Potential in the limits of neighborhood organizations

In the 2012:2 issue of Parola, Ágnes Velenczei gave an account of her community development projects in a Hungarian housing estate. In the last six years, these programs provided a variety of recreational opportunities for local families with kids. As a result, community life strengthened, and this helped active members to identify issues which are important to the majority of the neighborhood. The establishment of an organization was in the pipeline and the residents were delivering concrete results at a neighborhood level (for example, the city council installed a ramp for parents with baby buggies, and moved abandoned wooden equipment from a nearby woods to a popular playground). In the last couple of years, however, the Iris Family Circle faced an issue which stretches beyond the boundaries of the neighborhood: there is not enough space in local child care centers. The program, called "Créche Revolution," addresses a national, systemic issue.

Building linkages between the local and the larger systemic aspects of an issue is the key to community organizing. On the one hand, a measure of success for an organization is whether it manages to mobilize enough members and win issues which are important to the neighborhood. On the other hand, the organization should also be able to achieve real social change, address a systemic issue, keep up the momentum of the members and build alliances with other groups. To make this happen, it is essential that community members identify the connection between the local and the systemic aspects of the issue, e.g., by means of political education and self-learning groups. The anger (challenge, opportunity to grow, love) which stems from this process and feeds longer campaigns which go beyond the boundaries of a neighborhood can radicalize the group if proper support is given by the organization. For example, it can prepare the members to undertake conflict and make them understand that such actions are not at all harmful to society.

Based on the movement building experiences of the 1960s, community organizers in the U.S. reinterpreted the Alinsky tradition and, consequently, the role of the neighborhood in the fight for social change. Community organizers came to the recognition that without strong local organizations, broad, overarching campaigns and movement efforts can lose impetus. Also, without targets which go beyond the limits of a locality, community organizations can get stuck and become unable to grow. By the 1970s, it became a well-established concept that organizers should develop mass political organizations rooted in strong neighborhood groups, which can deliver concrete results at a local level while they articulate these demands at a national level in a synchronized manner (and can channel local community organizations into a national campaign). One of the first and most successful pioneers of this neo-Alinskyist organizing model was the very influential Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

In terms of the Iris Family Circle's "Créche Revolution," there seems to be an emerging need to formulate systemic demands. This can enrich the community development organization with new tools. Stoecker argues that community development is rooted in a functionalist model of society while community organizing is rooted in a conflict model (DeFilippis-Fisher-Shragge 2010:137). In the former (community development), interactions between members of the society tend toward equilibrium and seek cooperation. In contrast, in the latter (community organizing), societies are defined by power differentials - social, economic and political inequalities - which produce conflict rather than equilibrium. This means that community development is differentiated from community organizing in a way that the developers' primary aim is to render services through the inclusion of the community to improve its quality of life, whereas the organizer's first and foremost aim is generating power for community members in the public arena and they primarily use community resources to put pressure on the decision-makers.

These two seemingly contradictory approaches can supplement each other very well in a movement, but it can also intermingle within one organization. It can easily happen that a community development group is forced to take a more confrontive approach in case the legislators are not cooperative to its initiatives or the interests of the members dictate so. The more progressive settlement houses, for example, the Hull House in the Near West Side neighborhood in Chicago, mobilized residents to improve the working conditions of immigrant workers even though its main purpose was to render social, cultural and art programs to low-income communities. For a community organizing group, it can also render services. The housing group called Fifth Avenue Committee in New York, for example, mixes community development and community organizing components in a way that it rents (and manages) housing units to low-income people and organizes tenants against evictions. There are organizations in which the community development service component fully replaced the community organizing profile, such as the Arab American organization in Detroit, ACCESS or the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) in Chicago.

We started to link the local and national aspects in The City Is For All with the Vacant Housing campaign. We protested against the eviction of one of our members who lived in a storage unit with her child, and we are working with her to arrange her housing. At the same time, through her example and through actions which raised awareness about the district's vacant housing situation, we drew attention to the insufficient housing management of the city council, the lack of a national housing policy and the lack of enough public housing. Ultimately, the group (provided it is consistent) works at both levels to increase public housing.

(Sources: Robert Fisher: Let The People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, Twayne Publishers, 1984; James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher and Eric Shragge: Contesting Community. The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing, Rutgers University Press, 2010)

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Building an organization in the Back of the Yards

The Back of the Yards today.

Commissioned by the University of Chicago as a criminologist, Saul Alinsky started to implement a delinquency prevention program in one of the urban slums of Chicago, the Back of the Yards in 1938. The Chicago Area Project (CAP) initiated neighborhood programs (e.g., youth sports club) to decrease juvenile delinquency with a huge emphasis on community involvement (juveniles, families, former felons). However, Alinsky showed yet more interest in models which focused on changing unjust power relations as much as on ensuring the participation of the community. This is how the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) evolved as an offshoot of the Chicago Area Project, as a partnership of the local union and the Catholic church groups.

The gate of the
Union Stock Yards today.

By the turn of the 20th century, Chicago became the center of the American meat industry. This city produced a significant part of the meat consumed in the U.S. and millions of animals were slaughtered and processed annually. Production took place in the city's gigantic industrial complex, the Union Stock Yards. Animals waited to be slaughtered in tens of thousands of corrals and their smell penetrated the neighborhood. Despite the miserable conditions tens of thousands of European immigrant workers flooded the city (Irish, Germans, Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, etc.) and settled down in the Back of the Yards, the neighborhood behind the meatpacking district. The workers sweated for 10-12 hours each day for low wages under unhealthy conditions, many of them hardly spoke English. The mostly Catholic enclaves showed a high degree of segregation along ethnic lines, which divided people and made joint action impossible. In the neighborhood, ethnic tension was rampant.


Criminologist Clifford Shaw, the leader of CAP, did research on how socio-economic conditions support acts of delinquency. Thus he disproved the widespread racist idea that the ethnic or racial origin of a person (i.e., the immigrant group one belongs to) could account for whether a person will commit a crime. With the hope of decreasing juvenile delinquency, Shaw initiated setting up grassroots community councils, where the community actively participates in elaborating and implementing the projects.


Alinsky, the co-worker of Shaw, however, nurtured different plans. He wanted to set up multi-issue neighborhood organizations, which have a wide community support, and also raises a coordinated voice against the exploitation of workers. Alinsky was for a short time an activist of one of the biggest American unions, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). This experience strengthened his enthusiasm and passion to the principles and methods of the CIO, which gained a foothold in the Back of the Yards in the 1930s. So Alinsky adopted and implemented models he learned as a criminologist researcher and a union activist to organize neighborhoods.


The idea behind the Alinsky method is that the community organizer forms an alliance with the leaders from the neighborhood, i.e., with those community members who have significant support. Together they set up a democratic, community-based organization. The strength of the organization comes from the collaboration of the ally leaders, who are strategically identified by the organizer and are agitated to run the organization. In the Back of the Yards, Alinsky had three main allies: the manager of a recreation center, Joe Meegan; a Communist union organizer of the local meat packing plants, Herb March; and a progressive Catholic bishop, Bernard J. Sheil. So the strength of BYNC reflected the fact that Alinsky managed to unite in one platform the seemingly most antagonistic figures of the community: the Catholic Church and the unions.

The recreation center,
the Davis Square Park today.

Setting up a neighborhood council entails many stages. In the first meeting the organizations identified the most immediate issues and defined the main principles of the organization. (Read about the preliminary canvassing here.) On the basis of this agenda, they started the month-long recruitment process. Alinsky and Meegan agitated to sign up as many organizations as possible (churches, schools, social clubs, etc.) to become members. This organizational model significantly differed from Shaw's neighborhood committees. In the latter, individuals who were interested took part, whereas the Alinsky-Meegan structure was more similar to the union model, where delegates from local chapters sit on a central council. Alinsky and Meegan emphasized stress on using the local press, too.

At the founding neighborhood assembly, close to 350 people gathered and the organization was represented by Bernard J. Sheil. The first board was set up with the membership of four Catholic priests (from church communities of different antagonistic ethnic groups), church-based club representatives, three businessmen, the leader of an athletic club, a union youth committee member, the local police captain and Herb March. Their aim was to set up a board which represents broad community interests.

So the BYNC, simply due to its composition, was itself a power factor in the eye of the Chicago city management and the factory owners. The composition of the organization undoubtedly rearranged the power relations in the neighborhood and it threatened the businessmen with the possibility of broad-based community support in favor of a potential strike against the meat packing plants.

The board held public planning meetings about the projects of the BYNC and it set up several committees (e.g. on delinquency). The organization lobbied for lunch programs for schools, created new recreational activities, founded a credit union to provide low-interest loans for neighborhood development projects, carried out job creation programs (local businesses to hire more local young people), and it supported campaigns to boost local businesses ("Buy in the Back of the Yards"). In 1946 church leaders demonstrated in the strike organized by the workers of the meat packing plants.

The Alinsky-style of organizing has been criticized because it does not exceed the limits of a neighborhood. Although Alinsky envisioned the proliferation of these democratic citizen organizations in the whole country, and how this whole process would eventually revitalize democracy in the U.S., these local neighborhood organizations never agreed on common goals and did not turn into a state-wide or a national movement. Furthermore, Alinsky was very much against the idea of organizing a neighborhood on an ideological basis instead of along concrete and winnable issues. As a result of this, however, community members were not urged to confront their own racist, gender, or sexual prejudice. The Back of the Yards, for example, did not react progressively to the social change between the 1940s and 1970s when millions of African-Americans migrated from the Southern states to the Northern and Western states in the hope of getting a job and escaping racial violence. The Back of the Yards neighborhood was then mostly inhabited by Caucasians (whites), and it did everything to prevent African-Americans from moving into the neighborhood who were about to start a new life in Chicago.

The Back of the Yards today is mainly a Mexican-American neighborhood. The BYNC still operates: the present leadership focuses more on development community programs. Thus the community organizing profile, which enabled the organization to question existing power relations if it was needed, is not active now.

(Source: Sanford D. Horwitt: Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky - His Life and Legacy. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989; Robert Fisher: Let The People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America. Twayne Publishers, 1984; Encyclopedia of Chicago, access: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org)


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Can homeless folks and service providers join in their struggle?

Springfield, Lobby Day, Nov 29 2011. Source: FB

The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH) was established in 1980 by service providers and charities - it was not initiated by homeless folks. The coalition mobilizes service providers or neighborhood organizations (institutional community organizing) and homeless people. Can the two parties equally assert themselves in different campaigns through this community organizing strategy?


CCH sets its campaign agenda based on research and by canvassing the residents of shelters for the homeless. The organization organizes active listening tours in service providing institutions and the community organizers talk to hundreds of homeless folks. They want to know what the most pressing issues are for their constituency. (Who are you and what have you gone through? What do you think about it? What makes you angry?) Or they ask the opinion of homeless folks on a concrete campaign.

In CCH every new community organizer starts with a listening tour, and in the first month they conduct a one-on-one with at least 50 homeless or formerly homeless people. The people interviewed, however, are not involved in the actual decision-making process, but the campaign goals are set by the staff of the organization.

Personal relationships with homeless folks are very important for CCH community organizers. The one-on-one is an important tool to build trust and to find out to what extent the group is organized and what skills its members have which they could use for the benefit of the whole group. The community organizers try to figure out who can be involved in specific tasks in an action, and determine who are real leaders, those members who are able to represent the interest of the broader community.

The community organizers hold regular events in shelters and they agitate homeless people to accumulate power and get involved in running actions to make the decision-makers accountable. And the leaders tell their own story in different places, take part in talks with decision-makers or less often give interviews to the media. CCH does not stress, however, urging the leaders to establish autonomous chapters (or cells) in their shelters, which can set their own agenda or decide about new campaigns.

Furthermore, CCH does not represent homeless people against service providers. The organization goes no further than mediating between the social worker or the institution and the homeless person. The community organizing strategy of CCH focuses more on issues which both parties have a self-interest in and can line up joint support (e.g., to increase state budget support to service providers or to increase housing benefits), rather than building the movement of homeless people. As a result, the organization does not put particular effort into strengthening cooperation and communication between different groups of different shelters and establish a strong network of organized cells. In addition, CCH in most cases works with people living in shelters or who are affiliated with a service provider. It does not organize people living on the streets and it does not directly represent their interests.

This does not mean that homeless people do not take part in the decision-making processes of the organization. In bigger thematic campaigns, such as the decriminalization of prostitutes and the reentry of former felons, persons who were affected by these issues sit on the campaign planning committees along with representatives of civil society organizations. And homeless or formerly homeless folks sit on the board of the organization or are employed as staff members.

CCH works in most campaigns in different coalitions, therefore service providers are their important allies. Just like in the case of homeless people, community organizers lay great stress on finding out their self-interest. They want to see and feel what kind of cooperation can be in the interest of these institutions and what would make them join the particular campaign. One-on-ones are therefore crucial with the representatives of the institutions, too. (During their listening tour, new community organizers also interview almost 50 shelter representatives besides the 50 homeless or formerly homeless people.) CCH sometimes ally with organizations who have less experience in doing advocacy and campaigning. In this case, they understand and start at the level where partners are the most comfortable and they gradually raise the stakes. Building trust is a process in institutional organizing, too: you have to know who is in the organization, who is worth negotiating with, who is capable of what and what they are ready to do.

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American homeless folks in action – a close-up of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless

At the end of the lobby day in Springfield, April 2012

In April 2012, I spent three weeks with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH) as part of a professional development program. CCH organizes and advocates to prevent and end homelessness in Illinois, USA.

The coalition was established in 1980 by service providers and charities. The organization since then has pushed for several legislative proposals, making an impact on policy-making around housing and homelessness. To put significant pressure on the decision-makers, CCH, in cooperation with shelters, mobilizes homeless people, and builds the base of their allies. Proposals for legislative changes and ordinances, put forward by CCH, are thus justified in a way by participating homeless people, or, if you like, the organization looks for legal solutions for the demands formulated by homeless people.

The main recipe for the elimination and the prevention of homelessness is just the same in Chicago as in Budapest: folks need sufficient affordable housing. For this reason, CCH, in cooperation with other civil society organizations, reviewed Chicago’s budget and identified potential funding streams to dedicate for affordable housing. From a variety of funding sources, the so-called tax increment financing (TIF) proved to be the best proposal. TIF is a public financing method that utilizes increased tax income for subsidizing community improvement projects. Infrastructural investments result in an increase in the value of the real estate in the neighborhood, which generates additional revenues for the city government. Based on the directives of TIF, this revenue increase should be spent on redevelopment or infrastructure projects, e.g., affordable housing. CCH research showed that the city spends only four percent of its annual TIF fund on affordable housing, whereas wealthy corporations snatch the subsidies and use it to rehabilitate their offices in the downtown area. This contradicts the original purposes of TIF as this funding stream should be spent on the rehabilitation of underdeveloped neighborhoods.

Based on the results of the CCH research, the Sweet Home Chicago campaign began in 2009. A coalition of 11 organizations was formed and demanded that 20 percent of the TIF funds (almost $100 million) be allocated to affordable housing. The coalition also revealed the profits of the corporations which benefit from the TIF, and their chief officers’ high salaries. The campaign resulted in an ordinance which the city council enacted in 2011: developers of vacant multi-unit rental housing (which can be vacant due to foreclosures) can apply for TIF funds for 30 to 50 percent of the purchase/rehabilitation costs. To meet these requirements, developers must rent 30 to 50 percent of units to low-income households (in 2011, annual income of no more than $37,700 for a family of four – in comparison, in 2011, the poverty guideline was a total yearly income of $22,350 for a family of four). As a result of this, gentrification can be slowed down for a while, i.e., housing can remain affordable for low-income people in neighborhoods where infrastructural development results in an increase in the value of the real estate.

CCH also campaigns against state budget cuts to housing programs and to services for homeless people. CCH, as a member of the Responsible Budget Coalition of 270 organizations, managed to prevent cuts on emergency shelters and transitional housing. At the Illinois General Assembly, more than 100 homeless people demonstrated against the planned 52 per cent budget cut. The General Assembly, however, is planning a 52 per cent budget cut again this year (2012), so a couple of weeks earlier the group protested again in Springfield, in the capital of Illinois.

The organization, furthermore, provides homeless and unaccompanied youth with legal aid, advocates for the decriminalization of prostitutes, promotes the re-entry of ex-felons, supports policies and programs supporting homeless youth, and pushes for the increase in living wage and job creation. In 2010, the Put Illinois to Work campaign resulted in more than 27,300 jobs by using federal stimulus funds. When CCH recognized that the State of Illinois does not have a concrete program on how to use major part of the $300 million, the organization submitted a plan for a subsidized employment program of homeless people. The plan was finally accepted by the governor, and the employment program was implemented by a professional company.

Homeless people take an active part in the operation of CCH. Formerly homeless people, former felons or survivors of prostitution sit on the board or planning committees, or are employed as staff members. CCH, in cooperation with shelters, mobilizes homeless people, who participate in their demonstrations. In cooperation with social workers (but not necessarily with their participation) community organizers hold regular programs in shelters and recruit supporters for their campaigns. The organization regularly holds a writing workshop (Horizons Creative Writing Outreach) where participants discuss pieces of literature or write their own pieces. In the framework of the Speakers Bureau, homeless folks tell people their stories, and thus support with their own experiences what is on the agenda of the organization. Members of the Speakers Bureau visit schools, universities, religious and civic groups, and builds the outer base of allies. As a result of the speakers, seven chapters have been established in different universities and colleges in support of homeless people.

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