HHS 201 Introduction to Human Services Wk5

Chapter 13 Organizing and Changing Systems

13.1 Getting to the Source of the Problem

We can think of no better way to start this chapter on organizing and changing systems than by retelling a parable attributed to the late Saul Alinsky, who was one of this country’s most imaginative and dedicated community change agents (Alinsky, 1969, 1971).

A Parable

A woman is taking a stroll along a riverbank. Suddenly she hears a cry for help and jumps into the water to rescue a drowning man. After saving the first man, she is forced to jump back into the river to save another and then still another. After she has dragged four men from the river, she looks around in disgust and starts to leave. An onlooker says, “Hey, I see another guy in the water, where are you going?” She replies, “I can’t hang around here all day long rescuing drowning victims. I’m going upstream to stop the son of a bitch who’s pushing them all in.”

Stopping Problems at their Source

The point Alinsky is making is that it is never enough to just rescue victims from their troubles, important as that is. We have to try to change the situations that are creating their problems. Then, hopefully, we can cut off the problem at its source so that new victims are not constantly being produced.

For those of you who are mechanically inclined, visualize a machine that makes Ping-Pong balls. Every once in a while, it goofs and produces one that is not round enough. A worker tosses the defective balls into a bin. Later on, another worker takes the odd-shaped balls out of the reject pile and tries to round them off. But it would save time and money in the long run if they fixed the machine so that it did not make so many mistakes.

To translate this analogy into human service work, we will describe the case of Marty, a young adult of Mexican American background. He was raised on a run-down farm on the wrong side of the tracks in a rural community. He attended a substandard elementary school that did not stimulate him. When his mother needed surgery and his family lost their farm because they could not pay the mortgage, Marty was forced to drop out of high school and seek work. He soon discovered that the few jobs available in his town were given to people who had more skills or education than he did. He found that luck and chance and connections played a part also.

Marty had always tinkered with old cars and was a natural mechanic. But the garage owner held stereotypes about people from the Mexican American community—he was convinced that all Chicanos were lazy and dishonest. As a result, when a job at the garage became available, Marty was rejected.

Marty became depressed about his bleak future and found momentary relief in drugs. Once he became so frustrated that he lashed out, vandalizing the garage. He got caught and was then enmeshed in the criminal justice system. He spent two months in jail, where he was brutalized by both his cellmate and a guard. By the time the probation worker encountered Marty, he needed a whole series of direct-care and counseling strategies to overcome his addiction and rehabilitate his shattered self-esteem. Now he also had a jail record holding him back.

This young man’s problems might have been prevented if there had been:

Decent housing in an integrated area

Adequate education, both academic and vocational

Affordable health insurance

Mortgage assistance to save family farms

Drug and alcohol education

Job-training and placement programs

Protection from discriminatory employment practices

A criminal justice system with the resources to protect and rehabilitate offenders

The lack of these basic services helped create and maintain Marty’s situation. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, his problems kept getting bigger. In their book Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need, Axinn and Stern (2007) conclude that poor people too often come off as second best—scapegoats for circumstances beyond their control.

Human service workers cannot change all the dysfunctional systems that impinge on the Martys of our country. Nor is it likely that they can change one system in a massive way. But all of us can, in our daily work, create small yet significant improvements in the social systems that surround our clients.

What Can One Worker Do?

When working with Marty, we might find that helping him file a complaint against a discriminatory employer has two major outcomes. First, it gives him the feeling that he can take some control over his destiny. Second, if he succeeds in winning the case, not only will he get a badly needed job, but other Mexican Americans who follow him may also find it possible to work there. If this young man joins a group of citizens who succeed in bringing bilingual and multicultural programs to the local elementary school, that might improve the life chances of his neighbor’s children also.

Filing a grievance when you believe a law or regulation is not working properly and drafting a proposal and lobbying for funds to start a program to fill an unmet social need are examples of strategies for organizing and changing systems. They support our efforts to deliver direct services to people.

These strategies rely on the same activities and skills as do direct-service strategies. They start with carefully collecting data, contracting, and building a trusting relationship. Worker acts flow out of well-designed and well-monitored action plans and are refined through reflection and evaluation. Although there are many similarities between direct-care and systems-change interventions, there are, of course, some significant differences in emphasis.

13.2 Checking on the Mental Health Quotient (Mhq) of a System

A counselor trying to help a child who is experiencing difficulty in school begins by seeking information about the child’s health, family situation, and scores on achievement and IQ (intelligence quotient) tests. Many stop at that point, only seeking out the causal factors within the child and the family. But we believe that the hunt for relevant insights cannot stop there. The competent worker must go on further, to look at the system in which the child is functioning. The worker must gather data about the MHQ (mental health quotient) of that student’s classroom and school. We must always look at both the internal and the external sources of stress. Ultimately we will need to intervene in both sets of forces.

Traditionally, workers in this field have often neglected the second step, looking at the system. It was the community mental health movement, with its focus on integrating institutionalized people back into the community that alerted us to the need to seek causality beyond the client. The civil rights struggles of the 1960s also convinced us that the problems individuals face could be made better or worse by forces exerted by their environments.

You can grasp this concept of the “system-as-problem-producer” if you think back to a time when you watched people rudely shoving each other in order to grab a cab at the airport—tempers flared, and anxiety levels rose as each person struggled to outmaneuver the others. Clearly, the environment with its chaotic method of allocating benefits exerts a negative impact on otherwise reasonably polite people. If a sensible airport manager inaugurated a system in which numbers are assigned to passengers in some equitable way, everyone could relax. It might take time to get a cab, but each person would be sure that his or her turn was coming. A passenger could risk leaving the line for a moment to carry the luggage of an elderly man or to help a harried mother with a toddler in a stroller and a heavy suitcase.

The airport analogy holds true for the bakery, the baseball game, the classroom, and any other environment in which people seek services or goods. All of us have the potential to act in a variety of negative and positive ways. What is it in an environment that brings out the best and worst in you?

Human service delivery systems—their rules, routines, and personality conflicts—all need to be examined. We must develop our personal method of measuring the MHQ of a system. For example, before we begin to plan counseling interventions for the little girl who runs around her classroom fighting with her classmates, we should check the organizational climate of her classroom and school. Some places are so disorganized or mindlessly rigid that they encourage disruptive behavior in a child who has some tendency in that direction. In a more sensibly organized environment, she might behave quite appropriately.

After we observe a client in a classroom or in a hospital ward, we might conclude that certain characteristics of the environment seem to be producing problems rather than solving them. Thus the system, rather than the client, should be the major focus of our change efforts. Yet despite recognition of this fact, research indicates that workers often continue to try to change the client by counseling, rather than change the environment by using organizing interventions (Brager, 2002, Brager, Specht, & Torczyner, 1987; Kahn, 1995).

Ryan, in his classic book Blaming the Victim (1976), asserts that focusing change efforts on the client rather than on the system that is malfunctioning leads us to design social programs that are at best irrelevant and at worst deceptively cruel. Why are so many human service workers unable to confront honestly the primary causes of a client’s problem? We think one reason is that workers tend to accept society’s negative attitudes toward social activism, even though social activism is required if systems are ever to change for the better.

3.3 Attitudes Toward Systems-Change Interventions

As we grew up, many of us might have heard adults in our families declare:

You can’t fight city hall!

It’s not what you know but who you know!

Good guys finish last!

Well-brought-up people (especially females) don’t make waves or rock the boat!

These homespun bromides encourage us to believe that working for change in a rational way is virtually impossible. Stereotypes of change agents encourage us to shy away from that role. One prominent stereotype depicts change agents as cartoon-character 1960s activists and bomb-throwing anarchists, bearded, grubby, and deranged. Or they are depicted as naive Don Quixotes, futilely tilting at windmills. On the other side lie the stereotypes that depict change agents as saintly crusaders—Joan of Arc or Mother Teresa. Perhaps you have assumed that change agents must be charismatic leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., or President John F. Kennedy. That, too, is a stereotype.

change agents

Workers who use their skills to bring about change in an unhealthy agency or situation, either alone or in concert with others.

When people see human service workers walking a picket line or speaking out at a school board meeting, they are often shocked by such aggressiveness. Activists are often accused by their own colleagues of behaving unprofessionally (Reeser & Epstein, 1990).

The social critic George Bernard Shaw has given us a fitting answer to that accusation. He often declared that reasonable people adapted themselves to the world as it was. Only the unreasonable ones persisted in trying to get the world to change. Thus, all progress depends on unreasonable people! We agree with Shaw and hope that there will be times when you decide you must take a strong stand on behalf of a client, despite an accusation that you are being “unreasonable.”

Bertha Reynolds (1963), one of the outstanding leaders in the history of the profession of social work, argued that it is the obligation of social workers to take partisan political stands and work for structured change in the socioeconomic system.

To paint an accurate picture of change agents, we must discard all our preconceptions of who they are and what they do. We need to explore our ambivalent attitudes toward social change. Then we will need to replace the unrealistic attitudes with the conviction that each of us should use our skills to bring about change in a system, just as we do in a counseling intervention.

Working to change an unhealthy system raises unique value dilemmas for the human service worker, especially for one who is accustomed to delivering direct services to clients. The following is a look at what can happen to some of our basic attitudes and values when a worker takes on an adversarial or confrontational role. As you read about the day-to-day tasks of a human service worker who uses all the techniques we will be discussing in this chapter, see if you can spot the moments of potential conflicts.

This statement is adapted from one written by a pastor who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. It eloquently warns us that if we do not try to stop injustice when it starts, it will spread and eventually engulf each of us.

Interview Ed Wong: Staff Worker for Citizen Action for the Environment (CAFTE)

Citizens Action for the Environment (CAFTE) is a citywide, citizen-based environmental advocacy organization. We combine independent research projects, practical ideas, and tough-minded advocacy to overcome the opposition of powerful special interests and the lack of knowledge (and often low commitment) of the average town resident.

These are the main tasks in my job description:

Build coalitions with local, state, and national environmental, labor, farming, and consumer organizations; identify and mobilize concerned citizens; and reach out to new constituencies to build our base of support in this town and state-wide.

While it is important for Edward and other environmental activists to confront those who pollute our air, water, and soil, it is equally as important to honor those who strive to undo past damage and protect our planet for future generations.

Generate media attention and build public awareness. Organize at least one major news conference per month; meet with reporters throughout the town and the region; conduct TV and radio interviews, update our blog and conduct workshops with various groups, including schools, chambers of commerce, other merchant groups, religious institutions, and civic organizations.

Lobby decision makers and expand our political base by building relationships with elected officials and candidates and demonstrate broad public support for our positions through letter-writing drives, e-mail activism, appearing at campaign events, and conducting meetings with decision makers.

Build the organization by increasing membership and recruiting and orienting volunteers and other small grassroots groups that share our mission.

This looks like an overwhelming job description, but as with every other job in the human service field, you take it one step at a time, and of course I don’t work alone.

Although I am the only paid staff member of CAFTE, we have an active board and an advisory committee. Both of these groups include professors from the local colleges, engineers and architects who specialize in environment issues, sympathetic politicians, and merchants and other leaders of groups in town who really care about what is happening not only to the town of Riverside but also to the whole world.

You probably wonder how a recent college graduate who majored in human services ended up in this kind of job. Well, I have to admit I am also amazed at times by my choice. When I was a student intern and in fact during most of my teenage years, I was involved in issues of homelessness. I volunteered for a food pantry and did overnight shifts at a shelter for men and women who had no place to sleep. Some of my friends were involved in environmental issues, and frankly I thought those activities were a way to avoid dealing with the more important problems of poverty, racism, mental illness, disability, and so forth.

I have since learned that mine was a pretty typical response to the word green. For many years the term green was defined—probably by folks like me who disparaged it—as “ultraliberal,” “elitist,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” a “girlie-man issue,” and alarmist. In an article in the New York Times titled “The Power of Green” (2007), Thomas Friedman argues that the wars in the Middle East revolved so much about the supply of oil; documentary films like An Inconvenient Truth (Gore & West, 2006) as well as popular books by Bill McKibben (2007a, 2007b) have pushed the terms green, global warming, and climate change onto Main Street. The reality is that the earth’s weather is changing with some alarming consequences, and the supply of natural resources, such as fossil fuels, is not endless. In some parts of the world, there isn’t enough water to sustain agriculture, thereby increasing famine, and in other places, the waters are rising and threatening to flood islands. The implications of these changes are not just on a few people but on the whole world. It might be that civil unrest will rise if these consequences continue.

green

Those products, services, or other kinds of activities that exert no negative impact on the health of people and on the environment.

On a more individual level, the evidence of climate change and its impact is reaching home. I read in a small-town newspaper that the maple syrup harvesters in Vermont are complaining that with the increasingly warmer weather in the fall, the yield of maple syrup has gone down by as much as 10 percent. Most of us couldn’t help but notice with surprise that within the last few years in the United States, we have experienced some of the hottest winters on record. Once very skeptical, Americans in large bi-partisan numbers now say that the heating of the earth’s atmosphere is having a serious effect on the polar ice caps now or will soon, and they think that it is necessary to take immediate steps to reduce its effects (Broder & Connelly, 2007).

My coming to understand the gravity of the situation was a result of joining the Sierra Club and the Appalachian Mountain Club because I love to hike with others. Both organizations publish magazines for members. I began to realize that although all human service issues are vital, our need to protect our forests and rivers is not “elite.” It is a matter of keeping the air pure enough so we can continue to breathe and so our kids will have a livable planet.

Although my job description sounds monumental and I do work hard, it is not overwhelming. I take my job one step at a time and day by day. The members of my board set the priorities. This keeps me from being spread too thin and ultimately not accomplishing anything. Since I cooperate with a host of other groups, their programs often determine where I will invest my energy for a period of time.

These are some of the things I have worked on in the past few months:

Helped publicize and recruit volunteers for a town-wide park cleanup day.

Wrote an article and held three forums on ways to cut down on energy consumption both in stores and in private homes.

Spearheaded a campaign to get the local big-box retailer to cut back on packaging on some of its products and to promote the sale of low-energy light bulbs.

Wrote a proposal that gained funding for the town to plant 400 trees in parts of town that are noticeably not very green. (Naturally, these were in the more economically disadvantaged areas.) This isn’t just for beauty; it helps the air we breathe and creates shade in summer months.

Wrote an article for the local newspaper on new technologies for solar and wind power. Many people don’t realize that the costs of these technologies are decreasing, and other countries are doing major projects using the sun and wind.

Attended a benefit screening of An Inconvenient Truth to raise money for Earth Day activities in six different locations in town.

Participated in a demonstration by the local biking advocacy group to try to convince the town to set aside a bike lane each time they have to do construction on the streets.

Organized a panel for the homeowners’ association on ways to insulate homes and on the use of programmable thermostats.

Participated in a successful campaign to convince the supermarkets to make paper bags more available to shoppers and to have the checkout clerks suggest them as the first choice in bagging (instead of the plastic bags that don’t biodegrade).

Attended board meetings of the town-wide recycling committee to represent our group and lend support to their efforts to increase recycling of cans, plastic, and paper.

Gave a talk at the high school on our need to cut carbon emissions, highlighting the plans already proposed by a few cities in the United States. This was an effort to let the future generation know that the problems are not insurmountable and to encourage the students to start a green club in their school—and maybe choose environmental studies if they go on to college.

I use all the strategies I studied in college, but of course it is the organizing ones I use the most. Skills like active listening come in handy when I am in a meeting with a company executive. I also use preparatory empathy when I am in a situation where I know I will be up against resistance. (I tried to go in prepared with answers to questions I thought they would ask when we lobbied for the bike lanes.) Proposal-writing skills and research are vital in this job.

I am not sure what I am going to be doing in the future, but for now, I could not be more excited about the job I chose. I feel that I am working in a small way on a very monumental problem. And I still have the time and incentive to hike in the woods on the weekends.

13.4 Dilemmas of the Change Agent

Very Often, the Worker Must Choose Sides

If we believe that the needs of one group are being neglected and the needs of another are given an unfair advantage or that one of our clients is being punished by an unjust rule or an unresponsive bureaucrat, we are making a judgment of right and wrong. When, for example, a human service worker helps a group of tenants who have been living with inhuman conditions organize a rent strike, he or she is taking sides in the struggle between landlords and tenants. Although he or she might realize that the landlord will have a temporary cash-flow problem when rent money is withheld, if he or she is convinced that the tenants are being exploited, he or she cannot expend much of his or her energy worrying about the landlord’s problems. But he or she has been trained to be empathetic and caring to everyone!

Of course, such adversarial situations can also occur when a worker is counseling or doing recreation work. But in an organizing advocacy job, they occur with alarming regularity. The pull between competing needs and outlooks is painful. It is often impossible to find a compromise. In Ed’s professional role, he often feels more like a lawyer than a human service worker. Having chosen to represent the interests of the town residents for a clean environment, he advocates for them with tenacity. He becomes adversarial when dealing with a factory owner who will not acknowledge that he has dumped industrial waste into a local stream, even though that is not Ed’s usual inclination. It is a difficult balancing act.

Frequently, Workers Must Choose among Competing Values

In addition to choosing sides between adversaries in a dispute, Ed is often forced to make almost impossible choices between competing values. This is frequently the case for social change agents.

For example, in writing about their experiences as welfare rights organizers in the rural South in the 1960s, several idealistic young human service workers described how they found the maintenance needs of their organization conflicting with the service needs of individual clients (Kurzman, 1971). In order to recruit new members to the Welfare Rights Organization, they would offer to accompany clients into their eligibility interviews, coaching them right in front of the welfare investigators. They were especially interested in recruiting articulate, energetic clients—most often, young single parents—who would be the most likely to give their time and energy to expanding the welfare rights group. Yet, it was frequently the elderly, infirm clients who begged them for help with their welfare and disability applications or appeals. Though desperately needy, they were also bound by the old traditions and fears engendered by experiencing a lifetime of segregation. They were sometimes the least likely to sign a petition, attend a rally, or become leaders in the welfare reform movement. Striking a comfortable balance between giving services to the most needy and building up the social change group gave many workers sleepless nights.

Workers Must Overcome Resistance to Change with No Guarantees of Success

Most interventions encounter resistance. But social change efforts exert a special kind of drain on our time and energy. They follow unpredictable courses down twisting, perilous roads that lead to many dead ends. There are dubious rewards at the end of the path, and both client and worker can burn out from their seemingly futile investment of time and energy. Lodging a complaint of environmental abuse or neglect, for example, can involve endless postponements and legal maneuvers, resulting in years of waiting for a trial date. By the time the trial rolls around, the litigants in the dispute have probably moved away; and even if they win the case, the current laws provide for few sanctions. Often it is cheaper for a store owner or factory owner to pay the fine than it is to clean up garbage he or she is dumping in our streams.

The laws that prohibit housing or job discrimination also have few penalties for those who flaunt the laws. Many times, in these kinds of disputes, the clients back off from pursuing complaints, even when it looks as if they might win, because they fear that their landlords or employers would retaliate. The threat of eviction or shutting off their heat in the winter and other forms of harassment often abruptly terminate protests. An organizer cannot in good conscience promise people that he or she can protect them. When a person files a discrimination complaint against an employer or agency, for example, the citizen litigant can fear being blackballed by other employers that now view him or her as a troublemaker. Of course, direct-service interventions also carry risks, but they are rarely as consistently perilous as those in advocacy situations.

Given Ed’s slim chances of winning most of the protests his agency is involved with, one wonders why he continues with so much goodwill. But he feels that though the risks of failure may be much greater in his kind of job, so too are the rewards for success. When CAFTE wins one reform in the way industrial wastes are disposed of, or when he convinces one company to lower its energy consumption, the eventual improvement in the quality of the lives of many people is incalculable.

Historically this has proved to be true. With the stroke of a pen, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935 and, since then, millions of elderly people have been able to look forward to some measure of financial security in their retirement years. An army of counselors working with each of those older people, one person at a time, could not possibly have achieved such positive changes in their emotional lives. To live in fear of being destitute in one’s old age is surely a gateway to depression.

Yet, surprisingly, remains much resistance after a new policy has been enacted. Often nothing changes until informed consumers rattle the cages of the bureaucracy. Implementation should be a rational process, but barriers of community indifference, lack of information, and bureaucratic rigidity often slow down real progress (Bobo, Kendall, & Max, 2010). Social Security is still, after all these years, under attack by some political groups that believe it would be a sounder plan to have the elderly depend on private pensions and investment schemes.

Workers Lack Models

Systems-change skills can be difficult to learn because we lack role models in our personal and professional lives. There is also a woeful lack of written material about successful social change efforts. Not surprisingly, workers who thrive on the unstructured, rough-and-tumble nature of social change often resist sitting down and putting their thoughts on paper. Many excellent change efforts go undocumented and unrewarded (Rivera & Erlich, 1998). However, there are some written materials, and we urge students to seek out those books that give firsthand accounts of systems-change efforts (Bobo et al., 2010; Boyte, 1986; Greenberg, 1969 reprinted 1990 Kahn, 1995; Kurzman, 1971; Miller, M., 2009, Russell, 1990, Shaw, 2001).

Children of the St. Mary Center in Oakland are sheltered by a massive puppet of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., created by a group of senior citizens as a tribute to his memory. MLK, Jr., brilliantly employed the three escalating strategies of organizing to overturn many of the practices of racial segregation.

13.5 Changes Are Generated from the Top Down and from the Bottom Up

Change flows in two directions. Like a giant waterfall, it flows from the top down, dragging the stones and sand along in its wake. Just as often, like a volcano, it simmers beneath the surface and then bubbles up from the bottom, engulfing everything in its path.

When change starts from the top of a system, it usually comes in the form of an administrative or legislative fiat. A board of directors, a supervisor, or an administrator announces a new policy or reduces or expands a budget item. It occurs when new legislation is passed. It can happen when the courts rule on a landmark case. Change can be propelled by the writing of a memo banning discrimination against one or another class of tenants or the passage or repeal of a housing or zoning ordinance. Sometimes seemingly benign words inserted in or deleted from an official policy dramatically change the course of life for many human beings.

Clients, workers, and students usually lack the formal authority to change destructive policies. But they can force change from the bottom up through the weight of their numbers and the power that weight can mobilize. Sometimes bottom-up change comes through the ballot box. Often it comes from citizen initiative or agitation. When homeless squatters break into a building that is boarded up and demand that city officials rehabilitate it, they are attempting to create change. The movement to accelerate the testing of new AIDS medications was spurred on by public demonstrations by citizen activists. Although these AIDS protests seemed to be unruly and angry, they were a catalyst in forcing the Food and Drug Administration to speed up the approval process of new medications.

Case histories of change efforts reveal that most of the time, struggles to create change and resistance against change are going on simultaneously, at both the top and bottom of the system. In the history of public welfare, for example, positive changes in benefits emanating from the top of the bureaucracy have often been initiated only after it looked as if the bubbling up from the bottom, from the grass roots, would spill over into uncontrolled disruptions. A fascinating analysis that links protest to reform was written by Piven and Cloward (1993).

The recent congressional actions that dramatically scaled back the social welfare system were spearheaded by many angry conservative legislators. Whether there will be effective grassroots opposition to these cutbacks as the U.S. economy slows down will depend on how accurately the elected officials have read the mood of their constituents. In any event, we can expect much ferment at the top and bottom of the society as the shifting away from post-Depression entitlements and the rise of Tea Party Movement accelerates.

Tea Party Movement

The Tea Party is a political movement in the United States that has sponsored locally and nationally coordinated protests since 2009 and is generally recognized as conservative and libertarian. It endorses reduced government spending, lower taxes, reduction of the national debt and federal budget deficit, and adherence to an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

Change efforts must be directed at all points of a system—the top, the bottom, and in between. But rarely can any one group or person spread thin enough to cover all the bases. Even if that were possible, however, different styles of organizing are needed to confront different parts of a system, for different issues, and to keep up with the changing public mood and world events.

Change agents come in two basic models: the in-fighter and the outside agitator. Infighters are legitimate members of the established authority who work for or administer a particular system. They might be directors of hospitals, supervisors of social service agencies, judges, or politicians. Outside agitators are neither employed by nor beholden to any of the established systems.

Ed is an example of an outside agitator. He stands outside the bureaucracy of the public sector and private corporations. He dresses, talks, and acts differently than he would if he were working for the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, or Mobil Oil Corporation. But sometimes Ed and a worker at a state agency or an employee of a corporation may share a similar change goal. Their techniques are different because they work on different rungs of the change ladder. If they build a coalition around a common goal using different change strategies, they can create powerful momentum for change (Seaver, 1971).

In the civil rights era, it was often said that the agitation of militant grassroots groups, such as those led by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, provoked the established authorities into dealing with the more moderate groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Malcolm X stirred the pot of protest in the streets of Harlem, and Martin Luther King, Jr., organized nonviolent marches, while the NAACP filed one lawsuit after another.

It is important to realize that if they work alone, neither enlightened leaders at the top of a system nor masses of angry people at the bottom of it are likely to create major, permanent changes.

Guarding Change

Change must be guarded after it has been won. Once instituted, it must be constantly monitored. If left unattended, a new law or policy can turn out to be totally ineffective. It can be “business as usual” unless an organized constituency monitors the process of implementation. The Supreme Court desegregation decision of 1954 is a good example of this. Although the decision made in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed racial segregation in every public school in the land, it has taken hundreds of individual lawsuits and the constant watchfulness of citizens’ groups to achieve even the modest amount of school desegregation we now have, over six decades later. If a school is segregated and no one complains about it, it is likely just to stay that way (see Ehrlander, 2002; Patterson, 2001).

The Targets of Change

Changes such as the Supreme Court school desegregation decision or the Americans with Disabilities Act must have two thrusts. First, change agents must create new structures composed of rules and regulations that translate the vision of change into the new reality. But that is never enough. For change to take root in a system, it must also become an integral part of the consciousness of the people involved.

For example, when parents are committed to overturning racial segregation in the local school system, they need to marshal the evidence that it is segregated and bring it to court. They must persuade a judge to order the school board to draw up an integration plan. If the parents, school administrators, or some other organization do not like the plan or the way it is being implemented, they return to court to negotiate adjustments. If the school board continues its opposition, the schools might be taken over by the courts, as they once were in Boston.

However, no matter how good a plan is on paper, on the day a desegregated school opens, the attitudes of the school and town officials, parents, and teachers determine whether the elaborate plans have any chance of succeeding. Ultimately, a new law is only as effective as the feelings that swirl around it.

If women, former mental patients, immigrants, or people with disabilities do not use the protection of the laws that guarantee their rights, those laws are worth nothing. On the reverse side, if a law is routinely circumvented by large numbers of people, it cannot be enforced. This was the case with the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. This law was consistently violated by the usually law-abiding general public. Alcohol was legally banned, which was a major structural change, but the desire (consciousness) of the population to use liquor as a means of pleasure or escape never changed. Today we face a similar situation with marijuana. Though it is illegal, both a Supreme Court judge and a two-term president, among other high-ranking officials, admit to having tried it when they were younger.

Learning a lesson from the failure of prohibition, antismoking advocates proceed on both fronts—structure and consciousness. They have changed the structure of smoking by prohibiting cigarettes from being advertised on television and passing smoking bans in government buildings and in many public spaces, such as movie theaters, workplaces, restaurants, and airplanes and colleges. They have succeeded in placing warning labels on cigarette packages. The antismoking change efforts have also moved into courtrooms. In high-profile lawsuits, the attorneys general of several states have sued the major tobacco companies to recover the money the state health care systems have expended caring for citizens who have sickened or died from smoking-related illnesses. In many cases, they have garnered large cash settlements for both individuals and states. But, after the legal victories, alert citizen groups have had to make sure that the cash is used for public health purposes, not to fill in budget gaps in unrelated areas.

And antismoking advocates continue to target the hearts and minds of smokers through smoke-awareness seminars and “I quit” days. Although many Americans still smoke, by targeting structure as well as consciousness, antismoking advocates have begun to tip the balance. Now it is often the smoker who is on the defensive, shivering outside the doors of office buildings and restaurants, puffing away almost furtively.

The feminist movement pioneered the use of consciousness-raising techniques. Out of this movement have come step-by-step procedures for conducting consciousness-raising groups in which members examine their current situation by thinking about the impact of current structures and by suggesting necessary structural changes (Culbert, 1976).

Feminist organizers have long understood that laws redressing gender inequality were a necessary first step but would not be enough to bring about major changes. Many women had to be convinced that they had a legitimate right to demand equal pay for their labor. They also needed to build up courage and group solidarity in order to press for remedies when equality was withheld from them.

The struggle of American women for liberation, social justice, and self-development has been waxing and waning for 160 years yet, not surprisingly, pioneers of social work and community organizing were women. They included Jane Addams, Dorothea Dix, Julia Lathrop, and Florence Kelley. Yet, despite this rich heritage, men came to dominate the field of community organizing as they did other fields.

In general, feminist organizing tends to be concerned with the quality of interaction between the members of the group and with their individual concerns, rather than focusing only on results. With a single-minded focus on results, leaders might be tempted to view members as faceless creatures who can be manipulated to achieve outcomes. Trying to avoid this trap, Ella Baker, who organized the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement, always started each meeting by asking if members had any personal concerns that needed to be dealt with before they settled down to planning organizing strategies. Only after they dealt with their own pressing issues would their minds be free enough to turn to the needs of the movement.

Now, on college campuses, both administrators and student activists work to change the definitions of appropriate sexual conduct. Policies defining date rape and sexual and gender harassment, with stiff penalties for transgressions, have been drawn up. And seminars and workshops are conducted to sensitize students and staff to new definitions or their rights and to inform them about the way to protest if they think their rights are being abridged.

13.6 Methods of Organizing and Changing Systems

Change methods fall into roughly three categories of escalating intensity: educating, persuading, and pressuring. We always start out by trying to educate the public and the powers that be about the need for change. If that is not sufficient to bring about change, we try to persuade them. Finally, if change is still resisted, we resort to pressure.

Educating to Create Change

When a change effort begins, we point out the problems (the GAPs), systematically document them, and suggest solutions. Ed spends a large amount of his time compiling statistics about the increasing incidence of certain diseases in areas with a great deal of industrial pollution. He reads journals and checks out web sites from all over the country and goes to conferences to find out what other groups are doing to solve the problems of carbon emissions and overdependence on fossil fuels. He digests the material and helps produce a monthly newsletter that is sent to members, politicians, and businesspeople.

Whenever a new ordinance or program is proposed, a committee from CAFTE reviews the plan to make sure it protects the interests of ordinary people. Then they testify before the planning board or selectmen to give their opinions and suggest changes.

Ed has learned the importance of having facts ready when he visits a legislator to lobby for change. Often he is competing with real estate developers who have assembled their own set of data printed in a fancy booklet. Although he complained about having to study statistics and research methods in college, he has come to appreciate their power and is grateful that he can read and interpret budgets, architectural plans, census data, and other weighty documents. The volunteer lawyers who work with CAFTE do much of the actual negotiating, but he needs to understand enough to explain the CAFTE position and answer questions about it.

lobby

An attempt to convince decision makers to support one’s ideas or proposed actions.

Sometimes as a result of an educational campaign, people realize how destructive a certain rule, policy, or action is and agree to change it. If that happens, then the change effort is successful and it terminates. But many times, exposing an unhealthy situation and suggesting ways of dealing with it are not enough.

So the change agents turn to the second, more powerful change method.

Persuading to Create Change

Persuasion strategies use both the carrot and the stick. They reward constructive changes and threaten sanctions for continued negative practices. For example, if employers lack the resources but are willing to hire workers who have disabilities (as they are legally bound to do), they might be granted the “carrot” of tax reductions or be given loans to build the ramps or install the special phone and computer equipment they will need. Or, if developers are willing to build affordable housing in low-income communities, they might be given grants-in-aid, tax abatements, and special technical-assistance programs. Factory owners who agree to retrofit old polluting equipment or restaurant owners who agree to eliminate trans fats from their food might be given technical assistance and even some funds to help in the switch. But even with incentives, change does not come about easily. Systems need money and technical knowhow, but they also need goodwill to forge new ways of thinking and acting. It is always easier (and, sometimes, more lucrative) to do “business as usual,” even if it results in harm to many.

If, despite all the incentives, change does not happen, then the “stick” might be threatened or used. Sanctions on this second level usually involve withholding money, denying permits, or causing public humiliation. For example, some towns list in the local newspaper the names of landlords and restaurant owners who have been cited for health and safety violations. There are lists on some post office bulletin boards of the names and pictures of noncustodial parents who have not paid their court-mandated child support payments.

A little fish swimming alone can easily be gobbled up. But when lots of little fish get organized, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.

CAFTE has used persuasion by organizing public rallies supporting or opposing a proposed housing plan or industrial complex, has collected signatures on petitions, and organized letter-writing campaigns.

Pressuring to Create Change

When education and persuasion strategies fail to bring about change, the CAFTE board resorts to using pressure tactics. They go into court to punish, restrain, or force compliance. If these formal channels of appeal are too weak or slow, the pressure tactics of direct action are used. They picket or boycott an office, or conduct a sit-in and refuse to move, or find some other way to disrupt “business as usual.”

direct action

An action that interferes with the orderly conduct of a system that is the target of change.

Believing they answer to a higher code of ethics, the agents of change sometimes take the law into their own hands. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., encouraged people to do this when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a bus to a white passenger. In accordance with the laws of Montgomery, Alabama, she was wrong. But she and the other members of the black community believed that they had the right to disobey an unjust and morally repugnant law. In order to force change, they boycotted the buses for almost one year. Faced with the possibility of a bankrupt bus company as well as many bankrupt stores, the town officials capitulated, and the segregation law was changed.

Forty years later, those who believe that abortion, although legal, violates religious or ethical principles, formed Operation Rescue. They chained themselves to the doors of family planning clinics, blocking the entrances. They have intercepted people walking into the clinics and attempted to disrupt the functioning of these agencies to rescue the “unborn children.” As the Supreme Court and state legislatures have debated the pros and cons of abortion, these activists have taken direct action on their convictions. The issue of stem cell research using human embryos has now taken center stage in public debate. The sides are shaping up on this issue. In the next few years, we will see many groups—pro and con—using all these change methods.

Choosing Which Method to Use and Who Should Lead the Struggle

We make no value judgments about which set of change strategies is better, more appropriate, or more professional. Obviously Ed, like other change agents, always hopes that exposing the facts about a problem will lead to solutions. But he knows that change comes slowly and often encounters a great deal of resistance. An elderly woman soon to be evicted from her apartment or a family whose baby is eating lead paint chips cannot keep waiting for help as the wheels of a bureaucratic grievance procedure grind on.

Thus, each strategy plays a role at a particular time with a particular problem in a change campaign. The important point to remember is that in order to maintain credibility, change agents must climb each step of the ladder before escalating to the final, most aggressive one. Each set of strategies must be carefully mapped out and executed, using the kind of planning models we have already described.

Frequently, visionaries or charismatic people take a prominent role in a change effort. They become identified with it. Mr. Pulashnik is an activist in a local housing group that is part of the CAFTE coalition. He is a recent immigrant from the Ukraine. He has the ability to rivet an audience with his eloquence and his rage. When a group of homeless families broke into a boarded-up apartment house, vowing to stay until the city made the apartments habitable, he was their spokesperson. It might have seemed to the public that he was the person who galvanized the city council into action. But that was not so. A phalanx of law students and their professor, a priest, a candy store owner, three housewives, and the members of eight homeless families all played significant roles. Before the news of the takeover made a front-page splash, many people had spent months collecting information, negotiating, and forging coalitions. If there had not been widespread participation and support for “Operation Move-in,” it could have been swept aside with one quick police action or simply ignored until the squatters gave up and left. All change efforts must be group endeavors.

coalition

A loose amalgam of people or groups who support a similar idea or goal.

When he first began his job, Ed was brimming over with energy and enthusiasm. Occasionally those wonderful qualities got in the way of careful planning. At one point, he helped organize a rally to protest the mayor’s deletion of money needed to fix up three local parks, which the city council had promised. To his great embarrassment, reporters outnumbered neighborhood residents at the demonstration, and one of the speakers never showed up. Ed did not realize then that he first had to prepare the ground very well before the seeds could grow into an effective intervention. He learned that preparation consists of:

Learning about the history of the problem and the systems involved in it

Locating the sources of power and estimating their potential for change

power

The capacity to influence others to achieve certain desired ends.

Getting to know the local community through both formal and informal channels of information

And of course he needed to learn the “rule of three”: double-check, double-check, and then double-check some more to make sure that everyone potentially involved knows the exact details of the mission and the strategy.

Learning about the History of the Problem and the System

Whatever the nature of the change we hope to bring about—more responsive routines in a day care classroom, more humane treatment for victims of domestic violence, changes in the governance of a recreation center—we need to learn about the full dimension of the problem. We accumulate the hard facts of the situation by asking questions such as:

How widespread is the problem?

How long has it been like this?

How did this problem come about?

Is it getting better or worse?

What evidence backs up our estimate?

Who benefits and who loses from this situation?

What will happen in the future if the situation does not change?

What solutions have others suggested? Which ones have been tried?

During a campaign to scale down a proposed development that would bring too many cars into an already overcrowded area, Ed located an investigative reporter who was also interested in the problem. Both of them believed there was corruption in the housing authority that had approved these plans without an environmental impact study. The reporter uncovered valuable information and brought it to the attention of the public. The developer’s plans are still on hold while this situation is being further investigated by the attorney general of the state. Ed also recruited assistance from a business professor. He and his students studied the feasibility of creating bike lanes and employing shuttle buses to reduce the crush of cars (and carbon emissions) in the center of town.

Locating the Sources of Power and Potential for Change

Before CAFTE begins a change effort, the members need to know just where the power lies to make the proposed changes. Ed has discovered that this is more complex than it at first appears. When dealing with city government, several agencies, bureaus, and commissions have overlapping jurisdiction. Ed worked with a committee trying to clean up a vacant lot and turn it into a playground. He soon found out how Alice felt when she went down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Everyone who answered the phone was eager to pass him along to another person. After many calls, he was right back with the first person again.

In trying to get that vacant lot cleaned up, he discovered that the health department was concerned about it only if he could prove it was rat infested (rat bites are health hazards). He discovered that the sanitation department could not clean it up because it was private property. They said they would be happy to clean it after it became a park. Finally, he discovered that the lot had been condemned for nonpayment of taxes many years earlier. In addition, no one at city hall could find a record of who held the title to the land.

With patience, time, persistence, and lots of help from friends, CAFTE finally unraveled the threads that led to the desk of the person who could cut through the red tape and say, “Okay!” A bit of green grass and trees now exists where only rubbish grew before. Ed often eats his lunch in that park and grins with pride (and scowls at children who try to pick the flowers).

Formal and Informal Sources of Power

Finding the genuine movers and shakers is complicated by the existence of two types of power hierarchies: (1) the formal power structure, which is composed of people who have the official authority to make decisions, and (2) the informal power structure, which is composed of people who actually make the decisions.

If you think about how decisions get made in your family system, in your college, or in a social agency you have worked in, you can grasp the complex reality of power. Locating the real decision makers in any system is a skill gained from many years of going down blind alleys and returning to try again. It develops out of having the courage to ask everyone involved with the system a lot of concrete questions, thinking about the answers, and then relying on your own intuition.

Ed has learned how to ask questions that might unveil the realities of power. Compare the following two questions. Which one is likely to yield the clearest picture?

Mr. Knight, who makes the policy decisions about hiring staff in your agency?

or

Mr. Knight, would you please describe exactly how the hiring of the project manager was done?

Of course, good questions do not guarantee accurate answers. But if you have ever watched a skilled television interviewer, you can appreciate the art of phrasing questions that elicit rich information.

Power and Change

Ed has discovered that power is in a state of perpetual flux, and change is always possible. If he gets turned down on a request one day, he tries again later, as the situation or the cast of characters changes. An election, a turnover in staff, or a downturn in the economy can change a “yes” into a “no” and vice versa.

No system is ever totally closed. Every system, no matter how rigid it appears, is vulnerable to change. When Ed gets frustrated and begins to believe the looming threat of global warming will never improve, he reminds himself of the dramatic international changes of the recent past. Ed’s mother describes signing petitions and demonstrating for nuclear disarmament. At that time, the world tottered on the brink of nuclear destruction, as the United States and the former Soviet Union faced each other from opposite corners. But almost overnight, the Soviet Empire came apart at the seams, and “Ban the Bomb” buttons became collectors’ items. After seventy years of power, the “evil empire” became a supplicant, coming to the West for advice and loans. On the other hand, while Ed’s mother is pleased to see that China, where she was born, has opened up its economy and now has a thriving middle class, she also fears that China is making all the mistakes we have made. The roads are clogged with cars, and many factories make the skies gray with the smoke from coal-burning furnaces, smoke that destroys cities and human lungs.

Getting to Know the Resources of the Community

Just as each client is rooted within a variety of systems—home, school, workplace, and peer groups—so too are systems rooted within communities. Before we attempt to change one part of a system, we must learn about its context. Communities are the sum total of their history, ethnicity, economics, geography, and relationships with the larger city or town.

The word community is often used in two ways. First, it is used to describe a physical entity. The Riverside community, where CAFTE’s office is located, for example, has homes, shops, streets, and boundary lines. However, we might also use the term to describe a community of interest, a group with which we identify. It need not have a geographic boundary. Perhaps we see ourselves as belonging to the gay community, the Christian community, the university community, or the macrobiotic community. In this section we will be dealing primarily with understanding the geographic community.

Understanding the physical layout of a community as well as its spirit helps us design strategies to cope with its problems. When Ed was a student, he helped conduct an attitude survey in Riverside. Crime and vandalism had been escalating, and one summer evening, a near-riot occurred when the police tried to disperse a group of teenagers congregating on a corner. When the surveys were tabulated, the researchers found that a major complaint of community members was the lack of decent public transportation. Because they could not get to the stores and factories of the nearby city, many residents had given up hope of ever obtaining steady, decent-paying employment. Hopelessness led to frustration, which then led to aggressiveness and destructiveness. When the Riverside Citizens Committee was formed, obtaining transportation was its major priority. Each community has its own agenda. Human service workers have to learn to read it.

When Ed takes a job in a new community, he will have to start learning about it from scratch. He will not be able to communicate with the people he works with if he does not have, at his fingertips, the details of their daily lives (see Kahn, 1995; Vollbracht, 2002). He will begin his education by creating a community profile. He does this by searching out answers to the following kinds of questions:

Where does this neighborhood begin and end?

What are the differences between what the map defines as the neighborhood and how the community describes its boundary lines?

Which is considered a central location?

Where do different age groups and interest groups congregate?

Where is the “other side of the tracks”?

Where are the significant dividing lines between the rich and poor and between one racial or religious group and another?

What are the main industries and in what way does each impact the environment?

Before scheduling any meetings, Ed needs to know how the neighbors feel about coming out at night or entering certain areas. He needs to know if in this community parents are likely to bring their children to meetings. If so, he needs to arrange child care. He needs to know what significant events his meetings might conflict with (such as the local church bingo game or ethnic holidays).

Ed needs to find out what languages people speak so he can arrange for translators, if needed. In Riverside, many of the elderly speak English but cannot read and write it, having emigrated from Greece as adults. The newest residents are Chinese, whose primary dialect is Mandarin. Ed speaks a bit of Cantonese, the two dialects are almost totally different. He has to find some community activists to translate CAFTE’s meeting notices into the languages of community residents. CAFTE has a phone message about upcoming activities it is sponsoring or supporting that is spoken in three different languages.

Even the refreshments Ed serves at meetings tend to mirror the preferences or dietary restrictions of the Greek and Chinese members. And their festivals and holidays are celebrated and acknowledged.

Formal Channels of Information

Even though Ed had volunteered in the Riverside community and helped to conduct its community survey, when he started this job, he still had much to learn. He found many valuable sources of information at the library and on the Internet (Kjosness, Barr, & Rettman, 2004). He looked up the census data, read reports written by different city agencies, and read the town budget. He even looked back over old copies of the Riverside News.

Then Ed made a list of the people in town he needed to meet. His list included politicians, school board members, clergy, directors of social agencies, and especially the local heroes and town characters. Although he did not formally interview each one, he did have a series of questions he tried to work into conversations whenever he got a chance to meet a person on the list.

Informal Channels of Information

The formal channels of information were valuable, but Ed found that walking and driving slowly in and out of the community’s streets was just as important. Often the official version of the economic or recreational life of the community contradicted what he saw with his own eyes.

The boarded-up stores he observed and the neighborhood park strewn with beer bottles and sleeping men and women told him more about its spirit and daily life than did the statistics on parks and unemployment. Through the use of the senses—looking, listening, feeling, smelling—human service workers can round out their profile and identify glaring GAPs in services.

Whenever possible, Ed drops into a service at a local church, attends a parents’ association meeting, and stops by the American Legion fair or the police versus firefighters challenge baseball game. He makes a point of doing his laundry near the office because the Laundromat is a great place to chat with folks, and it has a bulletin board full of notices about events he might never hear of otherwise.

Making Sense of What We Have Found

After observing an institution or a slice of community life, we try to make sense out of what we have seen and heard. This process involves three steps:

Observation—What exactly did I see?

Speculation—What might it mean?

Reaction—How do I feel about it?

Observation We describe exactly what we have seen, with no interpretation or evaluation. This guards us from jumping to premature conclusions. As a famous television detective used to say, “Just give me the facts, Ma’am!” after a visit to a local public school, for example, Ed describes what he has seen:

At the school I saw a lot of students milling in the hallways. There was a lot of noise, and some small fights broke out while I was there.

instead of

I visited the public school, and it was a zoo.

Speculation We propose alternative interpretations of what we have seen and heard. By observing a place or person for only a few moments, Ed cannot possibly know what might have led to whatever behavior he has observed. Later on, after learning more about that school, he may find out which one of these interpretations is more accurate. These are his speculations on his observations:

13.7 Planning and Implementing a Change Effort

Reaching Out to the Public*

*For further step-by-step organizing techniques, see Dale (1978); Kahn (1995); Mitiguy (1978); Mizrahi and Morrison (1993); Morse (2004); Rivera and Erlich (1998); Russell (1990); Shaw (2001); Speeter (1978a, 1978b); Weissberg (1999); and Wharf and Clague, 1997. For organizing manuals, contact the Center for Third World Organizing, 1218 East 21st, Oakland, CA 94606.

No matter how brilliant our ideas, they are destined to fail if we do not have active, broad-based support. We always seek coalitions with groups of clients and their families, influential community members, other human service workers, and the ordinary, not-to-be-ignored taxpayers.

Imagine that you were assigned the job of establishing a new family residential center in the Riverside community for mothers who have AIDS. First, you found the latest information on AIDS treatment and committed yourself to keeping current. (The POZ and A+U magazines are excellent ongoing resources.) For two years, you have been working with a citywide coalition to get funds. You gathered thousands of signatures on petitions. You went to the state capitol and spent days meeting with your legislators. You helped organize a sit-in demonstration on the steps of the capitol with people with AIDS. Finally, a bill was passed and funds were appropriated. Your group has written a program proposal. It wants to manage one of the three facilities that will be funded. Now you should be able to start the program. Well, not quite yet!

Assuming that you are lucky enough to find an affordable building in an accessible location, you still must negotiate a complex maze of obstacles. You will need to use all your understanding of the formal and informal power systems of the community to obtain the permits and licenses needed to transform a private house into a nonprofit group home. You will have to get permits from the building department to make renovations. You will have to meet the fire and health department regulations. The police department will probably be concerned about neighborhood safety and the extra cars the center will bring into a narrow street with limited parking.

You and your group (and your lawyer) will have to appear before the town zoning board to convince them to grant a variance to its usual rule that prohibits anything but a private home in a residential neighborhood.

Then you will have to face the members of the block association. They are planning to protest that the proposed center will lower the value of their houses. They are also terrified that their children might get AIDS from the children who will live at the house. At an emotional meeting, they pour out their fear and rage. Renting or buying a house for a community-based human service program is almost always a politically sensitive issue. Inevitably you will run up against the NIMBY syndrome—“I agree that those people need a place to live, but

NOT IN MY BACK YARD.”

Anticipating all these obstacles, you and your board have carefully laid the groundwork to defuse the protests. For six months, you have been actively reaching out to everyone who might be an ally. You have been presenting accurate data about AIDS, hoping to show that the risk of contagion from the mothers and children who will live in the house is minimal. You have also been reassuring the community that the house will be so well maintained that it will add to the value of the neighborhood, not detract from it. These are just a few of the outreach activities your group might do:

Speak at every church, mosque, and synagogue in the community

Appear on a panel discussion about the proposed residence on local cable television

Run public-service announcements on the radio

Recruit an advisory committee of local influential people

Set up an interview with the local newspaper

Run a series of workshops at the local high school

Speak at a parent–teachers association meeting

Convince a famous sports figure who is HIV positive (and heterosexual) to speak at a neighborhood rally

Organize a walkathon to raise money for AIDS research

Speak to the Chamber of Commerce to assure them that the center will patronize local businesses

Publish a monthly newsletter of your activities and progress

Organize and keep current a web site about the house

Even after successfully working your way through red tape and most of the resistance, you will need to continue to stay in close touch with the community. Some of the typical ways social programs do that are:

Have an open house

Become members of the block association and other civic groups in town

Offer free, anonymous AIDS tests or another benefit to the neighborhood

Encourage the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other groups to use your backyard for their fund-raising events or to use your living room for meetings

By keeping the channels of communication open in both directions, you will be able to accomplish several of your goals. Your staff will:

Receive constant, current feedback so that complaints can be dealt with before they explode into conflicts

Recruit volunteers and obtain donations of materials and services to supplement the scanty budget of the program

Obtain referrals of clients

Mobilize supporters for your grant renewal or to protect the program when budget cuts are threatened

Involving the Public in the Decision-Making Process

The most potent vehicle for creating significant change in any sector of the community is the ongoing, genuine participation—the give and take of ideas—of those who will be affected. Psychologists and sociologists have found that when workers are asked to help design changes in their work routine, they tend to be receptive to innovation. When they feel excluded from decisions, they are likely to resist even positive change, subtly sabotaging and undermining it (Klein, A.F., 1953; Mondros & Wilson, 1994).

As change agents, we encourage people to articulate their complaints and visualize solutions. Yet some human service workers fear putting too much power in the hands of clients or citizens. This is especially so when the clients are emotionally troubled, physically handicapped, or burdened with the daily problems of getting food, clothing, and shelter. Although the professional’s hesitations are understandable, there are at least three excellent arguments in favor of giving clients and citizens key roles in maintaining and changing systems (Fisher, 1997):

Client and citizen involvement is efficient and effective. Time and again, clients complain that social researchers spend needless time and money arriving at conclusions about social causation that the clients themselves could have supplied gratis. Although this is a pretty cynical view, it carries a kernel of truth. No matter how troubled or disorganized they may be, clients do have enormous insights into their problems, aspirations, culture, and lifestyle. No matter how skillful we are at understanding systems, clients undoubtedly know their world better than we ever can.

Rather than sit in the office wondering why so few tenants attended a workshop on applying for fuel subsidies or replacing high-wattage appliances with energy-saving ones, a worker can visit the Laundromat, school playground, and local park and ask folks why they didn’t come. Workers often find that one-shot research projects or twice-a-year open meetings are not enough to mobilize the ideas or energy of the neighbors. So community workers must constantly work at sharpening their program’s ability to solicit ongoing client and community feedback. This feedback has to be a regular part of the planning of every workshop and the evaluating of it after the workshop is completed.

Client and citizen involvement has therapeutic and protective value. Many of the people who arrive at the doors of human service agencies have already been overwhelmed by bureaucracies, unresponsive cumbersome institutions, urban ghettos, and suburban isolation. Feeling alienated and vulnerable—one small ant on a very big hill—they desperately yearn to play a significant role in the systems that affect their lives. When we counsel clients, we carefully guard their right to choose their own path. We must also do that as we pursue change.

Viable decision making about the administration of prisons, mental hospitals, counseling agencies, community residences, day care centers, nursing homes, and the like helps release positive forces for change. These forces might have lain dormant, but they have not atrophied. Participation in change efforts as equals rather than as passive recipients guards clients against the further development of their sense of powerlessness. It also protects change efforts from the self-interest of entrenched leaders and workers who might perpetuate their own powerful roles. One of the few truths we know that has no exceptions is power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We always have to be careful of our capacity to manipulate. Brager, Specht, and Torczyner (1987) point out that client trust in us is shaken when the worker engages in manipulative acts.

Client and citizen involvement in decision making is both a moral right and a legal obligation. Juggling the rights of individuals and neighborhoods with the rights of the larger society requires the wisdom of Solomon. Advocates try to find answers for questions that probably have no definitive answers:

Why should landlords be forced to abide by rent controls rather than charge whatever the traffic can bear, as in other nonregulated industries?

Why should people who work hard and save money have it taxed by the government to support programs for mothers who have children and no ability to support them?

All sides of these controversial issues have strong proponents. Although social policy issues are perplexing, they must be decided in an open marketplace of ideas. In some towns, legislation constricts the size of new buildings and taxes businesses differently than homeowners. In some towns, in order to fund improvements to the green belt, each time a house is sold, a portion of the proceeds goes into a fund to purchase open space for parks. Some towns spend tax money on building subsidized housing units, and other towns do nothing and hope that low-income people will move away. Whatever the arrangement, it is always open to change. The public can vote to change policies, and they can vote for candidates who espouse their positions. Thus, participation is built into our system at every level, either directly or indirectly.

In public education, for example, the federal government leaves to local jurisdictions a great deal of freedom to teach the curriculum as they choose. But, with the passage of Public Law 94-142 (the Education for All Children’s Act) in 1974, the federal government assumed a central role in deciding what kind of services must be offered to students with disabilities. The Education for All Children Act also mandates citizen participation. Every educational plan created for a child with special needs requires parental consent. If the parents withhold their consent, they can mediate with public officials, then arbitrate, and then finally go to court. If the lower court disagrees with them, they can go to a higher court. Currently there is a growing push for mandated academic testing and an effort to require passing a standardized test in order to graduate. Parent groups have mobilized on both sides of this hotly contested issue. Local school boards now grapple with federal legislation.

Many health and environmental laws require the approval of community planning groups. Social welfare and housing laws require advisory or review panels of citizens and consumers. These panels periodically review the work of public agencies and have some say in whether their funding is expanded or downsized.

Thus, whether or not human service workers are convinced that their clients can handle the responsibility or that participation has intrinsic value, they have no choice but to include it in most publicly funded programs. The challenge is to learn how to implement the mandate for participation so that it works well.

Decision Making and Participation

Citizen decision making is essential in a democracy, but both skeptics and supporters of participation agree that many barriers stand in its way. Citizens often lack time, self-confidence, specialized knowledge of resources and alternatives, articulateness, and objectivity. No less an authority than Thomas Jefferson, however, offered an answer to the public’s unreadiness to assume power. In a letter to William Charles Jarvis, dated September 28, 1820, he wrote:

I know of no safe repository of the ultimate powers of this society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.

An in-depth examination of several day care programs that had strong parental and citizen participation identified five crucial building blocks that help inform the discretion of citizens (Schram, 1975). Let’s look at each of them (Figure 13.1). You can use them in the future when you are given the task of building a strong advisory committee, house council, or board of directors.

Commitment. After the third meeting in a row when a vote cannot be taken on a grant proposal to fund a solar panel installation in the neighborhood hospital because there is no quorum, a legislator might be tempted to throw up his hands and yell, “Damn it, I’ll decide myself!” But even if shared decision-making is not working very well, it still cannot be abandoned.

Figure 13.1

The building blocks of participation

The agency director mandated to check out proposals with a citizen’s advisory board must grit her teeth and try a new approach to solicit the opinions of the members. She could call each one and take a telephone poll, or she could write a letter (and enclose a stamped, self-addressed postcard) and ask for written feedback. She must continue to believe that six hesitant citizens will eventually make a sounder decision about the proposal than she could make alone. She understands that there are low points in every group’s participation history.

Because of our deep commitment to the process of citizen input, we need to find ways to make it work. When it does not work (e.g., by not acting soon enough, they lose money the grant would have provided), we do not resort to blaming the members of the board. Their lives are complex, and we believe that they do the best they can. During the next funding cycle we will give them more advance notice, tack one meeting onto another, or take a telephone survey to obtain a vote. And there usually is a next time.

Clear mandate. Participation has the best chance of working when the contract governing the process is clear. Discussing each of the details of by-laws or personnel practices seems to most of us like tedious nitpicking. However, carefully written rules of the road are the backdrop against which rational participation can take place. Vague generalities doom shared decision making. Compare the following statements in the bylaws of two different community residences for adults who are in recovery from drug addition. The clarity of the second statement offers residents more of a chance of gaining significant participation than the generality of the first:

Residents will play an active role in running the house.

Compare that vague mandate with this very clearly specified process of decision making:

Once a week, there will be a two-hour meeting during which activities for the next seven days will be planned. Each member will have one vote. All activities must get the majority of votes and must fall within the recreation funds allocated for that week.

Appropriate structure. Every participation effort needs a tailor-made participation structure. The format must be the right one for the mix of purpose, participants, and set of tasks. Unfortunately, most of us know of few alternative models of structure. We drift into the familiar, having elections for president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. Then we establish a weekly or monthly meeting.

But not all groups need the same kind of officers, nor do they need to meet on a regular, arbitrary schedule. Some decisions need the face-to-face interaction of a meeting; many just need a polling of opinions in a variety of ways. Some tasks need not be done by everyone but can be delegated to committees. A neighborhood resident who recently returned to school was given the job of rewriting the Recycling and Waste Disposal Handbook. She sold ads to local merchants and churches. The proceeds from the ads and the small purchase price for the book covered her two-week salary. Once a year, CAFTE sponsors a citywide Earth Day conference. The fees from renting booths cover the small stipend paid to the member who does the secretarial work involved.

Some committees can be ad hoc, taking on one task and then disbanding when it is completed. Ed has found that it is much easier to ask a resident to take on a task if it has a beginning and an ending time attached to it. Although she turned down the job of chair of the fund-raising committee, for example, Ms. Kazantakis was willing to run two bake sales a year. That was a role that did not overwhelm her.

Carving out a structure is like sculpting a face. No two are identical. Experimentation and imagination are the keys to success. But if the structure is not designed, an informal one will evolve anyway, with all its attendant fuzziness and potential for conflict.

Knowledge and skills. Few of the citizens in Riverside have ever made the kinds of decisions that organizing a social change movement entails. Ed has often passed on to the members the knowledge and skills he has learned in college courses as well as the skills he has acquired from volunteering in local political campaigns.

When the board of CAFTE was hiring an architectural consultant and an engineer to help evaluate a developer’s plans for a shopping mall in what is a wetlands area, Ed showed them how to use the role-playing he had learned in counseling classes to prepare for the interview. Ed has brought in sample budgets from other groups to show them what is usually included. When they wrote their by-laws, he invited a guest from an older, established neighborhood association who had already gone through the process. And now that they have been meeting for several years, they can reach out and help other fledgling groups.

Supports that enable participation. No matter what the issue—a tenant council is lobbying for legislation to control the spread of condominiums in a low-income area or a community residence for retarded adults is planning its first open house—some people will inevitably invest more time, energy, and enthusiasm than will others. Those who do the work need to be warmly thanked, whether with a letter of appreciation, a dinner, or a certificate of appreciation.

Less active people also need encouragement. Resources can support the growth of democracy. Perhaps if child care were provided during meetings, more people might come. Ed has found that if he rotates the locations and schedules of meetings, it becomes easier for some folks to attend. Sometimes he suggests to one member that he or she carpool with someone he knows is coming. He always makes it a point to offer rides to members because very few of them can afford to maintain a car, and walking long distances at night can be frightening.

Ed also tries to remember that as important as CAFTE is, each member and coworker has a personal life outside the organization, and that life also needs to be nurtured. Ed builds time into meetings so members can swap news of job openings or available apartments. The group often has potluck birthday or wedding celebrations. He takes the time to visit a sick colleague or member. It is these touches of warmth that provide tangible rewards for the members’ investment of energy.

Because CAFTE is often on one side of a confrontation, it is especially important that the human service worker and participants form strong supportive relationships. They will need to shore each other up when they become discouraged or fearful. While social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are effective means for mobilizing large numbers of people to raise funds, attend a rally, or protest, they create only “weak ties” among people. Malcolm Gladwell (2010) points out that the people with whom you might engage in risky behavior, such as social activism, need to have strong, real (not virtual) relationships with you.

Changing the Rules, Regulations, and Power Arrangements of a System

Just as every worker has a boss, so every public or private organization has some type of governing body. Decisions are generally made in a boardroom, courtroom, or legislative chamber. It is to these groups that the members of CAFTE turn when they become frustrated trying to cope with a problem that is not getting solved at the local level. After they determine where the next level of power lies, they try to educate those officials.

For many years, the citizens in Riverside had been complaining about garbage collection that was very sporadic. When garbage was collected, the empty cans were often thrown in the street, where buses would reduce them to junk metal. The smell of garbage, especially in the summer, hung over their neighborhood. Letters written to the manager of the sanitation department got polite answers but no improvement. A petition demanding regularly scheduled and more careful sanitation service was circulated. More than 200 people signed their names, but nothing changed. So, for three weeks, an elderly homebound CAFTE volunteer sat by her window, marking down the times the trucks arrived on her corner and what the sanitation workers actually did. She noted their numbers so drivers could be held accountable.

Armed with all these credible data, Ed helped to arrange a meeting with the regional director of sanitation who listened courteously and promised to discipline his staff. For two months the situation improved, but it drifted back to its original sorry state. Summer came, and the stench of garbage increased. The fear of rat infestation increased along with it.

Appealing to Elected Officials

Ed realized they had to go over the head of the regional sanitation director. One of the experienced members of CAFTE suggested that the group members appeal to their local town council. Ed panicked a little. Since his public school social studies lessons, the legislative process had always seemed very overwhelming. But, as he soon discovered, in day-to-day practice, social change agents must inevitably deal with local, state, and federal elected officials. And when taxpayers have complaints that are not being taken seriously, they have a right to expect that those who are paid by their tax money will respond to their legitimate requests.

Ed made the appointment with Councilor Irene Haupt, who represented the Riverside neighborhood. The committee members practiced stating their demands in a tense late-night session. They went in with a written agenda, with evidence collected by the homebound volunteer, and with their petitions. Ms. Haupt, anticipating an upcoming hotly contested reelection campaign, seemed very impressed with the 209 signatures. Each of those signatures represented a potential vote she might capture.

To remove the “Whites Only” signs in public accommodations in the southern states, advocates went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Our society still must deal with the legacy of humiliation and resentment such segregation engendered.

Ms. Haupt investigated the sanitation department’s operations. Eventually the regional administrator was censured and put on probation. Ed was surprised to find that Ms. Haupt genuinely appreciated the feedback she got from the residents. She encouraged them to return to discuss their suggestions to improve the derelict park in their area and increase recycling efforts. She listened to their complaints about the lack of police foot patrols and promised to begin working on that GAP. Ed has found that legislators often depend on citizen groups. They cannot know everything that is going on in their districts, and the voters are their eyes and ears.

CAFTE is often consulted by a town councilor or by a state representative who wants to hear their ideas or solicit support when legislation that might have an environmental impact is proposed. The members have established credibility as people who do their homework. They have also built a reputation of having good memories, especially on election day!

Although they might think of themselves as apolitical, human service workers cannot be. They visit their statehouse when budgets are being discussed by legislators. If they do not lobby for the funding of social welfare programs, perhaps no one else will! The opponents of affordable housing, humane correctional programs, or shelters for battered women are likely to be there, telling their side of the story. They are demanding that money be diverted from social programs to fund their priorities. They too will have research documents and signatures on petitions. Thus, as Ed has learned, understanding how to present a case to a legislator is not a skill reserved just for community organizers. It is a skill he will take with him into every human service job he does. He will also use it in his personal life as a citizen of his own community.

Turning to the Courts for Redress of Grievances

Although the sanitation complaint was resolved on the legislative level, at other times Ed has needed to follow the path to the courthouse. If he is convinced that an inequity in the wording or practice of a law stands in the way of citizens getting fair treatment, CAFTE either tries to get the law repealed or asks a judge to change the way it has been interpreted or implemented.

Lawyers from legal services programs (many of them initially funded by the federal poverty program), private attorneys doing pro bono work, and nonprofit groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Sierra Club carry these cases into court. They work on behalf of both individuals and communities, especially when they are convinced that their civil rights or health and safety are being violated. When homeless residents of Riverside were being routinely gathered up by the police and forced to go to shelters against their will, lawyers from one of these groups filed a suit on their behalf.

Although the volunteer lawyers do the actual juggling of the incomprehensible legal words and motions, Ed plays a role, too. Because he had met many of the homeless residents when they were working on getting the parks cleaned up, he was the one who talked to them about participating in the lawsuit. He provided them with information at every step. And he also gave them the emotional support that helped them hang on through the endless delays before their case was finally heard.

Rewards of Social Change Interventions

Most human service jobs do not require as much time, energy, and skill at social change as Ed’s role at CAFTE. But all workers will, at some point, encounter an unyielding barrier that stands between their clients and the services they need. Then, even on a very small scale, the worker acts as a change agent. As the federal government continues to shift away from publicly funded programs and the slack is picked up by the private sector, human service workers will have to continually monitor the output of social programs. Would you stand by quietly if:

… a disoriented elderly woman you counsel was being evicted from her home because the landlord wanted to sell her apartment as a condominium?

… a young man just released from prison wanted to find work as an electrician, and the union representative told him the union would not take anyone with a prison record?

… the mother of a Cambodian youngster was told that she would have to wait six months for an educational assessment because the school psychologist was too busy?

… a person was running for office in your town on a platform of cutting out all the frills and was targeting the only teenage recreation center, a Meals-on-Wheels program for elderly shut-ins, and a van to transport adults who were physically disabled to their sheltered workshop?

We hope your answer is a resounding, “Of course not!” Walking a picket line and knocking on a stranger’s door to explain a community problem can at first be intimidating. Licking stamps, stuffing envelopes, handing out leaflets, and making endless phone calls is tedious. And losing a struggle after months of hard work can be devastating. Ed does all these tasks and has faced many disappointments. Yet he has also had incredible highs when desperately needed services were begun or reinstated after being cut back. The day the first tenants move into the demonstration “green” housing development he has worked on for so long will be filled with indescribable joy.

Every organizer can tell stories about coworkers or citizens who, after experiencing a new sense of their own power, went back to school to finish their degree, took a more responsible job, conquered an addiction, or returned home feeling more hopeful about their children’s futures.

Deborah Rosenfelt sums up the legacies of a social change campaign in her study of the aftereffects of a dramatic labor dispute in the mines of New Mexico in the 1950s. A group of poor Chicana (Mexican American) women defied years of their community’s machismo tradition and the prospect of spending several days in jail and walked a picket line for months. Their husbands and sons had been forbidden to strike by a court order.

Thirty years later, Rosenfelt interviewed those women. That strike had been the most significant event of their lives. For most, the relationships with their husbands had changed dramatically when their roles reversed during the strike. But afterward, their roles in the family gradually regressed to the old inequality. The women’s feelings of self-confidence had also gradually faded, they said, but not completely (Wilson & Rosenfelt, 1978).

Although it often appears as if the field of human services has, like the field of social work, moved away from social change and become enmeshed solely in clinical and direct-service practice, that might not be the full picture. With a shaky economy, questionable welfare reform, and a world community reeling from the impact of globalization, terrorism, and dramatic climate change we cannot afford this. Community efforts to work for positive change have never been more necessary. And they need not be gigantic efforts. Stopping at Every Lemonade Stand (Vollbracht, 2002) and Deep Economy (McKibben, 2007) describe the host of small acts all of us can take to build up a safer and more satisfying community, one that nurtures children—and everyone else.

Finally, one of our former students, remembering our oft-repeated injunction: Don’t Mourn, Organize! sent us this obituary from her local newspaper. It seems to epitomize what we have urged beginning students to do, when there is a problem; join together with others and try to tackle it. More importantly, it illustrates an ordinary woman taking an active role in her community, and doing it for a lifetime!

Pat Cody, Bookstore Owner, Pioneering Feminist and Health Advocate

My First Teacher

October 5, 2010*

*Used by permission of Anthony Cody, first published in the Berkeley Daily Planet on October 1, 2010, and then in a smaller version on his blog. With thanks also to Nora Cody.

My mother, Pat Cody, passed away last Thursday, at 87 years of age. She was quite a woman. Here are some of the lessons she taught me over the years.

If you see something is wrong, speak up and try to change it. Join with others and raise your voices together. In the early 1960s she helped found Women for Peace, which took a stand against nuclear weapons and the slowly expanding Vietnam war. Years before protesters marched by the millions, my mother was marching every week at Berkeley’s city hall, protesting the US advisors that would wind up leading the nation to war. The fact that most people had not heard of Vietnam did not stop her from speaking out. More recently, she helped found a group called Grandmothers Against the War, to call for peace once again.

Respond to the immediate needs of those around you. In 1967 the summer of love blossomed around the world, and Berkeley became one of the places where youth gathered. Every week, hundreds of youngsters would arrive with their belongings on their backs, looking for a new scene. My mother and father had a bookstore in the midst of this scene on Telegraph Avenue. Some of the local business owners wanted to make life as hard as possible for the youth. But my parents helped found the Berkeley Free Clinic in 1969, and for many years my mother served as the treasurer for the organization. This clinic has been a lifeline for thousands of people, and operates mostly on volunteer labor. Much of the funds for the project came in the form of spare change collected by young people on the street, who cajoled donations from passersby and split the proceeds with the clinic. My sisters and I did our part by counting and rolling the coins on the dining room table every Sunday night for years.

When personal tragedy strikes, build community with others and face it together. In 1971, my mother learned that DES, a drug she had taken to prevent miscarriages, actually caused reproductive damage to the children who were in utero. She discovered there were millions who had been affected, but there was very little public information available. She connected with others and started DES Action, a group devoted to informing people about the effects of the drug, advocating for research and support for those affected. This group grew to have chapters in more than thirty states and in other countries as well. My mother was the linchpin of this group, and built a powerful network that included doctors, medical researchers, and the people affected by the drug. She personally responded to thousands of people seeking information and support, and was like a second mother to many. Finally after her husband died Pat realized that there were very few support groups for those living with devastating grief from losing a close family member. She founded the Grief Support Project and created a model that paired a trained counselor with a layperson who had coped with such a loss to lead groups for those recently widowed or otherwise grieving.

Don’t preoccupy yourself with credit or awards or power. Just do what needs to be done, and enjoy the company of others while working towards common goals. She gave me the example by which I have lived my life, and I will miss her.

Crusaders for Justice

“There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment we will continue to see. We forget how often in this century we have been astonished by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible…

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we only see the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”

—Howard Zinn

Activist, historian, writer

Summary

Individual problems are often caused by factors rooted in the social environment.

Changes in the social environment can help one troubled individual and, more importantly, they can prevent the development of similar problems in others.

Systems-organizing and systems-change strategies rely on the same basic activities and skills as the direct-service strategies. They begin with data collection and terminate with evaluation.

Before forming an action plan to counsel a client, a human service worker must check out the mental health of the systems within which the client lives and works.

Human service workers need to explore their ambivalent or unrealistic attitudes toward change agents.

Momentum for change generates from the top down through legislative or administrative fiat. It also generates from the bottom up through the actions of organized citizens and clients. Often it is generating from the top and bottom of the system simultaneously.

Human service workers attempt to change both the structure of an unhealthy system and the consciousness of the people in it.

The three escalating methods of organizing for change are education, persuasion, and pressure.

Before a change effort begins, organizers research the background of the problem and locate where the power to make change really resides. They need to prepare a community profile to assess resources and understand the lifestyles of the people involved in the organizing.

Organizers use outreach techniques to solicit public support and participation in generating ideas and making decisions and to overcome resistance to change.

Citizen participation depends on obtaining strong commitment, clear mandates, appropriate structure, knowledge, skills, and participation supports.

To change the rules, regulations, and power arrangements of a system, organizers disseminate information, rally support, lobby decision makers, and take direct action when other techniques have not worked.

Working to change systems is time- and energy-consuming, frustrating, and often fruitless. But even very small changes can result in dramatic improvements. The potential rewards of all our change efforts can have widespread ramifications that change many people’s life situations.

Change efforts can be undertaken by anyone and can continue for a lifetime, bringing great satisfaction to both those who initiate and those who benefit.

Discussion Questions

George Bernard Shaw, a social critic of his times, is reported to have said that only unreasonable people will not accept the world as it is and, therefore, all change depends on “unreasonable people.” How do you feel about that statement? Does it make sense to you? Would you feel comfortable in the role of “an unreasonable person”? Can you think of some famous people who might fit that description?

What kind of change efforts have you been involved in within your own hometown or on your college campus? Who started them, what techniques did they use, and how did the effort work out? Remember that these change efforts need not be major campaigns. If you can’t think of any change efforts in your own experiences, what kind of change efforts have you heard of or seen in your community or on your college campus? Have you seen or read about any groups that asserted their position for or against a woman’s right to an abortion or for or against gun control? What kind of tactics did they use to influence the public or legislators?

Is there any form of student governance on your campus? Where would you go to find the sources of power that might be able to change a rule or regulation that you feel is unfair or not fairly implemented?

Who were your first teachers? What lessons did they leave with you?

Web Resources for Further Study

Neighborhoods Online

www.neighborhoodsonline.net

This is an online resource center for people who work through grassroots organizations as volunteers, and in government. It provides fast access to information and ideas covering all aspects of neighborhood revitalization, as well as to create a national network of activists and people in government working on problems that affect us where we live.

Net Action’s Virtual Activist Training Guide

www.netaction.org/training/reader.htm

A training guide for using the Internet to organize. It shows how to build and maintain a web site and become a virtual activist.

Websites on community organizing

www.nfg.org/cotb/Websites-4.pdf

Website listings including community organizing resources, toolkits, manuals, and an organizing game.

Nonviolent organizing

www.nonviolence.org/support

Many web sites on nonviolent organizing.

Write your Representative

www.writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

This service will assist you by identifying your Congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives and providing contact information.

Writing to government officials

USA.gov

This web site encourages you to contact your elected officials and share your thoughts on current events and government policy. Links are provided to the president and vice-president, U.S. senators and representatives, state governors and legislators, how to tweet a message to your representatives, and how to contact government agencies.

Comm-Org: The Online Conference on Community Organizing

http://com-org.wisc.edu/node/27

COMM-ORG conducts an e-mail list and a List-Serve to help connect people who are interested in community organizing, including organizers, scholars, and scholar-organizers, and to provide information about organizing. The e-mail list, with over 1,000 members across more than a dozen nations, is moderated by Randy Stoecker at the University of Wisconsin.

MoveOn.org

www.moveon.org

MoveOn organizes on the Internet as well as in communities. It has a Facebook page and it sponsors MoveOn Councils, local teams of committed members who organize in their community and build leadership among MoveOn members. They work on national campaigns to push for progressive change.