Collective Action for Social Change An Introduction to Community Organizing

by Schutz, Aaron; Sandy, Marie G.

• ISBN13: 9780230111257
• ISBN10: 0230111254
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-15
• Publisher: Palgrave-Macmillan

Summary

Community organizers build solidarity and collective power in fractured communities. They help ordinary people turn their private pain into public action, releasing hidden capacities for leadership and strategy. InCollective Action for Social Change, Aaron Schutz and Marie G. Sandy draw on their extensive experience participating in community organizing activities and teaching courses on the subject to empower novices tothinklike an organizers.

Author Biography

Aaron Schutz is associate professor and chair of the Department of Educational policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has taught courses on community organizing and worked with community organizing groups in Milwaukee for mare than a decade. His series, "Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing," can be found at OpenLeft.com, and his website is at Education Action.Org. He is also the author of Social Class, Social Action, and Education: The Failure of Progressive Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan). Marie G. Sandy is an assistant professor in the Department of Education Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has organised campaigns on issues of nontraditional employment for women and family economic self-sufficiency while employed at Wider Opportunities for Women in Washington, DC. She has also provided financial support and leadership development for the Ontario Grassroots Thinktank, a collaboration of residents, community-based organization leaders, and higher education partners in southern California that focused on making positive changes in their community. Her work focuses on the practice and theory of community-based participation, teaching, and research.

Table of Contents

"Schutz and Sandy provide an engaging overview of community organizing in the Saul Alinsky tradition from an organizer’s perspective.Clear and comprehensive, their book shows us how organizers develop skilled leaders, build powerful organizations, and help revitalize American democracy." - David Walls, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Sonoma State University

"A commendable text that challenges students to look beyond the ‘how to’ of organizing to the far more difficult task of ‘how to think’ about organizing. Without such intellectual work, it is difficult to understand community organizing as anything more than a series of techniques equally usable by The Tea Party, President Obama, Tupperware, or anyone else who wants to effectively gain ‘market share.’" - Mike Miller, veteran community organizer and author of A Community Organizer’s Tale: People and Power in San Francisco

"In accessible language and with compelling examples, Schutz and Sandyexplain the why of organizing - why we recruit new leaders, why we build power, and why we pick fights. As new media technology expands the tools for organizing, clarity about the why is more critical than ever. A must-read for anyone interested in building an inclusive, compassionate, and equitable society." - Rinku Sen, President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and publisher of ColorLines.com