One by One

I find it difficult to define community organizing.  It's not limited to any single Cause, like ending homelessness or saving the environment, though the work of organizing might address either or both of those issues.  Instead, community organizing is about bringing together the members of a particular community in order to address whatever the primary problems of that community are.  Organizing is about seeing measurable results.  And the results here in Chicago are impressive: greater access to health care, reforming schools in poor areas, affordable housing.

So with those kinds of results, I expected the actual components of community organizing to be some kind of impressive, sophisticated machine.  And it is.  But the lifeblood of this machine is relationships.  

The single, essential piece in developing the kinds of relationships necessary in community organizing is an individual meeting.  As members of organizing teams meet individually with members of the community, they get to know each person's hopes and concerns.  As organizers meet with more people, those meetings provide a broader vision of the hopes and concerns of the whole.  

Person by person, a community is built.  And person by person, a community can be renewed.