Master - Diversity and Social

Justice in Social Work

SW560xSocial Work Practice in
Community Organization,
Management and Policy/Evaluation

University of
Michigan
MichiganX: SW560xSocial Work Practice in Community Organization, Management and Policy/Evaluation

MichiganX: SW560xSocial Work Practice in Community Organization,

Management and Policy/Evaluation
1. Community Organizing as a Form of Social Work  Introduction to Community Organizing  Lecture

Hi, my name is Barry Checkoway. And here I will focus on a few core concepts and steps in the
process of community organizing.
Community organizing is a process of people joining together and taking action on a problem
that concerns them. For example, students are concerned about prejudice in their school. They observe
that some students say hurtful or hateful things about other students because of their race or because of
their religion.
They observe that teachers are not trained to handle sensitive racial discussions in class, and that
the administrators in the school Do nothing about the problem.
So, one student calls a meeting. They discuss the situation and they form a group to fight
prejudice in a school. They conduct a survey of attitudes towards prejudice, they discuss the findings with
the superintendent, they reach out to parents and community leaders, and this is central to the community
organizing process.
And they mobilize the community to come to the school board meeting. At the meeting, they
make a presentation and call for action.
They want to core some prejudice. They want students to become members of the school board.
Their actions show a few core concepts of community organizing, here they are.
First, community. Community is their unit of solution. Community is about people who care
about the problem, their relationships, their common values, Other things that they share in common.
Organizing, secondly, is a way to increase power. It's when people come together and do things
together more than any one of them could acting alone. Power is when people join together and it
generates power for the individual, the community, and the group of which they're a part.
Social justice Is the larger purpose. It enables them to challenge prejudice in the schools.
Challenging prejudice is a key element in social justice. So the students also show some of the steps in the
process, and here are some steps.

1
MichiganX: SW560xSocial Work Practice in Community Organization, Management and Policy/Evaluation

First, starting with you, you can start organizing, you know what the problems are and you know
what some of the solutions are. Second, gathering information.
You need the information about prejudice and the survey is an important part of it. Then there's
planning. How do you put these steps in order, and who's going to do what by when?
And how will this happen over time? Then taking action. Planning is good, but it's not good
without specific actions. And taking those actions helps the individuals, the students, to build up their
capacity.
Because they're having meetings, they're forming a group, leaders are emerging. And the whole
process has the step that we call learning from community, which is stepping back, reflecting on the
experience, and trying to decide what is next.
The whole process, when done well, can contribute to social justice. Let me get more specific.
Let me be more specific about the steps in the process. First, someone steps forward, develops a core
group to work together with a few others, and they reach out to others.
Imagine a series of stick figures. First, there's one. And the one come together. Then the ones go
out and find others, and now you've got four, and they're sharing the problem about which they know.
And now those two pairs go out and they meet up with two more and then they come together
and that is the organizing moment. Because when they do that, when they come together and discuss the
problem, it creates a whole new energy in the people that are there.
The group does a survey, which provides information about attitudes in the school, they want to
be accurate. Gathering information itself is a project that enables them to work together.
They create a plan with steps for organizing over the long haul, not just one time. Organizing is
not an event, it's a process.
Then they take their specific actions like presentations at the school board. That takes effort to
prepare, to rehearse, and then to make the presentation. That is a specific action that they take.
They build their own capacity. In this case, they'll learn how to facilitate meetings, to form
groups, and to develop leaders.
Present leaders and potential leaders who have not been involved in the process before, they
learn from the community. They reflect on their organizing, and they make adjustments responsive to
what they want to accomplish.
In the example, a course is created, teachers are trained, students become members of the school
board, the process is good for the students, the school and the community.
And now the community and its schools have the ability to challenge prejudice and become
more socially just. Community organizing is essential to social work. In fact, it is part of the process that
gave birth to social work.

2
MichiganX: SW560xSocial Work Practice in Community Organization, Management and Policy/Evaluation

But you should know, that it's closely related to other approaches within social work. So follow,
here is community organizing for one. But once the community is organized, we need organizations or
agencies that require management.
So organizing and management. Once people are assembled, they have issues that they want to
address.
So we have the field of policy advocacy. And then we have interpersonal relationships.
Interpersonal relationships are what people do in small groups in order to move toward community
change.
So all of this: community organizing, agency management, policy advocacy, and interpersonal
relationships, they are all integral and they all are about working for social justice. Thank you.

1. Community Organizing as a Form of Social Work  Core Organizing Concepts and Skills  Lecture

You heard an overview of what community organizing is from organizer and community
organizing professor Barry Chuckaway. I wanted to expand on a few of these ideas.
This includes the idea of power, what we mean by having a community organizing worldview,
how organizing interplays with leadership, and some of the skills that organizers use in their work.
Let's start with coming to some agreement about what community organizing is. There are
certainly various approaches to community organizing, and the approach or model that you choose will
undoubtedly impact the definition that we come up with.
What I like about this definition is that, it emphasizes that organizing is serious about building
powerful groups based on interests and values.
And then building them in a way where they're accountable to each other as they work towards a
common goal. Organizing is also about identifying leaders, and developing them into effective advocates
for their community.
One of the core concepts in organizing is the concept of power, about where that power lies and
where it should lie. And how we can generate and organize power to shape policies and practices that
meet the needs of people.
Power is a big part of what David Walls calls the community organizing worldview. The
worldview is a series of concepts that shape the way we think about how society works, and that
organizers use to shape the way they approach organizing.
The concept of power is hard for some people to get behind. It certainly has negative
connotations, and people have had experiences where power is only harmful.

3
MichiganX: SW560xSocial Work Practice in Community Organization, Management and Policy/Evaluation

One way that can help is to think about the difference between power over and power with.
Power over is a relationship in which one person has power over another person, or one group
has power over another group, one nation over another nation.
It's a relationship where dominance and perhaps coercion are used. And this power is often used
before other alternatives are sought.
Here’s an example of power over. Let’s say you attend a meeting of your town council and to
share your views on a possible road building project.
You're given three minutes to speak. And at that three minute mark, you still have some
important things to say but a council member cuts you off mid-sentence and calls the next person to the
microphone.
In this scenario, it's clearly the council members who hold the power. They've decided when
you're done speaking, even if you have more important information to share.
The power over model is embedded into our social systems, practices, laws, structures, norms,
traditions, and our habits, at home at school, at work, and in our communities.
Also in our government institutions, really everywhere, it's so prevalent. So much a part of our
daily existence that often we don't even see it.
So the power alternative to power over is power with. I think the biggest thing about power with
is that, it acknowledges that were all a part of the same system.
Power with often emerges organically from the participants who are involved and then grows
stronger the more that it's put to use. It also includes the belief that one person or one group is not in a
position to know what's best for another.
Lets look at our same town council scenario. In a power with situation it might go more like this,
you get your same three minutes to speak, and again you're stopped after three minutes.
This time though the council member offers to hear more from you after the meeting. And then
when the meeting ends, she actually does follow up. She and two other council members, sit down with
you.
They take notes while you finish your comments. One of them ask for your phone number, and
promises to keep you informed. Another gives you his cell phone number and email address, so that you'll
have another channel for expressing your concerns.
How is this different? In the latter case, you're both seen as a part of the same system. You both
have some important role to play in the process, and then that role is acknowledged and respected.
Now power over takes less time than power with. I often think this is why people go with power
over. I see it with employers all the time.

4
MichiganX: SW560xSocial Work Practice in Community Organization, Management and Policy/Evaluation

It's easier to just tell someone what to do, right? But does it have the same long term impact?
Absolutely it does not. Another thing we think about often in organizing work is the conflict between the
world that is and the world that should be.
Certainly things are the way they are. We could put our efforts into adapting to how that life is,
or we could work to shape the world, creating a world as it should be.
Of course this relates to other things we'll talk about in this class like, who decides how the
world should be?
It also relates to one of the big tensions in our field, between putting efforts into prevention
versus intervention. Organizing work largely focuses on creating the world or community or system that
should be.
Another important distinction in organizing is the distinction between leaders and organizers.
Leaders, inspire other people with a vision, and then guide them towards that vision.
Organizers, ensure that someone else or maybe many someones have the skills and the tools that
they need to lead.
In fact, good organizers will come in and out of leadership and as that's needed. People often say
that it's the job of organizers to develops leaders.
So in this way, training is also a really important part of the organizing world of view. So if thats
the community organizing world view, and that's what we're trying to do.
There are a number of skills that you need to make that happen. The first I wanna talk about is
running effective meetings. Organizers run a lot of meetings, both large and small.
While running a meeting may not seem that significant, we've probably all had the experience
sitting in on a meeting that was not run well, where you accomplish very little, or you don't stay on topic.
When this happens, not only do you not get done what you need to get done, you face potentially
alienating people who could be your allies in efforts.
Effective meetings have a few things in common. They have an agenda. Agendas should have
times on it.
That is, how long have you got planned for each item? And they should include who is
responsible for leading each item. It should be clear in a meeting what you're trying to accomplish.
Sometimes people put their meeting objectives actually on their agenda, but everyone should know what
they're here to do.
Someone needs to take responsibility for keeping people on track. This might be easier said than
done, so if people get off track, you have a few options about what to do about it.
You could create what's called the parking lot, some way to record items that you'll come back
to at another time.

5
MichiganX: SW560xSocial Work Practice in Community Organization, Management and Policy/Evaluation

You might take, for example, a big sheet of flip chart paper and write parking lot on it and
record the items as they arise. You could make a decision as a group to run the meeting long and go past
your time.
Or you could decide to skip over things that maybe are less crucial or critical, and then make a
decision to put those things on a later meeting agenda.
Really, any of these things are options. The key though is to do it consciously, and involve other
people in that decision. Negotiation is the process of discussing something with the hope of reaching an
agreement.
It usually involves compromise. There are key social work skills that tie nicely into the art of
negotiation. Things like rapport building, active listening and the idea of seeking to understand.
Effective negotiators also tend to use skills in assertiveness and also in problem solving.
Agitation is about pressing people to think differently.
And who is it that we're pressing? It's often first the community that we're organizing. And often
pressing is as simple as asking questions.
Are people okay with the way things are? How have you dealt with things in the past? Has that
worked?
You wrote a letter, why didn't you send people? You sent five people. What if you sent ten? A
lot of people say that the sort of social action that we're seeing on our streets around the 2016 election was
a form of agitation.
Now I do think that it's important to think about when to push and how far you push. Organizers
and social workers stir things up and we should. But this must be deliberate, and it has to be planned
because it can backfire when it's not.
We wanna make sure that we can be heard, and aren't just dismissed as the troublemakers. For
example, when I was working at a cancer support organization, if I wanted something within a hospital
system to change for patients, agitation might be a tool that I would use to get it changed for this patient,
right?
But I also need to think about long-term impact for others down the road. And how, maybe, if
I'm agitating in a particular way, it might not be so positive in the long run for people going forward.
Other core skills needed in organizing are discussed in more detail throughout this course. These
include fundraising, we're going to spend a whole module on where our funding can come from for our
change efforts.
We need to know how to assess and thoroughly understand needs and assets. We have to able
able to speak publicly and use social media effectively.

6
MichiganX: SW560xSocial Work Practice in Community Organization, Management and Policy/Evaluation

And we need the ability to strategically plan for and also to implement change. We need the
ability to work with the people on our teams and acknowledge how to effectively evaluate your efforts.
Of course this is not and exhaustive list, but it dies give you a summary understanding of some
of the core skills used in this dynamic field. You heard and overview of what community organizing is
from organizer and community organizing professor Barry Chuckaway.
I wanna expand on a few of those ideas. This includes the idea of power, what we mean by
having a community organizing worldview, how organizing interplays with the idea of leadership, and
some of the skills that organizers use in their work.

Course  1. Community Organizing as a Form of Social Work  Assignment #1: Community Organizing Skills
Inventory  Skills Inventory Activity

Fazer exercicio