local level. As public money has been withdrawn from direct services, many community-based organizations now self-identify as community-organizing groups – blurring the distinction between service providers, advocacy organizations and community organizing. So a part of my visit was a meeting with funders who are sorting through the distinctive features of organizing versus other approaches to responding to social needs and interests.
Mott: How adaptable are U.S.-style organizing techniques to the different cultures and countries in Europe? Doby: Beyond the U.K., I had an opportunity to visit several community-organizing groups in Slovakia and Hungary. I was struck with the tremendous opportunity for organizing to provide a pathway to deep, meaningful citizen engagement and action.
At the same time, the challenges are tremendous. The level of social trust is very low, and there is little experience with effective organizing – political organizing, labor organizing or community organizing. So when organizers begin to work in these communities, they are not just introducing ideas about how to work together to seek the common good. They actually have to introduce the concept of working together, period.
The foundational instrument of organizing in the U.S. is what’s called the one-on-one meeting, a disciplined conversation between a trained leader and a member of the community in order to listen, connect and seek common purpose. In some places, the level of trust is so low that a one-on-one conversation is viewed with suspicion.
All of that said, where community organizing is taking root, it is achieving visible, tangible results.
Mott: You met many inspiring individuals during your visit, but is there one who has a particularly interesting story to tell about the power of organizing?
Doby: There’s one group that was inspiring and uplifting. In the town of Zvolen in Slovakia, there is an enormous, Soviet-era housing development. I’m not sure how many people live there, but I was told that it’s in the range of 50,000. The multistory apartment buildings house many children and there is a school right in the development. But there were no sidewalks between the apartment complexes and the school, and apparently when it rained the ground around the school would be one gigantic mud puddle, which could last for days. And the kids had to wade through that to get to and from school.
When a community organizer began working in this complex, using the usual techniques of organizing, he began having individual conversations with residents, then gathering people and putting them into conversation with one another, and finally, guiding them toward identifying an issue that they would be willing to work on together. Having a sidewalk to the school was one of the community’s primary concerns.
The community’s experience was when you wanted something from the public sector, you begged or bribed. They had no experience of organizing, putting forward a demand, and working to have their vision implemented. But with the help of this organizer, that is what they did, and they are so incredibly proud – not just of the sidewalk, but of the experience of being citizens in a democracy. Over and over they said to me, now we have democracy!
Mott: Are there some lessons you took away from this experience that would be applicable to your work here in the U.S.?
Doby: Well, I think an important connection is to our commitment to democracy. Our own civic culture is in rough shape, I’m afraid. And while I don’t think community organizing alone will save our democracy, I don’t think we’ll save it without community organizing.