About Community Organizing

At its core, community organizing is the process of mobilizing a community to attain some type of positive change. As Randy Stoecker and Susan Stall described in Community Organizing or Organizing Community? Gender and the Crafts of Empowerment, community organizing includes the entire process of "organizing relationships, identifying issues, mobilizing around those issues, and maintaining an enduring organization.  It involves 'the craft' of building an enduring network of people, who identify with common ideals, and who can engage in social action on the basis of those ideals." 

According to Harry C. Boyte of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, "organizers seek to develop the organized power of ordinary, uncredentialed citizens, especially the poor, working class, and minority communities." (Kristin Layng and Joe Szakos, We Make Change: Community Organizers Talk About What They Do—and Why,  p. xviii). As LeeAnn Hall, executive director of the Northwest Federation of Community Organizers, put it, "[a] community organizer is someone who works with members of the community to identify their concerns and problems and issues and hopes and dreams, and then brings those together in the form of an organization to act collectively." (Szakos and Layng, We Make Change: Community Organizers Talk About What They Do—and Why,  p. 2).

In fact, this notion of developing the ability of an affected constituency to create change is the defining characteristic of organizing and separates it from other strategies for change.