Do-It-Yourself
Organizing
This
section is a do-it-yourself guide to grassroots organizing. It focuses
on bringing together people who share a common place such as an apartment
building, city block, or neighbourhood. The focus on people acting together
does not diminish the importance of citizens acting alone. Nor does
the focus on organizing around a place diminish the importance of organizing
around an issue.
Learn-it-yourself
organizing
Before
you can do-it-yourself you will have to learn-it-yourself. Most provinces
in Canada do not offer full training programs in community organizing.
In Canada, faith in government has placed decisions about our communities
in the hands of politicians and professionals.
When
you can't do it all yourself
A paid, experienced organizer can help when the task is to pull
citizens together quickly, or involve people who normally stay at home.
Paid organizers often begin by gathering information on the neighbourhood,
then proceed by introducing themselves to residents, bringing people
together in discussion groups, building self-help skills, and finally,
training new leaders to take over the organizing task. The presence
of a professional organizer may lead some volunteers to wonder why they
are working for free while someone else is being paid. A few groups
have addressed this problem by turning funds for an organizer into honoraria
for volunteers.
The
Active Ingredients of Organizing
Community organizing is often presented as a step-by-step process.
The ingredients of a process often make sense, but the step-by-step
sequence usually fails to fit actual circumstances. What we've done
is look at community organizing from the point of view of its ingredients.
Which of these you turn to at any given time will depend on your circumstances.
Except for the first, ingredients are added and readded regularly as
part of community organizing. All, as well, are interwoven. For example,
planning requires research, which depends on getting and keeping people,
which is affected by decision making, which requires evaluating, and
so on.
Take
Action! ->
Community
Organizing
The
Citizen's Handbook:
A Guide to Building Community in Vancouver
© Charles Dobson / Vancouver Citizen's Committee
