Yeah they went there- What A Community Organizer does.

[Mother Of Four]

The Roles and Responsibilities of Community Organizers

Organizers challenge people to act on behalf of their common interests. Organizers empower people to act by developing shared relationships, understandings, and tasks which enable them to gain new resources, new understanding of their interests, and new capacity to use these resources on behalf of their interests. Organizers work through "dialogues" in relationships, understanding and action carried out as campaigns. They identify, recruit and develop leadership, they build community among that leadership, they build power out of that community.

Organizers develop new relationships out of old ones - sometimes by linking one person to another and sometimes by linking whole networks of people together.

Organizers deepen understanding by creating opportunities for people to deliberate with one another about their circumstances, to reinterpret these circumstances in ways that open up new possibilities for action, and to develop strategies and tactics that make creative use of the resources and opportunities that their circumstances afford. Organizers motivate people to act by creating experiences to challenge those feelings which inhibit action, such as fear, apathy, self-doubt, inertia and isolation with those feelings that support action such as anger, hope, self-worth, urgency and a sense of community. ...

Organizers work through campaigns. Campaigns are very highly energized, intensely focused, concentrated streams of activity with specific goals and deadlines. People are recruited, battles fought and organizations built through campaigns. Campaigns polarize by bringing out conflicts ordinarily submerged in a way contrary to the interests of the organizing constituency. One critical dilemma is how to depolarize in order to negotiate resolution of these conflicts. Another dilemma is how to balance the work of campaigns with the ongoing work of organizational survival.

Organizers build community by developing leadership. They focus on identifying leaders and enhancing their skills, values and commitments. They also focus on building strong communities: communities through which people can gain new understanding of their interests as well as power to act on them. Organizers work at constructing communities which are bounded yet inclusive, communal yet diverse, soladaristic yet tolerant. They work at developing a relationship between community and leadership based on mutual responsibility and accountability.35


http://www.nfg.org/cotb/12organizers.htm



Gee...sounds like just what we need to me.

[Radical Activist]

1. A lot of people would understand Obama better

if they studied up on community organizing and the ideology behind it. People who thought Obama was speaking about a Clintonian "third way" weren't getting it.

[Mother Of Four]

2. It takes a hell of alot of sacrifice, dedication and compromise-

To get people to work together. The KEY is to empower them, so they can have the pride of changing where the live.

The R's ticked off MANY people tonight, social workers among them, by belittling these wonderful people who devote themselves to making life better around them.

[pookieblue]

3. I know it's not the same thing...

But I was the community organizer/coordinator for the local MS Walk for 3 years in a row.

And I will tell you...it takes ALOT of work.

I can imagine what Obama did was a hard job. And nothing to be mocked.

Then again, these are Repubs... helping people is a bad thing.

[Mother Of Four]

4. Shamelessly kicking my own post-

For those that are confused about what a CO does.