Community Organizing or Organizing Community (Stall Stoecker 1997)

8/8/2019 Community Organizing or Organizing Community (Stall Stoecker 1997)

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A COMM-ORG Working Paper, revised November 1997

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING OR ORGANIZING COMMUNITY?

GENDER AND THE CRAFTS OF EMPOWERMENT

Susan Stall

Department of Sociology

Northeastern Illinois University

5500 N. St. Louis Ave.

Chicago, IL 60625

773-794-2997

[email protected]

Randy Stoecker

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work

University of Toledo

Toledo, OH 43606

419-530-4975

[email protected]

Co-Authors

This paper is adapted from presentations at the annual meetings of the Midwest Sociological

Society, and the American Sociological Association, and COMM-ORG: The On-Line Conference

on Community Organizing and Development.


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ABSTRACT

This paper looks at two strains of urban community organizing, distinguished by philosophy

and often by gender, and influenced by the historical division of American society into public

and private spheres. We compare the well-known Alinsky model, which focuses on

communities organizing for power, and what we call the women-centered model, which

focuses on organizing relationships to build community. These models are rooted in somewhat

distinct traditions and vary along several dimensions, including conceptions of human nature

and conflict, power and politics, leadership, and the organizing process. We conclude by

examining the implications of each model in the current socioeconomic context and the

potential for their integration.

INTRODUCTION

Despite a rich and proud heritage of female organizers and movement leaders, the field of

community organization, in both its teaching models and its major exponents, has been a

male-dominated preserve, where, even though values are expressed in terms of participatory

democracy, much of the focus within the dominant practice methods has been nonsupportive

or antithetical to feminism. Strategies have largely been based on "macho-power" models,

manipulativeness, and zero- sum gamesmanship (Weil l986, 192).

The WOMAN in woman organizer is important....It stands for a growing awareness of different

tactics and techniques, and maybe even a growing awareness of unique goals (Education

Center for Community Organizing [ECCO] 1989, 15).

Behind every successful social movement is a community, or a network of communities. The

community behind the movement provides many things. It sustains the movement during the

hard times, when the movement itself is in abeyance (Taylor, 1989). It provides for the social

reproduction needs of movement participants, providing things as basic as childcare so parents

can participate in movement events (Stoecker, 1992). It provides a free space (Evans and

Boyte, 1986) where members can practice "prefigurative politics" (Breines, 1989), attempting

to create on a small scale the type of world they are struggling for.


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These communities do not just happen. They must be organized. Someone has to build strong

enough relationships between people so they can support each other through long and

sometimes dangerous social change struggles. Or, if the community already exists, someone

has to help transform it to support political action. Sometimes that requires reorganizing the

community (Alinsky, 1971) by identifying individuals who can move the community to action.

This process of building a mobilizable community is called "community organizing." It involves

"the craft" of building an enduring network of people, who identify with common ideals, and

who can engage in social action on the basis of those ideals. In practice, it is much more than

micromobilization or framing strategy (Snow et al., 1986.). Community organizing can in fact

refer to the entire process of organizing relationships, identifying issues, mobilizing around

those issues, and maintaining an enduring organization. The distinction between community

organizing and social movement is that community organizing is localized, often "pre-political"

action, while social movements are multi-local. Consider, for a moment that we speak of the

Civil Rights "Movement," or even the "sit-in movement," but not the "Montgomery Bus

Boycott movement" (whose community was organized long before Rosa Parks refused to give

up her seat).

The distinction is subtle but important. One of the most common definitions of social

movement, by Charles Tilly (1984) says that a social movement is a "sustained series of actions

between power holders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency

lacking formal representation, in the course of which those persons make publicly visible

demands for changes in the distribution of exercise of power, and back those with public

demonstrations of support." A general definition of community organizing, on the other hand,

says that "community organizing is the process of building power that includes people with aproblem in defining their community, defining the problems that they wish to address, the

solutions they wish to pursue, and the methods they will use to accomplish their solutions. The

organization will identify the people and structures that need to be part of these solutions,

and, by persuasion or confrontation, negotiate with them to accomplish the goals of the

community. In the process, organizations will build a democratically controlled community

institution - the organization - that can take on further problems and embody the will and

power of that community over time." (Beckwith, Stoecker, and McNeely, 1997) In general,

Community organizing is the work that occurs in local settings to empower individuals, build

relationships, and create action for social change (Bobo et al, 1991; Kahn, 1991, Beckwith and

Lopez, 1997).

Both of these definitions emphasize the action part of making change. Both talk about moving

people to put pressure on authorities to make that change. But in community organizing the

focus is on the community, while in social movements the focus is on the movement. These

are different levels of action. Community organization is the process that builds a constituency

that can go on to create a movement, and it occurs at a level between the micro-mobilization


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male-dominated world of sports and the military provide images and metaphors for building

teamwork, and for igniting competition and antagonism against opponents "to win" a

particular movement campaign (Acker, l990). The rhythm and timing of social movement work

often does not take into account the rhythms of life of caring work outside of organizing

meetings and campaigns (Stoecker, 1992). Or when it does, the result is that women's

movement involvement is restricted. In the New York Tenants movement, women were

restricted to the most grass-roots organizing activities, while men did the negotiating (Lawson

and Barton, 1980). In the 1960s Freedom Summer campaign, organizers worried about the

consequences of white women recruits developing relationships with Black men in the South

(McAdam, 1986).

As a consequence, the community organizing work that women do in social movements is also

neglected. Payne (1989), Barnett (1993, 1995) and Robnett (l996) have challenged accounts of

the civil rights movement that neglect the central contributions of women activists. Barnett

(l993, 165) challenges research on modern social movement leadership that presents "the

erroneous image that `all of the women are white, all of the Blacks are men'" She argues

against the narrow definition of social movement leadership that elevates the movement

spokesperson, while neglecting the "leaders", often women, who serve as grassroots

organizers. Robnett (l996) analyzes how the "gendered organization" of the civil rights

movement defined the social location of African-American women in the movement, creating

a particular substructure of leadership.

It is possible that community organizing is neglected for the same reason that women's work in

social movements has been neglected. Women's work and community organizing are both, to

an extent, invisible labor. What people see is the flashy demonstration, not knowing the manyhours of preparation building relationships and providing for participants' basic needs that

made the demonstration possible. Indeed, community organizing is the part of social

movements that occurs closest to the grassroots and is in fact more often done by women

(Robnett, 1996; Lawson and Barton, 1980). Even when men, such as Saul Alinsky, do it, it

receives short shrift. And social movement analysis, with some exception (Taylor, 1989; Taylor

and Rupp, 1993; Taylor and Whittier, 1992; Robnett, 1996; Stoecker, 1992) has scarcely

developed concepts which would even allow us to see this grassroots labor, far less

understand it.

What are some of the gender dimensions that would help us understand community

organizing and its relationship to movement building? Our analysis begins with the historical

division of American culture into public and private whperes that split the "public work done

mostly by men in the formal economy and government from the "private" work done mostly

by women in the community and home (Tilly and Scott, 1978). These spheres have always

influenced each other (through routes such as the economic impact of women's unpaid

domestic labor or the impact of economic policy changes on family quality of life), but have


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historically been organized around different logics with different cultures and, we argue, have

produced two distinct models of community organizing. These two community organizing

modeld--one developed by Saul Alinsky and the other developed by a wide variety or women--

in fact begin from opposite ends of the public-private split. The Alinsky model begins with

"community organizing"--the public sphere battles between the haves and have-nots. The

women-centered model begins with "organizing community"--building relationships and

empowering individuals through those relationships.

The Alinsky model, which we name after its most famous practitioner, is based in a conception

of separate public and private spheres. Community organizing was not a job for family types, a

position he reinforced by his own marital conflicts, by his demands on his trainees, and by his

own poverty. In fact, if anything, the main role of the private sphere was to support the

organizer's public sphere work. In his Rules for Radicals, Alinsky (1971) remarked:

The marriage record of organizers is with rare exception disastrous. Further, the tension, the

hours, the home situation, and the opportunities, do not argue for fidelity. Also, with rare

exception, I have not known really competent organizers who were concerned about celibacy.

Here and there are wives and husbands or those in love relationships who understand and are

committed to the work, and are real sources of strength to the organizer (p. 65).

His attitude toward which issues were important also illustrates his emphasis on the public

sphere. While problems began in the private sphere, it was important to move the community

to understand how those problems were connected to larger issues outside of the community.

Thus, problems could not be solved within the community but by the community being

represented better in the public sphere (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987, pp.27-28). This is not to say

that Alinsky avoided a focus on private sphere issues. His first successful organizing attempt, in

Back of the Yards, produced a well-baby clinic, a credit union, and a hot lunch program (Finks,

1984, p. 21). But these programs were accomplished through public sphere strategizing, not

private relationships. In establishing and maintaining the hot lunch program, Alinsky pushed

the BYNC to understand its relationship to the national hot lunch program and "In order to

fight for their own Hot Lunch project they would have to fight for every Hot Lunch project in

every part of the United States." (Alinsky, 1969, p. 168).

The women-centered model, though it has a long history, has only recently received much

attention as some feminist researchers and organizers began arguing for a theory of organizing

that is feminist or "women-centered" (Ackelsberg l988; Barnett l995; ECCO 1989; Gutierrez

and Lewis 1992; Haywoode l991; Weil l986; West and Blumberg l990). For the women-

centered model, while organizing efforts are rooted in private sphere issues or relationships,

the organizing process problematizes the split between public and private, since its "activities

which do not fall smoothly into either category" (Tiano, l984, p. 21). Women's emotional


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attachments to their families affect their everyday community commitments and their

priorities about what are appropriate targets for local social change efforts (Colfer and Colfer,

1978; Genovese, 1980; Stoneall, 1981). But women-centered organizing extends "the

boundaries of the household to include the neighborhood" and, as its efforts move ever

further out, ultimately "dissolve[s] the boundaries between public and private life, between

household and civil society" (Haywoode, l991, p. 175). Organizing to secure tenant rights, local

daycares, and youth programs "define a sphere which is public, yet closer to home"

(Haywoode, l991, p. 175) and demonstrates the importance of the interconnections between

the spheres (Ackelsberg, l988; Petchesky, l979). Women-centered organizing utilizes "feminist"

values, practices, and goals. Within this type of organizing there is an emphasis on community

building, collectivism, caring, mutual respect, and self-transformation (Barnett l995). As we will

discuss, women-centered organizing is defined as much by the historical placement of women

in the home and neighborhood as the Alinsky model is defined by the historical placement of

men in public governing and commerce.

In this paper, then, we address two neglected issues in one question: How do gender

structures and identities play out in community organizing? It would be nice if we could just

say that community organizing is the backstage women's work of movement building. But the

most famous of the community organizers, Saul Alinsky, was a man, and one who was

particularly fond of his masculine style of community organizing (see below).

This paper attempts to understand the not-quite-social-movement world of community

organizing. We draw on U.S. examples across five decades utilizing secondary sources and our

own community-based research to compare the Alinsky model and the women-centered

model--which we see as two of the most important strands of community organizing in theUnited States. Our purpose is not to systematically test theories or evaluate the models.

Rather, using a heuristic approach, we want to begin exploring the possible dimensions across

which these two organizing models can be compared. Some authors have examined and

critiqued the Alinsky style of organizing (Lancourt 1979; Sherrard and Murray 1965; Stein

1986), and a few authors have argued that there is a distinct way of women's organizing (ECCO

l989; Haywoode l991; Oppenheim l991; Weil l986), but no one has compared these two

approaches.

These "models" are ideal type constructs and, we suspect, do not occur as mutually exclusivein the real world. Indeed, many Alinsky organizations have been reluctant to engage in public

conflict (Lancourt l979; Bailey 1972), and Alinsky followers such as Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez,

and Ed Chambers increasingly emphasized private sphere issues and family and community

relationship building (Reitzes and Reitzes l987a; Industrial Areas Foundation l978). We also

focus on the more traditional Alinsky-style organizing rather than recent adaptations by groups

like the IAF. Likewise, the women-centered model has to-date not been portrayed as a model


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and thus its practitioners, many of whom are trained in Alinsky-style organizing, are very

diverse. Instead, our purpose is to show two strains of influence on community organizing.

We first examine the historical roots and some basic traits of each tradition. Next, we explore

some key differences between the two approaches. We then discuss the implications of eachmodel and the potential for integrating them.

BACKGROUND OF THE ORGANIZING MODELS

The Alinsky Model

The very term "community organizing" is inextricably linked with the late Saul Alinsky, whose

community organizing career began in the late 1930s. As part of his field research job as a

graduate student in criminology at the University of Chicago he was to develop a juvenile

delinquency program in Chicago's "Back of the Yards," neighborhood downwind of the Chicago

Stockyards--a foul-smelling and crime-ridden slum of poor Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks.

When Alinsky arrived, the Congress of Industrial Organizations was organizing the stockyard

workers living there. Expanding the CIO model beyond workplace issues, Alinsky organized the

Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) from local neighborhood groups, ethnic clubs,

union locals, bowling leagues, and an American Legion Post. The success of BYNC in getting

expanded city services and political power started Alinsky off on a long career of organizing

poor urban communities around the country (Finks 1984; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a).

Alinsky's targets shot at him, threw him in jail, and linked him to Communists, organized crime,

and other "undesirables." He saw how the "haves" blatantly took from the "have nots" and

unashamedly manipulated the consciousness of the "have a little, want mores." Alinsky had

little patience for the version of community organizing practiced by social workers, saying

"they organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-

legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats" (Alinsky 1971, 68).

Alinsky often argued that a career as a community organizer had to come before all else,

including family, and to enforce this he would keep his trainees up all hours of the night at

meetings and discussions (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987, p. 10). Though he did not publicly

discourage women from engaging in the work (Alinsky, 1971), he was skeptical of women

doing his kind of community organizing, fearing they were too delicate (Finks, 1984).1 Heather

Booth, who went on to help found the Midwest Academy and Citizen Action, quit the


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their public role...explain[ed] that they were only protecting their homes and families by

extending their activities from the home into the public arena. Women claimed the right to be

guardians of the neighborhood, just as they were acknowledged to be guardians of the

family"(Haywoode l991, l80). Since then, women have created numerous voluntary and

benevolent associations to campaign for concrete reforms in local neighborhoods and broader

reforms in municipal services, education, labor, housing, health care, and childrens' rights

(Berg 1978; Haywoode l991; Tax 1980).

Perhaps the most famous of these activities were the settlement houses, founded primarily by

college-educated white middle-class women who believed they should live in the

neighborhood wherethey worked (Bryan and Davis l990, 5). The most well-known settlement

house organizer was Jane Addams, who with Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House on

Chicago's west side in 1889. Their goal was to improve the social networks, social services, and

community life in poverty-stricken immigrant slums. They succeeded in developing parks,

playgrounds, expanded community services, and neighborhood plans. They were also involved

in social reform movements promoting labor legislation for women and children, care of

delinquents, and women's suffrage. But community organizers often saw them as engaging in

charity work rather than adversarial social action (Brandwein l981, l987; Finks 1984, 96-7), and

clinical social workers saw them as violating the detached casework method that emphasized

individual treatment over social reform and community development (Drew l983; Lee l937;

Specht and Courtney l994).

The women-centered model also carries a history of success different from the Alinsky model.

The activism of women in the early settlement movement, the civil rights movement, and the

consciousness-raising groups of the radical branch of the 1970s women's movement allowedwomen to challenge both private and public arrangements in ways that would forever effect

their relationships, housework, parenting practices, and career paths. The consequent changes

in women's health care and women's knowledge of their own bodies, in cultural practices

around dating and relationships, and the relationship between work and family are still

reverberating through society. That these successes have not been better documented owes

to the fact that struggles focused on the private sphere have been neither defined nor valued

as important. Today, women of color, low-income, and working class women create and

sustain numerous protest efforts and organizations to alter living conditions or policies that

threaten their families and communities (Bookman and Morgen l988; Feldman and Stall, 1994;

Garland l988; Gilkes l988; Gutierrez and Lewis l992; Hamilton l991; Haywoode l991; Leavitt

1993; McCourt l977; Rabrenovic l995). These include, but are not limited to tenant organizing

(Lawson and Barton l990), low income housing (Breitbart and Pader l995; Feldman and Stall,

1994), welfare rights (Naples l991), and environmental issues (Pardo l990).

COMPARING THE MODELS


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Human Nature and Conflict

The Alinsky model and the women-centered model begin from different starting points--the

rough and tumble world of aggressive public sphere confrontation; and the cooperative

nurturant world of private sphere personal and community development. Consequently, they

have very different views of what human nature is and its role in human conflict.

Among all the tenets of the Alinsky model, the assumption of self-interest has the strongest

continuing influence (Beckwith n.d.) and is strongly influenced by the centrality of the public

shpere in the Alinsky model.. Modern society, from Alinsky's perspective, is created out of

compromise between self-interested individuals operating in the public sphere. Thus,

organizing people requires appealing to their self-interest. People become involved because

they think there is something in it for themselves (Alinsky 1969, 94-98; 1971, 53-9). Alinsky's

emphasis on self-interest was connected to his wariness of ideology. From his perspective,

organizing people around abstract ideology leads to boredom at best and ideological disputes

at worst. Alinsky also feared ideology becoming dogma and was adamant that building a

pragmatic organization should come before promoting any ideology. He did hope that, as the

community became organized, the process would bring out "innate altruism" and "affective

commitment." But even that level of commitment was based on building victories through

conflict with targets (Lancourt 1979, 51; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 56; 1987b). Alinsky relates

the story of one organizer's effort to start a "people's organization" and how he used self-

interest to achieve the desired result:

Mr. David was a businessman who...had avoided participation in any kind of social-betterment

program or community group....His whole manner let me know that in his opinion I was just

another `do-gooder' and as soon as I finished my song and dance he would give me a dollar or

two and wish me well. I suddenly shifted from my talk on the children and began to point out

indirectly the implications of his joining our organization....I could almost hear Mr. David

thinking..."And where could I get better business relations than at this meeting." Then David

turned to me and said "I'll be at that meeting tonight." Immediately after I left David I went

across the street to Roger, who is in the same business, and I talked to him the same way.

Roger had a doubled-barreled incentive for coming. First there was David's purpose and

secondly Roger wanted to make sure that David would not take away any part of his business

(Alinsky 1969, 95-97).

Since Alinsky saw society as a compromise between competing self-interested individuals,

conflict was inevitable, and a pluralist polity was the means by which compromise was

reached. Since poor people are at an initial disadvantage in that polity, the organizer's job is to


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prepare citizens to engage in the level of public conflict necessary for them to be included in

the compromise process (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a). Alinsky contended that the only way to

overcome the inertia that exists in most communities (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 70) was to

"rub raw the resentments of the people in the community" (Alinsky 1971, 116). In order to

engage in the level of battle necessary to win, "the rank and file and the smaller leaders of the

organizations must be whipped up to a fighting pitch" (Alinsky 1969, 151). Alinsky would

engage small-scale conflicts within communities against unscrupulous merchants, realtors, and

even entrenched community organizations, to build victories and a sense of power (Reitzes

and Reitzes 1987a, 54, 65), treating even the relatively private sphere of the neighborhood as a

public sphere arena. Alinsky's involvement in 1960s Rochester with FIGHT, pressing for Kodak

to support an affirmative hiring and jobs program, is illustrative. FIGHT began with a drawn-out

negotiation process, and then Alinsky escalated to confrontational rhetoric and pickets. When

Kodak reneged on a signed agreement, Alinsky and FIGHT organized a proxy campaign for

Kodak's annual meeting. Forty members of FIGHT and Friends of FIGHT attended the meeting,

demanded that Kodak reinstate its original agreement by 2 pm, and then walked out to 800

supporters in the street. They came back at 2 pm and were told Kodak would not reverse its

position. The FIGHT leadership came out and told the crowd: "Racial War has been declared onblack communities by Kodak. If it's war they want, war they'll get." Threats of a major

demonstration in July and further escalation of the conflict produced a behind the scenes

agreement at the eleventh hour (Finks 1984, 213-221).

Unlike the Alinsky model, women-centered organizing involvement does not emanate from

self-interest but from an ethic of care maintained by relationships built on years of local

volunteer work in the expanded private sphere, particularly community associations (Stall,

1991). Rather than a morality of individual rights, women learn a morality of responsibility that

is connected to relationships and is based on the "universality of the need for compassion andcare" (Gilligan l977: 509). Women-centered organizers grasp the meaning of justice not as a

compromise between self-interested individuals, but as a practical reciprocity in the network

of relationships that make up the community (Ackelsberg l988; Haywoode 1991; Stall, 1991).

Leavitt (l993) describes how concern for their children's welfare led a group of African-

American women in Los Angeles in the late l980s to focus on rehabbing the existing tot lots in

their public housing development. In Nickerson Gardens, as in public housing across the

country, women make up the overwhelming majority of grassroots organizers. The campaign

of this all-women tot-lot committee ignited them to testify at housing authority hearings,

conduct a community survey, and eventually secure funds and participate in the design and

the construction of two play areas in their low-income community. They did not manipulate

self-interest but instead built a cooperative consensus.

Within the women-centered model, the maintenance and development of social cohesion--

personal connections with others that provide a safe environment for people to develop,

change and grow--is more immediately important than conflict to gain institutional power

(Kaplan l982). For women, community relationships include the social fabric created through


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routine activities related to the private sphere, such as childcare, housekeeping, and shopping

(DeVault l991), as well as through social arrangements they make to protect, enhance, and

preserve the cultural experience of community members (Bernard l981, Stoneall l983).

Historically, women have relied on community networks to feed, clothe, and shelter their

families (Sacks 1988a, 21; also see Hill Collins l990). Particularly for women, communal

structures can serve as "free spaces" offering arenas outside of the family where women can

develop a "growing sense that they [have] the right to work -- first in behalf of others, then in

behalf of themselves" (Evans and Boyte l981, 61; l986).

Women residents of the Wentworth Gardens Chicago public housing development in Chicago,

in 1968, created and now continue to manage their own laundromat which provides both on-

site laundry facilities and a community space that serves as a primary recruitment ground for

community activists. The ongoing volunteer work of women residents over four decades has

assured the laundromat's continued success, and has helped numerous women developskills

and self-confidence to further develop the community through the opening of an on-site

grocery store and obtaining other improvements to their housing. A Resident Service

Committee, made up of laundromat volunteers, meets monthly to resolve problemsand

allocate laundromat profits to annual community festivals, scholarship funds, and other

activities.

Power and Politics

Both models have seemingly inconsistent understandings of power and politics. These

inconsistencies are rooted partly in the ways each thinks about human nature, but are also

particularly affected by how they deal with the public-private split. The Alinsky model sees

power as zero-sum, but the polity as pluralist. The women-centered model sees power as

infinitely expanding, but the polity as structurally biased. Understanding both the differences

between the models, and their seeming inconsistencies, requires looking at how each deals

with the public-private split.

For the Alinsky model, power and politics both occur in the public sphere. When power is zero-

sum, the only way to get more is to take it from someone else. Alinsky was adamant that real

power could not be given, but only taken. He watched how obsessed elites were with power,

even taking it from each other when they could and thus making the very structure of power

zero-sum. Thus, the method for a poor community to gain power was through public sphere

action--by picking a single elite target, isolating it from other elites, personalizing it, and

polarizing it (Alinsky 1971).2 The 1960s Woodlawn Organization (TWO) was one of Alinsky's

most famous organizing projects in an African American neighborhood on Chicago's south side.

When TWO was shut out of urban renewal planning for their neighborhood, they

commissioned their own plan, and threatened to occupy Lake Shore Drive during rush hour


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unless their plan held sway. Not only did they get agreement on a number of their plan

proposals, they also controlled a new committee to approve all future plans for their

neighborhood, shifting control of urban planning from city hall to the neighborhood (Finks,

l984, 153; Reitzes and Reitzes, 1987)).

In women-centered organizing, power begins in the private sphere of relationships, and thus is

not conceptualized as zero-sum, but as limitless and collective. "Co-active power" is based on

human interdependence and the development of all within the group or the community

through collaboration (Follet l940; see also Hartsock l974). "[I]t belongs to a group and remains

in existence only so long as the group keeps together" (Arendt l969, 44). The goal of a women-

centered organizing process is empowerment (ECCO l989). Empowerment is a developmental

process that includes building skills through repetitive cycles of action and reflection which

evoke new skills and understandings, which in turn provoke new and more effective actions

(Keiffer l984). Empowerment includes the development of a more positive self-concept and

self-confidence; a more critical world view; and the cultivation of individual and collective skills

and resources for social and political action (Rappaport l986; Van Den Bergh and Cooper l986;

Weil l986). In the case of the Cedar Riverside Project Area Committee, an organization

dedicated to planning resident-controlled redevelopment of a counter-culture Minneapolis

neighborhood, tensions developed in the 1980s between those who emphasized building

power as an outcome and empowering residents as a process. One woman organizer

compares her approach to that of the lead organizer:

I disagree with Tim, but he's a very empowering person. Tim is more Alinsky. For me, the

process, not the outcome, is the most important.... The empowerment of individuals is why I

became involved.... I was a single mother looking for income, and was hired as a block workerfor the dispute resolution board, and gained a real sense of empowerment.

Power, for this organizer, is gained not through winning a public sphere battle, but by bringing

residents together to resolve disputes and build relationships within their own community.

When we shift the focus from more abstract notions of power to more concrete practices of

politics, both models are forced to work in the public sphere. But the public sphere-private

sphere split still influences how each relates to politics.

The Alinsky model sees itself as already in the public sphere, and as a consequence already

part of the political system. The problem was not gaining access--the rules of politics already

granted access. Rather, the problem was effectively organizing to make the most of that

access. Alinsky believed that poor people could form their own interest group and access the


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polity just like any other interest group. They may have to make more of a fuss to be

recognized initially, but once recognized, their interests would be represented just like anyone

else's. Community organizing, for Alinsky, was bringing people together to practice democracy.

Consequently, Alinsky did not see a need for dramatic structural adjustments. The system was,

in fact, so good that it would protect and support the have-nots in organizing against those

elites who had been taking unfair advantage (Alinsky l969; Lancourt l979, 31-35; Reitzes and

Reitzes 1987, 17-18). Alinsky organizations support government even while attacking office

holders (Bailey 1972, 136). When the IAF-trained Ernesto Cortez returned to San Antonio to

help found Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in 1973, he began with the

traditional strategy of escalating from negotiations to protests to achieve better city services

for Latino communities. Soon after their initial successes, COPS turned to voter mobilization,

eventually resulting in a slim win to change San Antonio's council from at-large to district

representation. From there they were able to control half of the council's seats, bringing over

half of the city's federal Community Development Block Grant funds to COPS projects from

1974-1981. Eventually COPS found that its political lobbying and voter mobilization tactics

outpaced the effectiveness of confrontation and protest (Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 121-123).

Heather Booth's Citizen Action project has taken this pluralist organizing approach to its logicalextreme, focusing her energies entirely on voter mobilization in cities and states around the

country (Reitzes and Reitzes l987a, 153).

The women-centered model, however, approaches politics from an experience and

consciousness of the exclusionary qualities of the public-private sphere split, which becomes

embedded in a matrix of domination along structural axes of gender, race, and social class and

hides the signficance of women's work in local settings. This matrix has historically excluded

women from public sphere politics, and restricted them through the sexual division of labor to

social reproduction activities centered in the home (Cockburn l977; Kaplan l982, 545).Increasingly, women have politicized the private sphere as a means to combat exclusion from

the public agenda (Kaplan l982). Thus, women have organized around issues that flow from

their distinct histories, every day experiences, and perspectives (Ackelsberg 1988; Bookman

and Morgen l988; ECCO 1989; Haywoode l991; Stall, 1991; West and Blumberg l990; Wilson

l977). Women-centered organizing "dissolve[s] the boundaries between public and private life,

between household and civil society" and extends "the boundaries of the household to include

the neighborhood" (Haywoode l991, 175). Organizing to secure local daycares, youth

programs, tenant rights and a clean environment "define a sphere which is public, yet closer to

home" (Haywoode l991, 175) and demonstrates the importance of the interconnections

between the spheres (Ackelsberg l988; Petchesky l979). Cynthia Hamilton (l99l), a community

organizer in South Central Los Angeles, described a primarily women-directed organizing

campaign to stop the solid waste incinerator planned for their community in the late l980s.

These low income women, primarily African-American, with no prior political experience, were

motivated by the health threat to their homes and children. They built a loose, but effective

organization, the Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, and were gradually joined

by white, middle-class, and professional women from across the city. The activists began to

recognize their shared gender oppression as they confronted the sarcasm and contempt of

male political officials and industry representatives--who dismissed their human concerns as


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"irrational, uninformed, and disruptive" (44)--and restrictions on their organizing created by

their family's needs. Eventually they forced incinerator industry representatives to

compromise and helped their families accept a new division of labor in the home to

accommodate activists' increased public political participation.3

Leadership Development

Leadership is another characteristic of these models that shows the influence of the public-

private split. The Alinsky model maintains and explicit between public sphere leaders, called

"organizers," and private sphere community leaders who occupy decision-making positions in

formal community organizations. For the women centered model, leadership begins in the

private sphere, but leadership becomes a form of boundary spanning across public and private

spheres.

For Alinsky, the organizer is a professional consultant from outside the community whose job

is to get people to adopt a delegitimizing frame (Ferree and Miller 1985; Gamson et al. 1982;)

that breaks the power structure's hold over them (Bailey 1972, 46-7). Advocates of the Alinsky

approach contend that organizing is a very complex task requiring professional-level training

and experience (Bailey 1972, 137; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987a, 53). In many cases organizers

must "disorganize" or reorganize the community since so many communities are organized for

apathy (Alinsky 1971, 116; Bailey 1972, 50). The Alinsky model also maintains a strict role

separation between outside organizers and the indigenous leaders that organizers are

responsible for locating and supporting (Lancourt 1979; Reitzes and Reitzes 1987b). New

leaders have to be developed, often outside of the community's institutionally-appointed

leadership structure. The focus is not on those individuals, however, but on building a strong

organization and getting material concessions from elites. Organizers have influence, but only

through their relationships with indigenous leaders (Lancourt 1979). It may appear curious that

Alinsky did not emphasize building indigenous organizers, especially since the lack of

indigenous organizing expertise often led to organizational decline after the pros left (Lancourt

1979).4 Tom Gaudette, an Alinsky-trained organizer who helped build the Organization for a

Better Austin (OBA) in Chicago, explicitly discouraged his organizers from living in the

neighborhood, arguing they had to be able to view the community dispassionately in order to

be effective at their job (Bailey 1972, 80). But when viewed through the lens of the public-

private split, it is clear that the organizers are leaders who remain in the public sphere, alwaysseparate from the expanded private sphere of community. Because the organizers remain in

the public sphere, they become the link that pulls private sphere leaders, and their

communities, in to public action.

There is less separation between organizers and leaders in the women-centered model, as

women-centered organizers, rather than being outsiders, are more often rooted in local


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networks. they are closely linked to those with whom they work and organize and act as

mentors or facilitators of the empowerment process.5 Private sphere issues seem paramount

with these organizers. They find they need to deal with women's sense of powerlessness and

low self-esteem (Miller l986)--before they can effectively involve them in sustained organizing

efforts. Mentoring others as they learn the organizing process is premised on the belief that all

have the capacity to be leaders /organizers. Rather than focusing on or elevating individual

leaders, women-centered organizers seek to model and develop "group centered" leadership

(Payne l989) that "embraces the participation of many as opposed to creating competition

over the elevation of only a few" (ECCO l989, 16). Instead of moving people and directing

events, this is a conception of leadership as teaching (Payne l989).6 Analyses of women-

centered organizing and leadership development efforts also underline the importance of

"centerwomen," or "bridge leaders," who use existing local networks to develop social groups

and activities that create a sense of familial/community consciousness, connecting people with

similar concerns and heightening awareness of shared issues (Sacks l988b; Robnett, 1996).

These leaders can transform social networks into a political force, and demonstrate how the

particular skills that women learn in their families and communities (e.g., interpersonal skills,

planning and coordination, conflict mediation) can be translated into effective public sphereleadership. Robnett (l996) provides evidence that, "The activities of African-American women

in the civil rights movement provided the bridges necessary to cross boundaries between the

personal lives of potential constituents and adherents and the political life of civil rights

movement organizations" (1664). Thus, ironically, gender as a "construct of exclusion...helped

to develop a strong grassroots tier of leadershipwomen who served as "bridge leaders" who

were central to the "development of identity, collective consciousness, and solidarity within

the civil rights movement" (Robnett l996, 1667). Although bridge leaders were not exclusively

women, this "intermediate layer" of leadership was the only one available to women at that

time (Robnett l996). Mrs. Amey, now seventy years old, has been a key activist and a

centerperson in nearly all of the Wentworth Gardens organizing efforts discussed earlier since

the mid-l950s. A woman resident's description of Mrs. Hallie Amey provides some insight into

the importance of her leadership role:

She's [Mrs. Amey's] the type of person who can bring a lot of good ideas to the

community....And she's always there to help. And she's always here; she's always doing things.

And she's always pulling you, she's pushing you, and she's calling you, "We've got to do this!"

She makes sure you don't forget what you have to do. Early in the morning she's on the phone,

"Mrs. Harris, what time you coming out?'' That was to say, "you gonna do it without me having

to ask, or you giving me an excuse (Stall, interview, 1991)?

The Organizing Process

Finally, these two models adopt organizing processes that reflect the influence of, and their

conceptualization of, the public-private split. The Alinsky model emphasizes farge formal


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public organizations to manage large visible public events. The women-centered model

emphasizes the development of informal small groups that take on less visible issues, in the

private sphere, in less visible ways.

Within the Alinsky model the organizing process centers on identifying and confronting publicissues to be addressed in the public sphere. Door knocking is the initial strategy for identifying

issues. Those issues then become the means of recruitment to the organizing effort. The

organization bills itself as the best, if not only, means of resolving those issues. The "mass

meeting" is the means for framing issues and celebrating gains. Important to the process of

building up to the mass meeting are cumulative victories--beginning with an easily winnable

issue, and using the energy generated by that win to build to bigger and bigger issues. The

public activities of the mass march, the public rally, the explicit confrontation, the celebrated

win, are all part of building a strong organization that can publicly represent the community's

interests. The annual public convention is the culmination of the Alinsky organizing process.

The first annual convention of the East Toledo Community Organization in 1979 was preceded

by flyers emphasizing the neglect of the east side of Toledo by city government, broken

promises from officials, the victories of initial organizing, and the unity developing in the

community. ETCO mailed packets across East Toledo that produced 500 registrants for the

meeting. At the meeting itself the 500-1000 people gathered passed 13 resolutions covering

dangerous rail crossings, park maintenance, utility complaints, service shortages, truck traffic,

and many other issues (Stoecker, 1995).

In the Alinsky model, the organizer isn't there just to win a few issues, but to build an enduring

organization that can continue to claim power and resources for the community--to represent

the community in a public sphere pluralist polity. The organizer shouldn't start from scratchbut from the community's pre-existing organizational base of churches, service organizations,

clubs, etc. In many cases, the community organizations created also spawn community-based

services such as credit unions, daycare, etc. This is not a process to be taken lightly or with few

resources. Alinsky often insisted that, before he would work with a community, they had to

raise $150,000 to cover three years of expenses (Lancourt 1979). When Ed Chambers took

over the Industrial Areas Foundation from Alinsky, he required $160,000 just to cover startup

costs for a serious organizing project (Industrial Areas Foundation 1978). For Alinsky, the

organization itself was part of the tactical repertoire of community organizing. Dave Beckwith,

an Alinsky-style organizer with the Center for Community Change, also argues for the

centrality of the organization.

If an organization doesn't grow, it will die...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. (Beckwith n.d., 13)


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The presence, and partial restriction, of women in the private sphere leads the women-

centered organizing model to emphasize a very different organizing process formed around

creating an ideal private-sphere-like setting rather than a large public sphere organization. The

process begins by creating a safe and nurturing space where women can identify and discuss

issues effecting the private sphere (Gutierrez, l990). This model uses the small group to

establish trust, and build "informality, respect, [and] tolerance of spontaneity" (Hamilton l991,

44). The civil rights organizer, Ella Baker, was dubious about the long-term value of mass

meetings, lobbying and demonstrations. Instead, she advocated organizing people in small

groups so that they could understand their potential power and how best to use it, which had

a powerful influence on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Britton l968; Payne

l989).7 Small groups create an atmosphere that affirms each participant's contribution,

provides the time for individuals to share, and makes it possible for participants to listen

carefully to each other (Stall, 1993). Gutierrez and Lewis (l992 126) affirm that, "The small

group provides the ideal environment for exploring the social and political aspects of

`personal' problems and for developing strategies for work toward social change". Moreover,smaller group settings create and sustain the relationship building and sense of significance

and solidarity so integral to community.8 Women in Organizing (WIO), a 1990s urban-based

project, organized twelve low income, African-American teenage mothers to gain self-

sufficiency and political empowerment. One of the organizing staff described the effort of this

"Young Moms Program":

Our work is about connecting women with each other, about transforming their experience in

terms of working with mixed groups of people of different races, about building the confidence

of individual women and building the strengths of groups....All of our work is really about

leadership development of women, of learning more of how consciousness develops, of how

we can collectively change the world.

While WIO did help these women to organize an advocacy meeting with public officials, the

meeting was preceded by nearly five months of training sessions that addressed less

traditional issues such as personal growth and advocacy in the family, as well as more

traditional organizing issues (Stall, 1993).

Because there is less focus on immediate public sphere action in the women-centered model,

a continuing organization is not as central in initial organizing. In place of the focus on

organization building are "modest struggles" ----"small, fragmented, and sometimes

contradictory efforts by people to change their lives" (Krauss l983, 54). These short-lived

collective actions (e.g., planting a community garden, opening a daycare, organizing a public

meeting) are often begun by loosely organized groups. The organizing efforts of the African-

American women in South Central Los Angeles, described earlier, functioned for a year and a


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half without any formal leadership structure. Their model depended on a rotating chair,

stymying the media's hunger for a "spokesperson" (Hamilton, l991, p. 44; see also Ferguson,

l984). If empowerment is "a process aimed at consolidating, maintaining, or changing the

nature and distribution of power in a particular cultural context" (Bookman and Morgen l988,

4), modest struggles are a significant factor in this process. Engagement in modest resistance

allows women to immediately alter their community and gain a sense of control over their

lives. Attention to these struggles is necessary in order to understand the more elusive process

of resistance that takes place beneath the surface and outside of what have conventionally

been defined as community organizing, social protest, or social movements (Feldman and Stall,

1994). Women can achieve significant change in their neighborhoods by building on the

domestic sphere and its organization, rather than separating it from their public activities

(Clark l994).. Research on New York City co-op apartment tenants in the 1980s, found that the

tenant leaders were almost always women, the majority were African-American and were

long-time residents of their building and their community (Leavitt and Saegert l990; Clark

l994). These women organizers/leaders applied skills they had learned and used to sustain

their own families to the larger sphere of the building. They often met around kitchen tables

and they made building-wide decisions with the same ethic of personal care that they appliedto friends and family. Many of the tenant meetings included food made by different women

residents who equated sharing their dish with the recognition of their role. The style and

success of organizing was rooted in aspects of the social life within buildings and on a gender-

based response to home and community. They discusses rent payment and eviction issues in

terms of the situations of each tenant involved, and searched for alternatives that supported

residents' overall lives as well as ensured that good decisions were made for the building as a

whole (Clark l994:943).

CONCLUSION: SEPARATE MODELS, LINKED ISSUES

We see the differences in these two models as at least partly the result of the historical split of

family and community life into public and private spheres as U.S. industrial capitalism

destroyed Colonial-era community-based enterprise and forced men to work outside of the

home and away from the community (Tilly and Scott 1978). The competitive, aggressive,

distrustful, confrontational culture of the public sphere contrasts starkly with the nurturant,

connected, relationship-building and care-taking ideal of the private sphere. Clearly the

emphasis on conflict, opposition, separation, and winning in the Alinsky model reflects public

sphere culture. And just as clearly the emphasis on nurturance, connectedness, and

relationship-building in the women-centered model reflects private sphere culture (Cott l977).

The fact that for nearly four decades the Alinsky model was the preserve of male organizers,

and training in the Alinsky model was controlled by men for even longer, while the women-

centered model developed in settings closer to the domestic sphere often among groups of

women, reflects and has influenced the development of these differences (Stall, 1991; ECCO

1989).


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In the disinvestment and deindustrialization that has come with global capitalism, each model

is as weak by itself as a nuclear family with a full-time male breadwinner and a full-time female

homemaker. As corporations either disinvested wholesale from their host communities or

downsized their local workforce, they forced women into wage-earning positions to make up

for male wage losses, leading to pressures on men to take on more private sphere tasks. In

poor communities that disinvestment left devastation--neighborhoods without businesses,

services, or safety. Indeed, many urban neighborhoods of the 1980s and 1990s were no longer

communities at all, but only collections of medium and high density housing with few

sustainable social relationships. In this kind of a setting, gender-segregated organizing models

can work no better than gender-segregated family members. Imagine trying to employ the

Alinsky model organizing young moms who are socially isolated and exhausted from the daily

grind of trying to make ends meet. The masculine confrontational style of the Alinsky model,

that must assume prior community bonds so it can move immediately into public sphere

action, may be disabling for certain grass-roots organizing efforts, "particularly in domains

where women are a necessary constituency" (Lawson and Barton l990, 49). The de-emphasis

on relationship building in the Alinsky model will mean that, where neighborhoods are less and

less communities, and the people in them are less and less empowered, the community canengage the battle but not sustain it. Large organizations may in fact inhibit empowerment

because they are not "likely to offer the kind of nurturing of individual growth that smaller

ones can provide, and may be especially off-putting to members of low-income communities,

where the predominant style of relating to individuals is still prebureaucratic" (Payne 1989,

894). Consequently, internal power struggles will threaten many Alinsky-style organizations in

these settings.

At the same time, the problems that poor communities face today cannot be solved at the

private sphere or local levels. The women-centered model, consequently, is also weak by itself.First is the risk that postponing public sphere confrontation with a white patriarchal capitalist

elite will maintain the vulnerability of at-risk communities, because white patriarchal

capitalists don't play fair. While women-centered organizers are concentrating on personal

empowerment--a process which cannot be rushed--the bulldozers could be coming. One

criticism of consciousness-raising in the women's movement is that it doesn't translate into

action very effectively (Cassell l989, 55; Ferree and Hess 1985, 64-67; Freeman, 1975). Indeed,

those risks appeared very pronounced in the Young Moms program described above. When

the program was threatened with a staff lay-off, organized resistance was difficult to mobilize.

But they also appeared in the Wentworth Gardens case where the maintaining a community-

run on-site grocery store became difficult as warehouses refused to deliver to what they saw

as a `dangerous' neighborhood. And they appeared in Cedar-Riverside as a community clinic

saw its funding cut and had to reduce services. Both communities had shifted away from

confrontational, Alinsky-style tactics to meet these issues and were consequently unable to

establish effective campaigns against these threats. The creation, nurturance, and

maintenance of community in the face of forces which threaten to destroy it--through neglect,

disinvestment, or disdain--is an act of resistance. It is a blow against the power structure just

to survive (Hill Collins l991; hooks l990). But the women-centered model may not work when

outside forces consciously attempt to destroy the community through any means available.


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There is also a danger that this model may degenerate into a social service program, reducing

participants to clients. This tendency is what the settlement house movement, and the

subsequent "social work" version of community organizing, has been criticized for.9

Today, global capitalism also creates a new set of challenges for community organizing thatrequires drawing on both models. With footloose capital that can make broad-reaching

decisions, and can hop around at the slightest sign of resistance from a local community,

community organizing must build even stronger relationships and interpersonal ties at the

local level, and mobilize those communities for even more forceful public sphere actions. You

can't do an action at your local bank, because your local bank is owned by a corporation

hundreds of miles or more away. Organizing to counteract and control global corporations

requires at least national and probably international coalitions. At the same time, you must

organize locally or there will not be a strong enough base on which to build anything larger.

Building relationships that are rooted in strong local bases, that can then be linked together,

requires both models. Julian Rappaport (1981) describes the "paradox of empowerment" as

the need to organize simultaneously at the personal and structural levels. True communities

(with strong networks, culture, mutual support systems, etc.) under siege from identifiable

sources need to engage in confrontational campaigns to defend themselves, and will probably

benefit most from emphasizing the Alinsky model. Communities that really are not

communities--that lack the networks, culture, support systems and other qualities--require

first the foundation that the women-centered model can provide to prevent self-destructive

oligarchies. But in both cases the other model cannot be neglected. The tension created by the

Alinsky model challenges the strongest community bonds and requires compensating

strategies of relationship building and personal empowerment. And as much as a strong

community provides the foundation for a strong defense, when a threat presents itself, the

community has to be able to respond effectively. This integration of the two models also mustbe done very carefully. You can't just add together an Alinsky organizing process with a

women-centered leadership model, for example. Rather, integration needs to occur across

each principle so that the models are combined. Ella Baker's comments that "real organizing"

is working in small groups with people so that they can discover their competencies, and then

"parlaying those into larger groups" (Britton l968, 67) is an example of bringing together the

organizing process components of the Alinsky and women-centered models.

Careful attention to history also shows there are times when one model will be more viable

than the other. Robert Fisher (1984) showed a see-sawing between more militant and more

community-building periods of community organizing which seem to correspond to

progressive and reactionary periods in history. The transformation of Alinsky-style community

organizing efforts in the Reagan 1980s into community development efforts, and the

"discovery" of women-centered organizing during that same period, may also support the

contention that the two types of organizing may be more effective under different conditions.

Reactionary periods such as the 1980s force social movements into "abeyance" (Taylor 1989)

where the maintenance of community bonds and the provision of emotional support become


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paramount, since public sphere action seems ineffectual. In these periods, the women-

centered model sustains the possibility for future public sphere action. Certainly, in the wake

of the deindustrialization and devastation of inner city communities there is a tremendous

need to rebuild communities of place. Mary Pardo (1990, 6) notes that "The issues traditionally

addressed by women--health, housing, sanitation, and the urban environment--have moved to

center stage as capitalist urbanization progresses." Community organizing today faces special

challenges, as the targets are no longer visible and local. As we move into the next century, if

women-centered organizing succeeds in rebuilding community bonds, aspects of the Alinsky

model may again become applicable. Some social workers are trying to resurrect the

professions community organizing roots (Specht and Courtney, 1994) and are calling for a

return to the empowerment model ala Piven and Cloward (1979). And the realization that

global economic processes continually threaten local communities may provide for a new

round of social movement activity.

NOTES

1Alinsky, along with Fred Ross, were instrumental in organizing "educationals" in California

that used a popular education process to support the organizing process. These educationals

produced the first woman organizer hired by Alinsky, and the first organizing effort targeting

women specifically (Finks, 1984:68-71).

2This is not to say that Alinsky avoided a focus on private sphere issues. His first successful

organizing attempt, in Back of the Yards, produced a well-baby clinic, a credit union, and a hot

lunch program (Finks 1984, 21). But these programs were accomplished through public sphere

strategizing, not private relationships. In establishing and maintaining the hot lunch program,

Alinsky pushed the organization to understand its relationship to the national hot lunch

program and "In order to fight for their own Hot Lunch project they would have to fight for

every Hot Lunch project in every part of the United States" (Alinsky 1969, 168).

3In Bullard's (1993) study of nine cases of grassroots community groups fighting proposed

toxic industrial sites, incinerators, or hazardous waste landfills, seven of these communities

were organized by women. These women improved "the environments of day to day life" by

utilizing family, ethnic, and community networks, creating a sense of community commitment

and connection (Wekerle l996, 141).


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4Sometimes, indigenous organizers did develop. Fred Ross's work in the Southwest, for

example, produced an indigenous organizer by the name of Cesar Chavez (Reitzes and Reitzes

1987a).

5Fish (l986) distinguishes the Hull House mentoring model from the traditional mentor modelbased on an unequal distribution of power between an older gatekeeper or instructor and an

apprentice. The mentor model at Hull House, rather than a dyad, included a larger support

system characterized by a network of egalitarian relationships and shared visibility that

provided both public and private supports for the women involved.

6The Civil Rights leader, Ella Jo Baker, throughout her life modeled group-centered leadership,

stating that, "Strong people don't need strong leaders," (Cantarow and O'Malley l980, 53). At

one point Ms. Baker shared, "I have always thought what is needed is the development of

people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among

other people (Baker l973, 352).

7A quote from Payne (l989, 892-893) about Ella Baker's views shows the distinct position of

the women-centered model on how the organizing is done, versus the immediate, visible

outcome.

How many people show up for a rally may matter less than how much the people who

organize the rally learn from doing so. If the attempt to organize the rally taught themanything about the mechanics of organizing, if the mere act of trying caused them to grow in

self-confidence, if the organizers developed stronger bonds among themselves from striving

together, then the rally may have been a success even if no one showed up for it. As she said,

"You're organizing people to be self-sufficient rather than to be dependent upon the

charismatic leader.

8Tom Gaudette, in rebuilding the Alinsky-style Organization for a Better Austin, started by

creating small groups, but for the purpose of targeting issues and building a larger organization

(Bailey l972:66), rather than to empower individuals as the women-centered model does.

9To the extent that service provision can be organized through indigenous leaders, or

"centerwomen", and the goal of empowerment sustained, this tendency can be countered.

The Young Moms organizer explains, "I think social service programs for the African American

community are really extended families that you are now getting paid to be [part of]. So if you

look at it like that, it's really not about the numbers....It's about being there when the people


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need you." Gilkes (l988) discusses how women social service workers who live and work in

Black communities are fashioning new organizational structures and practices and

transforming old ones--rebeling against the traditional human service practices (e.g.

impersonal, instrumental, bureaucratic) and restructuring their organizational settings to make

them "Black-oriented" (56).

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Community Organizing or Organizing Community (Stall Stoecker 1997)