Preface
One year ago, the sponsors of the Community Organizing Award were presented with a
unique opportunity. Judy Hertz, an experienced community organizer and writer, proposed
to us a documentation project that would tell--in some detail--the stories of several recent
campaigns, executed by varied community organizations, that have had substantial and lasting
effects upon their neighborhoods or on a city as a whole. As individual foundations, we fund
community organizing for many reasons. We fund it because it contributes to progress in
many distinct issue areas, because it can prevent or remedy injustice, because it strengthens
the social fabric in individual communities, because it holds public officials and private entities
accountable for their actions, because it can bring needed resources into challenged
communities, and because it provides a training ground for citizens and leaders who go on
to other issues, other organizations, and other arenas. But, most of all, we fund community
organizing because it lights the flame of civic participation in a way that no other funded
activity can do.
The reality of that participation, however, is not always easy to see through the lens of the
kind of press coverage that community organizations typically get. It is not even easy to see
in the format of the usual funding proposal. The intense self-education, relationship building,
and development of decision-making processes that form a large part of community
organizing are hard to capture on paper. When these sorts of activities occur in middle-income and upper-income communities, they don't need foundation funding, since the many
civic organizations found in such communities can contribute the resources needed to make
them happen. Civic involvement in resource-poor lower-income communities, on the other
hand, needs to be supported with funding specifically aimed towards the development of
broad participation.
We agreed to support Judy's idea with a great deal of enthusiasm, because we think that these
four stories illuminate the way that community organizing creates a broader and more
inclusive public conversation. As with every movement to extend and increase participation
in public life, those who have to give up some of their dominance resist and complain, and
much of what you will read here is about that resisting and complaining. While the
interpretation of events that you will find in the following stories is Judy's, and while we as
individual funders might differ with particular emphases, we are unanimous in our support of
the constant thread that Judy weaves through these accounts: that community organizing is
a sophisticated, thoughtful, long-term, and needed contribution to the democracy that we all
cherish.
--The Sponsors
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