What makes a good community organizer

This article was co-authored by Kris Jensen. Kris Jensen is the Principal of Regenerative Communities Collective, a design consultancy focusing on regenerative design. He has been an environmental activist for over 25 years. This article has been viewed 36, times. Community organizing can be a challenging, yet incredibly rewarding career.

You will have the opportunity to positively affect your community and the people in it. If you think community organizing is for you, learn how to get started and make a difference. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great.

By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article parts. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Part 1. Understand what a community organizer is.

Before you commit to being a community organizer, you should understand what the job entails. You will have to identify issues in your community, think of solutions, and gather enough support to enact them. This will sometimes mean challenging the existing authority by public protesting or rallying. You shouldn't be afraid to speak to a crowd, go door to door, make cold calls, and do whatever it takes to get attention for your cause.

Educate yourself politically. To change the government, you should understand how it works. Become familiar with the election process, how laws are passed, and who your local politicians are.

Familiarize yourself with local and national laws. This will all become important when you start campaigning for change. Learn about political or social issues in your community. These can range from simple, like needing a stop sign on a corner, to serious, like an unjust law. Whatever the case, you should learn all you can about the issue before taking action.

There are a few ways you can do this. Watch the local news. These networks will often cover local issues and give you ideas on how to take action. Read local newspapers. Look especially at the editorial or opinion sections. Local citizens will often write in complaining of problems in the community.

Talk to people. This is a crucial skill for a community organizer. Ask neighbors if they're unhappy with something in the community and listen carefully to their answers. Investigate if there are similar groups in your area. Once you've identified an issue and educated yourself on it, you should see if anyone else has already taken action.

Usually an internet search will uncover groups in your area. You can also check local meeting places like libraries and government buildings for flyers. If you find a group taking the same actions as you, you may want to join it instead of starting your own.

However, if you think this group has different goals or methods than you, you can go ahead and start your own. You may still wish to approach this already established group and present your ideas and see if they will support you. Try volunteering first. If you're still unsure if community organizing is for you, try volunteering with a similar group.

This will show you what the job is like. By volunteering you can also make important contacts that will become important when you form your own group. Part 2. Organize a small meeting. Through investigating an issue, you've probably come across a few people who share your thoughts. These can be friends, family, or people you know from school or the community. Say you'd like to meet and discuss a problem you've noticed in the community.

Even if it's only a few people, this initial meeting is very important to develop a plan for your group. As a smart organizer, we start to build public community support through town halls, rallies, meetups, protests, news editorials, and other actions. By making our collective voice loud enough re: power , it becomes clear to the city's politicians if they don't change the laws in our favor, we'll vote them out in the next election cycle.

Developing and rallying people around this type of social change cycle is how community organizers operate. It's about putting together all the pieces necessary for social change: vision, skills, incentives, resources, and an action plan.

Also, be mindful of privilege and power dynamics in your own approach. Are you a member of the impacted community, or an "ally" looking to help? How well do you actually know the community and its problems?

Would the community agree with your diagnosis? Are you involving them in your solution and giving them a say? As an organizer, it's very important to be truthful with yourself, and to stay on the lookout for issues with diversity, inclusivity, or elitism in your approach.

Here are few best practices and tips for getting started as an organizer, connecting with individual people, then organizing and inspiring them to action. The most powerful social movements work and grow because they become powerful, recognizable brands. Occupy Wall Street. Black Lives Matter. March for Our Lives. Sunrise Movement. If your cause or organization doesn't already have them, come up with a plan for your brand, visual identity, symbols, and key messages.

Make sure they're clear, templated, available, and easily shareable. There's no "right" answer for organizing. Some movements are completely decentralized no leadership control at the top. Other movements balance central power at the top with distributed, local responsibility and decision-making freedom. Successful movements establish structure, limits on structure, or "semi-structure" early, and make that a part of their movement identity.

Is the group a democracy? Is there a leader or board of directors? Are the leaders elected and if so, how? How do decisions get made? Do your best to figure out answers to these questions early. In our experience, you're most likely to run into problems if 1 you have too much structure slowing decisions and progress, or 2 you have too little structure so no one knows what to do or who's responsible for certain work.

Feminist author and activist Jo Freeman has a famous essay about the difficulty of working in movements with no power hierarchy, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," which you can read free here.

Effective organizing always starts with meeting people in person. We have the head of Parks for the City coming, and we want to show him just how many people want action. Will you be able to come to the meeting? IF NO: Have you ever been bothered by the kids hanging out on the corners or playing on the street?

LISTEN Does it bother you that the parks on the other side of the river have brand new equipment, and kids here in MidRiver have to play in the glass and asphalt, on broken swings? We're having a meeting about the playground tomorrow night over at the school at These two 'raps' seek to interpret the problem in terms of the self interest of the person you're talking to, and thus to get their interest aroused enough to come out.

If the people in the audience are there just to cover a chair, and they are not asked to participate, or there's no chance to ask questions or tell their story, they will find it easier and easier to drop out. The agenda for the meeting should always include a time for individual stories to be told, to put a human face on the problem. Schultz should be lined up in advance to come to the mike and tell about poor little Otto who went to the hospital for stitches after he fell off the broken swing.

The chair should ask if anybody else has had kids hurt, and ask them to stand, or raise their hand, or even come to the mike. The agenda should include parts for lots of people - not just one chair who speaks and leads and asks the questions of the city folks or the other targets, but plenty of folks trooping up to do their pre-assigned parts -- the more folks who have a part, the more are likely to come out.

Even spectators can get the feeling that, next time, they could have an important part in the group, if there are obviously lots of parts being given out. A one-person show, however, tends to stay that way. The second rule is: Nobody's going to come unless they know about it. This is another painfully obvious point. Time after time, though, I have helped groups analyze their shrinking participation, and found that they've ignored this rule.

They publicize meetings through the newsletter. The newsletter is distributed door to door by block captains. Half the blocks have no captains. On the other half, the newsletters were delivered for distribution on Tuesday night after 7, and the meeting was held on Thursday. Even where the conscientious block captains actually went to every house on the block and dropped one off on Wednesday afternoon when they got home from work, about a third of the folks didn't go to the front porch until the next morning, another third read the story about crime on the front page, but missed the meeting notice, and another third thought it MUST be next Thursday they're talking about.

Many groups rely on a regular meeting night and a telephone tree to get people out. Others just invite the ones who came to this meeting to come back to the next one.

In fact, there is an almost unbreakable ratio - for every one hundred folks who get a timely, well crafted written notice and a follow-up personal contact by phone or in person, ten will come out.

Late notices or wordy, unclear ones cut further into the final count. No personal contact cuts even further. Organizing is hard work, and there are few shortcuts worth taking. A group that doesn't plant seeds with effective outreach should not be surprised when the harvest is sparse. The third rule is: if an organization doesn't grow, it will die.

A good outreach effort will bring out new recruits. These folks must be put to work. Somebody has to recognize their effort in coming out, and talk to them, welcome them, give them a chance to get into things. Could they do calls for the next meeting? Would they like to help with posters for the fundraiser? What did they think of the meeting? Each issue should bring in new folks, and there should always be a next issue on the horizon, to get out and touch the community with, to find yet newer folks to get involved with.

People naturally fade in and out of involvement as their own life's rhythms dictate - people move, kids take on baseball for the Spring, they get involved with Lamaze classes, whatever. If there are not new people coming in, the shrinkage can be fatal. New issues and continuous outreach are the only protection against this natural process. Rule four: anyone can be a leader. I have had the privilege of working with a wide variety of very talented community leaders in twenty years of community organizing.

I can safely and in all humility admit that not one new leader was 'developed' because of my foresight and careful cultivation and training of a new recruit who showed clear promise. Almost without exception, the best leaders have been people who rose to the occasion of a crisis.

The priest who spoke at all our news conferences got sick at the last minute. Who can take his place? What do you mean, Mr. President, you're not going to run for reelection? This organization is big, it's new, and nobody else is ready!

The only wisdom or craft I can claim in any of these scenes is an ability to convince people to step into a tough situation and give it a try, coupled with a shameless willingness to praise and support a person after their first shaky performance. They did the rest. Anybody can be a leader. A good community organization provides a lot of people with a lot of opportunities to practice, to try it out, to learn by doing. A broad team of folks who can lead is built by constantly bringing new people into leadership roles and supporting them in learning from this experience.

Rule five. The most important victory is the group itself. This starts a series of rules about winning. Winning is what organizing is about. Winning without building is a hollow process, though.

We need to celebrate the simple fact of survival, given the odds most groups face. The way to ensure that a group is built out of activity on issues is to create a structure that governs the group and bring people who work on issues into the governance of the group. In a mature organization this happens through elections, and the elections should at least bring new people in, even if they are not contests where folks vie for the votes to outdo their 'opponents'.

A growing organization should pay close attention to this as well, through steering committees or leadership meetings where folks who are mostly involved in issues get brought into the deliberations on priorities, strategies, structure and the 'business' of the group. Even if they choose to say no, the opportunity to join in setting the course of the group makes it more their own.

A group that is governed by one set of folks and involves a whole different set as beneficiaries or volunteers is never going to be a real people's organization. No empowerment ever comes from well meaning outsiders helping the helpless. Rule six: Sometimes winning is losing. A group that never loses is probably just too naive or nearsighted to understand what's happening.

Part of the political literacy that community organizing ought to impart is the ability to stare the facts in the face and understand that the politician who just talked for twenty minutes didn't really mean that he supports us - he really said he wasn't going to do what we want.

Beyond this, we need to be careful that we ask for something we really want. A community organization that I worked with in Providence once undertook a two year campaign to open up membership in the United Way to more minority and non-traditional agencies. One result was that the group itself became a member agency! We thought this was the ultimate victory! No more spaghetti suppers, no more grant writing, no more scratching around for free paper for the mimeo - easy street.

When a big Federal grant came down for anti-crime organizing, all other fundraising ground to a halt, everybody got a raise, the group bought a van and moved into a nice office.

The dark side soon surfaced, though. The highly motivated but formerly low paid staff started to get resistance from leadership when it came time to challenge the real power brokers downtown - these folks are big in the United Way! We're going to be cutting our own throats! Leaders started to bid for the job openings, which now were much more lucrative - and those who didn't get hired felt that they had been put down unfairly, and stopped volunteering - if their fellow leader was now going to get to take home all that money, well he could make the phone calls!

The final straw was the fight over the van. Who gets to drive it home at night -the new director of the anticrime project or the president - the fight was vicious and bitter, and the staff that thought they'd signed on for a crusade left in disgust, and the organization took a two year nosedive, leading to de-funding by the United way and death.

This group thought they wanted respectability and acceptance, and were willing to pay any price to get them. In the end, they lost their power and they lost their integrity, and finally they lost their very existence.

Rule Seven - sometimes winning is winning. Most community organizations take on little slices of the problems that confront their community. The achievements seem insignificant, and the progress seems so slow! A good organizer knows how to build a sense of power and accomplishment, while not ignoring the problems that still remain to be solved. The process of community organizing is a dynamic one with few rigid guidelines, suggesting that the functions of a community organizer require flexibility, creativity and excellent leadership skills.

Community organization aims to organize, mobilize and educate people to build a sense of community. By doing so, the community gains power or influence over issues concerning their welfare. Strengthening groups at the grassroots level empowers the community to direct their own path to some extent, holding government and private organizations accountable for policies and programs that directly impact the community.

Community organization is a valuable strategy at all levels, including at the national, regional and local level. There is strength in numbers, and the community organizer's initial efforts will focus on getting individuals to buy into the collective goals of the group. Unification efforts involve reaching out to individuals and households and getting them to engage with the community.