Abstract
Community organizing (CO) in the USA has a long and rich history dating back to at least the 1930s. It has taken a range of forms and approaches but a guiding theme is that paid organizers work with local volunteer leaders, usually from low-income communities, to build local peoples’ capacity to influence change. This is often ‘patient long term work’ spanning decades with the aim of building what Warren and Mapp call a sustainable ‘political constituency’ capable not only of demanding real change but of contributing to improvement efforts as constructive and powerful partners (p. 5).
In A Match on Dry Grass, Warren and Mapp, seek to explore the application of CO to educational inequalities among historically marginalized communities in the USA. From the 1990s CO began to more closely recognize the importance of education and so extend an interest in jobs, housing and neighbourhoods to schools. About 500 groups across the USA are now estimated to have an educational focus. Warren and Mapp are particularly interested in the goals and aspirations that CO has for schooling and what key organizing strategies CO employs when focused on educational change. They set out six detailed case studies of CO groups that have sustained community action over a significant period of time. Researched by graduate students, the case studies form the central chapters of the book and focus in turn on CO groups in San Jose, Los Angeles, Denver, the Mississippi Delta, Chicago and New York City.
Each case study shows the context specific work of organizers as they build local leadership for action. Local aims include increasing funding for public education, addressing over crowding in school, responding to health problems among children and developing parent leadership in schools. In San Jose, California, for instance, a group called People Acting in Community Together (PACT) has organized from the 1970s out of several local Catholic churches in the poor Latino Alum Rock district. From 2000, PACT began to focus on education and recruited an organiser with experience of creating new schools. PACT successfully pressured the district into writing a ‘new autonomous in-district schools’ policy that it then used to set up three small schools (two primary and one middle) to serve its three main church communities. The process, described in detail, included building of a parent network through small listening meetings, a joint design process for each school between parents, organizers and prospective school staff and targeted actions to respond to a subsequent district backlash against school autonomy.
Across the case studies’ diversity, Warren and Mapp are keen to stress common themes and strategies that emerge. These include, first, a focus on shared history and identity. Beyond local geography CO needs, they argue, ‘people to be connected to each other and to recognize those connections as significant in their lives’ (p. 19) so that they ‘have a shared sense of fate’ at the hands of injustice and a shared ‘sense of belonging’ (p. 20). The authors recognize that this ‘might sound’ rather idealized and so argue ‘shared fate’ may not exist clearly prior to organizing. Rather, and this is a key point, it is the job of organizing itself to make more salient people’s sense of connection to their community traditions so as to build a network capable of action.
The shared values and connections that are sought out vary by group but also fit closely with one or more of the organizing tradition on which CO commonly draws. These include: a tradition developed from Saul Alinksy’s work in 1930s Chicago, with a focus on organizing through existing faith congregations; a Civil Rights tradition, typified by Ella Baker’s concern for combining skill training with political education and consciousness for liberation; a feminist tradition, which highlights the importance of relationships and an ethic of care together with a focus on local leaders rather than external activists; a new immigrant tradition with a focus on immigrant citizenship rights.
Building on one (or more) of these traditions, organizers work explicitly to strengthen existing relationships and build and extend local networks. This is done meticulously as it is networks, and their capacity to mobilise people to take action, in which the political strength and social capital of CO lie. Organizer help volunteers to develop the skills to bring other members of their communities together. Foundational work includes small group meetings to share stories of marginalization and inequality. The process develops a core group of new community leaders capable of developing an agenda for action and negotiating, collaborating and pressuring for change with public officials.
The aims of these actions are commonly transformational. CO groups are shown to involve themselves in education not only to improve public education but also ‘as part of a larger process of developing leaders and building power for communities to address poverty and marginalistion’ themselves. Specific educational aims are important, but are usually secondary to local people building long-term collective power ‘to influence the social and political processes that determine their fate’ (p. 32).
The way such transformational work is exemplified and conceptualized is particularly interesting. Warren and Mapp describe the creative tensions that exist between CO groups and teaching professionals. Organizers and local parent leaders have had to learn that demanding change in schools is different to demanding change in policy. They have often adapted their strategies to become partners with professionals and have sought out relational power, that is ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over’. Groups may still need to hold community actions to pressure professionals at particular points, but they also seek power by building new relationships with the local state and crucially by developing their own knowledge of education as a means to influence it.
This, Warren and Mapp argue, offers a different paradigm to the ‘typical approach of school reformers’ who seek change in low-income communities by focusing (narrowly) on improving school outcomes. The CO alternative is located, they argue, at the interaction between the inclusive and collaborative approach to community schooling of John Dewey and the critical social inquiry and consciousness of Paolo Freire. Viewed in this way, the engagement of CO with schooling offers potentially a very different perspective on society–state relations to that of either the state-market preoccupations of the ‘Third Way’ or the society-market focus of the ‘Big Society’. Rather than civil action to replace a diminished state, CO appears in this account to be a mechanism through which low income communities can organize themselves to work with (and pressure) the state to better respond to their needs and interests.
There are however several critical questions on which A Match on Dry Grass remains relatively silent. While we gain a perspective on the politics of local change efforts, the case studies offer predominately a positive/descriptive perspective on CO. For instance, despite recognition of the active role of CO in re-creating a sense of community, we hear less about how particular norms and values inherent in communities are prioritized and imagined by organizers and volunteers. It is possible, for instance, for communities to strive for social justice while simultaneously promoting conservative values that oppress or disempower some of their members. Equally communities can strive for their own inclusion while simultaneously being themselves exclusive and divisive. Despite the democratic tendencies of CO it is less clear whether and how these tensions are resolved. In this account, CO can come to feel very cohesive, without ongoing intra-network tensions, foundational class/race/faith/gender debates, inter-personal and organizer/volunteer conflicts or member exit.
Finally, while the authors state that the impact of CO is not a focus of the research, it would be useful in such detailed case studies to have greater evidence of the outcomes for both student learning and collective well-being and social capital. This is especially so given that the benefits of CO may accrue or be accessed differently across a community so that intra-community class/gender/ethnicity inequalities persist. Learning how CO groups analyse and respond to these complexities would be intriguing. In summary, then, the book will be of interest to all those concerned with collective action for progressive change, but it may leave readers with nearly as many questions as answers.
Rob Higham
Institute of Education, London