Definition
Community organizing is the practice of building durable, locally-led associations of residents who together apply pressure on institutions — landlords, agencies, mayors, federal departments — that affect their neighborhoods. The technique was pioneered in 1930s Chicago by Saul Alinsky, matured through the postwar fights against urban renewal and expressway construction, and provided much of the practical methodology of the 1960s civil-rights and anti-poverty movements.
In The Power Broker community organizing is the principal force that eventually breaks Robert Moses's invulnerability. The Greenwich Village mothers who stopped the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the East Tremont residents who fought the Cross-Bronx route, the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway — these are organized communities, not merely outraged ones.
Why it matters
How it works
A community organizer's craft has four parts. First, identify the actual leaders who already exist in the neighborhood — the church deacons, the school PTA presidents, the long-tenured small-business owners — and build the campaign around their networks rather than around outside leadership. Second, name a specific, winnable target ("stop this expressway") rather than a diffuse grievance ("end urban renewal"). Third, train people in the skills of public meeting, press contact, and political demand. Fourth, win something concrete early to build the confidence and the institutional memory for the harder fights to come.
The technique works because institutions are designed to manage routine inputs — written comments, polite letters, individual constituents. Organized communities deliver inputs the institution is not designed to process: hundreds of people at a public hearing, coordinated press timing, allies inside other institutions. Moses's career ended in significant part because the city had grown a community-organizing infrastructure he had spent thirty years pretending did not exist.