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 CentOS 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.