Community and Environmental Soci

...to Community Organization and Change. This course will focus on the rich history and contemporary practices of the craft called community organizing. This is the work of the famous Saul Alinsky, the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and more recently people such as Barack Obama. It is, fundamentally, about oppression and inequality and the struggles for social change that come from them.

Because this is a course in community organizing, much of the course will be experiential. That includes the construction of the course itself. This is only the initial syllabus. During the first course meeting we will have our own "community" meeting where we will develop learning goals and strategies. We will focus on three topics:

We will then together produce a full written syllabus. Please note that this will not be a free for all. The focus of the course will be strictly community organizing--how people who are historically excluded from power by discriminatory economic, political, social, and cultural systems can develop their collective abilities to get power. I will also demand significant reading and writing (typically 60-100 pages a week of reading and 30-50 pages of writing for the semester). So you need to come prepared to engage in a process that involves real work.

The two books should be available soon at Rainbow Books, 426 West Gilman Street. Rainbow is a community-owned cooperative.

(most course requirements will be developed in class--see the assignment due at the beginning of the first class on January 28)

1. Introductory essay (due at the beginning of class on January 28, see week 1 in course calendar for details) -- 10 points (half points off for every day late)

Here are our agreed upon class requirements, based on our discussion on 1-28.

2. Choose any 12 weeks to submit questions about the readings (3 questions per week citing specific sections of readings). Questions are due before the beginning of class for that week (use the Learn@UW dropbox and check to make sure your submission actually succeeded). 1 point each for 12 points total (half points off for every day late).

3. choose any 12 weeks to write reflections on (1/2 to 1 page each). Reflections can cover readings and/or discussion and are due before the beginning of the class after the one you are reflecting on (use the Learn@UW dropbox and check to make sure your submission actually succeeded). 3 points each for 36 points total (half points off for every day late)..

4. do a final project of your choosing (can be a paper or multimedia or an actual community organizing process you are already committed to and involved in) 22 points divided into 6 points for proposal, 6 points for rough draft/update, 10 points for final draft/product. Proposal is due 2-25 ( a paragraph about what your project will be and either an outline for a paper or a timeline for other projects. Rough draft/update is due 4/22 and will either be a full draft of a paper or a report on the state of your project up to that time. The final draft/report of your project will be due by the end of the regularly scheduled finals time, May 12, 5:05pm (even though we will not meet then--half points off for every day late). I will support credit for community-engaged work provided that you are *already involved* in the work and that it is *community organizing* and *not* community service or community development).

5. facilitate/co-facilitate one class (meeting with professor, choosing readings, choosing activities, and managing time during the class. it can also include you presenting and leading activities). 20 points. To get full credit you need to meet with me two weeks before the class you facilitate, provide a reading list and a draft facilitation plan one week before the class you facilitate, and then facilitate.

5. for each class you miss beyond one, you lose 6 points, and can make it up by turning in extra questions and reflections from other weeks.

In order to have a productive discussion there will be both a reading assignment and a writing assignment due at the beginning of the first class meeting on January 28. When you do the reading, bring questions, objections, critiques, and reactions to talk about in class. When you do the writing, do it to contribute to our planning the rest of the course.

Due no later than the beginning of class on January 28, is a minimum 500 word essay on what you want from the course and what you are able and willing to bring to the course. You are welcomed to e-mail the assignment at any time up to the deadline, upload it at Learn@UW, or bring it with you to class. The purpose of this assignment is for you to do careful reflection on your interests and your own resources and skills. It will be worth ten percent of your final grade and will be graded as a serious writing assignment. So put your best thinking and your best writing into it. I will expect thoughtfulness and detail equal to my example below. And it needs to be about community organizing. You may not have had community organizing experiences, but you have other skills and knowledge you can bring. And if you don't want to learn anything about community organizing, then this isn't the right course for you. You can see my example assignment below.

Please also get Saul Alinsky's book, Rules for Radicals. It is the closest thing to a core text in the field. We will read and discuss that the second week, which will buy us time to get the other readings in order after our first class planning session. All books will be available at Rainbow Bookstore, a community-owned bookstore at 426 W. Gilman Street.

I don't exactly know why I became interested in how oppressed peoples organize to build their own power. But from a teenager on that has been my passion. I grew up in a very small and very conservative town in southeast Wisconsin, of rural working class parents. I watched them scrimp and save and suffer the stress of making ends meet. There was always food on the table and a roof over our heads, but their lives were preoccupied with the worry of having no job protection, few benefits (not even employer retirement plans), and a consequently uncertain future. I chafed at the religious and cultural conservatism that surrounded me everywhere but on the TV and an older cousin who was in college just when campus political activism was reaching its nadir in the early 1970s (I didn't graduate high school until 1977). Why I became so disenchanted with my immediate surroundings and so fascinated with the exciting turmoil beyond I don't know. But I did.

Since then I have always wanted to find out how people without power can get more control over their own circumstances. That includes poor and working class people, people of color, people of marginalized genders and sexualities, youth, people with disabilities, and others. As a sociologist, I spent a lot of time learning how bad things are. So I am quite convinced that things are very bad indeed. The social structures of race, class, sex, ability, age, and others produce frightening and unjustifiable inequalities. But I get bored with learning how bad things are, and I don't need any more convincing. What I need to learn is how people successfully fight back against those oppressions and inequalities and build the kind of society we all deserve.

It's actually a lot more exciting for me to study how people fight back. First, even when they don't win, it is a lot more inspiring to study people's resistance than just how they got oppressed. And when they do win it's really inspiring. Thankfully, I had the good luck in graduate school to live smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood that fought back against a government-capitalist developer coalition that tried to literally bulldoze them off the map. Not only did they win, but they got to then redevelop their own neighborhood. The folks of the West Bank neighborhood in Minneapolis taught me how to be inspired.

But there are still far too few examples like that neighborhood. So one thing I want is to learn about more examples, which I know are out there. My idea of a good vacation is to visit a city where there is good organizing going on and hang out with the group for a few days. I also am trying to collect as many written examples--both successes and failures, as I can. There are a bunch of newer books that I want to read again or more carefully: Contesting Community, Tools for Radical Democracy, Creative Community Organizing, Progressive Community Organizing, Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, The Revolution Will not be Funded, Streetwise for Book Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and Education Reform in the Bronx, and others.

Something else I want is to have some fun building and being part of a learning community. What I enjoy most about this class is that it has some aspects of community organizing in its own process. At some point in the course during each of the past two semesters it felt like ownership of the class shifted from me to the students, and that made the class a lot more enjoyable for me.

I can bring a fairly long history of experience in working with such groups. I started learning about community organizing first-hand in that Minneapolis neighborhood in 1983, and formally started doing research with them in 1985. I’ve been working with them from time to time ever since.

I can’t say that I’m an actual community organizer, though I’ve got a couple of successes under my belt (the most fun was organizing against my previous university when they wanted to replace a park with a parking lot in my neighborhood). But I also haven’t just read about and studied what people have done. Instead, I have been involved in supporting community groups’ organizing work. So I’ve mostly provided research support for community organizing groups to help them do their work better, using a method called participatory action research. I’ve worked with ACORN most closely, but also with a number of unaffiliated neighborhood organizing groups. I have helped such groups also by facilitating strategic planning and strategy development. I am also currently working with a southwest Madison community organizing effort and just finished up working with neighborhood groups in Waukesha, WI. And I've worked with many other neighborhoods doing their own organizing in Australia and Canada, and in this country (Chicago and Toledo most notably).

Perhaps most importantly for this course, I have learned a lot about teaching by hanging out with community organizers. I’ve seen community organizers teach people lots of stuff, and I’ve never once seen them give a lecture. So I’ve also learned to teach by facilitating, mostly by reading about the work of two people—Myles Horton and Paulo Friere—both of whom developed models of community organizing that integrated community education and community organizing.

OR choose about 100 pages from the following articles (but Alinsky's book is a lot more fun and provocative and it's not expensive):

Week 3, February 11: The Less Visible Historical Origins of Community Organizing

Ohmer, Mary L., and Karen DeMasi. 2009. Chapter 1: “Approaches to Community Organizing and Their Relationship to Consensus Organizing.” Consensus Organizing: A Community Development Workbook. U.K.: Sage Publications Inc. http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/24165_Chapter1.pdf

Theories and Ideas for the Progressive Organizer. Chapter 3 in, Pyles, Loretta. New York: Progressive Community Organizing, 2009

Minieri, J., & Getsos, P. (2007). Chapter 5: Developing Leaders from All Walks of Life. In Tools for radical democracy: How to organize for power in your community (pp. 81-107). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Starhawk. Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery. (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1988

Minieri, J., & Getsos, P. (2007). Chapters 14 & 15. In Tools for radical democracy: How to organize for power in your community. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Minieri, J., & Getsos, P. (2007). Chapters 6 & 8. In Tools for radical democracy: How to organize for power in your community. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Stoecker, Randy. "Cyberspace vs. Face to face: Community Organizing in the New Millennium." 2002. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology. 1:143-164.

Minieri, J., & Getsos, P. (2007). Ch.10. In Tools for radical democracy: How to organize for power in your community. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Community and Environmental Sociology 573 ~ The web address for this syllabus is: http://comm-org.wisc.edu/syllabi/cosyllabus13.htm

Community and Environmental Sociology 573
~
The web address for this syllabus is:
http://comm-org.wisc.edu/syllabi/cosyllabus13.htm