COMM-ORG

Randy Stoecker moderates the COMM-ORG listserv and edits the COMM-ORG web site and Working Papers collection.  I am currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Toledo, and have been providing support services to community organizing and development groups for over a decade, including ACORN, the West Bank Community Development Corporation, the Lagrange Village Council/Lagrange Development Corporation, Organizing Neighbors Yielding Excellence, and other.. If you wish, you can see my academic vita or e-folio.   Please contact me with questions and/or concerns about COMM-ORG in general or this web site at randy@comm-org.wisc.edu.

As moderator of the COMM-ORG List-serv, I try to intervene as little as possible.  I do not reject any posts, but return about 1 of every 20 or so for clarification.  All the comments I make on a post are only suggestions, and I will send out the original post at the author's request.

As editor of the COMM-ORG web site and papers series, my job is to make sure the papers communicate as clearly as possible. I see editing as a negotiated process, and all of my suggested changes are open to discussion.

The COMM-ORG mission is to 

• help connect people who care about the craft of community organizing.

• find and provide information that organizers, scholars, and scholar-organizers can use to learn, teach, and do community organizing.

• involve all COMM-ORG members in meeting those goals.

COMM-ORG is based on two basic beliefs: 

• community organizers and academics can both benefit by exchanging information and resources.  The COMM-ORG membership is composed of about half academics and half practitioners (including some government officials and funders)

•  the Internet should remain a place where information and communication is freely available (meaning, at no cost).  That means not only that everything on COMM-ORG is free, but that COMM-ORG runs on completely free open source software, including the Fedora Linux operating system, Apache web server, and Mailman list server software

COMM-ORG defines community organizing as:

• people without power getting power, both as individuals and as a community.

• building relationships,and sometimes this is its primary goal.

• beginning in a local area, often as small as a neighborhood.

• building on shared experience--rooted in a place or a cultural identity.

• often leading to development activities and/or larger social
  movements when it succeeds. 

COMM-ORG began as an on-line seminar on the history of community organizing, moderated by Wendy Plotkin at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in late 1994, funded by a grant from the UIC Great Cities program and supported by H-Net, an international cooperative initiative in Humanities and Social Science computing. COMM-ORG has evolved into a conversation of scholars, community organizers, community development workers, and others.

COMM-ORG is now sponsored by the Department of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin.

COMM-ORG was chosenfor November 1997 by the National Housing Institute.  It is also recognized in the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership Nonprofit Good Practice Guide and is linked by over 50 other web sites.  COMM-ORG is known widely as a premiere web site for community organizing resources.